Food Is Politics: A Primer

This is my podcast Citizen Chef. You know, I am a working chef. I have seven restaurants and some in Manhattan, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. I also have another side of me. I am a food activist. And what does that mean. I'm on a conference call every morning with a hundred chefs across the country. Again, the Family First program, the SNAP program is actually has expanded. We got rid of all the restrictstions to receive We got to talk

about not just the economics here. Cafeteria workers. They are first spenders at this point and they need to be treated that way. They are doing They're doing God's work right now. From our next Senator from Pennsylvania. So you're asking yourself, why the chef? Why is he up here right now? Let me tell you. I'm just a regular guy. I was the first food correspondent on MSNBC, and UM, you know that that that was a pretty good gig for a while until the election three years ago, and

that kind of knocked food off the table. So I decided to turn this into a podcast, and um, this podcast is is really going to tell a story about food through the news of the day. You know, everywhere I look when I see a news story, I immediately link it to the food system. You know, whether it's immigration, military preparedness, healthcare, and even the economy. Every single one of these issues is touched by food and the food

that we eat. We're gonna interview experts and people at a response well for our food policy as well as farmers and food producers all through this country. We're gonna see if we can make our food system a more equable one for all. I can came to food politics in a very interesting way. My wife is a filmmaker and she co directed a film called A Place to Table,

and it looked at hunger in America. We Uh, figured out pretty quickly when we started doing research on the film that people in this country are not hungry because of famine, are because of war, because of drought. People are hungry in this country because they often don't have the dollars to feed themselves, and we don't have the

political will to make sure everyone is well nourished here. Well, every single president since Reagan has gone on record saying that one, if one person is hunger in this country, we failed, and yet nothing seems to happen about it. And this is both Republicans and Democrats, and nothing seems to happen about it. And so hopefully, um with this film, we can shine a light on this and hopefully that

will start a public discourse. And so after my wife's film came out, it really gave me a platform, especially to talk about hunger food issues in a very different context that put me right in the crosshairs of a

political conversation. And very soon after founding Member of Food Policy, I co founded an organization called Food Policy Action Jeff, Thank you, Ken, Thanks Happy Food Date, a DC based group that worked on various food policies and whether we're issues of hunger and farming and transparency in the food system or fishing. We produced a score card and we grad a congress on how they voted on various food issues.

About about values. So if you value how your food iss made, if you value where your food comes from, if you value uh farm communities? So, how how did I get here? How did I go from being a chef and TV personality to activists? I guess we should we should take you through a brief journey of how I got here, back to uh, you know, growing up. You know, I grew up at with New Jersey, grew up in a kind of family where we had to

be home every single night for dinner. And I saw how important food was, and not only in terms of nourishing us and keeping us healthy, but how it brought people around the table and created those conversations. My dad was a union organizer and he helped on some local campaigns, and my mother ran a school cafeteria, And you know, I didn't really think much of that. It happens every noon for the pupil who takes advantage of the lunch program. This noontime lunch maybe the only real food some of

these children see all day long. Miss school and miss lunch, So it's important they sit here with someone to care for you. I never really thought much about it in terms of giving back to a community. Later on, I learned how important that job actually was one the issue that has really made a difference generally. I think it's very good. It's better school food. May we keep it please? I would like to introduce Mary Nestl. We're talking to her today because she literally wrote the book on the

politics of food. I was going to all these meetings about childhood obesity in the mid nines, and I would go to these meetings of the pain Are you kidding me? How come nobody's talking about how the food industry is marketing junk food to kids. You know, why aren't they talking about the environment in which parents are trying to feed their children. I was pretty upset by it, so I started writing articles about it, and those articles lead to my book Food Politics, which has a chapter on

feeding kids and exactly that kind of thing. Her books have been so helpful to me, and um, she's really helped shape my ideas around food policy, and so I thought this would be a great place to start. How's it going. It's not bad, It's not bad like most people. Marryan, UH and I are practicing our social distancing during this pandemic. So we uh we spoke via zoom. I'm in the highest risk demographic for this thing. Yeah, obviously, so much

has changed. Um, but I want to sort of start off because and part of the reason I wanted to talk to you is because if ever I had to go to the hill of talk policy usually, UM, I called to you first, and uh, just to understand policy lit better and understand from someone who knows it inside. Now, UM, you kind of wrote the book on food policy. When it comes to teaching you, how how did you? How did you get how did you you start teaching food policy? Well,

I have a doctorate in molecular biology. I'm a last molecular biologist. On my first teaching job, I was given a nutrition course to teach. It was like falling in love. UM. I had been teaching selling molecular biology to premit students and it was very abstract and difficult for them to understand. And when I started teaching nutrition, I could see that this was the most wonderful way to teach undergraduate biology because everybody got it. Everybody eats everybody's interested in food.

