Organic Justice-The Politics of Eating

Food expert Mark Winne examines America’s culinary class divide.

Between the rising price of food, the growing commitment to eating locally and worries about food safety, how we eat in America has become a top issue for many consumers.

This week, Santa Fe resident and community food systems expert Mark Winne (markwinne.com) talks with SFR about some of these issues, as well as his key concern: how economic divisions in the US affect the way people eat. We also present an excerpt from Winne’s recent book, Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty, which examines this problem in detail. Winne was a recent participant in the Santa Fe Farmers Market book series.

The Food Gap
Examining the differences between how the wealthy and poor eat.

BY MARK WINNE

As a class, lower income people have been well represented in some of the best-covered food stories of our day, particularly hunger, obesity, and diabetes. As these issues have faded in and out of the public’s eye over the last 25 years, another food trend was rapidly becoming a national obsession-namely, local and organic.

At about the same time that Berkeley diva Alice Waters was first showing us how to bestow style and grace on something as ordinary as a local tomato, the Reagan administration’s anti-poor policies were driving an unprecedented number of people into soup kitchens and food banks. And as organic food advocates were putting the finishing touches on what was to become the first national standard for organic food, supermarket chains were nailing plywood across their city store windows bidding farewell to lower income America.

Organic food and agriculture had barely climbed out of the bassinet in 1989 when 60 Minutes ran its now famous Alar story. The exposure it received before 40 million television viewers ignited a firestorm of consumer reaction that eventually made organic food the fastest growing segment of the U.S. food industry.

Yuppie families reacted first. Like every parent since time immemorial, these parents wanted what was best for their children, and the emerging evidence that our food supply was tainted accelerated their desire for the healthiest and safest food possible. Though the research surrounding the health and safety attributes of various foods remained foggy, competing claims opened up a never ending number of consumer options. One’s food choices may be vegetarian, vegan, organic, grass-fed, free-range, humanely raised, or some combination of these. As to the source of this food, it could range from “generally local when it’s easy to get” to “obsessively local and will eat nothing else.”

In low-income circles, however, such food anxieties got little traction. Between getting to a food store where the bananas weren’t black and having enough money to buy any food at all, low-income shoppers had little inclination to parse the differences between grass-fed and grass-finished. But this didn’t imply that their awareness of organic food was non-existent, nor did it mean that low-income consumers were less likely to buy organic if they had the chance.

Low-Income Shoppers Speak

To better understand a variety of issues, the Hartford Food System, a Connecticut-based non-profit organization that I directed for 24 years, would often meet with low-income families to get their point of view. On one such occasion, we asked eight members of Hartford’s Clay/Arsenal neighborhood to discuss local and organic food. Like other impoverished urban neighborhoods, Clay/Arsenal was entirely devoid of good quality food stores, and their residents experienced hunger, obesity, and diabetes at rates that were two to three times the national average. This group was comprised exclusively of Hispanic and African American residents.

First off, the group expressed an immediate consensus that fresh, inexpensive food-the food they generally preferred-was unavailable in their neighborhood. Everyone agreed that traveling to a full-line supermarket was a hassle because it required one or two long bus rides or an expensive taxi fare. As a result, they did their major shopping once or twice a month, and when they shopped, price was their most important consideration.

When asked what the word organic meant to them, the residents answered “real food,” “natural,” “healthy,” and “you know what’s in it.” While they believed that organic food was preferable to food they described as “processed,” “full of chemicals,” or “toxic,” they said that buying organic food wasn’t even an option, because it was simply not available to them. One young woman made a point of saying that she didn’t trust the environment where she lived or the food she ingested. “Everything gives you cancer these days,” she said. Conversely, there was an underlying tone of confidence in the safety and healthfulness of food that they could identify as local and organic.

Their awareness of the benefits of local and organic food was very high. For the elderly, there was the nostalgic association with tastes, places, and times gone by. For those with young children, there was an apprehension that nearly everything associated with their external environment, including food, was a threat. Like parents of all races, education levels, and occupations, these moms wanted what was best for their children as well, even when they knew that what was best was not available to them.

Local and Organic Go Mainstream
“In a burst of new interest in food,” spouted Newsweek’s 2006 food issue, “Americans are demanding-and paying for-the freshest and least chemically treated products available.” Whole Foods’ John Mackey told the Wall Street Journal, “The organic-food lifestyle is not a fad It’s a value system, a belief system. It’s penetrating into the mainstream.”

