All You Can Eat

From Real Change, the local paper that employs the unemployed homeless in our city.
April 22, 2009

The Locavore's Dilemma
by: Rosette Royale , Assistant Editor

Everyday, millions of people don’t get enough to eat. Joel Berg can’t stop thinking about them

Walking into the Whole Foods on Westlake and Denny downtown is like stepping into an epicurean wonderland: the four-pound containers of perfect strawberries (on sale, $7.99), the bound spears of asparagus (organic, from California, $5.99 a pound), the steam tables with chicken teriyaki and spicy rice ($7.99 a pound) and the glistening seafood display. Here, there’s everything you could want and things you didn’t even know you could want.

Joel Berg sees the want too, but from a different perspective. To him, the abundance on display, and its attendant cost, speaks of gross inequality. He points to the snow peas, at $6.99 a pound. “For peas?” he asks, exasperated. And don’t get him started on the high-end cheeses.

Berg spends a lot of time thinking about food or, more precisely, why some people have it and others don’t. As the director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, he works to represent that city’s 1,300 soup kitchens and pantries, along with the 1.3 million New Yorkers who use them. Prior to his current post, he spent eight years with the USDA during the Clinton years, where he concentrated on programs to end hunger.

All of this work, this passion, has fueled his latest endeavor, “All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America?” (Seven Stories Press, $22.95), a treatise that examines a sad truth of our country: every night, one in eight people goes to bed hungry. Full of hard numbers and a good dash of wit, the book is a call to the president — and the populace — to take a hard look at our nation’s hunger.

And so, after a quick stroll through the grocery store, with his sense of indignation on high alert, Berg sat down for a chat in the café. With a scone before him and a sparrow hopping from table to table, dining on dropped crumbs, Berg let loose on billionaires, foodies, p-patches and the benefits of canned food.

Let’s start with the most basic question and take it from there: Just how hungry are we in this country?

We’re less hungry than Darfur and North Korea, less hungry than we were in 1910, but more hungry than we were in 1979. And 36.2 million Americans [now] live in households that can’t afford enough food. We almost entirely ended the problem in the 1970s and we’ve gone backwards — basically because of Reaganism and the false belief that we can slash social programs and leave it up to charities to solve the problem. So today we have people choosing between food and rent, between food and health care.

Now, the levels of food insecurity we have in America are devastating to people’s psychological well-being, their physical health, their ability to learn in school, their ability to stay in jobs, all that. So it’s a very low bar that we’re doing better than North Korea. The fact that a country of 400 billionaires has 36 million people who don’t know where their next meal is coming from really is a disgrace. [Picks up a scone.] He says as he stuffs his mouth with a delicious raspberry Whole Foods scone. [Chuckles.]

When you say hunger, what do you mean?

I consider anyone who, on a semi-consistent basis, can’t afford all their food — their family’s needs — to be hungry. I consider anyone who is forced to use a soup kitchen or food pantry to be hungry. We casually use the word hunger in American society all the time. Wealthy people, when they’re a little late for their luxury dinner at a fancy restaurant, say, “Boy, I’m really hungry.” I actually collect pop culture references to the word “hungry,” or “hunger” — “Venus and Serena are Hungry for a Win,” “Executives Hungry for a Promotion” — and yet our society begrudges using that term where it relates to poor people who don’t have enough food. In fact, the Bush administration stopped using the word “hunger.”

What?

To be ultra-technical: the USDA, when I was there, developed a “food insecurity methodology.” They basically said tens of millions of Americans are food insecure — they’re juggling food, rationing food. And I think that really describes the problem in the United States, more so than outright starvation. But the USDA had a more severe category, so the people with the most severe food insecurity were described as “hungry.” The Bush administration stopped the use of that word and started calling them “people with very low food security.” They said, “Oh, when people think of hunger they think of a starving kid in Darfur, not of Americans juggling food.” I think that’s preposterous.

And the greatest irony of all is: virtually no one in America will admit to being hungry. I met a gentleman in Minnesota. He was living in a shelter and he was insistent that there was no hunger in America and that it was really easy to get food. I said, “How often do you eat?” He said, “Once a day.” I said, “How long does it take you to get that food” He said: “Oh, about a two-hour round trip each way from the shelter.” So America is socialized into telling us that we don’t have such problems here, or if you do, it’s your fault.

