A Bone Left Unpicked

Though he first entered the public
consciousness through his cookbooks, Mark Bittman has become a thought leader with
his New York Times columns on food
politics. These days, he’s widely regarded in the food movement as an expert in
food policy and nutrition, with his column serving as a benchmark – and
catalyst – for the central issues of the movement.

With A Bone to Pick, an
anthology of columns from his four years at the Times, Bittman provides a survey of his food policy analysis. The
book’s wide array of topics includes corn subsidies, federal nutrition
programs, soda tax policy, dietary recommendations, and more. These short
essays range from quippy advice on how much butter to consume to an explanation
of how the FDA regulates the use of antibiotics in livestock.

A single theme unites these distinct
issues: Bittman’s belief that with better policy and less processed food, we
can reform what he calls the “Standard American Diet” (an intentional, if
unsubtle, acronym). Read together, his articles are a strong indictment of the
way our food is regulated, grown, processed, and distributed. But the
collection also reveals Bittman’s disheartening lack of analysis about how,
exactly, the American public came to find itself in the midst of such a
widespread – and growing – agricultural and
dietary crisis. Bittman’s proclivity to position the
eater as a powerful decision-maker and federal food policy reform as the most
effective path forward obscures much of the reality of who holds the power in
today’s international food system.

Read a Bittman column without a
background in food policy, and you’ll likely conclude there are only two major
actors determining how our food system operates: the eater and the government.
To be sure, both parties play essential roles. The Farm Bill,
a package of federal food and farming laws renewed every 5 years by Congress, shapes
agricultural activity from subsidies to nutrition programs. What an eater
chooses to consume, meanwhile, can encourage better farming practices, or sanction
the latest in Doritos innovation. But this simple worldview is dangerously
incomplete and fails to acknowledge the power players lurking between the eater
and the government.

For a growing number of food activists
and scholars, those power players are easy to spot: they’re monopolistic,
multinational corporations. There are moments when A Bone to Pick
considers the broad ramifications of such corporate power. For instance,
Bittman’s piece on Shuanghui’s purchase of Smithfield, “On Becoming China’s
Farm Team,” highlights how international corporate control of American
resources is a growing danger in our agricultural landscape. He rightly identifies
the Smithfield deal as “a land and water grab,” that “transfers the
environmental damage of the large-scale pork production from China to the
United States.” That strong language is warranted, given the size and scope of
Shuanghui’s control over the international pork market. The effects of
Shuanghui’s influence will be felt by American pork producers, employees of
Smithfield and its subsidiaries, pig grain farmers, bacon enthusiasts, and many
others along the food chain. Bittman’s concern is well-placed.

Such analysis indicates that Bittman
understands the dangers inherent in our incredibly consolidated food industry,
where companies like Smithfield, Nestle, Monsanto, and Dean Foods, just to name
a few, have outsize influence on what appears on our television screens, in our
cupboards, and within the USDA’s dietary guidelines. But it also reveals little
awareness that such unrestrained corporate power was not always a hallmark of
our food system, and that our current reality has an enormous impact on the
eater’s control over her own diet. And though Bittman on occasion acknowledges
the existence of these behemoths, he rarely discusses their influence on the contents
of our kitchen cupboards. Worse, when Bittman does address corporate power, his
tone edges toward resignation. “You can’t blame corporations for trying to
profit by any means necessary, even immoral ones: It’s their nature,” he writes
in “Parasites, Killing Their Host.” That’s not exactly a rallying cry for
reform.

In the absence of a critical evaluation
of corporate power in our food system, Bittman must look elsewhere to
understand how corn subsidies and crappy school lunches became the status quo.
And in searching for culprits for why our national waistline is growing and food quality deteriorating,
he all too often points his finger at the eater. “The power lies within you” to
“fix the food system in your world today,” he writes in “(Only) Two Rules for a
Good Diet.” If consumers only bought more antibiotic-free meat and avoided the
soda machine, he implies, they would, all on their own, begin to reverse many of
today’s worst health and environmental crises.

In Bittman’s framing, the eater’s
decisions at the grocery store affect our food system as a whole, as well as
society as a whole. If she chooses Whole Foods or sources directly from
farmers, she is opting into a better future for our environment, citizenry, and
collective health – “voting with her fork,” as Michael Pollan has put it. If
she eats junk food and drinks soda, her inevitable weight gain will be a burden
on well-meaning taxpayers.

