Sole Food

For the past three years, following the typical Michael
Pollan-fueled, now-I’ve-seen-the-locavore-light conversion experience,
I’ve been trying hard to feed my family good food. It’s more difficult
than it sounds; the supermarkets are full of tempting, affordable
foodlike products that ultimately owe more to industry than
agriculture, once you start reading the labels. It took me an
embarrassingly long while to figure out that buying foods so basic that
they don’t have a label is the key.

I found myself shopping less at the grocery store and instead buying
directly from the farmers who actually produce the food, sometimes at
farmers markets, sometimes at the farms themselves. Thus it is always
local and usually also organic (in practice, if not formal
certification) — and affordable. This kind of conscious buying
has come to be known as SOLE food, for Sustainable, Organic, Local and
Ethical.

Our current meat-centric diet — with its reliance on highly
processed fats, refined grains and industrial inventions like
high-fructose corn syrup — is killing us. This diet is the main
reason why one of every three adult Americans is now overweight, and
obesity — which parties with its morbid pals diabetes, cardiac
disease and high blood pressure — is drowning more of us every
year.

Handing over our nation’s nourishment to agribusiness companies that
earn more from processing the food than growing it is not only making
us fatter and sicker, it’s also degrading the environment. Monocultures
of corn, wheat and soybeans can thrive only on massive inputs of
petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides, the manufacture of which
requires massive amounts of fossil fuel. Once applied, these chemicals
don’t go away; the ones we don’t consume directly in our food aggregate
in our soil and water supply along with the antibiotics and hormones
used in factory-farmed livestock production. Meanwhile, the industries
doing this to us receive billions of dollars each year in taxpayer
subsidies.

All of this is why I pay $7 a gallon for organic, local grass-fed
milk: Yes, it does cost double the price of generic grocery-store milk
from cows kept God knows where, fed God knows what, and very likely
amped up on bovine growth hormone and antibiotics. But I have two young
sons whom I would like to see grow up lean and disease-free to inherit
a relatively intact planet.

To my great surprise, it turns out that holding these priorities
makes me — according to sources as diverse as the conservative
Hoover Institution, freebie magazine Blue Ridge Outdoors and my
own mother — a member of the economic elite. Or, as Julie Gunlock
wrote in a National Review essay earlier this year, “The truth
is, organic food is an expensive luxury item, something bought by those
who have the resources.”

Well, Julie, hon, our family has taken major pay cuts this year. So
just like everyone else these days, we are looking for ways to cut
back. Given this brave new economy and our financially fragile place
within it, when feeding my family do I now have to choose between my
beliefs and my budget?

Only one way to find out.

I scraped together $342.92 in cash and put it in an envelope. For 30
days, whatever food I bought had to come out of there, and if the money
ended before the 30 days did, I would just have to figure out a way to
feed us for free. I arrived at that seed money amount after deducting
the cost of four weeks of our community-supported agriculture (CSA)
membership in an organic farm from the $426 maximum food-stamp
allotment for a family of three. (My husband declined to participate;
he is not as devoted as I am to the pursuit of overpriced organic
hippie chow. To suit his preferences and save money, his food stash was
segregated; we intersected at cookies).

So: one month, 343 bucks. That’s $11.43 per day for the three of us,
which seemed workable. I was used to spending more, but always knew we
could get by on less.

Going in, I established a few ground rules: First, everything
counted, cost-wise, even basics like salt and spices. Next, in addition
to CSA produce, I was going to be using things from my own garden. I
recognize that not everyone wants to raise their own food, but anything
my tiny, shade-hampered plot produces could be grown equally well in a
few buckets on a city fire escape. And the federal food-stamp program
allows benefits to be used for purchasing seeds and plants to grow your
own food.

Finally, and most importantly, I aimed to buy the best possible item
for each need, combining as many elements of SOLE as possible in its
origins and purchase. It’s virtually impossible to eat purely SOLE
everything all the time; food can be local but not sustainable, or
organic but not purely ethical. None of the staff at our CSA has health
insurance, for example, a violation of the living-wage ethos of that
“E.” In making these choices, however, I’m also very much into not
making myself crazy, so I just try to make the best possible decision
for both the planet and our family and then let it go.

After kicking off Day 1 with a breakfast of generic Cheerios (Joe’s
O’s), CSA blackberries and Amish milk (respectively: not SOLE at all,
SOL with questionable E and totally SOLE), I made a trip to a
supermarket for staples like coffee, cooking oil and so on that I can’t
otherwise source locally. I left feeling sort of depressed that much of
what I had purchased — rice noodles, peanuts, store-brand bread
— seemed to utterly lack SOLE. But I felt better after realizing
that low-SOLE items accounted for less than a quarter of the $96.61
total; everything else — grass-fed meat and dairy products, an
$11 dollar quart of honey (yikes, but we use a lot of honey)
— came from close to home.

