Bill Berkowitz and Gale Bataille for BuzzFlash: Food Disparity in a Fractured Society
(Yasmeen)
March 22, 2022
By Bill Berkowitz and Gale Bataille
As income inequality grows in twenty-first century America, so does food disparity. While television series’, Tik Tok and YouTube videos and Instagram posts regale us with magnificent dishes and take us on vicarious trips to exceptional restaurants – some in far-off places – millions of Americans are food insecure. In this land of plenty, there are urban “food deserts” where communities do not have access to affordable, healthy food; farmworkers who harvest our food are still exposed to cancer-causing chemicals; agribusiness giants are sweeping up what’s left of family farms; stressed-out workers in meatpacking plants face dangerous conditions, and service employees remain underpaid and overworked.
Meanwhile, the one percent dines on six-hundred-plus-dollar tasting menus reminiscent of the “Gilded Age.” In the HBO series “The Gilded Age,” the nouveau riche Russell family (the Vanderbilt family thinly disguised) hosts a luncheon for Ward McAllister, an intermediary, and conduit, to 1880s New York Society old money. It is a luncheon aimed at impressing; a meticulously set English-style table; enough service staff to field a baseball team; and copious amounts of food prepared by the family’s in-house French chef.
The term “Gilded Age” was coined by American author and satirist Mark Twain, to describe an historical era of stark extremes in our nation’s history. According to women’shistory.org (https://www.womenshistory.org/articles/extreme-dining-gilded-age) “Ninety percent of the nation’s families earned less than $1,200 per year by the height of the period in 1890, while an elite 10% earned above it.” Fast forward to the early 21st century and according to the Pew Research Center, “The wealth gap between America’s richest and poorer families more than doubled from 1989 to 2016,” with “the richest families the only group to have gained wealth since the Great Recession” (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/07/6-facts-about-economic-inequality-in-the-u-s).
The toll of food insecurity is not visible to most Americans. However, according to the United States Department of Agriculture: “In 2020, an estimated 1 in 8 Americans were food insecure, equating to over 38 million Americans, including almost 12 million children.” The USDA defines food insecurity “as a lack of consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life.”
In an article headlined “What is Food Insecurity,” the organization Feeding America (https://hungerandhealth.feedingamerica.org/understand-food-insecurity/) describes food insecurity as “a complex problem. … [that] does not exist in isolation, as low-income families are affected by multiple, overlapping issues like lack of affordable housing, social isolation, economic/social disadvantage resulting from structural racism, chronic or acute health problems, high medical costs, and low wages.”
The Covid-19 pandemic (two years and counting) has highlighted both food excesses and deprivations: People who could afford to shelter at home had groceries delivered, baked bread and honed their cooking skills. People on the economic margins struggled to survive and waited in long lines at overwhelmed food pantries. While Covid relief made inroads into poverty and food insecurity, those supports have now expired with little chance of being reinstated.
In her New York Times essay “What We Write About When We Write About Food,” Ligaya Mishan challenges food writers, and talks about the history of food cuisine as the face of inequality (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/18/t-magazine/food-writing-journalism-criticism.html): “Since the days of the Greeks, writers have been consumed by their meals. But are we writing about food — or is food a metaphor for something less palatable?”
Mishan leads us on a tour of the history of those that have written about food, from the Greek poet Matro of Pitane, in the fourth century B.C. parodying the “Odyssey,” to another fourth century B.C. poet, Archestratos of Gela, “who braved the seas in pursuit of local specialties, a proto-Anthony Bourdain.”
While Mishan is focused on the history of those writing about food over the centuries, she maintains that “When we write about food, we are already writing about class struggle.”
Mishan critiques the food writer Molly O’Neill Food stating, “There is a place in newspaper food sections and food magazines for cheery, revisionist, nostalgic waxings; for songs of dew-kissed baby lettuces; for Proustian glances back. But there is a line between soothing readers’ anxieties and becoming the Victoria’s Secret of the Fourth Estate.”
“How can food writing soothe readers when food itself is the locus of so much social anxiety?” Mishan asks. “This is the hidden thread that runs through food writing from the ancients to today that threatens to pull and unravel. The British social anthropologist Jack Goody has argued that the advent of cuisine as we know it — as opposed to the food eaten by everyone in a particular community — is predicated on inequality: When one group gains control of a larger share of resources and access to ingredients from other regions, making and eating food of increased variety and complexity become a way to mark status. Going further, the British sociologist Stephen Mennell has suggested that the extreme stratification of society is insufficient, yielding only differences in quantity, not quality, of food; what drives culinary innovation is rather the emergence of closer-knit, competitive classes jockeying for power, with those on lower rungs exerting ‘pressure from below.’”
Posting pictures of culinary creations on Facebook and Instagram became even more prevalent during the Covid pandemic — a new virtual sport. And, Covid relief (The American Rescue Plan) made a real dent in family and child poverty. According to Parolin and Curran of the Columbia Center on Poverty and Social Policy, the Child Tax Credit reduced child (and family) poverty and food insufficiency by close to thirty percent ((https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5743308460b5e922a25a6dc7/t/61e73f1169294a3cba6af9d9/1642544913557/Monthly-poverty-December-2021-CPSP.pdf).
Now, Americans seem so “done” with Covid. The Covid Child Tax Credit expired in January with little chance of renewal, so child poverty and food insufficiency is rising again with disproportionate impact on people of color. Mask and vaccination mandates are ending. Front-line health workers, exhausted and no longer applauded nightly, are quitting in droves, leaving health care institutions unable to respond to normal demands—let alone future pandemic waves. People are going back to sports events and concerts. Local online newsletters are devoted to restaurant openings, re-openings and closings. And food banks are experiencing rising costs with little let up in demand (https://www.kqed.org/news/11897177/nearly-2-years-into-pandemic-food-banks-still-need-support-how-to-help-and-find-one).
Hunger and food insufficiency are not so “done!”
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