Stuffed & Starved Reading on May 13 at Stacey's

[Guest guest]

EVENT: Stuffed and Starved, Book Reading

Tuesday, May 13th

Location: Stacey's Books, 12:30pm, 581 Market Street, San Francisco

It is difficult to pick up a newspaper without reading about

increasing food crises in much of the world or the epidemic of

obesity in America. Raj Patel argues that both are symptoms of the

corporate food monopoly. From seed to store to plate, Stuffed and

Starved explains the steps to regain control of the global food

economy, stop the exploitation of farmers and consumers, and

rebalance global sustenance. See

http://www.staceys.com/sanfranciscoevents.html

 

From http://stuffedandstarved.org/drupal/node/254:

The good people at the Food Ethics Council have run a piece I did on

the politics of vegetarianism. It appears in December's issue of

Food Ethics magazine.

If Meat is Murder, What's Vegetarianism?

With all the evidence that industrial meat production is bad for the

environment, cannot be sustained equitably for the planet, is a

profligate waste of resources, accelerates global warming, and is a

vector for all kinds of nasty disease, we might be tempted to enjoin

everyone to go vegetarian. And there's much merit to the idea.

Research shows that vegetarians and vegans have a smaller carbon

footprint than their carnivorous counterparts. In the United States,

where about 2.5% of the population is off meat, there's a marked

difference between the annual CO2 output of vegetarians and the

average population. One recent study found that an ordinary US diet

contributed nearly 1.5 tons more CO2 than a vegetarian one – and

that switching from meat-eating to vegetarian could cut US national

greenhouse gas emissions by up to 6%.

Vegetarians can also feel smug about their health. A range of

studies have shown that vegetarians have a lower chance of dying

from stroke and heart disease than the average population. One of

the largest studies of its kind was carried out in the UK, where

33883 meat eaters were compared with 31546 non meat eaters. In that

study, meat eaters were more likely to smoke and to be more

overweight. But, and this should give us pause, a range of studies

also conclude that in other diseases, vegetarians and similarly-

health conscious meat eaters fare equally well.

It's the `similarly health-conscious' that ought to set off alarm

bells, because it suggests that vegetarianism isn't spread randomly

through society, that being vegetarian is associated with other

kinds of health-increasing behaviour. This is borne out by the

evidence.

In the US, recent survey data find a link between occupation and

diet. Manual workers tend to eat more meat, and beef in particular,

than their counterparts in service or professional occupations.

Further, eating less meat is linked to higher levels of education

thought not, strikingly, with higher levels of income, which

suggests there's something cultural going on.

This leads to an interesting twist to our thinking about meat and

its absence. Certainly it's true that becoming vegetarian can

improve your life chances, other things being equal. But precisely

because other things aren't equal, the commandment to be vegetarian

isn't one that all of us can follow with equal ease. There is a host

of social obstacles that stand between the majority of the

population in the Global North, and sustainable eating patterns.

We already know, from studies in California for example, that the

amount of time you spend commuting and your level of obesity are

directly related. We know that poor people are less able than the

rich to live near their places of work. We know, further, that 14%

of US fast food meals – dense in animal meat – are eaten in cars.

This comes not from a particular national fondness for the interior

of cars as dining venue, but because for many of America's working

poor, the only chance they have to eat a meal is en route from one

job to the next.

Further, it's much harder to be vegetarian if you don't have access

to fresh fruits and vegetables. If you live in a poor neighbourhood

in the United States, you might be subject to `supermarket

redlining', a phenomenon named for its similarity to the practices

of banks, where red lines would be pinned onto local maps to denote

the areas within which the bank would make no loans. Supermarket

redlining is like this, but with food. It is an increasing feature

of American geography that low income neighbourhoods are

overwhelmingly less likely to have fresh food markets, and far more

likely to have fast food outlets and convenience stores. The

consolidation of supermarkets means that in Boston, more than half

of fifty big chain supermarkets have closed since 1970, and the

number in Los Angeles County has fallen by almost 50% as the markets

concentrate in only the well-to-do areas.

The choices that each of us makes, then, aren't made freely. And

there are some profound obstacles that prevent society's poorest

from choosing a healthy diet. In the Global South, being vegetarian

is a de facto state simply on the grounds of income. In the Global

North, vegetarianism is the prerogative of the middle class.

So what changes, then, would be required to move all of us in the

Global North towards a more sustainable diet? For a start, we ought

to dispense with the idea that there's a magic bullet. No one

intervention can unpick the morass of culture and class that pushes

poorer people to unsustainable eating habits. In moving towards

sustainable eating, it is important to jettison the kind of thinking

that reduces diet to individual choice. Instead, a range of policies

are needed, from encouraging fresh fruit and vegetable markets in

low income areas, to increased government-sponsored social housing

nearer places of work, to building cities with walkable environments

and green space, to living wage legislation, to a reduction in the

length of the work day, to some fairly serious investment in

education and healthcare to stamp out the injustices that accompany

our differential access to food.

It is impossible, in short, to talk about meat in America or

elsewhere without talking about class. And if we want to eat

sustainably, that's a conversation we can put off no longer.