Food, Glorious Food

Spoiler Alert:  this blog may piss some people off but I am not trying to offend.  After all, it is just my opinion, worth a couple of grains of expensive sea salt.

This past weekend I had the need for a couple of specific food items that one cannot get at Trader Joe's so I made a pilgrimage to Whole Foods in the Potrero district in SF.  I do not venture into Whole Foods very often, mainly because I have never lived near one.  But this particular store is less than 15 minutes from where I now live so a Saturday morning jaunt seemed in order.  OMG.  It was early, the store was quiet and almost reverent in that sort of church way, people speaking in soft voices, bowing down before the meat counter, quietly touching some of the produce, rapturous looks on their faces.  Oh wait, that was me.  Yes, I loved the market.  Yes, I could easily live there.  When Gabe and Annie tire of my presence in their home I will look for a small back room and take up residence in the Church of the Holy Food.

However, as I meandered through the aisles and stared in awe at the beautiful displays of every kind of food, I was also a teeny bit uneasy.  Not uneasy enough to leave, mind you, nor uneasy enough to change my mind about wanting to live there but uneasy because I realized that this sort of market is beyond the reach of so many people.  Yes, one often gets great value for one's dollar in WF because the quality of most of their merchandise is above average.  But if I was a run-of-the-mill unemployed woman who questioned every nickel spent, there would be no way I could shop at WF ever.  No matter how great the value.

This leads me to today's observation:  food has definitely become a class object.  The well-off can afford to shop at places like Whole Foods and Molly Stone's and go to farmers markets and buy organic, sustainable, seasonal food.  The poor cannot.  The huge wave of obesity that our nation is now experiencing is not necessarily because so many people are ignorant of the fact that fast food and processed foods are bad for you.  It is because so many people cannot afford anything else.  This week I read an article about the elite nature of good food and the writer commented that big, rich corporate farms grow food for the lower class people while small farmers, who are often financially strapped, grow food for upper class people with money. 

The whole concept of organic, sustainable, locally grown food is a great concept but for many people it is just that:  a concept.  Not a reality.  Simply put, that kind of food is more expensive and less available.  If you are a regular working person with children you often do not have time at the end of your working day to stop at a grocery store and pick up fresh produce.  You might do a big shopping run once a week, on the weekends, at a big store like Costco or Target (which now carries food) and rely on the corner store for things like milk and eggs during the middle of the week.   You stop at a McDonald’s on the way home from work and pick up dinner not because you think it’s nutritious but because it is easy, cheap and your family likes it.  They would also like a free-range roasted chicken but that would cost $15.00 and take more than an hour and it is already 6:30 and everyone is hungry.  Fast food serves a purpose; the problem is that it is served too often.

There is no quick solution to this problem, just as there is no quick solution to the obesity epidemic.  The solution lies in making food costs (and production, of course) more equitable.  It means making good food, not Tyson Corporation chicken tenders or frozen green beans, more affordable.  It also means making food less of an elite, designer object.  Why can’t we have government subsidies for organic farmers, if that’s what it takes?  Why do the corporate food producers get the tax breaks and the small independent farmers do not?  (No, I am not all that naive, it is a rhetorical question.)  But to pretend that eating locally, seasonally and organically is possible for all Americans is foolish, shortsighted and selfish.  And it’s a joke.  We occasionally are treated to articles in the SF Chronicle about folks who sing their own praises because everything they eat is produced less than 100 miles from where they live.  These people are pathetically out of touch with the rest of the world if they really think that is something that everyone can do.  Forage for food?  Sure, in the Western Addition in San Francisco, or in the Tenderloin.  There foraging for food means digging in the dumpster.  Now that’s really local food.

Living in West Marin at the height of this food craze got to be disturbing for that very reason.  I worked at the Palace Market, the local grocery store in Point Reyes Station, where they carried organic produce, organic Strauss milk and free-range chickens and many organic food items.  Even though I got a discount on my food purchases I still could not afford the organic products.  More than $2.00 for an organic grapefruit?  You must be kidding.  Pay $3.49 for a can of tomatoes or $1.29?  No problems making that decision.  And if I had been feeding a family, as many people in Point Reyes do,  it would have been difficult enough to just buy bread, eggs, milk and bananas, let alone organic anything.   It shouldn’t be this way.  But it is.  We live in an inequitable society and this is just one symptom of that.

I won’t start on my feelings about the term “locavore.”  That’s a topic for another day.