I just watched television’s Jamie Oliver give a TED talk (TED talks, by the way, are always worth watching) and it left me with some thoughts about food education. Mr. Oliver gave a good talk (it’s interesting to see a tv star stumbling over his words a little when he speaks about something he’s really passionate about) and my favorite thing he kept coming back to was how we learn about food. Jamie Oliver recently made a tv show where he went to a small town in West Virginia with a serious obesity problem, and tried to do something about it. The families he talked to had terrible food habits, and he talked about how we learn those habits, how some kids are never exposed to cooking at home, and therefore never teach their kids to cook, and new generations are essentially cut off from any knowledge about food. During his talk, Jamie Oliver shows a few pictures and videos of people he met, and the video of him talking to a mother, surrounded by the piles of pizza and chili dogs her family eats is particularly chilling. But it occurs to me that Mr. Oliver chose, as he was probably right to do, the worst examples of America’s obesity epidemic. I’m guessing that most people who read this blog don’t eat fast food every day, but it’s still important to recognize that even if you’re better off than the people Jamie Oliver shows us, you still live in and are affected by America’s food culture. We can all learn more about food, and we can all teach more about food. The culture that has caused this obesity epidemic is one in which we all separately accept food from the same sources. We go to supermarkets and restaurants and vending machines and bodegas and we trust them. We believe that if we buy a package labeled “lettuce” we are holding lettuce, with nothing extra and nothing missing. We watch cooking shows (like Jamie Oliver’s) and assume that when they tell us how to make a meal, there’s no reason to cook otherwise. The truth is that food knowledge is communal: we have much more to learn from each other about the food we eat than we think.
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I’m glad that you wrote this post. My kids go to a school in an upper middle class/affluent community but the cafeteria serves much of the same highly processed, packaged “non-food” that are in the food deserts described by Michelle Obama. Kids across the socioeconomic spectrum are targeted by marketers. Janet Poppendieck, author of the recently published “Free for All,” was right on target when she said:
“Well, when I was a child, kids didn’t have money. We got modest allowances for maybe a trip to the corner store once a week, but children today are major consumers in the economy, and the food industry realized that if they can establish brand loyalty among children they are likely acquiring a lifetime consumer. There’s really a concerted effort to enlist children in the fan clubs of particular brands while they’re young and I think it’s extremely destructive because the items that are heavily marketed to children are not subject to nutrition standards.”
http://www.salon.com/life/education/index.html?story=/food/feature/2010/01/13/poppendieck_fixing_school_food
I think there is a lot to be said for this realization that, while food is a commodity that can be purchased, food safety and food literacy are not. I come from a pretty privileged background, with plenty of access to good food, but I still ate Cheetos as a kid, and for some reason I trusted Cheetos not to do me any permanent damage. The same structures of production and distribution bring food to all of us, no matter who we are or where we get our food. I think a question that is not asked enough is “who is telling me how to eat?” and the answer should ultimately be Nobody.
I actually disagree somewhat with Janet Poppendieck’s argument there, or at least some of the wording. It is always dangerous to look to the past for examples to follow, or to find an ideal arrangement that existed once but was lost. Our memories are simply not that good, for one thing. And for another, the conditions of the present are complex and inter-related. That is, trying to recreate the good things of the past will always come out slightly wrong because the context has changed. I also think it’s wrong to think of the past, say when kids had no money and couldn’t raid the vending machine, and imagine a point, or even a series of points, when we could have made better choices, when paths diverged and we took the wrong one. I don’t think it’s right, or even possible, to stop giving kids money and hold them back from the pressures of the consumer world. I don’t think that’s so terrible either.
The solution, I believe, is to focus on the decisions we can make, and to assert ourselves there. Frightening as it is, the pervasive consumer culture we all live in is a culture of choice, not of necessity. Rather than trying to shield kids from the mind-control monsters of processed, packaged “food,” we should focus on providing alternatives and teaching kids to believe in their own good judgment. To me, that means providing kids with healthy food from local, sustainable sources both at school and at home, but also teaching kids to be thoughtful, informed, and confident consumers. Even for adults, it’s tempting to try and shut it all out, to ignore the non-food and “brand fan-club” pressure. But that is the world we live in. What kids need more than anything, I think, is to learn to face those consumer pressures head-on: to gather information on what they consume and make confident, intelligent choices. And most importantly, kids need to know exactly what they want from their food (be it sustainable, local, or organic production, healthy ingredients, ethical treatment of livestock, or anything else) and to demand food that meets those needs. Ultimately, the great evil of the processed food industry is that it asks us to let someone else make the very personal decision of how to eat (that is: what to eat, how much, where, when, why, with whom). As destructive as it is to market these products to children, they will be marketed-to for the rest of their lives, and the most important thing is to teach kids to trust their own judgment, even when advertising speaks so directly to them.
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