You could talk about metabolism, you could talk about all kinds of serious biological concepts within the context of food, and everybody just ate it up mhm as it were. When did you first start teaching food policy? That was nineteen seventies six, You know, I taught a class in nutrition, and in that class, I remember using as readings a book that had been written by Center for Science and the Public Interests called Food for People Not for Profit,

that could have been written yesterday. I remember using some articles that were in the New York Review of Books about sugar policy in that very first class, because I had never seen anything like that, and it was an environing, serious academic who just couldn't believe that the way that sugar subsidies and tariffs, the ent tariff system work was to make sugar more expensive in order to protect the businesses of sugar growers in Louisiana Nebraska. Is ragging nize

for one minute. When I first came to Congress in nineteen sugar prices were skyroggety. Consumers were furious then, But I do not hear consumers complain anymore. Time of the gentle lady has expired the gentleman from New York is we see displayed before US boxes of cereal and cans of soda, And the gestion is made that with the thousands of people who compete there, that if we reduce one of the raw material prices into that that that will not be passed on to the consumer. Nonsense. Time,

gentleman has expired. Gentleman from Louisiana, Mr Chairman I Yilmar remaining time to the Chairman of the Agriculture Committee, Mr. Dela cars recognized vote no on the down the amendment. It's jobs, USA, Jobs, USA, Jobs, USA, Jobs, USA. You can't cut it anymore, you can't hide it anymore. It's jobs, jobs, jobs in the U. S A. Vote no on the amendment. But the gentleman niel I yield. I'd like the chairman

for yelling. Let me point out the European supports sugar at thirty cents a pound, the United States at eighteen cents. Our farmers will compete head up with anyone, but we can't compete against the europe with the gentleman. Same time, and the gentleman has expired, USA. Um. You know again, this was forty years ago and nothing has changed anyway.

Has it gotten worse before COVID hit. Um. You know, the supermarkets have much much better food than they did thirty years ago, more farmers markets, more communities supported agriculture. But at the same time, the marketers have gotten even better at that selling unhealthy food to two people as well. And at the same time, if you're rich and educated, it's really easy to eat healthfully, or it was before COVID hit. So we have we have to talk about

pre coved and post covered. You know, when I first conceived this podcast, I want to talk about food and where we eat and why we eat, and how the food gets to us and what it means to us, how it unites us and brings us around a table. This podcast was originally going to expose the fragility of our food system through conversations that we hear on the news all the time, issues around the economy and healthcare.

Will you take a hard look at those issues and try to improve the quality of healthcare and education for the Native American people? Yes, I will, and I take it serious. Immigration in the environment, and then COVID happened, Various industries are starting to feel the brunt of the virus. As the pandemic continues to drastically alter americans daily lives. In a matter of weeks, the restaurant industry tank due to shelter and place orders. Me processing facilities were compromised

by the virus. Unemployment skyrocketed, forcing people who would never experienced food and security to wait in a mile long car lines at food banks. All the while we're seeing food that's being thrown out, highlighting exactly how delicate and inflexible our food system really is. Let's let our viewers take part in this conversation. We'll start with Bill, who's

calling from North Illinois. Bill, good morning, Good morning. I uh so, I saw these images from San Antonio where ten thousand cars were lined up at some food banks in San Antonio. Not My question is this, I live in a relatively affluent area and there's there's a food bank, and but how the people that are lined up in San Antonio? Are these people that have applied for SNAP and not been accepted or I mean, who are these people? I think how it has done one really terrific thing,

and that's to expose how the food system works. In this podcast, we'll be looking at that food system. That we've relied on few people all over the world, and how the pandemic has compromised it in a really visible way. If COVID has done anything it's to expose the problems with healthcare system. But I think that the food system also clary. If you were if you were teaching, what is your lesson plan look like post COVID? What has

