There’s a new study out purporting to show that, as this AP story puts it, “healthy eating is a privilege of the rich.” In many ways, this headline is meant to be a spear slicing deeply into the Achilles heel of the food movement. In one stroke, it seems to confirm the stereotype of the elitist, Alice Waters-loving, farmers-market-shopping locavore who demands we all drop the Doritos and start learning to love kale chips instead. It is, however, a bit of an overstatement.The study, published in the journal Health Affairs, is actually doing something a bit different from what the news coverage would lead you to believe. The researchers have excellent pedigrees: epidemiologists from the University of Washington’s School of Public Health, including Adam Drewnowski, who has a large body of work looking at the various challenges of healthy eating for low-income people, and ways to overcome those challenges.

The authors looked at four basic nutrients that the USDA recommends Americans get more of: potassium, calcium, vitamin D, and fiber. Then they looked at the buying habits of a group of residents from King County, Wash. (an area that includes Seattle) and calculated the increase in cost for them to do just that. The eye-opening finding that got most of the press coverage was that increasing consumption of potassium to meet USDA recommendations “would add $380 per year to the average consumer’s food costs.”

But even the study authors admit that there’s a wrinkle here worth noting: They didn’t search out the cheapest source of potassium (bananas, for the record) to come up with that figure. They performed statistical analysis to model a diet higher in those nutrients based on what the study participants were already buying. That’s very different from trying to shop on a budget!

Indeed, their point was not to demonstrate that healthy eating is the province of the rich. Their conclusion was simply that “adopting a nutrient-dense diet in line with both dietary recommendations and current U.S. eating habits may raise food costs for consumers.” In other words, it’s not enough for the government to set dietary guidelines. It needs to radically change its policies, including but not limited to possibly subsidizing healthy foods, if we are to achieve the goal of healthy eating.

Last year, writers Jane Black and Brent Cunningham demonstrated the possibility of healthy, even locavore-style, eating on a tight budget during time spent researching a book in Huntington, W.Va., site of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution television show. They spend $2.38 per person per meal (cooked at home) while eating “plenty of organic produce … local eggs, buffalo meat and un-homogenized milk in glass bottles.” That’s not to say it’s easy, of course. But it’s not impossible.

The new study’s main thrust is that Americans will have to change their eating patterns if they are to eat a healthy diet affordably. But didn’t we know that already? Forget potassium — it’s well known that Americans don’t come even close to the recommended number of servings of fruits and vegetables, and if they tried, there wouldn’t be enough fruit and veggies to go around! The real question, which the study does not address, is how to get from where we are to where we want to be.

To me, the most interesting finding of the paper was not the “cost” of potassium (which may be a convenient nutrient for this kind of analysis but is certainly not the one most consumers focus on when shopping). Rather, it was the researchers’ results that showed “each time consumers obtained 1 percent more of their daily calories from saturated fat and added sugar, their food costs significantly declined.” Over the course of a year, a consumer could reduce food costs by $125 for each 1 percent increase in calories from sugar and fat. In other words, all the financial incentives point strongly to upping calories from fat and sugar and slashing the nutritional quality of the American diet.

The sad fact is that we are not born knowing how to shop for healthy food. While the concept of “healthy eating” has a long pedigree, for most of history the vast majority of people ate what was available or, if possible, the foods their parents ate. To vastly oversimplify, this fact held true for most people in the developed world until the middle of the last century when the great “labor saving” wave swept over American households (much to the relief of millions of women). It was at that moment that traditional “foodways” finally gave way to a corporate version that emphasizes convenience, ease, and palatability (achieved through manipulating sweet, fat, and salt). Government should be the obvious counterweight to the corporate marketing machine, but for reasons of internal conflicts and regulatory capture, it’s not.

Navigating the grocery aisles has never been more complicated — and not just for low-income folks. I can attest to the fact that many of my well-educated, affluent peers don’t manage things so well either, if the number of parents who serve their children sports drinks but limit soda is any indication. With time and money at an absolute premium and when most food education takes place in front of the television, do we really need a study like this to tell us which way the food winds are blowing?

