In my travels this summer, I read these two books, and meant to write about them much earlier. Then Sibyl Vane over at BitchPhD wrote this excellent post, and I meant to link and write about it. And now there’s a NY Times article on the joys and health benefits of home-cooked food.
So I’ve gotten around to… well, this isn’t a review of the books. Nor is it really a criticism, for I don’t disagree with most of what the books have to say.
It’s a criticism about the scope of the books, which consider the problems of modern American eating from the monoculture of industrial agriculture to the medicalization of nutrition, from processed foods to our puritanical culture of eating for health at the expense of pleasure.
Some rambling, long-winded thoughts after the jump:
Pollan (and the article) make suggestions on how to change one’s eating habits: buy locally, cook more, and he offers some genuinely useful hints. He says little that I would point out as wrong, and I normally dislike criticisms that say, “The author should have written a different book.” But Pollan in part presents himself as offering solutions to American eating-related health ills: obesity, diabetes, diseases, etc. And many of these health ills are correlated strongly with poverty.
And all of his suggestions are targeted at the middle class. (Buy a second freezer. Then purchase part of a grassfed cow.) And this should sit uneasily; if one could afford to make all of the lifestyle changes Pollan proposes, one would likely be of a socioeconomic class that was already thinner and healthier. The general effect is rather like beginning a book on financial planning by assuming a trust fund. And this bias runs through both books, and most articles I’ve seen on this.
To be more precise, to the extent that this is influenced by class, it doesn’t track income as much as it tracks a combination of time, money, and knowledge. Off the cuff, if you have two of the three, you can fudge the third.
Let’s start with time. Pollan adopts a folksy turn of phrase that does not actually reflect upon his politics, but irks. Traditional food culture, he says, was passed down through ‘mom’, and traditional food culture is good for you, so we need to return to what ‘mom’ (or ‘grandma’, or ‘great-great-grandma’) did. And it is a little weird that activities like pickling and preserving foods have recently become hobbies for most people, instead of merely what people do just to get through the winter, or that so many of our calories come from things grandma wouldn’t recognize as edible.
There’s a couple things wrong with this, though, aside from coming close to sounding like women’s working destroyed the family meal. One, it enshrines cuisines and ways of cooking that might not really have been all that healthy or delicious; the joke among my friends of Irish-American descent is that their ancestors’ traditional recipes started by boiling the hell out of any vegetables that wandered nearby.
And so we should be wary of postulating a golden age of tasty cuisine, lovingly prepared, or assuming that the meals were all great feasts like the one at the end of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In my ancestry, there’s a lot of boiled cabbage. It wasn’t because my grandma liked boiled cabbage; it’s because it was a cheap way to get nutrients into her and her sisters in the 1930s.
Two, we should be mindful that cooking in the ways Pollan envisions required someone in the household dedicated to cooking. Historically, maybe the wife cooks full-time; maybe one of the older daughters does; maybe they share in between jobs. Maybe the family employs a cook. There’s a reason prepackaged foods sold! It’s that cooking from scratch is a lot of work! And suggesting a return to this model for the modern American family requires that someone stays at home, or that someone has a flexible job with a lot of time.
Moving onto money: as Pollan points out, American don’t spend nearly as much of their income on food as we used to, or compared with some European countries with better food cultures. We have room in the budget, he says, to cut out things like cable in favor of better quality produce. And here I think he’s badly missing the point. I’ll grant him, overly generously, that we all could spend more on food; what he fails to recognize is that food is often the only regular expense in a monthly budget where there is any wiggle room. If I were to fall $20 short on my rent or phone bill or loan payments, I would have problems. Processed food is cheaper by the calorie; I can spend $20 less and still eat and pay my bills.
It also requires often-daunting initial expenses if one wishes to make food taste good. I have refused to try a number of tempting recipes because buying the spices required at my local grocery store (i.e., cheap spices) would cost more than I could justify. There is a similar initial outlay for other cooking projects: yeasts, cream, equipment, etc. It pays off in the long run. So does buying the second fridge and part of a cow; it’s fitting that into a budget that’s hard.
And in the meantime, there’s a lot of prepackaged food and convenience food that is cheaper and often tastes good. And we shouldn’t ignore what is often available in grocery stores that serve poor areas. If all you could buy was some mealy tomatoes and wilty lettuce, you’d probably buy something prepackaged, too.
