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Alice Waters Seeks Organic Bailout

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its_a_feature
02/20/09

In reply to Alice Waters Seeks Organic Bailout
At my kids school, the lunch program is exactly what Alice Waters dreams of: Only organic, healthy meals are provided. The other parents were happy to pay more for this alternative to the traditional school lunch programs.

However, they forgot to take into consideration the kids' preferences. All too frequently, I see a kid pick up his organic, healthy lunch and then immediately drop it in the trash and then go and mooch off of one of their buddies for the "good stuff".

Personally, I'd be happy just for a lunch program that serves a well-balanced meal. Until then, I'll continue to pack my own kid's lunch with food that both parent and child find acceptable.
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Banjo-Sea Kitten
02/20/09

@its_a_feature: yeah, I get kinda pissy when I see the Burger King apple fries. It's not a replacement for a french fry. As humans we seek the most efficient highest calorie foods, and when others are munching on fries what kid will want the apples, a low calorie food? That's just mean, even though there are plenty of times a kid will eat an apple happily.

So the solution is to make comfort foods that are healthy, and it's done quite easily. You can bake fries with healthy non-trans fat oils etc. Not sure that works in a fast food environment but we may get there one day.
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FerdinandPorcupine
02/20/09

In reply to Alice Waters Seeks Organic Bailout
Can't remember where I saw it but someone had a great stimulus package idea -- Cook for America. Give cooking school grads the same sort of incentives that Teach for America does, but to go in and rebuild and run the kitchens of American schools. You'd get young and energized people with real cooking skills in school lunchrooms, and they'd learn real-life skills like budgeting, managing employees, and running a commercial kitchen. It's one of my favorite wish-list ideas (along with my Dad's long-held dream of building high-speed trains in the center medians of the national highways).
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ambitious
02/20/09

@FerdinandPorcupine: I think this is a Pollan idea.
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swagv
02/20/09

In reply to Alice Waters Seeks Organic Bailout
Alice's preferences aside, our food production industry is just this much behind our health care system in terms of unsustainable systems that are about to collapse on top of us all.
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Krashstar
02/21/09

@swagv: Actually, one is feeding the other, so to speak. It's like a giant clusterfuck of fat, grease, used scalpels, dirty needles, broken glass and scattered papers (specifically, your medical records)
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bytememehard
02/20/09

In reply to Alice Waters Seeks Organic Bailout
Love her photo. She's got that "I'm what's for dinner" smile going on.
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Smitros
02/20/09

In reply to Alice Waters Seeks Organic Bailout
Two other thoughts come to mind.

First, as the economists say, we probably shouldn't let the best be the enemy of the good: the impossibility of perfection shouldn't prevent us from doing at least something.

Second, unlike some of the greedheads who have benefited from or precipitated the financial bailouts, Alice Waters doesn't apparently stand to gain directly all that much from a shift in policy. She seems to be using the bully pulpit of her reputation.
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Krashstar
02/21/09

@Smitros: EXACTLY. And let's not forget that economic stimulus should really be about doing new things that we'll want to go on doing even after the crisis has passed.

$700 (or so) billion is a lot of money. We'd be idiots to spend it on things that don't go on producing value for as least as long as it's going to take us our kids to pay it off.

Actually, that's the very best reason for healthy school lunches. These little rug rats are going to have to live very long lives if they ever want to pay off the trillion dollar debt they're being stuck with. It's only fair to give them a healthy start.
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iplaudius
02/20/09

In reply to Alice Waters Seeks Organic Bailout
The school lunch programs do need reform, but there’s no easy fix. Burkhard Bilger (great name) wrote an article about this problem, focusing on the Berkeley schools (New Yorker). The hero of that story, by the way, isn’t Alice Waters but rather Ann Cooper.
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Banjo-Sea Kitten
02/20/09

@iplaudius: It takes lots of voices but Alice was pretty much the O.G.
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Krashstar
02/21/09

@Banjo-Sea Kitten: Absolutely. She was the first Bay Area chef (by a very long shot) to take ownership of the food she served starting at the point where seeds went into the ground.

