There was an interesting article I read recently (I don't recall the source, but I read it in my bathroom, which means either The Atlantic, Harper's, The New Yorker, or Mother Jones) about one school's nutritionist's attempts to provide healthy lunches for the kids. The short version: after tons of time and effort, the kids wouldn't touch any of it.

If I read the same article, you're misremembering it. The kids were fine with it after initial resistance -- other adults in charge of the schools kept on sabotaging the program.

actually, alice waters gets public school kids to eat vegetables and like it.

presentation, context plays a big role in how kids respond to food. also whether you're raised by parents who genuinely like veggies & fruit themselves, or not.

the article was in... NY Times magazine??

I believe: kids will eat fruits and veggies when they're hungry. Kids will eat junk food anytime. If they weren't eating the healthy food, give 'em time and they'll get hungry and eat it.

By "kids" I mean "me". Or "anyone".

1- It was the New Yorker, since I read it too and that's the only overlap in our dead tree subscription sets.

The whole junk food industry interaction with schools is pretty depressing.

But I can't find it -- I'm pretty sure it was Harpers or the Atlantic, but a search isn't coming up with it.

In any case, Ogged is absolutely right. There is no sense whatsoever in thinking that overweight kids are overweight because they haven't noticed, or that telling them about it is going to make them skinny. And schools are essentially treating them like battery hens -- remain motionless and eat your kibble.

It was the NYer, and the main point was that the Feds were very angry at her. B/c it's not just taking away play time and then telling kids they're overweight: it's that the school lunch program is basically a dumping ground for federal agriculture subsidy surpluses, which means lots and lots of fatty meat and processed cheeses--the very stuff that people won't buy in the grocery store because it's crap.

Kids will eat healthy *just fine* if that's what they're taught to eat. If you make a big fuss over "convincing" them to like vegetables while constantly feeding them fucking chicken nuggets (which are on every fucking kids menu in the entire goddamn country) then somehow they'll think chicken nuggets taste better than fresh tomatoes, which is manifestly untrue.

(Soub - do you have a contact e-mail? M/tch M/lls and Sir Kraab got in touch w/ me about a Tiny Texas Meet-up, and we've been e-mailing a bit. You can contact me at heebie dot geebie at gmail.)

But I can't find it -- I'm pretty sure it was Harpers or the Atlantic, but a search isn't coming up with it.

That's because it was in The New Yorker.

I don't agree with 8, paragraph II. I was taught to eat very healthy, and I loved junk food way better, anyway. Even now, if hamburgers were Exercise-With-Vita-Juice, I'd eat them all the time. It's mostly health-guilt that keeps me in line.

I'm not saying they won't like junk food, but they're not going to learn to appreciate foods they're not actually given--and most people default to feeding kids shit without actually even giving them the opportunity to try good food.

Then again, most adults eat shit too, so it's not all that surprising.

The healthiness of school meals (or lack thereof) is front page news in the UK, so if y'all want to read all about it, have a look at the Guardian etc, especially in reference to Jamie Oliver. There's some great stuff about schools trying to go healthy, and parents coming to the school gates with sausages and chips at lunch time. Not that their fat fingers could actually push the food through the gate, of course.

(You may know all that, but just in case.)

Fair enough. Mostly I just love eating, anyway. I loved the stuff we ate at home. I loved cafeteria food. I just think everything tastes really, really good. Sigh.

My brother, at age 6 or so, would get so lost in the pleasure of eating that he'd mew without realizing it. Little kitten mews of pleasure. My parents thought it was hilarious.

11: Really, or are you just saying that to avoid sounding PC? Obviously, fat and sugar are delicious, making, with salt, the three primary components of Cravenol™ (the stuff that makes it so hard to stop eating McDonalds french fries). But lots of fresh healthy foods really are delicious -- good whole wheat bread isn't just better for you, it's actively tastier than Wonder Bread; berries and other fruit, if they're ripe and good (and properly cooked when they're less than perfect) are also delicious; meat well cooked doesn't need to be breaded and fried to be wonderful, and so on. While I eat stuff that's bad for me because I have an incredible sweet/fat tooth, I don't avoid McD's because it's unhealthy, but because it's generally (barring the fries) nauseating.

As an adult, McD's started to upset my stomach. Before that, everything just tastes really good to me. Yes, berries and yogurt taste good and healthy. Pizza also tastes good.

Wonderbread and whole-wheat-tons-of-fiber both taste great. I have the palate that can't distinguish between That's So Raven and All Things Considered.

Breaded meat. Agh.

I'm serious: McGriddle with Tobasco. I'm getting fat just thinking about it.

Fresh food is difficult. You have to take a lot of trips to the store. Plus, a lot of tomatoes just taste nasty. It takes a certain amount of work figuring this out.

What's this weird tobacco - tabasco hybrid you keep on about?

Plus, a lot of tomatoes just taste nasty.

Those purchased between the end of September and the middle of July, you mean? Tomatoes in winter are why God (or Napoleon) invented canning.

What's scary about the article ogged linked is that little Karlind Dunbar now seems to have a better-than-average chance of acquiring an eating disorder. Everyone's going to be either obese or anorexic in our brave new world.

Tomatoes in Winter was a good movie, though.

Re post: So true. This really sucks for kids who move to think. I find I often bring visiting faculty for a walk while we talk - I think much better when I'm moving. Some love it, but others need to stop walking to make a point.

You know, the health and fitness info sent home from school is generally mindless. And mindless plus food plus girls body image is just shooting for trouble. My daughter is boycotting Mcdonalds, she's decided it's disgusting. I'd rather that than she be addicted, but it's making long car trips kind of inconvenient, honestly. Moderation just doesn't seem to be on the menu for elementary school.

13: I read a very funny article about just that, recently. There were two moms who would cart french fry and butter sandwiches over to the schools and throw them over the walls at lunchtime so the kids wouldn't be forced to eat the salads and whatnot served by the schools. French fry and butter sandwiches! The British really are very entertainingly nuts.

Napoleon invented canning?

Also, is the problem here the idea or just the execution? Obviously we don't want to scare little girls into thinking they're dangerously overweight when they're in the normal range, but a well-executed program warning parents (and kids, but mostly parents) that "hey, littly Johnny is in the red zone on the weight chart, and that's very likely to mean really bad things x, y, and z in his future. Here are some ideas for helping him slim down..." seems not to be a terrible idea. You may think all parents already know this stuff, but a frighteningly large number of them don't. And a lot more don't think it applies to their kid.

Not a cure-all, obviously, but an okay step in the right direction. Low-cost as well, which is a bonus.

No. Seriously, people know what fat looks like, and people aren't fat because they haven't noticed they're fat, they're fat because a combination of their genes, eating, and activity levels make them fat.

Those purchased between the end of September and the middle of July, you mean? Tomatoes in winter are why God (or Napoleon) invented canning.

You say this as if the average American had learned what months various foods are in season.

The only food that I could tell you off the top of my head when it's best (fuck you w-lfs-n, it's impossible to adequately phrase that in English) is Concord grapes, because that's the only food I have a memory of actually seeing growing near where I grew up. As for everything else, I figure it's the summer, except for root vegetables. But I never cook anything anyway.

26: Nah then, thee, what's tha got against chip butties?

And Napoleon's armies were the first mass usage of canned food. I don't know who literally invented it.

(Not that I'd give them to small children for lunch.)

I dunno, LB (in 28). There are studies showing that people have severe rosy-colored glasses on about their own obesity. Furthermore, I *think* you live in New York? Which is a thinner, walking community. In Texas, it's easy to think that quite overweight is a normal body size. I agree with 27.

a well-executed program warning parents (and kids, but mostly parents) that "hey, littly Johnny is in the red zone on the weight chart, and that's very likely to mean really bad things x, y, and z in his future. Here are some ideas for helping him slim down..." seems not to be a terrible idea. You may think all parents already know this stuff, but a frighteningly large number of them don't. And a lot more don't think it applies to their kid.