it changed for me? COVID is the perfect illustration of everything I've been teaching for years, and it just highlights the contradictions in our food system and the way that a system that is set up for profit, not to promote the health of humans or the health of the planet, is destructive and vulnerable. And the COVID points out the vulnerability of the vulnerability of the system which may not have been obvious before. So in a way it makes

teaching easier. What you want is you want a food system that's resilient, that can deal with something like this, and that means that it has to be decentralized much more than it currently is and focused on much more on human welfare then on corporate profits. And boy that takes some thinking. The point does the health of the planet and the health of individuals. When does that become

more valuable and where's the profit net? What policies can you create, What levers are there you can pull that would make healthy food more profitable and make the health of the planet more profitable. Well, that has to happen through government. There are things that government is really good for and this is one of them. And I think that it would be possible, with no trouble at all, to dream of government regulations that would make for a

much healthier food system for everybody. Many of our democratic colleagues have rushed to embrace the so called grain. The Green New Deal that was you know, put up by some legislators was a step in that direction, go much further. But the Green New Deal would kill our country. The deal Green New Deal would have a devastating effect on the world and it's not gonna happen anyway, because it's impossible for them to do it. If you have a look at what they want to do under the Green

New Deal, it's it's like baby talk. I mean, I'm someone who believes that there's a role for government in these kinds of things, and that the kinds of food regulations that we have now are set up to promote corporate profits. That's what they're set up to do. That's because we have an electoral system and a lobbying system where corporations have the money to make legislators do what they want. One of the things that the virus has exposed also are the lobbying forces behind some of these

kinds of rules. But we're going to be taking a look at this new trend bioengineered crops and what, if anything, the federal government should do about it. Our first call for Mr Bettelheim is from Cleveland, Ohio. Good morning, Good morning. I think they should be prifably regulated because you're dealing with things that most people don't understand and it could be harmful. You begin to see how the system works in a way that a lot of people may not

have noticed or don't realize. So you could have regulations that set a level playing field for food corporations that enabled them to make a profit, just maybe not as much of a profit. If you look at where the profits go and you look at where the bailout money

is going. The bailout money is going to corporations that are paying their executives very high salaries, that are giving stockholder is the dividends that they have been promised and that are not paying the workers who are doing the work. The National Black Farmers Association, good morning, Thank you for being with us. Good mornings. A PLEASU should be here with you this morning. A demonstration here in Washington against the Agriculture Department in particular and the government in general.

What's it all about. Well, basically, we've been struggling with the United States Department of Aquaculture for about since December of nine, and we've made a many trips to Washington, d c. And since that time the issue is really escalated to where the farmers are at dire stress. Right, the equality in the United States has gotten the way it was in the nineteen twenties. It's not how people survived in the nineteen forties, fifties and sixties and seventies.

For forty years we had much less inequality in this country and the country did very well. But my father sold wheat at nineteen forty for for two for almost two dollars of bushel and and we just not selling today, uh for just about the same price. And at that time a loafer bread was a dime, and today is almost two dollars. So there's a lot of profitability that's going on somewhere, and it's it's not going to farmers. Well it's white, a black o, whatever color it. Maybe

the economy boom, everybody did really well. They just didn't make excessive profits. The kinds of money that the upper one percent makes now are ridiculous. They couldn't possibly spend at all. You need enough money to be able to live a decent life. And then beyond that, what are you gonna do with it? You know, the system that is really there to benefit you know, big egg and large producers, it doesn't really take care of of eaters.

