1 post tagged “connecting dots”

Oregon Governor Starts Week on Foodstamps: A news story on the governor of Oregon's trip to the supermarket to spend $21 in food stamps, which is the average amount of food assistance provided to qualified families per week in Oregon.

It's both frustrating and amusing to read, to  realize how little many people understand living on a budget. I know I don't worry too much about how much I spend at the grocery store, despite my own upbringing on generic brands of hot dogs, cheese, spaghetti and instant potatoes necessitated by being poor.

It's also interesting to me that $21 a week can't feed a family in the United States. How much of that is because we want so much variety in our diet, so much colorfully packaged and convenient food? There are whole villages in some countries who can live off that amount of money, because they grow their own food, eat what is in season, and eat staples (staple crops, not metallic fasteners) every day.

I often hear that it is so expensive to eat well and healthfully. I've said so myself. But really, a lot of it seems to be because we make it so. A sack of rice, some dried beans, some canisters of spices, some oil, and some produce from a garden that costs next to nothing to have, and you can feed a family something way more nutritious than transfat peanut butter and macaroni and cheese. But you won't find the USDA recommending that anytime soon. The A in that acronym stands for agriculture, and the agricultural lobby is one of the most powerful in this country. The Farm Bill that subsidizes American farmers, and sometimes pays them NOT to grow things? How much of that money actually gets to real family farmers? Not a whole lot. The USDA claims that 91% of farms in the USA are family farms, but how many of those are contracted to corporations and agribusiness to sell and distribute their crops? How many of them actually earn over the poverty line for a family of four? Agriculture, like every other industry around, is corporatized. 

To an extent that makes sense, I suppose. Agriculture is an industry where huge economies of scale can be reached. Large-scale production and vertically integrated food systems are the most efficient, when efficiency is measured in how much money a corporation can make out of the least amount of effort. Corporate farming practices may also more readily involve the use of genetically modified crops, hormones, preservatives, color additives and insecticides, again with a view to maximising yield and profit.

I've drive through the Mississippi Delta in July, and watched planes spray chemicals and large machines harvest corn, beans and cotton so that it could be processed in a plant, packaged in  another, and then shipped to a produce distibutor (or textile mill) across the country and then sent along to the companies that then distibute them to restaurants and grocery stores. I've also met with family farmers in the region, who might plant 40 acres of corn, join a cooperative for processing or marketing it, make very little money, and then have to go and collect food stamps so they can drive into town to buy macaroni and cheese and peas and chicken.

Have you ever thought about the journey your food takes to reach your mouth? I never used to, really, not even after I read Fast Food Nation. I'm a carnivore, and I can't see becoming a vegetarian, so I deliberately try not to think too hard about where all the chickens I eat come from. Just like I try not to think about the animals that my life-saving medications were tested on. It's probably cowardly of me.

We now know quite a bit about the path pet food takes before it reaches our pets, and that path is international and full of potential contamination at intermediate points along the way. How much different is human food processing, I wonder? Processed food is practically a religion in this country. Foods are processed by large conglomerates too, and they would not want you to start eating rice and beans and home baked goods and your own produce any more than the corporate farmers would. One of the biggest is Altria Group-- you may know them as Philip Morris, the parent company of KRAFT, Marlboro, Miller Brewing, and more. Powdered cheese, cigarettes, and cheap beer: the American Way. At least you can't buy two of the three with food stamps, which is a program through, you guessed it, the USDA.

The USDA set the dietary guidelines, too. That food pyramid that suggests we all eat a huge amount of carbohydrates including bread, pasta, and rice (minus the beans)? Set by the USDA. 

Of course, I'm still about to go spend $10 on my lunch, and try not to think too hard about how it got to me AND about how that's half of how much some families have to spend in a week on food.