That's standard fancy-chef stuff now (seen in references ot where the greens were grown) but when she started doing it, it was unprecedented.
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Smitros
02/20/09

In reply to Alice Waters Seeks Organic Bailout
Have to disagree with you on this one, Owen.

Like food stamps, school lunches have been a farm income stabilizer, with the considerations of student health coming in second, if not lower.

Fattening our kids on cheap commodity surplus may not be the way to save on Medicare and Social Security disability in the long run.

Moreover, people can engage in local growing in lots of places besides California, and lots of California fruit and vegetable production is actually the result of subsidized irrigation, which makes ever less sense in an era of tightening petroleum and water supplies.
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sample032
02/20/09

@Smitros: Maybe you can suggest a region that can better support such a wide range of crops with good water infrastructure (or rain).
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Smitros
02/20/09

@sample032:

There isn't. And California isn't that region, either. Just today there's a story about possible reductions in irrigation to the state's farmers.

This is where we have to start relearning what we have to get from afar rather than what is merely convenient to get from afar. In short, no quick fixes, and over time probably a higher percentage of household devoted to food (U.S. levels are roughly a world historical low) but a lower percentage of GDP devoted to healthcare.
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sample032
02/20/09

@Smitros: Because we're in a drought. They come and go. Granted, there isn't enough water to farm all the state in dry years, but these cycles have been going on for a while, now, so the amount of land being farmed in areas using surface water is probably sustainable.
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Smitros
02/20/09

@sample032:

This is an interesting discussion, and one where I'm about to hit the limits of my knowledge, but I would continue to have reservations about the sustainability of the California model, which hasn't been in place for all that long.
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Bentpost
02/20/09

In reply to Alice Waters Seeks Organic Bailout
It's curious to me how this post is framed--that those who prefer to eat things in their original organic form, and wish their children to do the same, are considered "privileged" and "sanctimonious". It shows just how successful the industrial food lobby has become.
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thucyditron
02/20/09

@Bentpost: No, its framed in terms of those who prefer others to eat things in their original organic form are privileged and sanctimonious. Eating organic in healthier is a great long term goal and everyone should for their health do as much as they can, but at current cost its not feasible for low-income Americans.
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Bentpost
02/20/09

@thucyditron: This isn't "fashion". It's not as if we are stating that everyone in America should be wearing hot pink sweaters. Every nutritionist on the planet would agree that eating whole foods is healthier. My point is that those of us who wish to see our food production made healthy and local are not the ones who should be in the crosshairs. My question would be this: Why are healthy foods so costly and, therefore, not available to low-income Americans? Have you walked down the center aisles of your local supermarket chain lately? You need to lay blame where it truly belongs.
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celery
02/20/09

@Bentpost: No one is arguing the fact that it's a problem, but when your suggestion is a kneejerk complete overhaul of the system, it's no wonder that you come under attack. Doing so is the result of pie-in-the-sky thinking disconnected from reality and does nothing to help the problem at hand. Par for the course from Berkeley, of course.
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Bentpost
02/20/09

@celery: Let's just cut to the chase. Basically, the argument we're having here is about class and politics. And, sadly, this is precisely the discourse the food lobby prefers. So good job, Owen!
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ambitious
02/20/09

@Bentpost: That's the last conversation they want anyone to have. Trust me. I work with CPGs every day.

They'd prefer we keep arguing about whether or not something is organic or fortified or filled with preservatives (R&D or marketing fixes) so we never think about how a tobacco company got control of the Mac'n'Cheese(-food) market in the first place.
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BadUncle
02/20/09

@Bentpost: Organic food is resource intensive. "Natural" fertilizers, alternatives to pesticides, and free-ranging, hormone free animal husbandry require greater acreage, water use, support resources and labor. That all translates into higher food costs. Furthermore, most states not in the sunbelt have limited growth seasons.