As we cast our eye over the sheer effulgence of American food, there appears to be no limit to the type and number of food products for those who are motivated by taste, environmental concern, animal welfare, political correctness, or simple virtue. Niman Ranch produces a pork to die for, and costs significantly more than the factory-farmed alternative. Don’t want to spend the “best four years of your life” eating swill from the college cafeteria trough? Select from any of hundreds of colleges and universities that are now featuring “sustainable dining” (some inspired by master chef Alice Waters). And when you just can’t find anything that satisfies your organic lifestyle where you live, you can always pack up and leave. The New York Times style page featured a number of families who had the financial wherewithal to escape from New York City to the Hudson River valley. Once there, the families “began eating strictly organic foods.” One couple said they had moved because the wife was pregnant with their second child and “we decided that the children needed to be in nature.”

“What about those who can’t escape or afford to eat ‘strictly organic’ or for whom ‘buying local means the past-code date, packaged baloney at the neighborhood bodega?”

Sounds pretty good. In fact, it just may be the latest incarnation of the American dream. But what about those who can’t escape or afford to eat “strictly organic” or for whom “buying local” means the past-code date, packaged baloney at the neighborhood bodega? How do we fulfill the desire for healthy and sustainably produced food that is increasingly shared by all?

There are two general directions that have shown promise in closing this food gap: one is through private, largely non-profit projects and the other is through public policy. At the Hartford Food System we founded the Holcomb Farm Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) Farm that made an explicit commitment to distribute about 40 percent of its local and organic produce to the city’s low-income community. Using a hybrid method of funding, CSAs like the Holcomb Farm (Just Food in New York City and the Western Massachusetts Food Bank in Hadley are other examples) have been organized around the country to ensure that CSAs are not solely the province of a white, bright elite. Other models like the People’s Grocery in Oakland are using mobile markets to bring high quality, healthy food into communities that are underserved by supermarkets.

Public policy advocacy has leveraged federal and state funding to provide special farmers’ market vouchers to low-income women, children, and elders (Farmers Market Nutrition Program). These small denomination coupons have opened an increasing share of the nation’s 4,500 farmers’ markets to a wider demographic of shoppers. Along the same lines, a small but steady stream of farmers’ markets are installing swipe card machines to enable food stamp recipients to use their electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards to buy local food. And in what might be the biggest breakthrough yet, the national Women, Infant, and Children Program (WIC) will be implementing a new fruit and vegetable program that is potentially worth hundreds of million dollars to lower income consumers and local farmers.

While it may be some time before we see a Whole Foods open in East Harlem, non-profit organizations like the Philadelphia-based Food Trust have secured millions of dollars in state financing to develop food stores in underserved urban and rural Pennsylvania communities. As part of an overall economic development strategy, these stores are not only providing new sources of healthy and affordable food to low-income families, they are also expanding employment opportunities and the local property tax base.

These projects and policies have inched us closer to bridging the divide between the haves and have-nots, but unless every segment of society rejects the notion that there is one food system for the poor, and one for everyone else, these gains will remain marginal.

How We Eat

BY CHARLOTTE JUSINSKI

Santa Fe resident Mark Winne was the executive director of the Hartford Food System in Connecticut from 1979 to 2003. A former Food and Society Policy Fellow through the WK Kellogg Foundation, Winne currently serves on the New Mexico Food and Agriculture Policy Council and the Southwest Grassfed Livestock Alliance.

You write about the need to get good food to poor people. Where is the gap in New Mexico where, for example, we have farmers markets all over the state, yet so many people who don’t eat well?

We know that New Mexico is currently the second or third hungriest state in the country based on the [United States Department of Agriculture] figures, and that ties in very closely to poverty. New Mexico is in the basement of just about every social and economic indicator that exists. In terms of obesity, we’re sort of in the middle. We have about 40 farmers markets in the state at the last count, and most of them are quite different from the Santa Fe Farmers Market, which does tend to be a very high-end, elite kind of market, catering to a demanding and discerning foodie crowd. I think they make a reasonable attempt to reach out to others. The thing that I stress in the book is, what has happened over the last 10 years is really an amazing phenomenon, it’s an incredible trend launching into the stratosphere as far as food goes, and people being very conscious about what they’re eating and how food is produced and where it’s coming from, from organic to local high-quality. It goes far beyond anything we ever thought about in terms of gourmet food But people moved ahead so quickly with that, they unintentionally, I think, left a whole class of our society behind. That, to me, is what was sort of problematic and what I had to write about, because my work had been in low-income communities, working in a whole variety of food programs.