The main point of SOLE food, to me at least, is the local component.
According to a Cornell University study, in this country food travels
an average of 1,500 miles before arriving in the local supermarket. So
eating locally produced foods in season saves an awful lot of
non-renewable energy in terms of processing, packaging and
transportation. Midwest farmers offer wonderful meats and dairy
year-round, and we can all re-learn to live on local fruits and
vegetables in season the way everyone who lived here even 60 years ago
had to.

In order to keep accounting simple, I deducted upfront the entire
cost of anything I bought — like, say, a bottle of organic
ketchup — even though it would get used in small amounts
throughout the entire month. This meant that in those first three days,
our per-meal average cost was $16.44, a pretty high number for, say,
the grilled cheese sandwiches and carrots we had for lunch on Day 2.
Finally, however, by Day 4 there were enough groceries laid out that I
spent less than $3 on that entire day’s comestibles. The first week’s
total was $177.59, a number which includes two Chik-fil-A kiddie meals.
(They cost $6.38 and were utterly devoid of SOLE. It was just one of
those days; anyone with young children will understand).

So after one week, there was $167.33 remaining in my by-now battered
envelope. That left $7.87 per day for three people for the next 23
days. Aside from swapping tofu for shrimp in one night’s pad thai
dinner, we had eaten pretty much as usual. Clearly, this was going to
have to change.

Looking back over my first week of meals, I was surprised how much
of our family’s intake still consisted of what the Amish call “store
foods” — pre-made items like bread and pasta. The thing is, these
are among the cheapest foods we eat. Dinner, which I dedicate
significant time to preparing, is usually scratch-cooked from local
foods and generally accounts for the main cost of each day’s menu.
Breakfast and lunch, however, are quicker affairs — I need to get
out of the kitchen for at least part of each day, dammit — and
often rely on things I can grab straight from a cabinet, like Joe’s
O’s.

Sighing, I pulled out a calculator and the six months worth of
grocery records I’d accumulated. Joe’s O’s are 17 cents per serving,
and bulk-bin organic oatmeal costs 11.5 cents per serving. So by
cooking breakfast for three, I’d save 16 and a half cents, probably
more than burned up by the cost of running the stove (not to mention
that it’s worth waaaaaay more than 16 cents to me to not wash a dirty
oatmeal pot). So obviously I’d use more fossil fuel cooking oatmeal
than dumping cereal into a bowl, but how much fuel went into
manufacturing, boxing and transporting those O’s, and how to account
for the cost of that? Holy crap, I thought, this is getting
complicated.

SOLE food advocates don’t talk much about how much sheer effort
conscientious eating requires. Not only do you spend time researching
local-food options and sources and shopping multiple suppliers, but you
must spend a lot of hands-on time rendering those whole ingredients
into actual meals. But cooking was to be my fate.

We eat a lot of bread, so I started there. The DIY-types in my
circle are all about the no-knead bread. A simple loaf costs $1.33 to
make, half the cost of the store-brand whole-wheat bread. As an added
bonus, the homemade bread has four ingredients instead of 13, so
bye-bye preservatives and mono- and diglycerides, whatever you are. The
guys wolfed down my first loaf; it was delicious and so painlessly
simple to make that I’m ashamed for not jumping on the no-knead
bandwagon long ago. (I know it costs money to heat the oven, but let’s
just offset that against the subsidies that go into the store loaf and
call it even.)

Shaving half the price off already inexpensive items wasn’t going to
get us through the month, though, so I took a harder look at my first
week’s expenditures and, by extension, my own approach to and
assumptions about our diet. I saw that one thing hurting us was fresh
fruit, which the boys especially enjoy — I’d spent 12 bucks on
peaches alone. SOLE on a budget means sometimes having to pass up
glorious in-season food at peak amazingness, alas, but fortunately, our
CSA shares began to include early apples and raspberries, so I was able
to cut back on fruit buying. It also occurred to me that I was not
making the most of our CSA bounty, serving the week’s vegetables as
side dishes or salads when they could instead star as already-paid-for
main dishes.

This analysis of my expenditures finally helped me see that, though
I’d been planning meals and shopping with lists, the dishes I wanted to
cook often required buying ingredients I didn’t have. Key to living
both SOLE-fully and on a microbudget is to see what you have on hand,
what’s on sale, what’s in season and abundant and selling for cheap,
and turning ingredients into meals. I had it backward — first
picking a recipe, then shopping for the necessary stuff. Once again, an
embarrassingly obvious tactic that took forever to sink in. In our
lavishly stocked grocery stores, desire rules the foods we choose, not
the weather outside; season becomes irrelevant. It was really hard to
break out of this mindset. The hardest part was recognizing it was
operating in the first place, even when I made conscious efforts to
step outside the supermarket.

