Friday, October 14, 2005
Food for thought
Sometimes a meme can sneak up on you without making a sound. Today I read about the unstoppable rise of obesity in developing and developed countries (the US we all know about, but Kuwait?) and how smokers quitting have contributed to the rise in this epidemic.
Then I hear about this excellent essay by Tom Philpott which dissects the problem with the organic food "revolution" which seems to be stuck selling overpriced salad greens to yuppie bankers. The economies of scale which gave us the $2 bottle of wine and the £4 indian curry dinner have also put a premium on labor intensive "slow" foods with freshness and flavor, pricing them out of the market for most of the poor, large families in the developed West.
This isn't the worst, of course. As farming requires land, the high rate of urbanization in developed countries means most of our food actually comes from large econofarms in South America or Asia, packed and preservatized beyond recognition.
"Pricey land limits supply of local food; limited supply keeps food prices up; high prices maintain the class problem of the sustainable-food movement."
So while America's (and Britain's) poor grow fat off its neighbors' land; its rich dine on name-brand local farm produce. Farmers become celebrities and farms become brands, just like the TV chefs and their namesake restaurants of months gone by. All this would be astonishing to someone from the Philippines who traveled to Manila, because "planting rice is never fun". Or maybe not. Sonia's Garden pioneered the organic guilt-free bourgeois meal years ago, inviting punters at 800 pesos a pop to sample cold spaghetti and dalandan juice. So what do I know? Maybe we're even ahead of the curve back home.
Then I hear about this excellent essay by Tom Philpott which dissects the problem with the organic food "revolution" which seems to be stuck selling overpriced salad greens to yuppie bankers. The economies of scale which gave us the $2 bottle of wine and the £4 indian curry dinner have also put a premium on labor intensive "slow" foods with freshness and flavor, pricing them out of the market for most of the poor, large families in the developed West.
This isn't the worst, of course. As farming requires land, the high rate of urbanization in developed countries means most of our food actually comes from large econofarms in South America or Asia, packed and preservatized beyond recognition."Pricey land limits supply of local food; limited supply keeps food prices up; high prices maintain the class problem of the sustainable-food movement."
So while America's (and Britain's) poor grow fat off its neighbors' land; its rich dine on name-brand local farm produce. Farmers become celebrities and farms become brands, just like the TV chefs and their namesake restaurants of months gone by. All this would be astonishing to someone from the Philippines who traveled to Manila, because "planting rice is never fun". Or maybe not. Sonia's Garden pioneered the organic guilt-free bourgeois meal years ago, inviting punters at 800 pesos a pop to sample cold spaghetti and dalandan juice. So what do I know? Maybe we're even ahead of the curve back home.
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