Sara Robinson linked to this fascinating photoessay of families around the world (chosen clearly for their “averageness”) standing by a table with a week’s worth of their food purchases on it. Sara displayed these two pictures that show the disparity in need between middle class Americans and refugees living in Chad.
I recommend Sara’s thoughts on the issue of worldwide hunger, and I have nothing to add to that. This post is about something else I noticed, in the difference between the average American diet shown here and the average middle class diet in other countries. See if you can spot the difference.
Italy:
Mexico:
Poland:
If your answer is, “The presence of fresh produce,” bingo. Not that the Americans didn’t have any, but only the British family really one-upped them in terms of relying on processed food. There’s another American family represented, and they have more fruit, but roughly the same issue.
But I come not to wag my finger at and shame Americans for their diets. My impatience with individualized guilt-based solutions grows daily, and this is no exception. Neil’s weekender post at Ezra’s points to a larger, social policy-based cause for Americans’ bad eating habits, within a larger post about the John Edwards plan to fight malnutrition and hunger in the U.S.
It’s hard for poor people to eat a balanced diet. While calorie-dense foods containing lots of fat and processed carbohydrates are cheap, fruits and vegetables are expensive. This is partly because we allocate 0.37% of farm subsidies to fruits and vegetables, compared to 73.80% for meat and dairy (much of which goes to subsidizing feed grains for animals). The results are predictable — in order to meet the USDA guidelines for a healthy diet, poor families would have to spend 70% of their food budget on fruits and vegetables. They actually end up spending about 15%.
This is why I tend to get red in the face when I hear some ignorant asshole bloviating about the poor in America are doing just fine food-wise, since so many of them (like all Americans) are overweight. That only makes sense if you think the only nutrient is calories, and if you think that, then you are being willfully ignorant, since we’ve all had the food pyramid and/or the four basic food groups pushed on us since preschool. You can both be fat and malnourished, actually. Edwards’ plan is to address the lack of balance in the diets of the poor by trying to get more affordable fresh fruits and vegetables into their neighborhoods, because right now even people who are able to spend more money on these items often don’t have access.
But the difference between the price of processed food and calorie-dense meats and dairy products and the price of fresh produce (which is going up rapidly due to rising gasoline prices) doesn’t just affect the poor, but also the middle class. I look at the picture of this American family and I see that they’ve got two teenage boys, and their food budget ($342 a week) reflects their needs. Keeping up with the calorie needs of two active and probably growing teenage boys will dominate the food priorities of any family like that, and so I imagine the temptation to load up on calorie-heavy processed foods, meats, and cheeses is nearly impossible to avoid.
But it’s not good for you. Now, I’ll admit up front that I’m a bit uptight about food. Not terribly so—I eat of the junk food, make no mistake—but I put a lot of effort into eating fresh produce and whole grains and restricting the animals fats. Over the holiday, I indulged in the bevy of Thanksgiving foods, the processed food casseroles, the refined-sugar-and-fat-heavy desserts, etc. and I laid around for three days, not getting any exercise. By the end of it (driving 7 hours a day for two of those days didn’t help), I felt like shit. My head and back hurt, I wanted to sleep 12 hours a day, and I had no sex drive to speak of. Returning to an exercise routine fixed me right back up, but all I could think was that my problems stemming from just a few days of poor diet and little exercise are probably the standard life of a good deal of Americans. And it bothered me, patriot that I am.
I think a lot of people would like to eat better, but it’s just expensive. Farm subsidies are a controversial topic on both the left and the right, but if we’re going to have them, why not transfer them to produce agriculture? Make those vegetables a lot cheaper, and let the price of stuff that’s bad for you inch up. We should look to social solutions for this issue not just for the poor, but for the middle class as well.
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You hit the nail on the head. I was listening to the Tavis Smiley Show on NPR yesterday, and they were talking about hunger in the US. And one of said bloviating assholes said basically what you’d expect him to say — poor folks are fat, so they don’t need help with food, that food banks are lying about how many people really need their help, et cetera. *facepalm*
This goes for homeless people as well. I’ve spoken to a number of folks who provide meals for the homeless who say that American homeless folks get plenty of calories, but get very little nutrition. You rarely hear about homeless Americans dying of hunger in the streets, but many suffer from all sorts of health problems that come with a fucked up diet.
One of the other things I noticed—Soda everywhere except Chad. (reaches for morning Diet Coke).
It’s not just calories, it’s types of calories. From what types of foods are they coming? I’ve mentioned my enjoyment of preserving foods via canning. One of the reasons I like to do so is that I have more control over the ingredients than I would if I, say, bought a can of soup or stew. Indeed, here’s yesterday’s beef stew.My stew may not be the healthiest of the things I make, but my soups are much more likely to be healthier than anything you can pick up from Campbell’s.
I notice; when i focus on my own cooking I feel better than those times when I load up on junk food (and I loves me some flaming hot cheetos)
Good post.
Pam, everything you just said. As a father, I try to buy healthy foods (if it were just me, sardines would cover all my “health food” needs), but it’s God damned expensive. Really, you have to shop like a bleedin’ European, heading to Whole Foods for a certain array of items (meat, fish, produce, etc.) and then to a regular grocery store for more everyday food items (including the inevitable small complement of processed foods) and then to Target/Costco for housewares and the like.
I will add this observation: Great Jesus Criminy on a Biscuit, do ya think the Mexican family goes through a little Coca-Cola?
Oops sorry — Amanda, not Pam.
The soda thing is crazy. I gave up drinking it years ago, the stuff is gross. When I get together to play D&D with the very same people I did in highschool (it’s been a long time since highschool, but we all stayed near our home town with some trips away), we’re drinking tea and water. Used to be huge quantities of soda.
Our snacks still aren’t the healthiest, but I don’t really eat them. This whole diet thing really does boggle my mind. It isn’t that hard for me to get lots of cheap fruits and vegetables; in the mall is one produce stand that has better prices than the supermarket, and across the parking lot is another. Is the US really that much different than Canada? Granted this is out in the suburbs, but not affluent suburbs and downtown is largely the same (for that matter, it’s right along Skytrain, just about the easiest transit available).
Wow, someone in the Mexican family is a real coke-aholic. I’m sure that’s not representative of everyone in their area or economic bracket. I also wonder what the mystery beverage that the American family likes to consume is. Faux fruit juice of some sort?
Except for the coke, I admire the food choices being made by the Mexican family, but I also recognize that the prep time for their meals must be more time than I can generally spend. That’s a factor too. If you don’t have someone doing full-time homemaking, preparing healthy meals every day can be a daunting task. Frozen food becomes much more appealing as a result.
First off, I want to go eat in Italy. Yum!
I’ve had this argument with anti-fat folks a million times. I like to use myself as an example of how difficult it is to eat a balanced diet as I’ve lived on a tiny grocery budget and have no car. The only time it’s easy for me to have fresh produce is when the Farmer’s Market runs during the summer, and that’s because I work nearby. Otherwise, I’m dependent on mass transit and rides from friends/family to get my food. That means I tend to buy food that will last a couple of weeks because a) I don’t know when I’m going to get another ride to the store and b) I have to wait until my next paycheck to be able to afford it.
I’ve known one single working mom who cooked in a really traditional Mexican style, and the key is that Sunday is the big cooking day. You make the beans and some large amount of meat, and then the rest of the week, it’s reworking those items into various dishes, which is where the fresh produce comes in.
“Farm subsidies are a controversial topic on both the left and the right, but if we’re going to have them, why not transfer them to produce agriculture? Make those vegetables a lot cheaper, and let the price of stuff that’s bad for you inch up.”
I wonder if the preponderance of subsidies go the way they do because of climate issues combined with political considerations.
States like California, Florida, Arizona, Texas, etc. would benefit from subsidies on fruits/vegetables, while Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Texas (again), etc., benefit from a subsidized emphasis on meat and dairy.
Or maybe the the meat/dairy lobby is much bigger and more powerful (due to traditional subsidies) and can therefore fight off challenges to the current spending priorities more effectively?
Either way, it’s not a good situation…
MAJeff,
Yeah, I noticed all the soda, too. In some cases it may be due to concerns about water quality — people in the colonial US used to drink unbelievable quantities of beer, ale, and whiskey because it was all much safer than drinking whatever water was available.
Time is a big factor here, too. Not many people today have or make the time to cook good meals from scratch, and unless you spend huge sums of money nearly all the ready-to-eat foods you can buy are nutritionally iffy. I love to cook, and do all my family’s cooking, but I sorta have a thing about having a home-made family dinner basically every night of the week. If I didn’t like cooking, I’m sure we’d end up eating a lot more crap.
I totally agree about the feeling of switching from a good diet to a more typical American one. My family eats about like the American family in the photo. Last time I spent a few days with them, I came home and had to eat a giant plate of peas and a few raw carrots right away (even though it was 2 am). Of course, I’m sure if I could somehow make them eat like me for a few days, they’d be desperate for a cheeseburger by the end of it.
Make no mistake, I’m not “picking on Mexicans” — that could be any family in the North American continent, white, black, or, as they sometimes say, purple. That said, I’m absolutely floored. I count fourteen bottles and they’re at least two liters each. That’s two liters a day — their youngest child should not drink Coke, their second-youngest should only drink it rarely if at all, and the oldest child is already, well, frankly, fat. People, they go through four liters a day!
I drink about three 12-oz Cokes a month in the hot half of the year, and maybe one a month the rest of the year. So admittedly, my disgust is at least partly a matter of taste. If you could take every beer I’ve ever drunk and dump them in one place, they would easily fill six and one-third Olympic-size swimming pools.
Great post. It especially hit home to me as someone who lived for two years in a rural village in a developing country. When I lived there and would occassionally “treat” myself to some overpackaged American food bought in the supermarket in the capital, it turned out not be such a treat. I felt like I could actually taste the plastic. But now that I’m back in the States, I’m right back to eating that sort of food. I mean, I eat better than a lot of people and my weekly purchases would include a lot more vegetables than the American families pictured here, but there is plenty of processed food in my kitchen. I certainly “know better,” but there are a lot of social forces at play, with the biggest one for us being time - not getting home until 6 p.m. most evenings and having a little one who needs to be in bed by 8 p.m.
Re: agricultural subsidies and vegetables, does anyone have more information about that? I heard once that vegetables are much more profitable per acre than grains but require more work, but I’m no expert on it. I don’t know how all the economics shake out, but if anyone has more info on that I’d love to hear it.
One thing we can do is to go vegan. Stop supporting the meat and dairy industries, that shit is just plain bad for you, plus factory farming is a big contributor to global warming. Fruits, vegetable, grains, and beans are not difficult to find and you can usually find stuff on sale. I am a college student that works part time and I manage to get by just fine. I usually prepare two or three meals on Sunday to get me by through the week because I don’t have a lot of time to cook either. I have been a vegan for a few months after being a vegetarian for 1 1/2 years and I have never felt better. I have lost 17 lbs., my cholesterol has gone way down, and I have more energy than ever. Plus, I am living a live that is as cruelty-free as possible. Just my two cents.
And don’t forget the time costs. Eating macaroni and cheese out of a box takes maybe ten minutes, start to finish; making a vegetable stew takes a lot longer, not to mention you have to put in the time to learn the recipe. If you’re working two or three jobs, you have to be pretty committed to cook for yourself. Heck, I’m a student with tons of free time, and my idea of “cooking” is putting cottage cheese on baby spinach. Not unhealthy, but not lentils and wild rice, either. Throw in the costs of produce and there’s just no way a poor family can eat the way rich people say they should.
Many moons ago, in high school Spanish, I learned that all of Mexico has a love affair with Coke (this from a Puerto-Rican and later a Spanish-Italian-Mexican teacher). Current Mexicans feel free to correct me, but in the documentaries I saw, everyone drank Coke, and it was a major component of the Day of the Dead offerings as well.
