Paula Deen's Irresponsibility

  Flickr - Robert S. Donovan
There's been no shortage of reaction to the whole Paula Deen & her diabetes-drug-shilling story. I guess something about her whatevs, wipe-her-hands-clean-of-the-mess attitude has bothered me enough to start posting here again.

From the NY Times:

Ms. Deen defended herself in an interview with The New York Post by accusing Mr. Bourdain of elitism: “You know, not everybody can afford to pay $58 for prime rib or $650 for a bottle of wine. My friends and I cook for regular families who worry about feeding their kids and paying the bills.

So...feed your kids things like a bacon donut egg burger, fried butter, velveeta fudge, and bacon-wrapped mac & cheese?

I'm tired of the elitism/snobbery vs buy everything at your local farmer's market framework. For both poles, it's just reductionist and unproductive. I think chef/author Tamar Adler makes a great point for how we should respond to the whole affair:

What we risk, going through the ugly exercise of “I told you so,” is an opportunity to talk about what healthy food is and means, and who eats it where, and how it is made.

It's also an opportunity to talk about what Southern food actually is (which Tamar does as well). Southern food is not fried butter. Hugh Acheson's definition is dynamic, inclusive, and kind of lovely. Deen's definition? Butter and grits. Which is fine. Except it's static and stereotypical. Acheson's definition? After describing a dish he serves at his Atlanta restaurant:

Southern food is a celebration of the people within the community, using the agrarian bounty that is constantly around them. It pays homage to the past but is a constantly evolving, ebbing with the seasons and flowing with the constant progression of the South. It is a foodways that really has had a much stronger emphasis on vegetables and sides than huge portions of proteins, and one that is healthy if we show off the diversity of our crops and cooking styles.

So what bothers me about how Paula Deen handles her role as a food network celebrity is that she takes no responsibility for being a powerful messenger. She didn't use the news of her diagnosis or publicity around the news of her drug deal as an opportunity to talk about healthier preparation of food or educate her fans about the disease. She doesn't seem to take any responsibility for her role in helping to create, promote, and perpetuate a culture of bad eating habits, of all-the-time excess/ooh naughty indulgence comfort food being, without question, OK and perfectly acceptable (as the flipside to the culture that says we're much too fat, only eat lean cuisines and yogurt that is supposed to inexplicably trick you into thinking you're eating dessert). I mean, what's the problem, right? Eat and feed your family velveeta bacon donut balls, get sick with a disease that is the seventh leading cause of death in the US, then just pop some pills and things will be grand!

You'd think she would have had something more to offer after being diagnosed three years ago than a shrug and a fuller pocketbook.

Also check out smarter people:
Marion Nestle's nutritional debunking, reminding us that "You most definitely can eat your way to type 2 diabetes." And Tom Philpott looks into the drug she's promoting. Kind of a risky, expensive drug apparently.

Anti-doom & gloom

Bodega Down Bronx from the Center for Urban Pedagogy on Vimeo.

I've been finding the newish Gilt Taste shop a bit too rich for my wallet, but the site recently featured three great stories on kids becoming thoughtful eaters & creators. It's a nice change from all the doom & gloom around kids' health & nutrition in the news these days.

Mighty Young Writers - about Philly nonprofit Mighty Writers using gardening to grow kids' creativity.

Gastronomy 101 about a class at NY's High School for Math, Science and Engineering that introduces teenagers to thinking about food systems. They take a field trip to a farm that offers educational programs to food professionals on the region's food, but these kids ask great questions and writer Tejal Rao captures their energy and spirit.

One kid used to give up his $5 weekly allowance in order to buy free-range birds once a month. Another doesn't get discouraged when her family won't eat the vegetarian soup she cooks up and just packs it for her lunches instead.

Finally, the video above was made by high school kids from the South Bronx in New Settlement's Bronx Helpers program, along with the Center for Urban Pedagogy. I love how the kids captured the catch-22 of supply & demand that float around the problem of food deserts - that on the one hand that bodegas/corner stores are merely supplying customer demand and the other that any existent or potential to grow the demand for healthy foods is blocked by the status quo.

Food Label Design & News21's The Ration

Trying to catch up with food news lost to me thanks to the vortex of finishing/graduating school and brain-bruising by the bar. Seems like there are more things going on around food politics discussion/coverage though realistically and practically perhaps, plus c'est la même chose. See, my half-empty glasses are always on.

ANYWAYS, it is nice to see some of that discussion make it more into the public eye and such. Thanks to the interconnected webs, I discovered News 21's site, The Ration, all sexy with nice design, visuals and video. I haven't had that much time to poke around and read thoroughly but what I've seen looks good and not superficial. Yay depth! The site is a project on food & health by the UC Berkeley Grad School of Journalism and students from U. of Missouri, Harvard, and City University, London.

