One of the things I love about teaching and presenting
material is how much it pushes you as a scholar. You present material and in the act of preparing and putting it
all together you have to write a story about the subject you are trying to
teach about. Story telling is a lot of what teaching is - you have to tell the
story in the right way, with the right frame to get your point across. You have to be careful of what narrative you
use, and not to traffic in tropes and stereotypes. However, whether you are teaching about society or mathematics
there still needs to be a narrative arc.
This pushes you to figure out what the large themes are, what the take
away is – where the plot twists and turns, who the actors are...
Then once you have presented your story, you get questions
and it just shatters the whole narrative.
To me, this is the best part. This is the moment you really figure out
what you know about a subject, and this is the moment that “Ah-ha!” can happen. I can’t tell you how often I present
something and from the questions asked and the way I am forced to explain my
thinking I get a whole new train of research.
Today, I presented on a subject both near and dear to me –
and a bit of a hobby – Food Politics.
Most academics I know have two subjects they study. One is dominant and the other is
peripherally related to the dominant subject, but secondary. You have to have something to turn to when
you are overwhelmed with you current subject.
For me food and food policy, is my “mistress” research. It is what I consume in dark corners, or on
my days off, or when I cannot possibly face my primary research anymore. I love reading about the ways people think
about food, consume food, and try to make it better – then rail against the
results.
Today I was asked why I study what I do, because it seemed
interesting but not like something people would often get into. I gave my stock “I am a science studies
person and I think proof is interesting,” answer, and then anecdotal stuff
about my struggle to eat food without soy…but the student asked what my
undergraduate major was (Psychology) and it made me remember where my interest
in food policy really began.
My first job out of college was as a social worker. I was a Case Manager for adults with severe
mental illnesses. I was 23, newly
married, and wholly ignorant of the world. I was an idealist; I had majored in
psychology in part because I thought people were interesting but primarily
because I wanted to help people. I
wanted to CHANGE THE WORLD – in that way that young people want to do. Though my stint as a social worker was brief
(I burnt out after three months) it was the most enlightening and depressing
experience of my young life. Having
been raised in a progressive and liberal household I had sympathies for what I
saw as the “struggle of the poor.” I
understood I had opportunities as a middle-class, white, American that were in
no way universal. Until I took that job
I had no idea how extensive that privilege was, or how hard it is for people to
overcome with hard work alone. I had no idea what being poor or poverty looked
like. I thought I did, I thought I had
seen it represented on television. What
I found out was that what most Americans think of as “poor” is really just
lower-middle class. I had no idea that some people live in what for lack of a
better term are called motels – week by week rentals with rooms not much larger
than a single bed and rents that are quite frankly outrageous – because they
can never manage to save enough to pay a month of rent up front. Of course the cost of the weekly rental
helps ensure that they never will. I
had never seen someone living out of their car while maintaining a job, or what
a homeless shelter looked like. I had
never seen poverty, hunger, desperation… I do not care to list all the things I
witnessed in those months, the result was that I realized how very privileged
and sheltered my life had been. It was incredibly humbling, and
overwhelming. Particularly as I
realized that my job as a social worker was primarily triage – stop the
bleeding – I didn’t really have a chance to heal the problem.
I remember the first day it was my turn to be on food box
duty. Many of our clients (that is what
they preferred to be called) made use of food pantries in addition to food
stamps to meet the needs of their household.
They often could not get to the food bank themselves. We as case
managers would take turns going out to the food bank with the paperwork for all
the clients from out team that needed food boxes, collecting the food boxes and
then distributing them. I went and
picked up eight food boxes that first day – which turned out to be eight
grocery bags of food. These were mostly
shelf stable items, cans of vegetables, Spaghetti-O’s, beans, cereal, and
pasta. But that week they included a
rare commodity – some fresh grapes. The
woman at the food bank was kind and matter-of-fact as she processed the paper
work and helped me haul the bags to the car.
She told me how lucky this group was to get fresh fruit, they rarely had
it to distribute. She then reminded me of policy that each family could only
get one box each month and to talk to the clients about how to avoid needing to
use the pantry in the future.