But the real problem here, I think, is knowledge. Learning to cook isn’t hard, but it takes time, and it takes a willingness to experiment, and it takes the luxury to get things wrong. One can cook and eat inexpensively, but one has to know, e.g., what to do with cheaper cuts of meat and less than perfect vegetables, or what one can substitute.
The hardest part for me about learning to become a better cook in graduate school, while cash-poor, was developing the will to risk the food budget on trying something new, or the willingness to risk having to eat what I prepared. (Let me tell you of the week of an awful curried pumpkin soup…) It was harder for friends (mostly guys) who didn’t have any basic kitchen skills down at all.
And we’re all people who are doing relatively okay on a modest income, who have the time to learn. None of us have any kids that would have to eat what we messed up.
I don’t have any real suggestions for fixing all of this; like I said, it’s not so much a criticism of Pollan as it is a wish for a different book. Our local farmer’s market accepts WIC and EBT, which has been a great success. But beyond that I’m kind into magical thinking territory: I wish everyone had a friend to teach them to cook, and a slow cooker to make it easier to cook while working. I wish I could smack executives who thought it okay to put crappy produce in the low-income grocery store and charge more for it than for the nice vegetables in the grocery store up the road in the middle-class town.
So this is mostly a plea: the next food writer who goes to write a book about discovering the joys of a home-cooked meal? Do it on a budget, with the food and seasonings you can find in a common chain grocery store. Do not assume a house, a second freezer, a large kitchen, or the ability to cook. You may have a frying pan, some pots, some measuring implements, and some non-electric stirring implements; assume an oven and a stove. (Even though the latter aren’t always present.)
And let us know how it turns out.
48 comments
September 23, 2008 at 8:28 am
Wrongshore
That experiment would fit very neatly into Omnivore’s Dilemma, actually.
Michael Pollan’s grocery cart in the LA Times:
September 23, 2008 at 8:53 am
Patrick Banks
I too would like to shop like Polan. But cash is tight, my kitchen is tiny, the start-up costs are daunting, and I have other things in my life besides cooking that require my attention, so your critique resonated. I’d add, though, that transportation is an issue for many of us who either can’t afford a car or, in my case, who refuse to drive a car. I’m lucky that I live close to a convenient bus line in Portland, Maine that drops me off “close” to my local Shaw’s. (A hefty trek across the parking lot is still required.) Still, hunting and gathering is a bothersome chore for me and eating like Michael Pollan isn’t easy. I’ve been free from my car for a couple years now but I still haven’t gotten the hang of foraging without one. In flusher times, my default setting was to go out but that’s not so affordable anymore. In short, a lot more needs to change if more people are to follow Pollan’s advice – basically we need more and smaller grocery stores and healthier packaged food. Terraform the food deserts!
September 23, 2008 at 9:06 am
dana
Ooh, that’s a good point I neglected (or, well, cut out.) It’s easy to say ‘go here, here, and here, and load up the SUV with groceries’, or ‘shop like the French, daily’ but that’s hard to square with ‘ load up the wire cart, walk half a mile to the grocery store.’ or ‘the Sunday bus runs once an hour, so have fun!’
September 23, 2008 at 9:22 am
grackle
I can’t understand much of the complaints here. Caveat- I haven’t read the book- but leaving aside breakfast cereal, which I will grant is part and parcel of being American for many folks, I can’t think of a packaged food that is not wildly more expensive than the raw materials like meat, veggies, etc. Second, I don’t get the part about time constraints. Rice takes 20 minutes to cook. Beans a little longer but without supervision. I could put together a regimen of meals for a month which would rarely go over 45 minutes in prep time: roast a chicken (69-99 cents lb) prep time 5 minutes, occasional basting; most vegetables total cooking time 5-10 minutes. Spices? Lemon garlic salt and pepper – one could buy some oregano or basil occasionally. Mark Bittman publishes a recipe a day in the Times, based on the sense that wonderful food can be prepared in minutes. His weekly 5 minute videos are a delight. It’s way easier than gradual school, i.e. the learning curve is not steep.
September 23, 2008 at 9:31 am
Tyrone Slothrop
“I wish I could smack executives who thought it okay to put crappy produce in the low-income grocery store and charge more for it than for the nice vegetables in the grocery store up the road in the middle-class town.”
The “executives” who are stocking and selling the crappy produce in the low-income grocery store are probably work on such tight margins that they (a) can’t afford not to charge more for it than the grocery store up the road does, and (b) can’t afford to stock nicer vegetables.
Otherwise, terrific post.
