I grew up as the only biological child of a young single mother. We were very poor. My mother was barely 20 when she gave birth to me. No college degree, no job at the time, and no husband to take care of her. My parents were forced into marriage when my mother was 6 months pregnant with me but divorced shortly after. Living on opposite ends of the country, I never knew my father. When my mother had me, she was one of 3 kids still living with my grandparents. Shortly after I was born, she took off and left me with them, knowing she couldn’t take care of me. I was always fed. I don’t remember going to bed hungry while living with my grandparents. It took me until I was an adult to recognize the agonizing fight my grandparents had just to keep food on the table. And it took me until this unit to realize just how much poverty affected their food choices. There was always food, but it was almost always boxed, canned, or frozen. Very rarely did I eat anything fresh growing up.
When I
was 9, my mother managed to secure government housing, welfare, and food stamps
to help her raise me. That is when the
food insecurity started. Utilizing the
food stamp program that was established in 1939 by The Farm Bill (What is the Farm Bill and Why Does it Matter?, 2018,
5:17), the National School Lunch Program, established in 1946 as an
expansion of The Farm Bill to further curb the widespread hunger
My mother eventually started
working in a call center, making $10 per hour, ending the government benefits
that kept us afloat, and causing the rent on our government townhouse to up to
almost unmanageable levels now that she no longer qualified for government
assistance, eventually to a point where she could only afford go grocery
shopping once a month. We almost never
had fresh produce. Produce would go bad
very quickly so she would rather buy processed foods than waste money on food
that would just be thrown out. When bread developed mold, we were told to pick
the mold off and eat it anyway. “It’s
just penicillin,” she would say. We made too much for government assistance,
and yet not enough to eat regularly. Our
meals were almost always pre-packaged, shelf-stable food, high in salt, high in
sugar, and low on nutrients. My mother
worried nightly about the food running out before the next paycheck, and as a
child, I became aware that I was eating too much, so I started skipping meals
just so we didn’t run out of food and make my mother more sad than she already
was. Once a month, we would order
Chinese food and feast for a couple of days, but by the end of the month, the
cupboards were bare again, and I was left trying to find something – anything –
to calm the roaring hunger in my belly.
Eventually, my mother turned to
drinking just to cope with her feelings of failure (at being unable to keep me
fed, sheltered, and clothed) and the deep depression she felt as a result those
feelings. Things got worse with my diet
and now I had to deal with a drunk and abusive mother on top of always feeling
hungry and worrying constantly about how to feed myself. She would beat me if I ate too much, used too
much butter, if I shared my food with my other (also very poor) friends, and if
I “wasted (her) money” by needing to go to the doctor. I developed several
medical conditions as a direct result of the malnutrition and my mother wasn’t
able to afford the medications that I needed to correct the deficiencies in my
diet. I had started developing problems
in school, my grades slipped, I was always tired, and the only real meals I ate
were at school, which were still very high in saturated fats and very low on
nutrient-dense foods.
“(S)tudies
have shown that residents of communities without access to affordable, healthy
food options generally have poorer diets and are at higher risk for certain
diet-related diseases… (and) surveys suggest that students who eat meals
offered through the National School Lunch Program consume higher amounts of fat
and sodium, but also lower amounts of added sugars and higher amounts of
several key dietary nutrients (including calcium and B vitamins.
She tried buying more food to
combat the malnutrition, rather than pay whatever they wanted to charge her for
the medications I needed to combat my malnutrition, but in addition to being
still nutrient poor, my deep hunger would cause me to eat most of the extra
food within a couple of weeks, leading back to the cycle of food insecurity
that kept me malnourished in the first place.
She would almost never bring in fresh produce because it was always more
expensive than buying a processed food with added nutrients. The only times I ate a meal that was even
close to being appropriate for my age group were the times I ate at school (I
participated in both the School Breakfast Program and the School Lunch
Program), and the snacks I would have at daycare. And even then, I still didn’t eat much in the
way of fruits or vegetables, mainly because I was either never exposed to them
(specifically in the case of the kiwi I first tried in 5th grade) or
I just didn’t have the taste for them (as argued in “Diet and Influences on Food Choice”), referring the pizza to the carrot
sticks, the nachos to the salads, and so on.
