Disclaimer: Sorry for a lack of updates! I’ve only written a couple pieces for my final journalism course and one of the them will be pitched to publications over the next month or two. Thus, I can’t give you sneak peak. But here’s a piece I wrote recently. Enjoy! Welcome back to the Balcony!
“Some children don’t even know where a tomato comes from. And no, from a grocery store is not an answer,” said Alicia Kim, a student at New York University.
New York City policymakers say that “food deserts” plague our city. Organizations like City Harvest, Just Food and Slow Food International are shouting from the rooftops hoping to inspire change.
But we are a chic cosmopolitan “foodie” city too; a Mecca for innovation in couture food where chefs come to flex their muscles and push the boundaries of fine dining.
We have two different New Yorks emerging. Sometimes it feels like the two versions of New York have grown up in parallel trajectories.
We forget that they both exist in the same city.
“Some of the smartest people in the world are attracted to NYC for all that it has to offer, which conflates the growth of fine dining. On the other hand, the NYC Department of Education is responsible for the largest district in America- over 1 million children,” said Mitch Bloom, a Masters candidate studying food related social change at NYU.
In our city, children are the largest group affected by this food dilemma with one in five New York City children using emergency food services. Among NYC households with school-age children accessing emergency food, an estimated 79% participate in the National School Lunch Program, according to the New York City Food Bank.
The classroom is one place policymakers are looking to make change.
Last year, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer released “FoodNYC: A Blueprint for a Sustainable Food System,” a report stressing an overhaul of the city’s food system and institutional reform of how New York City approaches food policy.
“By devoting serious attention to our food system, city government can in one stroke improve public health, sustainability, and job creation,” said Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer in a 2010 press release.
Stringer emphasized implementing changes such as prioritizing products from New York State, increasing access to healthy food in underserved neighborhoods, and investing in ways to expand the New York City food economy.
On the other side of the food paradigm, you have the chic snobbery of the New York restaurant scene where unapologetic chefs reign supreme.
One chef that comes to mind is David Chang who owns five restaurants in New York City. One of his restaurants features a $100 Korean and South fried chicken pairing that you have to order a day in advance.
“We do not serve vegetarian-friendly items,” the notably mouthy Chang told BigThink.com. “Vegetarians are a pain in the ass as customers.”
But vegetarians and picky eaters are the only ones on Change’s chopping block. Both Chang and his on-again-off-again friend (read: sometimes foe) Anthony Bourdain both have a quite vocal disdain for chefs like Alice Waters, an advocate for sustainable and locally grown food.
Waters is now the Vice President of Slow Food International, a nonprofit organization that funds projects that hope to counter the fast food phenomenon.
“While both men applauded ‘her message’ and Chez Panisse’s game-changing cuisine, Bourdain likened her to a hippie who doesn’t grasp that the poor can’t afford organic milk,” wrote a Grub Street recap of a panel the brash chef pair sat on at the 2009 Food & Wine festival in New York.
Along the same lines, Chang recently said in a recent interview with BigThink.com, “Sustainability gets overrated. I think it is an overrated term. That’s how you should eat anyways.”
Poking fun aside, Chang shares many core values as Waters when it comes to supporting locally grown foods and most importantly, the farmers who produce them.
In the same interview, Chang talked about trying to start a nonprofit under the Momofuku banner, working with local pig farmers to find ways to use parts of the pigs that they would normally discard. Chang hopes that it would help support local farmers.
“We want to find a way to make that work. So they can just work the land,” said Chang.
He also mentioned how much he would love for an “edible school yard” somewhere in New York City, an idea that came out of Berkeley, California where an organic garden and a kitchen classroom was created for an urban public school. Chang believes that if we can show people where their food comes from, they can have a better understand of what they eat.
“It is impossible to change the habits of adults but if you can get a start early with the kids, you can make a big impact,” said Chang.
However, not everyone believes in the locally grown movement that has been so hyped up in the New York “foodie” scene.
In a recent Foreign Policy magazine survey, Sallie James, a policy analyst, named the “localvore” and “slow food” movement as the “stupidest present food fad” calling it “snobbish, condescending, indulgent, misguided and thoroughly unrealistic.”
But the believers have put a lot of stock in it.
The Green Cart Initiative, which was signed into law by Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2008, is supported by a $1.5 Million grant to fund micro-grants to get fresh produce out to these “food deserts,” which are areas of the city lacking access grocery stores and fresh food.
The Museum of the City of New York currently has an exhibit celebrating the history of the green cart and NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene program.
However, the celebratory spirit of the exhibition seems a bit premature in a time where the impact of the policy has yet to be measured.
This summer, a study at NYU will be conducted to see if the initiative has made an impact on communities deemed as “food deserts.”
What New York City needs is for our celebrity chefs, politicians and policymakers to start pooling resources and putting words into actions.
“Policymakers can bring change to NY by supporting a better school lunch system and sourcing it from local NY/NJ farmers. They need to have better partnerships with not-for-profits and corporations,” said Kim, who studies social entrepreneurship at NYU.
“I think we need to rethink our food culture.”
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