Two interesting articles on food. One on the behind the scenes lobbying over new food regulations in Canada, the other on how morality has become part of what drives food purchases, but just for those who can afford it.
'As we wait for the promised Food Policy for Canada, the government must decide if it will implement some Big Ideas in the public interest, or if it will allow Big Food to hold the rest of us back.'
Almost three years ago today, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau outlined his priorities for his new health minister.
They included some big ideas to promote public health through healthy eating. They were, and are, urgent.
In Canada, an unhealthy diet is the single leading
risk factor for death. Millions of Canadians have diet-related disease,
costing the public purse about $26 billion in 2015. Food Secure Canada
and many other non-profit organizations working in the public interest
have been raising alarm bells and proposing some big ideas for a very
long time. But Big Food, despite consumer trends, appears to be
marching to a different drummer, slowing all of us down.
Two years ago, Health Canada announced its Healthy
Eating Strategy with a number of action areas “to improve the food
environment in Canada to make it easier for Canadians to make the
healthier choice,” which we support. Trans fat regulations were recently
announced, but we’re still waiting for the three other pillars:
mandatory front-of-package nutrition symbols; restricting marketing of
unhealthy food and beverages to kids; and revising Canada’s Food Guide.
So what’s the hold-up? Thanks to transparency policies
put in place by Health Canada, we can access public records of any
lobby efforts on the Healthy Eating Strategy. This includes about 130
meetings initiated by the food industry and correspondence with public
servants working on the strategy — more than a dozen by the Canadian
Beverage Association alone. Though a significant number of food-related
companies recognize that foods that are healthy, sustainable and local
are the future, a closer look at each area of delayed action paints a
portrait of old-school industry tactics meant to protect industry
interests by watering down and delaying health-promotion policies.
Let’s start with the front-of-package labelling.
In Canada, the approach is symbol-based, designed to
alert consumers when a food product contains more than 15 per cent of
the daily recommended amount of a nutrient of concern to public health,
such as sodium, sugars and saturated fat. A letter sent to the federal
agriculture minister and co-signed by the Food and Consumer Products of
Canada and the Canadian Federation of Agriculture argues the proposed
labels “will cause food shoppers to feel undue, ingredient-specific
anxiety,” and will “undermine public trust.” Public trust cannot be
gained by refusing to display the information consumers need to make
informed choices.
Next up: marketing to children. Research has shown
that food and beverage marketing to children affects the foods they
request and prefer. Not surprisingly, the food and beverage industry
spends billions of dollars on it. With a third of children in Canada
overweight or obese, and 70 per cent not meeting the minimum daily
requirement for fruit and vegetable consumption, one would think
protecting them from advertisements for unhealthy food would be an
urgent public health priority.
Bill S-228, an act to amend the Food and Drugs Act
(prohibiting food and beverage marketing directed at children), was
first introduced to the Senate in 2016, and is still travelling through
the legislative process.
Canada’s Food Guide acts as a foundation for nutrition
education and meal planning in homes, school, hospitals, daycares and
more. It’s the second-most downloaded government document after
income-tax forms. Over the years, the guide’s credibility has been
questioned because of the undue influence of industry interest groups.
We commend Health Canada for building a firewall around the current
process: Bureaucrats developing the guide will not take meetings with
industry until after the policy’s release, to ensure it’s in the public
interest, informed only by the latest evidence.
This has not stopped lobbyists from getting their
message out through other government departments and processes,
including internal memos intended to influence Health Canada’s work on
the guide. One memo obtained by the Globe and Mail noted that “messages
that encourage a shift toward plant-based sources of protein would have
negative implications for the meat and dairy industries.” We think this
is missing the mark because, more than ever, Canadians want to make
healthy choices. This includes knowing where their food comes from, and
supporting local and sustainable producers and food businesses.
As we wait for the promised Food Policy for Canada,
the government must decide if it will implement some Big Ideas in the
public interest, or if it will allow Big Food to hold the rest of us
back.
Canadians need strong federal leadership to stand up
for the real public interest: healthy people, healthy communities and
healthy local economies. Consumers making better food choices will help
support a necessary transition to a food system that is healthier, more
sustainable, and more just. Forward-looking companies will bring those
products to market. But better food policy is about more than the
market. We need government to firmly act in the public interest and
implement some bold new ideas.
You aren’t what you eat: Why ethically ‘good’ food doesn’t make you a better person
Rebecca Tucker is the author of the forthcoming book A Matter of Taste: A Farmers' Market Devotee’s Semi-Reluctant Argument for Inviting Scientific Innovation to the Dinner Table, from which this essay is adapted.
In the television series The Good Place,
which frames the concepts of heaven and hell – or, more loosely, what
happens to you in the afterlife – as, well, a Good Place and a Bad
Place, each resident of Earth is assigned a point score based on their
deeds while they were alive. The greater the deed, in terms of its
virtuosity, the higher its score; the more abhorrent the deed, the more
it cuts that score down.
