The Right to Choose Your Own Food

Choosing what you eat isn't a given.

Confit Byaldi (aka Ratatouille)

I was making a confit byaldi. Better known as the ratatouille Remy makes in the movie Ratatouille. 

I made a piperade, a Basque-style stew of onions, green peppers, tomatoes, and garlic. The stew was flecked with piment d’Espelette, a fruity, briny, low-heat chili pepper that tasted subtle and round in this sauce. I sautéed it all in beef tallow. I sliced the zucchini into micro slices. I trained myself to cut them all by hand, without a mandolin, because I was an absolute blood-gushing lunatic with that contraption. 

I arranged the slices of zucchini and eggplant so that they formed tight circles inside my paella pan. Purple. Red. Light and dark green. And yellow. With slices of the Romas in there, too. I doused it all with good olive oil, salt and pepper, handfuls of torn herbs, and garlic confit. I made a A hit or three of black vinegar gave it some tang. Then it was into the oven for a couple hours on low where it steams slowly under paper.

I chose the vegetables. I chose the onions and peppers for the piperade. I picked out the herbs for the pistou I made to go on top right before we will eat it.

Of course, only the older girls, Lucy and Edie, and my husband, David will eat the ratatouille. With crusty bread (girls) and salad (David). I do a small chuck steak in the fry pan for my son, Raffi, which he will eat screaming rare alongside some leftover mash and gravy. He is the ultimate meat, potatoes, no sauce, nothing green man.

For my daughter Desi, it gets complicated. She eats three things (Thank you, autism/PDA) I know I will need raw salmon and sushi rice ready to wrap into a sushi burrito for her. It will need to be made the same way every time or she won’t eat it. Hot dog with the right kind of bun, chicken nuggets in the shape of letters not dinosaurs, chicken breast sauteed, teriyaki on the side. I made about 10 different homemade versions of teriyaki before trying about 10 bottled sauces to mimic the one they use in her favorite sushi joint.

I always think: My kitchen life would be pure hell if I couldn’t in-the-moment choose the foods we are eating.

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We used food pantries last year when my husband lost his job. I felt ashamed but I had to feed my family. It’s a shitty situation all around.

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Choosing your own food seems like it would be a basic right, yes?

I mean this is the stuff that is going into your mouth, passing through your body, providing for it. Imagine feeding your children and not being able to choose foods that make them feel good and safe, familiar and confortable, happy and taken care of. Imagine someone handing you a box or bag and you get to go home and make something with whatever is inside.

Choosing your own food is, it seems, a privilege for people with money and not dependent on non-profits to provide supplemental foods. A lot of our neighbors and fellow community members rely on food banks and pantries across this country, and those places often give out food based on what the organization has and how much it can give. 

This makes practical sense for these organizations. 

It helps them run more efficiently and help more people. But it also robs people of something inherent and fundamental to our humanness, in the form of freedom of choice. So many people are not able to do this basic, basic thing—go to a place and choose what they want to make for their next meal. The quality, the quantity, the brand. Even special snacks and treats they know will please their children and get them extra parenting points.

Imagine for a moment that you do not have the ability to put food on the table yourself and you have to go to a local pantry. You wait in a long line. Maybe you have a couple of toddlers with you. They are bored and your phone is running out of battery. The entire time you are waiting, you watch the line ahead of you. You monitor how much food is left compared to the number of people  in line. You worry - will there be enough food? And what if you walk away with nothing? It kills you to think of all the time wasted. The stress twists your spine. Your head is light and fuzzy. You want to sit. But there is nowhere to do that but the ground. You pick up a whiny child. You can’t blame her. You make a promise that it will be soon. You know it won’t be. 

There is nothing else to say. 

The line is a reminder of your social status. It reminds you that you are beholden to and dependent on others. Then, after waiting and waiting, you get to the front of the line. They tell you it’s one box per family. Or if you are driving, one box per car. You do not have any choices . This is what you waited for.

Invariably you will not get enough of what you need. Maybe nothing of what you need. You’ll get a bunch of things you don’t want and will never use. Or maybe you get lucky and it’s great. You can work with the contents.

A huge  relief.