Originally published on Grist

On Wednesday, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, farmer, poet and food movement hero Wendell Berry, physicist and seed-saving advocate Vandana Shiva, nutritionist and professor Marion Nestle, and His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales were among the speakers at The Future of Food, a conference put on by the Washington Post at Georgetown University.

The media was quick to focus on the comments by Prince Charles, who has been farming land on his Highgrove Estate for 26 years and selling produce under the name Duchy Originals, the profits of which are given to charities. But though the Prince gave a thorough and informed 45-minute speech about soil loss, the importance of biodiversity, and a critique of U.S. agriculture policy (you can read the whole speech here), some media and online comments focused on the perceived hypocrisy of the Prince as an environmentalist with a huge carbon footprint, and the old fall-back of detractors of the food movement: Elitism.

Chris Clayton, agriculture editor for The Progressive Farmer, tweeted “You just don’t make your case of what is needed in ag by tweeting “HRH Charles… His Royal Highness says. #FoF definitely #foodelitism”

Phillip Brasher, agriculture reporter for the Des Moines Register, didn’t use the word elitist, but used hyperbole to imply it. The title of his article: “Prince Charles: Save the world with organic farming.”

Elitism has been one of the hardest critiques for the good food movement to shake. For the last 50 years, conservative politicians have gained currency by slamming their opponents as elitist, pointy-headed liberals, and “nattering nabobs of negativism.” And food, which is often viewed as a liberal cause–even though conservatives are some of its biggest supporters–has become the latest hotbed for this fight (See Cookiegate). Making things more difficult, food is personal, habitual, and even addictive, and Americans are willing to cling to cheap food despite clear and present assessments about its toll on our health, our national deficit, and effects on our air and water.

Eric Schlosser, an investigative reporter and author of Fast Food Nation, among other books, kicked off the Future of Food event by saying:

Today, the chemical companies and the biotech companies like to dismiss organic food as something trendy or elitist. Well you know who needs organic food more than anyone else? …the two million farm workers who pick by hand almost all of the fresh fruits and vegetables in the United States. And their children need organic food, too. For them, the need for organics …is literally a matter of life and death. Pesticides are poisons. They have been carefully designed to kill insects, weeds, funguses and rodents. But they can also kill human beings. The Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that every year, 10,000-20,000 farmworkers in the United States suffer acute pesticide poisoning on the job, and that is probably a great understatement.

Though representatives from General Mills, Panera Bread, and the Grocery Manufacturers Association sat on panels, The Future of Food did bring together many known critics of the current food system. But the question is not whether the system should change, but how.

In fact, saying the system has to change should not be controversial. While the Farm Bureau and industry groups are preparing a PR campaign to change the consumer’s mind about industrial agriculture, it has become obvious that change must happen even at big corporations like Monsanto, Mars (which sponsored the event), and Walmart, which are all constantly trying to associate their image with sustainability. Meanwhile the price of oil is rising, the world water supply is becoming more tenuous, and extreme weather conditions and biofuel production contribute to food price spikes, all of which is leading to system collapse. Letting industry defend the current food system is akin to letting climate change deniers have a seat at the table while the science has long been settled.

Moreover, the two sides in this discussion are not equals. One is supported by an army of lobbyists and lawyers who shape legislation and feed talking points to the media. The other is an upstart with popular support based on overwhelming evidence that the system we have now is broken.

Just last week we saw what happens when you give too many industry spokespeople the stage at a similar event, put on by The Atlantic magazine. That event was sponsored by DuPont, Dole, Coca-Cola, and the Council for Biotechnology Information, a group funded by the industry. Each got to place staffers on the panels in return for funding. What resulted was a biased panel on “sustainable agriculture” that focused heavily on one thing: biotechnology. It also featured a panel on obesity, during which a Dole staffer and an American Beverage Association spokesperson marginalized the debate to focus on things like soda can sizes. Dr. Zeke Emmanuel, Chair of the Clinical Center Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, struggled to move the conversation toward discussing deeper solutions to the problem.

