Still, I feel lambasting a movement that I respect, albeit not always linguistically, is counterproductive to fostering a united front. If we are going to recreate our food system, both locally and globally, it is imperative that both the food intelligentsia (Pollan, Allen, Patel, Berry) and rank-and-file, food-minded citizens are not cannibalizing each other during this very important moment in time.

Decades from now, the early 2000s may be seen as a watershed moment for the alternative-food movement. Sociologically speaking, food consciousness, akin to the increase in human-rights consciousness during the 80s, has entered full-force into mainstream American society.

Evidence of this collective food consciousness is everywhere, and unless McDonald’s begins injections a brain-altering serum into their McRibs, it is here to stay. We can look at the popularity of movies like Food, Inc. (Oscar-nominated) and Fresh and Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, as good indicators that mainstream America is awake and mobilized toward the problems of our incredibly destructive food system.

But being awake about an issue doesn’t always mean you truly understand it. And this is not to say that there aren’t smart people spending serious amounts of time looking at the issue of food, but personal experience, no matter how scientific we try to be, invariably leads to some degree of bias. The problem is not the bias, but the fact that we seem to be ignoring glaring contradictions in favor of a more comfortable narrative. The food movements seems to be content with the idea that since poor food choices got us into this mess, changing these choices will in turn solve the problem.

When Michael Pollan says that “[e]ight dollars for a dozen eggs sounds outrageous, but when you think that you can make a delicious meal from two eggs, that’s $1.50. It’s really not that much when we think of how we waste money in our lives” (Worthen 2010), there seems to be some strange, out-of-touch daftness in his line of thinking. Is the problem simply that we haven’t understood the message of the food vanguards? Perhaps, but I think there’s more to it than that.

I’d like to propose something a little more critical—fully aware that it will be perceived as both polemic and hyperbolic. The problem of food is just another example of a systemic assault that has been waged against the poor and working-class in this country over the last thirty-odd years. As wages have remained stagnant, the price of foodstuffs—with the exception of soda—has steadily risen. We have the saturation of commercials focused almost exclusively on promoting heavy, processed, food-cum-chemically-enhanced meals to children—with fruits and vegetables rarely making an appearance.

We have people with limited access to personal transportation, coupled with working multiple jobs and longer hours, living in food-dead zones, where the nearest grocery store might be miles away. We have basically created an economy running so fast and unequally that the logic of this system is predicated on people also eating as quickly and cheaply as possible. This isn’t about people just not wanting to eat healthy food. Or not knowing some ridiculous cost-balance equation about how spending X amount of money on nutritious food today will save Y dollars on health bills in the future. Or the platitudes that if people stopped wasting so much money on material junk they’d have more money left to buy $4.00 organic peaches. It’s about a system in which food, which should be the most basic of rights, is now some repackaged, commodified afterthought.

The problem of consumer-based movements is that they tend to focus all the strategies on personal choice, disregarding structural inequalities that are at the root of our food problems. And even when they acknowledge these structures, they think that civil-society-promoted social movements can somehow operate successfully within the system. When thinking of food, the question should not be why people don’t eat well, but why we have created a system that reinforces—at a cost to mental health, financial security, and physical well-being—a food plutocracy where food has become increasingly fetishized at the top and placed out of the reach at the bottom.

As citizens we need to break the Ag Business-political accord. This can be done by voting into office people who are not wedded to the interests of Big AG, supporting your local food movements, and pressuring at all levels of government a need for healthy and safe food alternatives. But without widening government support toward locally grown food, current food solutions will remain largely on the periphery—eating around the edges instead of tackling the middle of our increasing food crisis.

If the 2050 food disaster-narratives are even half true, it’s not a matter of making better personal food choices, following rules of eating, or becoming awakened to a foodie manifesto, it’s about addressing a coming global food disaster the world has never seen. I think the food movement needs to push even further and leave no options off the table. As Raj Patel once said, “why are there markets for food at all?” If we are going to buy into the idea, as proposed by the likes of Graham Riches and Patricia Allen, that access to healthy and safe food is a fundamental human right, how then that right becomes realized is an essential question.

How about a government program that tiers the prices of food—through EBT-type cards—by income bracket? Or government refund checks to individuals who buy fruits and vegetables. This isn’t about accepting a future of “eight-dollar eggs” which will only exacerbate the division—mostly along class lines—between the well fed haves and the well fed have-nots, but about realizing that gravity of our food future requires a range of solutions.

Originally published on CounterPunch

According to food historian Felipe Fernandez-Arsmesto, food has always been a marker of class and rank in any particular society. He writes that, “Food became a social differentiator at a remote, undocumented moment when some people started to command more food resources than others.” He goes on to write that, “Class differentiation starts with the crudities of basic economics. People eat the best food they can afford: the preferred food of the rich therefore becomes a signifier of social aspirations.”