Talk a little more about those programs.
[The Hartford Food System] started the first farmers market in Connecticut in 1978, and today there’s over 90. Nationwide at that time there were probably 200 or 300 farmers markets-today there’s 4,500. We started community gardens in low-income neighborhoods, worked with neighborhood people to start markets, were very much in the vanguard of the local food movement in the sense that we saw a way to help people who needed food, because the supermarkets had just abandoned the cities. [Other groups] got this motivation as well; they were getting into this whole connection around local food-whether you’re growing your own or bringing it in through a farmers market enterprise as a way to help farmers and to help low-income communities at the same time. And that was a lot of the driving force. I think we lost a lot of that spirit along the way, particularly in the last 10 years.

And we now see a lot of indicators about how poorly some people are eating.

Twelve percent of our population is food insecure. The whole obesity thing is really just incredible, 60 to 65 percent. Just the other day there was a national study that showed that diabetes went up about 2 percent in the last year, and it’s already at record levels. This is a national epidemic that definitely affects the poor more than it affects others. It affects people of color more than it affects others. We as a society have to pay attention to what’s going on. It’s not just about organic and local food, that isn’t the whole story-it’s about good food. And in urban and rural areas, you don’t have good supermarkets. You have crappy supermarkets or you have little convenience stores or, in rural New Mexico, it’s the wide spot in the road where they pump gas and sell Dinty Moore beef stew and if you’re lucky they might have a brown banana or two lying around. That’s the kind of food desert that so many lower-income people come from.

Which is more important: eating organic or eating local?
If I had to make a choice, I’d say local, absolutely. The food miles is part of it, carbon footprint and all that, but it’s also keeping money in your own economy. The closer the farmer is, the more likely you’re going to know what his or her farming practices are. If you know they’re a chemical junkie and they’re aerial-spraying everything to death, you don’t want to eat that stuff. But if they occasionally use some chemicals-and a good farmer wants to minimize their use of chemicals because it costs them money-and they’ve refined their practices now so they can be more discreet and use just the right amount at just the right time so, on that basis alone, local is better. The idea that somebody would ship in an organic apple from Washington state to New Mexico, as opposed to a New Mexican apple that might have had some minimal spraying-to me, there’s no argument.

Here’s an example. My wife and I buy half a cow from a local rancher.

You must have a big freezer.

Yeah, it’s a big freezer. But it’s also a small cow. But we’ve done this calculation: Our cow is raised in Corona, New Mexico. It’s slaughtered at a very small facility in Fort Sumner-I don’t mean to ruin your appetite.

No, I’m a big cow-eater, it’s all right.
And then I go down and pick it up. Our meat has traveled a total of 300 miles and was raised completely on New Mexico grass its entire life. Now, a cow that was raised as a calf on a New Mexico ranch typically gets sent to a feedlot in Texas, then it goes to a processing facility in Kansas, then it goes to a chain distribution center in Denver, then gets shipped to, say, an Albertsons in Santa Fe. It’s gone 3,000 miles. And I pay a little more, but I think that’s worth it.

What about places that don’t have a large variety, or a large quantity, of local food? How do you eat local when it’s not possible?
You can’t. If you don’t have the natural resources to be able to produce food, you’re going to have to import it. That’s the answer. But the subtext of that question is: Have we done everything you can to make sure that you have the ability and the resources to produce food, locally and regionally? We’ve seen our capacity to produce food erode since World War II. We used to have a small-scale wheat industry [in New Mexico]-we actually produced 200 varieties of wheat, we had small-scale flour mills all over the state That whole infrastructure has been virtually eliminated. You see this time and time again to the point that, in the farm bill that just passed, they put in-not a lot-maybe a few million dollars to rebuild infrastructure in regions where there’s still agricultural capacity, where people are interested in marketing locally, but they don’t have the infrastructure to do it-and by that I mean refrigerators, warehouses, packing and mills, slaughterhouses, things like that. Right now there’s a shortage of slaughter facilities in New Mexico. It’s harder for small ranchers-or any ranchers-to sell locally. In order to sell locally, you’re going to have to slaughter your meat either in New Mexico or southern Colorado. There are a lot of pieces of this food system that need to be considered.

