Food and Politics

The photos above are taken from the book Hungry Plant: What the World Eats. The authors traveled around the world asking families to purchase one week's worth of groceries, stack it up and gather 'round for a photo.

East meets west. In the western family/grocery photos we see huge piles of food, mostly colorful packages with doubtlessly long lists of unpronounceable ingredients on them. The contents are chock full of sugar, hydrogenated oils, artificial colors, flavors, preservatives and sodium. Families from Africa and Asia display large amounts of whole grains and starches, smaller amounts of vegetables and fruits and very little else. There is rarely any pre-packaged food. Simple, even meager ingredients, but mostly whole foods -- real food.

I shop around the outside of the grocery store, avoiding the aisles for the most part. I try to buy local, grass-fed beef, pork and chicken. This summer I started growing my own vegetables organically. Our milk is rBGH-free. In fact, the cows who produce the milk we buy never get a taste of grain because the farmer we buy from thinks corn and especially soy are the devil. Our eggs are free range -- or cage-free organic when I buy them at Baker's. I've cut corn syrup out of my diet and most artificial sweeteners (true confessions: I still haven't kicked the occasional Diet Coke). Still, I consume large amounts of other sugar and dairy products. I eat more than my body needs and move less than my body wants. I am American, after all.

For ten years I worked for a non-profit that was provided advocacy, care and development for women and children in poverty around the world. I've been to some of the worst places in the world according to a lot of people's standards (to me, they're just the best places to eat). Needless to say, I am very conflicted with issues of food and politics. I am very conflicted about living in an over-consumptive society and being over-consumptive myself. How can I limit myself to the privilege of ethically- and locally-produced food when I have friends around the world who are hungry for just about anything right now? I guess because I think it matters...and there is part of me that thinks it's all connected somehow.

Feeding a hungry world is of utmost importance to me -- but how we treat our land, our farmers and our animals is equally important. I don't think that producing more food is necessarily better unless we drastically change the food system. We can grow more food, but the people who need it sure aren't getting it, and the ones that don't are throwing it away in mass quantities. After working to help the world abroad for a long time I think that right now I am ready to focus to help my own community be the best it can be. One of the things I love about Omaha is that people here are interested in making this city and our world better. It starts in your own backyard.

So for now, I have bought into buying local, sustainably produced food when I can so that I can have the best, freshest products possible, while trying to cut out the other stuff. Maybe it isn't possible for other people to do this for any number of reasons. But I do think that we all need to re-think our ideas of what good food is and be pickier about getting better food, even if we have to eat less of it. I think the east can show us how to cook real food from real ingredients. How to rely less on sugar. How to eat simply but deliciously, and using very basic ingredients.

There are so many food issues out there now, that it absolutely boggles my mind. Environmental issues and disasters always affect the poorest nations/people the most. Farm subsidies here in the US are bad for foreign farmers (and foreign eaters), yet it is continually more difficult for small farmers in the US to make a go at it. Our president is practically sleeping with Monsanto, the multinational agriculture business that is the leading producer of bovine growth hormone, genetically modified seed and herbicide to name a few. Monsanto continues to get bad press for basically seeking world domination of the entire food system (a big undertaking but one that Monsanto seems up for!) but they are far from the only big, bad multinational messing up the food system.

I am looking forward to continuing to engage these issues as I am in culinary school. I have a lot to learn. In the meantime, I am working on honing my own weekly grocery pile and supporting people who make/grow good, real food. Maybe I'll take a picture, sometime. :)