Finally Food II

When I finished the first post on food, I knew that something was wrong, was missing from it. Not to mention that I hated that upbeat ending that sits there like a fake smile on a greeter at some big box store.

I show some pictures of people that suggested something about their relationship to food, slag Michael Pollan, talk shallowly about food security, and then wrap it all up with a big shiny ribbon. This is not finally anything. The piece that's missing -- considering that this is a blog and not an op-ed, or a research paper, or even a term paper -- is a person and that person is me.

Because I'm the person who has eaten Popeye's chicken and probably will again. And I am one of the people with enough disposable income to go to Slow Food 2008 and eat fabulous hand-crafted eats. And I am the person who sometimes (but never often enough) buys food from her local farmer's market (which is about three blocks away). And I am the person who joined a coop but never makes it there on Saturday to shop. And I am the person who thinks about buying organic and will if the price differential isn't too great. And I am the person who will spend hours making something that will get eaten in fifteen (ok, twenty) minutes. And I am the person who is pretty happy with the cheapest Chinese takeout (from that place on 16th near Capp).

My relationship to food and cooking and eating is complicated, which makes me a lot like many people in the USA. But I can only make sense of food in this country by making sense of my own feelings about and actions around food.

I'm not going to make an everywoman claim here. For one thing, I like to cook. Lots of people (even ones who like to eat good food) don't necessarily like to cook. And they don't have to. One thing about living in the twenty-first (and for that matter in the middle to end of the twentieth) century, is that you can eat pretty well without having to learn to cook. Before then, unless you lived in a city, you needed to cook or have someone in your house who cooked, if you wanted to eat. If you were a woman, you were probably the cook. All women don't love cooking. My stepmother, who I mentioned in the first part, hated it. Sallie Tisdale writes about her mother who, like my stepmother, felt she had to cook and disliked it. (Tisdale writes about a lot more, it's a great food book.)

But I came from a family of women (excepting my stepmother) who mainly did like to cook and were good at it. They also cooked for a living. My grandmother on my dad's side was a live-in cook for a family near Palmyra, NY. Her mother was also a cook. My great-aunt cooked for a restaurant in a bar in Harlem (among her many different jobs). My mom's mother cooked and her mother cooked. Through their cooking I learned to love eating. I had paella for the first time at my great-aunt's apartment. I had great southern breakfasts, with eggs, grits, fried chicken, and biscuits at my mother's mother's house in Philly. I ate I don't know how many roasts and desserts over years of holidays. I have my dad's mother's recipe cards.

But I didn't learn how to cook from them. I learned to cook, really cook, once I left home.

That's also where I started to care about where food came from, how it was prepared, and how it got on my plate. I've worked in health food stores, natural food stores, and in a natural food warehouse. I've learned a lot about food production. I'm not a naif about how meat is produced or how farm workers remain the most exploited and ignored groups of hard working people in this country. How does that knowledge affect my shopping/cooking/eating? It makes me do the right thing when I can and feel guilty for the times when I go ahead and buy or eat that thing that violates my values around food.

I'm not the only one. And this is why changing the culture of food is going to be so difficult. Even those of us who know better, don't always do better because we are part of a culture that wants what it wants, when it wants it.

No matter what it costs someone else. No matter what it costs the soil. No matter what it means in the long run because we don't think in the long run.

Food Finally

That image a couple of paragraphs down is from Slow Food 2008. I took it in San Francisco. On the left is a picture I took this April in NYC. The details are a little hard to see, so let me describe it. It's a line of people standing on 145th street in Harlem. They're lined up to get the Popeye's Chicken Special. I think it was a bucket of 9 pieces, with biscuits for $2.99. The line, though you can't see it in the photo, was pretty long. There must have been fifty people waiting on a chilly, dreary day for a cheap bucket of chicken and a pile of greasy (though I have to say tasty) biscuits.

These two photos say a lot about what it means to eat in the USA.

Food is not just feeding. Food is economics. Food is culture. Food is class. Food is tradition and innovation. If you want to read about sustainable farming (and the pushback from Big Ag), then go over to Eco-Salon and read Vanessa's piece. She's great and she knows what she's talking about.

This post has been percolating in my head for more than a year. I have tried to think about how to write about the problems with food and and money and people in the USA. I talk with people. I read things. And lately I've been listening to Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food (nothing better than audiobooks about food when you're cooking dinner). Maybe it was listening to Pollan that finally pushed me over the edge to writing because his book is not about to fix anything, but his attempt to fix what's wrong with food in the USA reveals a lot of the problems with even thinking about this whole mess.

At one point, Pollan is telling the reader how to eat, some specifics to follow up on the basic dictum of "eat real food, mainly fruit and vegetables, not much meat . . . " which had been repeated a number of times. After suggesting that we buy a big freezer and buy quarters of beef, he says, offhandedly, " I realize that not everyone can do this, but those of us who can should. " And there is the key obstacle to "fixing" the myriad and complicated issues of food in a nutshell. Personal, individual solutions are offered up for what are institutional, commercial problems. Not that food in America is a problem for business people, unless you seriously think that getting more people to buy poor-quality food is a legitimate sort of problem. However it is increasingly an institutional problem in a country where more and more people suffer from food insecurity, if not actual starvation and food-related illnesses and disabilities grow .