Or we could just hire actual cooks and actual nutritionists to run school lunch programs, and fund schools well enough to afford fresh foods and to be able to pay for shit without having to sell their souls to Coca-Cola, and have physical education classes--perhaps even offer a *selection* of phys ed classes so that body shy kids can choose something that's not a team sport. And simply teach kids impersonal facts about health and nutrition in science class, like what vitamins and calories are for, why your body needs minerals, how your circulatory system works and why exercise is good for it, and so on.

But in 34, why is the stuff in italics mutually exclusive to the response? Aren't these good steps in conjunction with each other?

Wait, French fry and butter sandwiches? You're shitting me, right?

Not a cure-all, obviously, but an okay step in the right direction.

In the absence of good food and exercise, it's not a step in the right direction, it's psychological abuse. Between school with no recess and no phys ed, bad school lunches, and homework, it's nearly impossible for kids to stay in shape. To then say, "and by the way, you're fat" is deranged.

37 - but the letter was intended for the parents, not little Karlind. Poor execution not to just send the parents an e-mail directly, but no one intended to tell the girl, "and by the way, you're fat."

people have severe rosy-colored glasses on about their own obesity

Americans in general have seriously fucked-up ideas about body size, because we view "fat" as "bad." Therefore, if one isn't happy with how one looks, one thinks of oneself as fat (even if one isn't); and if one feels pretty happy, or average, or simply wants to deny that one is lazy/unhealthy/a bad person, one says "I'm not fat" (I'm big-boned/husky/curvy/healthy). By using physical descriptors to indicate moral valuations, we fuck up kids' sense of what things mean, and as a result I think most people really don't have the vocabulary to even begin to talk about this kind of shit.

Maybe, if the school absolutely must get involved (why not the doctor?), the better method would be to talk to the parents at parent-teacher conference. Of course, the teacher would surely just love to be the one to break the news.

35, 38: Because, as Ogged says (and see 39), notes home to the parents don't happen in a vacuum. They happen in a context where measurements and discussion of people's bodies is almost always pejorative, and the kid knows that. Which is why even though she doesn't understand the note, she knows it's about something "bad."

People, "french fry and butter sandwiches" - chip butties in English, have been part of the British working class diet for at least as long as I've been alive, which is over half a century.

In the days when most people did manual work, and then carried their own coal when they got home, this wasn't completely crazy - megacalories on a bun, so you can eat your lunch on the hoof. Now it's just traditional (and you pour salt and malt vinegar over the fries before you eat them).

Look, it doesn't matter what awesome way you find to alert the parents when the other things your own institution is doing make it nearly impossible for the problem you've identified to be remedied. It's as if (awesome analogy alert) the teachers beat the children every day and then sent a note home about how little Becky has a flinching problem.

Shudder.

Furthermore, I *think* you live in New York? Which is a thinner, walking community.

I may have said this before here, but I've never understood, why, as tense and screwy as the US is about fatness, no one seriously makes the argument that New Urbanist pedestrian-friendly development, with public transportation and walkable neighborhoods and all that, is desirable as a matter of public policy because it will make the residents healthier and skinnier. I hear people talk about how much thinner New Yorkers are all the time, and it's only about the physical layout of the city, nothing else.

French fry and butter sandwiches sound awesome.

I don't disagree that we should be doing everything in 34. (Although I think ogged's "nearly impossible" in 37 is overstating things.) But that doesn't make this a *bad* move. Plus, this is cheap and those things are all expensive. (This also will likely do little good while those would do a lot of good, but that's a side issue.)

it's only about the physical layout of the city, nothing else

And all the running from muggers.

39 -

I agree that we hold fat = bad. But the problem is not that healthy-weight people see themselves as fat - the problem is that healthy-weight people see themselves as "bad", which easily means fat in our society. (If clumsy=bad to the same degree, they'd see themselves as clumsy.)

Disentangling fat and bad is a huge, critical task. Introducing some realism as to what is a healthy weight and what is an unhealthy weight is part of that task. Also part of the task is dispelling scare-tactics myths about the repercussions of being fat, and replacing them with reasonable proclaiments about living healthy.

.

and have physical education classes--perhaps even offer a *selection* of phys ed classes so that body shy kids can choose something that's not a team sport.

What a dream this would be. The NYC public school I taught at didn't have a gym. No gym. Two schools shared the building (one elementary, and one combined middle and high school) and no gym. The kids fulfilled the state phys-ed requirements by dancing--I'm not sure where they did it. Talk about embarrassing the shy kids.

18: Why do you hate on the schnitzel?

if the school absolutely must get involved (why not the doctor?)

I think this is the heart of 90% of the problems with how we treat kids in this country. Since the only social service we bother to provide them is public schooling, and the only place we think poor kids should be allowed is school, public schools are expected to do everything.

chip butties in English, have been part of the British working class diet

Same problem in America. A lot of the criticism of people's diets boils down to class issues. That's part of why it's so hard to change, and part of why doing it in school is actually kind of a bad idea--it just feeds the whole "teachers against parents" issues that a lot of poor people already have precisely because we *do* use schools to do more than just educate, but also to try to "improve" the moral/social values of poor people.

That's Sally and Newt's school (although the gym teacher is awesome: he used to dance with an all-male drag ballet troupe). We just got them in formal athletic activities this fall (soccer, taekwondo, swimming lessons), and it's made a huge difference. They do have vanishingly little free time, though.

Just to REALLY play the devil's advocate...

We don't know how much Karlind's 2-year-old sister eats, either. Perhaps eating less than this obese toddler is a healthy amount.

But really, does the mother have a clear concept of healthy portions? I think the letter is a circumstantial trigger in Karlind's environment, but not inherently awful.

But that doesn't make this a *bad* move. Plus, this is cheap and those things are all expensive.

That's exactly it. Blaming individuals for social problems is cheap; addressing the social problems is expensive. But yes, the former *is* a bad move, because it *doesn't* address the social problem--it just exacerbates it by stigmatizing its victims.

The poor public schools. One public institution that pretty much works in this country, and we want it to fix absolutely everything because there's nothing else. Maybe if we had health care for kids, then health care professionals could focus on kids health.

We just got them in formal athletic activities this fall (soccer, taekwondo, swimming lessons), and it's made a huge difference. They do have vanishingly little free time,

Exactly. The middle and upper middle class can make up for shitty phys ed by paying for lessons, providing alternate activities, etc. But for the poor, it's a matter of "does the mother have a clear concept of healthy portions?"

We just got them in formal athletic activities this fall (soccer, taekwondo, swimming lessons), and it's made a huge difference. They do have vanishingly little free time,

Exactly. The middle and upper middle class can make up for shitty phys ed by paying for lessons, providing alternate activities, etc. But for the poor, it's a matter of "does the mother have a clear concept of healthy portions?"

Right. And (I believe, although I don't know where I'd go for solid evidence) making people crazy about their weight tends to screw up their eating habits, and make them less healthy than they'd be if they weren't harassed about it.

I never said the mother was poor. If a child is overweight, I wonder if the parents have a clear concept of healthy portions.

56: Yes, lord.

salt and malt vinegar

What?!!!! No catsup?

Look. Getting kids active in public schools the number 1 best possible thing ever. I think it would solve everything.

But I don't think that being realistic about children's weight is the enemy of the first statement. It's not the most important thing, but I don't think it's destructive. Having fat=bad is destructive. Not the letter.

LB, one of the authors of this article was just on the radio.

The study followed teenaged girls and their exposure to teen mags with a lot of articles about dieting. Now, of course, much much younger children are being put on diets.

And a lot of parents do have unclear concepts of healthy portions. And like it or not the poor generally have less access to and grasp of this sort of information than the middle class. "Clean your plate" was the only thing I was ever told as a child, even when I didn't want anymore. Turns out that's a horrible idea to instill in a kid. But plenty of people still try to make their kids clean their plates every meal. Even when the plate's full of unhealthy slop, not broccoli.

