Foodist: Is Bourgeois Sustainable Food A Folly When 45.8 Million Americans Use Food Stamps?

It’s ironic that the two news stories should come out one right after the other. Eating healthy food costs more. Millions more Americans are on food stamps. Irony or political karma? You decide.

First, (just in case you didn’t notice that organic mesclun costs $12 per pound and organic butter is $2 per pound more than its conventional cousin), it costs significantly more per year to eat healthfully. Well, duh! A few nights ago, we had AnnArbor.com’s food writer Anne Savage and her husband Chris (who writes for A2Politico) over for dinner. Anne is passionate about healthy eating and provided a dessert that showed just how serious she is, and just how clever. The carrot cupcakes, topped with pineapple flowers, could double as carrot muffins, she explained, and were prepared with whole grains and honey. My 14-year-old son ate his in two bites then tried to hold-up Anne for her cupcake. Check out her great  food and photography blog The Savage Feast, here.

We had a rousing conversation about eating locally-sourced (I detest that term—it smacks of pretense) food, and eating organically whenever possible. Our family conducted an experiment about three years ago: for six months, we only ate food produced locally, in Michigan. We each had one exception. My youngest son’s exception started with chocolate and moved around a little. My exception was olive oil. Other than the four exceptions, we passed up the bananas, didn’t give the blood oranges a second look, ate from our own garden, bought steel cut oats grown in Michigan instead of Quaker Oats, generally learned to love Michigan trout, and to set aside worries that we would glow in the dark after eating Lake Superior white fish weekly.

We broke the pactum localis on Thanksgiving. We totaled up the food bills racked up from buying at local farmer’s markets, food co-ops (Ann Arbor, Ypsi) and grocery stores which carry organic and locally produced foods (Hiller’s and Kroger). We had spent an additional $1,800 on food, or about $300 per month (our family of four generally spends about $800 per month on groceries). The experiment hiked our grocery bill by about 45 percent per month, and made it quite clear that the local food movement is a long way from spreading from the inner rings of Whole Foods shoppers. The Whole Foods marketing team will tell you that the chain is for the natural food consumer for whom price is not an object. In other words, people who have money to burn on groceries, and who can pay $1.20 for a box of macaroni and cheese.

Brian Rooney works for the Michigan Department of Human Services. He spoke about the rise in Michigan residents who are on food assistance. “One in seven Americans are on food assistance and in Michigan one in five. That means 20 percent of our population is on food assistance.”

Across the country and here in Michigan, the number of people using food assistance is rising.

“In Michigan in the last year the number has almost doubled,” Rooney said. “A year ago we were at 11 percent of the population. We’re at 20 percent now.”

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 45.8 million Americans are on the food assistance program. CNN Money reports this is a record number in America: “It’s up 12% from 2010, and 34% higher than 2009.” According to CNN, “in May of 2011, the average food stamp benefit was $133.80 per person.”

Of those 45.8 million Americans, two million live in Michigan.

“This is as high as it’s ever been, by far,” Rooney said.

Governor Rick Snyder’s most recent “dashboard” assessment shows that over the past months he has been in office, child poverty and hunger have increased. Almost 25 percent of children in our state live in poverty. Per capita income has dropped, as well, down to $27,558, well below the national per capita income that stands at $31,806. Infant mortality is up. In Michigan there are 7.7 deaths for every 1,000 live births. U.S. infant mortality fell to 6.7 deaths for every 1,000 live births in 2010.

Then, a study was released by Health Affairs that concluded healthy eating adds nearly $400 to yearly grocery bills. Health Affairs isn’t the only publication to look at the high cost associated with eating well. The Atlantic Monthly published a piece in February of 2011 titled, “The Moral Crusade Against Foodies.”

B.R. Myers skins “the scene” alive. The main course of his argument is simple: “gluttony dressed up as foodism is still gluttony.” Gluttony, the last of the seven deadly sins. Any foodie worth his imported, pink, French sea salt could recognize himself in this passage:

Even if gourmets’ rejection of factory farms and fast food is largely motivated by their traditional elitism, it has left them, for the first time in the history of their community, feeling more moral, spiritual even, than the man on the street. Food writing reflects the change. Since the late 1990s, the guilty smirkiness that once marked its default style has been losing ever more ground to pomposity and sermonizing. References to cooks as “gods,” to restaurants as “temples,” to biting into “heaven,” etc., used to be meant as jokes, even if the compulsive recourse to religious language always betrayed a certain guilt about the stomach-driven life. Now the equation of eating with worship is often made with a straight face.

On August 3, 2011 The Atlantic was back at it again with a piece titled, “The Folly of Bourgeois Sustainable Food.” Is the increasingly vocal urging to “buy local,” “eat organiclly and sustainably” somewhat like the alleged suggestion made by Queen Marie Antoinette upon hearing her starving people had no bread? “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche,” she was supposed to have said. “Let them eat cake.” In Chinese culture, there is a similar story that involves rice and meat, instead of bread and cake: an emperor who, when told that his people didn’t have enough rice to eat, replied, ‘Why don’t they eat meat?'”

