New grocery stores like Walmart may not help America eat better.
How can we change the way America eats? If there is one thing most people agree on, it’s that we need to make healthy food more accessible and affordable to low-income families.
Or do we? A new survey from Share Our Strength’s Cooking Matters program, challenges a piece of the conventional wisdom. The poll of 1,500 families reveals that most low-income families are satisfied with the availability of good food. Seventy-seven percent of urban families were satisfied with their options versus 69 percent of rural families. The greater obstacles to healthy meals are planning skills, time and, yes, price.
According to the survey:
- Families with a stay-at-home mom or an unemployed parent are far more likely to prepare healthy from-scratch meals. An at-home parent makes dinner from scratch 4.4 times per week versus 3.6 for families where the adult(s) are employed full-time. Homemakers, the unemployed and disabled were more likely to agree that that cooking healthy meals was a realistic goal than those that worked full time.
- Families that regularly budget and plan for meals before shopping, using a written grocery list, for example, are the same families who eat healthy, balanced or made from-scratch dinners most days of the week. Families that always or often plan are significantly more likely to provide healthy meals five or more times a week. However, overall 35 percent and 55 percent of survey respondents don’t regularly use written grocery lists or plan meals before going to the store, respectively.
- Price is a factor. One in four families report choosing less healthy foods often or always because of price. But, the report smartly notes that this can be overcome by educating families about the benefits of canned and frozen fruits and vegetables, which cost a fraction of fresh ones and don’t rot in the crisper drawer. While 81 percent of families said that fresh produce was extremely healthy, just 32 percent of parents rated frozen fruits and vegetables as extremely healthy and only 12 percent said that canned ones offered great nutritional benefits.
The study was funded by ConAgra, which has led some to be suspicious of the results. But the data reflect what my husband, Brent Cunningham, and I saw while reporting for six months in Huntington, West Virginia. Among the families we followed, the very poorest was the one most likely to cook healthy meals at home. But it required intense planning and basic cooking skills. The families least likely to eat well were the ones who, frankly, didn’t have to. They had enough money to swing by Burger King for dinner on the way home instead of cooking family meals and eating leftovers. (See my recent post on the Atlantic: Fast Food’s Dirty Little Secret.) They shopped impulsively, instead of methodically, at the grocery store, which meant their carts were filled with frozen pizzas, chips and snacks.
It’s fashionable to blame a lack of access to good food for America’s lousy eating habits. It may be easier to plunk down a new Walmart in the inner city. (And the schemes also may help cash-starved politicians generate corporate campaign contributions.) But the Cooking Matters survey is more evidence that helping families to eat better is a lot more complicated.
I am a Brooklyn-based food writer who covers food politics, trends and sustainability issues. My work appears in the Washington Post, (where I was a staff writer), the New York Times, Slate, New York magazine and other publications. On this site, you will find my blog and links to my written work and my podcast, 
Reinventing the CSA
A customer picks up her customized CSA share from Star Hollow Farms. (Image courtesy of The Washington Post)
If it’s February, it must be time to feel guilty.
It’s not because I’ve broken any new-year diet resolutions. (I don’t make any.) It’s because I will not join a CSA.
Community-supported agriculture programs, or CSAs, traditionally offer a weekly box of seasonal produce from a local farm. Customers pay upfront so the farmer has the cash on hand to buy seeds and equipment, and a guide for what and how much to grow. (Some plans also require that members put in a few hours’ work on the farm.) In exchange they receive an assortment of whatever is ready for harvest that week. That might mean a lot of greens in early spring and an overload of tomatoes in high summer — or if there’s a blight, no tomatoes at all. The benefit, or so they tell me, is that participation supports local growers and teaches families to cook with what Mother Nature provides rather than the global panoply of foods available year-round at the grocery store.
Maybe. But a model designed to serve the producer and not the customer will never be, well, sustainable. And in my experience, CSA customers get the short end of the stick. If I take a vacation in the summer, I pay for food I never receive. If I want more food one week to throw a party and less the next? Tough luck.
The good news, as I write in my latest Smarter Food column for The Washington Post, is that farmers and a new crop of food entrepreneurs are getting the message that, at least some of the time, the customer should have options. Flexible CSA models are sprouting up around the country, proving that subscription services can work for farmers and consumers. Some, dubbed multi-farm CSAs, offer produce from a network of small farms for more variety. Others let customers choose what and how much goes into their weekly box or use pre-paid credit at the farmers market or online.
Do you belong to a CSA? Do you think it’s fabulous? Or too restrictive? Check out my column and let me know what you think.