The Sustainable Food Movement’s Big American Problem

To hear foodies talk, you’d think that if farmers' markets were cheaper and inner cities had supermarkets, Americans across the economic spectrum would start gobbling up every scallion in sight. Those who work three jobs, the logic goes, don't buy fresh vegetables because they cost more than fast food. And in inner cities, people eat badly because the best option is often the corner store, where you’re less likely to find celery than Funyons.

These arguments do indeed hold truth. Rebecca Ruiz is correct when she writes in Forbes that “by and large, the healthiest food is not cheapest, nor is it available in every market.” But she is overlooking one important, cornfield-sized impediment to making Americans more conscious eaters.

The problem is that in America, we don’t like to eat healthy.

The movement faces a sensibility gap — a space between what the group pushing the movement considers reasonable behavior and the way everybody else prefers to live.

Michael Pollan, recently discussing the prognosis of the movement on NPR, said that if the momentum carries forward among dedicated elites, then costs will eventually come down and more people will sign on. He pointed out that many successful movements — women’s suffrage, for instance — started with the upper echelon.

Well, rich people can go on buying pallets of heirloom tomatoes, but it won’t fix the problem underlying both our food and our health: In America, we don’t like vegetables. If the average American spends more on soda than on cucumbers (I don’t know, but I’m betting!), what chance does an elite movement based on a healthy respect for plants have of widespread success?

This is not to say that people across classes can’t appreciate healthy food. There are inspiring forays in urban and community agriculture, and there are government programs that capitalize on low-income women’s interest in farmers' markets.

But the truth is that our current system of industrial agriculture is based almost entirely on giving people what they really want: cheap meat, and lots of it. If we were to produce meat on pastures in family farms, a more resource-intensive method, we couldn’t eat as much of it. And asking Americans to sign on to that — even many of the smart-talking foodies who pay lip service to sustainable eating but continue devouring meat daily — is a tall order.

A major push of the sustainable food movement, then, must be to nudge people away from meat-heavy diets. We can educate people about the costs of meat and benefits of fresh produce. We can argue that kids should form good habits.

But what we really need is to make fruits and vegetables hip. They need to be sexier. What we require is an ad campaign, along the lines of Dos Equis’ brilliant “Most Interesting Man in the World.” But in this version instead of drinking a beer, he would bite into an apple. I can see it now: “Stay hungry, my friends.”

Photo courtesy of alexlomas on flickr