Feeding the Hungry Healthy Food is Not "Snobbery"

Despite the mushroom risotto sometimes served to guests at the Washington, DC-based homeless center Miriam's Kitchen, the organization's leaders are certainly not food snobs.

This is a fact apparently missed by National Review's Julie Gunlock who writes in her playfully-titled piece "Let Them Eat Arugala" that Miriam's Kitchen and other non-profit organizations serving the homeless throughout the nation should be ashamed for refusing to serve perfectly "good" food to their guests simply because it lacks any nutritional value.

She laments that the refusal of Miriam's Kitchen to serve high-calorie, high-fat donuts to its guests is driving the organization to stray from its goal of feeding the city's hungry population.  The article goes on to state that the:

dismissal of donuts betrays an expanding food snobbery that once was confined to food magazines and ladies who lunch, but now is showing up in the unlikeliest of places, like food banks and homeless shelters.

What Ms. Gunlock does not understand is that feeding the hungry is about so much more than simply filling stomachs with empty calories.

Last night, I had the opportunity to attend a panel discussion about sustainable food that included Will Allen of Growing Power.  He hammered home the message that good, healthy food is a basic human right that each and every person, regardless of income level, deserves access to.  Eating fresh fruits, veggies, meat and pasta is not something that should be restricted to the elite.  This is a message that Miriam's Kitchen understands and takes to heart.

The mushroom risotto and other seemingly gourmet dishes are fed to homeless guest as a way to nourish not only their stomachs, but their minds, their bodies and their souls.  Feeding the hungry healthy food in an empowering activity.  It is way to make those who are struggling economically feel cared for.  It is a way to show people that they deserve to be able to eat well, and should not be restricted to feeding themselves the hotdogs, white bread and Velveeta Ms. Gunlock mentions in her article.

More importantly than anything else, Miriam's Kitchen and other like-minded organizations are choosing to opt out of a food system that is dominated by corporate interest and not by the nutritional needs of human beings.  Maybe Ms. Gunlock should think about the farmers who are barely making a living by growing hundreds of acres of corn only to sell their harvest to huge companies like Cargill who turn it into hugh fructose corn syrup to use in products like those very donuts she thinks so highly of.  This is not even considering what this kind of intensive monoculture farming does to the land and the environment.

Instead of supporting this sort of food system exploitation by serving nutritionally-lacking products to their guests, food pantries that are able should follow Miriam's example and be leaders in the healthy-food-for-all movement.

Quite obviously, not all food aid organizations are created equal, and not all have consistent access to healthy food.  In these situations, I understand the need to hand out some less than desirable goods.

My point is that we should not look down on progressive programs that seek to feed the homeless as well as we'd like to feed ourselves.  We should be highlighting these programs as exemplary models to follow and not labeling them as misguided elitism.

I have a message for you Julie Gunlock: feeding the hungry healthy food is in no way, shape or form snobbery.  It is all about caring for people, our food and our environment.

(Photo credit: Rick McCharleson Flickr)