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Divided We Eat December 2010

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Divided We Eat

As more of us indulge our passion for local, organic delicacies, a growing number of Americans don’t have enough nutritious food to eat. How we
can bridge the gap.

Christopher Anderson / Magnum for Newsweek

Photos: How We Can Bridge the Food Divide

For breakfast, I usually have a cappuccino—espresso made in an Alessi pot and mixed with organic milk, which has been gently heated and hand-fluffed by my husband. I eat two
slices of imported cheese—Dutch Parrano, the label says, “the hippest
cheese in New York” (no joke)—on homemade bread with butter. I am what
you might call a food snob. My nutritionist neighbor drinks a protein
shake while her 5-year-old son eats quinoa porridge sweetened with
applesauce and laced with kale flakes. She is what you might call a
health nut. On a recent morning, my neighbor’s friend Alexandra
Ferguson sipped politically correct Nicaraguan coffee in her comfy
kitchen while her two young boys chose from among an assortment of
organic cereals. As we sat, the six chickens Ferguson and her husband,
Dave, keep for eggs in a backyard coop peered indoors from the stoop.
The Fergusons are known as locavores.

Alexandra says she spends hours each day thinking about, shopping for, and preparing food. She is a disciple of Michael Pollan, whose 2006 book The Omnivore’s Dilemma made the
locavore movement a national phenomenon, and believes that eating
organically and locally contributes not only to the health of her
family but to the existential happiness of farm animals and
farmers—and, indeed, to the survival of the planet. “Michael Pollan is
my new hero, next to Jimmy Carter,” she told me. In some neighborhoods,
a lawyer who raises chickens in her backyard might be considered
eccentric, but we live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, a community that
accommodates and celebrates every kind of foodie. Whether you believe
in eating for pleasure, for health, for justice, or for some idealized
vision of family life, you will find neighbors who reflect your food
values. In Park Slope, the contents of a child’s lunchbox can be fodder
for a 20-minute conversation.

Over coffee, I cautiously raise a subject that has concerned me of late: less than five miles away, some children don’t have enough to eat;
others exist almost exclusively on junk food. Alexandra concedes that
her approach is probably out of reach for those people. Though they are
not wealthy by Park Slope standards—Alexandra works part time and Dave
is employed by the city—the Fergusons spend approximately 20 percent of
their income, or $1,000 a month, on food. The average American spends
13 percent, including restaurants and takeout.

And so the conversation turns to the difficulty of sharing their interpretation of the Pollan doctrine with the uninitiated. When they visit Dave’s family in Tennessee, tensions erupt
over food choices. One time, Alexandra remembers, she irked her
mother-in-law by purchasing a bag of organic apples, even though her
mother-in-law had already bought the nonorganic kind at the grocery
store. The old apples were perfectly good, her mother-in-law said. Why
waste money—and apples?

The Fergusons recall Dave’s mother saying something along these lines: “When we come to your place, we don’t complain about your food. Why do you complain about ours? It’s not like
our food is poison.”

“I can’t convince my brother to spend another dime on food,” adds Dave.

“This is our charity. This is my giving to the world,” says Alexandra, finally, as she packs lunchboxes—organic peanut butter and jelly on grainy bread, a yogurt, and a clementine—for her
two boys. “We contribute a lot.”

According to data released last week by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 17 percent of Americans—more than 50 million people—live in households that are “food insecure,” a term that means a
family sometimes runs out of money to buy food, or it sometimes runs
out of food before it can get more money. Food insecurity is especially
high in households headed by a single mother. It is most severe in the
South, and in big cities. In New York City, 1.4 million people are food
insecure, and 257,000 of them live near me, in Brooklyn. Food
insecurity is linked, of course, to other economic measures like
housing and employment, so it surprised no one that the biggest surge
in food insecurity since the agency established the measure in 1995
occurred between 2007 and 2008, at the start of the economic downturn.
(The 2009 numbers, released last week, showed little change.) The
proportion of households that qualify as “hungry”—with what the USDA
calls “very low food security”—is small, about 6 percent. Reflected
against the obsessive concerns of the foodies in my circle, and the
glare of attention given to the plight of the poor and hungry abroad,
even a fraction of starving children in America seems too high.

