Dear Lisa Miller, author of "The Dinner Divide: How Our Foodie Obsession Is Driving Americans Apart,"
An apple that has not been poisoned with chemical fertilizers and pesticides is not a "delicacy."
This is how far off the rails we are in this country, that the choice to eat healthy food can be described--and dismissed--in a national news magazine as somehow precious and self-indulgent at best, and as insensitive to the food-insecure poor at worst. My letter to Newsweek follows, although I don't notice that the magazine even includes a Letters to the Editor section any more, hmm.
Dear Editor,
The recent cover story on "The Dinner Divide: How Our Food Obsession Is Driving Americans Apart" is badly misguided. The author, Lisa Miller, suggests a cause and effect relationship between organic eating and food insecurity, as if everyone who chooses to eat healthy whole foods that have not been poisoned with chemical fertilizers and pesticides, or meat that has not been tainted with steroids and antibiotics (and the threat, ever-present on overcrowded feed lots, of E. coli) is taking the bread from the mouths of the poor. While she repeatedly refers to the "obsessive concerns of the foodies" in her circle, nowhere does she mention Big Food, the handful of companies that dominate the food industry and who have processed our food beyond recognition and healthfulness, and who are getting rich by getting Americans hooked on cheap, empty calories. Nor does she mention the unholy alliance between those industries and our own government, which has been subsidizing farmers to grow corn and soybeans almost exclusively for the past 20 years. All that corn has to go somewhere, and it goes into our food as high fructose corn syrup and other manufactured substances that make us fat and sick. And don't even get me started on fast food...
We have convinced ourselves (or more accurately, have been convinced by the millions of dollars spent every year in this country on food advertising) that our choices are more narrow than they really are, that it is always a choice between the $1 menu at McDonald's and an "overpriced" bunch of arugula. In fact, it is not hard or prohibitively expensive to eat better, but it does require buying real food and cooking it at home from scratch most of the time. Sustainably and humanely raised meat IS expensive, so I eat meat very rarely now, at one meal a week at most, but the local farmer's market is selling broccoli at 75 cents a head this week, and a bag of brown rice costs less than $2.00. You can throw away $1.50 on two liters of soda and ingest an excess of sugar, dyes and chemicals, or you can spend $3.00 on the same amount of farm fresh milk and get Vitamins A and D, Omega-3 fatty acids, calcium and phosphorus. We do have choices, and the organic movement, if that's what it is, and its leading spokespeople like Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, Marion Nestle and also documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock and chef Jamie Oliver, have done us a tremendous favor that Miller should acknowledge. They are having to teach us all over again the primal essential skill of how to eat. I am grateful for them. I guess that makes me a "foodie," but I am a healthy and happy one.
Sincerely,
Maura Mandyck
