Digging up the Dirt with Gracy Olmstead

Reckoning with the hidden costs of how we eat

In part one of my dialogue with Gracy Olmstead, we talked about this month’s reading (Michael Pollan’s essay “The Sickness in our Food Supply”) and how our own household’s habits around food had changed in the pandemic. This week, we move to more systemic topics.

Leah: At the close of last week’s conversation, we were talking about the need to sometimes lower our standard of living, when what’s cheap for us (meat, rideshares) is only inexpensive because a worker is being shortchanged and squeezed. You talked about two challenges, first: “helping more Americans see their lives as obligated and indebted to a whole web of life that extends beyond themselves,” and second: “empowering people—no matter their income or lifestyle—to become better stewards of that web of life.”

Let’s talk a little about that second challenge. I’m especially interested in that shift from sacrifice to stewardship. Sacrifice is easier to wind up resenting or feeling lonely about. As Christians, we’re called to make our sacrifices an act of unity with Christ, but it’s challenging! Thinking in terms of stewardship makes it easier for me to think of my choices as an act of care and as going beyond my self.

Where can people start?

Gracy: I think the second challenge requires a highly multifaceted approach, given the challenges of acquiring food in America today. Many people get frustrated (myself included) when the burden of this sacrifice seems to fall so disproportionately on poorer Americans, many of whom might live in food deserts or be reliant on the supplemental nutritional assistance program (SNAP). It is easy for an upper-middle-class family to purchase organic produce or grass-fed beef from the grocery store; it is a daunting prospect for poor, working-class families. 

But I think there are some secrets here—hidden, whether purposefully or no, by the way our food system generally works—worth emphasizing and considering. First, meat was never meant to be the focus of our plates or diets. It’s expensive for a reason. And throughout human history, people have treated it more as a supplemental luxury than as a main course. Plant-based proteins like beans and lentils are far cheaper (especially when you get them dried and cook them yourself), and provide the ample benefits of protein without the hefty price tag. Plus, they’re good for you and delicious. We could help many Americans cut their grocery bills in half, eat healthier, and increase ecological stewardship simply by re-emphasizing the benefits of plant-based proteins. 

Helping more Americans understand the benefits of buying meat in bulk (purchasing a half-cow or quarter-cow, for instance) is another way we could help make food stewardship more cost-efficient. The difficulty here, of course, is that you have to have the right infrastructure (and live in the right place) to make such a choice possible. I do know some urban families without access to a chest freezer who have bought a quarter-cow together, and split the meat. So there are still options. But it requires work and collaboration.  

With organic produce, the costs can be equally prohibitive—but I’ve been grateful to learn about the “dirty dozen” and “clean fifteen” in determining when it’s most beneficial to buy organic, and when I can let those standards slide slightly (if necessary) in order to avoid high costs. It’s expensive to buy food that’s good for you. That’s partly because it costs more to raise or grow good food, and partly because of how we’ve allocated resources and subsidies in our food system. There are ways we could (and should) lower those costs—but at times, I think it’s beneficial and important to be savvy, and to know when you as a consumer can get away with the cheaper version. The best options—having a share in a local farm, say, shopping at the farmer’s market, or growing your own produce—are not possible for everyone. So how do we lower barriers of entry to help people feel like they are still doing their part, being responsible insofar as they can, and making choices that are healthy and wise for their families?

All that said, cheapness matters a lot to Americans—and often people who could afford to spend more on food still opt for the cheapest offerings. We spend less on food than any other country in the world. Most European countries devote more than twice the amount of their budget to food spending that we do. So when it comes to Americans who don’t have to worry as much about pinching pennies, there’s work to be done convincing them that they ought to spend more on food than they do. The aforementioned inspiring narrative / repairing of dismemberment can help with this. But I also think we could probably do more to help people see the long-term personal costs that come from putting cheapness first.

The hidden cost of our meat consumption does not just appear in distant human and animal suffering. Cattle are meant to be ruminants (grass-eating animals). But those fed grain and fattened at a CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation) are often given synthetic growth hormones to help them gain weight faster, as well as antibiotics “to preempt the diseases that come with standing and sleeping in their own manure 24/7,” as Stephanie Anderson puts it in her book One Size Fits None. Many scientists worry about the residual impact such hormones and antibiotics (as well as the pesticide residue on the grain cattle eat) might have on our own immune systems. The meat that we receive from a grain-fed, CAFO-housed animal, meanwhile, is “dull” and “fatty,” as Anderson puts it, and lacks the flavor, complexity, and nutrition of its grassfed counterpart. 

As Pollan notes in his essay, meanwhile, many of the health struggles that made many Americans especially susceptible to Covid-19—such as diabetes or hypertension—are related to our diets. The cheapest foods at the grocery store are often full of highly processed ingredients like corn syrup, soybean oil, and sugar. There’s some research to suggest that conventional produce, regardless of its brightness or bigness, lacks nutritional complexity (because of the poor health of the soil it’s grown in). All this means that the “cheapness” of our food catches up with us down the road. We pay the bill in our health, and the health of our families—as well as in the impact on far-off soil, plants, animals, and farm workers’ wellbeing. And while I wish we were solely inspired by the urgency of the latter, the self-interested nature of human beings suggests that it helps a lot to emphasize the former. Berry would suggest, however, that there’s a reason the two are connected: systems that are bad for the earth and those who work it, as well as the plants and animals that depend on it, are going to be bad for us as consumers, too. Because we are members of each other, responsible to and for each other.