The secret to eating a variety of fresh produce is being able to buy some every day. European cities have fresh food markets, with produce stands all over town. Grocery stores with fresh produce are near town centers, which are subway stops. When I was in Germany one summer, between my metro stop and home was an Italian cart owner with beautiful tomatoes, etc., and a shopping center with two supermarkets: a nofrills Aldi with a basic produce section, and a completely stocked store with such exotic gourmet options as American popcorn as well as a large produce section with an array of fresh greens. The only food I had trouble finding was beef, as Germans in that area subsist on pork with the occasional chicken.
Only fourteen comments in and the obligatory vegan appears. Is there a vegan bingo card?
Hector B, that is my memory of Germany too. Produce stands everywhere! It’s a victory that some inner city areas in the US are getting weekly farmer’s markets, but for most produce, you can only buy it a day or two in advance if you want it to be any good. Still, a couple days a week with fresh food is better than none.
Only fourteen comments before the obligatory vegan chimes in. Is there a vegan bingo card?
Paris was like that too. Between our subway stop and our hotel (which was a less than 10 minute walk) in the 15th district, there were 3 produce stands, 2 bakeries, and several cafes. It was amazing (and delicious).
I am most emphatically NOT being a finger wagging arsehole: I just want to say to anyone who might consider it, that you can get around the HIGH cost of produce, (especially organic) by having a garden (If you have a sunny yard, and YES I realize most city dwellers do not have one).
I could NEVER afford the vast quantities of organic vegetables in my diet if I didn’t grow them myself. Yes I think I am the only person with a vegetable garden in a mile radius of my house…maybe more!!! Having a garden DOES take time, but for the most part, once you plant them, the vegetables grow on their own.
Godmonkey: I will add this observation: Great Jesus Criminy on a Biscuit, do ya think the Mexican family goes through a little Coca-Cola?
Hey, if they still made Coke with real sugar in the US the way they do in Mexico, I’d probably still be drinking it. I can get it sometimes here in LA and it tastes MUCH better than that corn syrup crap they try to give us here.
Matthew: It isn’t that hard for me to get lots of cheap fruits and vegetables; in the mall is one produce stand that has better prices than the supermarket, and across the parking lot is another. Is the US really that much different than Canada?
You have produce stands in your malls? Man, I’ve gotta move to Canada. The best we do down here in Southern California — provider of produce to most of the United States — is weekly farmers’ markets, which are on a day that you can go if you’re lucky. There’s one near me on Sunday mornings, but I work until at least 12 noon and it closes at 2:00, so I can’t always make it in time. Otherwise, it’s supermarket or nothing.
One thing we can do is to go vegan.
Yes, it’s completely practical for someone living on a limited income in the inner city with little access to fresh produce — or, often, any produce — to go vegan. They have no fresh produce? Let them eat seitan!
Perhaps if certain localities with large numbers of poor wouldn’t fight tooth-and-nail to prevent vendors capable of selling fresh produce at very low prices from opening stores, more low-income people could afford to eat a more balanced diet.
Just saying, better produce would significantly benefit EVERYONE not just the lower and middle class. Even though wealthy people can afford expensive produce that doesn’t mean that they want to be paying higher prices. (Especially if they are busy people whose produce spoils before they can eat it or are, like some wealthy folks who gave birth to me, incredibly cheap.)
It seems to me the only people who would be hurt by more subsidized produce production would be the dairy/meat industry.
Mnem, it only took fourteen comments too. Is there a vegan bingo card? There ought to be.
What do you suppose the Italians are going to do with all those persimmons? I’ve always thought of them as inedible.
I disagree that the Coke in the Mexican family is non-representative. I’ve spent some time in Mexico and the amount of Coke consumed is huge. And it’s very cheap; usually sold in glass bottles, with the bottle deposit more than the price of the coke inside.
Amanda,
This was in yesterday’s Louisville Courier-Journal on how the lack of grocery stores in poorer parts of town combined with lack of good mass transit or cars means the only available food source is fast food or mini-mart junk food.
KMT:
Let’s see, hmm, well. The first summer I moved into my house I planted tomatoes, peppers, zucchini and herbs. The psycho squirrels knocked off every single tomato while tiny and green. They were also the prime suspects for the peppers that disappeared, but they left no evidence so I guess those tasted better. Rabbits came and munched off every bud that the zucchini produced so no fruit ever appeared. Squirrels even dug coriander seeds out of the herb planter. Japanese beetles ate the basil.
Tried hanging pie tins, cayenne-spray anti-wildlife preparations, tying the beagle outside during the day. No dice all around. I was left with chives and oregano, got about 5 tiny tomatoes, one teeny tiny green pepper and one jalapeño about a quarter of an inch long.
Guess who didn’t bother even trying summer number 2.
When I the first picture I thought this might be an episode of “Honey we’re killing the kids.”
I have three sons, a.k.a bottomless pits. When I was growing up my mother complained that I would eat all the fresh fruit in the house, to quickly, etc. She comes to my house and sees what the boys inhale and I try not to remind her. But it’s not junk food. Rarely do we have chips, unless it’s left over from one of my versions of Taco Salad.
I try to buy in season fruits, and I do look at the country of origin, and have plenty on hand. Cases of water bottles, fruit juice and a pitcher of Kool-Aid replace all the soda we used to drink (because when we were poor it was cheaper than fruit juice).
I buy better and leaner cuts of meat (sorry but the best I can do with these omnivores is one or two meatless days a week - but then that’s not much different from our days when we were poor.) But that takes $$$$$
We do have “processed” foods like the 90 minute microwave rice packets for snacking, and also the “everything in the bag” salad fixings for both meals and snacks.
Our moo cow fock milk is hormone free, organic and $$$$$ and so are our vegetarian feed, hormone free almost always free range chicken eggs, also $$$$
But it costs money which the poor do not have. Which we did not have at one time. . . a cheap can or two of diced tomatoes (which may have had a large piece of stem in it), a cheapest hamburger I could find (drained until there was probably more fat taken out than meat left), to boxes of cheap mac and cheese, cheap milk, margarine .. and viola a meal for us poor . . . loaded with fat, nothing good and fresh, but would fill our bellies (and give us heart disease later on)
We eat better and more healthier because we can afford to now.
I ‘m with the people who think it’s time in addition to (or even maybe instead of) the cost. Which is where americans are screwed by (on average) longer working hours, longer commutes, longer trips to grocery stores blah blah blah. The same structures that give us two weeks of vacation (in a good year) and lousy social services.
And it’s not just the prep time, it’s the education time. I can throw a decent meal together in 15 minutes, or prep fresh bread for the rest of the week in half an hour, but I’ve been in and out of from-scratch kitchen for 40 years now. If kids don’t learn this kind of stuff from elementary school age on up, it’s hell to teach them later.
I moved to a low-income neighborhood at the beginning of this year and at first I honestly did believe that it was still possible to maintain a healthy diet- I’ve changed my mind since. I noticed that I do eat more fruits and vegetables than many of my neighbors but it’s the quality of fresh produce that’s the problem. My eating habits may be healthiER, but it’s still been a step down from when I lived in a neighborhood with a farmer’s market or Trader Joe’s. The grocery stores in this neighborhood are small and end up stocking mostly canned goods, while the selection of fruits and vegetables are… well… I’ve grown to be very frustrated with it. I brought a salad to a potluck at my office last week and since I didn’t have time to take the bus out of the area, I spent a lot of time searching for lettuce that wasn’t brown and tomatoes that weren’t moldy and there were NO carrots, mushrooms, or cauliflower. I never thought I’d take fresh carrots for granted!
I’ve talked to a lot of people around here who are tired of hearing that they need to eat healthier, but don’t have the option of buying fresh, affordable ingredients.
Wow, $342 a week for a food budget.
I have an $80/month food budget. I can’t even get enough calories anymore, I’m down to eating once a day and filling my meals with as much white rice as I can tolerate. I’ve learned how to make a $1 box of saltines stretch to cover four days worth of meals.
But I’m fat so I must not be malnourished.
Yep, Mnemosyne. A two minute walk from my apartment gets me to a mall with a produce place and a bakery, I don’t live in a huge city but I don’t live in the sticks either. Produce is pretty cheap up here in Canada. My husband and I are vegetarians and most of the time it’s not expensive for us to eat, unless we buy lots of “fake” meat products. Tofu is way cheaper than meat and a couple bucks gets you a whole box of mandarine oranges. Soy milk, however, is much more expesive than cow’s milk, but I have a major grudge against the dairy industry so I am very glad I can afford it and stick it to the diary man.
Soy milk
Whoa there. No. There is no such thing. It’s “soy juice”. Soybeans don’t have teats.
Anyway, just remember that it’s not easy for some of us to get fresh produce and whatnot, what with us working shitty, $6-an-hour jobs and not living in cities where things are readily available. I notice this with lots of (presumably) well-intentioned moral crusaders of my political stripe - most seem to believe that since they can X, then all who agree with them can X. Life don’t work that way.
a whole box of mandarine oranges is only couple bucks?
Ya gotta be kidding me. A single mandarine orange around her probably goes for 60 cents. I know that’s the cost of one piece of fruit around here..
My two strategies for eating well on little money or time are as follows: live near a heavily immigrant area if possible, preferably heavily Asian, and cook something in a slow cooker on Sundays (buy one cookbook that has healthy slow cooker recipies - after a few weeks you can just eyeball it). Food in Asian markets is cheaper because it does not have to keep long - under-assimilated Asians tend to shop every day. Buy Jasmine rice in the big honking bags for a few bucks, ditto beans and such. Then buy whatever is fresh but going bad in a day or so and cook a big vat of slow cooker something. Freeze about 8 meals in containers. If you have to skip a week, you will have some from other weeks. This is also one of the most viable ways to go meatless because there are a lot of bean recipies. Your prep time can be less than 10 minutes.
Color me weird but the thing that struck me most was the sheer amount of packaging in the USAmerican picture. The total volume of the packaging alone is comparable to the volume of the Chadian food.
Those photos are so fascinating. I am really curious about the layout of the food in each photo. Was the family responsible for arranging the food? I feel that I am a bit biased towards the more aesthetically pleasing displays, and I wonder how the placement of the items reflect the relative importance of the food.
For instance to be fair to the British family there seems to be some vegetables trying to hide in a basket near the fireplace, and some of their packaged food is pet food which is endearing but the layout is remarkably wan.
Packaging is definitely problematic. I probably buy half of my food at the local farmer’s market here in CA, but the cheese and eggs, even the dried beans that I buy are required to be packaged. The woman selling lovely baguettes was told that she had to have them in plastic, they could not be exposed to open air!
The Italian family doesn’t drink wine?
I’m wondering though, if your tastebuds can be adjusted over your lifetime. If I don’t have meat at meal time, I feel unsatisfied…still rather hungry. Also, the fruit I can by up here in NoDak is DISGUSTING. We can get some decent strawberries in the summer, but that’s about it. It was much better in WA, and even better in Germany.
Those photos are so fascinating. I am really curious about the layout of the food in each photo. Was the family responsible for arranging the food? I feel that I am a bit biased towards the more aesthetically pleasing displays, and I wonder how the placement of the items reflect the relative importance of the food.
For instance to be fair to the British family there seems to be some vegetables trying to hide in a basket near the fireplace, and some of their packaged food is pet food which is endearing but the layout is remarkably wan.
Packaging is definitely problematic. I probably buy half of my food at the local farmer’s market here in CA, but the cheese and eggs, even the dried beans that I buy are required to be packaged. The woman selling lovely baguettes was told that she had to have them in plastic, they could not be exposed to open air!
The Italian family doesn’t drink wine?
Mnemosyne:
Actually, by swapping out one’s animal protein intake for proteins from beans, lentils, etc. one gains a ton of health benefits by upping your intake of fiber and vitamins and reducing your saturated fat, hormones and cholesterol, not to mention the fact that beans are way cheaper.