So, while Alice Waters' values are laudable, they probably should be secondary to more pressing national debt concerns. And when it comes to school lunches, I'd be more worried about the overall nutritional balance of the food than it's origins. In some impoverished areas of the country (eg, the Arkansas delta country), a school lunch is only guaranteed meal of the day.
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Bentpost
02/20/09

@BadUncle: I think we need a major paradigm shift. Just as an example, you offer pesticide alternatives as cost prohibitive. When you externalize costs for pesticides, (i.e., environmental degradation, pollutants from production, health and illness, etc.) it can appear as if our current system is more efficient. As for meat, we eat way too much of it. We also have serious issues with eating seasonally and believe we should have access to everything always and we do this through transport. We cut fuel costs here. Part of the point is not just to eat whole foods but to eat locally.
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Scullery_Maid
02/20/09

@Bentpost: Exactly. Our whole foods system is based on cheap petroleum- petroleum to manufacture anhydrous ammonia fertizilier, cheap petrol to run the agricultural machinery and truck it all over the place, and don't get me started on the ecological insanity of grain-fed livestock...
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BadUncle
02/20/09

@Bentpost: Oh, I totally agree with you about a paradigm shift - in particular about meat. And in the long-run, a more comprehensive agricultural plan ought to be the goal. But in a period of economic crisis, a whole-sale overhaul of agriculture - which would require the end consumers to think differently about food - is probably well beyond what the US budget can handle.

As for eating locally, though, I have to ask you what I'm supposed to eat in New York City that's locally grown in winter? Or anyone in the snow belt? I think there's a trade-off between responsible eating (hello, Slow Foods), and returning to a 19th century diet of suet and moldy root vegetables.
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Smitros
02/20/09

@Scullery_Maid:

And let us not forget the effects of run-off on the Gulf of Mexico and the Cheseapeake Bay.
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Bentpost
02/20/09

@BadUncle: "...a 19th century diet of suet and moldy root vegetables..." It works for Madonna!
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Krashstar
02/21/09

@BadUncle: You can pay relatively high costs for good food grown properly and prepared well, or you can pay stratospherically high costs for cheap bad food grown in ecologically devastating ways and consumed in a fashion that leads to all sorts of chronic and nasty disease that fucks up out health care something terrible.
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Krashstar
02/21/09

@sample032: Also, California farmers have been notoriously inefficient users of water, so while this appears bad, it's actually not necessarily so, as it forces them to stop treating it like oxygen, and start treating it like the scarce and valuable resource it really is.

For the record, industrial farming has a deservedly shit reputation when it comes to environmental impact (aka shitting in your own nest.)
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PirateHooker
02/21/09

@Bentpost: you're right, and don't let the douchey responses throw off the point. if anyone bothered to read waters or if they knew anything about her, they would see that she focuses on local/slow foods, not just organic food. there is a huge connection between cost, access. quality, and location of food. within the next decade, most americans should be eating foods produced within 25 miles of where they live. people need to think of this the way they should have thought of the energy problem several decades ago. and a short term investment now--i.e. a one-time cost for improved school kitches, mechanisms for creating and transporting healthier lunches--will create that paradigm shift you are describing. and, dare i say, we will be dealing with preventative health for the entire country, rather than footing the bill for care and treatment of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer for the morbidly obese poor and middle class 2/3 of the country, or more, thanks to the current crisis. make healthy food convenient.
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BadUncle
02/22/09

@PirateHooker: All of which are laudable goals. But do you belong to a CES in New York - or anywhere north of the Mason Dixon Line? If you do, you'll notice that they only operate for 5 months out of the year. Shit does not grow in the winter, dude. So where is this "health(ful)...convenient" food? In the sunbelt. Strict adherence to Slow Foods sentiment would reduce heart disease and might reduce cancer, but then the hospitals would be treating cases of rickets, scurvy and plurisy. I wonder if Alice Waters will sell a line of medical leeches? And the philsophy sure isn't a magic wand that will instantly fix the "energy problem (that should have been fixed) several decades ago." Most of imported oil in this country goes into cars, not locomotives.