While bloggers lamented these biases, and asked whether or not this was what it takes to stay afloat as an independent magazine publisher, The Atlantic event was not a complete loss. White House chef and policy adviser Sam Kass spoke. The event also featured Alice Waters, who tweeted before taking the stage that, “The true elitism is a food system controlled by a handful of corporations,” and sent out a photo of the refreshments table, which featured bottles of Coke.

The Future of Food event instead featured a delicious lunch prepared by Bon Appétit Management Company, a locally-sourced and organic-committed caterer. But aside from the food served, the main critique I have of both of these events is their lack of deep, meaningful debate. For The Atlantic event, the debate was stunted by industry, for The Future of Food, there were too many people on each panel and a lack of time and direction by some of the moderators. And both events lacked diversity and youth voices. The Future of Food took place on a college campus, and yet the students who showed up didn’t stay after Prince Charles spoke. Indeed, the event could have been better publicized if the goal was to engage students on Georgetown’s campus.

If we are going to sit together in a room and discuss the finer points of food policy, we need to have real, solid debates and solutions. It’s time we get down to brass tacks about genetically modified foods, antibiotics in livestock agriculture, health concerns surrounding pesticide use, and other subjects, featuring scientists and those unassociated with industry. We need to talk about the barriers to producing research when it is missing, the consolidation in the industry and how this effects choices, and bring more farmers into these discussions to speak for themselves.

Otherwise, we should be rolling up our sleeves to build new models for food access. Dr. Hans Herren, a scientist and lead author of the IAASTD report, who was on a panel about international food policy, said it succinctly when he pointed out that we need to stop talking and writing reports and do something. “The time to act was yesterday,” he said.

Writing new policies will also help put to bed the tired old argument of whether or not organic vegetables are elitist. “Smart sustainable food policy is common sense,” said Senator Jon Tester in the closing keynote at The Future of Food. “And if you fight for it, you can win.”

In the end, calling those who want to change the food system elitist is merely a way of diverting our attention from the very real problems we face. In an opinion piece last week, Eric Schlosser wrote:

This name-calling is a form of misdirection, an attempt to evade a serious debate about U.S. agricultural policies. And it gets the elitism charge precisely backward. America’s current system of food production—overly centralized and industrialized, overly controlled by a handful of companies, overly reliant on monocultures, pesticides, chemical fertilizers, chemical additives, genetically modified organisms, factory farms, government subsidies and fossil fuels—is profoundly undemocratic. It is one more sign of how the few now rule the many. And it’s inflicting tremendous harm on American farmers, workers and consumers.

Photo: AP

Perhaps if it’s repeated enough, we’ll actually believe it, and then begin to spin yarns about the vast implications of this highly disturbing trend.

James McWilliams takes this simplistic view over at the Times’ Freakonomics blog. If good, clean, food is elitist, he argues, then it leaves out the vast majority of shoppers and thus creates a wedge in our communities. So you better watch out! Farmers markets are secretly destroying your neighborhood.

In countering this ludicrous assertion, I’d first ask, Where is the evidence that local foods are elitist? You won’t find it in McWilliams diatribe. He just assumes it.

Sure, I see people who are well-off at the Dupont Circle FreshFarm market in Washington (which is located in a high-income neighborhood). But I also see well-off people buying baby clothes on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I don’t jump to the conclusion that farm-fresh food or baby clothes are only sought by the wealthy.

This issue actually came up when I was researching my book Organic Inc. I had the notion firmly imprinted in my head that the typical organic shopper was a 30-something, upper-middle class, Volvo-driving, latte-swilling, yoga babe.

But try as I did to find the market-research to support that image, I could not. In fact, the largest and most authoritative study on that issue found that the median income of an organic shopper was right around the national median. The Hartman Group, which studies such things and sells their data in pricey reports to the food industry, has said that income is the least important factor in determining whether someone is an organic shopper or not.