September 23, 2008 at 9:33 am
A White Bear
I would love to see a book out that made cooking extremely accessible for lower-income and time-pressed families. First, it would talk about how to schedule your time. One good way is to pick the day when you have the most time at home and do a lot of simultaneous cooking for the whole week. Instead of worrying about having two freshly-prepared meals every day, which almost no one has time to do, you set aside Sunday (or whatever day) and make low-effort, large meals that are tasty enough to reheat throughout the week, like a lasagna, a stew, beans and rice, etc., that require minimal effort to get on the table. You can even pre-pack portions for the whole week in those Ziploc meal containers so everyone can take them to school and to work.
Second, you have to learn how to shop for produce and figure out what staples you always want to have in the house (rice, pasta, cans of tomatoes and beans). My own attitude toward produce is to buy several vegetables that I can use in anything (zucchini, broccoli, onions, potatoes), but also occasionally throw in one thing that you want to experiment with (beets, kale, poblano peppers). Thinking ahead and gradually developing your vegetable repertoire makes this kind of cooking easier as time goes on.
Third, make the same dishes regularly enough that you learn to make them faster and tastier. If you figure out how to make a couple kinds of soup, soup becomes a great diet staple for the refrigerate-and-reheat method. My old roommates always knew I could make a dish of Mexican-ish rice, vegetables, beans and cheese that was cheap, convenient, portable, and nutritious, and the more I made it, the better and easier it got.
Fourth, learn how to use a knife. Learn. How. To. Use. A. Knife. Prep time used to be the thing that made cooking such a goddamned chore, especially when vegetables were involved. Now, I think nothing of dicing ten different vegetables; it takes all of two minutes.
I am so, so lucky to have had a mom who learned old-school Southern cooking. There are no recipes, just concepts and skills. And you don’t worry so much about what’s authentic; you just make what you and your family will eat. A lot of the food is cheap to make, and quick to prep if you learn to move around your kitchen efficiently. One of the things that annoys me about the bourgeois back-to-the-land stuff is that there’s a sort of hopelessness about the eating habits of lower-class people who work a lot and have kids. You want to know why poorer families find themselves at McDonald’s so often? It’s because it’s better food than they may know how to make, and it takes less time. The more and better I cook, the less I find myself venturing out for high-fat, high-sugar Chinese takeout.
And I do believe these are learnable skills. Confidence in the kitchen goes a long way. The other thing you’ve got to figure out how to do, though, is who’s going to do the dishes. If your eldest kid or your partner can be convinced that, seriously, you’ll make good home-cooked food if they’ll just wash the dishes afterward, you won’t dread spending a few hours in the kitchen.
The caveats here, of course, are that I don’t have kids, so I don’t know shit. But when I was little, my mom cooked at home for my brother and I, with basically no help, while she was working, and we had very little money, and the only difference between her and some of our friends’ fast-food-getting moms was that ours felt confident in the kitchen. A book like this could be cheap, short, readily available, and enact the broad-scale change that Pollan seems to be preaching only to the socioeconomic elite.
September 23, 2008 at 9:37 am
A White Bear
Added above, of course, caveats about the shopping availability as mentioned above. Seriously, something’s got to be done about this. In my old neighborhood, there were like five bodegas within walking distance, no serious grocery stores, and a total lack of any produce beyond a fly-blown banana and an ancient potato. You can’t survive on that shit.
September 23, 2008 at 9:41 am
dana
The “executives” who are stocking and selling the crappy produce in the low-income grocery store are probably work on such tight margins that they (a) can’t afford not to charge more for it than the grocery store up the road does, and (b) can’t afford to stock nicer vegetables.
Working on tighter margins than the other grocery stores? In the case I’m thinking of, the two grocery stores are about 15 minutes apart (about 3 miles in traffic.) Produce is never a profit-maker. So, what gives?
September 23, 2008 at 9:57 am
Walt
An underappreciated fact is that planning ahead sucks. It exacts a psychic cost. If your life is not already full of psychic costs, then adding another seems like a small price to pay. If you are already at your limit, and you’re supposed to cancel cable and sell your iPod so that you can dutifully plan ahead some more, then suddenly McDonald’s doesn’t sound so bad.
dana: The one store probably makes money on higher-markup items than does the other store.
September 23, 2008 at 10:30 am
Tyrone Slothrop
“Working on tighter margins than the other grocery stores? In the case I’m thinking of, the two grocery stores are about 15 minutes apart (about 3 miles in traffic.) Produce is never a profit-maker. So, what gives?”