It’s one of many
concepts that the show, in its initial presentation, plays for
quirkiness and laughs. But, as with the fundamental narrative of The Good Place
– which is, like it or not, a deeply thoughtful, nuanced and at times
devastatingly incisive criticism of human morality – there’s much more
to the idea than immediately meets the eye.
For one thing, the good
that we, as individuals, are able to perform isn’t necessarily equal:
One person’s “high-ticket items,” good-points-wise, may be entirely
unavailable to another person; but how is it then fair that that person
would be granted a higher moral status, simply by virtue (no pun
intended) of factors beyond his or her control? In the TV series, the
character Tahani – a wealthy socialite during her life on Earth – notes
that some of her points were contingent on her elevated socioeconomic
standing. It’s a lot easier, in other words, to get ahead, in this life
and the theoretical next, if you’re already a member of the 1 per cent.
Doesn’t seem particularly fair, does it? It reminds me a lot of the way
we think about food.
In 2018, the discourse around what we should eat is a lot like the discourse around where the characters in The Good Place
should end up: Is it good, or is it bad? In the slightly literal sense,
in the context of food, you might think that this means is it
nutritious – is it good for me, for my body, for my health? – or the
opposite: Will it harm me, physically? Our idea of what constitutes good
food is just as deceptively surface-level as The Good Place; in actuality, it’s all about virtue and vice, on a slightly esoteric and often unattainable level.
These two types of good
and two types of bad – the healthful and the virtuous goods versus the
unhealthy and immoral bads – aren’t mutually exclusive: Often, food that
ticks off virtue is also good for our bodies. But in marketing, and in
the collective consciousness, it’s become more important to emphasize
morality than literal physical wholesomeness; good for you might be the
baseline, but virtue is the prevailing top note.
To understand this, we
need to go back a few years. In 2006, the writer Michael Pollan released
the defining tome of the modern foodie era: The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It sought to answer one (deceptively, beguilingly) simple question: “What should we have for dinner?” The Omnivore’s Dilemma
at once defined and catapulted into the zeitgeist the food-borne
anxieties that would come to frame the next decade for food activists
and concerned diners. In it, the American journalist scrutinizes
everything from factory farming to foraging to fast food, with the
stated goal of determining the best food to eat. His conclusion,
practically, is that the Perfect Meal, as he calls it, is one that is
partly foraged, partly hunted and allows him “to eat in full
consciousness.” Which is to say that, almost immediately, Mr. Pollan
gives up the idea that the “best” food means, purely, the healthiest
food. The best food, to him, is the food that allows for a pretty
significant helping of righteousness.
Mr.
Pollan notes that the question of what to eat, for humans, has
historically been almost strictly utilitarian: Evolutionarily, the
omnivore’s dilemma – that is, the human’s dilemma – centred on
determining first which of a plethora of foods available would not kill
us, and second, deciding which of these foods could serve as good
sources of the nutrients, vitamins and minerals we required to stay
alive. A lot of the time, we figured this out by tasting things, and
subconsciously associating biological responses with flavours: The
collagen in bone broth might have once helped your body recover from a
bad cold, for instance, which explains why you might crave chicken soup
the next time you have a flu. (In The Dorito Effect,
Mark Schatzker calls this “biological wisdom,” although he also
explains that we’re not as instinctively wise to the evolutionary
benefits of flavour as we used to be, on account of our prolonged
exposure to the artificial stuff).
Mr. Pollan addresses
some of this, too. “Many anthropologists believe that the reason we
evolved such big and intricate brains was precisely to help us deal with
the omnivore’s dilemma,” he writes. “Omnivory offers the pleasures of
variety … But the surfeit of choice brings with it a lot of stress and
leads to a kind of Manichean view of food, a division of nature into The
Good Things to Eat, and the Bad.” Mr. Pollan was joined in 2007 in the
pursuit of revolutionizing dinnertime by Canadian writers Alisa Smith
and J.B. MacKinnon, whose The 100-Mile Diet brought to the fore the very virtuous idea of “locavorism”; Barbara Kingsolver and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
followed shortly thereafter and doubled down on the assertion that the
best food is the stuff that comes from your own backyard. Mr. Pollan
returned in 2008 with In Defense of Food; firebrand New York Times columnist Mark Bittman released Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating that year.
In 2009, the moral quandary of what’s good to eat and what’s not hit the big screen with Food Inc., A documentary co-produced by Eric Schlosser (who, eight years earlier, eviscerated McDonalds and co. with his book Fast Food Nation). The film, based on The Omnivore’s Dilemma,
and narrated by Mr. Pollan, was called “literally gut-wrenching” by NPR
and “one of the year’s most important films” by The San Francisco
Chronicle. Food Inc. was nominated for an Academy
Award and succeeded in putting onscreen – and therefore making far more
widely accessible and discussed than it was in print – Mr. Pollan’s
message that eating right doesn’t just mean eating nutritiously – it
means eating morally. (Not coincidentally, that NPR review described Mr.
