Table Talk

By Dave the 1st

November 15, 2007 12:15 PM | Link to this

Oh YES it is!

Grow your own food folks and stop acting like you are better than everyone else.

Why is it even a “movement”? Just do it and leave it at that.

This is no different from a “born again” trying to convert everyone they know.

By ron

November 15, 2007 12:24 PM | Link to this

The buy local,at the higher the price,the better,crowd is simply the wine tasting crowd with a new bunch of adjectives,and a new interest.Conversations are laced with words such as antioxidant and free range and sun kissed,etc.They have a whole new set of clothes for going to the farm to select just the right haricot vert to acccompany their free range chicken.Now that particular free ranger there had to be executed by shotgun as it couldn’t be caught.They don’t kow that.

By kg

November 15, 2007 12:54 PM | Link to this

The expense of locally grown food has nothing to do with elitism. It is only about economics. Locally grown food will never be able to compete on price with big agricultural and food companies, who can take full advantage of their economies of scale and government subsidies. If there weren’t people willing to pay a premium for locally grown food, then there would be no locally grown food at all.

To improve the quality of inexpensive food, you will have to get the attention of the federal government, which hashes out the farming subsidies to the big agricultural states. For example, favoring sugar beets or sugar cane over corn syrup would probably make many inexpensive food products less unhealthy.

By Kimberly A. Davis - Historic College Park

November 15, 2007 1:00 PM | Link to this

I don’t think local food is elitist at all. You can get great food at any given price range.

One great recent find is Andre’s on the square in Newnan (only 35 mintues from downtown). It’s incredibly tasty with prices that will make you feel like you’re getting a bargain for the incredible creative food! I had oysters with spinach and goat cheese last night (my mouth waters when I even think about how incredible they are!).

You can find great food at any price.

By Syd

November 15, 2007 1:28 PM | Link to this

Pretty soon the elitist will want the government to wipe our a$$’s.

By GoodFoodLover

November 15, 2007 1:40 PM | Link to this

While “good foods” (fresh locally, sustaibably, organically grown without over use of pesticides and antibiotics, etc) are currently more highly priced than foods from industrialized agriculture, it is not because these foods actually cost more to produce. When you consider the amount of fuel, water (this should hit home in Atlanta right now) and other resources required to produce, process, distribute and market most industrialized foods, the cost becomes very high. This is currently off-set by government subsidies that benefit large-scale industrial farmers instead of local, small-scale farmers. They are able to undercut prices and create an every-growing share of the market. Changing our governmental policies relating to food and agriculture would make a huge difference in increasing access to better foods for everyone, regardless of socio-economic status.
Also, your article indicates that Alice Waters thinks people should give up cell phones to afford better food, but I believe she was really pointing out that we can and will afford whatever becomes culturally mainstream. This isn’t an issue of choosing phones over good food, but a look at what we prioritize as a society. Good foods are more difficult to afford and access right now, and this won’t change until the public demands it, but it’s possible.

By Mike

November 15, 2007 2:13 PM | Link to this

It’ all Bush’s fault!

By lovelyliz

November 15, 2007 2:37 PM | Link to this

Is the local food movement elitist?

I believe the complete opposite is true. Besides the savings in transportation costs, local food is fairly consistent. How many cookbooks have been given as gifts over the years only to have to intended cook give up because they can’t find needed ingredients?

You are also more likely to help family farms as opposed to agri-business, the Wal-Marts of the food chain. Local farmers are more likely to support the local economy.

By catlady

November 15, 2007 3:17 PM | Link to this

Elitist? No, but I feel rich each and every day (which is about 300 days a year) that I spend outside in my garden producing the food my family eats. I have gardened wherever we have lived, even if on a mini scale. We have too many people too lazy or cheap to grow their own. Walmart food is cheaper than mine (if you factor in ANY kind of “wage” for me) but it is fresh and unpoisoned and I am in control of it, which makes it much more of a bargain than the cheap food.

