Nikes and lentils

The thread following Mark Bittman's post about how rice and beans is a cheaper meal than fast food hits the predictable points: Some commenters ask (in a reliably insensitive tone) why the poor are said not to be able to purchase good food, when they can afford beer/cigarettes/Nikes/babies/lottery tickets/acrylic nails. Others enter into an authenticity contest centered around what poverty really means, with an interest less in sorting out whether it's actually a problem that Americans are overweight and eat junk, and if so, what to do about it; than in declaring as many people as possible out-of-touch trust-fund brats.

The question of who 'counts' as poor for the purposes of the Great Food Debate is nevertheless worth having, even if the posturing it inevitably elicits is tiresome. 'Poor' in this context, some point out, is not about a temporary lack of funds - a college student who's 'broke' the day before his parents transfer him his allowance, a recent college grad with a low-paid but educational or do-gooder job, these are not The Poor. In a sort of intermediary category would be, say, over-educated adjuncts subsisting on poverty wages, living in crummy neighborhoods, without family money, but with class aspirations or what-have-you. As would be those recent immigrant families, however poor and however uneducated the parents, whose children are on a path towards middle-class status, and whose eating habits have not yet been Americanized, and whose children can thus skip relatively quickly from 'traditional' meals to Whole Foods, with maybe a brief period of McDonalds consumption during high school.

Then at last there are the 'real' poor, the unambiguous cases, and it's in discussing this set that the discussion heads towards either the patronizing, the offensive, or both. If the issue was simply, 'how does one eat well for not much money?', the answer would be easy enough: lots of pasta, lentils, oatmeal, etc., with much smaller amounts of more expensive, perhaps more difficult to acquire, foods - not caviar, but, say, $13/lb. cheese, fresh or frozen berries, etc., without which the bulk foods can start to feel a bit like they belong in a farm animal's trough.

But the question is clearly not whether it is possible to feed one's self on very little money, but what the Alice Waters-ite should do when she sees a 400-pound mother on the subway feeding her kids, who are also overweight, cans of Pringles and non-diet Coke. What's at stake has something to do with money, health, and the environment, but it's just as much about class, race, aesthetic preferences, and liberal guilt at judging Them.

Every generation since god knows when has had it's Poor People's Health and Hygiene dilemmas, in which poverty is conflated with unhealthiness. With real-versus-fast-foods as with previous incarnations of this discussion, part of what's going on has to do with actual health, as in, illness-prevention and lifespan-extension, or, for this generation, the health of the environment, but another, tough-to-separate part is about what happens to be trendy at any given time in the upper classes. Local-seasonal is now a trend. Thinness beyond what's necessary for health is now a trend. The visceral response of the Waters-ite to her fellow subway riders might be an altruistic concern for the obesity-related illnesses the mother and children might face and for the carbon footprint of Pringles production, or it could be an 'ick' reaction to rolls of fat and artificial ranch flavoring. But it's most likely a bit of both, although people do tend to fall into categories of tactless or patronizing, so it will be tough to find the same person admitting to both responses.

It can feel as if there's no way to address health (and environmental) concerns without risking the external, snobbish factors from at least seeming present. And there would certainly be no way for the Waters-ite to intervene at that moment, on the subway, without being an ass. It would help if the Waters-ites were to recognize that it's patronizing to say, 'Now, now, that's just what They eat, we shouldn't judge,' but that it's also patronizing to suggest that anyone who's spent money on any luxury (in Waters's own example, Nike sneakers) rather than local-seasonal-organic farmers-market produce is a fool.

On a similar note, while it would be insane to begrudge the Obamas a fancy night-on-the-town in New York, or a night off, period,I cringed when I read about their clearly-symbolic choice of a restaurant specializing in local-seasonal foods... after arriving in the city via an airplane and a helicopter. I get that there are huge security concerns, and that this is kind of an Al Gore-riding-airplanes-during-'An Inconvenient Truth' scenario - the positive of getting the word out could exceed the carbon footprint of doing so - but the evening's much-publicized itinerary risks reinforcing the belief that local-seasonal is something for the exceptionally privileged, that consuming food from local farms is somehow tied up with what would be, for anyone but the Obamas, extravagance.

So, after heaps of my locally-grown cynicism, I'll end on a positive note: Today I saw a group of schoolkids - racially diverse ('diverse' as in 'not all one race', not as a euphemism for every-last-one-was-black) - getting a tour of the Union Square Greenmarket, learning about what grows near New York, what's in season, etc. It looked like much more fun than any of my own school trips (with the exception of the 9th grade trip to a Hindu temple in Queens), was far more health-promoting than staying inside to watch some Lifetime-esque film about eating disorders, and was an introduction to a major NYC institution that probably some students already knew and others did not, and inasmuch was no more or less patronizing than a field trip to, say, the Met. So, uh, more stuff like that, please.