I’ve been vegan for almost 2 years now, and I’m not rich. I’ve also lived in extremely poor urban neighborhoods and although the produce options aren’t fantastic, they do exist.
Produce is pretty cheap up here in Canada.
That depends on where you are, really. When I lived in the Yukon produce was pretty expensive and the quality wasn’t always great, especially in the winter. In British Columbia and Ontario it was a different story, especially in Ottawa which is produce haven for broke students.
Damian, all I was meaning to do was illustrate how different things are in Canada. I never said that everyone should live near a produce stand or be vegetarian. I am fully aware that not everyone’s life looks like mine. My point was that in a mid-sized city in Canada, it’s cheaper to buy veggies than it is to buy meat.
I am also kind of sick of people giving me crap about soy milk. I put it on my cereal so I will call it milk if I want to. I never said you have to drink it, but I can’t drink cow milk so I’m pretty grateful for soy.
Tofu is way cheaper than meat and a couple bucks gets you a whole box of mandarine oranges.
I’m south of you, and my taco meat substitute costs as much as a pound of meat, and oranges here are frequently $10 a bag. You may have just made it worth it to drive to Canada to go grocery shopping.
Mrs Nice Guy here. My impression, from having met a fair number of people from other countries, is that every country values soft drinks way more than, say, I do. I’ll bet the family in Chad would be buying them if they could afford it.
As to why poor folks don’t eat better: a lot of the time there is no actual grocery in poor neighborhoods. There are “convenience stores” and they have produce, but very little, poor quality, and expensive. Poor people don’t get grocery stores because, y’know, they don’t have much money. US groceries are counting on selling a lot of packaging and other unnecessary stuff, or they don’t want to bother.
The dairy pushing onto kids is way out of control. My kids are both lactose intolerant and they have never eaten the kind of dairy loading that they are “supposed” to. Wondering if they were getting enough to eat, I did some digging. They eat about 2 servings of yogurt, cheese, and lactose-reduced dairy daily and that is more than fine. I’m plenty capable of evaluating health evidence and I know damn well that it isn’t as good for kids or necessary as it is being promoted to be. Who the fuck needs a quart a day from age 5???? GMAFB!
I knew a professor at Harvard named Walt Willett who quit the committee that built the food pyramid because they kept pushing away mounting evidence that dairy wasn’t as good for you as it is hyped to be, and cherry picking industry sponsored “research” to place milk much more prominently in the diet than the science says it should be.
Most of the population of the world can’t tolerate unmodified dairy anyway - how is it they are alive? It is because it isn’t necessary. I get so very extremely tired of the “they won’t get enough calcium unless they eat six pounds of kale” nonsense emitting from official mouths. How about a couple of corn tortillas, then, huh??? Puhleeze.
One thing that jumps out at me from the photoessay is that what you place in the front makes a huge perceptual difference. In the U.S. picture in your post, your eye is drawn to the two pizzas; in most of the other pictures you added to the post, it’s to the bread and produce, with any prepackaged foods set off to the side or partially obscured by other goods.
Wow, someone in the Mexican family is a real coke-aholic. I’m sure that’s not representative of everyone in their area or economic bracket.
Mexicans drink enormous amounts of sucre soda - more soda per capita than anywhere in the world, and nearly as much cocacola in total than the US!!! Mexican sodas don’t have corn syrup in them, though, they have locally produced sugar. Yummmmy!
So, yes, that is representative of the kinds of offerings I saw in Mexico. I like to visit grocery stores in my travels because you learn stuff like this.
Yep. If you’re college-educated with an internet connection that you can access during the workday, you have a lot more information at your fingertips than a high school dropout working two jobs to keep a roof over your family’s head. It’s not just about money, people — it’s social class, too.
I’m grateful that I have an office job that allows me enough independence that I can hop online and chitchat when I feel like it, but I’m under no illusion that someone working in a retail job has the same luxury.
Actually, by swapping out one’s animal protein intake for proteins from beans, lentils, etc. one gains a ton of health benefits by upping your intake of fiber and vitamins and reducing your saturated fat, hormones and cholesterol, not to mention the fact that beans are way cheaper.
Yes, assuming that you
(a) you have a pot to cook them in
(b) a stove to cook them on, and
(c) a refrigerator to store them in for a week.
Not everyone in this country has those things readily available. Take a look at Nickel and Dimed the next time you’re at the library.
Yes, assuming that you
(a) you have a pot to cook them in
(b) a stove to cook them on, and
(c) a refrigerator to store them in for a week.
One out of three ain’t bad.
BTW, that kid who somebody said is “fat” isn’t much more pudgy than my own son, who never drinks much soda (and it counts as part of his treat allowance), exercises regularly, and could out eat a fruit bat on the fresh stuff.
Some kids are just programmed to pudge, regardless of feed stock. Not everybody is northern European or Dinka.
Back when this photoessay was first making the rounds, some of us started a Flickr to keep track of a week’s worth of food. (We too noticed how the Americans had a lot of processed and fast foods.)
We’re thinking about doing a Holiday version sometime soon, so if anybody’s interested, feel free to join our Flickr group.
BTW, the day I had Burger King for lunch, I felt awfully ashamed of having to post it.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/a_week_of_food/
I also wonder what the mystery beverage that the American family likes to consume is. Faux fruit juice of some sort?
Based on the swirled shape of the bottle, I’m guessing Ocean Spray ™ cran-something juice. (The pink bottle on the left looks exactly like my Ocean Spray ™ grapefruit juice.)
Still, by my count that’s six bottles of cran-whatever and two of grapefruit for four people for a week. I’m partial to my grapefruit juice and all, but as one person I go through one bottle every two weeks, or about one-fourth the juice per person as this family. I’d guess they use fruit juice as their regular beverage, but that wouldn’t explain the stockpile of pop as well.
I have to wonder: just because this is what they purchased in a week, does this mean that this is what they get every week? F’r'ex, did they buy eight bottles of fruit juice this week, so that they don’t need to buy fruit juice for another month? Because a lot of the proportions for foods that “keep” seem out of whack.
Ms Kate, Mother of All Apple Pies -
A friend of mine says that it is not that people are “lactose intolerant” it’s that by in large American “tolerate” lactose longer than any other human population or any other animal for that matter.
The secret to eating a variety of fresh produce is being able to buy some every day.
That makes a huge difference. In my old apartment, I was one of the “walk to the grocery store every day” types of people. It’s a bit further now, and my schedule a bit less conducive, so I make far fewer trips, and I’m not eating as well as I was.
Mnemosyne you forgot one
(d) have people who will actually eat them
lentils are a non-starter for everyone in this family
beans, once it was one of those mainstays when we couldn’t afford much. When we could I was requested not to make them so much. I didn’t know they caused my husband so much physical discomfort.
Ditto what commenters said on the problems of time and knowledge re: cooking.
I’m solidly middle-class — despite at the moment being a “broke” student, I have enough money to eat well (thank you, scholarships!) — and most of my classmates are also middle and in a couple notable cases, upper class. Many of them are very health-concious, this being ‘the land of the fruits and nuts’, as they say. Even so, most of my classmates eat prepackaged and prepared foods — they just shell out lots and lots of $$$ for the whole grain-organic variety.
Why? Well, most of them can’t cook, and admit it freely. (Mind you, this is a master’s program, so we’re talking about people who’ve been living on their own for a few years now, not folks straight from Mom&Dad’s). Those who can don’t have the time. I love to cook, and have been doing so since I was old enough to climb on a chair and reach the counters, and if you look in my closets you’ll find a lot of rice and noodles and veggies, but you’ll also find boxes of mac&cheese and cup of soup and such, because I just don’t have time to cook some days — and compared to the average working American, I have a lot of free time — I basically have a 20-hour ‘work-week’. If I, with money and time, can’t manage it, how are families with two working parents supposed to track down the good food and prepare it? Much simpler to nuke a TV dinner and call it done.
(One thing that’s easier for families — quantities. It’s cheaper to buy in bulk… which requires storage space a tiny studio apt. doesn’t have.)
Pixelfish -
I had BurgerKing too, today .. a veggie burger
- but I did have onion rings (okay so a little bad) and then I drove over to the Dunkin Donuts for an ice tea.
My excuse . . . lots of appointments
The only way we’re able to eat even moderately healthy is that 1) we have middle-class resources 2) live within walking distance of a health food store, a produce market and a fish market 3) Rachael Ray’s 30 minute cookbook.
When I was broke, I ate a lot of pasta and packed on the weight. I’m still trying to lose it and that was more than 10 years ago.
One of the only tolerable things about the shitty little town Mrs. F and I are stuck in for the nonce is the farmers’ market five blocks away. Makes it way easier to eat well than it was in the big city.
Eating a healthy, balanced diet is not just expensive in terms of money, but also time. When everyone in the family is gone ten hours a day–some at work, some at school and extracurriculars and daycare–nobody has time to plan healthy menus, shop for fresh ingredients, and cook balanced meals. It’s much quicker to pick up a bunch of processed crap from the store and stick it in the microwave.
another (better?) pyramid:
http://thegarance.com/archives/1010
but the conclusion’s the same… the farm subsidies ARE out of whack
This all seems to be simple enough to understand, and I’m surprised that it didn’t get more play in the comments: Americans eat more grains and meat because they’re subsidized.
The reason they’re subsidized is pretty easy to understand, too. It’s partially because the Senate has a disproportionate number of Senators from agricultural states. Those Senators will fight tooth-and-nail for these subsidies because their jobs depend on them. And it’s also because THE key presidential primary state is Iowa, which grows a lot of–that’s right–corn. Most of that corn feeds America’s meat animals, and what’s left feeds America. It’s subsidized all down the line. We’re paying Americans to eat badly.
Take away the corn subsidies and move it to fruits and vegetables, and you’d be better off. Good luck with that.
Nice link, Hunter, backs up the corn problem really well.
Heather: I’m happy that going vegan has made you happier and healthier. Please don’t assume that it does the same for *everyone*. I tried that vegan diet for 90 days - supposedly that’s enough time for your body to adjust. Never. Again. By day 90, I was constantly grazing because I was always *hungry*. I was never satisfied; it was like living in a bad Chinese food joke - an hour later and I was hungry again. As far as I am concerned, people should eat the way that makes them feel best - whether that’s strict vegan or strictly carnivorous.
Marcyfight: I’m sure you love soy “milk”, but technically, it’s not “milk” since it does not come from any lactating female of any species. It is a soy-based milk-substitute, and a more accurate name would be “soy drink.” But common usage has made “milk” the preferred term, so why not? I personally find soy “milk” (and tofu) utterly disgusting. I would rather do without dairy products altogether than substitute soy (or rice) “milk”. I’m glad those products exist for people who cannot eat dairy products, but they’re not for me.
Ms. Kate: What food pyramid says that kids need a quart of milk a day? Last I checked, the equivalent of 3 8 oz. glasses a day was plenty (including other dairy products such as yogurt, etc.). That’s only 3 cups, and a quart is 4 cups, right?
Also, regarding “Most of the population of the world can’t tolerate unmodified dairy anyway - how is it they are alive?”, have you considered that the lactose-intolerant populations come from where cows were *not* raised for food? My own ethnic background is from Northern Europe (Scots-Irish), and I am not and have never been lactose-intolerant to cow’s milk. The Mediterranean peoples are fine with goat and/or sheep’s milk, many Arabic peoples drink camel’s milk, and the Mongols did just fine with mare’s milk (although the thought of drinking fermented milk - kumiss - gives me the heeby-jeebies). I think you’ll find the Asian people who are lactose-intolerant (the vast majority of your lactose-intolerant population are Asian) are the same ones whose main sources of animal protein were (and are) fish, poultry, and pigs, none of which are conducive to dairy production (only pigs actually produce milk, and pigs are not known for their sweet tempers so milking them would not have been worth the risk).
