Off With Her Head

In her Ted Talk We Need to Feed the Whole World, Dutch scientist and writer Louise Fresco says that eating well is the privilege of the wealthy. Gwyneth Paltrow already showed us that in April 2015 with her disastrously-out-of-touch-with-what-food-costs attempt at the $29 Food Stamp Challenge, where she attempted to shop to feed her family for $29 for the entire week, as many poor families on government assistance must.

Gwyneth's Twitter picture of what she bought for her $29. Her caption: "This is what $29 gets you at the grocery store--what families on SNAP (i.e. food stamps) have to live on." She ultimately gave up four days in and bought a bag of black licorice to celebrate not being poor.

Not only is this, like, a pretty blatant postcard to the world of "Hey guys I don't cook for myself EVER since even though I named my child after a piece of food I actually have no idea what the caloric needs of a family of four would be or how much rice a sack of rice makes and then how to put those two numbers together to get a weeks worth of food"...but that she thought that for $29 a week total she would get to not only have green stuff, but fresh green stuff, and fruit and garnishes? Oh Gwyneth. Calorie dense. Not nutrient dense. Nutrition is for rich folk.

It's incredibly offensive that someone so absolutely out of touch with even her own food needs (or really, the idea of a budget, or, like, I don't know, putting stuff back onto the shelves once you realize you essentially made a half of a taco salad with what you picked out and that's only going to last little Apple Paltrow until snack time) considers herself an ambassador for the Food Bank program. But Louise Fresco isn't talking about Gwyneth.

Eating well is the privilege of the wealthy.

I had to sit with that for a minute.

See Louise shows her audience a loaf of artisan bread and loaf of white Wonder bread. Which would we prefer? The point I waited for her to get at was how big agriculture and its irresponsible chemical shortcuts have robbed our food of its nutrition and nourishment; or that government subsidies for big corn and wheat have necessitated so much placement of refined white flour and corn syrup that the white Wonder loaf now bears almost no resemblance to the loaf of actual bread, the beautiful, irregularly shaped and crusty artisan-baked loaf.

Instead she said we live in a time of unprecedented abundance. Our science has made it possible to feed every man woman and child on earth (even though our distribution systems haven't caught up with production yet) and that has all been made possible by the agricultural science that is represented by--you guessed it--Wonder Bread. Her point being that science makes it possible for us to have enough, and to have it whenever, and to have it here. Oranges in the Netherlands in December? Sure. These oranges can travel. Bread in Bolivia for peasants? Yes. This bread will keep forever.

Her point is that big agriculture isn't the villain we make it out to be and without it we wouldn't be able to deliver citrus fruits all over the world; more of the population would be required to work to grow food instead of making advancements in neuroscience and astrophysics; and we wouldn't be able to get bread to poor farmers in Peru. So by extension, when I purposefully try to hurt big agriculture by taking my spending dollars to farmer's markets and stores with local and organic produce from small farms and grow my own blueberries, I am, as a privileged member of the elitist aristocracy, and by extension, the urban farmers, the farmer's market-goers, and the crazy chicken ladies, taking bread from the mouth of peasants.

Eating well is a privilege of the wealthy. Jesus. I am Marie Antoinette. "Let them eat blueberries!"

Because Americans suck at feeding the hungry (thanks Gwyneth! You can be our ambassador! Say hi to the folks at Nobu!) Louise Fresco wants us to bring science to underdeveloped countries so maybe they can feed themselves.  Because, by the way, Global hunger is not caused by food scarcity. And she's right. we make more wheat, corn and soybeans than we can possibly eat in this country. We make so much we have to find things to do with the extra. That's why fries are coated with flour and salad dressing has corn syrup and muffins have more calories than a double burger and bread, the most basic unit of nutrition for human culture, has a page of ingredients instead of only three. Science is giving us all of that! And when we don't accept what science is giving us (by growing in our backyards, going to farmer's markets, and shopping locally) we are hurting our global ability to end hunger.

Except here's the thing.

Backyard farmers like me now produce 20% of the world's food. And it's not just food, it's nutrient dense food like Gwyneth likes to eat at her favorite celebrity restaurants (like "Animal", where she finished celebrating not-poorness with a nice $80 dinner. Pfft. Beans!). My backyard blueberries don't sacrifice flavor for portability. They're packed with the stuff that they pull out of the compost I make from my kitchen scraps. They are at their peak of vitamin potential because I picked them just before I shoved them in my mouth. I save heirloom seeds and teach my children to love vegetables picked fresh from the vine and that even the deformed strawberries are still sweeter than anything you can get at a grocery store.

And yes. The little stone fruit orchard that brings me cherries and apricots in season at the farmer's market is taking up land resources that could be cranking out wheat, corn and soybeans. While commercial wheat fields crank out continuous chemical enhanced crops for endless corn syruped ciabatta buns, depleting the soil to the point that we may have less than 60 years of usable growing soil left, the little organic stone fruit orchard harvests the crop for the season and spends the rest of the year rebuilding the soil with compost.

Eating well is a privilege. Those blueberries in my backyard have a cost attached to them; more so the artisan bakeries and free range goose farms and my beloved stone fruit orchard who stand in the path of progress and that inevitable march toward scientifically engineered wheat fields as far as the eye can see.

But those wheat fields have a cost too, Louise.

I'm not sure I'm the one in aristocratic heels this time.