"The ability to eat high-quality food is a luxury, and until that changes, it’s hard to believe that those of more modest financial means with families to feed will be persuaded to forego the convenience and price of, say, McDonald’s in favor of a healthier approach. The superiority of the good-food movement’s arguments is not self-evident when stacked against the realities of limited resources. Ethical and nutritional appeals alone are not enough to overcome the structural advantages of Big Food. For the movement to take the next step forward, it will have to find new and effective ways to reach people beyond the aisles of Whole Foods and bring them into the fold.
The U.S. food system is too global, too all-encompassing a network to be overhauled by one approach. It will take many incremental changes and varied strategies, and it will take politics. This will require playing politics the way it is typically played: with money, with lobbyists, with carefully disciplined strategies, and with targeted messages. An ability to live with compromises, and a realistic understanding of how inert something as institutionalized as food will be when it comes to actual change, needs to become part of the movement. It is encouraging that there have been recent signs of a move toward more concrete and broader political goals. In a New York Times op-ed piece in February 2009, Alice Waters proposed a significant expansion of the National School Lunch Program and called for tripling the program’s budget from $9 billion to $27 billion. Whether or not this particular initiative stands a chance of being realized, it is a step in the right direction.
Similarly, Michael Pollan, in an op-ed in the Times in September, suggested that health care reform could finally provide the food movement with an ally in its fight against intractable agribusinesses. Under present circumstances, health insurers benefit handsomely from our chronically unhealthy food system. “One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry,” Pollan writes. But should health care reform pass, he says, this equation may change in the food system’s favor: “When health insurers can no longer evade much of the cost of treating the collateral damage of the American diet, the movement to reform the food system—everything from farm policy to food marketing and school lunches—will acquire a powerful and wealthy ally, something it has never had before.”
Pollan’s idea strikes me as a perceptive, and more important, as a pragmatic idea. It’s a reminder of how shrewd a thinker he can be. Partnering with the much-vilified health insurance industry is the kind of political calculus that the movement will inevitably need to make. Alliances with less-than-appetizing interests are a necessary way forward. Progress may well mean sacrificing the movement’s pristine image. How the sausage gets made, after all, isn’t quite an organic process."
- More Here
To get up-to speed with the "definition" of the food problem, check out the following books:
- The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
- In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan
- Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes by Mark Bittman
- The Man Who Fed the World: Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Norman Borlaug and His Battle to End World Hunger by Leon Hesser
- The Boy Who Changed the World by Thomas Nelson
- The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter by Peter Singer and Jim Manson
For those who are not "into" reading books (yes, people do proudly proclaim that without a hint of irony), then you can order a free (yes, "free") DVD on Norman Borlaugh - Freedom from famine.
No comments:
Post a Comment