The Maturing Food Movement
Decatur Metro | June 10, 2010 | 4:34 pmMichael Pollan, author and professor of journalism at UC Berkley, is often credited with igniting the local food movement with his 2004 book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Building off the work of early big agribusiness critics like Eric Schlosser, who penned Fast Food Nation three years earlier, Pollan used a tale of four different meals to expose the often-ignored realities of the post-1970s corporate food chain and offered his readership an alternative: local, organic food.
For many of you, this isn’t anything you haven’t heard before. Heck, many of you are already arm-deep in compost, installing urban gardens in the forgotten corners of town, raising chickens, and luring farmer’s onto store shelves and weekly tables at markets, thanks to that little black book.
But Omnivore was published six years ago, and the food movement today struggles more with fusing the many thought-segments of the movement, than convincing enough average citizen that she should care more about the true “cost” of a corn dog.
Pollan’s follow-up books have dealt largely with transposing his Omnivore arguments into action items for the everyday eater. ( “Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.”) In Defense of Food and Food Rules are smart publishing moves, giving the populace the diet books they crave (pun intended), but what of the movement itself?
Where is Pollan’s concise voice to help solidify a movement grounded in fresh produce, but still struggling to define itself as it is embraced by environmentalists, health advocates, urbanists, farmers, foodies, libertarians and human rights advocates?
Until now, that theorizing has been largely confined to the stage, as he tours the country advocating the cause to groups of supporters. His shorter-form written work has mainly been about restating the old lessons from Omnivore in a contempory context or addressing specific areas of critique, as he did last year during the health care debate.
But in a recent write-up in the New York Times Review of Books, Pollan was tasked with reviewing five recently released books with five different angles on the issue of food and finally had an excuse to go really big-picture and tackle some of the finer inconsistencies of a movement embraced by so many factions.
[The food movement is] a big, lumpy tent, and sometimes the various factions beneath it work at cross-purposes. For example, activists working to strengthen federal food safety regulations have recently run afoul of local food advocates, who fear that the burden of new regulation will cripple the current revival of small-farm agriculture. Joel Salatin, the Virginia meat producer and writer who has become a hero to the food movement, fulminates against food safety regulation on libertarian grounds in his Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front. Hunger activists like Joel Berg, in All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America?, criticize supporters of “sustainable” agriculture—i.e., producing food in ways that do not harm the environment—for advocating reforms that threaten to raise the cost of food to the poor. Animal rights advocates occasionally pick fights with sustainable meat producers (such as Joel Salatin), as Jonathan Safran Foer does in his recent vegetarian polemic, Eating Animals.
A thought-provoking read for both followers and critics alike.
A long response here, but I think this issue is interesting.
So last night I had “corporate” food for dinner. It was a frozen meal with chicken, pasta, peas, broccoli, and a few other veggies in a light sauce, that I prepared in a sauce pan. Marketed by a large corporation. Relatively low fat, not particularly high in calories. Basically, a healthy meal made mostly of lean protein and veggies.
Of course, making all of that from scratch, as opposed to frozen food, would have made a tastier meal. But it would have taken 5 times as long to make it, and I did not have time. Nor did I happen to have all those fresh ingredients on hand on this particular day. Keeping these in a frozen meal diminishes taste, but precludes spoilage of the ingredients and saves a huge amount of time in preparation. Really, who has time for slow food on a regular basis, and doesn’t need the occasional 15 minute meal?
So, I have ask, after reading Pollan’s review, what exactly is the problem with this? There was nothing low-quality about the food — it was nutritious and, though it could have been tastier, it was far from bland/awful. It saved me time and prevented me from buying a bunch of fresh food that might have spolied had I not eaten it in a few days from purchase.
Also, I’d love to have time for a fresh dinner, eaten over deep/insightful conversation with friends and family. That would have required a huge amount of re-arranging of schedules. No one has time for the equivalent of a holiday meal most nights.
I’m sure that the frozen food section has many awful, unhealthy meals for sale next to my healthy meal. So is the problem that corporations make those meals — both unhealthy and healthy — or is it that many people simply choose the bad meals? Pollan seems to almost avoid this issue with the standard critiques — oh, the poor can’t afford the good meal (no evidence of that; it’s all corporate, frozen food sold at WalMart) or they’ve been duped into an awful diet by slick marketing. But there’s also slick marketing for the healthier corporate food too (Healthy Choice by ConAgra, Smart Balance, etc, all advertise). Is Pollan telling me the marketing works for fried chicken, but not grilled chicken? For McDonald;s but not Farm Burder? If so, why is that? And if he’s right, why did entire food cultures evolve around frying food in oil/lard in the first place, years before television, when it has always been easier to just roast something over an open fire or boil it in water?