Thinkers like Bittman and others in his
cohort – which include Marion Nestle and Robert Lustig in addition to Pollan (all
of whom are quoted extensively in the pages of A Bone to Pick) – position eating as a moral decision. The morality
of this group is binary – there are good foods and bad foods; good eaters and
bad eaters. This binary creates a high-stakes shopping and eating environment
for consumers. Opting for a bag of Doritos over an apple isn’t just a lapse in
willpower or a choice of convenience – it means you’re siding with the bad
guys.

But our lives aren’t as simple as
Bittman would have them seem. Among the many factors that complicate our
decisions about what to eat, money is perhaps the most decisive. Though his
nods to food justice have increased in recent years, Bittman’s analysis is
still steeped in the notion that we all ultimately can afford to choose every
day between Whole Foods and 7-11, between kale salad and a Big Mac. While they
may hold true for most of Bittman’s readers in the Times, assertions like “for most people, eating better is mostly
about will and skill,” as he claims in “Leave ‘Organic’ Out of It,” are
alienating to anyone who knows from personal experience that eating better is
mostly about whether or not you can afford it.

Bittman’s frequent advocacy for junk
food taxes is a case in point. Once an issue most closely associated with former
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, sugar and soda taxes are gaining momentum in
the food movement. Bittman and his colleagues believe that a per-ounce tax on
such items would drive consumers towards healthier options. When pressed on the
regressive nature of such taxes, those writers often fall back on the idea of
earmarking the income from the tax for obesity prevention programs, or
subsidizing vegetables. In “Bad Food? Tax It, and Subsidize Vegetables” Bittman
says:

Some advocates for the poor say taxes
like these are unfair because low-income people pay a higher percentage of
their income for food and would find it more difficult to buy soda or junk. But
since poor people suffer disproportionately from the cost of high-quality,
fresh foods, subsidizing those foods would be particularly beneficial to them.

Besides its condescension and lack of
empathy, this suggestion is also weak policy. As we’ve seen with cigarettes,
earmarking income from “sin taxes” is notoriously unsuccessful. And while
vegetable subsidies are an easy recommendation, Bittman doesn’t accompany that recommendation
with any concrete plan. Rather, he appears content simply to shame consumers,
without equipping them with a viable alternative.

This same attitude extends to Bittman’s
discussion of that favorite topic of food pundits, the “obesity epidemic.” It’s
hard to turn a page in this book and avoid an implicit or explicit discussion
of the supposed economic toll that obese Americans are taking on our national
healthcare system. These discussions are imbued with moral superiority, and rife
with the pathologized language often utilized to discuss the bodies of fat
Americans. As Julie Guthman wrote in her 2008 essay “The Food Police: Why Michael Pollan
Makes Me Want to Eat Cheetos,” research around the public health consequences
of poor diet and obesity has become “entangled with moral discourses and
aesthetic values.” Bittman’s concern with the ways bad eaters are morally
culpable for our national health crises represent just this type of
entanglement. A stronger corporate power analysis would more accurately reflect
who dictates what and how we eat; it would not eliminate the eater’s role in
determining her health outcomes, but would make evident the reduction in choice
that consolidation in the food industry has wrought. But Bittman has no need to
investigate further for the source of today’s shameful state of agriculture and
eating – he’s found the source, and it’s us.

Bittman’s analysis matters because his influence
has been felt widely in the food movement and beyond. As an agenda-setter,
Bittman has accomplished much for the many noble causes of the food movement. His
coverage of issues like the
minimum wage, antibiotic
regulation, and GMO
labeling has helped to bring those topics into the mainstream. In his more
recent columns, he’s championed racial and economic justice as pillars of the
food movement. He’s pushed movement activists to work toward specific,
attainable goals, and to make their issues translatable and understandable to
the public.

But in A Bone to Pick, his
scapegoating of average Americans and lack of investigation into the massive
consolidation of our food system results in an analysis that comes off as
elitist, exclusive, condescending, and naïve. The food movement should take Bittman’s
advice and “make food issues real.” But in drawing our roadmap towards change,
we must move away from implicating the eater, and take aim at the greater ills
in our food system.