"food politics" news and stories

Shhh! Be quiet, or they'll find us.

I'm typing this from under the kitchen sink in my triple-bolted Brooklyn apartment where I'm cowering in fear of Chef Alice Waters. If the New York Post's Carla Spartos and the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd are to be believed, the founding Slow Foodista and her hench-polemicist Michael Pollan are hell-bent upon mugging every last McNugget-lovin' American of their free will, hard-earned cash and bags of pre-shredded iceberg lettuce.

It's my fault. I didn't speak up the first time they came and forced me, at Shun-point, to trek to Dan Barber's Blue Hill Farm and choke down sun-warmed, newly picked cherry tomatoes that tasted of summer and promise and the few times my grandfather was kind to me.

I remained silent when they dragged me hemp-bound to the Union Square Greenmarket to spend several dollars less than I would at my local C-Town grocery store to meet the folks who got their hands dirty growing ridiculously delicious heirloom peppers, beans and squash with more Earth-friendly farming practices. And I cried hot, sloppy tears when they pointed and laughed at my insufficiently grained bagel. See, according to Spartos' recent N.Y. Post editorial "Gourmonsters," Officer Waters and her ilk are out to shame us all.

"They're the food police and their patron saints -- Alice Waters and Michael Pollan, chief among them -- are on a crusade to tell you not just what you should eat, but how you should eat it.

Like an exclusive clique of anorexic cheerleaders, they think they're better than you."

Silly me.

Marion Nestle says that when she talks to people, she hears "this phenomenal sense of despair about their inability to do anything about climate change, or the disparity between rich and poor." A despair that she says is alleviated by a trip to the grocery store where "they can make decisions about what they are buying and send a very clear message." Perhaps people really do express these sentiments to her, but unless specifically directed, it seems unlikely that most people make the connection between relieving their feeling of despair over the "disparity between rich and poor" and shopping for groceries - in this case, probably organic ones.

But it is true that consumers have the power to change the marketplace and that they are doing it every day with the decisions they make at the grocery store, as The Economist mentioned in a recent article. The organic food industry is growing by leaps and bounds and there is an ever-increasing call for higher-quality food, held to higher standards, whether they are organic, local, fair-trade, hormone-free, etc.

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