This week in class we watched a film called What’s On Your Plate, following the story of Sadie and Safiyah, two girls exploring how the food options in Brooklyn impact the health and happiness of many different communities. In class, we’ve been learning about food environments and individual responsibility for food choices, so the video added a lot to our in-class learning. One interesting part of the film made me want to learn more about local CSAs -- my family goes to a weekly farmer’s market in the summer, but we haven’t looked for a CSA since we moved to the Twin Cities. One way I can make individual changes to my food impact would be to see whether we can find a new local CSA.Food Environment
An important concept we learned about in class this week is the idea of a food environment. A food environment is a collection of factors that impact an individual’s food choices. They range from the individual level to the national level and can be separated into four specific aspects.
The first aspect is the individual factor. This can range from an individual’s food preferences -- for example, if you hate avocado, you won’t eat it, even if you know it’s good for you -- and their dietary restrictions: if you are lactose intolerant, for example, individual factors might prevent you from getting calcium from the usual sources.
The second aspect is the social environment. This can be your family, your friends, or any other community that creates an environment that impacts your food choices. For instance, if you like to go out to eat with your friends, you’re likely to eat at whatever fun place you go to, even if it might not be the healthiest, or, on the flipside, if all your friends are becoming vegetarians, you might as well. Another example of the social environment is the difference between how different families eat -- while another family might eat a more a traditional American meal, my family tends to eat different food, with, say, lentils and fish over bread and beef.
The third aspect is the physical environment. This refers to what, geographically, you have access to. If you live in a warmer climate, you might have better access to fresh fruits and vegetables year round. Or, maybe, you live on the coast, and therefore have easy access to fresh fish.
The fourth and final aspect is the policy environment. This is how the government impacts your food. One example of how the government impacts an individual’s food is school lunches -- many children, for twelve years of their life, attend schools that provide them with lunch and often breakfast as well. However, in public schools, it’s the government funding these school lunch programs and therefore basically deciding what is served -- usually the cheapest and most efficient foods rather than the healthiest. The government is also responsible for regulating the health and safety of food production -- they’re the ones who get say whether or not this chemical is safe in processed foods, or whether that farming practice should be legal.
One statement brought up in class, before and after we learned about food environments, was this idea that “individuals are responsible for their own food choices.” Originally, I agreed wholehearted with this statement -- after all, it seems that saying we aren’t is just an excuse to sit back and be lazy about our own health and food decisions. And, after learning about food environments, I still say that yes, I agree with this statement, but with a lot more thought behind that claim.
After all, three out of four of the aspects of the food environment seem out of our control. It’s not our decision what our family eats, at least when we’re children, or what our school serves us or where we live. Looking at it like that, it’s easy to say no, actually, individuals aren’t responsible for their food choices -- all these outside factors are.
However, for two reasons, I believe that they are. First, I want to highlight a key word in the statement: “individuals are responsible for their own food choices.” One definition of ‘responsible’ is ‘in control of,’ and yes, it’s possible to argue that we aren’t completely in control of the food available to us. However, the definition I prefer is ‘accountable.’ Even if we step back and say yes, there’s this and this and this that I can’t control, there’s still space for individual choice within all that. Your school lunch may be unhealthy, but why not go to the salad bar? Your friends may want to go out to a fast food place, but what’s the healthiest thing you can find on the menu?
Or, better yet, don’t go to the fast food place at all. The second part of my answer is that while we have these outside environments impacting our food environments, we still have the individual power to try to change them. You could convince your friends to go somewhere else or to come over and cook dinner with you instead. You could petition for better school lunches -- maybe not even at the school level but at the city government level. If the area you live in is impacting your food, you could move, or see how you could change that -- if you live near a corn or wheat farm, maybe start a community vegetable garden, or if you live in a cold place, figure out ways to preserve or store healthier foods for the winter.
For me, agreeing or disagreeing with the statement comes down to choosing between the active and the passive mindsets. I choose the former because to me, that’s the only path to constructive change.
Food Revolution
In the film we watched this week, Sadie and Safiyah talked to two administrators from the New York City Department of Education about school lunches and how the American diet -- basically, the policy environment -- has changed since post-WWI America.
Originally, after issues with malnutrition in soldiers, there was a focus on food that got you the calories you needed -- ‘mystery meat,’ some kind of vegetables, and bread, was the standard fare.Then, in the 1960s, the focus shifted away from nutrition to anti-hunger programs, which came alongside the rise of fast food, fatty foods, and carbohydrate-rich foods, the foods that are still a staple of the American diet today. Now, moving forward, there’s a movement for the balance of the two -- filling and nutritional, focusing on organic, low-fat, low-sodium, non-artificial foods.
The trend most surprising to me was how the American diet actually went downhill. The earlier diets were, out of necessity, healthy enough. It was when people were getting richer and people were finding ways to make food taste better, regardless of actual nutritional value, that the least healthy of the three examples of the American diet occurred.
In my family, as I said, we usually try to avoid the lingering influence of the second American diet. We rarely go to fast food places and tend to eat, as I mentioned previously, mostly quinoa-type grains or pasta, various vegetables, and chicken or fish. However, one thing we don’t monitor quite as much is the sodium or fat in our foods -- even though our homemade things won’t have the same extreme problems there packaged food often does, we still eat some of those and only sometimes get the low-fat or low-sodium version of things.
Later in the video, Sadie and Safiyah showed statistics about how obesity rates in America have steadily increased in America since the 1970s. This shows how all four food environments have changed since then -- individual taste preferences change when they realized everything seemed better fried or with high fructose corn syrup, social environments changed as everyone started getting into fast food and it became a quick and easy way to feed the family, policy environments changed as fast food was served as school lunch and fast food corporations gained the ear of the government, and even physical environments changed as fast food places spread and suddenly there was one just down the street… for everyone.
