Friday Round-Up: the Aspartame Cover-up, Elitist Foodies Suck, and Obama Approves GMO Beets

What’s everybody talking about in the world of food politics this week?

• DIS-PEPSI-A If you’re one of those otherwise health-conscious people who still drinks Diet Pepsi, you might swear off it after reading Tom Philpott’s excellent back story about aspartame, our #1 diet soda sweetener. It’s a fascinating read that includes Donald Rumsfeld, a corrupt FDA official, and Monsanto. (Doesn’t it sound like the makings of a John le Carré novel?) Not only does a growing body of evidence suggest that the chemical sweetener is a carcinogen, says Philpott, a recent study of 2,500 New Yorkers shows that there’s a correlation between diet soda drinkers and strokes. Refreshing!

• THE FOODIE BACKLASH The Atlantic enjoys courting controversy. Last year, the magazine published Caitlin Flanagan’s over-the-top screed against Alice Waters and her Edible Schoolyard movement, in which she argued that “forcing” children to garden keeps them from studying Shakespeare and Arthur Miller. Now, they’ve run a myopic book review by B.R. Myers that singles out the (very real) elitism and insularity of some foodies and food writers. Judging by Myers’ caricature of the Omnivore’s Dilemma as a book that elevates the eating of (sustainably-raised) meat, though, it seems that Myers has excerpted the most egregious parts of each of the books he was asked to review rather than review each book as a whole. (As anyone who has read even an iota of Pollan’s oeuvre knows, he advocates eating a plant-centered diet, with meat serving as an occasional side.)

Not that I’m going to defend any of these books—other than the Omnivore’s Dilemma, I haven’t read any of them and would much rather re-read M.F.K. Fisher. And Myers has a point: many so-called foodies are elitist and would rather brag about their latest meal at Per Se (and eating ortolan, apparently) than work to make organic fruits and veggies affordable and accessible to low-income communities. No, what pissed me off about Myers’ review was his dismissal of Slow Food as some elitist foodie club. That is such a tired cliché. If Myers had done his research, he’d know that Josh Viertel, who has been the president of Slow Food USA for three years, has reasserted the organization’s focus on food justice—the organization’s tag line is “supporting good, clean, and fair food.” That is, making sure all Americans have access to nutritious food that’s been harvested in an environmentally conscious manner by farmers who are earning a livable wage. Slow Food USA was instrumental in pushing Congress to allot more money for public school lunch programs (those bastions of elitism!) and supports many gardening and cooking initiatives at struggling public schools, including this one in Brooklyn. As Eric Schlosser pointed out in a 2008 article for the Nation, Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini believes there is nothing contradictory about championing pleasure and working for change. Fundamental to his Slow Food philosophy, Schlosser writes, is the need to “distance its celebration of pleasure from mindless decadence.”

Myers also engages in Alice Waters-bashing. Yes, Waters has an upscale restaurant in Berkeley (did it ever purport to be otherwise?) but she also pays everyone at her restaurant—including the dishwashers!—a living wage. (That Magruder Ranch veal that Myers singles out is no doubt pricey. But guess what? The farmer who raised it is making his livelihood thanks to the support of chefs like Waters. If we are to change our food system, we’re gonna need upscale restaurants who cater to the well-heeled as well as ways of subsidizing sustainably-raised food for low-income folks.) Waters also has a foundation that’s raised nearly $5 million for Edible Schoolyards, revamping the school lunch program at Berkeley public schools, and advocating for school lunch reform. No one who takes pleasure in eating food of any kind is immune from Myers’ disdain, apparently.

As with many reviews, this one tells us more about the author than it does about the books he’s ostensibly writing about. Half-way through reading “the Moral Crusade Against Foodies,” I realized that Myers must be a vegetarian. All of the passages he excerpts as examples of perverted, out-of-touch-with-the-common-man food writing have to do with…meat. (The more extreme and macho the better.) So I was not surprised to learn, in Robert Sietsema’s amusing rebuttal in the Village Voice, that Myers is both a vegan and an animal-rights activist. Good for him! But his review would’ve been stronger had he disclosed that fact up-front.

• ACTION OF THE WEEK The Obama Administration just approved both Roundup Ready GMO alfalfa and Roundup Ready GMO sugar beets. (These biotech crops contain genes that are resistant to Monstanto’s infamous Roundup Ready herbicide.) Change we can believe in?  If this pisses you off, join the Food Democracy Now letter-writing campaign. Their smart sample letter reads, in part: “In order to protect the biological integrity of our nation’s seeds and the organic industry, we call upon you as President to immediately rescind the recent approval of GMO alfalfa and instruct the Secretary of Agriculture to implement a moratorium on the further approval of genetically engineered crops until the issues over the science, contamination and labeling are more transparently reviewed.”