June 09, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:John Braue, who always has
John Braue, who always has a ton of nifty things on his blog which is why you should read him every day, has this interesting piece on trying to grow your own food. What appears to have started it off is a post bemoaning the fact that the urban poor can't afford fruits and vegetables and have to eat cheap, malnutritious food.
Not necessarily so.
First of all, fruits and vegetables aren't that expensive if you stay out of the raspberry case. I'm a vegetarian (I will allow a brief pause for shocked exclamations at the thought of a conservative vegetarian, but there you are. I am. A non-political, lacto-ova vegetarian. It's a health choice, not an idealogical one, and I do occasionally eat a steak. But I'm getting off the point.) Anyway, my diet, even eating off the expensive end of the vegetable case, is a lot cheaper than a meat-eater's, even if they're eating cheap meat. Eggs: $2 a dozen, vs. $3-$4/pound for the cheapest chicken or fatty ground beef (In New York. But we have a lot of urban poor, so I think it's relevant.) Beans and rice: about $1.00 per serving, if you use the more expensive canned beans and toss in pricey accoutrements like fresh red peppers and cilantro. Corn casserole can be made for under 50 cents a serving if you use the generic crackers. If you focus your budget on fruits and vegetables instead of crappy meat protein sources, you can more than afford them.
And it's not like the urban poor don't have the ability to cook with less expensive protein. Any latin american or afro-caribbean immigrant comes from a culinary tradition that relies on vegetable, not meat, protein. African americans, too, have many dishes in their cultural repertoire that could substitute for fast food, more cheaply and nutritiously, although of course african americans are a couple generations further removed from such food as a dietary staple. As the health experts I spoke with for my fast food article told me, the various impoverished communities in New York have a traditional diet that's very healthy, and loaded with nutrition.
So why don't they cook that way?
First of all, because they don't have to. Meat is a status food. People coming here from Mexico where meat might be on the table a couple of times a week unsurprisingly revel in the ability to have it every single day -- just like your grandparents did in the American dietary revolution that followed World War I. People are both culturally and biologically conditioned to eat as much of the stuff as possible. I can't tell you the consternation that my dietary habits cause my farming family.
Second of all, those traditional foods take time. Your affluent New Yorker gets lower fat takeout food, or buys something healthy that's pre-prepared from the supermarket. The poor are both less likely to understand how bad their diet is for them, and lack access to fast, healthy food. Whether it's because work is more pressing than it used to be, or leisure is simply too appealing, they choose fast, unhealthy food over the equally inexpensive traditional foods that would take longer to prepare.
Fresh fruits and vegetables take time. Oh, tomatoes are great raw -- but green beans? Peas? Squash? Even a salad takes too much time when you're tired . . . the problem isn't that the poor lack access to fresh fruits and vegetables; it's that they make choices about what to consume that are very unhealthy. But, given the rest of their lives, unhealthy may turn out to be their best option.
Posted by Jane Galt at June 9, 2002 11:29 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links