As the article elaborates on, there are about a dozen different ways to look at “what’s wrong” with a frozen, premade, corporate meal. From the way that the food is grown (with non-renewable fossil fuel-based fertilizers and pesticides) and harvested (by low-income, migrant workers with few protections) to the actual questionable “health” of the meal.
Yes, it might be high in protein and include veggies (good things), but be careful about what else is included, especially in the sauce. Mostly I’m talking about man-made chemicals and additives, which we really don’t know the long-term effects of. Our bodies haven’t yet evolved to deal with the many creations of food labs. This doesn’t mean necessarily that these preservatives will cause cancer, but at best they make it hard for your body to know when its full.
Also, corporate, corn and byproduct-fed meat isn’t all that it could be. It’s lower in healthy saturated fats than animals that live a more traditional lifestyle. Also, animals fed on corn are given large amounts of antibiotics to combat the animal’s natural problems with digesting such starchy food. Those antibiotics are passed on to us. Also, large slaughterhouses ruin the environments around them due to the high concentrations of waste.
As for the “time” issue with preparing fresh food, I don’t know your personal schedule obviously, but the average American watches something like 5 hours of television a day. I’m not suggesting you have to spend hours each day making a meal…I certainly don’t. But it’s not necessarily for lack of time. Those committed and inspired by the movement will tell you that the time is available if you dedicate a bit more time to what you eat.
As for “the problem” addressed in your final paragraph, it’s again a multi-fold issue, but here it’s mainly about price. Since Earl Butz, the Fed has heavily subsidized corn, soybeans and wheat, making the price discrepancy between foods made with elements of these items MUCH cheaper than the fresh fruits and veggies. More than anything else, these subsidies are the biggest single problem with the U.S. food chain. The poor aren’t “duped” by slick marketing, but by the fact that frozen dinner made with cornfed beef and nitrogen fed veggies, looks the same as an organic option, tastes similar, but costs far less.
As for why entire food cultures evolved around frying food, I believe it mostly had to do with the fact that frying food is the most effective way to cook food without releasing a ton of energy and heating up a kitchen. An open fire or a couple boiling pots of water in the summer Georgia heat? Yuck. Also, because of that heat, the folks in those cultures, working in a non A/C world, could afford to consume a few extra calories. Fried food was a good way to do that.
I think you know I we agree on the corn subsidy. Get rid of all ag subsidies, as far as I am concerned. That alone might get rid of a huge amount of corporate food, since large indistrial farmers are taking in the lion’s share of that federal money. I think it’s hard for a political compromise on that, though, because very few people want to rid us ofag subsidies altogether. My bet is that Pollan et al want to stop subsidizing corn and soy but are fine with sending checks to small farmers to grow kale and arugula. And so long as that kind of money is being handed out, the farmers with the best lobbyists will generally get it. Witness the current administration. Michelle Obama wants healthier food and her husband has done nothing to end corn subsidies. Not to say he is unique in that. It is inherent in politics.
As for the health issues with my corporate meal, that seems like something people can make their own decisions about, no? You might fear the effects of the ingredients a lot more than I do. I eat that meal about once a week, and I’ve had zero adverse health effects. So you can bypass the frozen food, and I’ll buy some. As for low-paid migrant workers, I thought this was about food, not income distribution. If the food movement is another left-leaning effort to eliminate income inequality, then it needs to be transparent about that. I, for one, can’t make food purchasing decisions based on speculation about how much the workers made harvesting my meal. I have no idea. I don’t know how much GE paid the workers to make my refrigerator, either. How much did the mill workers earn making the shirt you’re wearing?
The larger public health issue Pollan seems to be talking about is not so much fertilizer and pesticides, but high fat and salt, and low nutritional value. That is right as applieed to many corporate meals. But it’s not true as to all of them, like the one I ate. And it came in a bag that amounted to about 650 calories. Even if one at ate the whole thing, it’s not an unreasonable dinner that leaves on over-full.
Which gets back to my point that corporations make lots of bad fod, and lots of good food too. If folks ate Healthy Choice meals instead of McDonalds, the obesity epidemic might not exist. So I think the fod movement errs by focusing on the role of corporations in supplying food, and by essentially second-guessing the food choices people make. It has to simply deal with the fact that people like high fat foods, and not just poor people. There is a very defnite class condecension in haitng on McDonald’s and waiting in line for Farm Burger. The food movement seems to do exactly that.