Culture Shock

It was definitely fitting that he described organic food as being about little stories, because his story about Polyface Farms is my favorite in the book. The story about how “organic” came to be a thing, with the “People’s Gardens,” was a good one, too. I like the idea that organic implies more than just a different way of growing, that it’s also a different mode of distribution (that’s hopefully more local and more just to its workers) and even a different kind of cuisine. On the other hand, his description of organic nowadays certainly doesn’t live up to that at all, even if that’s what it implies: After a semester of reading about how regulations fail to protect food quality, it was annoying to read about regulations for organic labeling that seem to have the right idea but block out farms like Polyface because they’re aimed at big, industrial-type businesses.

Some gender-related notes: I noticed more discussion of women farmers in this chapter, like the woman who helped invent the bagged salad mix, but there weren’t very many of them. However, when he was discussing who the detailed labels at Whole Foods were targeting, he used feminine pronouns: She doesn’t want to feed her kids food with pesticides. Which reminded me of Perfection Salad, where the women were expected to have a home chemistry kit to test the food safety – it’s implied to be part of a mom’s responsibility here less directly, but that’s still what it comes out as. I also thought it was interesting that one farmer said organic isn’t as “macho” as conventional farming.

Sunday

9:30am: Bagel sandwich (egg, cheese, bacon); orange mango peach juice
1:00pm: Red apple; lemon muffin
6:30pm: Hazelnut chocolate candy
7:00pm: Two bowls of potato dumpling soup; grilled cheese; peppermint Hersey’s kiss
8:30pm: Chocolate chip cookies; green tea 11:00pm: Chamomile tea

Monday

7:30am: Peanut butter cranberry sandwich; water; earl grey tea
11:30am: Vegetable stir fry with chickpeas and brown rice
2:30pm: Herbal tea; cookie
6:00pm: Couscous, lentils, and butternut squash
8:00pm: Cookies; green tea

Tuesday

10:30am: Peanut butter cranberry sandwich; water; earl grey te
2:30pm: Couscous and lentils mixed with tomato hummus; green tea
4:30pm: Orange tea; yogurt covered raisins
7:00pm: Vegetable stromboli; pink lemonade 9:00pm: Chamomile tea

Wednesday

9:30am: Peanut butter cranberry sandwich; water; earl grey tea
11:30am: Orzo with zucchini, peppers and onions; banana; water
2:00pm: Banana
3:30pm: Berry black tea; cranberry blueberry cookie
6:30pm: Zucchini quiche; water
8:00pm: Chai tea with honey

Thursday

7:30am: Billy tea
8:30am: Bagel
12:15pm: Potato chips
4:00pm: Rice with cinnamon and pistachios
6:00pm: Two bowls of potato carrot soup; Wheat bread
7:00pm: Mini bar of chocolate, mini box of Nerds candy

Analysis: My roommate brought back a new cook book from Thanksgiving break, so we had a new cookbook! We also had a big thing of cookies that my Dad bought me when I went grocery shopping; I was surprised how many I ate just because they were there! They weren’t even particularly good cookies, it was just nice to have a convenient, sweet snack. And then when we went to cook delicious things from the new cookbook, we ran into the problem that they all required so many ingredients! As a college student who mostly only goes grocery shopping when my parents are able to take me and pay for it, I can’t stock up on enough vegetables to cook dishes with 4 or 5 different vegetables – they’ll all go bad before I have time to make more than a couple of dinners, and I’ll end up spending a lot more on groceries! Fortunately, I discovered a lot of really tasty dishes with only a couple of ingredients this week. Over the break I ate meat – I eat what my parents cook for me – but there are so many delicious, easy-to-prepare vegetarian meals that I can’t imagine I’ll go back to eating much meat even when I’m in Ireland next semester and I give up on being 100% vegetarian for a few months. I’ve even gotten in the habit of cooking light lunches after class rather than trying to grab food on the go on campus between classes, so the times I snacked on campus it was usually with friends or while working in the library. Writing down what I eat made me really appreciate my food-related routines, like having a cup of tea in the morning and then again after class, and picking a recipe to cook almost every evening with my roommate. Putting the kettle on or asking “what’s for dinner” are such mundane things, but they’re actually really relaxing.

