Further Food, Inc. For Thought

My review of the movie Food, Inc. has been linked to at SafeFoodInc, SafeFoodInc being "an alliance of associations that represent the livestock, meat and poultry industries". Their website is aimed at countering the claims of Food, Inc. Curiously enough, mine is the only review critical of the film they link to so either everyone loves it or they don't look very hard.

My main complaints about the film were 1) that it romanticized our food supply as it was pre-Mcdonalds to the point of caricature and 2) that it ignored the reality of poor people. Since writing the post, I've come across some interesting articles that are relevant to the latter criticism.

First I encountered an article by Mark Bittman in the NYT called "Real Food Can Be Cheaper Than Junk Food". In it, Bittman points to the site Cook For Good wherein "a compelling set of instructions for how to shop and cook inexpensively enough to live on food stamps" is to be had.

Saying that there is more to the picture than simply eating a steady diet of beans and rice is La Vida Locavore who wrote:

A Raleigh woman has a great method for eating on the cheap. She makes her own bread, pizza dough, tomato sauce, yogurt, you name it. Her meals average $1.12 per person and the cooking takes her 4.5 hours per week. You can see more about her methods on her site - http://www.cookforgood.com
Is this the key to eating well for actual food stamp recipients? I'm not convinced. Her methods involve little money but they require transportation, skill, cooking equipment, and food storage - all things that somebody living on a low income may or may not have.

When looking at the diets of the poor, it is often noted that their neighborhoods tend to be heavy on fast food with grocery stores a good distance away. Hence La Vida Locavore's comment about transportation. (I also believe this was mentioned in Food, Inc.) Time Magazine recently had a profile of a grocery store that has opened about 10 months ago on Chicago's south side - Farmers Best. As the article asks: "Can an inner-city supermarket profitably specialize in fresh produce and meats — and, ultimately, be a model solution to urban America's health crisis?" Only time will tell but, unfortunately, the store has yet to turn a profit.

The last thing I encountered about this issue is an interview with Sasha Abramsky about his new book Breadline USA which is "about the millions of Americans who work 40 hours a week and still go hungry". I've not read the book but here are some important issues brought up in this interview: 1) There are lots of working poor who go hungry; 2) going hungry or having a poor diet as well as just being poor have deleterious psychological effects which impede improving one's diet and bettering oneself; 4) and lastly, Abramsky's book is not purely about hunger. He sees hunger as being a symptom of poverty more generally and it demands an economic solution – controlling health care costs, a higher minimum wage, the cost of transportation, et al.

Finally, Food, Inc.'s director, Robert Kenner, was interviewed on last week's NOW. You can watch it here.