This box has to feed your family whether you are two people or eight. It doesn’t matter whether you are Mexican or Indian, Indigenous or white. Or whether you cook particular cuisines. Or don’t cook very much at all. Or have a broken stove. Or you are living in your car or have food allergies and dietary preferences. Or just crave diversity of dishes and flavors. It doesn’t matter if you are vegan or vegetarian.

That box is your box.

Over and over again.

Don’t get me wrong: the people feeding you are well-intentioned. They want to help you. As a former food pantry owner, I can tell you—we all want to do right by the people we serve. But with no money, you are at everyone’s whim. You control very little. 

You are at the mercy of other humans.

You are poor. And you feel it.

You have little control over the most basic things. 

Salmon for Desi’s burritos.

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There's a lot of rice and beans for sure, and pasta. I find that I always need to buy extra items to make any particular recipe. It's hard to make something with only food box items. For example, to make turkey tetrazzini, I also had to buy frozen mushrooms, sour cream, parmesan cheese, bread crumbs. I already had plenty of pasta from pantries. I had to buy butter this time and frozen peas.

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The food bank system is designed to do one thing very well—get food to people who need it. The system excels at this. 

Our food bank here, Three Square, supported by Feeding America, is a literal lifesaver for the Vegas community. They supply pantries, churches, and non-profits with food for those who needs it, including backpack programs, after-school kids’ meals, and meal delivery for the elderly. They are quite literally filling in gaps for people who are struggling with hunger.

But these food banks and their subsidiaries were only ever conceived to be stopgaps. Temporary setups to keep people fed through disasters and economic downturns. They were never meant to be permanent. T​​he longer they stick around, the more they can be generally engaged in maintaining hunger. They serve as a kind of enabler for the federal government to not raise wages, form unions, tax the rich, tax corporations and provide resources and housing for our most vulnerable citizens, the mentally ill and disabled.

In many ways, the existence of food banks means that our elected officials don’t have to meet all the basic needs of their constituencies. The food bank system enables the government to abandon its citizens.

Food banks are one of the things both Republicans and Democrats can get behind together. We might fight about guns but dammit, we all want to be seen funding food banks. Republicans like providing money to corporations that will get their foods to low-income people, bolstering businesses that provide that food. Democrats love helping poor people. Everyone benefits, except the struggling families who will continue to struggle.

They will be dependent on the system of saviors feeding them.

Pantries and food banks can be so much more. According to Katie S. Martin, who wrote the book, Reinventing Food Banks and Pantries: New Tools to End Hunger, they can be a hub for folks to get a leg up. Benefits. Interview training, nutrition advocacy. Tutoring for school. Cooking demos. Locate where the jobs are and meet people who have been where they are now and who can be assets in their lives.

“We lack justice and equity within our food system, we lack the courage or patience to tackle the root causes of poverty, and we lack the political will to ensure living wages and a strong social safety net,” Martin writes. She goes on to say that in an effort to respond to this problem, “...we have designed systems that are largely transactional, with a focus on serving as many people as possible, as quickly as possible.”

A pantry that can be a community hub will be better at navigating inclusion. Providing foods that are culturally and lifestyle relevant. They won’t be monitoring how much you can take. Or when are you allowed to visit again. You won’t need a complex gauntlet of paperwork and identification. People won’t yell at you or admonish you for behaving in ways that are indicative of your stressed out, worried, consumed poverty-brain. 

It will be designed with the input and voices of the people being served. 

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This week is killing me. My son wants tacos. I think I have enough money to get lettuce, tortillas, and tomatoes for that.

My bank account is almost always negative. I just got fired by another doctor I can't pay. I'm prednisone cranky. And steroid starving but there is no food in the house and I'm waiting to go get anything because I have to pick my daughter up from school and I can't afford gas for two trips.

Being poor and sick sucks big, green, donkey dick.

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Raffi’s preferred meat + potatoes meal.

People in poverty also get different food than the rest of us. 

While writing this I was talking to neighbors who use WIC. They talked about how the bread eligible for WIC at the grocery store had recently been cut down to three specific brands. WIC is “The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children,” which supports postpartum moms with kids under five. These women talked about having to go store to store to find this bread and what it meant for them to use extra gas or walk. They talked about how they had to shop at multiple supermarkets to find the right brands and what that meant for their time. 