I set off to drive those eight boxes to eight families in
need. I don’t know exactly what I
expected of those homes, I only remember that what I found was not what I
thought would be there. Each home was
different. Some were in small motel
rooms like the one I mentioned, some lived in apartments, some people owned
their homes but just couldn’t afford food that month. They lived all over the city.
Each place, each person, each story was different. What was constant was that each person was
happy to see me – not a common occurrence in case management. They were happy
to see the food - even when some of them lamented about the type of food
available to them (“I hate green beans”, “ugh, wonder bread” “oh this pasta is
expired”– it ranged the gamut of tastes and concerns). Being a young and new social worker I dutifully
discussed food budgets with each person I delivered a box too. I was shocked at what I found. Contrary to what my younger self had thought
these individuals were doing all they could to make their budgets stretch. No, many did not cook from scratch as I had
been taught to advise, but they had very good reasons not too.
Some just didn’t have the time. One woman who cared for her sister worked two full-time jobs and
cleaned houses in her “down time.” When
was she going to find the hour plus a day to prepare a meal from scratch? Her sister was not able to prepare food
unsupervised so the family relied on quick and easy to prepare meals and often
fast food. There was an elderly woman
who lived on Social Security who had the time and know-how to prepare meals
from scratch, but her home only had a microwave. She didn’t even have a burner – just a hot plate that if the
landlord found out about she could be evicted for. Another woman (and overwhelmingly that day I spoke to women) did
prepare meals from scratch for herself and her children, but had trouble
accessing ingredients. She did not have
a car and the Phoenix bus system was woefully inadequate. Hauling home a gallon of milk the half mile
from the bus stop in 110-degree weather? – forget about it! Would it even be edible
by the time she made the hour-long trip home from the grocery store? She relied
on powdered milk, but the children hated it.
Again and again I found that though each person listened, either with
interest or an air of knowing this was the price of the food box, they made it
clear they had reasons for needing the food.
Yes, some of the clients I encountered had lost their food money through
illegitimate means – they spent it on drugs or alcohol – but this was the
minority of those that I saw. Seeing
the conditions they lived in and knowing the mental health challenges they
faced I began to see even this as not so much a personal failing, but a symptom
stemming from the system.
Ultimately the experience changed my life. It made me realize how much of the problems
we face as a society can be traced back to systemic issues. It got me to think about food and all the
moral issues that come with it. The way
we often deny the needy the right to have tastes and preferences (if you are
hungry enough you will eat it). The way
we deny them the right to desires and pleasure through food. The paternalistic notion that people are
poor or hungry or lacking in means because "they don’t know any
better." It also made me an
advocate of food pantries – Please people donate to your local food bank! You cannot imagine the good they do.
The concept of a food desert has caught on lately, and
certainly they are challenges to health and food security, but the problem goes
deeper than putting in a grocery store.
We need to be certain the people in a community can afford to shop there
– and have the time and resources needed to prepare the food found there.
Today I was asked, essentially, if taxing soda wouldn’t
work, what will? I answered that if we
want to address health we can’t just address weight – it is a poor indicator
and a lazy stand in for good public health practices. If we want to increase the health of the social body, we need to
increase access to fresh food AND the ability to prepare it. It is about
equalizing choice (no not that elegantly).
Having thought about
it I would now add the following. If
you want to combat the illnesses associated with poverty, raise the minimum
wage, increase public transit, and expand the safety net –including some form
of universal access to health care. We
might also try subsidizing the kind of food we want the public to eat, rather
than subsidizing dairy, meat and corn syrup and then calling the fall out from
it a personal failing.
A living wage will allow people to work fewer hours to meet
their basic needs – which gives them time to prepare food for their
families. A living wage means being
able to access transport to the store to buy food. It means no more working poor – people who cannot access services
but cannot meet their own needs even though they work full time.
Public transit means getting to a store with produce or a
farmer’s market and getting it home without a car, and without it going
bad. It also means more people walking
and less fumes in the air (environmental justice being a whole other important
topic).
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