I was surprised at how complicated corn is! The last thing I was expecting in chapter one was a detailed description of corn sex. One farmer made the very passing comment that corn is a “welfare queen” in that it’s been so heavily subsidized, and and I thought that was an oddly gendered comment to make. All of the farmers he spoke to were all men, at least in the corn section, but from that comment they didn’t see themselves as the ones receiving government aid for the price of corn – instead the speaker described corn as a popular image of a lazy, usually black, usually urban woman. That just doesn’t seem to fit corn at all, or the arguments about subsidies that it’s the farmer who needs them – it’s not like the corn cares one way or another! It sort of fit into what we’ve been discussing all semester about the demonizing of welfare programs, like schools asking all sorts of details so that only “worthy” families get free lunch. It’s also sort of fits with some other things we’ve read this semester that he describes the food itself as female – I’m thinking of Chiquita Banana and Aunt Jemima, who are also both personified female food.

On Friday, I walked the mile or so from campus to Bottom Dollar Food on Jefferson Davis Highway. It was around noon and quite cold but sunny. When I got there, a lot of the class was already gathered at a strange counter-like area at the front of the store; a poster above, in the same handwriting font as all the rest of the signage, said that it was for “Putting away purchases, putting money back in your wallet, gloating,” in English and Spanish, though the Spanish sign didn’t translate quite the same – it said “being happy about your purchases,” not “gloating,” though there is an equivalent word for gloating in Spanish. (I think it has a harsher connotation.) Also in the front of the store was a sign explaining how the prices were so cheap – for example, because of cheap displays, selling only popular brands, and low overhead costs, which I later decided meant the fact that the shelving units seemed to be older than me.

I noticed the same phenomenon among shoppers at Bottom Dollar as I noticed at Wegmans – there were several pairs of women shopping together, and men shopping alone. However, there were far fewer families at Bottom Dollar – I noticed only one – and almost everyone was older. In fact, the marketing inside the store was targeted at older shoppers – there were signs with pictures of older people that said “When I’m living on a fixed income, Bottom Dollar has what I need for less,” or something along those lines. There were also far more people of color among the shoppers. A few people had full carts and seemed to be stocking up for Thanksgiving, but most people shopped very slowly and were only grabbing a few things. Items which counted for WIC support were clearly marked.

The store was much smaller than Wegmans, and didn’t have any specialized areas like a deli or bakery – in fact, they cited that as one of the reasons for low costs. The employees wore brightly colored t-shirts, and there weren’t very many people working the floor. (All the employees I noticed were younger white men.) Two things that were striking was the lack of brands available – for example, only two brands of cake mix, compared to about a half-dozen at the Giant down the street – and the displays, which included old-looking shelves and cardboard boxes (some festively gift-wrapped.) There was also a lot of signage with a friendly, joking tone and occasional cartoon illustrations, which emphasized both the low prices and the quality of the food.

The store seemed to target a Hispanic market. The small vegetable section, which mostly didn’t have any of the more “exotic” fruits or vegetables you might find at other stores, included a prominent display of produce common in Hispanic cooking, and corn flour on the same shelf. The layout of the store was different from other stores I’d attended – normally, frozen prepared meals are on the far left of the store, the last place customers go, but in this store they were on the far right, the first aisle customers walk through. There also seemed to be a heavy emphasis on prepared food overall – I remember finding a variety of canned meats and baked beans. Foods were also displayed with easy meals in mind, as in a cardboard display of peanut butter, jelly, and bread.

I had never been in a Bottom Dollar Food before. When Food Lion rebranded itself, my neighborhood was deemed affluent enough to get a Bloom, though most of the surrounding areas got Bottom Dollar. We were rather dismissive of both as a family, and changed shopping habits to avoid Bloom, which seemed overpriced. I was never quite sure why anyone would want to shop at someplace called “Bottom Dollar” – doesn’t that just sound like code for “bad food?” – but they obviously work very hard on advertising, even within the store, to convince people that they’re getting all the same quality, but at a better price than people who shop at other places.

