Food System Dilemmas

In January 2017 when I began culinary school at Brightwater: A Center for the Study of Food, I did not know the experience that was awaiting me. NorthWest Arkansas Community College already had a culinary program, but in January 2017 a rebranded and restructured program started in a newly refurbished Tyson Chicken plant largely funded through a grant by the Walton Family Foundation. My class was the guinea pigs for the new facility and a few new faculty. For months we walked through unfinished parts of the building to get to

The dark hallway behind the bakeshop would later lead to shops and restaurants. It was also a popular place for people to watch students cooking as if we were on display.

our kitchen classrooms in the center of what would be a future food hub. The school was built within a larger building surrounded by third-party food-related businesses including restaurants, shops, and a brewery. On the first day of my Intro to Baking class and Foundations culinary class, we were taking inventory of our equipment, which included taking bowls, pans, and utensils out of plastic and taking off the barcode stickers. (Surprisingly, we started without the right equipment in some kitchens and had to make lists of needed supplies. One would think rubber spatulas and solid measuring cups would have been first on the order list.) During my time at Brightwater, the program and staff went through some growing pains. Running out of supplies in the storeroom was not a good idea for the storeroom manager; they went through a few to find a good fit. Despite a few ups and downs, my time at Brightwater helped make me into the skilled baker I am. I also became better educated about food in general, and I am still using and passing on that knowledge.

At Brightwater, all culinary students are required to take a Food Systems course. I enrolled in the course during my last semester before graduation - spring of 2018. While I’d heard some of my culinary friends complain and talk about being bored, I decided to remain optimistic and knew I’d make up my own mind. Food Systems was not a hands-on course. There was no lab time; it was strictly a lecture. At the time the course was taught by a current culinary school student who was also a practicing food law attorney. While she brought experience from the policy and advocacy side, her husband was a guest lecturer at least once who brought experience from the marketing side. This one required course changed my direction after culinary school and still influences my job decisions and life habits today.

While the course was “sit and get” (teacher lingo for less hands-on), I found the content extremely interesting and applicable. I took the class at the same time I took Culinary Nutrition, and I’d often spend time talking with both instructors after class continuing to ask questions and share ideas. Culinary school was a second degree, and one I was paying for on my own. I wanted to make sure I was getting all I could out of my time and taking advantage of the expertise of my instructors. In the course, we learned that a food system comprises all the activities and resources that go into producing, distributing, and consuming food from the seed to the landfill. This includes agricultural land use, environmental concerns (water use, soil, energy, air, and pollution prevention), the economy (distribution, processing, and retail), and education and policy, each of which has its issues and concerns we discussed in greater detail. A specific area of discussion that I found interesting was externalities. These are costs external to the feedback loop or system being considered that aren’t part of the price tag. For example, the externalities of drinking soda could include diabetes and other health issues. Externalities from eating an apple or tomato involve land, labor, and equipment costs; illegal immigration ramifications (“farm worker” isn’t a top job field for most Americans); pesticide impacts to bees and people; and air pollution and water impact resulting from the use of pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides. We watched several documentaries including King Corn, a documentary co-written and produced by Curt Ellis, one of the founders of FoodCorps which I later served for two years. We watched The fields of Immokalee, a film about the tomato workers of FL many of whom are undocumented yet they willingly take on a job for little money in harsh conditions that those who do not want them here are unwilling to do themselves. We also watched the Oscar-nominated film Food, Inc. and read The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, both of which give eye-opening looks into where our mass-produced food comes from. I recommend all for viewing and reading.

While these works were made and written in the early 2000s, little has changed in the food world from that time, and the information is still current today. I have since driven with my parents past Dodge City, Kansas (multiple times, moving across the country), and the feedlot smell greets you from miles away. Even if the cows had a good first few years of their life in green pastures and ample space, they still finish their last few weeks packed close together, crowded in their waste and bulking up on grain. According to The Washington Post opinion article by Carole Morison, a previous chicken farmer for Perdue Farms, nothing much changed in terms of public health after Food, Inc. was released. Chicken farmers and towns dependent on the poultry industry are still unable to get a bill passed by legislators “owned” by the chicken industry. The Maryland Community Healthy Air Act was written to create an air-quality monitoring protocol. Six years later it has yet to move out of a referral to committee step, and children on Maryland’s eastern shore where there is industrial chicken production, continue to be diagnosed with asthma. Residents point to industrial chicken production which involves factory emissions of ammonia and other contaminants.