As I stated above, people should eat the way that makes them feel best. Obviously, milk products make your kids feel like crap - therefore, they shouldn’t eat them. But please don’t deny the delights of the dairy world to people like me, who have no problem with them. Okay?
Speaking of time, can I just say how annoying it is to hear people go on about how you “just have to find TIME to excersize!” As though the single parents working 2 jobs are just lazy. As though they have any kind of flexibility in scheduling their work hours. It’s just so classist to talk about scheduling in time to work out, IMO. It says to me “I have one single desk job with flexible hours and not much to do once I get home.” Which obviously isn’t the case for everyone.
Sniper: you are so wrong, persimmons are delicious. The trees grow beautifully even in our cold climate (northern regions), they have been the mainstay of my family’s winter-time diet, and my parents in particular are big fans of them
Mnemosyne: that’s ridicolous. You can cook canned beans straight from the can, and you can get dried beans, lentils, etc. that will last you months without a refrigerator - and can, again, be cooked from a goddamn tin can. I have eaten tons of the stuff
“When everyone in the family is gone ten hours a day–some at work, some at school and extracurriculars and daycare–nobody has time to plan healthy menus..”
yet
“According to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day”
Television viewrship climbs as income level falls. There is clearly plenty of time for meal planning and preparation. In fact, most of it could take place while this tv viewing was occurring. Some of this has to be laid at the feet of the individual. Availability of healthy food in lower income neighborhoods and expense of healthier food is fair. No time is untrue.
Mnemosyne: that’s ridicolous. You can cook canned beans straight from the can, and you can get dried beans, lentils, etc. that will last you months without a refrigerator - and can, again, be cooked from a goddamn tin can. I have eaten tons of the stuff.
So, just checking, you ate tons of beans when you didn’t have a pot, cooktop/microwave, or refrigerator available?
Or are you assuming that because you found it easy to make beans when you had all three of the above that it must still be easy to make them even if you don’t have them? After all, if you’re going to soak and then cook dried beans, you need to either (a) have a pot to do the soaking and cooking or (b) wash and save a tin can to soak and cook them in, hoping that it hasn’t been weakened by being re-used several times and doesn’t burst while it’s set over the hotplate.
Oh, and you of course were feeding yourself and a child or children on beans, correct? You certainly weren’t a single person cooking for yourself, because that would be a lot easier than trying to feed a family on dried beans and wouldn’t be a very good comparison to someone feeding his or her family.
Those damn welfare queens.
Since I think it may be needed in this thread, once again here’s John Scalzi’s litany of what it’s like to be poor. Not college-student poor, but actually poor.
Note: Dr T is now offering a custom time management consultancy.
Please submit your schedules to Dr T and your life will be remodeled to accommodate all those time conflicts we only imagine exist…
Whose doing the watching and when. . . a latch key child who cannot play out side because 1)there is no adult home, they are working 2)it’s not a safe neighborhood so that’s not an option
sure they are watching tv
do you honestly think a parent, working two jobs, coming home to feed kids, make sure clothes are ready for tomorrow, check homework, deal with kids, whatever came in the mail, yada, yada, yada, has the mental ability to deal with “time to make” much less figure out a meal???
Or do you suppose they come home and after getting everything else done, colapses infront of the tv because it’s all they can mentally do?
Eliminate farm subsidizes–the vast majority of which go to big agribusuiness, not the small “family farm–and eliminate tariffs on foreign produce and you go a long way towards helping people eat a more balanced diet. And pay less for it, too.
And don’t think subsidizing even more is the answer. Sure, it sounds like a good idea to subsidize healthy foods–but interference in that market can lead to over-production leading to all sorts of nasty side effects. Why do we use corn syrup instead of sugar? Because corn subsidizes cause farms to produce way, way more corn than we could ever consume without it being processed into some kind of chemical goup.
“Why do we use corn syrup instead of sugar?”
Very little agricultural land in the US is good for growing sugar cane, but will produce corn well. Sugar beets are not necessarily a good alternative. The sugar/corn syrup thing comes down to economics - the beverage producers would have to import sugar (at higher prices) if they didn’t use corn syrup.
Sooner or later, it always comes down to money…
Very little agricultural land in the US is good for growing sugar cane, but will produce corn well. Sugar beets are not necessarily a good alternative. The sugar/corn syrup thing comes down to economics - the beverage producers would have to import sugar (at higher prices) if they didn’t use corn syrup.
Sugar would be as cheap, of not cheaper than foreign sugar if we didn’t tax foreign sugar imports. Using corn syrup isn’t a function of the market so much as it is the market being distorted by government subsidies.
Its the same thing with ethanol. It make much more sense to use Brazilian sugar instead of corn. But, you see, the first Presidential caucus isn’t held in Ceara, Brazil. Its held in Iowa.
Whoa there. No. There is no such thing. It’s “soy juice”. Soybeans don’t have teats.
It’s “soy milk” - those bloody estrogens in the environment again…
Mike, you left out the part about heavy subsidies to corn growers making the prices drop and favor the use of corn as a sweetner. It’s been a sweet deal for ADM, as their machinations and corporate welfare conspire to permit them to now buy that corn at well below the production cost.
I love how people seem to think that by using the words “soy milk” I am laboring under the assumption that somehow it comes from a lactating animal.
I am aware that soy milk is not real milk, thats sort of the point.
And honestly, since why is mentioning that you consume diary or meat substitutes tantamount to telling everybody that they must too? I am not trying to take away anyone’s precious dairy (I love yogurt, myself), but more commenting on the fact that dairy products are unnecessarily pushed on us all the time when there are plenty of other (non-soy as well) foods that will meet your needs.
It’s been a sweet deal for ADM, as their machinations and corporate welfare conspire to permit them to now buy that corn at well below the production cost.
ADM–Welfare Queen to the World.
We’ve had social welfare reform in this country. Now I think its high time for corporate welfare reform.
“We’ve had social welfare reform in this country. Now I think its high time for corporate welfare reform.”
Right there with you…
You can cook canned beans straight from the can, and you can get dried beans, lentils, etc. that will last you months without a refrigerator - and can, again, be cooked from a goddamn tin can. I have eaten tons of the stuff
You are welcome to come over and cook them for the four of us while my husband and I are at work.
Oh. I forgot: we don’t have a stove. Sorry.
Maybe you will be able to get the side burner on the grill to work in the cold and snowrain? For long enough not to use all the gas?
(and yes, we did try doing beans in the crockpot - handfuls in stew work, entire pots of them do not)
@AtomicFruitbat:
Spot on with the corn syrup. Have you ever tried to find a pack of Skittles or Starburst in Europe? *MAYBE* in on of the larger international airports on the continent, otherwise forget it. The European (esp. German, Swiss and Italian) junk food is chocolate. It’s everywhere. I’m in Italy right now and haven’t seen anything that wasn’t chocolate in a vending machine or small shop in 3 weeks. You have to go to the large supermarkets to find the fruit-flavored “gelees” and “morbidas”. Even then, it’s all got sugar rather than corn syrup in it. Coke and Pepsi all have sugar.
I’ve been making this particular trip once a year for about 5 years now(I’m teaching) and can’t remember when I saw anything that had HFCS in it. It probably exists somewhere, but I haven’t found it, and that’s with being here 3-4 weeks at a time.
You know what else they have over here that we don’t in America? —Portion control. There is such a thing as a meal where you don’t roll yourself away from the table. Even in Northern Italy.
Americans on the other hand, cannot be convinced they’ve eaten until they’re absolutely stuffed and/or pass out in a food coma.
The two biggest things we can do in the US for our nutritional health is get back to some sense of portion control and cut out the HFCS.
So, just checking, you ate tons of beans when you didn’t have a pot, cooktop/microwave, or refrigerator available?
You know, you can’t exactly cook or store meat without those things available, either, so you’re hardly making the point I suspect you think you’re making. But really, all but the most poor will have some kind of cooking facilities, even just a hot plate — including people on some kind of food assistance, so that’s kind of a non-issue.
What *is* an issue is that various agriculture and food-industry lobbies have such a stranglehold on food policy in this country. Because corn is grown in Iowa and both parties start their Presidential campaigns there, corn is heavily subsidized. But you’ve got to have a market for all that corn, so it’s fed to cattle, for example. But cattle can’t digest corn well, so they get sick and are injected with antibiotics as a matter of course. Then there’s HFCS, which is in absolutely everything and apparently does weird things to our bodies, too.
The dairy industry is heavily subsidized as well (lots of cows in Iowa, too). But the problem is getting people to buy it all. Enter the Got Milk? campaign, and the push to promote dairy as the single-best source for calcium and a necessary part of one’s diet. And if there’s surplus cheese and milk, no worries! WIC requires you to buy vast quantities milk, cheese, sugary cereal and juice drinks (boon for the sugar/cereal and beverage lobbies), and only recently started allowing the use of WIC checks for fresh produce. And if there’s still cheese leftover, it goes into the federal school lunch program, along with surplus meat.
And even though kids are being fed high-fat, high-calorie food in school because the school nutrition standards are written by the agriculture lobbyists rather than actual, you know, nutritionists, and even though they no longer have recess or gym classes in a lot of schools because they need to test-prep, the government is going to start screeching about the obesity epidemic and blame the individual kids and their families for eating crappy.
Ms. Kate: not having a refrigerator or stove makes you fairly unusual. Are you living off the grid?
“Food coma.” That’s good. Where I was raised, Dillo, we called it “itis.”
Anyway, this comment is mainly valuable to anyone living in the Bay Area who has access to the Museum of the African Diaspora. There they have the full exhibit that accompanies the pictures in this post.
I was in SF last week and saw this exhibit; the only thing of value I can add to this discussion is that the exhibit details the cost (including U.S. dollar values) for each family’s weekly diet. I found the wildly disparate costs for similar food items to be noteworthy. Also, it bears mentioning that the Revis family (the ones at the top with the pizzas) made a conscious effort to combat the deleterious effects of their unhealthy lifestyle. They first started a family exercise program, but found that time spent at the gym (added to work and school hours) left little time for procurement and preparation of healthy eating (they wound up getting fatty, starchy takeout, which counteracted the fitness program). So they started working out at home and preparing healthier meals. Still, access to fresh produce was a challenge.
I reckon the message I took away from the exhibit is that the planet offers us all healthy dietary options. Our food production and distribution schemes are the problem. If only the unfettered market offered magical solutions to this (snork)…
The whole corn-syrupization of the American Diet is well covered in The Omnivore’s Dilemma
He also does a good job looking at the real costs of the Whole Foods type of organic food.
This is really interesting.
I recently tried doing the nutrisystem diet and I discovered I preferred REAL food!
Some healthily helpful things came from that though.
I don’t (or crave) as much sweets and I genuinely desire fruits, nuts, and vegetables. I realize how junk food and soda make me feel wiped out, so I am now very reluctant to eat them…but when you work from 7:30am-3:30pm on the weekends with only 30 minutes for lunch, combined with the fact they won’t let me work more than 16hrs a week, some times (especially for breakfast) I have to.
If only the unfettered market offered magical solutions to this (snork)…
Theres nothing “unfettered” about our current agricultural and food distribution systems. They heavy hand of the Feds–whether through subsidization of agribusiness or protectionist trade policies–is very much present in both.
Exactly.
I am broke not poor. HUGE difference.
Pretty fucking disturbing comparison.
My daughter goes to the largest university in Iowa and has much better access to organic/imported foods than we do here in Capitol City. Pricey, but she swears by it.
Actually, now that I’ve clicked on the link theres a second American family that has some pretty healthy choices.
zuzu said “The dairy industry is heavily subsidized as well (lots of cows in Iowa, too).”
