Blogging in the New York Times, Mark Bittman argues that real food can be cheaper than junk food, and that by buying healthy items like dry beans and cooking at home, low income people living in ‘food deserts’ can eat cheaply but healthily.
This is obviously true, if not the whole story. Helping poor people live better under tough circumstances is critical. For instance, the community groups we work with on food access issues train health promoters to encourage their peers to cook healthfully with ingredients that are available and affordable. The USDA’s Thrifty Food Plan was designed to help low-income people shop for and cook healthy recipes on a budget.
The comments to Bittman’s entry do a good job of laying out some of the obstacles that people face in terms of time, work, stress, demands of family and child care, transportation — even if they can buy dry goods and some vegetables and have a kitchen to cook in.
I’d just add that while we need to simultaneously encourage healthy living strategies and improve the food environment that influences peoples’ options, there’s something mean about Bittman’s emphasis. Not mean as in cruel so much as parsimonius, stingy in its ethical vision. A difference, perhaps, between justice and just getting by.
Encouraging people living in food deserts to make do/ survive like people have in difficult circumstances throughout human history doesn’t live up our potential as a society. That’s why we have focused on promoting food justice. Food justice is being defined every day by the efforts of communities to make food fairer, greener, and healthier. Roughly speaking, it’s the notion that everyone deserves healthy food and that the benefits and risks associated with food should be shared fairly. The concept borrows its distributional equity framework from the environmental justice movement, its focus on access to food from the community food security and community economic development movements, and its interest in food environments from research in the public health and food systems fields.
Tags: cooking, food deserts, Food Justice, thrifty food plan