Which is why you find penniless college kids eating organic vegan dishes. Now, programs are sprouting that double the value of food stamps at farmers’ markets. And guess what? They are quite successful.

As it is, ethnically diverse groups are disproportionately represented, Hartman found when studying the organic marketplace. Here’s another factlet: one of the largest factors in determining organic food purchases was availability. What looks like a white, upper-middle class trend might simply be a function of availability. Or to flip the notion on its head, do low-income people prefer buying fast food and chips from corner stores, or are those purchases disproportionate because of the lack of alternatives? Access isn’t the only issue here, but it is a big one.

Take the farmers’ market I visited last weekend in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Sure there were a fair amount of white hipsters and young parents with strollers but there were Latino and Eastern European shoppers as well. “It’s fresh?” asked one babushka eyeing a plump sourdough loaf. Surveying the crowd, you would be hard-pressed to describe it as upper-middle class.

In Washington, D.C., where I live, you see it too at farmers’ markets that straddle neighborhoods with diverse income groups, like Eastern Market. This market is not some homogeneous beast as McWilliams assumes — it’s diverse because, it turns out, a lot of people like good, fresh food from farms.

Here’s the other thing about this community-wilting farmers’ market fantasy McWilliams concocts. Local food represents perhaps 2-3% of all food sales (though farmers’ markets are sprouting extremely fast and not just in upper-income zip codes). It’s so minute it probably has less impact on a community than a public school gardening program.

But as farmers’ markets continue to grow — and there is no indication that they won’t — they will likely add to communities simply by being a gathering place, where people can interact, especially as access increases. In short, there is nothing inherently elitist about local food, which is why all effort should be made in increasing access across the income spectrum.

But following McWilliams’ logic, a superstore would offer more cohesion. They have the lowest prices. Low-income people can afford it. Oh yeah, only one problem. You don’t need a lot of other businesses or even a Main Street when a superstore comes to town. You don’t even need a lot of farmers. Just a few big ones. So how would a superstore create community cohesion? By spinning it from a fantasy determined solely by price.

Originally Published on Chews Wise

I’ll even eat at one of those bastions of gastronomic elitism like Stone Barns in New York or that citadel of all things “foodie”, Chez Panisse in Berkeley. On one such occasion I celebrated my son’s college graduation with a dinner at Stone Barns where the tab for the two of us came to a cool $325. It dawned on me as I was staggering out of the restaurant that I could have paid for 126 low-income children to eat school lunch that day at the current USDA reimbursement rate of $2.57 per meal. Better yet, 283 food stamp recipients might have had dinner on me that night at the average meal allotment of $1.15.

Such disparities in the way that different classes of Americans eat are disconcerting. With our nation teetering on the brink of economic meltdown, a record 31.8 million of us are receiving help from the food stamp program. Nearly 190,000 Mainers currently receive food stamp benefits, 15 percent more than last year.

Food banks and food pantries have been overrun as well. Over 25 million Americans are using emergency food assistance annually. Maine’s Freeport Community Services’ Food Pantry alone received 20,000 visits from people seeking food last year, but estimate that will grow to 28,000 this year.

In light of the fact that demand for “free” food is reaching levels not seen since the Great Depression, at a cost to the taxpayer of $73 billion a year and climbing, it might seem odd that there is also an infatuation with higher-priced local and organic food.

Chez Panisse’s Alice Waters, regarded by many as the nation’s premiere food elitist, appeared recently on 60 Minutes to proclaim the virtues of local and organic. She snootily dismissed its high cost by saying, “some people buy Nike shoes, two pairs, and other people want to nourish themselves.” And in a recent New York Times op-ed, Waters slashed the quality of the nation’s school lunch program, pronouncing that its federal subsidy should be doubled to $5.00.

