Yuppie Foodies and Hungry Children

On Labor Day this past Monday, Slow Food USA kicked off its new Time for Lunch campaign by staging "eat-ins" in various cities across the United States.

The purpose of these events, as well as the campaign in general, is to raise awareness about the need to increase healthy food in schools by reauthorizing the Child Nutrition Act before the legislation expires at the end of September.

The message of this campaign is right, but the image and the branding are completely wrong.

Slow Food--although being an organization whose mission I support--is the epitome of the yuppie-foodie groups, a pay-to-play network of gazpacho sipping gastro-enthusiasts.

To me, there's just something painfully ironic about a group dining on organic goat meat tacos while advocating for increasing the amount of healthy foods available to some of the nation's poorest children (who probably have no idea what organic means, nor what a goat meat taco is).

From an outsider's perspective, it looks like wealthy intellectuals projecting their values onto a population they could not fathom being a part of.  In this case, the goal of these efforts is an extremely noble and necessary one.

However, I worry that it also helps to blur the line between what is actually needed on the ground, and what is perceived to be needed by those looking down from above.

As in the majority of advocacy work, the vehicle for disseminating your message is just as, if not more, important than the message itself.

This was proven true in the recent PETA "Save the Whales" debacle.  Although the message of the groups campaign--stop eating meat in order to live a healthier life--is one that can be supported, the manner in which it was delivered undermined their effort completely.

Slow Food's Time for Lunch campaign could have added some credibility by partnering with the School Nutrition Association or another organization that has worked on the school lunch issue for quite some time.

I just hope that people can see that reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act is about feeding kids healthy food, and not about promoting a yuppie-foodie agenda.

(Photo credit: Orin Zebest on Flickr)