Category Archives: politics

Max? Whose Side Are You On, Anyway?

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I haven’t written about politics in a while, but this health reform debate is making me froth at the mouth. I’ve called Baucus’s office so many times that I think I’m on the “crazy lady” list.

First off, the idea that we’re going to have a public mandate with no public option is insane. Why on earth should we give huge subsidies of public money to the insurance companies who have done nothing but openly rip us all off for decades? A public mandate with no public option to keep them in check is simple collusion. Thanks Max. I guess we know now why they gave you all that money.

Second, this is Montana. I don’t know anyone (including myself at this point) who has insurance through a job. Wait, my friend Jennifer is a public schoolteacher. She gets insurance. Other than that everyone else I know is self-employed: writers, artists, carpenters, fishing guides, small business owners, ranchers. None of us can get anything other than the crappiest, high-deductible, won’t-cover-you-if-you-do-get-sick insurance. One writer friend of mine bankrupted himself last year paying for his girlfriend’s care as she died of cancer. She had insurance, but that 80/20 deductible, well there wasn’t any cap on the 20%. I’ve got power of attorney for my mother, who has nothing, who lives on social security, and who is still getting hounded by a hospital for a 10 year old surgical emergency (that coincided with her boss dropping insurance for the employees of his small company). Baucus clearly doesn’t give a rats ass about his actual constituents, but why should he when all of his campaign money comes from insurance companies and big Pharma?

I’ve never been one of those people who dismiss politicians by saying “they’re all bought and paid for …” but I have to say, Baucus’s behavior on this matter has nearly pushed me to that edge. I’ve called and called and called and all I ever get is a mealy-mouthed form letter. He was in the state for almost six weeks this summer and refused to meet with his constituents. He’s totally sold us out.

I hate to say it, but if the Republicans run anyone even remotely reasonable against Max next time, I might have to cast my first Republican vote ever.

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Tomatoes and Slavery

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Way back in my youth I worked in New York for a company that repackaged magazine material into cookbooks — our biggest client was Gourmet Magazine. So I’ve watched with great interest as Ruth Reichel has taken that hoary old magazine, run by women from the suburbs who at least in the late ’80 were still known to come to work in plaid skirts and knee socks (knee socks! I remember my shock that grown women would go out dressed like old girls — oh, and in blouses with those big floppy bows that women wore in the ’80s in lieu of men’s ties. Sigh), at any rate, I’ve been thrilled to see the magazine move into the modern world.

The past year or two they’ve even started added a regular feature on food politics. This month’s article is particularly worth reading: Politics of the Plate: Florida’s Slave Trade, Tomatoes, Migrant Workers: Food Politics : gourmet.com.

The article is truly appalling — but having grown up around migrant workers in the landscape and horse business, I know how easy it is for such a vulnerable population to be taken advantage of — go take a look. It’s a really interesting article.

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School Lunch, Opportunity for Change?

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There’s a vigorous and healthy debate going on in the blogosphere about school lunch. Congress is gearing up to revise the Child Nutrition and WIC act, which includes the school lunch program, and the forces of Hope and Change have ideas. (Click through to the actual essays linked, my summaries necessarily oversimplify.)

Alice Waters started the debate on the NY Times Op-Ed page, advocating that we double the lunch subsidy from $2.17 to $5.00. She also, no surprise, wants a program that works with farmers to get organic local produce into schools, and advocates rebuilding school kitchens.

This suggestion, particularly the price tag, has set off something of a storm. There’s a new-ish blog called the Internet Food Association, which seems to be a bunch of policy wonks who are also interested in food, and who are cross-pollinating the argument by bringing economics and policy experience into the debate. Tom Lee takes on Alice’s argument, and in particular, her price point, here in a piece entitled The Pretentious is the Enemy of the Good. Ezra Klein, writing on the same blog, has a slightly different take, one that I think includes my favorite quote:

Cooking is more useful than dodgeball proficiency — particularly as you get older. But schools have dodgeball courts. I cook more often than I play the clarinet. But my school had a music room. We have to decide whether it’s worth the expenditure, but integrating kitchens into schools is not crazy on its face.

Tom Philpott, over at Grist, does a good summation of the argument. He’s curious, as am I, about why the mere suggestion that we spend five bucks on lunch for kids gets people so riled up. And it’s Philpott who keeps floating my favorite suggestion — a program for endebted cooking school grads based on Teach for America — trade the enthusiasm and skill of newly trained chefs for some debt relief and the opportunity to demonstrate that they can run a good kitchen on a budget.