63: But the letter sends the message that your fatness is so important that even your school, an organization clearly unconcerned with your physical health in terms of physical activity and diet, is monitoring your fatness to warn you in case it's problematic. Fatness is terribly, terribly important. I think that's an awful message to send, and probably literally counterproductive.

60: I wasn't trying to slam you, personally. I was just pointing out that the default assumption when there's a problem with a kid is that the parents are ignorant (don't know good manners, don't know what constitutes good food, etc.). Which may be the case, but even if it is, it's only a symptom of the larger problem, which is *why* does the mom not know anything about healthy food for a kid? I mean, I know about healthy food, and I'm not a nutritionist. How did I gain that knowledge?

And the real answer is, pretty much simply by virtue of social class. The stuff that's pushed at adults like me everywhere from the grocery stores I shop at and the restaurants I eat at to the parents magazines in the pediatrician's waiting room makes learning about basic shit like nutrition pretty damn easy.

"Clean your plate" was the only thing I was ever told as a child, even when I didn't want anymore. Turns out that's a horrible idea to instill in a kid. But plenty of people still try to make their kids clean their plates every meal.

I'm as fucked up as any other American over eating and weight, and put in some effort to trying not to pass it along. I spend a fair amount of time snarling at the kids at the dinner table: "You know what the rules are: you have to eat exactly as much as you want to, and then you have to stop." And then they crack up and point at me for being a nitwit.

And a letter alone doesn't give any useful information. If the parents really are ignorant (which I'm willing to believe), isn't it more likely that they'll just make the kid eat less, without regard to proper nutrition?

66 - ....yeah. I keep switching camps in my head on this issue, even though I'm only commenting on the one side.

Full disclosure - I guess I should say that I was raised in a family with an anorexic approach to food and an obsession with staying thin. To compound the irony, my mom's area of research is body-image, obesity, and eating disorders.

I think I have an overly unsympathetic, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps approach to weight-management as a result. I dunno.

"Clean your plate" was the only thing I was ever told as a child

I find it almost impossible to leave food on my plate, no matter how much was put there to begin with, for this very reason.

69- I concede botched execution, on many levels. I'm just saying the underlying idea isn't bad.

I think we're overlooking the benefits of weight-related neuroses and diseases: a better looking population and fewer people drawing down the Social Security funds. Surely this must be balanced against the other interests.

I think I have an overly unsympathetic, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps approach to weight-management as a result.

You and the rest of the US (including me).

One of the benefits of having had a narcissistic mother is that she didn't pay any attention to what I ate or didn't eat. But because I was *her* kid (and the favorite kid--my sister, being "dad's" kid, got shat on), I was (but of course) pretty damn great no matter what.

my sister, being "dad's" kid, got shat on

"Your sister smells bad."

No, but while my issues all center around living up to my expectations, hers all center around feeling fat/stupid/loserish. It's pretty fucked up.

67: yes, it's really important to keep in mind how this all came about, and that involves a lot more than isolated individuals. Important, that is, if we want approaches that work, instead of just a public shaming ritual. The ways in which people are alienated from their kitchens astounds me, and I'm definitely no foodie.

On the positive side, here as elsewhere knowledge is power, as the cartoons said, and control over one's physical self can be tremendously liberating. Cue Ogged ridiculing me.

control over one's physical self can be tremendously liberating

This could make an awesome justification for eating disorders.

Where the fuck is your new base of operations, Labs? Evergreen?

I'm thinking, Bard.

(New Paltz?)

I wrote a comment and didn't post it somehow, responding to Cryptic Ned:

You say this as if the average American had learned what months various foods are in season.

A big part of why Americans eat so much crap is that crap (fried fat sugar and salt) is the only thing that tastes good year-round and is cheap to store. If you want healthy food that actually tastes good, you do have to know (in my area, anyway) not to bother with tomatoes or strawberries in the winter -- if you want fresh fruit in the winter, it's apples or citrus.

This isn't hard -- frozen berries are available year round, and are good in their own right; leafy greens are okay shipped and out of season; but you do have to have a sense of how the season is going to affect what tastes good, if you don't want eating 'healthy' food to feel punitive.

I don't take it all that seriously, but I try to eat seasonally for the sake of taking pleasure in what I eat.

84: Even worse, somehow people have been convinced that spending time in rush hour traffic is better than spending time in the kitchen --- processed foods have much higher markup and marketing for `convenience' is king. As a result, people eat a lot of mediocre food that is quick to prepare. Or eat out a lot. Or both. In the worst cases, good fresh food is only available if you travel a fair distance, which puts it out of reach of many poorer families even if it is affordable (and it may well be more affordable than what they end up buying locally).

84- LB, it isn't hard for *you*, but you're a lot smarter than most people, and probably grew up learning a lot of this stuff. I'm reasonably intelligent and *I* still have a lot of trouble keeping it straight, I suspect because for the first 20 years of my life I never ate anything that had "seasons", and furthermore, I figured if they were selling it in the store it had to be "fresh". I don't think this is all that uncommon among the poor -- it's all packaged, frozen, or canned. Fresh food is way too expensive to eat. And if you're not going to eat it, why bother to learn all about it's growing seasons? OT: why do they even sell tomatoes in the winter, if they taste like shit?

Forgive me for the apostropher in "it's".

86: the tomato thing, like many out of season things, is demand driven. People buy visually, and a lot of people don't actually know what fresh fruits and vegetables should taste like. But if they want a tomatoe slice on their hamburger, they want one.

Some fresh food is expensive. Some isn't really, especially in comparison to highly processed stuff.

87: That wasn't me.

If you want healthy food that actually tastes good, you do have to know not to bother with tomatoes or strawberries in the winter -- if you want fresh fruit in the winter, it's apples or citrus.

And this is a very weird state of affairs to be in. Until, probably, a few generations ago, humanity has known not to bother with tomatoes in the winter because tomatoes don't grow in the winter. But now we have foraging methods that don't make this fact explicit, it's not too surprising that people would conclude that Cheetos are better, being of consistent quality and price.

An earlier comment about canning led me to read up on the history and learn: "Throughout the mid-nineteenth century, tinned food became a status symbol amongst middle-class households in Europe, becoming something of a frivolous novelty." [in part because it took six hours of labor to make a canned meal] In a way, this reminds me of how people now pay extra for the privilege of eating food that was grown near where they live. When a farmer's market is only affordable to yuppies and the cheapest food is processed and shipped frozen, you've entered the Twilight Zone.

90 gets it exactly right. I particularly like "Cheetos are better, being of consistent quality and price". But who was that masked commenter?

90: If the peak-oilers are even remotely close to right, this is one of the earliest areas that will radically change, since our entire production and distribution system is predicated on cheap oil.

90 was me. By the way, down here in the Third World (where it's summer right now, by the way, and container ships bound for the U.S. are being loaded full of peaches and cherries ) it is not hard to know what food is in season and what food isn't: the food that's in season is cheaper and better. I seem to recall that this is not the case in the U.S.

the tomato thing, like many out of season things, is demand driven. People buy visually, and a lot of people don't actually know what fresh fruits and vegetables should taste like. But if they want a tomatoe slice on their hamburger, they want one.

Absolutely. The last time I had a really good tomato I was just thinking to myself "Hmm this is a very good tomato, why don't I eat these all the time, let's see if I can remember where it came from so I can buy some more." And then the thought hit me that it was not in fact a particularly good tomato, it was a tomato that was being eaten during tomato season. If people have no tomato experiences that are better than any other tomato experiences (that is, if they always buy the cheapest tomatoes), they will see no evidence for the existence of a so-called "tomato season".

Until, probably, a few generations ago, humanity has known not to bother with tomatoes in the winter because tomatoes don't grow in the winter.

What about in the southern hemisphere?

When a farmer's market is only affordable to yuppies and the cheapest food is processed and shipped frozen, you've entered the Twilight Zone.

This seems perfectly normal to me. Something that has been stored long-term is cheap and convenient. Something that can't be stored long-term is expensive and inconvenient unless you actually live on a farm.

84- LB, it isn't hard for *you*, but you're a lot smarter than most people, and probably grew up learning a lot of this stuff.

