A Point of Optimism on Food
There is a story in the latest GQ about the Ferry Building in San Francisco and the wonderful food market therein. Obviously there has been lots of anxiety about our food culture and eating habits. See for instance the anti-scientific manifesto in the New York Times Magazine, by Michael Pollan. "Return to tradition" was the appealing call.
GQ food critic Alan Richman explains our angst well:
These days the food pages in American publications read like police blotters, a compilation of all that has gone wrong with our diets, our dinners, even our trans-fat-laden church suppers. Organic can't be any good; it's been co-opted by conglomerates. Nutrition is a sham; artificiality dishonors it. You can't eat anything processed. (Tight. Try finding something that isn't) You mustn't pay attention to health claims on packages. (Lies! Lies! Lies!) And by the way, corn syrup kills. We've come to the point where any attempt to do something beneficial for our bodies ends up making them worse.
San Francisco now has a resource for truly healthy food, much of it grown nearby and most of it at a steeper price. Despite the terrible developments whereby Wal-Mart is able to sell "organic food" under a standard no one would recognize as organic five years ago - the upper end of the food market adapts and looks for local and truly organic food. Although that co-optation is regrettable it hasn't deterred the general trend towards healthier, more natural food in the elite. Already the hoi-polloi, (that is to say, us middle class fatties) know that they want to eat something more natural than Hungry-Man frozen dinners for each meal. I can only come to the conclusion that despite government-corporate collusion in lowering standard for organic food - that the overall trend will eventually be benefit small farmers and our national diet. What is the reason for my optimism? A change that seems this persistent in our elites, signals to me that it is an actual cultural change - not merely a market trend or fad brought on by advertising. And if we don't find enough small farmers - perhaps we can make some out of our excess of graduates from small liberal arts colleges.
I won't play Pollyanna too often, I swear.
I expect Miss Annie of Poetic and Chic to tell us if Richman's right about the Ferry Building. He doesn't find every establishment in it, a bounty of the most moral and most healthy foods. But- overall sounds like a sign of hope. No?
Michael Brendan Dougherty
in Culture
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Reader Comments (13)
The Ferry Building is lovely, we went there last year during our trip to San Francisco. If you go you must try the pistachio meringues at Miette. Yum.
Maybe--but then again, Starbucks' shameless co-opting of upper-middle-class yuppies desiring to appear "elite" (holding a coffee in a cardboard cup?!) arguably has not led to higher confectionery standards (quite the opposite, if you ask me).
Not that I have any objections to organic: I say, wear leather, eat meat, and drink ethanol.
Most small farmers grow conventional foods for the mass market. The farmers exploiting the organic and local-grown markets are either hobbyists or the few conventional farmers who were smart enough to see a sucker coming.
When I was a child (not all that long ago) we grew much of our own produce and slaughtered almost all of our own meat. We did that because it was cheaper, not because it was necessarily better. Much of the locally-grown and organic foods phenomenon is just townies being taken for suckers.
Well, the real difference between organic and conventional produce mainly comes down to the different kinds of pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides being used on them. The difference in meat comes down to antibiotics and steroids in conventional livestock (which I don't like).
The apparent difference to most consumers, I think, comes from their belief that the organic food is healthier because it has less chemicals (highly doubtful) and that more care was taken with the organic food (may well be true, since the higher sale cost allows for more production costs).
I am generally in favour of locally grown conventional foods, although I doubt that one could tell the difference between them and foods grown far away in many cases.
The demand for organic is strange, though, because in my experience (with produce, mainly) the organic food seems to be poorer in appearance than the conventional food. It may be that people feel that this means it is more natural, which is rather humourous to me.
Personally I do not think rural farmers should have pesticides sprayed about their neighborhood just so my green peppers can look extra shiny and they can stay competitive. I will pay extra to avoid the fertilizer and pesticide runoff working its way into the rest of our environment. Vegetable aesthetics just are not high on the list of priorites here.
I am unimpressed by the sustainibility arguments I suppose because much of America's agriculture is devoted to producing heavily subsidized corn and requires large amounts of petroleum based inputs and is not sustainable as it stands now. Maybe because our notions of what is productive land or what can be productive land is often so limited.
Farmers will generally plant peas, or some other nitrogen-fixing crop, for one year and then gamble (trying to guess what will yield well and give a good price per bushel) on the remaining years in their rotation. I suppose that this may be somewhat different in the States as you guys tend to grow a lot of corn (due partly to subsidies). In Canada we tend to choose between wheat, barley, and canola.
Most city people don't realize the costs involved with chemical (fertilizer and herbicide, generally) for a grain farmer. Believe me, if we could get by without chemical then we would not use it.
At least for fruits and vegetables, I think slightly poorer (?) appearance typically equals much better taste. Perfect melons, strawberry's and apples, in general, are tasteless. This can also be true to tomatoes
You do have a point, especially since 1. most people nowadays could stand to eat a bit less, and 2) we throw away about 40 percent of the food we buy. Still, any argument about farming or mining techniques has to consider the fact that, in the future, maximizing the productivity of scarce natural resources will be an increasingly salient issue.