*Note: This story also posted on Chicago Tribune here.
Has the Food Movement’s Moment Finally Arrived?
What happens when you put Mark Bittman and Michael Pollan in a room with a couple of hundred
well-heeled foodies—and a few dozen conventional farmers.
By Andrew Lawler
Civil rights had a bridge in Selma, Alabama, and gay rights had a bar in Greenwich Village. Last week,
foodies made their stand at a former Rockefeller family dairy in New York’s tony Westchester County. A
group of more than 200 food activists, peppered with a few dozen conventional farmers, ranchers, and
retailers, gathered at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture for a meeting organized by the
New York Times to discuss the future of food. Their goal was to transform a trend into a full-fledged
social and political movement.
“There is a war here!” thundered Mark Bittman, the New York Times columnist and self-described
rabble-rouser, to scattered applause in the conference’s opening speech. “I won’t apologize for not
being genteel.” Much of what the current food system produces, he charged, “pollutes, sickens, exploits,
and robs.” There were no paddy wagons or billy clubs, however, and gentility quickly returned by
supper. A few ranchers muttered unhappily about Bittman’s declaration of war, but all sat down
together in the center’s upscale restaurant to enjoy carrot cutlet and rotation risotto as heritage turkeys
gobbled in an adjacent pasture.
At the moment, the food movement is, at best, in an awkward and confused adolescence. It doesn’t
really know what it wants, how to behave, or whom to trust. There is a hodgepodge of individuals and
organizations concerned about the safety of their food, the treatment of livestock, the accessibility of
organic vegetables, the rise of diabetes, the low pay of food workers, the health of soil, and the role of
farming in climate change. “They are not always the same people,” Michael Pollan, the famed author of
The Omnivore’s Dilemma, told me. While foodies have enjoyed scattered political successes—the
nation’s first soda tax was passed in Berkeley, California, on Nov. 4, and a few states have recently
approved food charters—the groups behind these successes have yet to coalesce into a single political
bloc.
Pollan and Bittman want to herd these cats toward common objectives in order to change a food system
that they see as a deadly threat to U.S. national security. On Nov. 7, just a few days before the
conference began, Bittman, Pollan, and two co-authors published a Washington Post opinion piece
called “How a national food policy could save millions of American lives.” The manifesto has something
for everyone: It demands a fair wage for food industry workers, well-treated animals, limits on
marketing junk food to kids, and access to healthy food free of toxins for all Americans, as well as
support for food policies that jibe with public health and environmental goals. In the essay, they
challenge the Obama administration to join them on the right side of history by taking a stronger stand
in remaking a system that they contend is controlled by “agribusiness oligopolies” uninterested in the
public welfare.
Bittman, Pollan, and one of their co-authors arrived at the Stone Barns conference eager to spread their
message. For a movement often accused of elitism, the setting seemed a bold choice. Once part of a
sprawling Rockefeller estate, the center comprises a bucolic farm designed to train a young generation
of organic farmers and a restaurant where acclaimed chef Dan Barber serves a $198 tasting menu.
Participants paid $1,400 apiece to attend the day-and-a-half meeting sponsored in part by Porsche—one
of the perks, along with the carrot cutlet and a pig-butchering demo, was the chance to schedule a test
drive. “So what—we all meet in a Marriott?” said a testy Bittman when I asked him about the luxury of
our surroundings.
Though the backdrop was upscale, Pollan and Bittman came to Stone Barns to prepare to take their
argument to the streets—and to Washington. “We’ve tended not to think of food as a public concern,”
Pollan told me. “But if there were a food bill, the public would feel they have a stake, and you would
have urban legislators suddenly wanting to be on a Food Committee, because they represent eaters.”
Pollan and his colleagues intend to canvass Capitol Hill for support, and their manifesto already has
garnered 18,000 signatures of support that the Union of Concerned Scientists has forwarded to the
White House. If the Republican Congress ignores them, “it is something that Obama can do unilaterally.”