Mine seems on some level like a naive complaint. There have always been rich people and poor people in America and, in a capitalist economy, the well-to-do have always had the freedom to
indulge themselves as they please. In hard times, food has always
marked a bright border between the haves and the have-nots. In the
earliest days of the Depression, as the poor waited on bread lines, the
middle and upper classes in America became devoted to fad diets.
Followers of the Hollywood 18-Day Diet, writes Harvey Levenstein in his
1993 book Paradox of Plenty, “could live on fewer than six
hundred calories a day by limiting each meal to half a grapefruit,
melba toast, coffee without cream or sugar, and, at lunch and dinner,
some raw vegetables.”

But modern America is a place of extremes, and what you eat for dinner has become the definitive marker of social status; as the distance between rich and poor continues to grow, the
freshest, most nutritious foods have become luxury goods that only some
can afford. Among the lowest quintile of American families, mean
household income has held relatively steady between $10,000 and $13,000
for the past two decades (in inflation-adjusted dollars); among the
highest, income has jumped 20 percent to $170,800 over the same period,
according to census data. What this means, in practical terms, is that
the richest Americans can afford to buy berries out of season at Whole
Foods—the upscale grocery chain that recently reported a 58 percent
increase in its quarterly profits—while the food insecure often eat
what they can: highly caloric, mass-produced foods like pizza and
packaged cakes that fill them up quickly. The number of Americans on
food stamps has surged by 58.5 percent over the last three years.

Corpulence used to signify the prosperity of a few but has now become a marker of poverty. Obesity has risen as the income gap has widened: more than a third of U.S. adults and 17 percent of
children are obese, and the problem is acute among the poor. While
obesity is a complex problem—genetics, environment, and activity level
all play a role—a 2008 study by the USDA found that children and women
on food stamps were likelier to be overweight than those who were not.
According to studies led by British epidemiologist Kate Pickett,
obesity rates are highest in developed countries with the greatest
income disparities. America is among the most obese of nations; Japan,
with its relatively low income inequality, is the thinnest.

Pictorial Parade

Photos: 10 Things That Changed the Way We Eat

Adam Drewnowski, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington, has spent his career showing that Americans’ food choices correlate to social class. He argues that the most
nutritious diet—lots of fruits and vegetables, lean meats, fish, and
grains—is beyond the reach of the poorest Americans, and it is economic
elitism for nutritionists to uphold it as an ideal without broadly
addressing issues of affordability. Lower-income families don’t subsist
on junk food and fast food because they lack nutritional education, as
some have argued. And though many poor neighborhoods are, indeed, food
deserts—meaning that the people who live there don’t have access to a
well-stocked supermarket—many are not. Lower-income families choose
sugary, fat, and processed foods because they’re cheaper—and because
they taste good. In a paper published last spring, Drewnowski showed
how the prices of specific foods changed between 2004 and 2008 based on
data from Seattle-area supermarkets. While food prices overall rose
about 25 percent, the most nutritious foods (red peppers, raw oysters,
spinach, mustard greens, romaine lettuce) rose 29 percent, while the
least nutritious foods (white sugar, hard candy, jelly beans, and cola)
rose just 16 percent.

“In America,” Drewnowski wrote in an e-mail, “food has become the premier marker of social distinctions, that is to say—social class. It used to be clothing and fashion, but no longer,
now that ‘luxury’ has become affordable and available to all.” He
points to an article in The New York Times, written by Pollan,
which describes a meal element by element, including “a basket of
morels and porcini gathered near Mount Shasta.” “Pollan,” writes
Drewnowski, “is drawing a picture of class privilege that is as acute
as anything written by Edith Wharton or Henry James.”

I finish writing the previous paragraph and go downstairs. There, in the mail, I find the Christmas catalog from the luxury retail store Barneys. HAVE A FOODIE HOLIDAY, its cover reads.
Inside, models are covered—literally—with food. A woman in a red $2,000
Lanvin trench has an enormous cabbage on her head. Another, holding a
green Proenza Schouler clutch, wears a boiled crab in her bouffant.
Most disconcerting is the Munnu diamond pendant ($80,500) worn by a
model who seems to have traded her hair for an octopus. Its tentacles
dangle past her shoulders, and the girl herself wears the expression of
someone who’s stayed too long at the party. Food is no longer trendy or
fashionable. It is fashion.