As a result of living in such deep
poverty, I was taught not to waste a single food item. What others would deem as worthless and toss
in the trash, I was beaten for trying to dispose of. Wilted lettuce covered in brown spots was
still served as a makeshift salad or on a sandwich. If bread molded, the molded
part was pulled out and the bread was still eaten. Expiration dates were completely ignored, even
when it came to things like meat and dairy.
Unless it was curdled or the can was bulging, it was still good. “You could just cook off all of the bacteria
from (expired) meat.” The only time we
were allowed to throw out “perfectly good food” was if it was clear that it couldn’t
be saved (curdled milk being the primary example), or had developed so much
mold that you couldn’t just scrape it off and, even then, sometimes she would
still serve it.
At 14, I started taking babysitting
jobs that led to various other odd jobs to help her buy groceries and keep the
lights turned on. She started drinking
more now that there was a bit more cash flow, and I started eating whatever I
could afford that didn’t taste like molded bread. I didn’t have the concept of eating fresh
food because I almost never had it growing up, and I knew that if I tried to
buy things that I couldn’t hide, I would be beaten for going behind her back to
feed myself, proving that she was incapable of doing it herself. It was either shelf-stable food from a box or
can, or fast food when we could afford it.
But when I would buy my own groceries – mostly ramen, snacks, and other shelf
stable things I could safely tuck away in the drawers under my bed – she would
eventually find it, and I would get beaten for hiding food instead. Sometimes, she would take all of my food and
give it to the neighbors. Sometimes, she
would just beat me, and take the rest of my money out of my wallet so that she
could buy more alcohol.
I went to college out of state on a
full scholarship that included a meal plan at the cafeteria, which was – for
the first time in my life – a period when I never worried about where my next
meal would come from. I had access to
fresh fruit and vegetables. I was able
to eat not just once but four times a day.
I didn’t know how to handle it. Most of the time, I opted for food that
resembled most like what I had grown up on, prioritizing taste over nutrition
I married young, to a man in the
military, and, still not knowing how to properly feed myself without a box or a
can, we defaulted to fast food and shelf stable or canned meals. Then we divorced and I lived on my own for
almost a decade on a pittance salary, being laid off time and time again, with
many months of unemployment and no care from the government. At one point, I was homeless and living out
of my car while still making $14 an hour at a full-time job because I simply
couldn’t afford to acquire an apartment. I made too much to qualify for social
programs, but still didn’t have enough to even eat a fresh apple once a
month. So back to the shelf-stable,
nutrient poor diet I had only ever known growing up, and the many days of going
to bed hungry because I couldn’t afford to feed myself. If the government and social programs are
supposed to be “a hand up, not a hand out (The
Shocking Truth About Food Insecurity, 2016, 11:22)” they certainly didn’t give
me any hands up. I even resorted to food
banks, which was a largely humiliating experience, no matter how friendly the
people were to me.
When I met my husband, I was
finally introduced to a nutritious and balanced meal made with fresh
ingredients, as he came from a family that had only temporarily experienced
poverty but worked very quickly into affluence.
I don’t think he’s ever had to worry about where his next meal will come
from. And, for a couple of years, I
never worried about where my next meal would come from either, knowing that we
had enough money to buy properly nutritious, fresh food, or that we would have
enough money to order out, something that had become somewhat of a delicacy to
me, as I only ever got take-out on rare occasions, despite having an affinity
for high calorie but nutrient deficient foods.
And then I got sick. Very sick.
So sick that I had to quit my decent paying job and start fighting the
government for assistance, which they never gave. We sank right back into poverty, and the
inability to throw out food resumed with a vengeance. I was absolutely terrified of throwing things
out and often let them sit in the fridge for days, saved for times when the
cupboards would be bare, fully prepared to eat food that had rotted or
developed freezer burn just to stave off the hunger pains that had – by that
point – become so familiar to me, until my husband would throw them out for me,
causing me massive panic attacks and flashbacks to my childhood that would
leave me sobbing.
