Most of us grew up in a world where nutritionally void fast food was the norm, where true nutrition was all but forgotten and never accurately addressed by mass media, and where giant corporate food conglomerates fought daily to keep us of unsound body. Some of us (such as the readers of this magazine) have been lucky enough to have, at some point, parted ways with such practices, and have discovered the truth about nutrition and health and what they actually require.
Anna Lappé, on the other hand, had quite a different upbringing. Her mother, Frances Moore Lappé, was a pioneer of organic agriculture and cooking philosophy in the 1970s with her best-selling breakthrough book Diet for a Small Planet, so Anna herself had her eyes opened at an early age. It took hands-on activity, however, for her to become involved in a similar pursuit. “I think that I got particularly inspired to do this work after working on the book that my mother and I wrote together called Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet,” she told Organic Connections. “And it was really, for me, just a totally eye-opening experience to have the opportunity to travel to many different countries—India, Brazil, Bangladesh, Poland, Kenya, France, and throughout the US—and to see with my own eyes the impact of the food choices that we make here in the US and the impact of US-based companies on people’s lives all around the world.”
The Cultural Problem
In the first half of Anna’s latest book, GRUB: ideas for an urban organic kitchen, co-written with chef Bryant Terry, she is attempting to right the informational wrongs forced into society about nutrition. “The culture at large is missing a lot of key information,” she told OC. “I think part of that is because the food industry—ranging from beverage companies like Pepsi and Coke to fast-food corporations like McDonald’s and Burger King, to the organizations that are producing the chemicals used in agriculture—is spending billions of dollars every year on advertising and marketing and public information campaigns. The food industry is the second largest advertiser in the world, so the public is bombarded with media messages and media ideas from the industry itself. I think a lot of people are really confused about what good food is—confused about what food is good for their bodies and for the environment; and that confusion stems from the information clutter we experience in the media overload coming out of this mass marketing.”
As one might suspect, the motivation behind this constant pushing of bad food onto the public at large is money. The corporate food giants have worked hard to discover the cheapest and most profitable solutions to food production—to the serious detriment of our environment and our health. While they have reported increasing dividends to their shareholders year after year, farmland has been poisoned and depleted of nutrients, pesticide runoff has ruined our lakes, rivers and streams, and malnutrition and obesity are running rampant through our society, to name but a few of the ill effects.
Grub
So what does Anna suggest as a solution? The answer can be summed up in one multifaceted word: grub. “Grub is our slang term for food that is local, that has been sustainably raised, and that has been produced with fairness all along the way from field to plate,” she explained.
The concept begins with food that is locally grown, and Anna considers there are many reasons why consuming locally grown fresh food is important. Typically it means fruits and vegetables that have been organically grown and picked at their peak ripeness, so they’re more nutritional. It can also mean food that has been raised with sustainability practices with attention to the land and the environment; so support of local growers also encourages the preservation of green space.
But, for Anna, it goes even further. “I guess for me a very big reason for supporting local food producers is that I firmly believe—as do many people—that we should continue to be a food-producing nation; we should be producing a diverse variety of foods,” she told OC. “Having thriving, diverse small-scale farms throughout the country is really an essential part of what makes our country what it is and what makes our food system safe and secure and healthy. So by choosing local foods we are playing a central role in helping keep alive exactly the kind of farming that is best for the environment and best for our families and our bodies.”
Besides being strictly culinary, it can be seen that the grub concept also obviously involves a sense of community, and Anna believes that in addition to purchasing locally produced organic food, all of us who eat organic should continue a public insistence that organic standards be strictly maintained. “I do strongly believe that eating organic foods—eating foods that have been raised without chemicals, that have been raised in sustainable ways—is a very important decision we each can make,” she explained. “I also think it is very important that we, as ‘concerned eaters,’ continue to be vigilant about maintaining the rigor of what the organic standard means.”