What’s my take? I live in a small town. We have two elementary schools (one that shares a building with the middle school) and a high school. We have a population of people who could easily work in school lunchrooms, competantly making lunch every day. We still have a pretty low unemployment rate, but a lot of people are in extremely low-wage jobs and would be happy to trade up for a nice safe school district job, especially if we could find a way to provide insurance. I also live in an area where there is an easy supply of local meat (including game in the fall) and where agricultural education is already part of the curriculum. It would not be a big stretch to get kids throughout our entire district involved in the production end of the food system, many of them already are (or have extended family who are ranchers).

If we had real kitchens in schools again, and gardens, and some vibrant connection to the ranching community in which we live, we could build a curriculum around food that would teach all sorts of useful skills. Cooking for one, which as anyone who has read this blog for more than five minutes realizes is a big cause for me. Cooking with kids is a proven way to get them to expand their food preferences, and you learn a lot of school skills when you cook. Math and measurement and ratios and temperatures –what is cooking but one big science experiment? Get kids in the kitchen, let them help figure out budgets and decide what to cook for their schoolmates. Have them write recipes and menus and “advertise” their lunch day in the school paper. Get high school kids in the kitchen as interns — we’re not a district where it’s assumed everyone is going to college — give a kid a chance to learn a useful skill.

I don’t know, I don’t see any downside except that this means being more involved. I cannot see any upside to feeding our kids the crap we’re currently feeding them. And frankly, if we’re going to stimulate some areas of the economy, why not stimulate farmers and cooks and teachers and people who want to be passionately involved rather than stimulating the big food processors and delivery companies who think that battered chicken shards formed in patties are an actual food product?

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Yes We Did!

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Yes We Did! We are flying the flag today for Barack Obama, for the restoration of the Constitution of the United States of America, for the revival of the American Dream.

I hate crowds, but there’s part of me that now wishes I’d somehow managed to go to DC. What a day. What a miraculous day. I have a staff meeting that starts just when he’s supposed to take the oath and I think that I’m just going to have to call in late. I can watch the speech on TiVo, but I need to see, in real time, that this actually happens. That it’s real.

I really have no words to express how proud I am of America. How thrilled I am that the long long shadow of the Reagan revolution, a shadow that has fallen over my entire adult life, might now be lifted. That selfishness disguised as individualism might no longer be the norm, that working for the collective good, that working to raise those who among us who are least able to help themselves might once more be seen as a civic duty, that millions and millions of little children will see that yes, we can.

The waterworks are starting already. It’s going to be a very emotional day.

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Cook for America?

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Over at Grist, Tom Philpott has a fascinating proposal for how to use the stimulus money to stimulate the local food movement. Among his proposals:

  • reinvest in local food infrastructures: slaughterhouses, meat lockers, and school kitchens
  • cook real food in schools again — he proposes a Cook for America program for culinary school grads mired in debt. Based on the Teach for America program, it would get real food, cooked on site, back into our schools.

The comments are also worth reading because Grist’s readers have some terrific ideas. I know that I would not be able to eat as much local meat as I do in most other parts of the country where there are no local slaughterhouses. My friend Hope, who has a ranch on the western slope of Colorado, has hesitated to raise her own beef in part because she’s have to ship it nearly to Kansas for slaughter, and what’s the point of raising your own if it still has to go to a feedlot? We have two local slaughterhouses nearby, and one of Jon Tester’s biggest contributions to the far-from-ideal Farm Bill was to legalize the sale of meat across state lines that has been slaughtered in non-USDA licensed abbatoirs that have passed state inspections. This is a really big deal since the USDA slaughterhouse rules were designed by agribusiness precisely to be too expensive for small abbatoirs and to drive them out of business. I think it was probably the processing of game that saved our local slaughterhouses, since it brings in a lot of business every fall but since game can’t be sold, doesn’t require USDA licensing.

And lunch ladies! Bring back the lunch ladies. My mother is not a morning person, and since she’d gone k-12 to a private school in Chicago, the idea of packing lunches for us was entirely foreign to her experience. She’d buy a year’s worth of hot lunches for each of us at the beginning of the school year. So I know from hot lunch, and while the food was never fabulous when I was little — at least it was real food, not just reheated chicken nuggets. We need jobs, right? And culinary school grads need experience cooking decent food under a real budget — during that phase of my 20s and 30s when I dated chefs, it was managing budgets that really separated the successful ones from the mere cooks. So let’s get some creative young cooks into school kitchens — give them tight budgets and picky kids and let’s see what they can do. How about a Realty show while we’re at it? (And while we’re really dreaming — can we team them up with Alice Water’s Edible Schoolyard project? Gardens and real food — you can teach a lot of stuff through cooking — reading recipes, calculating fractions, following directions, cooperation, manners — can you tell I come from a progressive/experiential ed background?)

So go read Tom’s terrific article, and contribute your ideas to the comments section. And while you’re at it, bookmark or subscribe to Grist’s RSS feed — you won’t regret it.

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