Not to get in the way of your Iowa-bashing, but there’s very little dairy farming in Iowa. It’s corn, soybeans, and hogs. Most of the cattle being raised there are being raised for beef, not milk. California is the #1 dairy state, with Wisconsin coming in at #2 (much to their chagrin).
Iowa may have a disproportionate amount of clout due to the caucuses, but I hardly think it is the main controlling factor in our current system of farm subsidies. Money trumps all, and subsidies benefit large agribusiness, not Iowan family farmers.
(Yes, I am originally from Iowa, so my response may be heated for that reason.)
Somebody said something above about Coke being a substitute for clean water in Mexico. I’m afraid it’s more insidious than that. Coke is such a large producer in Mexico that they are actually decreasing the amount of clean water available. One liter of Coke uses something like two liters of clean water. They are also tied to the increasing privatization of land and water resources in Mexico, further decreasing the ability of poor people to support themselves.
I’m sure there are better sources out there, but a quick google search came up with this article, (http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2840/ )which contains:
Ms. Kate: not having a refrigerator or stove makes you fairly unusual. Are you living off the grid?
I do have a refrigerator. It is taking up a rather large space in the corner of my dining room right now. We sold the stove 2 weeks ago. I finished tearing out the walls this weekend in the once and future kitchen.
Meanwhile, we are experimenting with various ways of not eating out or eating pre-prepared food as the New England winter closes in, which means we are eating a lot of rice from the electric rice cooker.
In about a month I will have a large double oven range and nearly double the usable counter space, conveniently located. I am very fortunate, indeed.
Who the fuck needs a quart a day from age 5???? GMAFB!
Ms. Kate, I had to laugh.
I needed/craved a gallon of skim milk a day from probably about the age of 5. Seven years ago, at the age of 41 and getting progressively sicker and sicker with strange, weird symptoms, I was diagnosed with hyperparathyroidism - very very rare. I’d had a bit of a high calcium count on all my blood work during my adult life, but everyone just wrote it off to “she drinks so damn much milk.” Turns out, if you’re functioning correctly, doesn’t matter how much you drink - your count is never supposed to be high.
In other words, a huge (non-malignant) tumor on my parathyroid glands literally sucked the calcium right out of my system. My doctor figured I’d probably had it for most of my life - once removed in emergency surgery, I’ve not had that craving for milk. Still love it, just don’t physically crave it. I do, however, fully expect to get run into by a bumblebee and have it break my leg at some point.
My 46 year-old sister, on the other hand, probably has never swallowed an entire glass of milk in her life, can’t stand the stuff and has hardly been sick a day in her adult life.
So, who knows. I’m at the age of being worried about osteoperosis, but guess I can be like Sally Field and remember to take “just one pill a month.” I may have enough menopausal brain cells left for that! Maybe.
Three hundred and forty bucks a week for four people? Does everyone else pay that much for food?! I’m hardly starving, and yet two people get by on roughly fifty bucks a week here. Do I have access to some kind of magical grocery wormhole which your typical American doesn’t?
I apologize for the insensitivity of this question, but my curiosity has gotten the better of me. Sometimes I see these single electric stove burners at the ‘Mart or its local equivalent. (Apparently they run around fifteen to twenty bucks, but I’ve seen one as low as eight.) Do those not work well enough to cook with?I’d like to emphasize that I’m not trying to blame you for being in a tight spot or implying that if you clipped a few more coupons, you’d be happily middle class. Having recently had my work status updated from “employed” to “working odd jobs”, I’m trying to cut every expense that I can to stretch things a bit further.
ADM- Arch Demonic Monopolists.
I will never say that I make all the best choices and I do know better but time, availability and finances are all factors to be considered. Anyone who thinks making a healthy meal is easy should try tracking one down in some of the poorer neighborhoods where the nearest store with less processed choices can be an hour away by public transport. If you haven’t a car or share one, it may not be possible to make that trip. So now you have to work with what your neighborhood has to offer. If that is highly processed or fast food, at least you eat. You have just sunk more of your budget into a meal than if you could have prepared it youself but you ate and tomorrow is another day.
I am lucky that vegetables are actually a priority for our municipal government. We have a local farmer’s market, during the warmer months many of the metro stations have fruit and vegatable stands beside them. Most malls are anchored by a food chain and many have specialty food markets nearby. That was one thing that bothered me on a recent trip to the States, none of the malls had a real food store attached to them. You could find a Walmarts with packaged stuff, a Sam’s Club that required a membership but no simple grocery store. You actually had to go out of your way to find real food. People should petition their city councils, that is truly outrageous and the local politicians should have their feet put to the fire for allowing it to happen.
Maybe I’m misreading the degree of dismay about not being able to buy fresh produce daily. I love it fresh, but most of it doesn’t go bad after only one day, and face it, if you buy from a grocery store, it was probably harvested last week and then sitting in the warehouse before arriving and waiting on the shelves for a day or more.
And if you grew it yourself, you wouldn’t necessarily harvest every day, either, or sell it on harvest day.
Apples and pears last easily for a week in the refrigerator, and most root vegetables last two. Bananas that are ripe can go in the fridge, too; they get dark skins, but don’t ripen any further.
Leafies and stuff like tomatoes are more vulnerable. You want to make sure you get the freshest stuff when you buy it. Still, you don’t have to use it the same day.
This all presupposes the refrigerator, which not everyone has. Without one you’re going to have trouble with long-term storage of anything other than potatoes and onions and apples. And there is always the question of availability, especially in a city with no grocery store nearby, or only the cruddy grocery stores.
If you’re lucky enough to have a farmer’s market, they’re great, but if not, you may have friends, family, co-workers or neighbors who grow extra.
Want to see something really scary? Rickets is making a comeback, because kids aren’t getting enough calcium, sunshine and outdoor play.
You know, you can’t exactly cook or store meat without those things available, either, so you’re hardly making the point I suspect you think you’re making.
I think you missed my point — not having important prep stuff like pots and stoves and fridges is why people eat fast food. No need to store, no need to cook, enough calories to keep you going even though it’s not actually nutritious.
I had some healthy fast food for lunch (yes, it exists). Cost me about $9. For that $9, I could have fed four people at McDonald’s. Which was, again, my point.
If you’re doing all (or even most) of your cooking at home, it probably is just as easy to make a big pot of beans. But if you’re not, saying “just make beans!” is about as practical as saying “just buy grass-fed beef!”
Maybe I’m misreading the degree of dismay about not being able to buy fresh produce daily. I love it fresh, but most of it doesn’t go bad after only one day, and face it, if you buy from a grocery store, it was probably harvested last week and then sitting in the warehouse before arriving and waiting on the shelves for a day or more.
It was very hard for my best friend to get used to eating fresh produce when she was in college, because her family was fairly poor. Each kid got one (1) piece of fresh fruit a week, because when you’re feeding 8 people (6 kids and 2 adults), that’s about all you can afford to get at the grocery store. Especially when you’re shopping at a crappy inner-city grocery store where you’re lucky not to get mugged for your groceries on the way home (yes, that happened to her and her sisters at least twice).
And these were people who had a house and both parents had jobs, so not even close to the poorest of the poor here. Just too poor to follow the rest of the white-flighters to the suburbs.
Spot on with the corn syrup. Have you ever tried to find a pack of Skittles or Starburst in Europe?
You’ll get them in any corner shop in the UK and Ireland. I’m pretty sure they’re not made with corn syrup here.
Not that this detracts from your point; the diet in the UK and Ireland is pretty dire, and I think UK obesity rates are the highest in Europe.
And I can’t talk at all because I’m a total sugar addict, but I am nonetheless shocked by how much soda everyone in the world drinks. I might have one can a month; and even that is only because the vending machine at the DART station doesn’t sell bottled water. I am really grateful to my mum for discouraging us from having that stuff, and for never buying it. I’ve seen how even a small amount, if you take it on a regular basis, can play havoc with your metabolism and blood sugar regulation.
“Why do we use corn syrup instead of sugar?”
The government.
In order to protect out uncompetitive domestic sugar industry from foreign competition, Congress enacted large tariffs on imported sugar. The result is that you pay almost twice as much for sugar as the rest of the world. Anyone who needs sweeteners in very large quantities will quickly determine that cane sugar is just not an economically viable, and that corn syrup is much more attractive.
Want the cane sugar back in your Coke? An end to agricultural subsidies and (gasp!) free trade is the answer.
I think you missed my point — not having important prep stuff like pots and stoves and fridges is why people eat fast food. No need to store, no need to cook, enough calories to keep you going even though it’s not actually nutritious.
I had some healthy fast food for lunch (yes, it exists). Cost me about $9. For that $9, I could have fed four people at McDonald’s. Which was, again, my point.
If you’re doing all (or even most) of your cooking at home, it probably is just as easy to make a big pot of beans. But if you’re not, saying “just make beans!” is about as practical as saying “just buy grass-fed beef!”
Which would be a fair point had you mentioned McDonald’s at all in your responses instead of simply shooting down the idea that beans are cheaper than meat because some people don’t have stoves or refrigerators. But you were responding specifically to someone who’d said that it was cheap, and possible, to swap out plant proteins for animal proteins in one’s cooking.
Absolutely, some people don’t have stoves or refrigerators and wind up having to eat crap from places like McDonald’s. But McDonald’s didn’t grow to a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry just because poor people who can’t afford anything else eat there. Plenty of people of all income levels eat there, and they do so frequently.
Don’t underestimate the power of a huge market player like McDonald’s to affect the prices of commodities like potatoes or ground beef. These cost savings come at the expense not only of the consumer, who gets a lower-grade product, but also of the farmer, the agricultural worker and the slaughterhouse worker (the cows don’t do all that hot, either). Then you have the incredibly powerful agricultural and food-industry lobby, which distorts what is seen as necessary to eat in order to get their products subsidized.
I read not too long ago that African-Americans went from having on average the healthiest diet of any group (lots of greens, vegetables, beans, very little meat) to having the least healthy (high in fat, salt, sugar, simple carbohydrates, heavy on meat and low in vegetables). A lot of that had to do with what was cheapest at any given time, and before agricultural subsidies and food-assistance programs driven by Big Ag’s needs, vegetables and beans were cheap and readily available. Now, the price of vegetables has gone up relative to subsidized meat and cheeses, white flour and sugar are cheap, and packaged foods are convenient. Not to mention, Big Ag spends a lot of effort making sure Americans keep thinking that Real Men Eat Meat and that dairy is vital to bone growth and health.
The picture of the British family was pretty depressing (although the inclusion of the cat food made me smile).
On a related note, I was reading an article the other day that said that here in the UK on average we throw out about 1/3 of all of the shopping we buy. To me this was shocking (generally I only throw food away if it’s on the verge of climbing out of the fridge and joining me at the dinner table), but thinking about it further, it might be another symptom of the gradual erosion of time that everyone seems to be experiencing. As someone who lives on their own, within a five-minute walk of both work and supermarkets, it’s pretty easy for me to buy whatever food I need on the day I cook it, which means that the food is generally fresher and virtually nothing gets thrown away. For families where the adults need (or want) to work full-time in addition to the unpaid work of raising and caring for dependents, though, the food shop gets done weekly, which almost inevitably leads to more fresh food being thrown away and more processed stuff that keeps better being bought in the first place.
I think I prefer that thought to the idea that we’ve all become wasteful layabouts, anyway.
I haven’t had a soda in bloody years.
Maybe I’m misreading the degree of dismay about not being able to buy fresh produce daily.
Two reasons: convenience and economy. First, being able to buy fresh produce daily means being able to buy it whenever you want. if you have to make a special trip to the store with the produce, you are less likely to buy any. Second, produce does deteriorate with age. By the time the distribution chain gets it to you, its shelf life is fairly used up. If you can buy just what you’re going to eat over the next day or two, you don’t have to worry about it spoiling. Throwing produce out is literally throwing money away, which can be prevented by buying only what you will use over the next day or two. Again, the temptation is to buy heavily processed foods, which have shelf lives measured in months, not days.