Folks in financial crisis can’t choose their own brand of bread for fucks sake. 

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I also tend to get canned diced tomatoes, tomato sauce, a lot of dried raisins and plums, bags of nuts that are on the verge, but mostly good, canned green beans, corn, pears and apricots, milk and cheese, frozen ground beef on a good day. Eggs are rare. I don't know what to do with all the nuts and raisins.

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During the pandemic, folks were given Farm to Family boxes by the federal government. Think cooked taco meat, tortillas, bags of dried beans, canned corn, sour cream and dried pasta. This food does not have the same labels as food for the upper classes. Not seasonal. Not local. Not heirloom. Not GMO or non-GMO. Not organic. This is not the food sold at Whole Foods or Erewhon in LA. 

We use different words for food for people in different classes.

Food comes to hunger organizations in pounds. Baked into talking about food in pounds is the disconnection between people and the food itself. The kind of food, the quality of food, the way it tastes—all of it doesn’t matter because we just delivered someone pounds of food. The more pounds the better, and forget what it is, because it will help you stay alive in the short term.

Talking about food in pounds disconnects people from the kinds of foods they are choosing. It disconnects our fellow humans from the fun parts of food—that it can taste good, it can be filling, nourishing, and comforting. It can be healing. Cooking it can be a ritual, a source of connection itself, a balm for loneliness. Eating together can be restorative—standing around a butcher block, dipping breads in sauces, vegetables in dressing, chicken in its own fats—and can be a radical act of togetherness even in times (especially in times) of hardship.

Words like heirloom, organic, local may exude certain privileges, but the joy of food is not a privilege. We do not think people who are experiencing poverty should experience joy—or the full range of emotions—with their food.

Picking up forty pounds of chicken parts from a pantry—that you had no involvement in choosing—feels hyper-disconnected from all the things we like about food, the things that are cultural and intimate and important. Food is reduced to fuel, a subplot rather than the centerpiece

Of course we need to feed people in the interim, but as long as we get trapped here in inertia, a subset of our fellow citizens will continue to be unable to have this very simple, elemental human thing - choice over what and how they eat, cook and shop. 

Changing the system requires us to do what Princeton Sociologist Matthew Desmond discusses in his excellent book, Poverty By America. It us an overhaul of the mind as much as it is an overhaul of policy, and that means all our minds.

We need to hold rich corporations accountable, make them pay, make rich families pay, empower the IRS to keep the rich from using loopholes to get out of paying their taxes, tax doctors differently than factory workers, accept that the middle and upper classes get all kinds of “welfare” including educational, pension and homeowner subsidies, invest in construction of affordable housing and incentivize builders to do it, create universal basic income, increase food stamps for folks above but close to the poverty line, encourage collective bargaining and unions, increase rental assistance programs, create communities with low, middle and upper income folks so that everyone can have good amenities, give women full decision-making about their reproduction, and encourage supported housing inside our communities for people embroiled in addiction, mental illness and disabilities.

There is a way through. 

People are struggling because all of us allow it. We all play a part. We must be unmerciful about who we vote for and elect into office from local to the federal government, because until we do, people will continue to make meals out of canned potatoes and pre-cooked taco meat from a generic box handed to them at a drive through. 

This isn’t good enough. 

The answer isn’t to donate more food to pantries. To make sure we donate that nearly expired can of pickled jalapeños and feel great about helping folks out.

It’s to finally make pantries and food banks obsolete. 

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END NOTES:

The quotes in the piece were taken from discussion groups in Reddit. You can learn a lot about poverty there.

Also, I will be making a few appearances this month, if you are out our way.

• April 18: I have been asked by Black Mountain Institute to give the Spring Forum lecture at the University of Las Vegas, which will be about hunger. I will be bringing a big pot of pozole. Join me.

• April 26th: I will also be teaching a class on the intersection of poetry + memoir with our poet laureate Angela Brommel. This will be fun!

• April 27th, 1-3p: I will be in St George, Utah at Bungalow Books, reading, talking, listening. More info to come.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

xo Kim