What would you consider to be a vegetable?

What would you consider to be a vegetable?

Some people use it as a word to describe people who are lazy, or worse, someone who is kept alive on a respirator and feeding tube. The dictionary defines it as a “plant or part of a plant used as food.” Most commonly, though, it is used to refer to the latter.

Like carrots.

Broccoli.

Brussels Sprouts.

Potatoes.

Lettuce.

Tomato Sauce.

Yes, tomato sauce. Much to my own personal dismay Congress has passed a bill that legally classifies tomato sauce as a vegetable so that it can be counted towards the percentage of federally funded school lunches required to be composed of vegetables.  This provision is part of a larger bill that would:

1. Block the Department of Agriculture from limiting starchy vegetables, including potatoes, corn and peas, to two servings per week. The two-serving limit was first proposed to cut down on french fries.
2. Maintain two tablespoons of tomato paste as the limit necessary to categorize it as a vegetable. The USDA had previously tried to require a half-cup of tomato paste to be counted as a vegetable, which was argued to be too large of an amount to make a pizza. Federally subsidized lunches must include a certain number of vegetables to be served.
3. Require more studies on the long-term sodium requirements set forth by the USDA guidelines.
4. Require the USDA to define "whole grains" before regulating them.

When this story showed up on my Twitter feed (Yes, I do get a large amount of my food news from my Twitter feed… don’t judge. It’s the information age.) my first reaction was somewhat similar to David’s, coming back from the dentist combined with a segment of “Really?” on Weekend Update with Seth Meyers.

Is this real life? Is this what we have come to that we are considering pizza sauce a vegetable? Really? Really Congress? We want to teach our children that eating processed pizza for dinner is the same as eating Brussels sprouts? Really? That’s like saying that broccoli-cheddar soup with a side of nacho cheese in a bread bowl is a vegetable. Really? Didn’t you ever hear that tomatoes aren’t even technically classified as a vegetable? It has seeds inside, which makes it a fruit!

Republicans on the House Appropriation Committee said the changes would "prevent overly burdensome and costly regulations and to provide greater flexibility for local school districts to improve the nutritional quality of meals." However I fail to see how pizza and spaghetti improve the nutritional quality of meals. Tomato paste is made of tomatoes, but in order to become the consistency of paste, they have to cook for hours, which then eliminates the vitamins and minerals that are a part of the untouched tomato. This bill further creates an incentive to cheapen the quality of school lunches, so that school districts can increase the profitability of their food service programs, thereby compromising the nutritional value of the meals they serve and the health of their students.

This is the first step down a dangerous road. Next thing you know, the Ag Industry will be lobbying for Congress to consider French fries a vegetable. Hey they’re made from potatoes… so why not?

Op-Ed: Occupy Wall Street and the Consequences of Instant Gratification

October 17, 2011 marked the one-month mark of the Occupy Wall Street Movement’s initial march on Manhattan.  OWS has dedicated itself to “fighting back against the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process…and aims to expose how the richest 1% of people are writing the rules of an unfair global economy that is foreclosing on our future.”  They seek to cure the ill that is the selfishness and greed in our financial system, wage war against those who prioritize their financial bottom line over the health of the economy.

Selfishness and greed: aren’t all of us guilty of those two vices to some extent? That is not to justify the corruption on Wall Street, however I would argue that the contemporary Wall Street robber baron represents an extreme consequence of a phenomenon that has come to characterize American culture.  By and large we are incapable of delaying gratification, the precursor to a selfishness that has affected every cross-section of society, but particularly corporate America.  OWS is using the top 1% as an entity to blame for a problem that is really far more widespread, and has helped to shape the business practices they condemn.

The “GIMME NOW” mindset Americans have adopted as a collective group over the past thirty years can be attributed to the increasingly rapid pace that dictates the way we live our lives. Technology enables us to do practically anything with the press of a button, which sets an unrealistic standard for the pace of life, which we then attempt to live up to. This attitude breeds impatience, selfishness, and has resulted in a disconnect between the individuals that make up our society. It has permeated every level of culture, and has facilitated the creation of a lifestyle valuing instantaneity with regard to the fulfillment of ones needs. We are so caught up in ourselves, our problems, our successes, that selfishness has become part of our cultural identity—and we are infamous for it the world over.

Wall Street’s elite possess the desire for need fulfillment to an acute degree, to the point where they will prioritize their own interests over those of the collective whole. It becomes a way of life. They become numb to the questionable morality of the decisions they make.  If it turns a profit, who cares?

Unfortunately this poisonous attitude pervades other corporate structures. Anyone remember the collapse of Enron in 2002? Executives turned a blind eye to lying about profits, concealing debts, and shady business dealings, which resulted in 21,000 people losing their jobs and livelihoods.  Enron is an extreme example but corruption in the name of profit runs rampant and often unregulated within Fortune 500 companies—a title Enron could claim back in its heyday.