Yet, as I watched and read this
week’s discussions on food insecurity and waste, I found myself thinking about
how my mother started dumpster diving shortly after I left for college, just so
she’d have enough money for booze and rent, since she now only had to feed
herself and she didn’t mind eating food that had gone bad. She called herself a “freegan,” meaning that
she would hop into grocery store dumpsters and pick out food they had thrown
away just because the store knew nobody would buy a yogurt that was 6 days
until its “sell by” date, even if it would still be good for a while and just
need a stirring to mix the yogurt back together, as described in the video
“Taste the Waste (3:26)” To be quite
frank, although I grew up in a home where “best before” and “sell by” dates
were merely recommendations (and that not only applied to food but to
medications as well), I was pleased to learn that these really are arbitrary
dates established by CEOs rather than scientists, and that my mother was right
when she said that it was merely a marketing tactic designed to make you spend
more money.
For most of her life, she not only
struggled with poverty as a military brat, and later as a single mom on
welfare, but also with eating disorders (which is why she never minded going to
bed with only booze in her stomach). She became obese when I was in middle
school as a result of those high calorie, high sugar, and low nutrient foods,
described in “Diets and Influences on Food Choice (p.3).” When I was in my teens, she developed
hypertension as a result of her diet, and was told to make adjustments to her
diet, but never did. She had become so
used to living on poverty foods, that when I tried to show her how to prepare
mashed potatoes from scratch, she waved me off and told me that instant
(shelf-stable) was just as good. At that
point, poverty foods had become her preferred taste. Fruit goes bad within a few weeks. It will never survive from one month to the
next. So highly-processed, shelf-stable
foods became her preference, because they were cheap, quick and easy, and they
tasted like foods she had grown up with, tastes that she preferred. “American
consumers prioritize taste, cost, nutrition, and convenience (in that order)
when making food choices
I’m still not okay with wasting as
much food as we do. Just last week, we
threw away a brown head of romaine lettuce because my husband had bought a new
one to replace it for his sandwiches.
The entire time I was watching “Taste the Waste,” I kept thinking about
that head of lettuce, and how my mother would have beaten me if I had thrown it
out instead of just cutting the brown parts off and eating it anyway. She hated food waste. To her, every piece of food thrown away
represented a dollar amount that she was now literally throwing away because it
wasn’t eaten, and when you’re in poverty, every penny matters. She would have lost her mind at finding out
that the average household throws away about 100kg (or about 220 pounds) of
edible food per year (Taste the Waste, 2010,
32:18). Like the dumpster divers shown
in that same video, my mother became someone who would routinely dive into
grocery store dumpsters and sift through layers and layers of thrown away food
to fill her fridge for the week because grocery stores are just wasteful.
In
our home, there is very little waste.
Definitely not 200 pounds of it a year.
Because I lived in such abject povery for nearly 30 years of my life,
literally the subject of the “Food Insecurity” video, I know that wilted celery
still can get thrown into a crock pot for either a soup or a roast. I know I
can cut off the bad parts of an apple or potato, and eat the edible parts. Dried herbs can last for years beyond their
“best before” dates. When the sour cream
starts to separate, we simply stir it and use it anyway. I think the only thing we won’t eat past its
shelf life is fish, and that’s primarily because my husband eats it raw. Normally, however, fish never makes it more
than 24 hours in our home without being eaten.
Food
environments are where the tastebuds begin.
A home with a family that eats a lot of fast food is going to end up
with children who eat a lot of fast food.
No matter how many times we preach the gospel of fresh and healthy,
there are always going to be people who just don’t care. When you grow up as I did, you end up having
a hard time adapting to new foods. I
think back on how much I resisted kiwi fruit as a child or asparagus as an
adult and how obsessed I am with them now.
