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HuffPo writer and author of TASTE (a cooking blog!) Isabel Cowles has come down on Out Patron Saint of Organic Sprigs Alice Waters. She says what most people are afraid to say about Waters and the slow food movement: it's too expensive. Cowles says, "If Ms. Waters is serious about changing the national food system for all Americans, she needs to get down and dirty on the economic issues tied to her edible ethos. At present, the food Waters espouses--clean, local and organic--is not sustainable to the American wallet." Too true. If Waters can address this issue -- which she really should do; tell us this economic climate is a surmountable challenge to live an organic lifestyle, or just tell us po' folk to stick to our Sonic burgers -- this fresh food philosophy might be a tad more accessible. Until then, we'll be sticking to the 'conventional' produce section at Whole Foods.
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I don't get it. What's cheaper than growing some of your own veggies?
Spending your valuable time on something more profitable?
Like searching for scrap metal so I can afford rent? For a lot of us growing our own food is actually a really good idea. We're out of work and don't get to make sanctimonious statements about how valuable our time is. Of course, we don't have yards either so not a lot of options to actually grow anything.
Once upon a time there were public gardens in this city operated by the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG). I had a plot in one of their gardens. It never got any sunlight and was overrun by slugs, but at least it partially satisfied my inner yuppie urge to go back to the land. I think I was able to produce a couple tomatoes on that plot. I've had similar plots in other cities I've lived in. I would like to have another plot here but SLUG got caught up in some Willie Brown for Mayor voter influence scandal and was promptly drugged up and dumped out of a plane into the South Atlantic, never to be heard from again. I've searched in vain for their successor organization and have turned up nothing. Anyone have any idea as to what organization now runs the public gardens in this city?
There's one at fort mason, but I've been told the wait list is about 20 miles long.
http://www.fortmasoncommunitygarden.com/membership.html
You can try contacting these people.
http://www.sfgro.org/sfgardens.php
Found them. Thanks! looks like there's only one garden in my district with a waiting list 22 miles long. Perhaps Alice Waters should shift her attention away from school lunches and join me in demanding more land for community victory gardens in San Francisco! How can we set an example for the rest of this annoying country if we ourselves won't go back to the land and grow our vegetables right here? Hah?! Of course, the Whole Foods/Rainbow Grocery/Ferry Building industrial military complex will prolly send in lobbyists to put a stop to our attempts, but one can hope and dream...
"Out Patron Stain" Ye gods, Brock, the spell checker only goes so far, you know.
Good for Isabel Cowles. I blogged about this some time ago and got nothing but lip for my trouble. Waters, like a lot of folks in the Bay Area, lives inside a magical Siebel bubble in which the normal rules of economics do not apply. In her proposal for the National Chez Panisse School Lunch Program, she used Berkeley schools as an example of what schools across the country could do, stating that school dietitians had negotiated with local hippie farmers to produce organic fruits and vegetables for the schools, among other things. While this would be great nationwide, it's simply not feasible for most school districts out there to follow suit.
First, one has to have local organic farms with which to negotiate. I imagine that the market in most of the country is not full of Bay Area yuppie types who can afford an all organic, sustainable diet. No mass of the right kind of white people, no market for organic produce, no organic farms.
Second, most schools are seriously strapped for cash. They can't afford to hire the kind of staff it would take to support a school lunch program of the kind Waters dreams about.
Third, we'd need to halve our population to go back to an all sustainable, organic diet nationwide. There is simply no way to produce the amount of food necessary to support 300 million people without some kind of industrialized farming.
Alice Waters is obnoxious. Bay Area folks really need to drop the let them eat cake attitude and wake up to the fact that we're all very lucky to be living here, wealthy and secure. Most people out there in Amurrica are not so similarly situated.
Self-satisfied, self-indulgent San Francisco-lefty types do not like to hear that their fantasies are crashing up against the cold, cruel reality of economic fact. It must be some conspiracy of The Man and "corporations" that is the true villain.
I completely agree with you. How, exactly, is North Dakota going to produce year-round organic produce? Or Wyoming? Or Minnesota? Or Alaska? Bay Area squishy-heads seem to forget that our year-round growing season is NOT the norm - vast areas of this country - assuming they even have geographic access to sufficient amounts of agriculturaly productive land - live in a climate zone where you can't grow shit for long periods of time because the great outdoors is semi-frozen tundra. What is Alice Waters organic locavore plan - we all go back to an era of root cellars? Great - kids in the Midwest get to live on salted pork, shriveled apples and mealy potatoes for 6 months a year. And I guess kids in Alaska are stuck with roots, berries, bark and mooseburgers.