The description of the banana industry in this book really seemed to reflect a lot of trends that were mentioned in earlier readings. The introduction talked about vertical integration pushing smaller farmers out of business, just like in the chicken industry (though perhaps a bit earlier, it seemed like?) It talked about how American companies put the responsibility for safety when using pesticides and picking or packing fruit on the workers, not on the business, which seems similar to how Rachel Carson talked about pesticides, and how workers in chicken factories were treated. The author also mentioned that fresh fruit consumption decreased with the rise of processed food. The companies responded by “branding” bananas – emphasizing aesthetics, choosing particular species, and having a character almost like Betty Crocker in Something from the Oven.

The discussion of women’s changing roles on plantations was also quite interesting. By the 60s, it sounds like they were in similar positions to the women in the chicken factory – having the worse, most monotonous jobs. But before that it sounds like they had important roles to play that seriously impacted plantation life and the banana industry but weren’t officially recognized.

Forgot to post these last week…

http://www.whatsonmyfood.org/ List of pesticide residues on various types of food

http://extras.insidebayarea.com/bodyburden/bodyburden.html Quiz to estimate your body burden

Have fun!

I was fully ready to read 150 pages about how gross chicken is, about how horrible factory farms are and about all the germs and unhealthy grossness along the conveyer belt in processing plants. I don’t eat chicken; I was looking forward to feeling smugly satisfied at reading about some nasty part of the food process that I don’t really have much to do with.

I was not at all ready to read 150 pages about how the chicken industry treats its workers. I thought the most striking scene in the book was the boldness of the women explaining how useless their manager’s safety lesson was – his advice was fine, but the conditions in the factory were such that they couldn’t do their jobs safely. I thought it was strange that older women got the most difficult jobs (or specifically, the jobs most prone to repetitive stress injuries.) Why are the women who work in the plant older – where are younger immigrant working? Or are there just not as many younger immigrant women; the older women come over with their families to the South because they can, as they couldn’t in California?

But really, his description of the factory was just disturbing. Not because of the condition of the chickens – they’re dead, what do they care? – but for how the workers were treated. It was such a mess of racism and sexism and putting profits above workers that it made me really upset.

I have to start by saying that Vickie Schufer’s talk made me want to spend a day roaming the woods picking berries and nuts. Foraging sounds like so much fun.

I was a bit confused at what the definition of “wild” is. In suburban Virginia, we don’t really have a lot of wild spaces – I imagined a national park, where you’re sometimes not allowed to forage, or the woods behind my friends’ houses, which might be close enough to the highway to be suspect. Schufer said the best place to find them was a farm, but does that mean you’re growing them on purpose? Is it wild anymore at that point, or is it just a different form of agriculture? I had the same uncertainty when she showed a picture of a Native American village with that quote about foraging – the picture had fields with nice straight rows that looked far more agricultural than wild to me. Is there a huge difference? Is it more about the kind of food you’re getting or the way you get it?

The image is from Fed Up With Lunch, a recent blog project where a teacher ate a school lunch every day and documented it.

The beginning few chapters of School Lunch Politics by Susan Levine made the most sense to me. When she was describing the conflict between female domestic scientists emphasizing nutrition and men in the Department of Agriculture hoping to stabilize the market as school lunch programs developed during the Great Depression, I could easily picture the earnest women we read about in Perfection Salad continuing their quest for bland but healthy food, and the men carrying on their long-standing reluctance to recognize research by women and focusing on less domestic priorities. But once it got into the tangle of policies, geographical differences, different regulatory agencies and executive offices and acronym programs by the 1960s, I was SO confused. I thought it was interesting that the need for school lunch was documented in part by the increase of working mothers as easily as during World War II, and that during the same era the need for good nutrition was painted as an almost entirely masculine concern – boys need good food to grow up to be good soldiers!

I’ve read this book before, but I forgot what detailed attention it gives to animal rights philosophy. One thing that really bothered me was how much he cited evolutionary theory. While it’s pretty solidly fair to guess that we’re evolved to eat meat, assuming that hunting – which is, of course, a masculine thing in his description, while he describes gathering with his mother and siblings as a more feminine activity – is something hard-wired into the male brain, and that he should be able to get some primal satisfaction and understanding of his diet out of it despite having no prior experience of it, seemed a bit silly to me. I found his arguments about culture as a guiding force for healthy eating to be much more convincing than assuming that all men have an instinct for hunting and meat-eating due to Evolution. (Would women have the same instinct, I wonder? I don’t think traits like that gender-select that way… Not sure though. Gender-based arguments from evolution get pretty complicated.)