This is because the USDA official federal “organic” certification is not immutable—it can be changed. Anna notes that since the standard was made official, there have been a number of attempts, primarily led by the food industry, to weaken the standard and make various non-organic practices allowable under the law. “It’s important that there continue to be vigilance and consumer awareness about what we want ‘organic’ to look like and how to keep its integrity in place,” she said.
In addition to citizen vigilance, Anna would like to see the government become more involved in the production of healthy foods. She believes it is high time for a radical redirection in use of tax dollars as regards agriculture. “The last time I looked into the numbers, it was around 1 percent of all federal money for agricultural research that was going to researching organic and sustainable practices,” she said. “In other words, virtually 100 percent of agricultural research tax dollars are going into researching the very practices that we know now have gotten us into such dire straits in terms of environmental impact of the food system, in terms of the health impacts of highly processed foods, and in terms of a food system that is emphasizing feedlot factory farmed meat versus grass-fed or pasture-raised meat.” Anna points out that it would make a significant difference if the government flipped the research emphasis on its head and invested that money in a far more positive direction.
From the Ideal to the Practical
In her book, Anna and her co-author Bryant Terry bring this vision right into our kitchens, and urge us to discover the ease of forming completely healthy diets. While the first half of the book discusses how our dietary culture has gone so terribly wrong and what should be done to right it, the second half provides recipes and practical ideas for creating organic kitchens.
Anna explained the purpose of the book to Organic Connections. “My co-author Bryant Terry created the amazing recipes and grub that make up the second half of the book—and which really bring to life the message in the first half. He has these great recipes that are oriented around menus, and he even has a suggested soundtrack of music to listen to while you’re cooking the food and serving the food.
“For us, our mission with Grub is to empower people to realize how to make the healthiest food choices for themselves and their families, to realize they can make those choices, and then to inspire them to do so with these recipes of Bryant’s that bring the food to life and make it so appealing and so fun.”
Time and Money
Like many of us who promote healthy diets and lifestyles, Anna often encounters the objection that eating completely organic diets is expensive and requires too much time. She has some interesting counters for such arguments.
Her first response to such an objection is, “Does it really?” She cited her own example of how such meals can be fast. “The other night my boyfriend and I were throwing together our dinner. I didn’t have a stopwatch timing us, but I would guess we pulled together an amazingly delicious fresh, wholesome meal in under 15 minutes. That’s because we have a well-stocked kitchen and we plan ahead; on the weekends we have a little bit more time and we typically make bigger meals that we can tweak the leftovers from during the week.”
Anna continued with a further argument. “Would it take less time to prepare a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese than it would to just make whole-grain pasta and your own cheese sauce with real cheese? Well, no, it really wouldn’t. And during the time that that water is boiling you could cut up ingredients for a salad, and by the time you’d pulled together your pasta and cheese you could actually have a perfectly good meal.”
And finally, Anna argues that whenever we think about the time it takes to cook healthy food, we should ask ourselves about the impact on our lives of diet-related illnesses. How much extra time is taken in caring for such maladies day in and day out, when they might have been prevented by a wholesome diet?
The other common argument against a totally organic diet is expense—another objection Anna deftly handles. “Some of us do have flexibility within our incomes,” she said. “There are people who are figuring out a way to buy a new iPod or a new pair of shoes. Why don’t we value the importance of having healthy, fresh foods in our lives, in our kitchens? For some of us, it might just be a matter of looking at where our priorities are and where we’re spending our money. And as a country, it would mean looking at using our tax dollars to help ensure that those of us who have no flexibility in our incomes can get access to healthy, nourishing food at affordable prices.
“As a nation, I would also argue, we’re paying a huge cost for the epidemic of diet-related illnesses,” Anna said. “Instead, think about the potential that we could unleash if we shifted resources toward building healthy communities and making a lifelong investment in our nation’s health.”
For more on GRUB, including shopping lists, recipes and even local events, check out www.eatgrub.org. Order a copy of Anna’s book from our bookstore.