I might have one can [of soda] a month; and even that is only because the vending machine at the DART station doesn’t sell bottled water.
And it may never sell bottled water. There is some environmentalism-flavored movement to shame people into not buying bottled water. We are all supposed to tote tepid aluminum bottles of tap water around with us — there is no movement to put chilled water fountains on every street corner. I’d like to preserve the right to buy a cold refreshing drink that is filled with neither sugar nor industrial chemicals.
My question would be is fresh fruit really more expensive than comparable junk food? I think bananas usually cost between 20-40 cents a pound; surely that’s less expensive than a hot pocket or a bag of chips. Canned veggies cost maybe 60-70 cents. A huge thing of fresh carrots is $1.50. Potatoes are very cheap. Canned fruit isn’t the best, but it’s under a dollar. Normally chicken, ground beef, and pork chops are 3-4 bucks a pound.
I am not saying that food is free or even cheap, but it seems that fresh produce, and healthy food in general, is far cheaper than the processed crap at the store. Moreover, almost anything you buy at the grocery store (apart from steak or seafood) is cheaper than fast food, even McDonald’s.
Tonight I brought home enough stuff for about eight servings of chili. I spent $9. Again, my argument is not that food is cheap, especially if you are poor. My point is that healthy, homecooked food is much cheaper than crap junk food or fast food.
The opposition to bottled water is because for the most part, bottled water is a con-job that is both environmentally and economically expensive.
Tap water must meet certain standards to be considered safe. Bottled water is nowhere near as rigorously tested. Tap water may not be completely pure, but most bottled water isn’t either. Even if you don’t have good quality tap water, a filter is a much better solution than buying bottles.
Bottled water is a waste, but a convenient one. I’m not buying the water so much as the convenient package: the spout-top, that’s it’s chilled, and it’s better than the many alternatives. I want so much to drink from an aluminum SIGG bottle, but I couldn’t take one to work (the prison requires clear containers) and I already am toting my soda-substitute of chilled tea in plastic containers from Target.
As for fresh fruit, just get frozen stuff. It’s not the same as stuff from a farmers market, but my morning smoothie pretty much covers the day’s fruit intake (half a banana, orange juice, and loads of blueberries,) and is much better for me than my old breakfast of cereal and milk. And I still put milk in the smoothie along with some protein stuff, so it’s often enough to make me able to skip lunch or dinner.
I think bananas usually cost between 20-40 cents a pound; surely that’s less expensive than a hot pocket or a bag of chips.
I’ve rarely seen bananas less than 60 cents a pound at the big grocery stores here in Los Angeles.
Of course, I live close to several grocery stores, have a reliable car, and can pick and choose where I shop. I don’t live in the inner city where there are no big grocery stores, the local bodega charges $1 per banana, and I’m stuck because I have no car and can’t ride the bus for an hour each way to get to a real grocery store. If I were going to take a two-hour round trip to get groceries, you’d better believe I’d be spending my money on non-perishables that can sit in my kitchen or freezer for a long time.
Fresh fruit and vegetables are a luxury for many people in this country. I realize that’s a strange concept to a lot of people, but it’s true. You should have seen the produce at the supermarket that I went to near school in south central Los Angeles — it looked like it had been picked up off the ground when it fell off the tree, and it tasted about as good. Fortunately, I had a car, so I was able to drive myself and my friends 15 miles north to a “real” grocery store that had fresher food.
Mnemosyne,
The grocery store situation differs from place to place. Here’s my anecdote: My brother lives in Harlem, and there’s a large, suburban style grocery store about three blocks from his apartment.
However, I’m still arguing that at just about ANY given grocery store, a can of green beans and a can of peaches are going to be cheaper than a frozen pizza. Oatmeal, rice, and dry beans are going to be cheaper still.
Some stores are bad. Even at those stores, healthy food is less expensive than chips and sodas.
Many different diets discussed with tolerance, but it took only four comments to begin bashing the vegan.
Heather will doubtless say something lovely at the funeral of the haters.
Lactose is a carbohydrate unique to milk. All milk. It accounts for almost half the calories in milk. It’s what makes milk taste sweet.
Lactose is a combination of two simple sugars, glucose and galactose, that only occurs in milk. We have a special enzyme, lactase, to digest it. About 75% of non-whites in the world lose the enzyme to digest lactose by the age of 12. They can rarely tolerate more than a cup of milk a day without severe, osmotic diarrhea, from the undigested lactose drawing water into the lower gut. Cheese has little lactose (it is washed away in the whey) and yogurt has lactobacilli species that can turn the lactose into the digestible lactic acid.
I have only seen rickets once, about 30 years ago in a little black child (poorer production of vitamin D with darker skin) in Philadelphia. It is VERY unusual to see rickets from calcium malnutrition alone. We probably all need to take a supplement of 800 IU of vitamin D a day. In general vitamin supplements are vastly overused, a balanced diet provides all you need. However vitamin D is not a vitamin, it is a hormone. Any molecule made by one organ that travels in the blood to affect the metabolism of another organ is, by definition, a hormone. The skin makes vitamin D, it affects the bone, gut, and kidneys. By definition vitamins (from the Latin, vita=life) are biological catalysts (enzymes) that we need to take in trace amounts because our body cannot make them. Any of them. Except vitamin D, which our skin can make if we get enough sun. We don’t; we shouldn’t (skin cancer). Hence the need for supplementation.
If you are still awake after reading all that, Heather, I just want to say good for you and your diet. I’m sure you know to get all the essential amino acids, but don’t forget to get enough vitamin B12. The bacteria in the gut of herbivores make most of the B12 in the American diet. Although we only need about 2 micrograms a day, and the liver stores 3-5 years of B12, the onset of deficiency is very insidious, and can damage nerves, brain, and blood. I would consider an occasional supplement.
A vegan diet would improve the health of most adult Americans. It is a little more problematic in children, but not for educated parents.
ah yup, accept in areas where your treated drinking water is being fed to you in 100+ year old pipes, and every town around has an e-coli or other scare in the water. Bottled water looks pretty good then. It also looks really good when your water either turns black in the presence of Pepto Bismal or oil black as it comes out of the hose because of mountain top removal. (see http://orestia.blogspot.com/2007/10/what-do-we-loose-when-we-remove-tops.html )
Some of my relatives come here from Germany or other countries will not drink water from the tap because of Giardia or other water born paracites. Some will but only if it is boiled first. And I would rather have cold bottled water than anything in alumninum.
I haven’t had a soda in year. I purged the whole house of it. Give me ice tea and I’m fine.
Dr. Oz on Oprah said if you live North of Atlanta, you need to be taking vitamin D supplements.
example of a convenience store “dilemma”
$1.00 for a soda
$1.25 for a bottle of water
$1.49 for a bottle of juice
If I had little money, which will I choose to quench my thirst?
aye yup, I have pernicious anemia, and you’ll notice I did not bash the vegan. I cannot absorb b-12 from my food and what was stored as long since washed away. Your body does recycle some b-12, mine does not.
I have to take/give myself monthly injections. I have never counseled anyone away from a vegetarian/vegan diet and I have been asked in grocery stores when someone finds me reading and comparing supllement jars.
Well, the American family looks to have bagged salad mix, tomatoes, grapes, and applesauce, and that’s not even being able to clearly visualize everything. It’s not like they have no veggies or fruits. But it’s highly interesting that that’s the assumption that many people make about Americans and their supposedly all-junky feedbags.
I’d also be curious to know what part of the country they live in. My mother lives in South Florida, and she can certainly afford fresh fruits and veggies, but she doesn’t buy nearly as many as she likes because a) the quality is generally lousy (they ship all the local citrus out of the area, and there are no farmer’s markers), and b) everything spoils in her (top quality) fridge in a matter of days because of the high humidity.
Also, note that the children in the American family are much older than the ones in the other families. Those boys look to be in their mid to late teens. Ever try getting boys that age to eat veggies and fresh fruit if it’s not something they naturally prefer? Ever know a teenaged boy who didn’t put away “junk food” like there was no tomorrow, assuming his family could afford it?
Bananas are the cheapest fruit, yes, but they also have the shortest shelf life of just about any fruit save strawberries.
These photos appeared in Time magazine several months ago. Didn’t notice any credit given in the original post.
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1626519,00.html
Here’s hoping this doesn’t become one of those annoying double posts:
As for the oatmeal, rice, and beans, I believe others have already covered the issue of having the time and energy to cook such things. I must take issue with your first sentence there, though: the canned peaches and beans are not nearly as filling as a frozen pizza. I may be repeating someone, but when you compare the cost of getting your daily caloric needs from canned vegetables vs from frozen crap, the cans do not generally come out ahead.
clytemnestra:
You know there is an excellent B12 nasal gel you can self-administer (not to presuppose your preference for needlesticks vs. nasal manipulation) which is apparently too expensive to mention.
The photos all come from the book “Hungry Planet”, which has great narratives, more details, and many more families. It’s well worth taking a look at. I’m shocked that no one cares to give them credit.
Frozen vegetables go from field to bag in under 8 hours and the nutrient loss slows to a trickle at that point. Even with freezer burn they are still more nutritious than most of the “fresh” stuff at the local market. The problem is that to make it cost effective you need to own a freezer, buy bulk and have access to a car at least once a month. If you are on a limited income, have physical problems preventing travel or have limited space then all three of those become problematic.
The advantage of cans is that you don’t need electricity to store them. Many canned foods can be eaten cold from the can as they are already precooked. They can also be bought on sale and stored for a considerable length of time.
It all depends on why you aren’t eating fresh, nutritious foods. However, shopping to the newest trends or advertising campaigns is never a good idea.
Loaf of bread, tomato sauce and cheese (cheese is covered by WIC) put under the broiler is still cheaper and/or quicker than any of your suggestions (and you’ve got the leftover bread for breakfast). Ramen noodles (ten packs for a dollar), generic mac’n cheese from a box (4 for a dollar, plus the cost of milk). All of these are cheaper than your can of green beans (which would need something else to go with it) and make a satisfying meal that kids will eat.
A vegan diet would improve the health of most adult Americans. It is a little more problematic in children, but not for educated parents.
it really depends upon your definition of a vegan diet. lots of veggies, a healthy amount of starches, nuts and beans and like that? yes, absolutely. the soy-based TVP / fake dairy crap that many vegans and vegetarians live on? not so much. swapping out all the real animal products for fake ones is the easiest way for people to go veg, and most everyone i’ve known who has been or is vegan or vegetarian (including me) starts out that way. quite a few continue eating that way for ages. it makes you feel like crap. it’s no less processed than any other highly processed food, even if there’s a big ol’ VEGAN! label slapped on it.
balance is key, not Purity of Diet. small amounts of meat might be a better choice for many people than huge amounts (or even small amounts) of soy. particularly soy-crap, rather than tofu/seitan.
I’m sorry, Em, your contribution to the conversation was??? I was merely making a suggestion. People do what they have to do. My big problem is that fresh produce, grains, beans should NOT be more expensive than a meal at McBurgerKFCTacoHell which offer little to no nutritional value. And our so called “social programs” to assist people in need offer milk and cheese, what is wrong with us? And we have people working their asses off for way more than 40 hours a week for minimum wage (most times way less) that don’t have time to spend with their families much less cook. And our school lunch program? Going vegan isn’t going to solve all these problems, but by doing so, I can say that I will not support the meat and dairy industries or corporations like McBurgerKFCTacoHell and their bullshit propaganda.