Can the push for local food be attributed to the issues that have come out of recent food-safety scares?
I think that’s a small part of it but, frankly, the local food movement has been going strong for quite a while and continues to grow. You see spurts for whatever the latest food scare is. I’ve seen so many food scares over my career, they come and they go, and they always concern me, but they’re indicative not of where food is grown, but how it’s grown A big part of the local food movement is a reaction to industrial food production. People were really turned off by everything they saw and heard about the industrial food system-the whole idea of an industrial food system was new to people, they didn’t understand what that meant. The industry is putting food into the same sort of production model that they use to make automobiles. People realize that the local producer is less likely to be caught up in that kind of production system.

Saying that, I’ll also say that I’ve seen bad farming practices on the part of local farmers. We almost lost the apple cider industry in Connecticut about 10 years ago when there was an E.coli outbreak traced back to a small cider producer. The guy had 10 acres of apples, and he was using all the drops in the field to make the cider. He also had all these deer grazing in his field. The shit hit the fan, and they almost lost the entire industry as a result.

Is that coming from greed? Desperation?
It was a combination of ignorance and not having the resources to invest in the latest technology.

With the number of farmers in the US decreasing and the food industry shifting [to other countries], what is the impact on the US food market?
That’s kind of a long treatise and I’m not sure I’m in the mood [laughs]. We’ve had this incredible push on local foods, but we’re losing our capacity to produce not only good local food that we eat, but we’re losing the capacity to produce corn for high-fructose corn syrup or cattle feed or ethanol. And with the high price of energy, while farmers are making record amounts, they’re also spending record amounts. Concerning low-income families, you see high food prices. They’re a result of changes in both the American food-and farm economy as well as the global food-and-farm economy. The fact that the Chinese want to eat more meat means that more of our grain is exported, more of our cattle are exported, and that global demand drives up prices. So a person in the US who is spending about 20 percent of their annual income on food-which is typical for low-income families, the rest of us spend about 10 percent-means that they’re going to have to start spending more on simple things. Forget organic, forget local; they’re going to be spending more for their Wonderbread or their industrially produced milk. Then, factor into this that one of the best growth stocks is McDonald’s, because where do people go when food prices go up? They go to the cheap place. They get McDonald’s. You see more people buying food from companies where the food is unhealthy. McDonald’s is a big part of the problem in the American food system. A lot of our health problems go back to the fast food industry and how we’ve been propagandized and forced, economically, into going there. It’s the same thing with Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart doesn’t pay their employees well, so they end up going to food banks and getting food stamps because they don’t earn enough, or they end up in the ER because they don’t have any health insurance, and then the taxpayer picks that up. Food is only one part of a much more complicated picture. It’s a good way to understand how a lot of these things connect because we all buy it, we all need it and we see so many differences in class and culture in the way that we buy and think about food. It’s a good way to understand our economy and society.

Is there hope that this food awareness explosion will eventually trickle down into more impoverished communities?
I just testified at a hearing of the governor’s Poverty Reduction Task Force. He appointed this poverty task force about a month ago, about 20 or 30 people who will come back with recommendations on how to reduce poverty in New Mexico.

I was asked to testify, and I was the only food-issues person there. I made the point that there are a lot of ways that you can use food and agriculture to reduce poverty. If you improve people’s health you’re going to reduce their costs and reduce taxpayers’ costs, but the food economy is underdeveloped in New Mexico. Yeah, your industrial-scale farming is highly developed, but that’s extracting more cost to society than it is providing in terms of benefit. I think there’s a potential to make a significant impact on the local economy if we start to think about eating locally If everyone in New Mexico ate 15 percent of their diet from New Mexico producers, it would contribute almost $400 million more per year in local income. We’d keep $400 million. That’s just 15 percent. That figure is less than 5 percent now. That’s an indication of the potential for agriculture to be a much more vital force in the economy.

I’d been wanting to ask the final question of ‘What should everybody do?’ but you just answered it.
That’s one answer. Eat local, pay attention to where your food’s coming from, support your local farmer, grow your own, all that. There’s a million reasons why that’s good. The other part of it is, you can be a good food consumer, but you should also be a good food citizen. The citizen part of it is the public policy aspect. The marketplace is not going to correct itself so that everybody is going to be able to eat well. It’s just not going to work. The public sector needs to intervene to make sure that everyone has access to healthy and affordable food. But we also need to get to the root cause of all these things, which is poverty. We have to drill down a lot deeper and think beyond food banks and beyond food stamps. We need to talk about the causes of hunger and food insecurity, we need to talk about a living wage, health insurance, job training, and economic development strategies. Not ones that don’t provide people with enough wages to even feed themselves.