Karen Michaeli: On food & class
It is with great pleasure that I introduce my first guest blogger, Karen Michaeli, MSW. Karen is an expert in issues related to improving health for individuals living with chronic illness. She has also thought a great deal about the linkage between how we live (including what we eat) and how it impacts not just our individual health, but the health of our communities and, indeed, the health of the world.
Opinion: Healthy Food is a Class Issue
By Karen Michaeli, MSW
“How we eat determines to a considerable extent how the world is used.”
-Wendell Berry
If you subscribe to a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) or shop at your local farmers’ market, you know what it’s like to eat fresh, organically-grown food during a growing season; you also know that you are supporting local farmers. What you may or may not know is that you are also supporting access for all people to healthy food.
Co-ops, during their golden age of the 1970s, were once also a way to buy affordable, locally grown produce. Since that time, however, these grocery stores have retained a minimal co-op structure with membership fees, but largely transformed themselves into boutique-style specialty food retailers. They continue to sell produce, but at a significant markup. The pricing belies the traditional marketing aesthetic of hand-drawn signs and a token bulk-foods aisle, and local agriculture is supported to a limited extent. An organic farmer near Iowa City, Iowa recently shared with me his observation of a woman buying a three-dollar tomato at a local co-op grocery!
Proponents of co-op grocery retailers argue that it’s worth paying a little more to buy organic. Co-op markups are far more than “a little”, however, and this is the point where sustainability and class issues converge: the excessive markup at co-ops is maintained by the mostly high-income customer base willing to pay the high prices. This boutique grocery model has inspired the proliferation of large chains such as Whole Foods, which cater to the same market. Like co-ops, these groceries support local farmers to a limited extent, which helps their popularity with sustainability-aware markets, but these stores also charge exorbitantly.
A deeper issue exists here in the lack of socioeconomic awareness among the sustainability community. Class and income are not necessarily associated in this context. Curiously, even some lower-income individuals among this group find the class dimensions of the issue not applicable to them: one mother very active in the natural parenting movement told me “we don’t make much money, but we manage to feed our family by shopping at the co-op. If we can do it, there’s no reason for anyone to support big corporate grocery stores.” More examples of the dissonance between environmental and economic awareness are vividly presented in the 2001 PBS documentary film “People Like Us: Social Class in America” which includes several segments on the politics of food. One segment titled “The Trouble with Tofu” focuses on Burlington, VT, where a culture war between the lower-income population of Burlington and “upper middle-class countercultureites” was waged over who would build a new downtown grocery: Shaw’s, a national supermarket chain, or the Onion River Co-op, a health food/specialty item grocery store. The classism of the faction supporting the co-op was evident in their paternalistic view that the poor needed more grocery-shopping options in order to broaden their tastes—never mind the fact that options without economic access would be useless.
Hiram Bonner and Meredith Taylor, who transformed a traditional community food pantry in Harlem, New York, describe the challenge of providing healthy food for the poor: “Fresh, healthy food is the most expensive, so it's the first to go when times get tough.” The reality is that healthy food is more expensive—expensive enough to make access a real issue, which belies the common sustainability sentiment that it’s worthwhile to pay more. The question is, “worthwhile” to whom? The only access to healthy food that is maintained by supporting the pricing at specialty grocery stores is access for people who can afford to pay more. Bonner and Taylor identify the health implications of this economic barrier: “Emergency programs get stuck with lower quality food, and some of that is so processed, it's not worth eating.” It would behoove those in the public health arena concerned with population characteristics of so-called “lifestyle diseases” such as diabetes or hypertension to support activism related to food politics.
A litmus test of political acceptability among the sustainability community is one’s attitude toward Wal-Mart, a commonly agreed-upon enemy for many good reasons (not the least among them, the company’s labor practices). Now, with its foray into the organic food market, Wal-Mart is identified by the New Yorker’s Field Maloney on Slate.com as an unlikely champion of access: “The organic-food movement is in danger of exacerbating the growing gap between rich and poor in this country by contributing to a two-tiered national food supply, with healthy food for the rich. Could Wal-Mart's populist strategy prove to be more ‘sustainable’ than Whole Foods? Stranger things have happened.” This said, and given the assumption that buying locally produced organic food is preferable, what can someone who is both sustainability-conscious and socioeconomically conscious do?
Shop at your local farmers’ market.
Farmer’s markets can be found in almost every community, though access issues exist for the poor here in terms of geographic access.
Join a CSA.
According to the Practical Farmers of Iowa, Community Supported Agriculture is a “relationship of mutual support…between local farmers and community members who pay the farmer an annual membership fee to cover the production costs of the farm. In turn, members receive a weekly share of the harvest during the local growing season.” The subscription fee is usually affordable for most incomes, $100 to $200 for the season roughly spanning May through October. Many farms provide sliding-scale fees or special discounted subscriptions as well, for low-income individuals or families (why don’t “community” co-op groceries do this?)
During the winter, choose lower-priced chain store organics when possible.
This advice is likely to be controversial, but voting with your dollars can help pressure specialty natural-foods stores to adapt their pricing to an increasingly socially conscious customer base. A Green Left review by Belinda Selke of Peter Singer and Jim Mason’s 2006 book The Ethics of What We Eat gives us something to think about, if you’re feeling guilty about not buying locally during part of the year:
…locally grown food is preferable because it keeps dollars in local communities, supports small-scale farming, and is better for the environment because it reduces carbon emissions and packaging waste. But when you live in one of the wealthiest countries on the planet, wouldn’t it be more ethical to support poor farmers in underdeveloped nations by purchasing their produce imported under fair trade conditions? And what if your local family farmer doesn’t pay award wages or let its workers join a union? Singer and Mason also show how buying distantly produced food can contribute less to global warming — for example, when it is grown seasonally, in soils and climates naturally suited for its production and transported by sea (which is very efficient in fossil fuel terms). Singer and Mason are not opposed to buying locally, but recognise that it is not automatically the more ethical choice.
Learn more about food and class, and educate others.
When you hear someone moralizing about healthy or responsible food choices, don’t be afraid to speak up: seek clarification by asking “healthy for whom?” or “environmentally or socially responsible?” This is an opportunity to help otherwise “aware” individuals learn about the socioeconomic dimension of food and environmental responsibility.
This article has also been published on www.gather.com