If you’re interested in food politics, you’ve got to check out Michael Pollan’s book review in The New York Review of Books titled, “The Food Movement, Rising” and linked here.

The books under review:

1. Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front
2. All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America?
3. Eating Animals
4. Terra Madre: Forging a New Global Network of Sustainable Food Communities
5. The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society

Pollan’s prose weaves in reviews of the books with a natural discussion of the food movement’s history and evolution and how, at this very moment in time, food politics is at the center of national debate (which is AWESOME). I’ve culled some of the quotes I found most interesting and what I found to be his key points:

• How did the Food Movement Get Here? In the 70′s, at a time of questionable agricultural practices and food cost inflation, key books like Diet for a Small Planet, and others, threatened to bring food politics to the center of national debate. The government was able, at the prompting of Nixon, to bring food prices down, to make food issues “disappear” in the sheer ubiquity of food: the govt. shifted focus from “supporting prices for farmers” to focus on high yield crops, which created cheap and ever-present food.
• Why this had hidden costs: “…although cheap food is good politics, it turns out there are significant costs—to the environment, to public health, to the public purse, even to the culture—and as these became impossible to ignore in recent years, food has come back into view.”
• What happened next. The 80s and 90s contained many highly publicized examples of these costs — e.coli break-outs, mad cow disease and a general bewilderment at the thought of seeing what was indeed behind the metaphorical curtain of our food production.
• How multinationals hijacked the ability to afford healthful food. “…companies like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s pay their workers so poorly that they can afford only the cheap, low-quality food these companies sell, creating a kind of nonvirtuous circle driving down both wages and the quality of food. The advent of fast food (and cheap food in general) has, in effect, subsidized the decline of family incomes in America.” (My note: See books like Fast Food Nation, Nickel and Dimed, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition, and Health, Revised and Expanded Edition (California Studies in Food and Culture))
• Defining the food movements. “Cheap food has become an indispensable pillar of the modern economy. But it is no longer an invisible or uncontested one. One of the most interesting social movements to emerge in the last few years is the ‘food movement,’ or perhaps I should say ‘movements,’ since it is unified as yet by little more than the recognition that industrial food production is in need of reform because its social/environmental/public health/animal welfare/gastronomic costs are too high. As that list suggests, the critics are coming at the issue from a great many different directions. Where many social movements tend to splinter as time goes on, breaking into various factions representing divergent concerns or tactics, the food movement starts out splintered. Among the many threads of advocacy that can be lumped together under that rubric we can include school lunch reform; the campaign for animal rights and welfare; the campaign against genetically modified crops; the rise of organic and locally produced food; efforts to combat obesity and type 2 diabetes; ‘food sovereignty’ (the principle that nations should be allowed to decide their agricultural policies rather than submit to free trade regimes); farm bill reform; food safety regulation; farmland preservation; student organizing around food issues on campus; efforts to promote urban agriculture and ensure that communities have access to healthy food; initiatives to create gardens and cooking classes in schools; farm worker rights; nutrition labeling; feedlot pollution; and the various efforts to regulate food ingredients and marketing, especially to kids.”
• We’re at our Breaking Point. “Viewed from a middle distance, then, the food movement coalesces around the recognition that today’s food and farming economy is ‘unsustainable’—that it can’t go on in its current form much longer without courting a breakdown of some kind, whether environmental, economic, or both.”
• Feeling the Food Movement in your Gut. “But perhaps the food movement’s strongest claim on public attention today is the fact that the American diet of highly processed food laced with added fats and sugars is responsible for the epidemic of chronic diseases that threatens to bankrupt the health care system.”
• Politics under President Obama and Michelle Obama might be paving the way to better health. “The political ground is shifting [my note: see Michelle Obama here], and the passage of health care reform may accelerate that movement. The bill itself contains a few provisions long promoted by the food movement (like calorie labeling on fast food menus), but more important could be the new political tendencies it sets in motion. If health insurers can no longer keep people with chronic diseases out of their patient pools, it stands to reason that the companies will develop a keener interest in preventing those diseases. They will then discover that they have a large stake in things like soda taxes and in precisely which kinds of calories the farm bill is subsidizing. As the insurance industry and the government take on more responsibility for the cost of treating expensive and largely preventable problems like obesity and type 2 diabetes, pressure for reform of the food system, and the American diet, can be expected to increase.”
• Monopolization of our Food is something to Fear. “Speaking in March at an Iowa ‘listening session’ about agribusiness concentration, Holder said, ‘long periods of reckless deregulation have restricted competition’ in agriculture. Indeed: four companies (JBS/Swift, Tyson, Cargill, and National Beef Packers) slaughter 85 percent of US beef cattle; two companies (Monsanto and DuPont) sell more than 50 percent of US corn seed; one company (Dean Foods) controls 40 percent of the US milk supply.’”
• When Food is More than Food. “The modern marketplace would have us decide what to buy strictly on the basis of price and self-interest; the food movement implicitly proposes that we enlarge our understanding of both those terms, suggesting that not just ‘good value’ but ethical and political values should inform our buying decisions, and that we’ll get more satisfaction from our eating when they do. That satisfaction helps to explain why many in the movement don’t greet the spectacle of large corporations adopting its goals, as some of them have begun to do, with unalloyed enthusiasm.”
• Where the Food Movement Hits Home. “Part of the movement’s critique of industrial food is that, with the rise of fast food and the collapse of everyday cooking, it has damaged family life and community by undermining the institution of the shared meal. Sad as it may be to bowl alone, eating alone can be sadder still, not least because it is eroding the civility on which our political culture depends.”

