Food Co Ops and Our Health
I just left a presentation at my local co-op called Grocery Democracy and boy do I have lots of thoughts on this.
The presentation was put on by Jon Steinman, author of Grocery Story: The Promise of Food Co-ops in the Age of Grocery Giants. He talked about how co-ops are an opportunity for the people to exercise democracy. He spoke about how these mainstream grocery stores like Target, Kroger, Cub Foods, etc. are not regulated. Their main goal is profit and that comes at the expense of peoples’ health. He talked about the evolution of co-ops in North America, starting in the 30’s and 40’s. The chaotic nature of the early co-ops were fundamental to their image. They were run by self-proclaimed members of the counter-culture movement that felt that if they were too structured it would morph back into the big chain stores they were trying to disrupt. After decades of unstructured leadership they realized that to not only survive but to compete, they had to instate a democratic system of board members who were elected by the owners.
He talked about how co-ops can be born out of necessity due to food deserts, a barrier that prevents a community from having access to whole and healthy foods. Healthy being the operative word, a main pillar in co-ops values being the well-being of its members. He shared a picture of a co-op that was created in a small rural community, whose members chose to purchase foods like Mountain Dew and Oreos.
Here lies the conundrum - the foundation of a co-op gives its owners the right to choose what they want on their shelves. What do you do when those people use their purchasing power to support food companies who don’t have the consumer’s best interest in mind?
I felt a shift in the conversation because there are so many factors to consider. Food is cultural, it’s an extremely personal thing to talk about what one chooses to eat. Food is comforting. Food brings people together, families gathering around a dinner table. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, birthdays, weddings, really any celebration, all seem to revolve around food.
One person in the audience raised her hand and said that Mountain Dew and Oreos were simply calories, not food. Someone else chimed in and brought up how different socio-economic classes make different food choices but he worked with low-income individuals and they wanted access to the “healthy foods” ie milk, eggs, bread, etc. So I brought up the question of how can food co-ops help in bridging this gap because there is already a major disparity in health between socio-economic classes? Poorer people are dying 10-15 YEARS before richer people. So this is a matter of life and death, quality of life, governments spending X billion dollars on health costs each year.
John chimes in and explains how in certain communities they don’t consider cauliflower to be a food. They see Oreos and foods of the like as their food. He shared that he knows of some co-ops that find it hard to have any sort of produce section because people simply aren’t buying those types of food. Someone in the back of the room raised their hand, you could hear the frustration and almost anger in her voice. For context, she was a white middle-aged woman. She shared that her family was currently utilizing EBT due to job instability and wanted to be a face of the types of people that use these types of programs. How her kids want to eat these recognizable food brands. She even talked about how she didn’t want her kids to feel embarrassed by not having these name brand foods after their soccer practice… or was it hockey? That’s besides the point. What I was gathering was that she was feeling attacked. Attacked for letting her children have these foods that by this other person’s definition wasn’t actually food.
I’m hearing this conversation and my ears are hot and my heart is racing. “What is food?” is a question that was thrown out there. What is food?? Food is food. Food grows from the ground and is edible and has some nutritional value, at least in my mind! When we start entertaining this idea of not letting there be a concrete definition of food… I mean, we might as well throw in the towel, folks! For the sake of this blog post let me put in the definition of food from Oxford Language:
Food (noun) - material containing or consisting of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins used in the body of an animal to sustain growth, repair, and vital processes and to furnish energy
I can see this in two ways:
Anything with calories is food because it helps to sustain growth
Foods like Oreos and Mountain Dew aren’t aiding in repair and vital processes to furnish energy so therefore they aren’t food
But I want to step outside of this idea for a moment and go back to what this woman said about being on EBT and wanting to give her kids what they want. My family benefited from these programs when I was growing up. I have friends who currently utilize these programs. I’m not judging or misunderstanding the demographic of the people who use these programs. That isn’t the issue here. I do not think she’s a bad mom. I do not think she’s doing anything inherently wrong. I think that these large food companies are at fault. Shame on them for creating this culture and this idea that their foods are perfectly fine to be consumed at any amount. Shame on them for making themselves the only affordable and most accessible source of calories for their own financial gain and at the expense of peoples’ health. It’s a cultural shift that happened over a few decades and landed us here… trying to figure out how to define food for god’s sake.
It’s insidious how these big food companies operate because the effects these processed and ultra-processed foods have on consumers isn’t straight-forward. You aren’t able to make the same comparison you could with, like, let’s say, the tobacco industry. People were smoking and it was leading to mouth, throat, and lung cancer. That tracks in people’s minds. Where processed foods have a systemic effect. Not to mention it plays on this intangible thing called discipline. Oh you think this food is bad and you’re eating too much of it? Stop eating it! Well it makes it a lot harder when these companies invest billions of dollars to engineer food that are addictive. Tweaking these recipes to be the perfect crunch, the perfect punch of flavor right to your mouth that then sends signals to your brain akin to drugs. Then people are getting diagnosed with diabetes, heart disease, and digestive tract cancers. You see where I’m going with this. Colorectal cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in men and the second leading cause of cancer death in women (possibly overtaking breast cancer by 2030!). 1 in 2 men and 1 in 3 women will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime. The percentage of adolescent and young adults being diagnosed with cancer is rising 1-2% each year since 1995, why is that?
And what I wish I could have said to this woman was this…
I hope you don’t think I’m attacking or bringing into question your ability to care for your children, I’m sure you’re a wonderful mom. I’m looking at this from a 10,000 foot view of the issue. You might be wondering who I am and why I’m so invested or concerned about this. My name is Kelly, and last year on January 18th I was diagnosed with stage IIIB rectal cancer at 28 years old. And after 8 sessions of chemotherapy, 25 sessions of radiation, 3 major surgeries and countless procedures and I’m so happy to be able to say I’m in remission. But the effects of this cancer are lifelong. I cannot bear my own children, my treatment that saved my life has left me infertile at 29 years old. I have met with several different oncologists, 3 separate dietitians, and talked with a plethora of medical staff and I’ve learned a lot through this journey. One major thing I’ve learned is the role food plays in our health. We, as humans, need to be eating whole, nutrient-dense foods that support repair and growth. I would even say it’s a human right.
Some of the things that have been told to me by doctors at Mayo Clinic, one of the greatest medical institutions in the world, are to not eat processed meat. So those pre cooked packaged meats like bacon, frozen sausage patties, deli meats, and hotdogs. They advised to not consume alcohol, no amount of alcohol is safe. Not to consume charred meats. Watch sugar intake and try to limit the amount of added sugar you consume each day. Now keep in mind I am a cancer survivor so my recommendations are more strict but this is just to show there is ample data out there to support these dietary modifications. These things shouldn’t be controversial but they are because again, food is very personal. People have free will to make whatever choices they want, but I think it’s vital that people are at least aware of the risks so they can make informed decisions. Because yes, there will be people that hear this information and choose to still eat processed and/or charred meat and drink alcohol, but at least they are aware. Just like people are now fully aware of the risks of smoking tobacco and still smoke, that’s their choice.
Back to the democracy of food co-ops. I truly believe this can be a stepping stone of sorts in order to get to a healthier society. First and foremost, people need access to food. Hopefully the place that they get this food can then work to educate the public. From there, people can choose what foods they want to have stocked on their shelves and it might lead to healthier choices. Because I want my family and friends to be healthy. I want everyone in the whole world to be healthy and happy and to never experience the pain of cancer or any other disease for that matter. To quote Mean Girls, which feels like an entirely appropriate thing to do right now, “I wish I could bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles and everyone would eat and be happy”.