By Gail

November 15, 2007 3:20 PM | Link to this

Basic fruits and vegetables are not expensive. If people choose fast foods instead, so be it.

By Drew

November 15, 2007 3:36 PM | Link to this

Gail I feel you’re missing the point. We’re not talking about going to Kroger’s wimpy produce section and buying some fruit from South America. We’re talking about local, seasonal produce. Unfortunately, those kinds of items are very hard to find (I can’t just go out and buy them on my way home from work, I have to travel to the local Saturday markets in town) and tend to be priced equally or above the price of the produced shipped from Peru. I think the point of this is that local food should cost less and be available to everyone. I don’t expect the farmers to drop their prices just because we ask, but if we adopt the practice of buying locally, we create a need - once a need is created, more farmers grow more food and more competition is established. It’s simple supply and demand. Right now, there seems to be ignorance to the fact that much of our food is imported and the quality suffers a great deal because of it. A classic example is a grocery store tomato.

By dave

November 15, 2007 4:00 PM | Link to this

Hey….you SHMUCKS go ahead and keep eating and drinking pesticides. Heck you spray it all over your lawns and in your homes. Why would you care what you actually eat and ingest into your own bodies. Pizza Pockets and Bagel Bites are yummy…..right? My favorite is eating dead rotting flesh pieces shrink wrapped and made to look pretty in a store….you know…from animals that were fed garbage and dosed with more drugs then a dime store hooker…..

By Sri

November 15, 2007 4:04 PM | Link to this

Hello Elizabeth,

Thank you for calling it what it is. As a former Decatur resident, I often encountered people who knew exactly what was good for the rest of us. So, you had to vote for only one party (Dems), you had to hate the current President, you had to have only one political ideology (liberal/progessive)….you had to be into spirituality, you had to go to yoga classes, eyou had to drink fine wine, etc etc etc

While I personally never had any issues with the choices that people made for themselves (elitist or not), what I did dislike was the snobbishness that folks had over people who did not follow their unwritten diktats. They had a very straitjacketed approach and were, ironically guilty of that very fault that they accused others of.

By Truthifier

November 15, 2007 4:05 PM | Link to this

Oh good grief! I grew up with a vegetable garden in the back yard but we certainly weren’t elite. Ms. Waters needs to drop the victimization crap. People make choices. Just because your choices don’t allow you to also enjoy everyone else’s choices does not mean the other’s are elitist. Nor does it in any way support the asinine argument that the government should be responsible for ensuring that people can go to the farmers market. This is really one of the stupidest things I have ever heard.

By no food snobs here

November 15, 2007 4:12 PM | Link to this

Isn’t this just the way things have traditionally been done - you go to the market on a daily basis (before we had supermarkets) and buy the fresh fare that the local vendors (the only kind there are) have to sell? Makes perfect sense to me. Believe me, I am not a food snob at all, just a garden variety schmo.

By Truthifier

November 15, 2007 4:33 PM | Link to this

Tips for those who think they can’t afford good, healthy food:

1) Go to your local farmers market toward the closing time — they will often drastically discount their produce so they don’t have to cart it back home.

2) Don’t buy all of the “gourmet” items they may be selling, but instead stick to basic items like fruits, vegetables and legumes.

3) If you find a bargain, stock up and freeze it and then use later.

4) If you really can’t make it to a market, buy some seeds and plant your own garden. This is incredibly cheap and will provide you with a rewarding hobby.

See, it’s really quite simple if you focus on possibilities instead of excuses.

By alan from Atlanta GA.

November 15, 2007 4:55 PM | Link to this

Hey Dave how dare you call someone a schmuck you putz. they both mean the same, it’s just that people have made these yiddish curses generic. I find it insulting. I prefer natural foods, but I’m not going to spend lots of extra money to buy it. There are many people in Atlanta who cannot have backyeard gardens due to living in apts. etc. I buy what I want to buy, and no dave who gets shtupped every day has the right to call another person a male sex organ.