Right. I don't mean that it's not an arcane area of knowledge that lots of people don't have, and I do because of my class background -- you and Bitch are right about that. I meant more that it's not laborious -- once you're thinking in those terms, it's not hard to scorn 'fresh' corn in January, and pounce happily on it in August.

why do they even sell tomatoes in the winter, if they taste like shit?

Couple reasons. First, being able to find/afford things like strawberries! And tomatoes! out of season is/was at some point remarkable and luxurious. Second, because people don't grow their own food, and b/c of *marketing*, which taught the entire 50s-70s generation that processed food was Scientific! And modern! And Saved Time!, a fuck of a lot of people don't know what a decent tomato/strawberry/whatever is supposed to taste like. E.g., a friend of mine who took some organic strawberries back to the market in a rage because after only one week they'd gone moldy! without realizing that that's what strawberries *do* when they're not sprayed with carcinogens to allow you to pick them unripe and ship them halfway across the fucking continent.

There's another layer of indirection with people's experience of the tomato issue, I think. If you experience tomatos mostly as things that show up on sandwiches other people make for you, I think you're less likely to notice the tomato itself, and the maker of the sandwich is probably getting the cheapest and thus most flannel-tasting tomato avaliable. So you'll never notice that a "good tomato" exists.

A cafe that was local to me recently stopped using any tomatos out of season - they switched entirely to roasted red peppers for the duration. Now, it was a hip cafe in a painfully eco-conscious town, but it would still be a pretty easy move to copy.

But that cafe would have only been using sun-dried tomatoes anyway, so the point should not arise!

Until, probably, a few generations ago, humanity has known not to bother with tomatoes in the winter because tomatoes don't grow in the winter.

What about in the southern hemisphere?

I live in the southern hemisphere and I can assure you it's not winter, and I wouldn't be bothering with growing tomatoes if it were.

tomatoes don't grow in the winter
Global warming will solve that one.
There's nothing wrong with frozen food per se, Trader Joe's has awesome frozen berries and decent frozen vegetables, available year round. It's processed frozen food that's bad- Hungry Man now advertises "Over 1 pound of food!" on the front of the package.
As for body image vs. what's really fat, there are obvious signs- the size 20 prom queen from the story may be all body image positive, but if she has insulin resistance at age 17, she's definitely got a problem.

I think that overeating and obesity have a big correlation with boredom, depression, and lack of options. Some people really have very few gratifying outlets. Eating a lot is one thing people can do without much money and without depending on anyone else's cooperation. If you're poor, you eat a lot of cheap food, which tends to be fattening.

There's probably a similiar correlation with alcoholism -- a bottle of cheap vodka is the most immediately accessible form of happiness.

b/c of *marketing*, which taught the entire 50s-70s generation that processed food was Scientific! And modern! And Saved Time!, a fuck of a lot of people don't know what a decent tomato/strawberry/whatever is supposed to taste like.

I was just reading about canning (apropos of a comment on this thread) and learned that "the canning process was slow and labour-intensive, as each can had to be hand-made and took up to six hours to cook properly, making tinned food too expensive for ordinary people to buy. Throughout the mid-nineteenth century, tinned food became a status symbol amongst middle-class households in Europe, becoming something of a frivolous novelty."

So now we can get huge bright red strawberries from the central valley all year long. And all year long they taste like crap. Because they are marketed on looks not taste, and this works. Even worse, in our agricultural obsession with looks and portability, we are actually making some common foods less nutritious (e.g. potatoes --- wish I could remember where that article was).

When I first heard of the slow food people, I thought they were all nuts. Not so sure, now. I realize the instatiation doesn't scale well, but some of the principles do.

96: Someone I knew did this with good bread. Incensed he couldn't leave it on the counter for a week in a plastic bag w/o it molding.

100: It is definitely processing & additives that are the problems, not freezing.

98: not quite that kind of cafe. More earthy-crunchy than yuppie, to the extent that they can be distinguished.

100: yeah, processing (well, canning and freezing) aren't really the problem here, I don't think. It's totally the season for making regular tomato sauce for pasta with canned tomatos, and they're fine. The shipment-stable variations are much more of the problem here.

It amazes me how much class trumps what ought to be actual experience in these matters. My mother, who grew up on a farm, prefers convenience foods and buys without discernment, my wife, whose family has been urban since just after Moses Mendelssohn walked through the cattle gate, buys and cooks fresh and seasonally.

Something that has been stored long-term is cheap and convenient. Something that can't be stored long-term is expensive and inconvenient unless you actually live on a farm.

But it's neither a question of storage nor convenience. It's a question of volume and shipping. Winter tomatoes were, at one point, luxuries, because they had to be shipped long distances, which was expensive and inconvenient. *However*, things like national chains and volume pricing and federal subsidies and interstate highways and so on mean that now, paradoxically, an individual tomato is cheaper if it's been picked green, gassed, shipped, and distributed via a national network of Albertson's than if you get it from a local place that doesn't have the advantages of volume and subsidies and therefore has to pay retail prices to rent storefront space, salaries to someone who keeps track of local growers, retail costs for shipping/truck rental, etc. Not to mention the marketing problems inherent in not being able to afford a large parking lot, expensive displays, a misleading sense of plenty from a large floor space, and so on.

People who actually grew up on farms (my father and inlaws) usually don't understand the romance at all.

Fresh tomatos and strawberries can be bad too, because they've been bred for shelf-life and toughness during transport.

In Portland, OR, you can now buy tasty old-fashioned strawberries commercially. Also tasty fresh-picked sweet corn. Not true 15 years ago, maybe 10.

106: I'm not sure it's just class. Class, or at least income, can constrain your options. And upbringing will color what you are used to. Another variable is that people seem to have remarkable different experiences with food. One guy ate the exact same (boring) lunch every day for the year I worked with him; he could't be bothered to make anything else. Another person I met plans holidays around local food availability & chefs.

107: which is why this whole system is so vulnerable to shipping costs (fertilizer issues aside).

106: Class and women's unpaid labor, yeah. Just like for working class moms breast-feeding is (1) gross and (2) unrealistic, time-wise. If you're poor, convenience matters more than it does if you have leisure time/money to shop around and educate yourself about food. It's exactly the same problem as the bra/shoe/fashion thing: if you care about the status that's the result of eating/dressing "well," you'll take the time to bother. If you either don't give a shit or realistically lack time or access to find out how the status markers work and then track down the requisite products, you end up being suckered by mass marketing, because that's what available and convenient.

109: Income and upbringing are major components of class.

This thread is making me want to have so much sex with B. 111 is perfect.

110: Not so much, though. This is what The Economist brought up in that article that y'all savaged because of their anti-freetrade reasoning. Studies by economists tracking fuel usage in shipping fruits and vegetables actually found farmer's markets and other locally-grown food to be more oil-intensive when you consider the small trucks that bring the food to market and the longer distances that individual consumers are travelling to buy them.

If carbon or oil had a uniform tax on them, locally-grown organic foods would actually face the biggest burden of cost compared to the vast planeloads, trainloads, boatloads and truckloads of industrially-produced fruits and vegetable currently being shipped to major supermarkets.

And this all goes back to school lunch. If kids were fed yummy healthy food, and taught about it, they'd at least be familiar with the concepts, rather than having to develop them on their own. Separating nutrition from pleasure is just messed up.

I don't want to minimize the continuing relevance of time and money constraints, but many people show after effects of that long after they do have the time/money. My mom and dad used to shop together just like my wife and I do now, but came home with very different stuff. Their income and free time were at least comparable, if not actually higher. But even though people my family knew did begin to care about these things, even back in the fifties and sixties, they didn't. My mother made some inherited recipes well, from scratch, and took the time to do it once and a while. But most of the time, not.

Thank you. I forgot to add, though, that this is one of the reasons why sometimes, paradoxically, the smartest working-class folks are the ones who are most critical of things like breast-feeding/organic foods/changing diets/whatever. Part of that resistance comes from being sharp enough to see that making food into a status symbol is fucking stupid.