BTW, regarding soy beverage (milk? juice? whatever.), I’ve found that for heavily fortified, brand-name soymilks like Silk, soymilk is, indeed, significantly more expensive than regular milk (although not really in a different price range than organic milk). However, I recently found a market in Chicago’s Chinatown, where they sell a very simple, unfortified soymilk for $1.99 for a half-gallon — as cheap as any bovine milk I’ve found in Chicago. It’s called Sun Hing Fresh Soybean Drink. It doesn’t have fancy stuff like cyanocobalamin fortification or the like, and it tastes a bit more… soy-ish than many (which you may or may not like), but I think it works fine with cereal. I don’t know where it’s obtained outside of Chicago. No doubt it’s obtainable in other cities (although perhaps not all other cities), but I don’t know specifically where. I hope this is useful to some penny-pinching Chicagoan soy beverage drinker, or something.
Heather, you don’t haev any room to talk about bullshit propaganda. You’ve come into this thread pushing this pseudo-moralistic vegan bullcrap for no other reason than to simply toot your own fucking horn. Then you have the utter temerity to start pounding your chest and getting all pissy about other people’s posts? FUCK YOU. You can take your miserable trolling ass somewhere where your self-important kind are needed, because this place is NOT it.
yeah, epistemology, i can’t speak for anyone else who reacted (or wanted to) to heather’s “one thing we can all do is go vegan” comment… BUT i gotta say that the comment couldn’t have been much else than self-serving agenda-pushing etc. think about it. this blog post (a) preambled a bit on how we need to look beyond wasting our time on guilt trips and “individual solutions”/ personal virtue, and (b) was specifically about the various factors limiting many people’s access to fruits and vegetables.
so if heather read the post and then wrote what she did, she must be promoting veganism regardless of access to produce, i.e. saltines-and-jelly veganism, which doesn’t display very much nutritional savvy or concern for the people under discussion, i.e. agenda-pushing. and if she didn’t read the post… well, you get the idea. so yeah, it’s fucking irritating.
also, her writing sounded a little manic to me (i feel terrific and i’ve lost 17 pounds and i stayed up all night and i can’t feel my extremities), but who am i to talk about annoying comment style?
(sorry, heather, i’m sure you’re an ok person when you aren’t doing that sort of thing.)
epistemology -
No I didn’t know, and I hate the monthly stick. I’ll check it out.
Thank you!
OK OK, Heather’s an arrogant little spoiled, middle class brat with more money than sense, pushing her precious little diet-of-the-year on people who don’t have the resources or education to pursue a similar lifestyle. Can we ban her Amanda?
(Sorry, Heather, I tried, but I have no backbone and cave immediately to any concerted social pressure. I’m sending you a box of steaks. Your mother and I would like to see you put some weight on. And about that loser you are dating…)
What’s wrong with textured vegetable protein? I’ve been buying it in bulk, dried at the supermarket. Over $4 a pound, but when you weigh it you find out that’s probably better volume than 10 pounds of ground beef, because dried TVP swells and is lightweight. I’m currently poor, so saving money is important, and I’m chronically ill, so ease of cooking is important.
But I seriously want to know if there is something wrong with it, or was the TVP bashing in reference to pre-made, salty meat substitutes.
Another big factor is that we are exporting the high-calorie/low-nutrition problem to developing countries, leading to rising obesity rates in places where you would not expect.
I think bananas usually cost between 20-40 cents a pound
Can you tell me where this is? Even the green grocer around here charges $0.50, and that’s almost half what the grocery stores do ($0.80).
From your other comments, something tells me Seroj hasn’t done much grocerty shopping lately or for very many people. Prices have skyrocketed for anything that 1) involves an exchange rate (the dollar is WEAK) and 2)involves transport (diesel is over $3 a gallon in these parts, and very expensive worldwide).
Eating locally in the Boston area isn’t a very good option most of the year. Yes, we have been doing our part with local produce, but that’s a July-October proposition. The farmers markets shut the last week of October, and their selection is pretty thin from 2nd week on.
Heather, the post was about how the system is stacked so people can’t afford/don’t know how or have time to cook/don’t eat enough vegetables, and how they rely on overprocessed crap (but not fresh meat, b/c meat is expensive), and thus–are overfed but under-nourished. Reading comprehension please. Did the post or any of the comments suggest that people should be eating fewer vegetables to be healthier? Your comment reminded me the people watching the news post-Katrina, looking at the stranded on the rooftops and saying, ‘Why didn’t they just leave?”
It’s.not.that.simple.
togolosh
November 26, 2007 at 1:13 pm
Color me weird but the thing that struck me most was the sheer amount of packaging in the USAmerican picture. The total volume of the packaging alone is comparable to the volume of the Chadian food.
Packaging is made to be seen, so your observation makes sense. I was overwhelmed by the packaging as well.
Packaging is far, far more important here than there. Here, there are many things to eat, so the money comes in when you encourage people to eat your food, no matter what.
Advertising, not nutritional science or even cooking, is the hallmark discipline of american food production.
Ms Kate, Mother of All Apple Pies
November 26, 2007 at 1:40 pm
The dairy pushing onto kids is way out of control. My kids are both lactose intolerant and they have never eaten the kind of dairy loading that they are “supposed” to.
(Good post snipped.)
Keep in mind that individual needs vary. Some humans will need certain nutrients more than others. There very well may be people oriented towards milk — are there not cultures that live primarially off of herd animals? Ten thousand years of that could lead to a bit of natural selection towards the lactose dependant. Similarly, there have been examples of Native Americans hailing from desert climes that become obese and diabetic when they eat typical U.S. food, but return to healthy physical states when they switch to a traditional diet.
AtomicFruitbat
November 26, 2007 at 3:39 pm
Using corn syrup isn’t a function of the market so much as it is the market being distorted by government subsidies.
Its the same thing with ethanol. It make much more sense to use Brazilian sugar instead of corn. But, you see, the first Presidential caucus isn’t held in Ceara, Brazil. Its held in Iowa.
This is a really old problem. The U.S. has overproduced sugar for quite some time. Our original solution: get wasted. We made a LOT of fucking whiskey. We became known for our drinking — the English complained we were a nation of drunkards in the 1800s. The coffee break was, in its original conceptualization, not for coffee.
Now this overproduction has been retooled. High fructose corn syrup is in everything because of artificially increased supply, free market be damned. Try buying something without corn syrup in it.
And the empty-calorie high-energy plant corn is another problem . . .
By the way, soy has way too many physiological effects to be considered a safe dairy substitute (not that dairy is all that safe nowadays). Individual humans have never consumed as we’ve seen in the U.S. (a U.S. soy milk drinker can ingest far more soy than a southeast Asian eating a traditional diet). All things in moderation.
wtf, epistemology, i didn’t intend offense.
Melissa
November 26, 2007 at 5:11 pm
Somebody said something above about Coke being a substitute for clean water in Mexico. I’m afraid it’s more insidious than that.
Coke is pulling this shit in India, too — they are literally destroying villages by buying off politicians and subverting wellwater. This may lead to an out-and-out social revolution or two.
Samantha Vimes: basically, like anything else, you have to read the label on your particular brand of TVP. some of the brands out there, both dehydrated and frozen, have huge amounts of sodium, and lots of other flavouring crap as well, including that fake-MSG autolysed yeast/vegetable stuff that has crept into basically everything these days, it seems.
some of the TVP brands out there are okay. it’s just a good idea to figure out what’s in yours before you eat it. (i’m also of the mind it’s not really so great for anyone to eat lots and lots of soy-based everything all of the time, but then, i’m allergic, so there’s a bit of bias there, i’ll admit. anecdotally, the weight gain some people experience when going veg can be related to overconsumption of soy, though.)
Apologies in advance for rambling.
I actually think there are two separate and related issues in the U.S. The first is the problem of access, which is a huge issue for a lot of low-income people. There aren’t good food options in a lot of poor to working-class neighborhoods. That’s usually acknowledged in these discussions, but then people posit solutions that sound good in theory but wouldn’t work in practice. It sounds great to travel to another neighborhood once a week to go to the supermarket, but that’s because the person suggesting that has generally never tried to lug a week’s worth of groceries on the bus while attempting to wrangle small children. Keep in mind that there’s seldom a direct bus line from poor neighborhoods to middle-class ones, so you’d probably have to transfer, and that might mean standing around waiting for another bus, no matter what the weather. Bus service being what it is in most American cities, we’re talking about a very long trip, and don’t forget that the kids are going to get hungry, and you’re going to have to figure out a non-fast-food option to feed them on your weekly grocery-store excursion. You can pack lunch for everyone, but good luck finding a place to eat it…. It’s just way harder in practice than people think it’s going to be. The problem of access is closely related to a lot of other issues that have to do with the geographic isolation of poor people in America: lack of access to decent education and good jobs, for instance.
The second issue, and the one that I think is less-often acknowledged when we talk about this stuff, is the way that the mainstream middle-class American lifestyle is not conducive to healthy eating. Middle-class people spend huge amounts of time commuting. They work longer hours than people in other developed countries. They, too, don’t live near grocery stores, and although they don’t have the access problems that poor people do, driving to a super market once a week isn’t a good recipe for healthy eating. When you’re buying for a whole week, you generally make a list ahead of time, which means you’re less likely to buy whatever produce happens to look yummy that day. You’re probably less likely to buy produce in general, because you worry that it’ll go bad before you get around to eating it. I bet you end up eating a lot more fresh fruit and vegetables if you stop by the produce store in the way home from work every day and pick up whatever looks good and strikes your fancy.
I spent Thanksgiving with my brother and sister-in-law. Neither of them is lazy at all, and they’re both good cooks. Before they moved to the suburbs and had a kid, they were both kind of foodies. Now, they’re working crazy hours at stressful jobs, commuting almost an hour each way, and totally exhausted. They get home from work and immediately have to feed their toddler, which means that they mostly feed him packaged food. They used to take pleasure in cooking, but now it’s another chore they have to do before they can collapse in front of the television. They’re not lazy, ignorant, or un-health-conscious. They’re stretched to their limits. That’s partly because of the choices they’ve made, but they’re choices that American society makes it awfully easy to make. I don’t think they even realized they were making those choices at the time. When people weigh whether to move to the suburbs, where there’s space and highly-rated schools and whatnot, I don’t think that the issue of food even enters their minds.
I don’t think we’re going to fix America’s food problem until we fix fairly fundamental things about our society. We need to re-think our social geography and try to figure out ways to shorten people’s commutes, allow people to live closer to where they shop, and end the devastating geographic isolation of poor people. We also really need to rethink our work culture. My sister-in-law leaves the house at 6:30 every morning and gets home at 6:00 every evening. Her job’s big concession to work-family balance was promising her that she could leave at 5:00 every day as long as she got to the office by 7:30. My brother leaves at 8:00 AM but often doesn’t get home until late in the evening. I’m sure if they were working eight hour days and commuting a grand total of a half-hour, they’d have a much different relationship to food than they do.
Finally, I think that part of the vegan college student fallacy is not realizing how much harder this is for people who have 9 to 5 (or 7:30 to 5, or whatever) jobs, not to mention kids. That’s just something for vegan college students (or other college students, or those of us who don’t have kids or 9 to 5s) to keep in mind.
Good comment, Sally. I’ll corroborate your story with own personal situation, which is that my gf and I (grad students both) choose to spend a majority of our disposable income and a good chunk of time on buying and preparing food. We don’t go out to bars, we rarely go out to eat, and we don’t buy a lot of extraneous crap for entertainment, b/c when you’ve made the choice to buy fresh/local/organic everything, it doesn’t leave you with much play money. We work regular weeks (no kids or other mandatory time obligations) and have stipends (with no money sinks like lemon cars or health problems), and we still have to cut out other things to be able to buy the food we know is healthy and cook from scratch. I’m very lucky to be able to eat the way I do, and I know it. I was a poor child for most of my first decade (and while it was a rural poor that allowed for such measures as wild game and a vegetable garden), I know what it is to pass up the nutritious stuff b/c the ten-pack of Mac-n-cheese is on sale for 4.99 and that’s dinner for the week.
