Stop Yelling About What Poor People Eat
By: Chris Newman
Tags: Health, Politics, Diet, Poverty, Food

Warning: there is strong language in this article.

“Boutique farmer” is a term I’ve coined for professional farmers that grow on small acreage (usually less than 10) and sell almost exclusively direct and retail. As a cohort they are overwhelmingly white and come from fairly affluent families. Homelessness, destitution, and true poverty — as opposed to hipster poverty — are not in the realm of possibility for these folks in the event they fail at farming or anything else in life. They enjoy deep, multi-layered social safety nets. Many, if not most, are college educated. They are awash in options and freedom.

And they’ve spent very little time with people unlike themselves. Usually until they talk to me.

I am also, arguably, a boutique farmer, though I now produce enough to keep both a large number of families and a few restaurants fed every year. Unlike most boutique farmers, however, I am a person of color. I grew up in southeast Washington D.C. in the 80s and 90s, when crack was around. I was never poor myself, but I did live near the geographic epicenter of post-riot urban decay. I attended D.C.’s public schools and had friends who lived in the projects. I didn’t live in the projects, but that didn’t stop people from getting stabbed in our driveway on two separate occasions. I walked around corners to discover one guy blowing another guy for drugs in an alley more times than a 12 year old boy should have to. At my elementary school, we came across used condoms, discarded firearms, spent shell casings, needles, and crack pipes on and near the playgrounds a few times a month. In the 5th grade, a police officer visited our school for the sole purpose of telling the kids in our class what to do when (not “if”) we got arrested. I’ve seen things in my childhood I’ll never tell my loved ones about.

Exhibit A

Since I’m Black, I have a lot of conversations with boutique farmers about getting good food into the “inner cities,” because that’s the default conversation the handful of Black farmers left in America are forced into. The boutique farmers, who’ve spent their entire lives as charter members of America’s most protected class, almost to a man/woman offer this “solution” to Local food going mainstream among the urban poor and almost-poor:

People just need to value food more, and pay for it. We don’t pay enough for food in this country.

“Fuck you right up your stupid asses” I shriek silently in my head, as “I think the situation is more nuanced than assignment of value” slithers audibly from a tongue well-honed with political polish.

In my youth, I saw my friends’ parents argue about whether to pay for food or electricity. Food or winter clothing. Food or medical care. Food or bus fare to work. Food or math tutoring. $9/lb for pork chops (which is what I charge for mine) isn’t something they could afford if they just “valued food more.” They’d have to value it at the expense of their jobs, children, shelter, and immediate health.

So Mr. Folta is damn right when he says:

At the same time we need to be constantly cognizant of those that live on the edge of food insecurity. How do you think they’d feel about separating the self-anointed clean food from the rest of the abundance we have access to?

As I’ve argued before in previous articles, those of us in the Local food movement need to stop being such snobs about it. We need to stop demanding that people lacking either the means or the motivation to go Local “come to their senses.” We, being privileged, need to do the work: figure out how to reach them, where they are, on their terms. And that’s because so-called clean food IS in the long term interests of everyone, which is why I take issue with Mr. Folta’s rosy depiction of conventional agriculture and cheap food.