When you grow up on Tang and Hamburger Helper, you develop a taste for
it. And since “Americans, on average, consume 68% of theur total calories from
foods prepared at home
I
also really like the idea of farmers leaving their “leftovers” in the fields
for people to pick, and think this is a wonderfully sustainable idea for
dealing with the 50% of product that never makes it to market because it’s too
small, the wrong color, has a dent, or whatever superficial reason the market
has against buying dented potatoes. My
aunt lives in a rural part of Israel, close to a very large farm that’s been up
and running for almost a century now.
When the farmer makes his harvests, he takes all the things that are
sellable at market and leaves everything else in the fields for people to pick
up, like the man collecting potatoes from the field at the beginning of “Taste
the Waste.” My aunt and her husband take
several bags every harvest just to collect the items he can’t sell because
they’re not “perfect” enough for the store.
She has shown me pictures of purple carrots the size of my femur that
had to be left behind because they weren’t the right color or size to sell at
market. I am a huge fan of ugly food and
believe that ugly food can save our world from starvation if we just get
consumers used to the idea that food does not always come out picture
perfect. A head of cabbage with a split
down the middle is still perfectly good for coleslaw or cabbage soup! It’s a waste to toss it back just because
it’s not pretty enough for market.
CSA’s
are a great idea to get this project started but I honestly feel like ugly food
(and food waste in general) needs a good PR rep and a commercial or three. Are CSAs useful and amazing? Of course.
But I feel like we need to adapt this to the market as well and start
working on the minds of the average consumer, not just the health-conscious. In last week’s video, “Cappuccino Trail: The
Global Economy in a Cup,” they show a young woman staring at a carton of (out
of season) strawberries in a market. She makes several comments about how ripe
they look, how pretty they look, and how tempted she is to buy them just because
they match her definition of what a strawberry SHOULD look like. But as someone who was taken to a U-Pick
strawberry field many times as a kid (and ate half of my lane in strawberries
every time I went), I can tell you that a strawberry picked fresh in the field
is so much tastier than the bruised and bland ones shipped in for the off
season, just because someone wants strawberry shortcake in January. Do I still buy strawerries at the store? Yes. I will admit to that. But I am also inordinarily picky about my
little carton of berries. Having had
freshly grown strawberries, straight from the field, at the peak of flavor,
those bland cartons at the store just gotta go.
We in the Western World need to start thinking more seasonally, and less
conveniently. As the caterer said in
“The Battle to Get on Your Plate,”:
“Let
me show you what I can do with butternut squash instead.”
References
Cappuccino Trail: The Global Economy in a Cup (2001). [Motion Picture]. Films for the Humanities
& Sciences.
Diet and Influences on Food Choice. (n.d.). In Teaching
the Food System. The Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future.
Food Environments (Background Reading). (n.d.). In Teaching
the Food System. The Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future.
Food Savers (2013). [Motion Picture]. Infobase. Retrieved from
https://digital-films-com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/p_ViewVideo.aspx?xtid=56521
Hunger and Food Security (Background Reading).
(n.d.). In Teaching the Food System. The Johns Hopkins Center for a
Livable Future.
Taste the Waste (2010). [Motion Picture]. Infobase. Retrieved from
https://digital-films-com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/p_ViewVideo.aspx?xtid=56522
The Battle to Get on Your Plate: High Stakes in The
Food Industry (2009). [Motion
Picture].
The Shocking Truth About Food Insecurity (2016). [Motion Picture]. TEDxWilmingtonWomen.
Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HakCAdPrlms&feature=youtu.be
What is the Farm Bill and Why Does it Matter? (2018). [Motion Picture]. Food & Environment
Reporting Network. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4mQyUOE_z0
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Grade: 100/100
Professor comments: This was an emotionally heavy read, Kathleen, but I thank you for writing it (and sharing it with me). You wrote well and honestly. And I wish that your classmates could read it. To understand that folks like you are "real" (if that makes sense); that this (all of this) isn't theoretical or "academic." And that what we're talking about (learning, doing, etc.) matters; it really does. Maybe more than we realize. And much more than maybe we even understand. So glad that you're here.
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