But this isn’t true in modern day America. The preferred food of the rich is now considered elitist and scoffed at by many Americans. In fact, there is data to suggest that even though many Americans can afford higher quality foods, they chose to eat cheaper and less nutritious foods. Jane Black and Brent Cunningham recently wrote about this in the Washington Post: “Many in this country who have access to good food and can afford it simply don’t think it’s important. To them, food has become a front in America’s culture wars, and the crusade against fast and processed food is an obsession of ‘elites,’ not ‘real Americans.’”

I would argue that the advertising agencies that work hand-in-hand with the big players of industrial food should take much of the blame for this change. Within the span of three short generations, Americans have come to accept industrial food as their mainstay—not only have they accepted it, they defend it like they’d defend the American flag as a symbol of their patriotism and allegiance with “real” America.

But there’s some perverse logic at work here and it strikes me as vaguely similar to the Stockholm syndrome—a paradoxical psychological phenomenon in which hostages express adulation and positive feelings towards their captors. While Americans are not experiencing a physical captivity, they are deeply mired in a psychological condition in which they’re captive to industrial food products and the corresponding ideologies that are ultimately harming them. Call it the American Fast Food Syndrome.

Part of the problem is that most Americans lack the knowledge that industrial food is a recent development in the history of agriculture. While human beings have been cultivating food for more than 10,000 years, industrial agriculture, as we know it today, has only been around for about 60 years. To many Americans, industrial food is simply food and they assume this is the way it has always been—Americans have all but forgotten that food might be the product of a farm and not a factory. I think it’s safe to say we’ve reached peak indoctrination: two out of three Americans is obese or overweight and one out of five 4-year-olds is obese. This is more than just a coincidence as we embrace our American industrial food diet wholeheartedly.

The fact that food advertising is a completely unregulated force doesn’t help. Advertisers spend billions of dollars on campaigns to make us want to buy their products. In her book Diet for a Hot Planet, Anna Lappé writes of a sly technique advertisers often use, “The food industry…is skilled at inoculation messaging, and part of its success comes from the ‘we’re one of you’ pitch.” She adds later, “The message, whether from Perdue, Nestle, or Cargill, is that these companies are like us; they care about the same things we do. It’s a message that forms another strand of the inoculation strategy.”

This “we’re one of you” ideology coupled with the food product’s corresponding affordability is slick marketing at its best.

You may remember a similar strategy used by Sarah Palin and John McCain in their 2008 Presidential campaign. Palin’s constant invocation of Joe the Plumber, Joe Six Pack, and soccer moms was the same “we’re one of you” rhetoric. Palin worked this angle again recently when she came running to the defense of the “real” Americans as she personally gave out cookies to elementary school students in her effort to stop the food police from depriving children of their god-given right to eat sugar-laden, processed foods.

These messages, from advertisers and politicians alike, are drowning out a sensible approach to healthy eating and improved quality of life for many Americans. I know that when people stop eating processed foods and start cooking whole foods, it’s nothing short of a revelation. My clients experience a transformation when they cut out junk foods—they lose weight, improve chronic health conditions, and feel better than they ever have before. Unfortunately, many Americans who really need guidance on healthy eating and cooking don’t have it. What they do have is a constant barrage of advertising for cheap industrial foods paired with the all-American rhetoric of Sarah Palin and her ilk.

Until all Americans see industrial food for what it really is, educating on healthier food options will remain a cultural battle. We can blame specific ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup or trans-fats indefinitely, but for a large portion of Americans their cultural identity is tied up in Big Macs, fries, and Cokes. As long as the food industry continues to succeed at imbuing their products with a particular sense of American authenticity, and as long as Americans continue to buy this image, while rejecting the organic, sustainable, and local food movement as part of some liberal agenda, we will remain a country in the midst of a dire health and food crisis.

This article is part of a regular column by nutrition expert Kristin Wartman, in which she examines food, nutrition, and the way the industrial food industry affects our food system and our health.

I’ve always admired honeybees for their elegant cooperation, and of course because they make more honey than they need out of sheer industriousness, which I love to eat.  So I was excited when I heard that I could learn to keep bees myself, in the city. (after the jump: how to build a hive)

For the past few weeks, I’ve been attending the basic course for beekeepers given by the New York City Beekeeper’s Association.  The focus of the course, which will be given again in March (but is currently taking names for the waiting-list only), was on the order of the hive, hive maintenance, the diseases that can affect a hive and how to treat them without chemicals, how to build your own hive, managing swarms, and when and how to collect honey.  But there was one catch: this is an illegal activity in New York City.