It doesn't take care of small farmers. It doesn't take care of branchers and fishermen and people who actually are working in that food system to produce food. COVID really change the face of food. It's really shown us what our food system really is like and how vulnerable it is. So again, post coded, what do you want to see come out of this? What do you think of table

right now? Like, for instance, I think right now if you had asked me four months ago whether or not we could have national health care, our natural national insurance for health care. I would say, there's no way you're gonna get sixty votes in the Senate. And now I'm thinking that possibly there there may be an appe site, especially when you look at twenty two million people who were laid off, and most cases health care is tied to your workplace, so probably sixteen millions of those people

have no longer have health care. I would imagine someone may still have health care. And so it's showing just just how our system does not work. It's exposed, and so the question is how can you take that exposure and turn it into legislation when you are fighting an insurance industry and a political party that is completely opposed

to it. In that political party, happens to the empower Now, you know, I think we're really hunger for smart solutions, especially now is food in security is growing and people are are more vulnerable than ever. So it's it's easy to point out how how things are broken. But the end of this podcast is to not only point out what is wrong with our food system, about to give some concrete ideas of how we can solve these problems and make sure that we all have a shot at healthy,

nutritious food. And I don't have the crystal ball on this. I can tell you what I'd like to see, universal health care. I'd like to see universal school meals. I'd like to see a federal subsidy system for agriculture that rewards the growers of fruits and vegetables for producing them at a price that people can actually afford. I'd like to see, I mean, certainly, a minimum livable wage for everybody.

Corporations that hire large numbers of employees in the food system pay the minimum wage, and those employees are on food stamps, so that the taxpayers are subsidizing those corporations for paying low wages. There's something wrong with that that that needs to fix. I don't think that would be hard to fix if there were political will. So the real question is how do you get the political will. It depends on how angry the population gets about what's

going on right now. There is an element deliberately fostering a movement to try to unlock the economy and expose lots and lots of people to the virus. But we're going to be back and we're opening our country, and I hope that the lockdown governors. I don't know why they continue to lock down because if you look at Georgia, if you look at Florida, if you look at the ones that are most energetic about opening, they are doing tremendous business. And that this is what these numbers are

all about. So what if people die? And I've heard people say that it just takes my breath away. Yeah, I mean, I guess, I guess. My hope is that COVID can bring together some sort of cooperation. Wouldn't that wouldn't wouldn't be? Would be nice? Well, I think that you have to use the political system in the way

everybody else uses the political system. You get as many people together as you possibly can to write letters, to call, to zoom their congressional representatives and make their congressional representatives know that they want a better food assistant system, they want a better healthcare system, they want better school food, and they want these things and think that they deserve

these things and demand these things. I mean, this is a time for political action, but it requires large numbers of people doing it, and that means they have to be organized in some way. But if enough individuals call and complain, the congressional representatives will hear them, and they won't hear just one person, They have to hear lots of people, and I don't know any other way to

do it. Yeah, I wish, I wish your crystal ball actually works, and a lot of the things that as you envision that I think would make for a better a better country, you know, hopefully, I guess. My my hope is that you know, COVID will bring about together, you know, some use, some coming together of these issues, at least a way to discuss them and move issues forward, as opposed to just flat out you know, sides are drawn and we're not getting anywhere. But anyway, I'm sure

I'll see more of you out there, I certainly hope. So, yeah, I wanted to marry him to be on the first episode because whenever I need help, if I was going to the hill and lobbying on or else something, I always tried to get married on the phone first because she just had great insight not only two food systems, but the policies that we need to to change to create a board just system. So you know, the American

food system really is, it's a web. It's complex, and once you start pulling on one string, you find that it's all connected to others, and so we're going to explore all of that, and we're gonna actually take a look at how the sausage is made. So to speak. I'd like to say I've seen both. I've seen how the law is made and so and and how sausage is made, and I'll stick to the sausage. No, this isn't a story about recipes, and it's not a podcast about you know, all the cool things happening in the

chef Weralda. You know that's all great, and that podcast has been done. We're gonna look at a new path forward and how to make our food system more equitable

for everyone involved. Look at that plate of food or when we're shopping and start to think about how that food got there, not only the people that were involved in producing that food, the farm workers who are picking those vegetables, and the processors that are processing it, and the people that are delivering it, and everyone involved in getting that there, and knowing that there are policies in place that affect all of those workers. We're gonna take a look at all of that. Thanks to Dr Mary

Nestle for her wisdom and her friendship. Very special thanks to my wife, Laurie Silverbush, and Kristen castri at a place at the table for their insights and guidance. Citizen Chef with Me Tom Colokio is a production of I Heart Radio. Our executive producer is Christopher Haciotis, our researcher is Jescelyn Shields, and our producer is Gariel Collins. Thanks for listening, don't forget to subscribe, and please check us out next week. Thanks