We all make individual decisions about how and what to eat. The people at Slow Food 2008 are opting for hand-crafted, scrupulously produced, and incredibly tasty food. The people in line at Popeye's are choosing uniformly manufactured, mass-produced, and kinda tasty food. There are businesses, smallish in the former case, immense in the latter, to provide them with the food they want and are willing to pay for. When the bulk of the infrastructure for food production and distribution is aimed at a mass-produced, uniform, and cheapish cuisine, our individual choices narrow, especially if we don't have the time or money to find alternatives. To eat well in the USA, the deck is stacked against all of us. If you follow Pollan (and many people do), the solution is to feed yourself and your family better, working in the interstices of a crappy system with as much of your disposable income as you can afford to spend.

But if the real problem in the USA is to get good quality, healthy food to everyone in the country, there's not much business in place to make that happen and not much institutional support for it either. There are food deserts in cities, places where there's no access to any food except what a corner store will carry (processed, shelf life measured in months, little fresh fruit, vegetables, meat and forget about fish).

But the logistics don't strike me as being the only hurdle to better eating in the USA. The hurdles are cultural and economic. And the cultural barriers might be the highest.

Although I'm not 100% with Polland, he does say one thing that I completely agree with and he hasn't thought through all the ramifications that follow it. There are different food cultures in the world and that's not just about whether your main protein is fish or chicken; whether your main starch is potatoes, rice, or cassava. Food culture is also about the preparation and consumption of food. That's something that both the people in the Popeye's line and the people at Slow Food 2008 have in common, something that marks them (and all of us) as American eaters.

As far as food goes, we expect to have what ever it is we want ready when we want it. It's obvious in the Popeye's case, but consider. At Slow Food 2208 nearly all the food (if not all of it) was prepared foods, wonderfully, artfully prepared food, but prepared food nonetheless.

To change food in the USA is a two-fold process. We've got to get real, whole food to everyone. And we've got to change our relationship to food and eating. It means more cooking, more planning, more time, and maybe more money. But the money is the least of it.

Because it will mean nothing if we got good food to people all over the country who don't know what to do with it or who see cooking as low-status drudgery (my stepmother did and she was an awful cook). Spending time choosing, buying, cooking and enjoying food is one of the most fundamental changes in our culture that I can imagine. But it could be the a key to making a lot of other things possible.

making movies I

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from M, asking me if I wanted to be part of Frameline's Generations Project. This project brings together youth (max age 23) and elders (min age 55) to learn how to make digital movies. She said they were short on elders. So I applied and I got in. This was my second weekend.

The first weekend was a potluck and a sort of get to know you session. There are a lot more elders in this group than youth. Nearly no one has any experience making films, though there are a couple of photographers (varying degrees of seriousness), a theater director, a part-time film critic for local Chinese newspapers, a couple of art students, a sound designer, a retired carpenter, and others whose work or ex-work I didn't catch.

There will be three groups of four or four groups of three making films that will be five minutes long. Unlike earlier years, the groups won't get to segregate by age. The themes for the films, the content is supposed to arise from the discussions the group has, not from any films that people have been dying to make, but have never (before now) had the chance.

I'm excited and worried.

I'm excited because I love learning new things and because this is making me think about how films are put together. Just this week we got this handout on cameras, about angles and movement and framing and how different shots have different effects. It's all about the visual conventions that enable storytelling. It's the stuff that signals and underlines and that we barely pay attention to most of the time (unless it's a really bad movie).

I'm worried because it's clearer than ever that film-making is a team effort. At this point, we're still all these individuals who are interested in making films and we're all lgbtqi, but that's about all that holds us together. The abundance of elders is a problem too because, in my experience, people don't necessarily get better about sharing as they get older. Already there's a tendency to talk over the less assertive. So I'm worried about us being able to make functional teams to make something special out of this incredible opportunity.

it's the little things and the not-so-little things

So right before the inauguration, I noticed that I was doing something I hadn't done in a long, long time. I was listening to the radio. I used to be a turn off the alarm clock, turn on the radio sort of person. I mean decades of this. I'm not a newspaper reader and I don't watch much tv. And before there was the internet, I got my news off the radio, public radio to be specific. The radio was my link to the larger world and whenever I drove cross country, I'd basically surf from one public radio domain to the next.

But by start of the Iraq War I had given up on the radio completely. I couldn't stand to hear one more piece of bad news or another equivocation out of that lying sack of shit, Scott McClellan. I didn't want to hear about yet another erosion, landslide of rights in the US. And I didn't want to hear the reporters dutifully taking notes, asking none of the hard questions that needed to be asked, that no one seemed to be asking offline.

I had had enough.

But then, I found myself listening first to the all-liberal all-the-time celebration on Sunday before the inauguration. Then I turned on the news on Monday to hear what was going on in the preparations for the inauguration and for the first steps of this administration. Then there was the inauguration, which I streamed and listened to as well. And for the last week, every morning when I get up, I turn on the radio and move it from room to room as I start the day.

I feel like a citizen again.

Then I read this. This administration is getting ready to defend John Woo against a suit from Jose Padilla. A suit brought by a man who's been tortured, held without charges, finally charged with some BS against one of men who chewed up or ignored the law, who made it possible for Padilla to basically be picked up and dropped down a dark hole. I've been finding out more and more about the enabling radical lawyers like Woo and Addington did. How their memos made it possible for the Bush administration to make a world so horrible I couldn't bear to listen to it on the radio. And I was lucky. I didn't have to live with the consequences, like the people in Iraq or Afghanistan.

If this new administration can't bring some justice to the real crimes that the Bush administration committed, maybe I won't be enjoying the radio for very long after all.