Chicago has beehives on the roof of City Hall, and in other cities like San Francisco and Atlanta, beekeeping within city limits is permitted.  But here in New York, the health code disallows the keeping of “venomous insects.”

Luckily we have the food advocates at Just Food taking the lead with their petition to legalize beekeeping in New York, who have also found an ally in Councilman David Yasskey, who put forward a bill that would override the health code and make beekeeping legal.  He spoke to the New York City Beekeeper’s Association on Sunday about his proposal, in which he describes beekeeping as an economic and environmental enterprise. He spoke about honey-gathering as a small business, an alternative for those struggling in this economy.  “With bees come flowers,” he added, going on to say that beekeeping is a part of building a greener city.  As a second-tier approach to the problem, Just Food has worked to encourage a re-evaluation of the health code, which will be taking place this summer.  Unfortunately, this is not in time for beekeepers to feel at ease in mounting their new hives this April.

Many beekeepers have been keeping bees covertly in the city for years, including many of the members of the association.  The threat they face is a fine of up to $2000, though this is rarely enforced.  Enforcement follows a complaint by the neighbors, who might assume that bees are like wasps, and sting without reason.  But Italian honey bees of the variety used by beekeepers in the city, Apis mellifera ligustica, have been selectively bred for gentleness, disease resistance and industriousness.

While I have yet to find a place to keep bees myself, preferably cooperatively (like in a community garden), I do plan to take part in as many “hivings” (introducing bees to their new home), inspections, and honey collections as I can this year.  Hopefully, my helpfulness will render jarred, sweet rewards.

Check back here for updates on the legal status of beekeeping in New York City, and for more posts about visiting city hives.

Building a Langstroth Hive

The class watched on Sunday at the Tompkin’s Square Park Greenmarket as our instructors, the family beekeepers Andrew and his father Norm, showed us the art of building a Langstroth hive.  The Langstroth is the most commonly used hive-type, and that is because it has mastered the concept of “bee space,” allowing just enough area between frames for bees to pass so that they won’t build a bridge of comb, which makes it more difficult to inspect the hive.  The wood being used is locally grown and milled in Maine.  It is cut into individual pieces, which you then hammer, glue, paint and stack, and voila! You have a home for your new “pets.”  Here is the photographic explanation on building the “deep,” or the main partition where the bees will produce the honey for their food and where they will raise their larvae:

Inside the deep will be placed the frames:

Then you do the process over again for another deep, so the bees have room to grow into the hive and will be less likely to swarm, and a “shallow,” a smaller box where you might have honey to eat by August.

There are many ways that we can interact with our food. We cook it, eat it, some of us garden or farm it, and perhaps we buy it at the market. In addition to all of those, some of us love to write about it.

Food writing takes many forms. Restaurant reviews have a certain celebratory style and language that has long been an established part of our cultural food fascination. On the other extreme, we have works like Fast Food Nation which explore some of the darker aspects of food production. In between these two are a million different voices and styles of prose and poetry relating to the food we eat.

For those of you in the Bay Area, the writing center 826 Valencia is holding a Food Writing seminar to explore how we write about food, and how you can get published, perhaps even paid, to do so.

I will be joining a diverse panel of authors and editors who will be present to discuss all the aspects of this growing field. Mollie Katzen, of The Moosewood Cookbook fame, will undoubtedly be a highlight for many. She will be joined by chef Scott Youkilis, editor of the journal Out of the Kitchen, Lessley Anderson, a senior editor at Chow.com, and Joe Jarrell, a writer for the SF Bay Guardian.

I caught up with Lessley, and asked her how she had become involved with the project. “I had volunteered with 826 Valencia in the past,” she said “and so was excited to be a part of the panel to support their work.”

The writing seminar is a fundraiser for the nonprofit 826 Valencia’s free tutoring and writing programs for 6 – 18 year olds. 826 National has branches in six other cities in addition to the original San Francisco location. The program is founded on the belief that “strong writing skills are fundamental to future success.”

With food writing specifically, it is clear that success in this particular field can be associated with a broad range of backgrounds. My original writing inspiration came from ecology and nature, as I attempted to emulate the likes of Barry Lopez and Annie Dillard. Lessley mentioned that she, too, did not start writing about food, but rather trained as a journalist and for a time was a crime writer.

But no matter where you begin, food writing is certain to nourish your mind and heart, but also your belly as you nibble away for inspiration while you write.

The Food Writing Seminar will be taking place Thursday, Nov 20 from 6 – 9pm at 826 Valencia, in San Francisco

Photo: asacart