The Good Food Movement

The Good Food Movement

“Food is hot.”

I get that a lot these days.

Local food, organic food, slow food, whole food, real food, sustainable food; foodsheds, food deserts, regional food; food patriotism, food justice, food rules, fair food, peak food; industrial food, genetically modified food, superfood, food sovereignty, food celebrity, Food Network; Know your farmer, Know your food: it’s all hot.

You don’t have to be a foodie to know that even raw food is hot.

So what’s not hot about food? The politics of it. The politics of food are barely warm.

Consider all the attention paid in recent years, from the White House to Wal-Mart, to the need to reduce the damage the American diet is doing to our spreading girth and diminishing health. Heart disease is on the rise, diabetes is epidemic. Most disturbing of all, America’s kids are increasingly both overweight and malnourished. Children in low-income households have a very good chance of being both hungry and obese.

This past year we had a remarkable opportunity to intervene as a society and get our kids hooked from the start on healthy food and healthy eating when the school lunch program was up for review in Congress. An intervention would have cost money—billions of dollars more per year than we’re spending now, so that we could serve kids lunches with more fruits, vegetables and other healthy fare. But we would have saved many more billions than we invested, because healthy school lunches will reduce the lifetime medical costs of diet-related illness and boost the economic productivity that comes with a healthier workforce. En route to those long-term gains, we’d have kids who are happier and perform better in school—especially poor kids, for whom school lunch is often the only reliable daily meal.

So what happened? Congress did pass a new school lunch law, and that law did make some laudable improvements. But funding for the legislation was woefully short of what was needed to fix school lunch.

And how did Congress come up with the modest amount of money that it did add to the school lunch program budget?

By cutting the budget of the Food Stamp Program—known now as SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). While benefits were largely preserved, the cuts still weakened a program that now serves a record 45 million Americans, almost half of whom are children—the very same children the school lunch program is intended to help.

Where was the food movement when this momentous policy opportunity slipped through our fingers faster than a canapé of sautéed ginger prawn on an heirloom-potato latka with mango-avocado purée and just a hint of sea salt? Where were the legions of passionate locavores when local kids had a shot at tasting local greens from a school salad bar, instead of a ladleful of over-salted slop from the lunchroom steam table? Where were the critics of industrial agriculture and factory farms when the freezer truck backed up to the grade school cafeteria loaded with chicken nuggets, mystery meat, surplus cheese, and chocolate milk?

Where were we? Why, we were right there in the fight—on the merits, in spirit, in our hearts, maybe even on our blogs. It’s just that not nearly enough of us rang the phones, fired off emails or darkened the doorsteps of the politicians who ultimately decided that America couldn’t afford to feed kids well at school—poor kids in particular—beyond a bit of money scraped together out of another program that feeds those same poor kids.  Another thing those politicians thought they couldn’t afford? Offending the vested interests that benefit from keeping the school lunch program as it is.

We face the same disconnect between the broadly shared values within the food movement and our ability to give political voice and power to those values in the looming federal budget fights. What is at risk? Federal nutrition assistance programs for low-income Americans, international food aid, food safety enforcement, an array of programs that support local food initiatives, conservation of land and water, the survival of small and medium-size family farms…just about any policy or program you could think of that is in support of the “good food movement” is on the chopping block.

If you were to interview any food shopper, whether strolling through a farmer’s market or a supermarket, or if you surveyed the leaders of any of the hundreds of public interest organizations working to reform our food system, I’m betting they would agree with every one of the following values—and probably many more.

No child should go to bed hungry or poorly nourished, at home or around the world. We should be safe from foodborne illness, know where our food comes from, and we have a right to know what’s in it. Our food and diets should be a source of health and well being, not ill health and disease. The food economy should be one of opportunity, and its workers should be fairly compensated. Farm animals should be treated humanely. Agriculture should regenerate and protect the environment, not degrade it. Fresh, local, affordable food should increasingly be a commonplace, not a novelty, in American agriculture.

In order for the food movement to find the political voice we still clearly lack, we have to find ways to work together on the many values that unite us. Public interest institutions in the food movement have a special obligation to make this effort. It isn’t easy or without risk. We have to fight our way out of issue silos that separate us and institutional habits that frustrate collaboration.

To my mind, if any organization is going to provide the leadership we need to capture the energy and passion of this new food movement and its shared values, it’s Bread for the World. Bread for the World? No, actually, it’s not that artisanal bakery in Sausalito where everyone goes for the fabulous rustic country 27-grain, gluten-free boule on the way to Pilates.

Bread for the World is a place where your heart meets your mind, introduces it to your spine, causing you to get off your duff to think and do something about the food someone else does not have—at all. Someone you’ve never met. Someone who’s hungry, and who quite probably is just a child.

And then, after perhaps some prayer and reflection, Bread for the World is a place that helps you do something about it with like-minded friends.

That’s the food movement I wish to be part of.

Ken Cook is president and co-founder of the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a public interest research and advocacy organization focused on protecting human health and the environment.