ElementalMom

Last night, we figured out that “King Corn” was available on Netflix’s instant watch, so we did. And I am still wigging out about it.

Rowan has been reactive to corn products since he was small, so we’ve been a corn-free house for a few years. I wasn’t expecting to go into this to learn anything at all (sorta like my experience with “Super Size Me” and “Fast Food Nation”.) Sometimes, when you’re the only person you know on the “know what you’re eating” bandwagon, (OK, other than my two fave food blogs, the Cleaner Plate Club, who reviewed the film here, and Ethicurean, who reviewed it here, and my peeps over on the foodlab list), you get kinda jaded about yet another film trying desperately to get the average consumer’s attention about what they’re putting in their mouths.

So it’s with no small delight that I report here that there was one, just one, fact in the film that just rocked my world. I’m still geeking out over it. Maybe it’s because I came late to the party (and the film) and the lunacy with food prices going on right now highlights this particular aspect of the corn madness.

Near the end of the film, our heroes, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, interview Earl Butz. Ethicurean says,

Many would argue that Butz, who was secretary of agriculture in the 1970s, is singlehandedly responsible for the corporatization of U.S. farming, the obesity epidemic, and the pollution of vast swathes of America by agricultural chemicals. But face to face with the nonagenarian Bogeyman of the sustainable food movement in his nursing home, the guys can’t quite bring themselves to come in for the rhetorical kill, neither in person nor voiceover.

Friends, this was the most horrifying part of the film, and I’m still metaphorically chewing on it. Butz says flat-out that Americans today pay a smaller percentage of their money for food than any other generation, and that’s the key to our prosperity. In light of the sustainable food movement’s take that we should be paying more and getting real food for it (see grist’s blistering critique of Michael Pollan and Alice Waters’ takes here and the New York Times here), the idea that Butz was able (with what support? Who knows) to make the decision that our health as a nation was to be sacrificed on the altar of prosperity makes me ill.

What grist and the NYT are missing (along with the vast majority of Americans) is that it’s not about dollars and cents; it’s about choosing to eat food which sustains health, and choosing to eat crap which will kill you and make a lot of money for the pharmaceutical industry in the later portion of your life. You will end up paying the money, the question is just whether you want to spend it on food all along the way, or in medical costs at the end.

And in grief and pain, of course. The film interviews a cabby in NYC, whose entire family is diabetic and/or dead from diabetes-related illness. It seems almost cruel and macabre to contrast his family’s story of early, gruesome death, with Butz sitting in his nursing home in his nineties. The man who decided that it was OK for us to eat the inedible and pay the inevitable health cost sits alone, well-groomed and clean into his nineties, while the people on the streets are slowly amputated to the point of choosing death.

Our family has always paid a larger percentage of our budget in food than pretty much anyone I know. When trying to plan last year’s household budget, I gave up in dismay, discovering that not a single budget recommendation I could find included an adequate food percentage (I usually transferred the allotment from “entertainment” and “clothing”, because being a Californian, there surely was no way to shed a dime from “housing”). The folks who deal in finance don’t see the difference between payments to a CSA and trips to McDonald’s; it’s all just “food” on the balance sheet.

This is not the only cogent point in the film; depending on your background, there may or may not be other bits that come as news. The filmmakers make the point that an acre of corn in Iowa touches “everything”, and of course, that alone comes as no surprise to folks who recognize that yes, it’s all connected, isn’t it? So check it out and see if there are any connections in there for you.

Tags: Cleaner-Plate-Club, Ethicurean, Fast-Food-Nation, King-Corn, Super-Size-Me

Over at The Cleaner Plate Club (sure as heck not by way of most mainstream media channels, sigh), I found this piece on the New York Times op-ed, My Forbidden Fruits (and Vegetables), by a farmer, Jack Hedin, who wanted to grow vegetables that could be sold at local farmers’ market. And was blocked by the government, who, you know, is here to protect you.

This led over to The Crunchy Chicken, who is so outraged she’s resorted to terms like “grinding my crackers”. Gotta love that. Also gotta love that she’s created clickable banners with which to encourage your readership to go do something about this. Here’s the code:

<a href=”http://crunchychicken.blogspot.com/2008/03/fix-farm-bill.html”> <img src=”http://bp0.blogger.com/_8ndgSYbdkZ0/R8ub_doK2GI/AAAAAAAABGk/Igsn3VHPWRA/S1600-R/FarmBill.jpg” alt=”Fix the Farm Bill”/></a>

…which will send people to her blog, where there’s a lovely sample letter to send to one’s Congresspeople, and links to several other letters as well.

So go out and do something good for your plate today.

There’s nothing like a pregnancy to make you start really thinking about your eating. Again.

We are already pretty “different” about our food. We did a phase of hardcore raw, but then fell off the wagon what with the move onto the boat, and then my pregnancy. And of course, cold weather does not encourage a raw diet, it just doesn’t. And it has been cold this year.

But you know, the question of “what” to eat is beginning to pale really, really fast, when compared with the question of “how” to eat.

I stumbled into The Cleaner Plate Club a while back… she’s brilliant. Her “How I Taught My Kid to Curse and Why I Blame Big Food” is a work of genius, and I cannot read “The many things I can talk about” with a straight face (course, that’s my face wobbling between laughing and crying, but anyway, it’s a fabulous post.)