If you assume that the margins are the same in both stores, as I would, then that suggests why the produce is worse at the low-income store. The characteristics of demand for produce are probably different at the two stores, I’m guessing for reasons relating to, as you say above, time, money and knowledge.
I don’t question the phenomenom at all — I just think the causes are structural, and not the result of malice or greed on the part of grocery store employees.
September 23, 2008 at 10:36 am
kid bitzer
part of what gives may be that crappy produce is produce that did not get sold yesterday, or the day before.
i.e., if your customer base is already oriented towards buying produce, then they buy it faster, it turns over faster, and you restock more often and so with fresher stuff.
if, on the other hand, you know that you don’t sell a lot of produce, then you don’t order new supplies every day, and so the same two peppers sit in the bin for a week, getting less and less appealing.
yeah, it’s a cycle, yeah, it could be made to run the other direction if everyone pitched in to intervene and make it run the other direction, but i must say that my sympathies follow those of tyrone slothrop, that the small shops, while culpable for many reasons, are at least comprehensibly culpable on this score.
hey tyrone, ever think about coming out with a cook book for slo-cookers?
September 23, 2008 at 10:38 am
kid bitzer
“Fourth, learn how to use a knife. Learn. How. To. Use. A. Knife. Prep time used to be the thing that made cooking such a goddamned chore, especially when vegetables were involved. Now, I think nothing of dicing ten different vegetables; it takes all of two minutes.”
truer than true, awb.
but i gotta say, for me the thing that makes cooking such a g.d.c. is not prep time, but clean up time. it’s not the knife, or even the cutting boards (one for meat, one for non, natch), but all the damned dishes and pots and spoons and on and on.
September 23, 2008 at 10:44 am
A White Bear
Walt, yeah, I think the stress of planning is the thing that learning a few basic kitchen and shopping skills eradicates. Once you trust yourself, and the learning curve is pretty steep, you stop thinking about what you’re going to cook and can shop on autopilot. My own shopping involves asking myself if I have bread, cereal, milk, eggs, pasta, beans, cooking oil, and rice in the house, and then, if I have a little extra money, I get vegetables, cheese, and tortillas. Using recipes stresses me out. Thinking about what I’m going to make this week stresses me out. It takes an especially calm week to get me to try something new, but I’ve got enough old reliable things under my belt that making food with whatever’s on hand takes very little effort now.
When I’ve talked to people who say they don’t cook at home, they often say how intimidating it is to try to plan and put together a meal, to make the right things that go together or whatever. I’m a big fan of learning how to make a few one-pot foods so one doesn’t have to worry about all that.
September 23, 2008 at 10:46 am
Marichiweu
The psychic burden thing seems like a good point. Good cooking and nutrition skills are not impossible even on a tiny budget, as AWB points out. But it’s hard. And that’s a burden that falls disproportionately, like so many burdens do. Family planning isn’t hard either, or good financial planning, or exercise, but some people have the time and money and skills and psychic energy to do it, and some don’t so much. And there’s a massive industry in place to take advantage of that disproportionate burden, for which Pollan offers only a ‘universal’ solution.
That’s not entirely true, actually, now that I think about it. All of the nice middle-class suggestions about better foodways come alongside discussions of federal-level agricultural policies that would make a big difference for everyone. And there’s what the Brits call knock-on effects, inasmuch as if more of us used farmers’ markets (for example), there would be more farmers’ markets, they’d be cheaper and easier, and more people would have access to good ways of eating. In all, Pollan is actually a better political and social-movement thinker than is implied by the sort of SlowFoody paeans in those books.
September 23, 2008 at 10:48 am
A White Bear
Yeah, Kid, cleanup is a bitch. Some people really like doing it; I hate it. My ideal future is one in which I find a permanent non-romantic life-partner who will eat the food I make and then do the dishes.
September 23, 2008 at 11:01 am
kid bitzer
“My ideal future is one in which I find a permanent non-romantic life-partner who will eat the food I make and then do the dishes.”
really? if you could find this ideal permanent life-partner who does the dishes, you wouldn’t want to fuck them, too?
separate topic–when our kids were little, one of the main headaches in meal planning was the resistance to food. yeah, we did all the stuff that awb says. planned it all out. had the ingredients. the kale, the poblano peppers. (actually not, back then, but the equivalent).
and then the little rats won’t eat it. or you get them to eat it, but that process exacts a huge psychic cost as well. or you’re trying to cook when they are in their deepest sugar-lows and need something now.
i just think, for anyone with kids–esp little kids–the meal issue is primarily a kid issue.
