Fighting Bad Food in Washington

Although food and politics have been intertwined in this country since the first settlers had to decide who would tend the crops, in Washington the debate has centered mostly around agricultural subsidies. But these days it seems fair to say that the people who live and work on Pennsylvania Avenue have never had such a heightened awareness of what we're putting on our plates.
As Jill Lawrence wrote in a recent Politics Daily post, "Is there anyone in America who doesn't know Michelle Obama planted a vegetable garden...?" And the First Lady is not the only one who wants to see an organic carrot in every pot. This Congress has introduced a bill to outlaw junk food in schools and another that would require the President to call a White House conference on food and nutrition.

At lunchtime on Monday, the progressive Center for American Progress threw another ingredient or two into the mix when it hosted a discussion featuring Mark Bittman, the man behind the New York Times Minimalist column and author of a new book titled "Food Matters," and Jose Andres, a Washington-based star chef whose mission is to make food and nutrition education mandatory in schools.

In the concise style that characterizes his food writing, Bittman offered some sobering statistics: livestock production accounts for 18 percent of this country's greenhouse gas emissions; 10 billion animals a year are slaughtered in the United States; and per person consumption of meat and animal products is 1 1/2 pounds every day. The proportion of meat, junk food, and processed food compared to plants in our diet "is out of whack," he said, as he urged the audience to make incremental changes--lowering our consumption of meat/animal products and reducing the number of animals killed. One suggestion he made to get there is instituting meatless Mondays, which, it turns out, has a whole public health campaign around it. Who could resist a win-win-win prescription for losing weight, creating a smaller carbon footprint, and being nicer to animals, as Bittman framed it? It's so easy that saying no seems tantamount to offering a kid a cigarette on the playground. It's not something a thinking person would do.

Still, the most valuable part of the discussion for me was his answer to a question that's been hanging out there ever since Michelle Obama turned her first shovel of dirt: is healthy/sustainable eating a privilege for the wealthy or are there viable options for people with lower incomes? "The first choice is not between an organic cheeseburger and a McDonald's cheeseburger," Bittman said. "It's between the cheeseburger and an apple, [which is] not intrinsically more expensive."

And it was Andres who perhaps had the last word when he said, "I'm trying to remember when you had to start putting 'health' before 'food.' My mother told me to eat your fruit and vegetables because you have to. Food is food. It should be only one way: good."