Pollan and Mr. Schlosser as “embodiments of conscience.”)
Fast forward to 2018,
when we’re stuck on the idea of food as a reflection of our conscience;
of good food as moral food, as virtuous food, as food that answers the
question not of “what does food do to my body?” but, rather, “what does
this food do for my soul?” Certainly, the core tenets of the sustainable
food movement of today, which Mr. Pollan, Mr. Bittman et al defined in
the early part of the aughts, have something to do with the health of
the planet and, almost by luck, individual, physical health. But the
terminology widely used by the sustainable-food movement (you know the
buzzwords: “all-natural,” “organic,” “free-run,” “nose-to-tail” and all
their friends and cousins) is more often meant to delineate a type of
eating that is steeped more thoroughly in a sense of moral superiority
than in the science of healthful eating – never mind the idea that, for
food to truly be good, shouldn’t it also be easy to access?
To understand one of the key reasons why this is the case, think back to Tahani, on The Good Place,
and to her point score. Her social standing allowed her access to
people, places and situations through which she was given the option to
perform acts of extreme moral good. She could have chosen to opt out, of
course, but even opting in part of the time allowed her a high moral
score with precious little effort – while, for another character, the
only option to increase one’s moral standing might be to hold open a
door, which is worth a paltry five points. In The Good Place as in life, advanced socioeconomic status comes with the luxury of access.
In terms of food, for
the most part, the stuff that we these days consider morally good is
also literally expensive. Take, for example, that all-Canadian staple:
Kraft Dinner. Having purchased both (for research, and for hunger!), I
know that Annie’s macaroni and cheese – an organic, boxed pasta option –
is a little different from Kraft Dinner in taste (less salty) and
caloric value (about a third lower). But the way both products are sold
is not altogether different: Annie’s uses a cute bunny as its mascot for
its entire product line, suggesting nostalgia, childhood and, again,
wholesomeness; a 2017 Kraft ad titled “Family greatly” has a number of
parents discuss how challenging it is to find time to be a perfect
parent (luckily, KD only takes about 10 minutes to make). Where these
two paths diverge in the woods is most evident when you dig into each
company’s mission statement: For Kraft, it’s “helping people around the
world eat and live better.” For Annie: bringing organic food to, ahem,
“everybunny.”
Annie's Macaroni & Cheese, shown on the shelf at a supermarket in Edina, Minn., in 2018.
On the surface, this
sort of seems like apples and, well, fancier apples. But the difference
between “better” food and “organic” food is significant. For one thing,
“better” – which we’ll take here to mean healthy, or healthier
– is subjective, and up for debate: One person’s healthy might be
another person’s sodium-rich. But organic is a set-in-stone concept,
enforced at a federal level in the United States and Canada, and
defended fiercely by its disciples as the best option for you, your
family and your planet. You can evangelize for Annie’s, because you can
evangelize for organics. And many do. It’s much more difficult to
evangelize for “better food,” even though that’s what we all really
want, because those terms aren’t as concrete. Annie’s has the advantage
of a clearly defined side.
But Kraft has the
advantage of price. A box of KD sets you back $1.47 at Walmart, and
Annie’s Organic Mac and Cheese costs about a dollar more. So it’s not
entirely clear whether, in this particular example – and many others –
the organic option is the better option for everyone, every time. Not
everybunny can stretch their grocery budget, but everybody deserves
better food.
Kelly Hodgins, an
academic at the University of Guelph, focuses on how the price of
“ethical” food choices affects consumers across tax brackets. Ms.
Hodgins, a British Columbia native, grew up farming. “I was very much
focused on the farming side of things, and supporting small farmers, and
trying to create a local, Canadian food system that supports small
farmers,” she says. “Doing that really neglected food access for
consumers.”
In researching her 2014
doctoral thesis, Ms. Hodgins looked not only at the high price margins
of alternative food-market spaces, such as farmers markets, but she also
conducted intensive interviews with the proprietors of such spaces –
vendors, and farmers themselves – to get a sense of what they believe to
be barriers to access. The responses were too varied to list here.
Among them was convenience: Specialty stores and farmers markets are
open infrequently, keep odd hours and are often simply not easy to get
to for low-income individuals. The convenience factor, respondents said,
also applied to the time it takes to cook food: One of Ms. Hodgins’s
interviewees remarked that one can “feed a family from scratch for three
days, if you wanna do it” (emphasis his).
The idea here, as Ms.
