Alternet's (Weak) New Food Section
Seriously? I’m all for better food reporting, but I’m sorely disappointed in Alternet’s new food section, especially this piece on Dollar Stores — a snooty screed that doesn’t even bother to talk to anyone at Family Dollar, save for a “curt” clerk. Doesn’t anyone do more reporting than an hour at a store and finding a single link to an NPR story from 2 years ago?
The piece misses one of the more promising developments in dollar store economics: the addition of refrigerated storage to bring in perishables, as Family Dollar announced it was doing last year. Might not seem like much, but that’s just one step away from bringing in fresh fruits and vegetables—not unlike the efforts to work with corner stores.
As I’ve written before, our food infrastructure is abysmally equipped to bring fresh produce to the ‘hood. And even when it gets there, good luck finding stores equipped with refrigerators to handle it. Figuring out ways to work within existing retail infrastructure, rather than solely focusing on developing sprawling, suburban-style supermarkets, is a good place to start.
Foodie Fight
A public squabble unearths the biggest fault line in food: Class.
What do America’s poorest, and particularly the immigrants who pick our food, want for their kids? What do they deserve? And what, if anything, do the sustainable foodies have to offer them? You wouldn’t know it from all the name-calling and hand-wringing going on, but those are the questions peering up from yet another food world squabble inspired by Alice Waters.
The ruckus started with a Caitlin Flanagan Atlantic Monthly essay which argued that without measurable proof that academic achievement is boosted by gardening programs—such as Waters’ famous Edible Schoolyard—we should direct educational funding towards programs that do. Nothing too dramatic there, but Flanagan chose to cloak her argument in populist rhetoric. Among the points she made were that migrant workers didn’t brave a trek across a desert so that their kids could pick lettuce; that hard physical labor is valorized largely by those from classes that never need do it; and that if our schools are meant to help kids climb out of poverty, gardening programs can be more hindrance than help. In other words, Flanagan maligned Waters’ Schoolyard program with every trope that’s been deployed before—elitist, out of touch, gourmand-focused.
Cue foodie backlash, which ranged from measured promises to weigh in after speaking with Alice (Corby Kummer at the Atlantic Online’s Food Channel) to staunch rejection (“Wrong, Wrong, Wrong,” from Ed Levine at Serious Eats) to a trenchant plea for more constructive criticism (Tom Philpott of Grist.org). Yes, Flanagan took easy shots. But the furor that erupted over them has been surprisingly intense, mostly because Flanagan hit the foodies where they are most vulnerable—charges of elitism.
What’s most striking about this debate is that neither side did the one thing that could have negated the other side’s critique: Talk to the people about whom they are speaking. Which is to say, talk to poor people. Or, even more specifically, talk to farm workers, since they figure so largely in Flanagan’s piece.
This is something of a specialty for me, so I called up the farm workers I met during two months I spent working in the fields this summer. Angelica, a single mother of two who organizes picking crews, told me she hoped her son would be a lawyer, but it was okay if his school had a garden because he would learn to work hard the way she does—harvesting cherries, grapes, and tangerines in California’s Central Valley, and selling food to other workers when her own work dried up. She isn’t against her son learning the value of hard work, and she isn’t against him knowing how to grow food. She just wants him, the way most parents do, to go to college and build a decent life for himself.
(One needn’t have farm worker friends to get this kind of information; there are plenty of farm worker and community organizations who would be happy to have a journalist talk to their clients.)
That gaping chasm between the foodies on the blogs and the people they’re purportedly trying to help, really, is the tragic flaw of the food movement. The discussion rages about whether migrant workers care if their kids work in a garden (the handful of interviews I conducted this week suggest they don’t); whether poor people are against their kids learning how to work hard (again, from what I’ve seen, they are not—although for most of them, hard work isn’t the same elective course of study that it is for upper middle class kids); and whether poor people want to eat good food. Even with food’s unique ability to build common ground between people who are otherwise strangers, foodies mostly talk about, but rarely with, the people whose lives they’re purporting to improve. And it’s that unspoken truth that gave Flanagan’s essay its fire.
This isn’t specific to foodies, of course. A reluctance, even an inability, to cross class lines is as American as apple pie. And therein lies the rub. Because if foodies can figure that out, they’ll have done more than prove their critics wrong, more than improve their own little corner of the world. They’ll have actually changed America.