Tiffiney Davis, a single mom, lives about four miles away from me, in subsidized housing, in a gentrifying neighborhood called Red Hook. Steps from her apartment, you can find
ample evidence of foodie culture: Fairway, the supermarket where I buy
my Dutch cheese, is right there, as is a chic bakery, and a newfangled
lobster pound. Davis says she has sometimes worried about having enough
food. She works in Manhattan, earning $13 an hour for a corporate
catering company (which once had a contract with NEWSWEEK), and she
receives food stamps. She spends $100 a week on food for herself and
her two kids. Sometimes she stretches her budget by bringing food home
from work.

Davis is sheepish about what her family eats for breakfast. Everybody rises at 6, and there’s a mad rush to get the door, so often they eat bodega food. Her daughter, Malaezia, 10, will
have egg and cheese on a roll; her son, 13-year-old Tashawn, a muffin
and soda. She herself used to pop into at Dunkin’ Donuts for two
doughnuts and a latte, but when New York chain restaurants started
posting calories on their menus, she stopped. “I try my best to lessen
the chemicals and the fattening stuff,” she says, “but it’s hard.”

Time is just part of the problem, Davis explains, as she prepares Sunday dinner in her cheerful kitchen. Tonight she’s making fried chicken wings with bottled barbecue sauce; yellow rice
from a box; black beans from a can; broccoli; and carrots, cooked in
olive oil and honey. A home-cooked dinner doesn’t happen every night.
On weeknights, everyone gets home, exhausted—and then there’s homework.
Several nights a week, they get takeout: Chinese, or Domino’s, or
McDonald’s. Davis doesn’t buy fruits and vegetables mostly because
they’re too expensive, and in the markets where she usually shops,
they’re not fresh. “I buy bananas and bring them home and 10 minutes
later they’re no good…Whole Foods sells fresh, beautiful tomatoes,” she
says. “Here, they’re packaged and full of chemicals anyway. So I mostly
buy canned foods.”

In recent weeks the news in New York City has been full with a controversial proposal to ban food-stamp recipients from using their government money to buy soda. Local public-health officials
insist they need to be more proactive about slowing obesity; a recent
study found that 40 percent of the children in New York City’s
kindergarten through eighth-grade classrooms were either overweight or
obese. (Nationwide, 36 percent of 6- to 11-year-olds are overweight or
obese.) Opponents of the proposal call it a “nanny state” measure,
another instance of government interference, and worse—of the
government telling poor people what to do, as if they can’t make good
decisions on their own. “I think it’s really difficult,” says Pickett,
the British epidemiologist. “Everybody needs to be able to feel that
they have control over what they spend. And everybody should be able to
treat themselves now and again. Why shouldn’t a poor child have a
birthday party with cake and soda?”

But Davis enthusiastically supports the proposal. A 9-year-old boy in her building recently died of an asthma attack, right in front of his mother. He was obese, she says, but his mom kept
feeding him junk. “If these people don’t care at all about calorie
counts, then the government should. People would live a lot longer,”
she says.

Claude Fischler, a French sociologist, believes that Americans can fight both obesity and food insecurity by being more, well, like the French. Americans take an approach to food and
eating that is unlike any other people in history. For one thing, we
regard food primarily as (good or bad) nutrition. When asked “What is
eating well?” Americans generally answer in the language of daily
allowances: they talk about calories and carbs, fats, and sugars. They
don’t see eating as a social activity, and they don’t see food—as it
has been seen for millennia—as a shared resource, like a loaf of bread
passed around the table. When asked “What is eating well?” the French
inevitably answer in terms of “conviviality”: togetherness, intimacy,
and good tastes unfolding in a predictable way.

Even more idiosyncratic than our obsession with nutrition, says Fischler, is that Americans see food choice as a matter of personal freedom, an inalienable right. Americans want to eat what
they want: morels or Big Macs. They want to eat where they want, in the
car or alfresco. And they want to eat when they want. With the
exception of Thanksgiving, when most of us dine off the same turkey
menu, we are food libertarians. In surveys, Fischler has found no
single time of day (or night) when Americans predictably sit together
and eat. By contrast, 54 percent of the French dine at 12:30 each day.
Only 9.5 percent of the French are obese.