Are agribusinesses a gigantic problem? Sure. So are sentimental attachments to family farming. There are trade-offs in a complex world. It may be "douchey" to be critical of Alice Waters pricey, top-down solution spending plan for a micro-sector of federal responsibility, but the problem lies more in the nature of American consumption.
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PrincessKashmir
02/20/09

In reply to Alice Waters Seeks Organic Bailout
She's probably seen the success Jamie Oliver has had in the U.K. with something very similar. I greatly admire Alice Waters, but dollars to doughnuts she has not spent any considerable time in an inner-city high school cafeteria. If she had, she'd understand the more pressing issue is making sure lunch is provided at all to students.

Even in decent school districts, kids are lucky to be able to choose between a slice of greasy pepperoni pizza and an iceberg salad with ranch dressing. Overhauling a system of this magnitude requires small, carefully plotted steps, not indignant tunnel vision.
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Clarence Rosario
02/20/09

In reply to Alice Waters Seeks Organic Bailout
If she's been fighting for 12 years on this subject, and now she's got an administration that might be poised to help.

Yes, Owen, for shame.
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Robert Synnott
02/20/09

In reply to Alice Waters Seeks Organic Bailout
Ah, yes, organic food. Is this still around? I love the optimism of these organic food people who want it to be standard. Especially given that until the invention of cheap artificial fertilizer, it was generally believed that the Earth could support about two billion people at early-20th-century levels of consumption, and this estimate more or less still holds true.

What of the other five billion, precisely?
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Scullery_Maid
02/20/09

@Robert Synnott: Do you realize the manufacture of anhydrous ammonia fertilizer is completely dependent on fossil fuels? Cheap now, but give it a decade or two. Not to mention we are exploiting many aquifers that took millions of years to form, and overtaxed rivers, to water many crops in arid regions.
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skahammer
02/21/09

@Scullery_Maid: I'm not sure you answered RS' question, there.
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Shadowlayer
02/22/09

@skahammer: Word, in any case we still have to find a way to solve the problem of the extra 5 billion humans.

PROTIP: did you know you can make biodiesel with people?
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Jenniferhdaniel
02/20/09

In reply to Alice Waters Seeks Organic Bailout
Owen, they're called green houses. You can grow vegetables anywhere. And weed.
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Robert Synnott
02/20/09

@Jenniferhdaniel: I'd be very impressed if you could feed any major urban area off locally-grown food.
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Jenniferhdaniel
02/20/09

@Robert Synnott: Well, since I consider local to be within a day's driving for the food. I do think it's possible. Do I think it will happen tomorrow or in the next ten years? No. I don't. But I think it's something that can be worked towards.
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Steverino Begins
02/20/09

In reply to Alice Waters Seeks Organic Bailout
I'll give her the benefit of the doubt on this because she is awesome. Maybe she's aiming high with the locavore stuff but will settle for a simple "better, healthier school food" program.
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Banjo-Sea Kitten
02/20/09

@Steverino Begins: she and Michael Pollan, to name two, are indeed awesome. It's all about aiming high and getting people talking about these critical issues. They won't get everything they want, and they learn as they go, about the systems in place, but their hearts and minds are in the right places; they are all about standards to aim for. p.s. I met Pollan last year and what a decent, humble, approachable dude he is.
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Uncle_Billy_Slumming
02/20/09

In reply to Alice Waters Seeks Organic Bailout
Is ketchup still considered a vegetable by the federal government?
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WideStanceRomancer
02/20/09

@Uncle_Billy_Slumming: Thanks to high-fructose corn syrup, ketchup is now both a vegetable and a grain.
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WideStanceRomancer
02/20/09

@WideStanceRomancer: which is doubly insane, since a tomato is a fruit.
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Banjo-Sea Kitten
02/20/09

@Uncle_Billy_Slumming: @WideStanceRomancer: and Kraft is still fude.
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Smitros
02/20/09

@WideStanceRomancer:

Isn't that hate speech?
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Uncle_Billy_Slumming
02/20/09

@Banjo-Sea Kitten: Fewd!
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El Matardillo
02/20/09

In reply to Alice Waters Seeks Organic Bailout
Send her to NYU.
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