food

As a poor person who has experienced food insecurity, I find many mainstream writings on food politics hard to accept as creditable. At times I find the professional middle class norms and assumptions agonizing to read. While sometimes writers make trivializing and token references to differences of class, race, sex and citizen status, these superficial acknowledgments are patronizing and tend to marginalize and perpetuate the ways the food system affects the lives of the poor and working class, people of color, women and im/migrants. The fact that these commentators ignore the experience of those of us most oppressed by our food system is too infrequently questioned.

A class-conscious look at the writings of best-selling author Michael Pollen can help illustrate the practical harms that class-biased food advocacy can have on poor and hungry people. Pollan's writings on food politics are rooted in his own privileged position as a professional upper-middle class White man. Much of Pollan's class and race bias is hidden under a voice that depicts his own privileged experience as normal and universal. He thus specifically writes for other class-privileged Whites and it is not much of a surprise that many of his affluent White readers don't question what is oftentimes their own experience as well. (Read more...)

Turns out my previous posts on a bumper sticker claiming "Vegetarianism is an Affordable Health Plan" and the Whole Foods Markets CEO op-ed denouncing universal healthcare that has prompted calls for a boycott are more related then I first realized. In the op-ed, as if taking his cue from the bumper sticker itself, John Mackey writes:

Recent scientific and medical evidence shows that a diet consisting of foods that are plant-based, nutrient dense and low-fat will help prevent and often reverse most degenerative diseases that kill us and are expensive to treat. We should be able to live largely disease-free lives until we are well into our 90s and even past 100 years of age.

Like the bumper sticker, Mackey thinks a vegetarian diet is a valid substitute for universal comprehensive healthcare. Also, just as I had predicted in my post — unbeknownst to me, the op-ed was actually published the day before — Mackey is using this very bumper sticker logic to promote privatization. (Read more...)

I recently read a bumper sticker that boasted: "Vegetarianism is an Affordable Health Plan." Wouldn't that be nice? Well, while I can certainly empathize with the desire to communicate the connection between a plant-based dietary system and well-being, I think this particular bumper sticker communicates a more disturbing message about class, health and privatization. (Read more...)

The baker of the so-called "stuffed turkey loaf" received numerous comments of praise. There was only one comment that questioned what was so funny about mocking a dead bird, particularly when "millions of turkeys are being killed in order to be eaten." I, too, think it's a little hard to find the humor in all this. And until I read the PPK thread on the "stuffed turkey loaf" I hadn't realized to what extent "mock meats" actually ridicule, not just imitate and mimic, the oppression of other animals, which makes "mock" a surprisingly apt term.