September 23, 2008 at 11:06 am
Nathan Williams
The ability to experiment when you’re single or otherwise don’t have demanding eaters is important. I’m definitely a wealthy stand-mixer hobby-cook type, and even my experimenting and recipe development is noticeably curtailed by the pickiness of my signifcant other. It’s not that she’s dependant on me or the food I make, but making things and having her reject them is a major drag.
September 23, 2008 at 11:12 am
kid bitzer
let’s face it, all mixers are a drag.
the enforced gaiety, the milling around, the feeble attempts at mingling, all of the small talk and glancing at name-tags, the cliques, the loners, the empty effusions.
whether you’re standing up or not is the least of the problems.
September 23, 2008 at 11:19 am
A White Bear
really? if you could find this ideal permanent life-partner who does the dishes, you wouldn’t want to fuck them, too?
Sex might complicate the delicate beauty of this relationship.
And definitely, kids can be a drag about food. My mom’s no-nonsense attitude was “Eat what we’re eating or starve.” This proved difficult when she made chili with green peppers, which made me sick, but we eventually negotiated some middle ground.
From what I understand, kids go through some intense “I only eat X!” food phases, which has got to be a giant pain in the ass, but they apparently survive it. However, a friend of mine once claimed that her brother, who had recently turned 18, had never ingested anything other than potatoes with butter, corn, and very plain chicken. I felt like I was contemplating the abyss.
One of my old roommates had a few weird childhood-holdover food issues, like worrying that bell peppers were “too spicy” and that beans were only edible if mashed into refried form. I eventually brought her around on the peppers issue (she now eats jalapenos regularly), but the bean problem I just had to work around. Thank God for the food processor.
September 23, 2008 at 11:25 am
kid bitzer
well, i guess your other option was to say:
“i didn’t say i wouldn’t fuck ’em, i only said it would be non-romantic.”
which would manifest a different kind of delicate beauty, i suppose.
yeah, props to your mom’s no-nonsense attitude. psychic costs, though, i suspect, all around–ask her about it some time and see hw she remembers it.
September 23, 2008 at 11:31 am
A White Bear
I have asked her about it, and it’s funny; she remembers the whole thing as terribly easy, and is disdainful of parents of picky eaters, figuring they’re just not standing firm. It’s true that it never really occurred to us to be really picky. My brother and I each got the right to stipulate a few Nevers, but they could be worked around; that is, we were allowed to veto an ingredient, but we weren’t free to order entirely different meals.
September 23, 2008 at 11:38 am
Josh
but i gotta say, for me the thing that makes cooking such a g.d.c. is not prep time, but clean up time. it’s not the knife, or even the cutting boards (one for meat, one for non, natch), but all the damned dishes and pots and spoons and on and on.
That’s why you clean as you go. Last year I took a 12-week series of cooking classes; one of the things the chef teaching it drilled into us was proper kitchen upkeep, and cleaning as we went was a huge part of that. Same with preparing our mise-en-place and making sure all prep work was done before we ever turned on any heat in the kitchen. (And if you’re prepping a bunch of vegetables, keep a scrap bowl handy and dump everything into that. Only after the scrap bowl is completely full do you empty *that* into the trash.)
It’s amazing how much of a difference it makes.
September 23, 2008 at 11:42 am
Josh
There are no recipes, just concepts and skills.
This is the other thing the classes hammered into us. The curriculum was based around techniques rather than recipes (so one week we covered soups, the next week stews and braises, and so on), and at the end we were presented with a mystery basket of food and required to make at least two dishes from it. Once you’ve got the underlying techniques down, the planning really does go out of it. (I can’t even read most recipes anymore. They don’t tell you what you’re doing or why you’re doing it!)
September 23, 2008 at 11:48 am
kid bitzer
yeah, okay, well i hate awb’s mom, and i hate josh too.
fuck it. i’m ordering chinese tonight, and throwing away each take-out box as i empty it.
it’s amazing how much of a difference it makes.
September 23, 2008 at 11:53 am
kid bitzer
sorry–that was meant to be funny in a caustic way, but i may have omitted a crucial ingredient, sc. the funny.
September 23, 2008 at 12:18 pm
ari
I laughed. Though not out loud. It was right here, just below the diaphragm, where it counts.
September 23, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Megan
Yep, the psychic costs would be a pain if I didn’t love the process of shopping and cooking. But I can’t expect other people to love the process.
