My oldest daughter used to drive me crazy with those "what if" questions, such as "What if you were stuck in a desert without food or water for several days and finally managed to return to civilization, but the only place to get food was McDonald's. Would you eat a burger?" This scenario is actually not that far removed from reality, as McDonald's can be found in the remotest places, even near deserts. But in this case, her trick question has an easy answer, as even McDonald's offers salads nowadays (albeit not great ones).
But you don't have to go to the Sahara to starve. There are deserts within our own cities where real food is simply unavailable. Visit any inner city neighborhood and you will see a wasteland of corner liquor stores and fast food joints but nowhere to buy fresh food. I have lived in a couple of such neighborhoods in my life, once as a student in Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, and later, starting out married life, in the Bayview-Hunters Point area of San Francisco. This was our first home, purchased in an area we could afford. While most of our neighbors were wonderful multi-generational families who had been in the area for decades, there was a large project at the top of the street, and we went to bed each night to the relaxing sound of gunshots and screeching cars .
We shopped for food in other neighborhoods and on Saturdays at the large farmers' market. It didn't occur to me to think about the dearth of real grocery stores in the area until one of my neighbors, a young single mother who later became a San Francisco firefighter, started coming around at mealtimes to see what we were eating. She was fascinated that I cooked with so many fresh vegetables, even though her 85-year-old grandmother, who lived next door to us, grew collard greens in her back yard. She said that she couldn't afford to eat fresh vegetables, and besides, you couldn't get them in the Bayview, anyway (that's when I had a "duh" moment).
What could be cheaper than vegetables, I thought? What did she eat? Although she was in her early twenties, she was extremely overweight, as were her two children. She did eat canned vegetables, she said, because that was what they sold at the one "grocery" store in the area (I would call it more a diaper store, since they had more options for that than about anything else). But as a busy single mother, she and her kids often resorted to dining at one of the many fast food options available in the area. In fact, she said, it was cheaper to eat there than prepare meals at home. Hmmm. Something seems deeply skewed here, I thought.
A sad but remarkable statistic today is that 50% of children show early signs of heart disease by the time they are 12. Unfortunately, these numbers are higher in inner cities where healthy food options are few. Diabetes is also frighteningly high, as well as a condition called "just plain being out of shape" where kids are out of breath playing ball. Today, the big political debate is about health care reform. But what eating reform? If we thought more about what we put into our mouths, health care costs would plummet.
A wonderful woman and crusader of low-income children once asked me what I thought about the high-brow eschewing of anything not organic or locally grown. She viewed this as frivolous snobbery. Sometimes you just have to feed people who are hungry, she said. This is definitely a good point. And it may be true if you are the Red Cross and just need to get nutrients into a populace suffering from famine, like sticking an IV into a whole population. But choosing food based on the sticker price may actually be the most expensive option; underneath the sticker price lies the "hidden" costs of your food choices. You buy cheap hamburger meat or drumsticks now and pay much more for it later in medical costs when you are diagnosed with heart disease, cancer or diabetes. But not only that: that double cheeseburger is cheap because both beef and milk products are largely subsidized by your tax dollars, along with chicken, pork and other commodities that can be sold at significantly lower prices than needed to produce them, thanks to large government subsidies. And we haven't even mentioned the impact of factory farming and large-scale agriculture on the environment and climate change - another way you will end up paying. So how much is that cheap hamburger really?
I realize that intangible costs don't mean a lot when what's in your wallet is limited and you just need something to eat. We do need to overhaul the infrastructure of how food is produced and distributed in this country, to make fresh, healthful food available to everyone at affordable prices. But at some point, we have to realize that by seizing the responsibility for our health by choosing the right foods, we are going to save ourselves a lot of money in the long run. Maybe you feel your voice won't be heard in the big debate about health care reform, but your food choices will impact your own health reform. I think that's a good start.
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