Mhorag: I’m sure you love soy “milk”, but technically, it’s not “milk” since it does not come from any lactating female of any species. […] But common usage has made “milk” the preferred term, so why not?
It’s a time-honored practise. Almond milk was a milk substitute during lent before Westerners ever heard of soy.
Ms Kate: “Most of the population of the world can’t tolerate unmodified dairy anyway - how is it they are alive?”
More sun. Lactose tolerance is a high-latitude mutation.
MikeEss: Sugar beets are not necessarily a good alternative.
It’s sugar. It’s local. (All around, and smelling to high heavens when processed.) It doesn’t have the bad aftertaste of HFCS (or I not not notice it — first time I had non-beet sugar was when I was in my 30s and had money to waste).
Of course, it’s either labor intensive or relying on a lot of herbicides…
“It’s sugar. It’s local. (All around, and smelling to high heavens when processed.) It doesn’t have the bad aftertaste of HFCS (or I not not notice it — first time I had non-beet sugar was when I was in my 30s and had money to waste).”
When I was in high school, my dad and I worked for a farmer in California’s Central Valley who grew sugar beets - I’m a little more personally aware of the issues surrounding sugar beet growing and processing than I want to be.
I have many (fond?) memories of the Spreckels Sugar plant near Manteca, CA, which released huge volumes of stink created during the process of cooking and refining sugar beets into sugar for Americans. I just found out the plant was torn down around ‘96. Been living in SoCal too long…
I’m pretty sure you’re not going to get too many people whose food security is already erratic to go vegan by telling them they can eat cold food out of a can. It’s just a feeling I have.
Sorry roula, just a joke. They did seem to be piling on Heather.
Yegods, Mike, I remember that smell of sugar beet refining too! Only it came from a sugar beet plant near Pendleton, OR.
Borscht like, sulphury stenchness, hard to say if it was good or not sort of smell.
I don’t really see how lactose tolerance could be an adaptation to lack of sun. The Vitamin D in milk is an additive.
epistemology: i have a feeling that’s because heather didn’t, you know, offer a hell of a lot to the conversation. not saying we have to be All Topic All The Time, but, well, “i’m a vegan and you can too!” was not really a helpful add-on to the discussion at hand, is all. the point of the post being that some people can’t even manage to buy and prepare healthful meals as omnivores, let alone go vegan.
lactose tolerance is an adaptation to the prevalence of milk drinking in the population. Which is why you see it in Northern and Western Europe and among the Fulani in Africa, where cow herding flourished, and not too many other places.
The fortification of milk with D came much, much later as the result of the high incidence of rickets in the US.
Wiki
Kathel, I could care less if someone choses to go vegan or not, my primary interest is insuring that people can eat regardless of circumstances. I know too many people who have had to make the choice between rent and utilities to not recognize the value of canned foods. If you can go vegan, it is a good option. Done correctly it is high nutrition, low calorie with plenty of bulk to keep you feeling fed, done badly it is as sucky as living on Big Macs. Trading one batch of overly processed foods for a certified organic overly processed food is a marginal trade at best. We need to teach Home. Ec. to every student with field trips included.
Responses to Heather:
Yikes. I just thought it a little harsh to a rather innocuous comment.
Hello,
I just wanted to let you know that we featured this post in today’s World section on The Issue. You can see the post by going to www.TheIssue.com Keep up the great work!
Matt
The Issue
Hawise, I certainly agree with you on the whole — however, statements like these:
make it seem as though the problem is with the choices being made, and not the choices being offered.
This is one of those subjects that “the personal is political” really applies to. Yes, there are certain personal choices that people can make for themselves that make them feel better, but those choices do approximately diddly-squat for the larger social issues. An omnivore who calls or calls his/her congressperson demanding changes in our agricultural policy does a lot more for these systemic problems than a vegan who thinks that veganism alone is the solution to all the world’s ills.
I could go vegan and buy nothing but organic food at my local Whole Foods, but that’s not going to do a thing to help the parents living in the inner city with virtually no access to a real grocery store.
The opposition to bottled water is because for the most part, bottled water is a con-job that is both environmentally and economically expensive.
For me, bottled water is a healthy substitute for soda pop when I’m out and about, not a pricey substitute for tap water at home. But if cities would put up more water fountains, I would not need to buy water when I’m away from home.
Caveat: not all tap water tastes good. West of the Rockies, tap water often tastes like swimming pool water. Or like you’re licking a pump handle. I reserve the right to buy good tasting drinking water when tap water is unpalatable.
Access is political, groups need to ensure that their cities zone for basic services, like grocery store, dry goods markets and banking services instead of just for more housing developments with little or no access to those services.
And shopping to the newest trends and ad campaigns is both choices being made and choices being offered. The stores tend to give shelf space to what the companies offer at the best deals and to what moves the fastest. It is not the job of your local grocer to educate you to better, cheaper choices and he is unlikely to do so when a company offers him a free fridge for pushing their newest carbonated beverage.
Public policy should have an education angle built in as healthier choices lead to more productive workers over a greater period of time. It is when short term thinking dominates public policy that real trouble begins to show its face. Hold your local politician’s feet to the fire and they will send the message up the political ladder. You know where they work, talk to them.
Access is political, groups need to ensure that their cities zone for basic services, like grocery store, dry goods markets and banking services instead of just for more housing developments with little or no access to those services.
It’s not necessarily a zoning problem — plenty of spaces in south and south central Los Angeles are zoned for banks and grocery stores. It’s getting those businesses to actually open there that tends to be the problem.
I was near USC in South Central and they didn’t even start building a real supermarket until the federal government provided grant money after the riots. Turns out that if you burn some shit down, the money magically appears.
(Note to FBI: I am not advocating burning shit down. But that’s pretty much what happened in the aftermath of 92, isn’t it?)
lactose tolerance is an adaptation to the prevalence of milk drinking in the population. Which is why you see it in Northern and Western Europe and among the Fulani in Africa, where cow herding flourished, and not too many other places.
The fortification of milk with D came much, much later as the result of the high incidence of rickets in the US.
Hmm…co-evolution. Don’t tell the fundies.
West of the Rockies, tap water often tastes like swimming pool water.
If you live on the Eastern seaboard, many older houses have lead supply pipes that cost massive amounts to dig up and replace. Since many homeowners can’t afford it and many landlords may not bother in lower income areas, well, bottled water is necessary.
I might add that my son spent kindergarten and first grade in one of the “old” schools in our city that were replaced as he entered second grade. They drank bottled water from jugs because the tap water dispensed by the internal plumbing in the school was not safe to drink. What passed for a cafeteria and food prep was not even allowed to use the water to rinse anything - they had to use bottled water.
In the new schools there are fountains everywhere, and the older kids have taught the younger ones to cherish them!
grendelkhan: Three hundred and forty bucks a week for four people? Does everyone else pay that much for food?!
That’a what I thought when I saw the German family. 375 Euro a week for a family of four? OK, so I’m single, but I’m spending about 35-40 Euros a week on food — cantina lunch and sweets included. In the US, I spent 20-25% more — I did less cooking and the prices for everything but beef and bananas were higher.
Samantha: What’s wrong with textured vegetable protein? I’ve been buying it in bulk, dried at the supermarket.
Mostly that it feels and tastes like textured vegetable protein. Which is not a problem in itself (no arguing with taste or necessity), but it’s not “just like” meat (if it’s the stuff I’m thinking of, that’s what it’s advertised as). It’s its own thing.
The most vigorous studies in the UK have shown that poor people actually have the same opportunity for a good diet as wealthier people, so I don’t buy the argument here.
The most vigorous studies in the UK have shown that poor people actually have the same opportunity for a good diet as wealthier people, so I don’t buy the argument here.
So, just checking — the UK has the same agricultural policies as the US? They have the same kind of supermarkets as the US? UK suburbs are generally built for car use only, with supermarkets 10 or more miles away from residences? How many people in the UK own cars, and how many of them take public transportation?
How much of the food in the UK is grown in one location and then trucked 3,000 miles to another location to be sold? How many national parks in the UK are being grazed by cattle owned by private companies? How many farmers in the UK are being paid to grow a single crop, or to not grow crops at all?
Now compare all of those things to the US. Oh, that’s right, you’re completely ignorant of how things are in the US, but if things are fine 5,000 miles away across the Atlantic ocean, that’s proof that things must be fine here, too.
Though I wouldn’t get too smug about how much better things are in the UK: you guys have the highest rate of obesity in Europe. You may not quite be where the US is now, but you’re on your way, and don’t say we didn’t warn you about where those policies were taking you.
I visited something I fondly term “the bachelor food store” in Edinburgh. Most every food item was either frozen or dry-packaged, and virtually everything was sold as single-serving portions (space issues in apartments, I know). And the store was full of young adult men. And the store had closed by about 6:00 pm. (I went into other markets in London and saw similar phenomena, although a tad more fresh produce.)
Comparing the “bachelor food store” with these brand-spankin’-new 24-hour “Phat” Albertson’s in Vegas and suburban parts of California - that little shop in Edinburgh would fit in its entirety in those super-giant Albertson’s produce sections - with room left over.
So I’d have to back up your implication that the supermarkets are not the same UK to US.
Just like I wrote earlier, too many people think “since I can X, everyone can X.” Not everyone lives in the eaxact circumstances as you, and to even entertain the notion is offensive.Only part of the problem is our agricultural and social welfare policies. These are aggravated by poor education. Indeed, miseducation. As noted above, the food pyramid is a cruel joke perpetrated by US industry and government and shamefully endorsed by experts who compromised their integrity by playing a part in a propaganda exercise. Shame on every doctor and scientist who participates; they kill more than doctors participating in executions.
Of course poor people could eat better than they do with the resources at hand, so could rich people. But our government has gone out of its way to teach ignorance on this subject.
Ignorance and lack of resources go hand in hand, one abetting the other.
To the vegan: a song for you.
Hm. A bit too harsh. Apologies.
Yes, the real problem is access to food. That is due to inappropriate subsidies (not subsidies per-se). If only there were a way to distribute them appropriately. Some kind of large, central organisation…
OF COURSE!
We should give all the money to a class-elected tyranny to distribute and LET THE MARKET DECIDE!
Damn that inefficient popularly elected type government! DAMN IT TO HECK!
In defense of Heather’s rather innocent comment about veganism, I didn’t see it as a prescription for poor people. Her comment came on the heels of condemnation of the subsidies the meat and dairy industries receive.
As Amanda said, “We should look to social solutions for this issue not just for the poor, but for the middle class as well.” One thing middle class people (or at least those who do care about equitable farm subsidies, pollution, animal rights, etc.) can do is stop supporting the meat and dairy industries.
I’m not a vegan, but I can at least respect its advantages.
I think maybe you’re a little confused about what “social solution” means, Unruly Duckling. The politics of personal virtue is the opposite of a social solution. If people want to be vegans, that’s awesome, but I don’t think it’s really a solution to our social problems.
Sally, of course veganism isn’t *the* solution to our social problems, but it one thing that some people can do to positively impact certain issues. I don’t believe that progress will happen unless all us do what we can as individuals while still working towards political and cultural change.
As I mentioned above, I am not a vegan, but I’ve made other personal choices hoping they will contribute to positive social change. I wouldn’t blame or criticize anyone for not making the same choices, but I will blame and criticize anyone who doesn’t try at all.
Sorry, I am changing the vegan subject. BTW, it is a healthier lifestyle! However, I thought the food expenditure was the most interesting fact about these diets from around the world. The American family spends $341.98 for one week, while the family from Chad spends $1.23. Americans are the consumers. We sure like to spend money!!
http://www.sugarshun.com/
Sorry, I am changing the vegan subject. BTW, it is a healthier lifestyle! However, I thought the food expenditure was the most interesting fact about these diets from around the world. The American family spends $341.98 for one week, while the family from Chad spends $1.23. We are consumers and sure like to spend money!!