I’ve been thinking about stuff that has very low, but still prohibitive barriers to entry. The reason I don’t take the bus in Berkeley is that I don’t know how to load my bike on it. I’m sure I could do it, but not in the minute the bus is stopped. I’m positive I could do it the second time, if someone showed me the first time, but no one follows me around to instruct me in minor things. I think an awful lot of life is like that.
Two more things – before you get that new skill, like learning to chop vegetables, you don’t know if it is hard or easy. Could be either, but you don’t know. Then, after you have it, you quickly forget what it was to not know. It has always been easy to cross that low barrier.
September 23, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Brad
Alice Waters, of all people, tried to write the book that Dana wants. We can discuss the irony of a $35 book to save a few dollars on groceries at another time.
September 23, 2008 at 1:47 pm
dana
There are no recipes, just concepts and skills.
This describes my style of cooking, which I learned from my mom, very well, and I’m not particularly skilled. I write recipes for my friends sometimes and they end up being very entertaining, because I am likely to describe an amount as ‘not too much’ but go into detail on how to roast garlic.
The scrap bowl thing I learned from watching Rachel Ray.
In all, Pollan is actually a better political and social-movement thinker than is implied by the sort of SlowFoody paeans in those books.
He is. Which is why I felt a bit unfair about the whole thing, and he does spend a lot of time covering policy decisions that have really shaped how American eating has turned out. It’s just that a lot of the non-policy stuff assumed not even the middle-class income, but a mindset that includes a lot of social capital.
I don’t question the phenomenom at all — I just think the causes are structural, and not the result of malice or greed on the part of grocery store employees.
I’d agree, but then it quickly becomes a chicken-and-egg problem. There’s no reason for me to bother to learn to cook X when X isn’t available or isn’t tasty, so I won’t buy it, so they don’t sell it, so….
But the one piece I have a hard time working into the explanation is that if the demand isn’t there, then it’s hard to explain why the farmer’s market does so well (it accepts EBT, and only has recently, so…) People seem to like fresh vegetables when they’re sold and are in good condition!
September 23, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Brad
What is really weird about processed food is that it is cheaper than the raw ingredients. Think about that, value has been added, and it is still cheaper.
This is in part because of the bizarre sets of subsidies that we have constructed over the years. If a large group of people work against those subsidies, then real food will become cheaper. You can see this in how much less expensive organically grown stuff has become over the years (though organically grown stuff is now much more industrial than it use to be).
Basically, Pollan is saying, if enough people make the sacrifice who can afford it, then it will be cheaper and easier for everyone else to eat a healthier diet.
September 23, 2008 at 2:01 pm
grackle
What is really weird about processed food is that it is cheaper than the raw ingredients. Think about that, value has been added, and it is still cheaper.
I don’t understand this statement. Maybe I’m thinking a different definition of processed food. I can’t think of any that are cheaper than raw ingredients. I mean, potato chips are in the neighborhood of 15 dollars a pound, potatoes, a couple bucks for 5 lbs.
September 23, 2008 at 2:12 pm
nick
so the problem with Pollan is it’s not for the genuinely poor? people who are temporarily poor, that is, grad students, would all buy the right sort of book (Pollan’s book, appropriately tweaked)–but there is no right book that’ll help the genuinely poor. we know what would help the genuinely poor: reforming the food subsidy system and fighting poverty. this isn’t a book problem; it’s a problem of political will….
September 23, 2008 at 2:16 pm
dana
Two points to that, grackle.
There’s scale to consider: it might be cheaper to buy ingredients to make my own bread over several loaves, but it won’t be cheaper than the loaf right there now. To make potato chips, I’d need a fryer, salt, and a way to slice the potatoes thinly.
The other thing that as this is usually calculated, for example, it’s amount-of-calories per dollar to spend at the store. That ends up weighted towards convenience foods and away from fresh vegetables.
September 23, 2008 at 2:27 pm
kid bitzer
there’s also a difference btw.
“this strawberry jam is cheaper, per pound, than this flat of fresh strawberries in the store!”
and
“this strawberry jam is cheaper, per pound, than the strawberries that went into it!”
it’s not just the difference that the jam has a bunch of corn syrup in it.
there’s also the difference that strawberries in the store have to be premium quality and have to be handled in expensive ways.
the berries that go into the jam may be pretty ratty looking, and may get mauled on the way from field to factory, and may travel a shorter distance to the factory as well.
ditto for the potatoes: a lot of what’s in processed potato products are the reject spuds that could not have been sold in a produce bin (tater-tots are a site for sore eyes).