When I was a child I was commanded to “eat your eggs. There are starving children in Africa.” And when I was old enough to think for myself, I could easily see that my own eaten or uneaten
eggs would not do a single thing to help the children of Africa. This
is the Brooklyn conundrum, playing out all over the country. Locally
produced food is more delicious than the stuff you get in the
supermarket; it’s better for the small farmers and the farm animals;
and, as a movement, it’s better for the environment. It’s easy—and
probably healthy, if you can afford it—to make that choice as an
individual or a family, says the New York University nutritionist
Marion Nestle. Bridging the divide is much harder. “Choosing local or
organic is something you can actually do. It’s very difficult for
people to get involved in policy.”

Locavore activists in New York and other cities are doing what they can to help the poor with access to fresh food. Incentive programs give food-stamp recipients extra credit if they buy
groceries at farmers’ markets. Food co-ops and community-garden
associations are doing better urban outreach. Municipalities are
establishing bus routes between poor neighborhoods and those where
well-stocked supermarkets exist.

Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, says these programs are good, but they need to go much, much further. He believes, like Fischler, that the answer
lies in seeing food more as a shared resource, like water, than as a
consumer product, like shoes. “It’s a nuanced conversation, but I think
‘local’ or ‘organic’ as the shorthand for all things good is way too
simplistic,” says Berg. “I think we need a broader conversation about
scale, working conditions, and environmental impact. It’s a little too
much of people buying easy virtue.”

Even the locavore hero Pollan agrees. “Essentially,” he says, “we have a system where wealthy farmers feed the poor crap and poor farmers feed the wealthy high-quality food.” He
points to Walmart’s recent announcement of a program that will put more
locally grown food on its shelves as an indication that big retailers
are looking to sell fresh produce in a scalable way. These fruits and
vegetables might not be organic, but the goal, says Pollan, is not to
be absolutist in one’s food ideology. “I argue for being conscious,” he
says, “but perfectionism is an enemy of progress.” Pollan sees a future
where, in an effort to fight diabetes and obesity, health-insurance
companies are advocates for small and medium-size farmers. He dreams of
a broad food-policy conversation in Washington. “The food movement,” he
reminds me, “is still very young.”

Berg believes that part of the answer lies in working with Big Food. The food industry hasn’t been entirely bad: it developed the technology to bring apples to Wisconsin in the middle of
winter, after all. It could surely make sustainably produced fruits and
vegetables affordable and available. “We need to bring social justice
to bigger agriculture as well,” Berg says.

My last stop was at Jabir Suluki’s house in Clinton Hill, about two miles from my home. Suluki has toast for breakfast, with a little cheese on top, melted in the toaster oven. He
is not French—he was born and raised in Brooklyn—but he might as well
be. Every day, between 5 and 7, he prepares dinner for his mother and
himself—and any of his nieces and nephews who happen to drop by. He
prepares food with the confidence of a person descended from a long
line of home cooks—which he is.

Both Suluki and his mother are diabetic. For them, healthy, regular meals are a necessity—and so he does what he can on $75 a week. “To get good food, you really got to sacrifice a lot. It’s
expensive. But I take that sacrifice, because it’s worth it.” Suluki
uses his food stamps at the farmers’ market. He sorts through the
rotten fruit at the local supermarket. He travels to Queens, when he
can get a ride, and buys cheap meat in bulk. He is adamant that it is
the responsibility of parents to feed their children good food in
moderate portions, and that it’s possible to do so on a fixed income.

For dinner he and his mother ate Salisbury steak made from ground turkey, with a little ground beef thrown in and melted cheese on top “because turkey doesn’t have any taste”; roasted potatoes
and green peppers; and frozen green beans, “heated quickly so they
still have a crunch.” For dessert, his mother ate two pieces of
supermarket coffeecake.

Suluki thinks a lot about food, and the role it plays in the life of his neighbors. He doesn’t have soda in his refrigerator, but he opposes the New York City soda proposal because,
in light of the government’s food and farm subsidies—and in light of
all the other kinds of unhealthy cheap foods for sale in his
supermarket—he sees it as hypocrisy. “You can’t force junk on people
and then criticize it at the same time.” Suluki is a community
organizer, and sees the web of problems before us—hunger, obesity,
health—as something for the community to solve. “We can’t just attack
this problem as individuals,” he tells me. “A healthy community
produces healthy people.” That’s why, on the weekends, he makes a big
pot of rice and beans, and brings it down to the food pantry near his
house.

With Ian Yarett and Jesse Ellison