I found help from the author of The New York Times food
column the Minimalist, Mark Bittman. His new-ish book Food
Matters translates Michael Pollan’s gnomic advice about
simultaneously improving our diets and the environment (“Eat food.
Mostly plants. Not too much”) into actual recipes. Bittman’s
more-vegetable-than-egg frittata plowed through a week’s leftover CSA
chard, tomatoes and zucchini, and used only two eggs, so the whole
meal-in-a-skillet cost 67 cents. SOLE rating: four stars. Compare that
to the Alaskan salmon, couscous and broccoli we had for dinner another
night ($10.50, and only SO, no L, E who knows).

Not even my mom wants a blow-by-blow of every meal we ate for the
past three weeks of my tracking-every-penny project, but I can tell you
that we made it — just barely but still SOLEfully. Despite buying
as carefully as I could, we went into the final week (which was
actually nine days long, given the 30-day timeline) with my total
budget at $28.42, or $3.15 per day for three hungry humans. I was going
to have to purchase another $7 gallon of milk out of that, and despite
my attempts to get by on a bare minimum of caffeine, coffee was running
dangerously low.

On the plus side, we had two CSA pickups in that time frame, so
veggies were taken care of, and the bulk buys I had made early on left
us with a decent supply of dried legumes and whole grains like brown
rice, couscous and oats, plus plenty of flour. This week was going to
be all about combining things, possibly in unexpected new ways.

They were also going to be largely vegetarian, but that didn’t mean
a spartan week of rice and beans. In order to keep things interesting,
I delved into Asian and Indian cookbooks at the library, drawing on
economical cuisines where meat is more of a flavoring than a filling.
We dined on fried rice (very popular, and a great way to sneak
vegetables into young children), curried eggplant (not so popular) and
sopa verde (mixed reviews). The final week also contained a community
picnic where we were supposed to bring a dish to feed a dozen, and I
panicked — no way could I afford the ingredients for any of my
potluck standbys. After getting a grip, however, I took a look at our
fridge contents, raided the garden and made a giant batch of gazpacho,
a dish that took advantage of a late-summer overabundance of tomatoes
and cucumbers, plus a few staples I had on hand.

At the end of our 30 days, there were still a few coins jingling in
the food-money envelope. There’s no doubt that living on the federal
SNAP benefits makes shopping SOLEfully harder: Although the WIC (Women,
Infants and Children) supplementary nutrition program provides vouchers
for use at farmers markets, food stamps do not currently offer that
option — using food stamp funds to buy directly from farmers or
join a CSA is out. Aside from using part of the allowance to buy seeds
or plants for a home garden and growing vegetables, food stamp
recipients are basically dependent on retail shopping.

My only moment of serious SOLE-searching doubt came on Day 26, when
both the Joe’s O’s and coffee ran out. O’s are their own food group in
our house — breakfast standby, all-day snack and nightly bedtime
ritual — and I have long considered them an essential, but if I
don’t drink coffee, I get a headache (yes, I’m a pathetic addict). With
my remaining $5.65, I calculated I had enough to buy both O’s and
conventional coffee, or enough shade-grown beans to see me through.

No Joe’s O’s would mean a little-guy riot, and I had really wanted
to shield them from any big changes due to our grocery cutbacks. But
our planet’s migratory songbirds are threatened due to habitat
destruction caused by industrial-scale coffee farming, with its heavy
pesticide use and clear-cutting of rainforests. I’ve read that each cup
of conventional coffee equals the death of a songbird. I’d have a hard
time getting the guys to understand this equation, but I decided to
proxy-vote for them on behalf of the birdies: I bought the shade-grown,
skipped the Joe’s O’s, put up with the inevitable protests and whining,
and extolled the wonders of oatmeal with lots of honey to a skeptical
pint-size audience. Everyone survived — especially, it’s hoped, a
few warblers.

Such a paltry little dilemma. How fortunate am I that the closest
the wolf gets to our door is needing to choose between breakfast cereal
and ecologically sound java? But it’s moments of choice like this where
we can each make a our small ripple in the pond. Too often, we look at
giant problems like loss of the rainforest, climate change or the
monolith of our industrial-food system, and feel like we can’t do
anything to change such dire and intractable things. But we can make a
difference each and every time we buy our food, which we all must do
one way or another. If you care at all that your food dollars are
supporting morally or ethically objectionable practices — factory
farms, environmental destruction — you can withhold your support
from those purchases and vote with your food budget for a better
alternative. Whether that is via food stamps or on a fat bankroll, the
responsibility of choosing a better food system and a healthy ecosystem
rests on us all.

With each food dollar spent, we are all casting an essential vote.
You can’t buy a senator the way the agribusiness lobbyists can, but you
can say yes to locally grown tomatoes.

news@clevescene.com

This article appears in Oct 21-27, 2009.