Is that not some amazing food for thought?   And, since I forgot to congratulate him earlier, I’d like to link to the Time Magazine spread that featured Mr. Pollan himself as one of the thinkers who most affect our world (linked here).

<3,

The Cranky One

p.s. Have you entered by $60.00 give-away to CSN Online stores? Click here to enter.

Top 5 Things I Learned that Piss Me Off

1. I now even have to worry about the fruits and vegetables I buy.  How will I know if my fruit is a GMO? Oh, I won’t!  I guess if it looks like an apple on steroids that’s an indicator.
2. My beloved soybeans are highly monopolized just like corn and are, therefore, the devil. Ok, not the “devil.” But I ain’t smilin’, let’s just say that. By the way, did you know corn is in everything from charcoal to diapers to the meds you take?
3. The FDA is pretty laughable when it comes to actually effecting change and watching out for the consumer. Here’s a great idea, let’s have an organization for the people’s interest and then staff it with people who have a vested interest in companies whose main motives are to make money off the people!  That sounds impartial!
4. Government subsidies of corn have made it so junk food is more accessible to the poor than real fruit and vegetables. Didn’t you know the “American Dream” includes eating Jack in the Crack 3 times a day?!
5. Big Corp is behind most of my favorite brands.  Dear Kashi, I did not know you were part of Kellogg.  That makes my soul die a little, but I still love your cereal, not gonna lie! xoxo

Let me follow this list with a concession — I suffer from H.E.S. (hyperbole and exaggeration syndrome), so I am being more dramatic than may be called for, but I am rather annoyed.  It’s not like I know enough science to know whether GMOs are going to make me grow an extra eyeball in the next few years or even if organic foods are really the answer.  What I do know is this — I value KNOWLEDGE above everything else.  I want to be informed if my food has GMOs — even if the sticker informing me is bigger than the fruit itself and merely says that there are GMOs but until further research is done no one knows what that means.  That way, I am given the choice to say “meh, whatevs!” or “hmm, think I’ll stick to this tiny ugly organic apple.”  I’m just sayin’…

Throughout the film, I kept asking myself:  why, why is fast food so prevalent…still? It’s not that “fast” food is inherently bad.  We all have to eat on the run and bananas are certainly “fast” to eat – peel, go and yum!  But a large portion of us are not eatin’ bananas from a drive thru.  Nope, they’re getting shit crap for food and not just once a week, but with such an insane frequency it creates a problem.

A friend said to me, “no one is a villain here.”  I am hesitant to agree. The reason people eat McDonalds, the reason it’s so in demand is not necessarily because out of a state of nature we as human beings said “I want to take these potatoes from the Earth and fry them to a crisp and eat them every day.”  Fast Food became widely available,  highly advertised, cheap due to subsidies and assembly line mechanics, addictive due to fat & sugar content and an ICON and societal NORM.

The thing that bothers me to the core is this line, “the biggest predictor of obesity is poverty level.” This absolutely bites at my core.  I have seen grocery stores in impoverished areas – they do not carry the same variety of whole foods or organic foods as the SAME store in a more affluent area.  Some poor people simply cannot afford to eat healthy.  And even if you balk at that statement, I’m pretty sure you can’t argue that a lot of impoverished people do not KNOW how incredibly awful they are eating.  And I’ll be the first to admit that food ignorance is not isolated to the impoverished…

I could go on and on, but as you can see — I’m just cranky and confused.  So, what do we disillusioned little souls do?

10 Simple Tips (as listed on the site here)

1. Stop drinking sodas and other sweetened beverages.  You can lose 25 lbs in a year by replacing one 20 oz soda a day with a no calorie beverage (preferably water).
2. Eat at home instead of eating out.  Children consume almost twice (1.8 times) as many calories when eating food prepared outside the home.
3. Support the passage of laws requiring chain restaurants to post calorie information on menus and menu boards. Half of the leading chain restaurants provide no nutritional information to their customers.
4. Tell schools to stop selling sodas, junk food, and sports drinks. Over the last two decades, rates of obesity have tripled in children and adolescents aged 6 to 19 years.
5. Meatless Mondays—Go without meat one day a week.  An estimated 70% of all antibiotics used in the United States are given to farm animals.
6. Buy organic or sustainable food with little or no pesticides. According to the EPA, over 1 billion pounds of pesticides are used each year in the U.S.
7. Protect family farms; visit your local farmer’s market.  Farmer’s markets allow farmers to keep 80 to 90 cents of each dollar spent by the consumer.
8. Make a point to know where your food comes from—READ LABELS.  The average meal travels 1500 miles from the farm to your dinner plate.
9. Tell Congress that food safety is important to you. Each year, contaminated food causes millions of illnesses and thousands of deaths in the U.S.
10. Demand job protections for farm workers and food processors, ensuring fair wages and other protections. Poverty among farm workers is more than twice that of all wage and salary employees.

If you want to know where I stand — like I said, I’m all about knowledge.  That is what I fight for. I don’t believe in shoving vegetarianism down people’s throats or staunchly advocating the purchase of organic goods.  But I believe people should know something as simple and important as what goes into their bodies as well as what options are available to them.  The main message of the movie was that the consumer has the power to effect change. It’s true — we do vote with every purchase we make. But some people really don’t know they have choices and may, even if aware they are making choices they would rather not make, feel trapped and are economically cornered.

Books I’ve Read (or Plan on Reading) Related to This Topic

• Omnivore’s Dilemma
• Fast Food Nation
• Diet for A Small Planet
• Food Politics

Trailer to the Movie

Now that I’ve blabbed on for way too long (congrats on reading this far, by the way — you earn an Extra Value Meal! j/k!), what do you think about these issues?  Have you seen Food Inc.?  Which of the 10 “tips” above do you already follow?