Why don’t you buy local? We should eat organic.

The Atlantic writer, Llewellyn Hinkes-Jones, suggests that the idea that sustainable eating can be a gospel spread to the masses is as out of touch and as bourgeoisie an idea as Marie Antoinette’s suggestion that people who couldn’t afford bread could afford cake. Hinkes-Jones asks: “Is it possible for gluttony, purity, and morality to coexist with affordability? Or is this utopian vision a myth?” He ends up his piece thusly: “The secret hope is that this current trend of foodie-ism, food snobbery, locavorism, gastronomy, or whatever it gets called becomes permanent and eventually leads to better, cheaper food for everyone. Otherwise I will have to learn to appreciate chemically flavored orange drink, and nobody wants that.”

Nobody wants that, but in Michigan, the 20 percent of the state’s residents on food assistance have little choice.

Hinkes-Jones writes:

I love drinking real orange juice and not destroying the planet, but my ability to do both is directly related to my supply of disposable income. Without that disposable income, paying a premium for organic food—as well as local, fair trade, and sustainable—becomes exponentially harder to justify. At a certain point, when only the relatively rich can afford to not ingest bovine growth hormone on a regular basis, appreciating food and where it comes from becomes a bourgeois endeavor akin to collecting Fabergé eggs. When fair trade bananas hit five dollars a pound, consumption starts to seem conspicuous.

According to a recent poll by National Public Radio the majority (58%) of Americans now prefer organic food. Prefer as in window shop the organic produce and buy the conventional stuff. Why? The NPR poll offers a simple answer: 54% of Americans said they weren’t buying organic food, or else they weren’t buying much of it, because it is too expensive.

Counterpunch.org, edited by left-leaning writers Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair posted a piece about this dilemma titled, “Your whole paycheck for organic food?” Writer Robin Cummings suggests this strategy:

Expanding the organic revolution will require that the organic movement offer practical solutions to the “Whole Paycheck” dilemna, so that ordinary people start to feel that the “organic premium” is a worthwhile investment in terms of health and sustainability. And for the poor, we’re simply going to have to find ways to subsidize their organic food consumption by incorporating, for example, organic food into food stamp and nutrition programs, as well as school cafeterias.

Federal subsidies. Then, Cummings offers what amounts to lifestyle changes: “Prioritize your time and money. Turn off the TV or computer, turn on the tunes, and head for the kitchen or the backyard garden.”

I hate this kind of assumption-speak. It’s elitist and frankly insulting. Someone needs to tell Robin Cummings that the majority of Americans don’t live in houses.

Cummings goes on. She correctly points out that:

Americans spend half their food dollars eating out, which is often expensive and usually unhealthy. By eating out less often we can afford to buy more organic foods to prepare at home and invite friends over for dinner. We can also set a good example by preparing healthy organic lunches for ourselves at work and for our children at school….With a bread-making machine or some lessons in kneading our own, all of us can enjoy organic bread and pastries every day for a fraction of the cost of chemical and GMO-tainted baked goods.

Cummings indulges in a bit of fuzzy math. Locally, whole wheat flour at the food co-op is $1.49 per pound and a dozen organic, free range eggs can run $4. At the local supermarket, a 5 pound bag of whole wheat flour is $2 and a dozen eggs can be had for as little as $1. The NPR survey reveals two things very clearly. First, that the average American is better at price comparison shopping than Robin Cummings, and that the organic food industry hasn’t hit on the same marketing magic to justify the cost of their products as, say, BMW and Rolex.

This is a discussion complicated by more than simple economics. Over 70 percent of American women work outside the home and as the A2PFoodist wrote in “Kitchen Fetishists”:

According to research by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 1920 the average American woman spent 30 hours per week preparing meals and cleaning up from them. By 1950, the number of hours per week women spent rustling up chow dropped to 20 hours per week. Today, American women spend, on average, 5.5 hours per week cooking and cleaning up, and the prepared food industry has grown to into a billion dollar behemoth. American men, you ask? How much time do they spend each week slaving over a hot microwave, and boiling bags of sauce? American men spend fifteen minutes, on average, per day cooking and cleaning up.

To be sure, the cupcakes Anne Savage brought were extraordinary, and to an extent she was preaching to the choir over supper at our house, where we ate pesto made from basil and parsley from the garden, as well as a salad whose ingredients had been picked from our garden just an hour before. At a time when Americans (and Michigan residents) have less money to spend on food, should they be cajoled, persuaded, tricked, bullied, educated, incentivized, or led to spend more on local and/or organic food? Last year, Americans spent $750 billion dollars on groceries, 4 percent of which went to producers of organic products. The room for growth in the organic food industry, then, is significant, and should explain why more and more grocery chains such as Kroger are expanding their organic offerings. It remains to be seen whether the American people, who shop almost exclusively by price point, will be convinced to part with their money for local and/or organic food and vegetables they perceive (for now) as just too expensive.