Hodgins notes, is the inaccurate assumption that shopping and cooking
habits are always typically framed as a matter of choosing to purchase
fresh, organic foods over packaged ones, or to prepare one’s own food
from scratch instead of eating out. It’s an especially egregious way of
thinking when applied to low-income households, an extension of the
age-old idea that if poor people would simply pull up their socks, work a
bit harder and maybe read a book or two, they’d be happier, healthier
and richer. Shaming the poor accomplishes nothing, and the
aforementioned idea – rooted as it is in a bourgeois definition of
financially anchored moral fortitude – is as wrong now as it ever was: A
2017 study by the University of Toronto think-tank PROOF found that
individuals living in food-insecure households reported the same cooking
abilities and menu-planning habits as those in higher income brackets.
Desire for the organic peach is universal; access to the organic peach
is not.
And that’s because, it
almost goes without saying, the organic peach – the farmers-market peach
– is just way, way pricier than its conventional counterpart. Last
summer, I passed up an $8 basket of juicy freestone peaches, on sale at a
farmers market located in one of Toronto’s wealthiest neighbourhoods,
for a $3.99 basket onsale at a convenience store nearby. I don’t know if
the half-price peaches were organic, or hand-picked, or how large the
farm on which they were grown actually is; I didn’t hand my cash
directly to their farmer or one of his or her friends, but a part-time
retail clerk. But, even on a decent income with few bills and no
dependants, I can’t always justify the moral superiority that comes with
forking out almost 10 bucks on stone fruit. And anyway, it’s no
coincidence that in Toronto, where I live, most farmers markets are
situated in wealthier enclaves, or near plenty of tourist and
white-collar foot traffic: Farmers need to make money, after all. So
they need to market to people who’ve got it.
The lower-price fruits
and vegetables available from chain grocery stores and big-box retailers
are often the products of a highly subsidized industrial agricultural
system that perpetrates (and perpetuates) serious environmental and
social ills. But they are fruits and vegetables all the same. And simply
suggesting that individual consumers choose to spend more money on food
– whether to invest in better farming practices, to demonstrate using
economic means that there ought to be a greater level of funding toward
alternative food-retail infrastructure, or both – assumes that such a
choice exists. “[Alternative food markets] are sometimes touted as the
silver bullet,” Ms. Hodgins says. “But they’re not. In fact, it’s not a
better food system than the conventional food system if it’s excluding
people.” Put another way: If a food system is not accessible, how can it
possibly be sustainable?
So what good does it do,
to inflict the idea of a moral good – and therefore, the attendant idea
that opting out of the moral good ought to result in a sense of
personal shame – on a way of living, shopping and eating that is
literally out of reach? A lot of the time, the language we use around
good food borrows terminology (and, indeed, sentiment) from religion:
It’s no coincidence that one of the most widely shared articles
responding to the recent lawsuit against hipster seltzer company
LaCroix, which claims the company overinflated its use of the term
“natural,” was written by Alan Levinovitz, an assistant professor of
religious study at James Madison University in Virginia. In fact, Prof.
Levinovitz writes often on the injection of morality into specific types
of food, and why this impulse is entirely useless – if not potentially
harmful.
“Seeking out natural products is about health, yes, but holistic
health: physical and spiritual, personal and planetary. Nature becomes a
secular stand-in for God, and the word ‘natural’ a synonym for ‘holy,’”
Prof. Levinovitz wrote in The Washington Post earlier this month,
commenting on the LaCroix lawsuit. “The appropriation of natural
goodness by corporate brands allows us to expiate our guilt for
participating in the system. As long as consumption is sacred, there’s
no such thing as overconsumption. … Buying ‘natural’ is the modern
equivalent of buying indulgences – deep down, we probably know that
holiness can’t be purchased, but the opportunity is just too tempting to
pass up. In this sense, both LaCroix and the people who buy it because
it’s ‘natural’ are guilty of reinforcing the false faith of consecrated
consumption and the false idol of nature to which it is dedicated.
Instead of confusing ‘natural’ with innocence and goodness, we should
think hard about who stands to benefit from the ritual practices that
result.”
So just as the church
demands penance of those who can’t afford to pay for forgiveness, so,
too, does our modern moral food system make participation more difficult
for those who simply can’t buy in. Certainly, it’s a net positive that
the conversation surrounding our food production and consumption habits
has veered strongly toward one that is critical of overprocessing,
environmental degradation and practices that are harmful to the humans
and animals who are participants (willing or not) in them. But we seem
to have come to a conclusion about the best way to eat without factoring
in the human experience. If good food is moral food, then morality
needs to exist on a sliding scale that factors for lived experience.
It’s not realistic to think that we’re all going to end up in a “good”
place, but it would be helpful to strive for a way of thinking that
doesn’t position anyone in a “bad” one. Let’s just try for a slightly
more egalitarian “better.”
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Annie's Macaroni & Cheese, shown on the shelf at a supermarket in Edina, Minn., in 2018.
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