But when it comes to the cost of good food for our children as well as for those who have hit a rough patch on the economic highway, I find the arguments over food elitism a bit spurious. Why can’t our society ensure that all our well fed? After all, aren’t we a nation that just bailed out the financial industry to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, including bonuses for those who put our economy in the toilet?

Perhaps it was this group of financial elitists who were among the party of 12 at Spaggio’s, Chicago’s premier eatery, (yes, the Obamas’ “special occasion” restaurant) who spent $18,000 on one meal this past November. Not only would that feed 15,652 food stamp recipients, it makes my dinner at Stone Barns look like a Happy Meal.

The fact of the matter is it will take money to make sure that everyone eats well. And I place the emphasis on well because we must ensure that everyone has regular access to healthy food. If we don’t, we run the very real risk of sustaining one food system for the poor and near poor, and one for everyone else – a divide, my friends, which is as unconscionable as it is unsustainable.

While the Maine state legislature should be congratulated for its support of school breakfast and lunch programs, the answers are not all about government spending. They are also about commonsense and compassion, qualities that I have found Mainers have in uncommon abundance. Take the new Fresh from the Pantry program currently being devised by the Freeport Food Pantry and two area CSAs farms – Laughing Stock and Tir na NOg. Together they will use the pantry’s ability to help people, the production skill of the farmers, and the generosity of their CSA members to bring the best food to people who need it the most.

Ideas like Fresh from the Pantry combined with a citizenry willing to support the simple notion that all should be well fed will lift both the economic and personal health of the nation. And in the end, we all may become little food elitists. Wouldn’t that be grand!

Alice Waters is taking a lot of heat in blogger land of late. From The Feedbag’s question “Has the locavore taliban finally been checked?” to NPR’s Monkey See blogger Todd Kliman noting Alice’s “inflexible brand of gastronomical correctness” to Anthony Bourdain’s equating her with the Khmer Rouge (I mean, can you see Alice carrying an 8.5 pound AK 47 when she couldn’t even do the Heimlich maneuver on Joan Nathan?) Alice is getting shredded in the Cuisinart of the Anti-Politically Correct. And some people would say, rightly so. Apparently, her local food obsessive-slightly fascistic behavior and precious organic-y grandeur has rubbed the wrong kind of salt into the wrong people’s wounded sense of self-righteous apathy.

In an article in the Washington Post this past Sunday, Jane Black, who wrote rather glowingly about the Kumbaya-ness of the Slow Food Nation event that took place in San Francisco back in August 2008, now seems to have turned a more specious eye upon the pre-inaugural dinners organized by Alice Waters in Washington DC. Thrown by private citizens in private homes, celebrity chefs (such as Daniel Boulud, Tom Colicchio, Lidia Bastianich, Floyd Cardoz, Nancy Silverton, Rick Bayless, José Andrés, Dan Barber) came in from around the country to cook on the Monday night before the Inauguration as a way to raise much needed funds for two Washington soup kitchens, Martha’s Table and DC Central Kitchen, and also FRESHFARM Markets, the organization that supports farmers’ markets in the Washington DC region. The dinners have received criticism for being at best irrelevant, at worst, down right elitist.

Patrick Martins, founder of Heritage Foods USA, who was at the infamous Joan Nathan dinner (and no, he didn’t see Colicchio perform the Heimlich maneuver on Ms. Nathan), just shakes his head upon hearing these petty Alice criticisms. “Whoever is saying these things, they should take a good look in the mirror and ask themselves, can they do better? No one else is stepping up to the plate.”

In the Wa Po article “Go Slow Foodies. It’s the Way to Win,” Black started the ball rolling by asking: “Can the combination of Barack Obama and a $500-a-plate meal of grass-fed beef in a rustic guajillo chili sauce and a warm tart of local apples and pears change the world? Or at least the way America eats?”

Can you guess what I am going to write next? Yes It Can!

On WNYC’s The Leonard Lopate Show, editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine Ruth Reichl and food writer for the New York Times Kim Severson discussed the implications, ramifications and machinations of the Alice Waters Inaugural Dinners.