I had previous exposure to The Omnivore’s Dilemma when I attempted to teach 8th graders about argument writing as an English Language Arts teacher in South Carolina. The book was part of our Common Core State Standards assigned reading, but we only focused on excerpts from the first section. The main takeaway my students had was that everything is made out of corn. While The Omnivore’s Dilemma opened my eyes to industrialized food, pros and cons of organic, and pastoral foods, I heard Pollan’s catchphrase from his book In Defense of Food, which I have yet to read, later on. His advice is simple - “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” If you cannot pronounce the ingredients, it’s not food. If you’re over-indulging, it’s too much. And if you want your wallet to have a vote if animal rights and public health rights are a priority, plants are the safer option. Don’t get me (or him) wrong. Growing plants can still involve chemicals sprayed into the air or leaching into water (there are plenty of organic farms next to non-organic farms and the groundwater doesn’t stop seeping at a magic line nor does the wind stop blowing). Plants still involve labor issues and “unfair” price markups. People still can get complete proteins from meat vs needing complementary proteins from plants. But the bottom line comes down to awareness. If a consumer chooses to buy organic, does the person know why it is more expensive, what went into growing the organic produce, or what the label does not protect the consumer from? If people choose to eat at fast food restaurants, are they aware of what it took to produce that hamburger or what conditions the cows lived in? If so, and they do not care, great, that’s the consumer’s choice. Are consumers who push for strict immigration laws aware that there are 2.4 million farm workers across the U.S.? According to the Center for Migration Studies about 283,000 of those workers are undocumented. This is something a delegation from the United Farm Workers Foundation tried to amend by pushing for a year-end bill in December 2022 that would include legal status for farm workers. Unfortunately, the bill did not pass. Ximena Bustillo from NPR reported that “Rick Naerebout, CEO of the Idaho Dairymen's Association, which advocated for the legislation … [said,] ‘Our food security in this country is completely dependent on a workforce that is here without status. And we cannot survive without that, … [and] that for whatever reason, does not seem to create the impetus you would think it might in solving this problem.’”

I am all for people making their own decisions, especially when it comes to what they put in their bodies. But I think the key is for people to make informed decisions. Nutrition, even Family and Consumer Sciences, is not a required course in the state and district in which I teach. But I believe all people should know where their food comes from, and as a science teacher, I believe everyone needs to know what their body needs nutritionally. My knowledge from my food systems and nutrition courses, and my experience watching and talking with kids in lunchrooms across the country as a student and then an educator, fueled my decision to base my Discovery Science elective course around the food system. I am not

teaching 6th graders about Monsanto and Big Ag. I am not showing Food, Inc., but I am teaching students about who is involved in the food system. Food is not grown at the grocery store, and while students may know that, few have thought about where it is before then. Students learn about growing practices including large-scale farming, hydroponics, and aquaponics. They consider who is involved in getting food from the farm to the plate and how many food miles their lunch may travel before it gets to them. Students look at seeds and decide what to grow in the classroom (which may or may not be a successful experiment), and they consider challenges large-scale farmers face - pests, drought, and root rot. Then they look at food nutrition and empty calories. So if they decide to keep eating that liquid candy, they are at least aware they will still be tired later from a sugar crash. I tell my students that school is not just to teach them about book knowledge. They are learning to be adults. More adults should shop for their priorities, and to do that, they need to be informed as consumers.

I am not a vegetarian. I never have been and probably never will be. It was a fad when I was growing up to have a vegetarian phase, but I ate what my parents put in front of me. We weren’t a strictly “meat and potatoes” family. My mom is an economical and creative cook who made good use of other meat proteins than beef. We ate a lot of chicken with some fish, pork, and beef thrown in - lots of casseroles, soups, and salads, many component meals. My parents have varied tastes, and I was exposed to lots of different foods, but meat protein was almost always included. When I moved out on my own and started cooking more for myself I explored more meatless meals. In 2003 Meatless Mondays became a popular way to cut down on meat consumption as a way to improve personal and environmental health. I was raised to care about my health, and I learned to care about the health of the animals from which I may benefit. As great as that is, my reasoning for eating less meat includes not only health benefits but also the fact that meat is more expensive than plant proteins, and it’s sometimes more of a challenge to prepare. (I did cook a delicious steak this fall with a red wine sauce in my cast iron Dutch oven, but I set off my smoke alarm a few times in the process.) So while I don’t prescribe to “Meatless Mondays,” I do eat a mostly vegetarian diet, with the occasional meat protein meal, or meat as a supplemental ingredient vs. the main star.

Ken has several recipes in The Harvest Baker with meat as a supplement ingredient or not present at all. One such recipe is Meatless Tostada Pot Pies. These use veggies, black beans, and cheese in an open pie shell. Ken recommends his Good Basic Pie Dough as the base for small ramekins or pie plates. I happened to have a few small pie pans, but then I turned the rest into free-form crostata. Sour cream, avocado, and hot sauce topped this delicious one-dish Tex-Mex pie. It was a meatless meal I will be repeating. And if you’re not ready to give up your meat, I’m sure ground beef would also be great in the pie. Do what’s best for you, but I encourage you to be an informed consumer, aware of the choices you make with your wallet.

Meatless Tostadas