Food for Thought Continued

The comments to my previous post on this thread continue to furnish new things to think about. Aine and Jackie (who even brought one of my favorite writers, Barbara Ehrenreich, into the discussion) gathered into the fold all those folks who are living in their vehicles, or in weekly room rentals in less-than-savory parts of town. These folks don't even have the equipment to make Kraft mac & cheese out of a box, unless they're using illegal hot plates or other fire hazardous pieces of cooking equipment. And there are probably more of these people than most of us realize. The book Jackie references, Nickled and Dimed; On (Not) Getting By In America, was written ten years ago, and documents the conditions at that time for the working poor. A point Ehrenreich makes is that the low-wage jobs held by the majority of the working poor are exhausting, and both physically and mentally degrading. Ten years on from Ehrenreich's investigations, the number of folks who have lost their jobs, well-paid white collar jobs as well as manual labor, their homes, and their vehicles, is bound to have grown by leaps and bounds.

Lisa has some interesting ideas about education in the use of commodity items, and Aine brings in the use of the crockpot, or slow cooker, something I was planning to introduce myself. I want to say something here about the students in my ESL class, who are all Mexican immigrants, working as service employees at the Univ. of New Mexico. They are legal immigrants, some are already citizens, some are working on the process. As presently all of them are women, food and cooking are frequent topics of our class discussions. None of them receive any government benefits, they are fiercely independent and proud of being able to hold a job in this country, no matter how menial cleaning the University Hospital clinic bathrooms, or the dorms or the classrooms may be. They have brought the cuisine of their native country with them, and cook every night for their families. Those who work the night shifts cook meals in the morning before they head to work, which they leave for husbands and kids to warm up when they get home. They use the slow cooker as one of their main cooking tools, for a staple of their diet, beans, as well as soups and stews. It is ironically interesting to me that the food movements I mentioned in my last post are mainly based on foods that were originally peasant fare, poor people's food that needed a lot of ingenuity and time in order to produce something savory and delicious. My students are cooking peasant food without belonging to any trendy "movement," simply because they don't have a lot of money and the nutrition of their families matters to them very much.

Something else Lisa brings up is a truly fascinating idea, that of a "foodmobile" modeled on the bookmobiles used by libraries to get books to rural areas and parts of town and cities without a nearby library. I have some doubts, as does she, that this could be an effective and viable government program. But what it could be, I think, is a food bank program. Getting to the physical location of the banks is bound to be difficult for many people, as they are often located in distant industrial sections of a town or city. A mobile pantry, stocked with nutricious staple items, and staffed by an educational volunteer willing to give cooking classes travelling through areas where people need the help the most, maybe biweekly - giving live demonstrations and hands-on participation in how to use the items in the van that session. I have to bring in Growers' Markets as a resource here, as in this town anyway, all of our markets accept WIC, EBT and Senior food checks (Commodity Supplemental Food Program) for fresh seasonal produce, some of it organic, some not. All of it better than what can be found in neighborhood groceries. I have suggested to our local food bank that they connect with the Growers' Market managers to get a deal going where leftover produce from the markets could be donated to Roadrunner Food Bank and distributed to their clients. At the market I usually frequent, there are often demonstration projects to show market customers how to use produce that may be new and a little scary to them. That market is located in an area close to downtown, and has customers of every class, ethnicity, walk of life. It's education for the masses.

Okay, this is way too long, and I think I have run dry. Please continue to add your thoughts, to post on this subject. We have by no means exhausted it. I, however, am a little exhausted by it for now. Thanks for all the input, what a great crew reads and writes on this blog. I am so glad to be part of the gang.

Food for Thought

It's turning out to be harder than I thought to sort out my thoughts here and write the post I promised yesterday. Lisa's comments on my two previous posts held much, pardon the pun, food for thought. Her points about food stamp shoppers not knowing how to cook, what to do with "those inexpensive foodstuffs" like rice, pasta, beans, flour, would have seemed more judgmental and critical to me had she not included this: "Let's face it, our culture no longer knows how to feed itself properly, especially using scratch ingredients."

Because these are some very true facts. It isn't just the food stamp population looking for fast and easy prepared foods and meals. (I almost said nutrition, but that's making a big assumption.) It's our general culture. Check out Trader Joe's around five PM any weekday and you'll see crowds of people cruising the frozen entrée aisles picking up dinner on their way home from work. The same can be said for the prepared food counters at Whole Foods, where dinner may be fast and easy, but it sure ain't cheap, I'd bet the farm that these customers aren't using food stamps. I was picking up something myself one evening at the Whole Foods near the building where I teach, when a guy waiting in line said to me: "Sure beats cooking, heh?" I couldn't really agree with him - my cooking is much better than Whole Foods' but my time constraints on a teaching day mean that sometimes I too pick up supper on the way home.

However, at the same time that many of us think Mac and Cheese can only come out of a box by Kraft, many others of us in our schizoid culture are moving into the Slow Food, the Locavore, the Real Food, movements and cooking like we never have before. Many of us are growing as much of our food as we can, given space and time constraints, shopping at Farmers' and Growers' Markets, buying in bulk at our natural food groceries and Co-Ops. This is a strange and interesting divide, one I would like to investigate further.

I've used the phrase "time constraints" twice now in writing this, and I think this may be one of the biggest issues. Maybe people do know more about scratch, or slow, cooking than we assume, but maybe many of us just don't have the time to do it. Many of those being squeezed out by this recession are still the working poor. They may go to the food bank, shop with the help of WIC, EBT or CSFP, but they still have to get to and from jobs, pick up kids from care, and often, as Jackie notes in her comment, shop without the luxury of their own transportation. (...But one of the biggest problems is that the people with the greatest needs often live too far from stores like Winco to take advantage of them. The Oregonian had a story last year that followed a mom and her daughters as they used multi transfer bus trips to do their grocery shopping. It wasn't easy and it took several hours. It's bad enough to have a limited budget; it's even worse when you have to do your shopping at your state's version of a store that's one step up from a Seven 11.)
(To Be Continued Later)