September 23, 2008 at 2:32 pm
dana
so the problem with Pollan is it’s not for the genuinely poor?
No, not at all. It’s more that it’s not for anyone who isn’t in the top tier of income, who has many children, who does not live in a house, who does not have a large kitchen, who works two jobs, who doesn’t have a full-time homemaker (or close enough to it.), etc. The problems with the personal suggestions start well above the poverty line.
Or to put it another way, it’s that he approaches the problems from an upper middle class knowledge base, and once you don’t have that knowledge base, his solutions are very hard. On policy, he’s reasonably strong.
September 23, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Brad
Grackle is right about the potato chips. I was more thinking about frozen meat versus the fresh stuff. But kb, of course, points out the important issue. So, I will just let kb do the talking…almost always the right thing to do….
September 23, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Emma
I agree that middle class people are more likely to respond, but White Bear is right that that’s not because the skills needed are hard. It is possible to cook from scratch nearly every night, for 20-odd years, with five kids and a full time job — I’ve done it, and in fact I got in the habit when we were poor, and had no money for eating out, even at McDonalds, or easy frozen food. Porridge (oatmeal) is way cheaper than cereal, and fruit in season is cheaper than bought biscuits. But there is a psychic cost, and you do need to be able to stand up to the kids. Actual poverty, rather than relative, makes this easier — if there really isn’t anything other than carrots for afternoon snack, hungry kids will eat them. But being tired, hassled, worried, and having junk in the house is a bad temptation to just give in and let the kids eat it.
The neighbourhood thing is important — I live in an Australian inner city suburb where the shops round the corner include 3 good cheap butchers, 2 good cheap greengrocers, a small grocery store, a great deli and a range of Indian, Turkish and Vietnamese groceries. I can shop for 7 people in half an hour on foot (with my trolley). I can get off my bus home from work at 5.30 and buy meat, vegies, milk, bread and fruit without going out of my way. This makes it possible. Part of the advantage of the middle class knowledge base that Dana talks about is that I’ve chosen such a neighbourhood because of these advantages (renting here when I was poor, and now buying). I do get tempted to say to people buying trolleys full of white industrial bread, frozen vegetables and canned meat at the grocery that there is an Italian bakery, and butchers and greengrocers round the corner that they should try. So far, I haven’t.
It’s a complex interplay of class culture, parenting styles, skills and knowledge, infrastructure and learned tastes, as well as marketing, that makes this problem so difficult to work out.
September 23, 2008 at 4:30 pm
ari
The neighbourhood thing is important — I live in an Australian inner city suburb where the shops round the corner include 3 good cheap butchers, 2 good cheap greengrocers, a small grocery store, a great deli and a range of Indian, Turkish and Vietnamese groceries. I can shop for 7 people in half an hour on foot (with my trolley). I can get off my bus home from work at 5.30 and buy meat, vegies, milk, bread and fruit without going out of my way.
Your neighborhood is called “Heaven”, right? Or maybe just my version of same. Is it hard to immigrate to Australia? And if I do so, will you cook for me?
September 23, 2008 at 4:31 pm
JPool
Weekend America recently did a report on a program in Cleavland to educate folks in poor neighborhoods about how to integrate vegetables and healthy foods into their meal planning. It’s worth noting that it’s a partnership with with local grocers who, at least in this particular case, would like to offer more produce, but need to know that folks are going to buy it. Read/listen here.
September 23, 2008 at 8:29 pm
an actual farmer
As I jump in way down here, I’d like you all to pick up a book that really filled in the gaps in the aforementioned Pollan material. It’s called “Serious Pig: An American Cook in Search of His Roots”, by John Thorne. It is cantankerous when Pollan is dreamy, delves where Pollan skates. Thorne seems to grasp the constant conflict in American eating, but is not on a mission to eradicate it; he seems more interested in elucidating the problem so that we may all accept and move on. But it’s all written so poetically that I, as farmer and food lover, want to cry.
As if in answer to all that talk about Mom passing on food traditions, I had to transcribe this passage found in the middle of a rambling essay on the long slow death of old-fashioned Downeast cooking, particularly good pie. He describes the three pillars of Maine cooking: Particularity, Generosity, and Frugality, and attributes the degradation to the latter; i.e. the use of Crisco in place of lard, or canned blueberries instead of fresh-picked, done in an effort to at least produce something that resembles pie for those who demand it by force of tradition:
“Today, you can have frugality and generosity or you can have particularity. Most cooks here choose the former, and even as they come to depend on the cheapness of out-of-state produce and meat, they get accustomed-or at least resigned- to its inferiority.”