So here we are in Whole Foods and, boy, is there a lot of food. How can we have so much and there still be hunger?

The problem in America has never been lack of food. The problem in America has been lack of money to buy food. Other countries have an excuse. Y’know, they have drought, horrible agricultural diseases, civil war, colonialism, dictators. We have no excuse whatsoever, except that we have a vast amount of inequality of wealth. And not only is food too expensive for most low-income people, the most nutritious food — like some of the food here — is ridiculously expensive. What was it, like $6.99 [a pound] for asparagus, for snow peas? The average food stamp allotment’s a dollar a meal. So you could get one-sixth a portion of snow peas for your meal. I like full portions, not one-sixth portions.

And by the way, I apply that to my friends in the foodie movement who — I love them dearly — are extraordinarily class biased. Someone wrote in a newspaper in upstate New York, “We should replace community food stamps with community gardens, teach self-reliance.” I calculate in the book that the volume of food you would produce by community gardens would never come anything close to the food stamps program, even if you dramatically increased the number of community gardens. So we need a little more understanding of what it’s like to be poor among the non-poor population in America.

Here we have a really successful p-patch program: 6,000 urban gardeners, 23 acres. They donate food to food banks. There’s this growing movement: “We can help solve food issues.” You’re saying that’s not true?

It’s not true. And we have a ridiculous triple standard when it comes to food that somehow we can become self-reliant. Even the most adamant self-help gardeners don’t grow the cotton for their own shirts.

The reality is when it comes to everything besides food, we understand that there are pluses and minuses of a mechanized society. Some foodies use a laptop made overseas to post a rant about how everyone’s immoral for buying food that’s not local. People need to accept that there are some horrible things about the international agriculture system — they don’t pay high enough wages, they do some horrible things to the environment, they promote obesity by promoting corn syrup over processed foods — but creating cheaper prices through mechanization is not a bad thing for poor people.

So these gardens are helpful, I support them, and there’s lots of good reasons to have community gardens: If you’re in a low-income neighborhood and there’s a lot of crime and people are scared to come out onto the streets, having a community garden can really bring people out of their house, reduce crime. And I believe that kids who grow their own food and have a direct connection to that are going to eat more nutritiously throughout life. That being said, I caution folks [about saying] that it’s a replacement for some serious social justice, for serious living wage jobs, for a serious safety net. It is not.

Also it’s culturally biased. If you’re a Puerto Rican or Dominican immigrant living in New York, saying you can never have a plantain again is pretty culturally biased. And by the way, foodies have to accept [that] being able to get a pretty good orange throughout the year isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

The reason I focus on the foodies is because these are folks who think of themselves as progressive — they’re anti-war, they’re for gay rights and women’s rights and other things — but sometimes they are hopelessly out of it when it comes to poor people. When you look at all the blogs and left-wing magazines, there’s Guantánamo, there’s gay rights, women’s rights, the environment — all of which I care deeply about — but there is little regard to hunger and poverty in anything the white upper-middle-class left has focused on. Today’s average white upper-middle-class activist has had no personal connection in their family, or life, with poor people. Ever.

That’s a generalization. There must be some.

There are some. But this society is so segmented. The upper-middle class tends to go to schools with non-poor people, they’re in different kinds of jobs than poor people. The only place in American society that non-poor people regularly interact with poor people is soup kitchens and food pantries — they call them food banks here.

I’ll just give you one more example: I posted a few things on Huffington Post. I did a thing on Obama’s anti-hunger plan: I got one or two posts. I commented on Michael Pollan, who’s a big foodie advocate: I got 50 posts. So yes, I know I’m painting a broad, broad brush and it’s probably a little unfair.

And I also think that, because [poverty is] so out of the media, people have been sold a bill of goods. They think the Great Society was a failure. They have no idea that in America, between 1960 and 1970, the poverty rate was cut in half: 16 million Americans moved from poverty to the middle class. So they think they can do something about the environment, about global warming, about gay rights or women’s rights. They do not think they can do anything about poverty because they have bought into the right-wing myth that the poor have sort of always been here.

