The Fat Nutritionist has posted an interesting article here – to which I was directed by way of one of Maryn McKenna’s tweets du jour – on the seemingly intractable divide between the Better Food movement (a name I just made up) and social welfare advocates. Executive summary (though you should read the post itself): people like Alice Waters and Michael Pollan who advocate healthier eating practices — fresh, locally grown food, home preparation, whole grains and organicity, less-processed and so forth — get it wrong about why poor people eat so badly. It’s not that poor people need to be educated about what to eat to stay healthy: it’s that poor people need access to good food in the first place,and that access includes not just the food’s physical presence in their neighborhoods but the amenities that make eating that good food possible: storage space, walkable or transitable stores to name a few. Most importantly, the better food needs to be affordable, and needs to be reasonably certain of continued affordability.
There’s nothing rocketsciency about any of that, to be sure. In fact, in what I’ve summarized above I doubt there’s anything that either Pollan or Walker would argue with. Both of them tend to get a fair bit of criticism from people who suggest they don’t get this. I’ll admit I haven’t read either of them as thoroughly as I might have, but I’m unaware of either of them saying anything especially class-clueless. Perhaps a reader will offer an example. It’s my experience that people like Waters and Pollan get lumped in, in the public’s mind, with the most annoying Whole Foods shopper the public mind has recently encountered, in much the same way that a controversial blogger will subtly become identified with their least palatable commenter.
The Fat Nutritionist doesn’t trash either of the food writers, but commenters on the post do, as does the Atlantic columnist Citlin Flanagan, to whom the Fat Nutritionist links right up top of her post. You may want to read Flanagan’s post, or you may not. Either is a fine choice. I read it, and thus added five minutes to the total sum of time I’ve spent in my life hearing one affluent person from Berkeley condemning two others for not keeping it real enough.
But TFN’s post is very much worth reading, among other things for the illuminating and Maslowian Hierarchy of Food Needs she borrows from Ellyn Sattler. Eating is our most intimate relationship with the world – possibly excepting breathing – and our most fraught. I do understand the venom directed at Pollan and Waters, even if I think it may be misplaced. What makes us feel worse than having the way we eat opened up to public criticism, even if the criticism is intended to be systemic? Criticizing the way people eat can kill, as any anorexic can tell you. And different people react to similar circumstances differently. Annette and I each went through periods of food insecurity early in life, and our responses to it are poles apart. (For instance, I tend to hold on to canned goods, where she feels like keeping stuff eight years past the sell-by date is a false economy.) In that sense Sattler’s pyramid, and TFN’s exegesis thereupon, are really good, um, food for thought.
But the hippie-bashing in her comments, and elsewhere in the world whenever the Evil Rich Bastards Michael Pollan and Alice Waters rear their Privileged Strawheads, makes me uncomfortable, and I think the two camps are often talking past one another.
When I was in my late teens, living in the recession-ravaged city of Buffalo, NY, I was starving. I ate out of dumpsters. I ate at soup kitchens and the Hare Krishna Temple. I panhandled and busked. I planted illegal vegetable gardens. I smoked cigarettes because they were cheaper than food. I cadged meals from my beleaguered friends, and occasionally from their moms. I shoplifted hundreds of dollars worth of food. I was 5’9” and felt it a personal victory when I weighed more than 110 pounds. I never knew where my next meal was coming from. I didn’t have a “next check” to look forward to, or help from my parents, or the promise of a job anytime soon. I got an occasional dishwashing job, and ate scraps off the plates I would be cleaning. I lost those jobs when I could not physically lift a stack of dishes or a box of detergent, when I could not stand on my feet for four hours straight without passing out. I had no hope that this would ever change. This wasn’t a round-trip ticket; I saw no way out. The wealthiest I have ever felt in my life was a couple years later, when — having moved to Berkeley with neither money nor contacts — I landed a minimum wage job in a cafe that had unlimited eating as a declared perk. I gained thirty-five pounds that summer.
I expect to gross about twelve thousand dollars in income this year, and I still feel far more secure than I did for years after my time in Buffalo.
But before I left Buffalo there were two institutions that routinely, and literally, kept me from starving. Michael Pollan and Alice Waters would have been right at home in either one.
The first was the Yeast West Bakery, which had a setup in which one could sign up for a four-hour 4:00 am shift, knead bread dough and roll it into loaf pans, and be “paid” in credit in their store. As I recall it, the bread was a dollar a loaf and each shift paid about 12 bucks in credit.
The other was the Greenfield Street Restaurant, an organic, macrobiotic vegetarian cafe that had a similar setup for their dishwashers. A shift washing dishes with a meal included, and about 25 bucks in credit added after my name on the tote board, and I was guaranteed at least four subsequent meals when I was in that part of town.
Advocating for better understanding of the plight poor people endure didn’t help me. Criticizing school gardens for being elitist didn’t help me. What did help me was a network of people very much like Michael Pollan and Alice Waters, who blended their concerns about better food with the tools to build an actual functioning community of people who fed each other. Those businesses, and Buffalo’s three food coops with discount prices for active members, and Buffalo’s community food buying clubs with all the benefits of a coop but little of the overhead, and a network of people devoted to making those organizations work to feed people? I am alive now because of them, I have no doubt.
In the decades intervening, much of that movement has been co-opted. “Organic” food is a multibillion dollar industry that mirrors the worst practices of its corporate predecessors. Try going into Whole Foods to see if you can break down boxes for a loaf of bread and see how far you get. The debate has been deliberately narrowed to a choice between Twinkies and expensive heirloom broccoli.
Somehow, the idea that the heirloom broccoli could be part of a system that actually takes pains to feed people has been abandoned.
Bravo!
What’s instrumental food? Food without lyrics?
Great post, Chris.
It’s actually kind of scary how the wind that brings me to google to look for something I haven’t thought about in years passes over your desert camp first.
i agree… although, having served in the trenches of that same co-op community a couple of years later, I think we sowed the seeds of failure by assuming, like conventional businesses, that starving teens would show up and work forever, much as the people who hire illegal workers do.
We worked for food… and we depended on the charity of everyone. When the cool dentist quit to work in Guatemala, we all lost dental care. If we got old enough to marry or reproduce, we couldn’t continue working. Emma books was sold to a collective member. Allentown co-op never recovered from a fire in the laundromat next door. And Yeast West, like RichardIII perished for lack of a horse (figuratively).
When I achieved the apex of my desire and became a coordinator at the North Buffalo Food Co-op, I was paid the munificent sum of $100 a week, before taxes.
Even then, that kind of money didn’t leave much margin. We didn’t nurture ourselves.
I’ve been meaning to reply to your typically astute comment, Brooke. You’re definitely right. There were many flaws in those groups’ corporate culture, including a Culture of Scarcity approach to most everything. And as I got out early in 1982 (as you’ll recall) I missed a lot of the subsequent transformation, especially with regard to Lexington Coop, which seems to have become a bit of a behemoth. (Though at least they don’t use Papyrus on their web site.)