Reichl was part of the committee, or “kitchen cabinet” as like might call themselves, (along with Waters and Danny Meyer) that organized these dinners and was happy to go on Leonard’s show if for no other reason than to tell the naysayers who cry “Elitism!” that eating good food is not an elitist act, that good food should be had by all, and the best way to get that message across is to take it to the kitchens of Washington DC.

Reichl said on the air: “When I started writing about food in this country, nobody seemed to care. And so it’s very exciting that people now care.”

So who cares? And what does that mean? It is easy to dismiss these green apple gelee and celery root remoulade glorified meals as oh so rococo and, to some cynics, a bit Marie Antoinette-ish, but at their heart (sunchoked if you will) there is substance to these dinners that can’t be blithely washed away with a decent bottle of ‘93 Hermitage.

In fact, a good many people of influence, media and otherwise were at these parties (Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, Mora Liason, Rachel Maddow just to name a few) along with Obama-ites like Zeke Emmanuel, Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel’s older brother and Chair of the Department of Bioethics at the NIH who came straight from celebrating with the Obamas to sit next to Reichl at Nancy Silverton’s dinner. Presumably these dinners, which received quite a bit of media attention, have started a conversation about food in this country that might now be on the radars of mainstream media in the future.

So if people care, then what are they going to do about it? Reichl asks that elephant-in-the-room question of the day: “how can we change things in this country so it’s not something that happens to rich people but is instead a prerogative for everyone in the country?”

Per Black’s article, the complaints continue: “They don’t have a central, core message,” says James Thurber, an expert on lobbying and the director of American University’s Center on Congressional and Presidential Studies. “What policy are they trying to change?”

Reichl’s answer: “We want to change it all! Who doesn’t think obesity is a problem or pesticides is a problem and social justice for farm workers is a problem — these are all things that need to be changed and many feel that the opportunity is finally in sight.”

Liz Falk, DC markets manager of FRESHFARM Markets, one of the recipients of the funds raised that evening, said this: “Recognizing that the lack of focus of the local food movement is understandable since food is so ubiquitous at every level, from policy, society and fair access issues, to business and support of small family farms, to the environmental impact… it is difficult to know where to start. And as such, we should want a whole lot more than validation from the White House and President Obama.”

Back on The Lopate Show, Kim Severson commented that she feels a larger food movement is afoot, “a second food revolution is in the air. Everything he [Obama] eats has been scrutinized. They all think Obama is their guy. I think they are overly optimistic but I know a lot of progress has been made.”

Reichl made a pass at one specific change this fall by supporting a letter written by Alice Waters last fall asking the Obamas to consider a change of guard in the White House kitchen. Both she and Waters and others were asking for a chef that uses local and organic foods. But the Obamas decided to stay with the chef already in the White House kitchen, Cristeta Comerford, and, as it turns out, Comerford has been cooking with organic foods all along for the Bushes. Oops.

Much bru-ha-ha has since been made that Reichl and the Gang were, to quote former White House Executive Chef Walter Scheib, treating Comerford like “so many pounds of chopped liver.”

Reichl had her chance to respond on the show.

“No one is beating up on her. The point of the letter was not that she wasn’t a great chef but that the position should be rethought, that it should be redefined as a bully pulpit who can talk about good food….They didn’t talk about the Bush’s eating organic food … They hid it and that’s the point. They were afraid they would be seen as elitist… This is a country that feeds their children pure junk while the President eats organic food. He didn’t want to say he was eating so much better than anyone else.”

And just yesterday, New York Times writer Marian Burros came out with the surprise announcement that yes indeed, Sam Kass, the 28 year old founder of Inevitable Table, a private chef service in Chicago, has joined the White House kitchen. His work with local, sustainable food should please even someone as picky as Alice Waters.

So as for the Bush’s Let-Them-Eat-Industrialized, Mercury-Tainted-High-Fructose-Corn Syrup-Cake philosophy, let’s hope the Obamas request the cake be made with organic flour.

Photo: JonBauer