A recent, tasty meal to clear out our farmshare backlog.

Leah: One thing that’s made a big difference for me is feeling more comfortable in the kitchen—going beyond just executing recipes to feeling comfortable making things up and being playful. It makes me more willing to try new foods and ready to get more use out of familiar and simpler ones.

Samrin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat was so helpful to me as someone who learned to cook only from recipes, and then often wound up throwing out the odd leftover ingredient because I had no idea what to do with it on it’s own. That and Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal gave me the tools (and the courage!) to improvise in the kitchen, which really decreases our food waste. 

I also found French Kids Eat Everything to be a really helpful book, partially because we’re introducing our daughter to solids through baby-led weaning, but also because of its emphasis on being curious about food. I was a picky eater (and remain somewhat of one, particularly about textures), and I want to avoid that for Beatrice. 

The book suggests that you avoid asking your children whether or not they like a food, and instead encourage them to describe what it’s like to eat it. What is its texture? What color is the flavor? How does it change as the taste lingers? etc. 

Alexi and I are practicing this skill now, even though Beatrice is still preverbal, and setting ourselves little puzzles: how would I translate this pasta dish to be a pizza? If I were adding one more ingredient to this soup, what would it be?

Are there any ways you’d suggest people stretch themselves beyond their habits (and sometimes ruts) in the kitchen or the grocery store?

An appreciative eater of the above meal!

Gracy: Signing up for a CSA and shopping at the farmer’s market have both helped me a lot, because they introduced me more fully to the world of seasonal eating. Prior to that point, there were many things I assumed I already knew about eating healthy or even seasonally—but I had rarely cooked with parsnips, rutabaga, or romanesco. I assumed strawberries were ripe in spring, but at least out here in Virginia, they generally hit their peak in June. The USDA’s SNAP-Ed page has a seasonal produce guide page worth checking out—even if you are shopping primarily at a grocery store, I think following some of these parameters can help you buy produce at peak freshness, identify goods that are cheaper (because they’re in-season), and widen your culinary horizons. (I also personally think strawberries and peaches just taste better when we treat them as special, and feast on them in the season in which they’re meant to be eaten.)

Similarly, buying a quarter-cow or working more often with whole chickens has forced me to learn about cuts that are often a bit more challenging to cook with (but often cheaper, and highly nutritious). Most other cultures and countries have a pretty robust knowledge set around this subject, and are far more comfortable and knowledgeable with parts of an animal that—at this point—are entirely foreign to Americans. (How many of us have tasted “head cheese”?) We often don’t know how to cook anything besides ground beef and chicken breast. That’s not just sad because it’s wasteful—it’s sad, in my mind, because there’s a whole wealth of flavors and textures out there that most of us have never experienced! 

Huckle and Goose is a seasonal meal planning app (and now cookbook!) that really helped me learn to cook with more seasonal veggies. They have a recipe for a rutabaga stir fry, for instance, that blew my mind: after sautéing thin rutabaga slices over low heat for a long period of time, they taste like soft, chewy rice noodles. The Huckle and Goose app and cookbook have a wide range of gluten-free and vegetarian recipes to try out (the authors are also very concerned about encouraging plant-based eating, and about making local, fresh food more affordable). 

With my girls, I’ve found that nothing quite excites a child’s taste buds like a fresh garden sitting right outside your door. Growing up, I remember my brothers both hating tomatoes until we began growing them fresh. Pretty soon, they were eating them like apples. The same is delightfully applicable to my four and two-year-old: I catch them out in the garden chewing on mint and swiss chard leaves, pulling radishes and carrots out of the ground, and eating cherry tomatoes to their hearts’ content. The four-year-old helps me plant seeds and water them in February, and she is quickly learning how to tell when things are ripe (her two-year-old sister hasn’t quite figured that out yet). My hope is that the garden teaches them gratitude and wonder, as they observe the miracle of growing things—and that it excites their culinary passions and creativity as they get older.

Leah: There’s nothing like eating a cherry tomato while it’s still warm from the sun! They rarely made it into dishes growing up, because we just ate them off the backyard vines the moment we spotted them. We’re not growing very much in the backyard as renters, but I think even one plant helps you understand (or at least get interested in understanding) all the work that goes into bringing everything else to your plate. The more holes we can tear in that veil that hides the human hands responsible for our food, the better prepared we are to act (and eat) well.

Next week, I’ll send out a roundup with highlights from your comments throughout the month. And don’t forget that you can pre-order Gracy’s first book, Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We've Left Behind, and that pre-ordering is a big help to authors because it encourages their publishers to put more money into promoting it.