sunday AM: both liked and hated @janeblack ‘s OpEd. geeked out on Judith Warner ‘s food politics history lesson. for more:
About a year ago, I was in the middle of six weeks of undercover work at the country’s largest grocer, working the night shift in grocery. I made about $8.50 an hour, had rent just under $400, a 25-mile commute, and could only get part-time hours. And what I remember most viscerally isn’t that I was spending every extra cent on food—though, when I look back at my data, it’s clear that my $32/week for food constituted almost all of my disposable income, the stat usually referenced to measure food spending. What I remember is that I came to hate, loathe and dread meal preparation because I simply didn’t have any real time or energy to dedicate to it. I had no choice: I could cook or I could not eat, but I didn’t have the money to buy something instead of cooking. So I cooked. And because I had to buy in (small) bulk, I cooked variations of the same thing over and over again: a fairly grim assortment of grains, potatoes, chicken parts and winter greens. There was no fun experimentation. There was just cooking. And thus I experienced, for the first time in my life, something I’d heard single moms mention but could never comprehend: cooking as a tiresome chore.
I was reminded of last winter’s experiment this morning thanks to two thoughtful essays on food and class (one via former Washington Post food writer Jane Black and her husband, one via the Times’ Judith Warner).
Warner’s piece is thought-provoking, digging into 20th century history to unearth a federal agency charged with promoting a specific dietary culture and hypothesizing about how and whether such efforts would work today. But Black and Cunningham—whose effort to document Huntington, WV’s efforts to transform the city’s diet post-Jamie Oliver sounds amazing—made me cringe with this foodie trope:
For the good-food revolution to have a chance, people have to make finding and preparing fresh food a priority at a time when everything about our modern food system urges us not to bother. And that won’t happen if people think healthy food is an elitist plot to take away their McRib. [Black and Cunningham]
It’s not just our food system that’s the problem, but the political economy of our lives, too. We work more hours and have less money than the generations before us. That’s why we don’t cook more. Full stop. Maybe some people think healthy food is an elitist plot. And maybe some people don’t like being told to just take more time with their meals by someone who probably works from home, doesn’t have kids, etc. etc.
(Also: I don’t see how exhorting people to take more time is any different from the “do the right thing” mentality that Black and Cunningham critique in their piece. A lecture is still a lecture, you know?)
Yes, there are rich people who eat like crap. I would guess that Rush Limbaugh is one of them. What’s more common, I think (and here I’m drawing from my own reporting on how America’s working class eats), is that an awful lot of people understand and value good food…and they don’t have the time, much less the monetary resources, to pursue it. And so they don’t. Time is a real cost. And when it’s taken into account, eating well and cheaply stops being so cheap: A recent Journal of Nutrition analysis of the Thrifty Food Plan—the model food stamp shopping list—found that the food prep time was incompatible with most families’ available time. (This held even when families had more money.)
Given my two months working the grocery aisle last year, I’d say the study’s right on the money.