Which, I argue, is why things like sending home bmi ratings from school is a bad thing to do. If people are sheep, they'll become paranoid and develop eating disorders from that kind of thing. If they're smart, they'll get their backs up about the school policing their fucking diets. On the other hand, the combined realization that making food=status is dumb, and that marketing is *all about* making products=status means that you can kind of go back to the beginning and think, okay, what is and isn't good, what is and isn't healthy, and let's start with that.

This is what The Economist brought up in that article that y'all savaged because of their anti-freetrade reasoning. Studies by economists tracking fuel usage in shipping fruits and vegetables actually found farmer's markets and other locally-grown food to be more oil-intensive when you consider the small trucks that bring the food to market and the longer distances that individual consumers are travelling to buy them.

See, this I just don't buy. It's possible, and I could be convinced of it, but I'd need an economist who I trusted as being on my side politically, and not motivated by hating hippies, to confirm that the studies were reasonably done. It's just too fudgeable.

111: It isn't just the shopping around, it can be the travel time. Local urban supermarkets with bad selection and inflated prices don't lose customers who would have to bus out to a better store.

I still don't think that completely nails it. Eating `well', by which I mean enjoyable food, can't be written off as merely a status thing. It is also going to depend on how much you value the experience. You're quite right that women's unpaid labour particularly and more generally, the shift to dual income households has driven some of the demand for convenience foods, etc. It has involved a trade off as to where people spend their time as I alluded to somewhere or other.

The path of least resistance is mass marketed products, sure, but I know plenty of people with very little income who spend time on food instead.

re 112: Agreed. I was just trying to point out that these aspects are *how* class affects eating habits, and that upbringing may affect you long after income has moved you out of your parents options, if that happens.

I'm not in any way claiming that class isn't important, just noting that there is another important factor, that people seem to care a lot more about food than others. If you care a lot, you're going to do something about it within whatever your economic options are. If you don't care, you'll probably just stay in some sort of rut determined by your upbringing, unless forced out of it.

117 to 113.

115: Not sure I agree. School lunches should be healthy because the government shouldn't be undermining the health of its populace--not because school is the place to Improve the Tastes of The Masses.

116: Changing one's economic status doesn't necessarily result in an instant change in one's class position.

118: Even if it's true, it's still an incomplete analysis. If people waste more oil driving to farmer's markets than they do driving to Albertson's (just to take one small issue), that isn't because farmer's markets naturally require one to drive long distances. It's because we've got infrastructure that encourages/forces people to drive, that makes big parking lots cheap for national chain stores, and etc.

Could we separate breast-feeding and organic foods? Too much lumping for me.

I don't like lumps in breasts or breast-milk. But organic food is supposed to be lumpy.

114: If that's the paper I'm thinking of, the analysis is flawed: at minimum it assumes current infrastructure is fixed, which is silly. Worse, it ignores petroleum input to more `industrial' styles of agriculture are high. At this point, the system can absorb a bit of price increase in return for higher quality food, surely.

School lunches should be healthy because the government shouldn't be undermining the health of its populace--not because school is the place to Improve the Tastes of The Masses.

There's Improve, and there's Actively Degrade. School lunches should be healthy for the reasons you gave, and they should taste good because it's wrong to teach children that healthy food is nasty.

I don't like lumps in breasts

You have a problem with "lovely lady lumps"?

124: I suspect you two are using `taste' differently.

Absolutely there is no reason that school lunches shouldn't be both healthy and tasty. It's a travesty that they aren't currently.

Here's the extent of my formal education in meal planning- in 7th grade home ec, we had to plan a week's worth of meals for a family of 4, on a budget of something like $20 (this is ca. 1990, not 1950), using a weekly circular from the local supermarket for prices. The only criteria was we had to include a certain number of servings from each food group. Our conclusion was that we should eat sausage pizza every night, because that was the only thing you could afford that included bits of each food group.
I suppose that sort of lesson goes beyond what many schools teach, although I think we would have been better off not learning it.

Eating `well', by which I mean enjoyable food, can't be written off as merely a status thing.

But what people enjoy depends greatly on its perceived status. See upthread references about tinned food, winter tomatoes, and so on. What one eats is very much a marker of one's social class: think about the reaction if you ask for ketchup at Nobu, or ask for wasabi at Denny's, and then your probable reaction to those reactions.

Re. women's unpaid labor, I didn't *just* mean that moving to paid work meant there was less time for cooking. I also meant that, paradoxically, *not* being paid for working is a major class marker for women, as it used to be for aristocratic men. So things that high-status women do are therefore "not work"--stuff like slow cooking, or breast-feeding, or sewing, or knitting. If *I* make beans and rice and homemade tortillas and salsa for dinner, I'm Teaching PK to Enjoy Authentic Foods or else Enjoying Being a Gourmand or Being a Yuppie. If the woman who cleans my neighbor's house does the same, she's doing it because she can't afford not to. For her, buying convenience foods is not only practical, it's a step "up"; for me, it might be practical, but it would be a step "down."

"think about the reaction if you ask for ketchup at Nobu, or ask for wasabi at Denny's"
I believe D'angelo made that point with the dessert tray in season 1.

$20 for a week's worth of dinners in 1990? It'd buy you a couple of rocks of crack for the teacher, I suppose.

I guess ramen noodles are meat and starch, kind of, and whatever the cheapest possibility for frozen vegetables -- if you fudged portion sizes you might be able to do it.

124: Absolutely agreed. I just wanted to make the point that healthy school lunches aren't necessarily going to do a damn thing to help kids develop good eating habits--they also have to be tasty, *and* they have to be aware of the status associations of food, either by adopting kids' own status markers (e.g. pizza!) or else by teaching kids to adopt the status ideology of the upper middle, weight- and health-conscious professional class (e.g., integrated lesson plans in which kids grow their own foods, harvest them, and then cook with them--the kind of thing you and I, LB, would think a *fantastic* use of class time because we'd see it primarily as being about science, but that a lot of people would think of as completely anti-educational, because they'd see it as mere time-wasting, or merely a hobby, or merely some kind of crafty crap).

I was a member of a CSA (farmshare) this last summer, and while the food was great, it did bother me that I was driving a 20-mile round trip to get out to the farm. The farm itself was all right there, and I bet it saved me a 8-mile round trip to the grocery store once a week, but I still tried not to think very hard about the total eco-balance there.

125 - Fergie's lovely lady lumps are in her organic oatmeal. I thought you knew.

128: a)sure, and my comments on the look of food vs. it's content and taste.

b) Again, I'm not saying class doesn't factor heavily. I just don't think it trumps everything, is all. I don't think we really disagree here --- but if you care about how your food tastes, you can't fake it. I know plenty of people who cook a lot because they can't afford to eat at restraunts that can do nearly as good a job, processed food tends to be mediocre (or expensive, or both), and they can somehow afford the time. They aren't yuppies, they just spend a significant chunk of whatever `free' time they have in the kitchen, by choice. This doesn't mean there aren't yuppie slow food types (I mentioned this doesn't scale), or that there aren't people who can't afford not to.

All I'm saying is that while groceries and restraunts and kitchen time may be positional, they can't only be positional. Make sense? `good' food has status tags, but `good' food is also *somewhat* objective.

133 -- is that how she introduces milk to the cereal then?

"$20 for a week's worth of groceries"

Or perhaps the teacher was using their own personal budget.

B's point about working class resistance is a good one. But in my family, some people never lost touch with the good things in their lives, and would have laughed at the notion that preferring a fresh, flavorful tomato was some sort of class marker. What seem to have made my mother's sensibilities almost entirely mass-consumer were things she and my father chose: moving to the city, postwar suburbanization. The cousins who stayed at home seem to have adapted better than my mother did, because they stayed rooted. So that now they seem to have more in common with us than with my parents.