So we’ve got all these hungry people and these liberal people. Do the hungry people have to align themselves with the foodies?

Frederick Douglass said, “[If there is no struggle there is no progress … power concedes nothing without a demand.]” No social movement in history has ever just spontaneously occurred from one group of people on behalf of another. So it was helpful that white people were involved in the Civil Rights Movement, but if it was just up to white people, I don’t think we’d have a non-white president today. I go to hunger conference after hunger conference where there are no hungry people there and very few people ever were hungry. I brought some current clients of soup kitchens and pantries in New York to a hunger conference in D.C. a few weeks ago, and it was shocking that their presence was shocking. You wouldn’t be shocked to see veterans at a veterans’ conference.

Now we’re having what’s being called in the media the “Great Recession.” Is this a time where we can actually take a stab at poverty and hunger?

Yes. And sometimes — it’s a cliché, but it’s true — a crisis creates an opportunity. Obama is the first president in U.S. history who grew up in a family that received food stamps. He’s the first president in U.S. history that set a specific goal for ending child hunger, by 2015. The stimulus bill had over $20 billion for anti-hunger programs. So I actually believe these are historical times of opportunity.

So I think it’s the perfect opportunity, but only if we grasp it. That’s one of the reasons I’m busting my butt traveling around the country. This is Obama’s moment to make the big change. If you wait too long, the momentum will peter out, people get cynical, you could have more conservative people come into Congress, so I think it’s got to be done now.

In the “New York Times,” there’s this [Mar. 22] article called “Is a food revolution now in season?”, talking about local and organic foods, and perhaps an advocate with Obama in the White House. Do you think we are in a food revolution?

I don’t know that it’s a revolution, but certainly an evolution. As much as I’ve criticized the foodies for being class biased, I criticize some of my colleagues in the hunger movement for not being concerned about food quality and maybe being too aligned with agribusinesses. Most people who work on hunger love food. I’ve had some great pot stickers since I’ve been here, some great oysters. I’m chowing down on the culinary treats of the Northwest.

But some of the only books selling anymore in America are cookbooks. Some of the fastest growing cable networks are the food networks. In city after city, papers are eliminating book review sections and local news sections and adding food sections. So there’s no doubt there’s a massively growing focus on food in this society from the very highest levels. The question is: Does that sort of advance the elites having even better, cool, Whole Foods kinda food, or does that spill out to low-income people?

I spoke at a conference of people working on getting extra food from farms to school cafeterias. I spoke a lot about class biases and I thought people would be really pissed, but people were nodding with it and not one person heckled me and not one person disagreed. When you bring it to their attention, most good hearted people say, “Oh yeah, it does suck. My kid can get this wonderful organic food, but a poor person can’t.”

Now let me say too: “Organic” can still be picked by quasi slave-laborers. So this sort of obsession with organic and fresh and immediately picked food, you know, sometimes canned food can actually be healthier than stuff on the shelf that looks fresh.

You know, people aren’t gonna believe you when you say that.

I know they’re not, but it is true. Because if it’s canned in the right way, you trap in the nutrients.

And again, not every person has the cooking facilities to create everything from scratch. And the one thing poor people have even less of than money, compared to rich people, is time. They’re taking one or two forms of public transportation sometimes to get to their job. They have to shop by public transportation. They’re raising their kids. Often they’re raising someone else’s kids. And then people say, “They should cook everything from scratch.” I’d love if everyone had all the time and inclination to do that, but again, that’s just not realistic. I just gently push people as they’re thinking about these things to be realistic about the lives of working people. They don’t have the money luxury and they certainly don’t have the time.

Interesting. Food has become another of my pet issues lately because of my diet (raw vegan). It costs more to eat just fruits and vegetables than it does to eat processed filler. Especially if I eat organic foods, but I have relented if I can get local produce (seasonally in the NW U.S.) I'm beginning to see this as an injustice and will explore it more in the years to come - if I'm able to continue eating, that is...