Industrialization is not evil. Industrialization is why we don't have the same shitty standard of living as Upper Mongolia and are free to go dine on Braised Organic Napa Eel Terrine with Frisse of Smug at Chez Panisse. Only 2% of our workforce is employed in farming. As a result of that efficiency, 98% of our workforce is free to do other economically productive things. Now, there might be an argument to be made that having more, smaller organic farms isn't a bad thing overall and could provide employment for those who would otherwise be left to flip houses. This might drive down organic food prices a little - but it ain't gonna solve our national food policy.
Flip burgers, not houses.
You're probably right, but there have been some studies that suggest that because our bloated food bill, we've made bad food cheap, and that making healthy food cheap would simply be a matter of changing current subsidies.
I think the woman who used to run Berkeley's program is now working for a much larger organization and taking her schemes with her. Maybe her success/ failure will give us a better idea. I don't think anything can happen until that boondoggle of a food bill is restructured.
I don't think anyone would disagree about the highly distortionary effects of agricultural subsidies (well, anyone except maybe ADM or ConAgra). The size of federal ag subsidies is huge and concentrated on a small handful of crops (feed grains [mainly corn], cotton, wheat, rice, soybeans, peanuts and dairy). Morever the top 10% of subsidy recipients receive 74% of all ag subsidies.
However, just flipping these subsidies to organic farmers doesn't change the underlying economics - large scale, industrial level farming is for the most part vastly more efficient than small, scale organic farming. In a world with no subsidies, the factory farms would still beat the small organic guys on price.
I'd love to see the subsidies go to small, organic farmers. But we don't live in that world - we'd have a better chance of cutting subsidies across the board in the name of deficit reduction than we will in taking from ADM's mouth and giving to Sonoma farmers.
no doubt organic food for the masses is impractical, but healthy (healthier?) food for the masses is within reach.
Bullshit. It's not sustainable to an american wallet that's used to dirt cheap food and spends all it's money on other crap.
Yeah! crap like rent and health care for example. worthless crap like that.
Amen, Holly. The thing I hate most about this debate is the false dichotomy the organic nuts bring up--that if you're not spending lots of money on organic food, you must be eating fast food and spending your money on cars you can't afford or flat-screen TVs. Never mind one might be spending it on education, clothes, heat and trying to set some aside for emergencies.
And if you're not growing vegetables in your backyard (if you're lucky enough to have one), you must be spending all your time in front of the TV. Let's forget that most people don't have the time what with work and kids, and growing things in your backyard can be harder than you think. You don't just bury a seed and then magically get healthy plants.
Alice Waters versus Archer Daniels Midland.
Yeah, right.
We're gonna be fat till a lot more people start dying.
Organic's more expensive, but I'd rather pay more for vegetables that taste like vegetables instead of chalk.
agreed. but this isn't a case of being tight with one's wallet. most of us can only afford the chalk.
It just rings a bit hollow when you're still able to afford to shop at Whole Foods. You might as well complain about gas prices by saying that you can no longer afford Super Premium, but had to drop down to only Extra Premium. How much you are clearly hurting.
Half of that is in your head. We see the label "organic" and when we eat it oru brains tell us it is more tasty because it "has" to be, it's organic. Same with wine - they've done tons of blind tastings with wine, switching bottle labels between high-end stuff & plonk - and time and time again, there winds up being a vast middle range of prices that even the "experts" can't taste the difference. Heck - they've even put the same wine in different bottles and tasters swear the fancier bottle tastes better.
If I steamed up a head of organic broccoli watered with the tears of Alice Waters and some heads I picked up for fifty cents in Chinatown, I'd bet you couldn't tell the difference, not matter how hard you tried.
For some items, I'd agree - certain kinds of fruit, certain delicate leafy greens, etc - a peach picked semi-raw in Chile and ripened with ethylene gas in transit is never going to taste as good as one tree ripened up in Sonoma.
But surely the discussion here isn't the wholefoods $3 broccoli vs. the 50c chinatown broccoli, but the chinatown broccoli versus the sonicburger.
Yes, arlette, you would.
But maybe someone else would not. Or maybe someone else doesn't have the money to pay 3 dollars a pound for apples at wholefoods.
Ever try to grow a tomato in Boston in the middle of January?
Didn't think so.
This debate is all well and good, but the more important question to ask is, what's that in the picture accompanying this article? I want to make it based on the photo alone, whatever it may be.
A contest! I say poached pears with profiteroles in creme anglaise and caramelized pear syrup.