In South Central, there used to be a farm collective for low-income residents of the area, and it was fantastic-- people farmed all kinds of things, cabbage, corn, chiles, nopales, tomatoes. A lot of people had their kids do afterschool chores at the farm, so kids got to learn about gardening and food production and seasonality, and people got to take home their super fresh produce or sell it at the South Central Farmers Market. Of course, it was too much of a good thing, so very sensibly it was razed to the ground last year.

I think all 134 is saying is that class isn't absolutely determinative with respect to most (any?) of the characteristics with which it's correlated. Which, duh.

Right, the frozen pizzas were on sale for something like $1.99, so buy 10, gives you 40 servings, and you're set.
In inflation adjusted terms, it's $33 today, and I might actually be able to do it- you can buy 2 dozen eggs for $3, you can buy a pound of tofu at TJs for $1.29 (forget about trying to do meat, that blows the budget), you can get really cheap, but low quality, produce at haymarket in Boston (3 lbs tomatos for $1, 2 lbs broccoli for $1, etc.), and maybe if you bought flour and made your own bread or pasta you could get it done. But of course, there's the hidden labor costs in making your own bread. In reality, for a family of 3, we actually spend about $100-$125 a week (all meals, not just dinner).

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard. Because they love my organic cereal.

$33 - my immediate reaction is "beans and rice", but that's my reaction whenever I don't know what to cook. Conveniently, it's cheap, too.

137: Is roughly why I feel a bit like I'm being attacked for something that should be obvious. It's not like we're talking about running off to the local yuppie market to buy a couple pounds of chantrells and a nice brie.

When I was a kid we'd go pick berries in the summer on a weekend afternoon (ok, so they have to grow near you), and in season tomatoes are in everyones budget, or at least a plant in the backyard or a pot on the balcony is if you live in any sort of helpful climate. The majority of people I saw when picking berries were working class, not that I can ever remember thinking about it in those terms then. I suppose if you grow up in a multigenerational deeply urban family, I could imagine not having any clue about this stuff.

134: I still think you're putting too much emphasis on the idea that taste (the physical sense) is somehow natural/inherent/somewhat objective. People by and large won't eat rotten food, and will prefer sweet to sour or bitter, but aside from those kind of really broad generalizations, I honestly think that our (we people here) preference for fresh food is largely class-determined. You don't have to be a yuppie to have value associations with foods that are a little more complicated than "I like tomatoes, but not spinach."

In other words, I think that broadly speaking we agree that both class and "natural taste" play roles--but I think it's probably about 85/15, if that, and I suspect you'd reverse the equation.

139: Well, yes. But also that food is one of those things that are unusual because you can't live without it, and it forms a major part of your daily routine regardless of your circumstances. And there are tradeoffs that can be made within class boundaries.

144- People naturally like unami, which a good tomato has lots of. Or you could just add MSG to everything.

144: I wouldn't reverse it, but I'd make it a more even. 70/30? 60/40? Not sure.

I may have a bit of selection bias, in that I emphasize food quality quite highly, and probably tend to associate with others that do as a result. This definitely doesn't come from my upbringing, nor the rather constrained access to foods that came with it. I hadn't been independent very long before I realized I could cook much better food than I could afford to buy processed or go out for, so long as I was willing to spend some time on it too.

118: Sorry, I'm having a hell of a time finding the original report at the DEFRA website. However, considering that it was prepared by the UK's Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs and that they've been under Labor power for 9 years by now, I'd say the ideological leanings of this report are likely to be green and/or liberal if anything.

120: This report was an exhaustive survey of the UK market, where the cars are more gas-efficient and the infrastructure is supposedly more walker-friendly. I dread to think what the comparable numbers for the US would be, with the much longer distances and much lower passenger car efficiency.

Also, given the natural limits of economies of scale for local farm producers, I'm not sure what sort of infrastructure could ever make individual farms competitive with the industrial farms for sheer energy-efficiency of producing and shipping their wares.

This definitely doesn't come from my upbringing

I'm perfectly willing to believe this. I wouldn't be perfectly willing to believe you if you asserted that your taste in this area wasn't something you were proud of, or something that you thought was preferable to liking Krispy Kreme for reasons that aren't purely about taste or nutrition.

m.f.k. fisher has a great recipe for "sludge" for students with a very low budget in _How to Cook a Wolf_. it must come in under the $20/wk, and is reasonably nutritious too.

this argument about farmer's markets using more petroleum seems very sketchy to me too - at least, a big generalization. i've been a regular farmer's market goer in 5 different cities in my adult life, and have never used anything other than a subway or my own two feet to get to them.

in fact, a car would have probably been more inconvenient than walking. (parking)

in fact, a car would have probably been more inconvenient than walking.

This may be different for people who live farther from farmers' markets.

Yeah -- I don't associate farmers markets with huge parking lots. We walk a block to ours, and our CSA share delivers to the neighborhood, so veggies for a couple of dozen families require one forty-mile truck trip once a week.

148: they aren't energy efficient so much as they are cost efficient. Industrial farms need a lot of petroleum for fertilizer, mechanical aid, centralized shipping. They reduce labour costs relative to smaller operations, and up per unit production, but this is not neccessarily a big win unless the only consideration is cost. Unless *all* of these factors are accounted for in the report, it is flawed. The current shipping infrastructure is set up the way it is for availability, product consistency, and scheduling, not energy efficiency. I suspect that the UK is like NA, in that trucking is effectively highly subsidized due to exernalizing the infrastructure costs.

I'm not sure what the situation looks like in the UK, but in NA local produce isn't available in many places, so people end up driving long distance to get to the `farmers markets', etc. The distrubution system is not set up to allow small farms easy access. This could quite obviously be changed.

151: I'm wondering if the study were measuring something stupid, like how much energy it would take for everyone in the UK to shop at farmers markets if there weren't any additional markets in response to the increased demand.

Because I don't know anyone who commutes all that far to get to a farmers market -- the people who shop there are the people for whom it's not terribly inconvenient.

151: sure, but the reason both a)parking would've been hard and b) walking/subway-ing was easy is because of high population density.

there's more of us in the cities. giving us the benefit of economies of scale - and surely affecting those statistics.

You can play stupid games like that as much as you want. For example, if a farm uses less labor because it's more mechanized, then that's x fewer workers who have to drive to the farm each day, saving you y gallons of gas. I believe such games are called economics.

I don't mean to jump on a study I haven't read too hard. It's just difficult to believe as reported. Not impossible, but difficult.

150: It isn't just the customers' cars that are relevant here. Every farmer is driving however many miles to the market in a light truck carrying their tiny number of individual wares. This is compared to the enormous multi-trailer trucks and semis carrying food to supermarkets. Considering how long those trips from farm to market are, that's a huge difference.

Also, consider the number of people who do not live near subway systems. The suburb I grew up in had a farmers' market, but you can bet there was no way to get there other than driving (unless you happened to live near one of the three bus lines in town, or near the train station in some other town on the same commuter line and just randomly decided to visit our farmers' market instead)

I'm all for good nutrition and healthy school lunches, but I think that the bigger point is that kids are not made to sit still for hours on end. No wonder every little boy is diagnosed with ADD. I think kids should be outside running around in an unstructured play environment rather than being force fed useless facts by overworked . Or something.

154- this may be a big-city vs. medium-city thing. In bigger cities, where people walk to pretty much everything anyway, farmer's markets are no exception. In smaller, parking-lot cities where people drive to everything, farmer's markets are also no exception. In my experience, at least.

149: Fair enough, it's a complicated issue. My original motivation to change my diet (from what I grew up with) was nutritious/ethical though. Along the way I discovered I actually liked food a lot and, being broke at the time had to find affordable ways to experiment. I was perfectly willing as a student to trade off owning a cheap car for eating better. I suspect I am more judgemental about these things now that I was then, though.

The suburb I grew up in had a farmers' market, but you can bet there was no way to get there other than driving (unless you happened to live near one of the three bus lines in town, or near the train station in some other town on the same commuter line and just randomly decided to visit our farmers' market instead)

I guess, but did it really have all that much bigger a catchment area than the local supermarket that people also drove to? Some bigger, sure, but that much?