A prime example of this prioritization of profit over people is the Agriculture Industry. Though no cooking of the books has occurred to public knowledge, there have been rising numbers of food recalls due to production procedures that aim at making a profit rather than keeping the food they produce safe for human consumption. 2006 saw the death of five Americans, all of who succumbed to a virulent strain of E. coli after eating bagged spinach. More recently, in the past month there have been four recalls of meat products due to E. coli contamination.

As consumers, however, we expect to walk into the grocery store and be able to walk out with a bag of apples in the middle of December.  Our uniquely contemporary demands for low cost food and out of season produce feeds the profit seeking priorities of the Food Industry—to cut costs and make production as quick as possible, often at the sacrifice of ethical business practices and consumer safety. 

Ethics: It would seem a disappearance of ethical practices and morality that came about as a result of corporate selfishness on Wall Street have caused the Occupy Wall Street movement to mobilize in the first place.  Although OWS has declared a figurative war on the top 1%, their rhetoric appears to support also the disentanglement of corporation and state, which I believe to be a more pertinent issue than vilifying investment bankers.  But at the root of both the top 1% and the marriage of corporation and state lies the inability of Americans to delay gratification, a bone of contention that shaped the business practices that have led us to this point in history.  Until that concern is addressed, the change that the Occupiers seek will continue to elude them.

The Lie that is the Dollar Menu

Last week, Elizabeth over at ThinkNG, WritNG, BloggNG wrote a very compelling post (which I highly recommend!) about the amount of households in America who are “food insecure,” and posed a few hard-hitting questions including:

What is to be done with the fact that income level is the biggest indicator of obesity? And why is it that fresh food is so much more expensive than processed or fast foods?

Well, long story short: it’s all about the money, honey.  And that money comes in a couple different forms:

1. Profits for the food industry.

2. Government subsidies of wheat, corn and soy.

It seems like a simple answer, but those two forms of money encapsulate one of the biggest problems America is facing today, and each of them in their implementation have a list of consequences you wouldn’t believe.

Profits for the food industry

Ever since the trust busting days of Teddy Roosevelt, there has been a negative connotation assigned to corporate conglomerates, which were only in the game to make a buck, and would do so at any cost.  Unfortunately, that mentality has never really been eradicated from corporate America, especially in the food industry.  In the past fifty years there has been a growing trend in corporate agriculture: Grow it faster, make it fatter, bigger and have the whole process be as cheap as possible (sounds like they have been listening to a little too much Kanye West, no?).

For example, the largest slaughterhouse in the country, located in Tar Heel, North Carolina slaughters 2,000 hogs PER HOUR, and is staffed by illegal immigrants who are encouraged to cross the border by thecompany who hires them, paid and treated badly, and then in many cases picked up by immigration police and deported after a few years. The hogs they slaughter matured on Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), and are raised using the cheapest methods possible.  Companies like this prize efficiency over quality, because quality is expensive to produce.

The HOW—high tech methods of production and solutions to theglitches in the system—has eclipsed the WHY. WHY do we need meat fillers treated with ammonia? To kill the bacteria that ends up in the meat. Why are there bacteria in our meat? The animals raised in CAFOs stand knee deep in their own feces for the entirety of their short lives. Why are there feces in our meat? Because the carcasses are processed so quickly there is no way to ensure that they are clean. This line of questioning could continue on forever. But the fact of the matter is that instead of getting to the bottom of the issue at hand, the food industry will almost always create a high tech band-aid to slap over the offending glitch in the system. The result then is food that is higher in fat than its grass-fed or organically raised counterparts--and potentially more dangerous. Then that product is sold to every fast food restaurant and grocery store in America, and consumed by those who are either ignorant or do not have the money to buy organic.

Government Subsidy

The cheap food this country has accepted as reality is in fact a lie. The entirety of our agricultural production is based primarily offof three crops: wheat, soy, and corn.  Believe it or not, these three crops comprise the ingredients of the majority of the calories in the middle aisles of your local supermarket—snack foods! In their Farm Bills (which should really be called Food Industry Bills), our government subsidizes the production of these three crops because of their ability to be altered from their natural state and used as practically anyingredient type--sugar, fat, wheat... you name it. Most of the sugar in processed food comes from corn, as well as preservatives.  On the other hand most of the fat in these same foods comes from soybean oil that is molecularly altered so that it is solid at room temperature. Crisco anyone?

The government pays farmers to over produce these commodity crops because they can be stored and processed in to so many food-like substances. The results of this system are a mystique of cheap food and the sad truth that the cheapest calories make you the fattest.

Elizabeth is right, it is shocking that you can buy 1,000 calories of chips or cookies with a dollar, but only 250 calories of carrots… not to mention an indicator of the priorities of the food industry and their impact on America’s health, especially those that only have that one dollar to spend on dinner.