Jun 18, 2009

For the last time: Fresh, local food isn't elitist; assuming that poor people don't want it is.

Until this weary critique goes away, we need good examples. Here's a great one.

5 comments:

  1. bpJune 19, 2009 at 9:38 AM

    Forgive me for my ignorance about the food debate, Steve, but if you had to narrow it down to one thing, what is at the heart of it? Health, morality, government corruption? I'm just not really sure where the thrust of the argument is coming from.

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  2. Steve ThorngateJune 19, 2009 at 10:20 AM

    Hmmm. That's a tough one, as the food movement is more of a loose collection of a lot of different issues and advocates: public health, food safety, rural communities, the environment, national security, trade, the enjoyment of food itself. Message control has been difficult...

    Here's a shot at the woefully short version of at least one of the crucial pieces: bad public policy makes food that's good for us only in small quantities--especially corn, soy, and meat--artificially cheap, so that we drastically overconsume it, with disastrous consequences for our health and the environment. Produce is thus, relatively speaking, artificially expensive. And the people who oppose the program I linked to above because it requires a bit of government investment to reduce this drastic price differential--to be able to buy a pound of fruit for something in the range of the cost of a fast-food burger--haven't done much to fight our government's ongoing massive subsidy of commodity agriculture that creates this price differential in the first place.

    For the long version, I recommend Michael Pollan's NYT magazine cover story from last fall: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html. Or, if you don't feel like reading a 10,000-word manifesto, check out the film Food, Inc.--opens in Chicago (and metro area, maybe?) tonight.

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  3. bpJune 19, 2009 at 3:46 PM

    Sorry to be such a pest, but I'm having difficulty wrapping my head around what's ultimately at stake, here. Are you basically saying that healthy food for the greatest number of people (in other words, affordablility of healthy food) is the main issue here?

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  4. Steve ThorngateJune 19, 2009 at 3:51 PM

    Affordable and accessible--both are issues in poor areas. That's the main point of the particular idea of this idea I linked to here, and it's one of several main points in the food reform movement generally--see Pollan for several others.

    Sometimes I use shorthand in short posts like this one--I talk about food issues quite a bit on this blog, and so I don't intend a post like this to exist separate from that context.

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  5. bpJune 19, 2009 at 4:19 PM

    Thanks for the taking the time to give some context to a less-contextualized person as myself. I really do appreciate it.

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