There’s one main problem with that plan, though, and it became abundantly clear at the Stone Barns
conference: The White House hasn’t yet shown any support for Pollan and Bittman’s food policy
proposal. “We already have a food policy,” insisted Sam Kass, the executive director of Michelle
Obama’s Let’s Move program and the senior policy adviser for nutrition policy. At the conference, Kass
trumpeted the food-related successes of the administration, like making school lunches healthier and
keeping junk food out of school vending machines. But he also pointedly warned that it is “a political
liability” to criticize incremental changes and demand only sweeping revisions of the food system, a
veiled reference to the manifesto. The way to be a better food policy, he argued, is through immigration
reform—a key issue for farmers and many of their workers—as well as an increase in minimum wage
that would benefit fast-food employees. In other words, Kass thinks that food activists can improve the
food system by supporting traditional progressive labor goals.
However, Kass did concede that bringing health care concerns into the food debate has “massive
untapped potential.” Limiting the junk food market and advertising aimed at hooking children into
sugary products is something that could energize insurance companies, the medical profession, and
other communities to exert political pressure on the existing system, in which there are few limits. That
struggle is already quietly taking place as the federal government assembles its 2015 dietary guidelines;
the 2020 guidelines will include a mandated section on the diet of young children likely to prove
controversial. Research shows that food habits instilled in the first two years are enormously important
for a person’s future health, says Marion Nestle, a New York University nutritionist, who spoke at the
meeting.
Clearly, Kass shares Pollan and Bittman’s explicit goals, even if he disagrees with the best way to meet
them. But there’s another obstacle standing in the way of the proposed national food policy: the people
who actually grow our food. All the talk about the evils of the food industry clearly baffled and shocked
the few actual food producers at the Stone Barns conference, including members of the U.S. Farmers &
Ranchers Alliance, an organization based in Missouri that sponsored a panel to get its voice in the mix.
The cultural gap between the New York and California foodies dominating the meeting and the
Midwestern producers yawned wide. “We’re the Big Ag you were taught to hate,” Illinois pig farmer and
businesswoman Julie Maschhoff, who was on the panel, told the audience. “I grew up on a corporate
farm, and my grandfather had a corporate farm before it was bad.” She spoke of her excitement that
biotechnology will “create a better animal on fewer resources” and noted something that would be
unremarkable to most urban foodies: “One of my good friends is a vegetarian.”
On the same panel, Joan Ruskamp, a cattle feeder in Dodge, Nebraska, expressed dismay at the
direction of the conversation started by Pollan and Bittman. Ruskamp told the group: “Please let us be
involved in the conversation about food!” She added, “I don’t want it to be a war.” Ruskamp went on to
refer to cattle as “one of the great converters of grain to protein” and organic meat as a “niche
marketing tool,” and to defend antibiotics as necessary to relieve animal suffering. Both Maschhoff and
Ruskamp later said they were appalled by Bittman’s acerbic language. “I felt deliberately offended,” said
Ruskamp.
By meeting’s end, Bittman had backed off his revolutionary rhetoric. “We’ve learned that everyone
wants to be sustainable, to produce less waste and better food, avoid worsening climate change, use
fewer antibiotics, encourage more people to farm, and encourage more people to farm smarter,” he
said. “We all want the same thing.” Life, he said, is compromise, and he insisted “the food movement is
not about targeting individual farmers,” but about changing the entire system. He added that he
thought that the food movement could build bridges between different camps. “This is not about being
adversarial,” Bittman added. “We are a family. It is our food system. Let’s make it as good as we can for
everyone.” Ruskamp was satisfied. “The tone changed,” she said. “It softened. Perhaps being here made
the difference.”
Pollan acknowledges that the food movement has a long way to go. “We’re still young, and we don't
have a big membership organization,” he told me. Tom Colicchio, a high-end chef and sustainable food
advocate who was at the conference, agrees that the food movement—whatever its goals may be—
needs broader support before it’s ready for prime time. “To me, food has always been political,” he told
me. “Now the mission is to raise public consciousness around food.” He added that this is a time to
focus on the movement’s grass roots. “I don’t think we’re on the bridge to Selma yet.”