If you clicked on those links, you wandered off Cleaner Plate and onto The Ethicurean: Chew The Right Thing. She’s got a series of digests up right now that are anything but digestable. The two pieces about “accidental” GMO contamination of corn and rice crops both make me really, really nervous.

After a whole childhood colored by Feingold, the idea that diet impacts behavior is old, old news to me. Course apparently it is news to science, and a big study at the end of 2007, published in Lancet, indicates that really, I haven’t been insane for the last 30 years, artificial crap in your food makes you unwell! How novel! ::sigh:: I’m printing a copy of this study out, to beat people with who continue to insist that I’m making it up when Rowan freaks out from consuming HFCS or coloring.

So what’s my point? My point is that the more you read, from Downergate to Pollan, the state of food here in the US is absolutely abysmal. Finding real food to feed your family is getting tougher all the time, let alone organic, seasonally-appropriate, healthy food. Going to the grocery is a depressing endeavor, not because it’s so hard to find what Pollan calls “real food”, but because even then, there’s danger (like the time I saw a produce guy putting clearly non-organic broccoli in the organic bins, and who, when I called him on it, shrugged and said “no one knows the difference without the labeling.”).

So how does a gestating, lactating, mother of growing people, ensure that everyone’s eating stuff they really should be, and not eating the kind of yuck that is becoming more and more common in our food supply? It’s a trick, without being fulltime hunters and gatherers. I’d be interested to hear how other people are dealing with this…

On one of my mommylists, for parents struggling with altering the family diet in response to child allergies, a woman stated that she was buying cartons of nut and rice milks, because she had no time for preparing food. This is my response to the idea that we don’t have time.

I wanted to address this some more, not to pick on anyone, but because it’s a really common refrain in our culture, and it’s something worth thinking about really carefully.

I used to be too busy to prepare food too. Amusingly enough, it was before I had kids. I lived on packages; top ramen, powerbars, mac n cheese.

Now, I work fulltime, I have a nearly five year old and a two year old, I’m the Publications Director for ICAN, I am in the process of fixing up my house and getting it rented while my family moves onboard a boat. I have two freelance editing contracts and two book contracts going right now, and I’m a moderator or leader/contact on four different email lists. And I make two or three meals a day, pretty much every day.

A very wise person told me, “either you spend time in the kitchen, or you spend time at the doctor, but one way or another, you’ll spend the time.” When I was young and invincible, I thought she was crazy, but now that I see the people around me going down for one health complaint or another, and I see westerners as a people accepting higher and higher levels of disease as “normal”, I see what she meant. What we eat, and how we eat, as a culture is killing us just as surely as the frog in the slowly-heated pot.

The Carol Flinders essay, “The Keeper of the Keys” that is the introduction to Laurel’s Kitchen has got to be, hands down, the best expression I have ever read, anyplace, for why spending time in food preparation is critical not only to your physical health, but to the mental health, and the heart, of a family. It’s worth the price of the cookbook, even if you can’t eat most of the recipes in there as a GH/CF/DF person. I keep the book for that essay alone, and I read it whenever I freak out about being the kitchen slave. Whenever the siren song of our culture, about being “too busy” starts telling me that I could just buy one, and then I’d have more time.

The learning curve involved with preparing food from scratch is really steep. I have been at this for five years seriously, although I grew up in the country, and I have in fact eaten a hamburger whose recipe started with :”first, go butcher the cow… then grind the meat… then grind the wheatberries for flour….”. I have bought cookbooks that rocked, and some that sucked. I have cycled through crap appliances and things I would not be without. Some recipes went from the bowl to the plate to the compost bin, and some have become family favorites. Our eating habits, our shopping habits, our kitchen supplies, the entire way we think about food has changed completely. It has been maddening, and frustrating, and intriguing, and enlightening. My entire relationship with food has been reworked, for the better.

This does not happen when one allows corporations to feed one’s family.

You know the whole saw about doing your chores, about “Do it happily, or don’t bother doing it”? Same deal with food. I don’t think that someone in an assembly line can make food for my family and have it be energetically the same as the food I prepare. I know that food prepared with care is totally not the same as food prepared for the masses.

There’s a selfish component as well. I have yet to meet commercial food that was even close to as yummy as what I can make. Fresh almond and rice milks are so superior to the stuff in the cartons, it’s ridiculous. Not to mention greener; no carton, no trash, no power to make the factory go. Making them, my process is down to five minutes; it takes way longer than that to earn the money to go to the store to pick up the carton to wait in the line at the checkout and to drive back home again. I think it’s a false economy to always buy what you need, but it’s a thought pattern that has been carefully nurtured in our culture for a very long time about all kinds of things.

I think that one of the finest things about this list of Monica’s is that we can help each other not have the hellish learning curve that I had, share tips for making it faster, more bearable, more accessible, when pretty much the whole rest of the culture is encouraging us to work more to get more money to spend it on suboptimal dietary choices so we spend more on doctors and pharmaceuticals and the whole economy keeps spinning on our graves.

Maybe I’m overly cynical. It wouldn’t be the first time. But if I can encourage you to do no other thing, please think about it really carefully, and see if you can’t find the time. Maybe we can start a revolution with nutmilks…