Filthy Commerce

The invidiousness of gendered money skills

I just put up a Dollars & Sense post on ways to reduce food waste. It's basically a collection of small, free-to-cheap habits that will keep you from wasting money on stuff going liquid in the crisper or stale in the pantry.

In theory, we should have learned all this housekeeping-type stuff at our mothers' knees. In practice, however, I'd bet that a substantial percentage of us didn't. And it's sometimes hard to pick this up in adulthood -- especially if you're a guy and you're not running with a peer group that will casually mention these useful things. Women's service magazines and lifestyle pubs like Real Simple or Martha Stewart Living will run homekeeping articles that underline the positive financial side effects of knowing how to handle your pantry, but when was the last time you saw GQ run any article on food that wasn't along the lines of "Twenty-five things every debonair man must eat?" There is no analogous man-style body of lifestyle porn tying living well to living wisely within one's resources.

If the assumption is that men will always have a woman to sweat the small fiscal-domestic details, that assumption is dead wrong: unmarried men represent about 40% of all men in the U.S., and 43% of all U.S. adults are unmarried, period. To pretend that parts of your functional adult life can or should be farmed out to a household partner seems unrealistic.

Also: more men are doing the shopping these days ("Role Reversal: Mr. Mom Goes Shopping," ADWeek, July 1, 09), so surely the "How can I avoid the sad phenomenon of the liquid broccoli in my crisper?" query has drifted across their minds. You would think that someone, somewhere, would say, "I bet there's a market opportunity to connect these guys to this specific body of information."

A show like Good Eats fills some of the void, what with its combination of cooking-fu and handy, masculinized kitchen tips. But how else are men learning how to avoid the sad phenomenon of the liquid broccoli? Are they calling their moms? Trolling the Internet and hoping nobody notices their browser history includes Martha Stewart slideshows on optimizing one's fridge? I'm genuinely curious how they do it -- or if they do it at all.

Eat the rich; they're healthier than the poor

Longtime readers will know that food-- how it's produced, what we pay for it, what we should pay for it, what criteria we use to determine how to spend our food dollar, transmuting those criteria to a food-lifestyle decision, how to prepare it -- is a recurrent topic on this blog. We've talked about the real and imagined obstacles to shopping at Whole Foods (more here), whether or not it's ever a good idea to eat fast food,how it's tough to be a thrifty food shopper/consumer if you don't already have capital to invest ... anyway, we all like to talk about food as a reflection of larger commercial and cultural forces.

We're all familiar with some basic facts: the current U.S. diet requires a hell of a lot of resources; junk food provides a bigger caloric bang for your buck; both urban and rural Americans struggle with "food deserts," i.e. places with limited to low access to grocery stores. (For the record: "low access" is defined as "no grocery stores within 10 miles or less.") With the exception of the very poorest of the U.S. poor, there is a strong correlation between obesity and poverty in the U.S. because of a killer trifecta: access only to cheap calories, a lack of places to safely exercise, and insufficient education on nutrition.

(For those who wonder why the rural poor, who presumably don't live in crime-ridden projects, can't take a jog, I have one word for you: sidewalks. When you live someplace without them, it's harder to get in even casual everyday exercise.)

Because it is so easy to look at the American foodscape and see the effects of the killer trifecta, it should, in theory be easy to be compassionate toward those who do not have the luxuries of choice and economy. And it should, in theory, also be easy to back the idea that personal and community health can be improved by giving people the tools they need to eat well over their lives.

You'd think it would be easy, yet somehow Caitlin Flanagan was unable to take time out of her busy scheduling of fapping over Twilight to give it a try. Instead, she denounces school gardens in "Cultivating Failure" (The Atlantic's Jan/Feb 10):

With these gardens—and their implication that one of the few important things we as a culture have to teach the next generation is what and how to eat—we’re mocking one of our most ennobling American ideals. Our children don’t get an education because they’re lucky, or because we’ve generously decided to give them one as a special gift. Our children get an education—or should get an education—because they have a right to one.

It's a poorly constructed argument.

First: at no point does Flanagan ever acknowledge why the idea of teaching children about nutrition and food production might have gained traction in the first place. Instead, she credits Alice Waters with mysterious powers of the occult and reasons that politicians and school administrators are all the victims of (organic) witchcraft.

Second: earlier in the piece, Flanagan righteously defended "education" as "the state standards for English and math." This conveniently overlooks the abundance of actual educational skills the kids can pick up while gardening -- planning ahead, problem-solving, analysis, observation -- much less the anthropological, biological and nutritional lessons afforded by explaining how the Native Americans' "three sisters" methods of planting afforded soil remediation, pest control and a diet rich in protein and vitamins.

Third: Flanagan doesn't bother to address and refute the point that our children's right to an education should include the right to know how their bodies handle the basic process of digesting food and absorbing nutrients. Instead, she claims that the one Ralph's she visited in Compton is proof that inner-city kids are at no risk of not getting vegetables.

Fourth: the entire piece is one in which she attempts to create a class war between well-educated "elites" and the immigrant/minority children they're depriving of their No Child Left Behind worksheets. While it is true that a lot of middle- and upper-class people are supremely oblivious to the genuine hardships a lot of people in this country face when it comes to getting decent food on the table, and it is equally true that some people think lifestyle consumption -- getting a CSA or buying organic -- is all we have to do to fix the broken American foodscape.

But explain how giving a child the tools to understand the world around them and the skills to grow their own food is so oppressive. She can't. She can only fling up her usual "The left is guilty of practicing what it preaches against! It's the real oppressor!" schtick and hope that people are too emotionally affected to bother picking apart her arguments.

Fifth: Try fact-checking beyond your neighborhood. After Wisconsin schools began teaching their kids about food and incorporating it into the daily grind, things like bad behavior plunged and academic performance rose. Going organic and local in Michigan helped keep tax dollars in the local economy, which in turn helps with municipal funding.

ANYWAY. You can read the article or you can shrug and say, "What can I do to help weaken the killer trifecta?" I'm going to point you toward the Community Food Security Coalition, which aims to execute "a comprehensive strategy to address many of the ills affecting our society and environment due to an unsustainable and unjust food system" And if you have any suggestions of your own, I'm all ears.