Every farmer is driving however many miles to the market in a light truck carrying their tiny number of individual wares. This is compared to the enormous multi-trailer trucks and semis carrying food to supermarkets. Considering how long those trips from farm to market are, that's a huge difference.

But the distance differences are huge too. I'm willing to admit that a huge truck is, say, three times as efficient as a small one in terms of gas mileage per pound of cargo. But the supermarket food is coming tens of times as far. Again, it's possible, I just have a hell of a time buying it without seeing the numbers myself.

158: Some of that is just infrastructure stupidity of suburbs though, nothing to do with aquireing food per se. It isn't the only way to do things.

As per my earlier comment on the relative efficiency, part of what you are talking about is economy of scale issues that only hold if you assume local produce is always a niche market. UK is small enough that it probably plays out differently than in north america, where the average distance travelled by foodstuffs is astonishing. Part of the advantage of local is that it doesn't have to cover the same overall distances, but you lose some availability in some markets that way.

A fully loaded tractor-trailer will get 5-7 mpg while carrying 40,000-50,000 lbs of cargo. A fully loaded Ford Econoline style cargo van will get something around 15 mpg while carrying 2500 lbs. The tractor trailer is about 5 times more fuel-efficient. And if the supermarket can keep the trucks full while the local farmer runs half-loads, it gets even worse.

And once you have large-scale urbanism, local produce has to become a niche market, because there's not enough local arable land to feed a large city, almost by definition.

tractor trailer is about 5 times more fuel-efficient.

So the breakeven point is somewhere around the point where supermarket food comes five times as far. Farmer's market food is (in NYC) from a 100 mile radius. Supermarket produce largely comes from California. I'm just not buying this.

And once you have large-scale urbanism, local produce has to become a niche market, because there's not enough local arable land to feed a large city, almost by definition.

Here, I'm just tossing shit around, but there were preindustrial cities of a million or more. Grain's always been shipped long distances, but produce was limited to what could make it into the city at the speed of a draft animal without spoiling.

Jersey's pretty fertile -- there's a reason they call it the Garden State. If all the suburbanites moved into dense towns, and opened up their subdivisions for farming again, I wonder how close it could come to feeding NYC. (See also Long Island.)

164: not if it has a route to the distributers. Yes urban centers need a watershed effect, but this can be handled by large producers, or a large number of small producers, or some sort of mix. If your distrubtion system is centered around large producers though, small guys can get pushed into very inefficent methods of distribution. This is one thing that can change.

While you are right about the raw numbers for large and small trucks, centralization means that often things ship a very, very long distance. This can help organize things if you are trying to keep the same stuff on the shelves of 1200 stored nationwide, but that is not an *energy* efficiency issue.

165 is why I said the current system is predicated on cheap oil (even without fertalizer)

Were there really pre-industrial cities of a million or more? Where any large fraction of the people ate produce?

My back of the envelope calculations for cropland (0.5 hectare-per-person) figured that New York City could feed itself if all land within 110 miles of it was turned to farmland. Of course, that includes most of New Jersey. If you made everyone within 100 miles of New York move to the city, you'd probably need more than a 200 mile radius.

(FWIW, it looks like the cost to ship one pound of stuff in a full tractor-trailer across the country is about ten cents. Energy costs are less than 20 percent of this, which means that the energy cost of shipping produce cannot be that large, proportionally.)

Rome, certainly, and I'm sure there were others. I don't know what fraction of the population ate much produce.

(Clearly, NYC is a special case in terms of sustainability on local produce -- it's one of the biggest cities in the world. But it's almost possible. For smaller cities, it should be possible.)

If all the suburbanites moved into dense towns, and opened up their subdivisions for farming again, I wonder how close it could come to feeding NYC.

For 8 months of the year, not very. There were pre-industrial cities of a million or more, but there was also rampant malnutrition. A good deal of the California produce is stuff that can't be produced near New York, at least not for the year-round supplies required by supermarkets.

Also, I found the report. Here it is. It's an interesting report, but I'm still trying to find the data breakdown for small markets versus supermarkets.

I get the impression that plentiful fresh produce is a pretty recent thing (i.e. burritos are filled out with rice and beans, not grilled onions and peppers). Rome is also not on a coast, which means that there's more farmland closer to it.

(I'm also not anti-local-produce. I just think it's a yuppie luxury that's only available to the extent that most people forego it, barring drastic and unwelcome changes in the way people live.)

All I can find is this passage:

AEA Technology 80 Again, impacts depend on the choice of policies to reduce the impacts of food miles. Some policies (such as improvements to freight logistics or reduced car shopping miles) would have a beneficial impact on transport energy efficiency. Policies which resulted in greater consumer demand for UK food compared to imported food would probably not have a dramatic effect on transport efficiency, which would still be orientated around the supermarket regional distribution centres. However, concern has been expressed that increased activity in the "local" food economy, typically defined as foods originating from around 30 miles from their point of sale, could lead to increased congestion if single deliveries in large vehicles are replaced by many deliveries in smaller vehicles. Also there could be a general decrease in transport energy efficiency associated with more use of smaller vehicles, lower load factors and more empty running.

It is possible that any increase will be mainly on rural roads where noise, congestion and pollution impacts are less significant, although CO2 impacts will be no less important. However, this issue still has the potential to be significant and to offset some of the environmental benefits of a lower food miles system. We therefore recommend further research into these issues, and monitoring of local traffic patterns to assess whether any effects are significant at the local level. Also, it is important that any efforts to boost local food initiatives are accompanied by policies to improve the transport efficiency of local food distribution systems, such as co-operative distribution amongst local producers and retailers to maximise load factors.

I obviously didn't read the whole report, but that passage isn't a conclusion that locally grown food is more energy-costly, and it seems like the sort of thing which shouldn't coexist in a report with such a conclusion. If this is the same report, I wonder if the Economist misreported it.

As far as I can tell, this is the section of the report focused on by The Economist:

6.4.7 Decrease in transport energy efficiency and production energy efficiency

Again, impacts depend on the choice of policies to reduce the impacts of food miles.
Some policies (such as improvements to freight logistics or reduced car shopping miles)
would have a beneficial impact on transport energy efficiency. Policies which resulted in
greater consumer demand for UK food compared to imported food would probably not
have a dramatic effect on transport efficiency, which would still be orientated around the
supermarket regional distribution centres. However, concern has been expressed that
increased activity in the "local" food economy, typically defined as foods originating from
around 30 miles from their point of sale, could lead to increased congestion if single
deliveries in large vehicles are replaced by many deliveries in smaller vehicles. Also
there could be a general decrease in transport energy efficiency associated with more
use of smaller vehicles, lower load factors and more empty running.

It is possible that any increase will be mainly on rural roads where noise, congestion and
pollution impacts are less significant, although CO2 impacts will be no less important.
However, this issue still has the potential to be significant and to offset some of the
environmental benefits of a lower food miles system. We therefore recommend further
research into these issues, and monitoring of local traffic patterns to assess whether any
effects are significant at the local level. Also, it is important that any efforts to boost
local food initiatives are accompanied by policies to improve the transport efficiency of
local food distribution systems, such as co-operative distribution amongst local producers
and retailers to maximise load factors.

There are similar concerns over energy efficiency in food production. It is possible that
processing of some local foods might be less energy efficient than for large centralised
factories. On the other hand, there is some indication that businesses involved in local
food production are also more aware of environmental issues and more likely to be
involved in, for example, waste reduction initiatives than comparable non-local
businesses.

As for transport, it is therefore desirable that efforts to improve local food systems are
accompanied by measures to promote energy efficiency, waste reduction and use of
renewable energy amongst these businesses. Further research and monitoring could also
be worthwhile.

Not exactly a ringing condemnation. I am finding it impossible to find a good indicator of relative efficiency of the different transport methods in terms of average tonne-kilometer of transported food per tonne of CO2 emissions, which I think would be the most pertinent measure to this discussion.

Sorry, that's on pages 80-81 of the linked report.