Recently, News21 also teamed up with GOOD for a project called "Rethink the Food Label" to make labels more accessible, informative, and inspirational for consumers. The rethinking could use the existing components of current labels or pull in other social and environmental informational characteristics such as the environment and food justice.

Salon/Imprint had a nice little blurb about the design contest & its winner, Renee Walker. Walker decided to make a color-coded food group key, so that "brighter colors represent what's good for you and grayer colors show additives and preservatives. . . . So the brighter the color, the healthier the food." I kind of love the idea of bringing in color to do what the food pyramid tried to do - to send a visual message to consumers about what would be a healthier food choice, and color seems an efficient/immediate way to influence emotion and decision. I also like the visual ratio so you can tell what is a more "whole" food and have an idea of the ingredient amounts in relation to each other, instead of resorting to imaginary numbers when you read an ingredient list.

Have you seen any good news sites or projects regarding food politicky stuff? Comment it up!

Future of Food conference - part one

Washington Post sponsored the Future of Food conference, a photo by Georgetown Voice Photos on Flickr.

On May 4, Washington Post Live held a conference on The Future of Food at Georgetown University. Thanks to the power of the interwebs, I was able to stream most of the conference from home and ended up doing my first live-tweet of anything (yay for that warm fuzzy electronic community feeling). But since that was mostly just quoting things people said, I wanted to blather on and on, I mean delve a little further, into what I took away from the event here and in some future posts.

I thought Prince Charles’s speech was excellent, in that it was very comprehensive, highlighting the interconnected webbiness that makes up the food system and why it’s imperative to consider that creating a truly sustainable system. The speech and the conference overall showed how food is not monolithic, and that it is in fact “part of a wider socioeconomic landscape.” What’s going on in one part of the system will have real impacts elsewhere. And for food that means the current system has real impacts on climate change and the health of the environment and people. So some of the solutions that Prince Charles presented are large and complex but important to consider, with calls to deepen our understanding between food, energy, water and economic security; taking steps with the whole system in mind, which means we must value and support local communities; and consider agriculture as an entire culture, not solely as an industry.

That distinction of agri-culture vs. agri-industry falls into that familiar divide between feeeeelings versus cold hard calculations, the messy complexities of cultures versus the orderly business of numbers, all so often treated as though never the twain shall or should meet. It’s easy to speak about food as industry, business, markets…. advocacy within these lines means voting with one’s wallet—change through affecting consumer demand and business practices. That approach is significant in some ways, but individual wallets can only tilt the balance so much and address a few threads of the web that is largely woven by the big wallets. (Great, now I’m imagining a weird wallet-spider evil-leggy thing selling sugary things.) In regards to industrial vs organic agriculture, Sec. Vilsack’s declaration to let the market decide, let consumers choose, made me shake my head. Lack of public information and transparency in the food system, amongst other things, means that consumers often have no such choice and they'll be caught by the scary wallet-spider thing.

Mobilizing

Farmers' markets are like number one awesome fantastico, but there are two major barriers for people - location & cost. So I'm down with this burgeoning interest on starting up mobile markets using vans and buses.

In the DC area, Arcadia hopes to raise enough funds through Kickstarter to start a mobile market using an old, retrofitted school bus to connect local farms to schools, community centers, and DC's food deserts. They plan on making regular, weekly stops in Wards 5, 7, and 8, taking SNAP, WIC, FMNP payments, and providing educational resources.

While we're on the subject of trucks and buses, oh my, DC Central Kitchen wants to start a truck farm, inspired by the documentary, uh... truck farm. Well, what else would you call it? The truck would be used to visit local youth organizations and use the gardens as education about food and healthy eating.


the last kid cracks me up

Michelle Obama is a superhero whose weapon of choice is.... FRUIT!!

Awesome. I, too, envision a coat of arms emblazoned with broccoli.

Vegetable Van vroom vroom

This old timey photo is from Mallala Museum in South Australia! Their caption reads: "Albert Charles Coleman used this covered wagon to deliver fruit and vegetables from his shop to his customers in the townnship of Mallala and nearby areas." Nothing is new again, plus ça change, etc. etc. PeaPod is just old hat.

BUT, it's great to get more fresh produce delivery systems out to food deserts. East Harlem is going to get a refrigerated Veggie Van that will tote affordable produce from wholesale markets in the Bronx to senior centers and housing projects, with hopes to expand the reach to Inwood and Washington Heights. Interestingly, to start the van project, the Manhattan borough President's office has been working with NYC's Greenmarket program, even though it seems the produce won't be coming from the greenmarket producers (or is there an overlap with the wholesalers?). It'll be interesting to see how this program rolls out, how it's run and received, whether there will be organic produce offered, etc. But yay for bringing produce to the people!!