By katrina

November 15, 2007 5:19 PM | Link to this

Kimberly A. Davis, do you really think that oysters are a local food? I’m not really sure what the point of your post was, because restaurants aren’t really being discussed here. I think you’re just trying to sound rich and… oh… ELITIST!

By BPJ

November 15, 2007 5:20 PM | Link to this

This issue isn’t just one of “people making choices” and “capitalism at work”. It’s a matter of government subsidies to gigantic industrial farms. The government has been interfering in the market for decades, against local foods.

One reason a lot of people don’t each much in the way of fruits and vegetables (the healthiest choices) is because most of the ones offered in grocery stores have all the flavor of sawdust. I’m probably being unfair to the better grade of sawdust.

By Noelle

November 15, 2007 5:36 PM | Link to this

It’s not about cost. It’s about convenience, in some cases, and just plain laziness in others. It’s easier and faster to go through a drive-thru or buy a preservative-laden boxed/frozen dinner than it is to choose items and plan meals based on what’s in season, and to cook from scratch.

(And yes, I’ve been guilty of laziness like that myself, but that’s the exception, not the rule.)

Convenience foods are cheap because they’re made by big businesses who deal in volume and often rake in big government subsidies to offset their costs (corn being the worst offender by far; thanks, Iowa caucuses). Much of the cost savings is offset by shipping and preservation expenses, but those companies’ shareholders want to see big profit numbers, so the prices are padded.

None of the cost considerations address health concerns, either. In the short term, the effects of things like E. coli in spinach and Salmonella in peanut butter are much more widespread because of centralized production. In the longer term, fast/convenience foods are nearly always unhealthy — loaded with fat, sugar, salt, and preservatives.

Beyond all that, fresh local foods simply taste better. Anyone who’s grown tomatoes or bought them from a roadside stand in midsummer knows that.

I know it’s not possible for most people to eat nothing but local/organic/fresh foods. But I do think it’s worth a little effort — and yes, even a little extra cost — to do what we can. That may be idealistic, but it’s certainly not elitist.

By Karl Marx

November 15, 2007 6:20 PM | Link to this

Consumers shouldn’t have the ability to exercise free will with regard to their eating habits.

Only the government should be able to specify what and when we should eat—along with the specific quantities.

We should have government employees monitor our food consumption and those violating the government policies should be taxed more heavily. And bourgeoisie Republicans should be taxed extra heavy because they are, after all, Republicans.

The government could hire hundreds of thousands of dietitians, exercise physiologists, nurse practitioners, and yoga instructors who could drive to peoples’ homes to provide personal consultation—all free of charge, of course.

Chef Alice Waters, who really sounds like a genius when it comes to these things, could be the new Secretary of Food Specification and Monitoring—a cabinet level position. Because when it comes to people making choices about what foods they should eat, we just can’t trust such an important decision to people.

Does that make me anti-choice?

By mo

November 15, 2007 6:54 PM | Link to this

Ms. Lee asks an interesting question. But before I answer it, I wanted to address a slight mis-statement she made. When speaking of fast food, Ms. Waters did identify it as cheap & easy to consume but not endlessly replaceable. In fact, she said quite the opposite. It has huge hidden costs for the environments health, our energy security, and the personal health of consumers (and their downstream health care costs). The system which produces fast food is not a sustainable one.

I think Noelle,BPJ, Drew, GoodFoodLover, and kg all make very good points about the ways in which the food landscape is a very uneven playing field, tilting the spoils heavily towards big-ag, fast food, and processed food.

The quadruple whammy of big-ag subsidies, fast food’s economy of scale, their marketing budgets, and its relative convenience in a country where the vast majority of the country’s population is too busy or tired from work to seek out these foods and then prepare them, give them a huge leg up with price and time sensitive consumers trying to navigate the food landscape.

As far as elitism goes, you have to have a normalizing discussion about ‘real’ pricing and availability. Certainly, the people who are consumers of this food right now are a small but growing minority, but a minority that, as represented by yesterday’s audience, is disproportionately white and upper middle class. (I wouldn’t go so far as to put a political stamp on them, though.) The audience and the talk was self-conscious of this and is actively working for ways to expand to the entire population.