He beautifully describes a scenario in which the women of Maine would much rather forego the ritual of pie-making if they can’t get proper ingredients, but they keep the tradition alive in an effort to meet the expectations or “cussedness” of husbands, brothers and sons:
“Maine cussedness may be a necessary luxury, but it is a luxury for all that, and it is the women who foot the bill. The men cling to familiar ways because they find their identity in them; the women stay with them because they love their men. But it is at a growing cost to themselves, if not in effort, at least in pride…something that the men do their best to ignore. This means a growing distance between Maine men and Maine women, a distance that doesn’t get discussed. And that, if you like, is Maine cussedness, too”.
Of course I’m not doing it justice, go read it and I’ll shut up.
September 24, 2008 at 5:01 pm
Bostoniangirl
I tried to sign up for a basic cooking class, but it costs more than $250. It’s kind of hard to spend that money when you’re on a budget.
September 24, 2008 at 6:59 pm
dana
Wow, BG. I had no idea they were that expensive (Pollan recommends them in his book.)
farmer, that sounds like a good book. And lo, my university library has it! I shall read it, and maybe do another post.
September 25, 2008 at 10:03 am
Liz
Great post – and amen to the comments on the psychic costs, which are easy to overlook but a major issue.
I wanted to pick up on the mention of farmers’ markets accepting WIC. I was pretty excited when I saw so many WIC coupons being used at the farmers’ market in my neighborhood, so I decided to write a paper about it for a public health policy class. It was disappointing to learn that the WIC Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program only provides $10-30 of benefits per recipient per year. (WIC is for pregnant women at young children at nutritional risk, so a WIC-eligible pregnant woman with a one-year old would be a two-recipient household and could get $20-60 per season.) States can supplement the amount they get from the federal government, but most don’t. And here in DC, the transactions are still done with the paper coupons, which means you have to buy things in $5 increments – the vendors aren’t allowed to give change. It’s a worthwhile program, but it probably won’t contribute to widespread changes in eating habits unless the benefit levels increase and it becomes more convenient … and, of course, WIC eligibility is pretty strict, so we’d reach a lot more people if a similar program were adopted for food stamp recipients.
September 25, 2008 at 11:24 am
Josh
Wow, BG. I had no idea they were that expensive (Pollan recommends them in his book.)
The 12-week class I took cost over $600. Now, part of that is definitely that it’s targeted to yuppies, but it doesn’t surprise me at all that BG’s class was that expensive.
September 25, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Tyrone Slothrop
“[T]he one piece I have a hard time working into the explanation is that if the demand isn’t there, then it’s hard to explain why the farmer’s market does so well (it accepts EBT, and only has recently, so…) People seem to like fresh vegetables when they’re sold and are in good condition!”
Maybe there’s enough demand to support a vendor or vendors at a weekly farmer’s market, with short hours and lower overhead, but not enough to prompt a supermarket to stock fresh produce all the time.
February 26, 2009 at 6:57 pm
ConsciouslyFrugal
I work in the non-profit industry (read: don’t make much money) for a healthcare agency. One of the things we do is reach out to low-income families, living in neighborhoods without decent grocery stores to teach them healthy cooking and eating skills. So, your thinking isn’t so magical. We’re working on it.
In other news, it’s a myth that it costs more to eat well. It doesn’t. Since I started eating primarily from the farmer’s market, I spend far less on food. Now, if you’re talking meat–well, that’s another story. But it’s quite possible to eat well on an extremely limited budget. It just requires some skills. Again, skills that must be taught for most everyone, regardless of income. We have horrible personal finance skills across economic lines in this country.
I suppose the point I want to make is–poor people are not powerless, helpless children. There are many of us working to make systemic changes, ensuring fresh foods are available and that people know how to shop and cook for themselves in ways that save time and money. And the majority of the people working on these issues are poor folks living in poor communities. Please keep in mind that poverty doesn’t make anyone “less than” or helpless when you’re championing for them.
February 26, 2009 at 7:54 pm
ari
CF: do you see evidence of anyone here equating people living in poverty with children? Or suggesting that poor people are helpless or “less than”?
May 23, 2009 at 11:52 pm
AWESOME! « The Droning Inquisition
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