173: I'm also not anti-local-produce. I just think it's a yuppie luxury that's only available to the extent that most people forego it, barring drastic and unwelcome changes in the way people live.

Well, sure. If fresh tomatoes being unavailable ten months a year is a drastic and unwelcome change, then local produce isn't going to work most places.

Rome is not on a coast, but it is in an area that has a very temperate climate. This, of course, gets back to the whole "waaah, I miss winter"/"snow is for suckers" argument we so often have, though. Come the apocalypse, Angelenos will, if nothing else, have plenty of citrus fruit and avocados.

pwned, and so concisely, too

But I need to get home and head out to the Bulls game. Maybe tonight I'll look for the numbers in the report necessary to calculate that relative efficiency measure for cars, little trucks (for local farmers and small markets) and big trucks.

Come the apocalypse, LA will revert to desert.

179 is actually true. I knew I should've stayed in Seattle.

173: The relevance of being on a coast is that half of the area within a given distance of the city is ocean, and thereby not much good for farming.

176: I meant more along the lines of everyone giving up their yard and moving into apartment buildings with parks and such.

181a: However, very good for fishing. Also, not too hard to get fresh water near a coast.

179 s/b the Valley and/or Inland Empire. Los Angeles proper has always had a mediterranean climate.

146: umami, no?

In re tomatoes, as John Emerson pointed out above part of the issue is that tomatoes aren't being bred for flavor any more, they're being bred for durability and visual appeal. [Tomatoes in particular are often harvested while unripe, then "gas-ripened" to give them the uniform cherry-red color we now associate with tomatoes that is in fact distinctly unnatural.] This doesn't just apply to fruits and veg, though; poultry and pork (at least in the US) are pretty awful nowadays compared to their counterparts 50 years ago. Again, they're being bred for durability (tons of antibiotics), visual appeal (nice plump chicken breasts sitting on a plastic tray, etc.) and certain strange notions of healthiness (superlean pork that has no actual flavor to it), not taste -- or, for that matter, healthiness, because who's going to eat a superlean pork roast that tastes like styrofoam?

In re poverty and food, maybe I missed it, but I can't believe no-one's cited The Road To Wigan Pier (specifically Chapter 6, if you scroll down). It's probably the single best summary of the problem I've ever read. The punchline:

And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food.

178: Local farmers and big trucks aren't mutually exclusive either.

While a truck can be driven cross country relatively cheaply, at both ends the food is driven in small batches to the point of purchase and from the point of production. The equation I've seen referenced here for big-store marketing doesn't describe the whole travel from farm to wholesaler to retailer to buyer. It talks at most of the trip from wholesaler/processor to retailer to buyer. A lot of small trucks are used in the initial phase of that trip, from the farm to the wholesaler or processor.

184: There was an ad on the radio a while back for one of those warehouse supermarkets which promised low low prices on food for your family so that you could "save your money for more important things." Which was somewhat understandable and yet very sad.

In re tomatoes, as John Emerson pointed out above part of the issue is that tomatoes aren't being bred for flavor any more, they're being bred for durability and visual appeal.

There was a story a while back about a Florida farmer whose tomatoes (I think), though fantastically ugly, were absolutely delicious—but he was forced to destroy his crop, because the state tomato controllers, or whatever, didn't want him selling his visually suspect wares.

86: i eat lots of tomatos in the winter, in salsa. Its supposed to mainly taste of garlic and cinlantro & chiles than tomato. tomato is just the filler.

188: I can imagine. The best tomatoes I ever had were from a farmer's market in North Carolina. They didn't look like anything, they didn't even smell like anything, but god*damn* they were tasty.

I like those. I don't really like the flavour of tomatos.

113 gets it exactly right.

Three-way at my place, then.

Bring yogurt.

Mean.

Ah, sorry, then. I figure if you blogged it, it was fair game.

(Honest question: does the male eating yogurt help?)

Looks like we're up to four.

It is fair game, but that doesn't mean I don't get to protest.

I honestly don't know the answer to that, but I'd think that yeah: a high intake of acidophilous would probably help with, say, chronic jock itch or athlete's foot or any of your garden-variety yeast-related problems. It couldn't hurt, anyway. I do know that dipping a yeast-carrying cock in yogurt helps, even if it is kinda weird. Make sure you label the yogurt container so some poor innocent doesn't go eating it.

Can't you just wait until the last second and then slap it out of their hand?

198: I meant, does a male partner eating yogurt help alleviate the risk and/or severity of his female partner's bladder or urinary-tract infection? I've been told as much.

200: I can't imagine the logic of that. I'd suspect that what whoever told you that wasn't realizing was that a guy can carry yeast without realizing it, so you can reinfect your devoted partner again and again.

201: And the unwitting male carrier is without remedy? No cranberry-yogurt slushee that will save us all?

You seem awfully concerned about this issue, Stanley.

No, if you have yeast (i.e., if your sex monkey gets another yeast infection right after she dealt with the last one) you can treat it with the same stuff she does. Only instead of sticking it in the cooch you don't have, you just rub it around on your dick. Or, like I said, you can use yogurt. But of course IANAD, so blah blah see a physician blah blah don't take expired antibiotics blah blah boring-ass preachy unnecessary cautions borne of too much exposure to anti-litigation copy.

But as to the bladder infection thing, I think the main preventatives are pretty standard: wash your junk, adjust positions if infections tend to crop up, stock cranberry juice in the fridge for the women you entice home.

204 -- I suppose one goes to the yogurt with the cooch one doesn't have, and not the cooch one doesn't want?

It's too gddamn late.

203: You'll understand one day, young Simba.

204: Actually, the suggestion was made more as a preventive measure.

I should also disclose that I've been hired to shill for the massive Yogurt-Cranberry Complex.

the massive Yogurt-Cranberry Complex

Somewhere in South Jersey, isn't it? On the way to the shore.

207: Well, again, I don't see why your yogurt/cranberry intake would affect her bladder infections, which tend to be the result of germs (which are gonna be there in one form or another regardless) getting shoved into the urethra by vigorous rubbing in the area. I mean, sure, be clean, but even the nice clean germs that keep, say, the vag nicely yeast-free do not belong in the bladder, and if they get a free ride there on the fun train they're gonna cause trouble.

I do know that dipping a yeast-carrying cock in yogurt helps

Obligatory. It turns out that ac's yogurt story is in the same thread.

According to that threat, ben got drunk off 1/3 of three bottles of wine? What a poseur.

*thread. Fuck. Point taken.

Interestingly, the "actor trick of the trade" link that Ben provides in that thread *also* has an XML reference.

No I'm not gonna reproduce the link. It's more fun if you have to hunt for it.

No relationship, no yeast infection. Easy.

That was easy.

Ben w-lfs-n, spoiler of fun.

215: No, it's no antibiotics, no yeast infection. Guys get yeast without relationships, too--see "athlete's foot" and "jock itch," mentioned upthread.

Dear future readers of this thread,

I'm sorry to have spoiled your fun.

In an attempt to cross-pollinate threads, one of my former students referred to a hook-up of his as "yoghurt city"; does that count?

By the way, who would *truck* grain across the US when you have railroads that were built to shift it?

My big plan for newfangled agriculture involves shipment of grain by air.

(My dream is one day to make supersonic organic oatmeal.)

Missed most of this discussion about local vs industrial, which is a shame as I'm in the middle of reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, a book I highly recommend.

I second mrh's recommendation. Very good book.

I third it, though vegetarians who wish to hold fast to their diet may want to take a pass on it.

This post gets it right. No phys. ed., no recess, chicken nuggets, and, oh, by the way, you're fat according to our charts. Leave the menu be, get rid of the pop machines, and give the little rugrats more sports time.

The portrayal of the town in the article made them seem a little weird, though. I can see being proud that your town has kids not obsessed by weight, but not that the prom queen is developing type two diabetes. And for some reason I kept thinking that the author had never been out of New York City; Pennsylvania's not really that foreign, and I've seen fat people in Manhattan, too!

and I've seen fat people in Manhattan, too!

Tourists, no doubt.