Kathy Spencer, a mother to four children living in Massachusetts, has been able to figure out how to feed her entire six-person family for $4 per week. Her money saving techniques primarily include coupon clipping from the newspaper, internet, and other sources. The first time I saw her story was on the news last night, but other information appears here and here.
Being able to clip enough coupons and stockpile enough store credits to feed an entire family for such a small amount is admirable, without a doubt, especially with the way the economy's been lately. But if you take a look into her pantry and shopping cart, what you'll see is precisely the opposite of the direction we should be heading in as a nation in terms of food purchases and consumption. This story and technique should not be hailed as something we should all aspire to, nor should it be touted as heroic, but this is certainly no fault of the Massachusetts mom.
Kathy says she clips coupons and only buys what works out to free, or close to free. This makes sense, and sounds great, but in reality, it puts her and other coupon clippers at the mercy of big supermarkets chains and corporate marketing campaigns. The items you'll see coupons for aren't on sale by coincidence. If they want you to buy a chemically enhanced package of strangely bright yellow cheese, they'll put it on sale, or use other techniques. And according to this article, you can't trust your supermarket when they say something is "local," and claims like that aren't regulated. And the article talks about all sorts of other things your supermarket doesn't tell you that you might want to know.
And if you watch the first link I cited above, Kathy's interview with Good Morning America, you'll notice she and her interviewer pass completely through the produce section during their first shopping trip. She does purchase fresh scallops, but according to the Monterey Bay Seafood Watch Guide for Sustainable Seafood, she needs to ensure they're Bay Scallops or Sea Scallops, not imitation scallops. Then she stops in the frozen food section for Tony's Crispy Crust Pizza. Take a look at the ridiculously long ingredient list. Mmm, chemically enhanced pizza. And the countless small individually packaged bottles of Pellegrino in her cart aren't doing wonders for the environment either. Plus, what'll happen if her kids actually try to exist on all the boxes of Pop Tarts in her pantry? It isn't teaching them any good habits about healthy eating.
Now, I'm being pretty nit-picky about what was in her pantry and her shopping cart, and I'm certainly not the poster child for sustainable, local food 100% of the time, but the bottom line is, the whole concept really irks and angers me. We shouldn't be at the mercy of corporate marketing programs. We should be making food purchasing decisions that make us healthier, teach our children how to be healthier, and better the communities we live in and the Earth as a whole.
I'm a huge fan of Michael Pollan, which should come as no surprise. He says in his must read In Defense of Food that most of what we're actually consuming and calling food today isn't really food. Our meals are full of food-like substances, chemicals, and flavors that are meant to trick our brains into thinking these items are things we need and want to eat. They're products of food science, of big business, not of nature. These packages come with claims about fiber and what's healthy for our hearts, but in reality, these claims should be red flags to us. Pollan says, "In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion. The result is...the American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become."
Pollan states, both with fact and theory in his books and in the documentary Food Inc., that if we'd just stop eating all the crap masquerading as food, we'd all be healthier, happier, and escape diseases the human race has been wrought with over the past several decades. We'd also be doing the Earth a great favor.
But it's a battle. It's easier, and cheaper, to go into the grocery store and buy frozen dinners than it is to find a farmer's market and prepare the same meal from scratch. It takes too much time, too much effort. And often, farmer's markets are hard to come by depending on where you live, especially during winter months in New England. (This opens up an entirely new can of worms - if it's not in season where we live, we really shouldn't be importing it from South America. We should be eating what local agriculture can produce for us and stay in harmony with our environments). Why aren't farmer's markets available everywhere? Why is it so incredibly difficult to support our communities and local farmers? Why are local farmers constantly duped and pressured and left bankrupt by companies like Tyson and Monstanto?
It makes my blood boil when I see people like Kathy Spencer being touted as heroes (or heroines) for playing along with a system that's largely responsible for putting cancerous and disease causing chemicals into our food. But what else can she do? She's got a big family to feed on a budget, and big grocery store chains and food manufacturers are going to dictate exactly how she does that. Never mind the health of Kathy and her family, or that of billions of other human beings.
And most importantly, why should this make your blood boil too, and what can we all do about it? By purchasing chemically enhanced food-like items rather than shopping the local farmer's market, or sticking to the organic produce section of the grocery store, you're perpetuating a system that's making us all sick and delusional about and disconnected from where our food comes from.
So what can we do about it? I could, literally, go on about this for days. But I urge you to become an educated consumer, and to vote with your purchase decisions as often as you're able to do so. If we can, as a nation, convince food manufacturers that organic, honest-to-goodness local food is important enough that we'll run them our of business if they don't listen, maybe things will change. Take the extra time to prepare your meals from scratch, and eat things that are "clean" - completely free of chemical enhancements. Subscribe to Michael Pollan's rule to Eat food. Not much. Mostly Plants. Realize this is the one body you've got, the one life that's yours to live, and help change things. We're not all going to be able to but free range chicken from the farmer next door 100% of the time, but I'd challenge with enough persistence, there will be a day when that will be the norm.
In the meantime, here are a few resources to take a look at:
- In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan (buy it at a local bookstore, support your community).
- Sustainable Table, Great educational site with all sorts of links and materials.
- Use this USDA site to find farmers markets in your state.
- Change.org has a listing of recent news articles and opportunities to take action
- Watch the Sierra Club's cute short called The True Cost of Food, then lead a discussion about it, especially if you have kids. It's a free 15 minute download.
- See Food Inc. and explain to your friends and family why it's not some over-the-top exaggerated documentary, it's real, and we need to change things.
- Keep up-to-date with Treehugger.com. There's a TON of stuff on their website, not just about food consumption.