For availability, Ms. Waters current goal of getting good food in public schools and sounds like the most egalitarian thing of all. Though it is only part of the puzzle, it is essential for re-growing supply and knowledge for the up and coming generations. Its a systemic solution that hopefully will become and become self-perpetuating as those kids grow up.

If she comes in for any criticism here, its because she was not able to concisely answer in the Q&A session some of the rubber-meets-the-road specifics of deploying what she’s accomplished in the last 10 years with public schools in the SF bay area with a national program. There are many challenges to be met, but I don’t think anyone argues with the goal.

To accomplish the goal, she made the comment about cell phones, sneakers, and video games. She wasn’t saying people must give those up. Just that when you’re on a budget, whether personal, household, state, or federal you must prioritize. And for what you deem important, you will find the money to allocate. Americans spend the least of any industrialized nation of our household budgets both as a gross amount or a percentage on food. Surely, there’s room for improvement there.

For pricing issues, I think discussions of those are usually way off the mark. A good article for Ms. Lee would be an actual side-by-side comparison of the price of things from the produce section in the Kroger’s vs. the prices at a farmer’s market [FM] in season. The FM’s prices are often the same or lower. If they are higher it is usually a case of organic vs. non-organic, in which case a price premium of 10-20% is totally justified. An exception to this might be the store Whole Foods where the prices of the their produce, whether organic or not, are often higher, testing the boundaries of what their more affluent customer base will pay. (Ironically, for their ‘processed’ items, like say, organic pasta sauces, they and Trader Joe’s are often cheaper by 30% or more than the prices in the set-aside section for those items at Kroger’s and Publix; a layout & pricing choice that plays heavily into the idea that ‘organic’ == elitist, at these stores.)

The last thing I’ll say about elitism: certainly some of the current consumers of local food can be a bit of a condescending boor when go on with lush description of the food they ate. But the food IS genuinely good. Certainly some are doing this to be trendy or sound sophisticated (and by proxy seem wealthy). Ideally, this will pass when things become more ubiquitous. On the flipside, you don’t see any comments here about pretentious farmers.

By Nita

November 16, 2007 8:12 AM | Link to this

There might be some who are elitists (as there are in all movements or groups), but the basic bottom line is you are what you eat. If you want to eat crap, you will have crap health, crap well-being, and probably a crappy early death (after you’ve spent all your money on crappy healthcare). Period.

By Dan

November 16, 2007 8:55 AM | Link to this

So now a chef is speaking at the CDC on the benefits, economics and sociology of fresh local food. ARE YOU KIDDING ME. She is a chef! I wonder who paid for her trip. as far as not being able to afford good food, you can by a chicken potatoes and veggies at kroger for less than a couple of super size “value” meals at mcdonalds.
People eat poorly out of laziness not lack of money

By mhays

November 16, 2007 12:30 PM | Link to this

If by “elitist” you mean inacessible to most people, I’d agree with that. Most posters here have access to a car, farmer’s market, or a natural food chain. Unfortunately, these things are out of reach to a majority in the US, both through lack of access and lack of education. While I applaud Chef Waters for her call to educate people, her statement doesn’t address the access problem.

The “Local,” “Organic,” and “Natural” food movements are not going to have any measurable positive effects if they are only accessible to a wealthy and/or well-educated minority - location and transportation are huge hurdles for the underpriviledged to overcome. Let’s face it, the median income in the US is $48,201. In the United States nearly 24% of Americans live below 60% of median disposable income. I’m betting that that 24% of Americans (who are’t participating in this discussion because they don’t have access to the internet) probably don’t shop at Krogers or Wal-Mart, but at the local gas station or 7-Eleven. Giving up a cell phone or sneakers (supposing, of course, you have them to give up) doesn’t buy you a car to get across town to the farmer’s market - and it sure won’t get you the gasoline you’d need for access from a remote rural area.