By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)
Written Aug. 2005
The American food pyramid is not the only food pyramid available. There are Asian, Indian, Mexican, Mediterranean, and Arabic food pyramids available online (http://www.semda.org/info/). There are also vegetarian food pyramids, vegan pyramids, special variations for diabetics and young children. There are pyramids based on body types; it seems there is a pyramid for every twist and turn. But what I am not seeing is income-based food pyramids. Thus I present to you…the American "food bank" pyramid!
In a society as wealthy as America, people perhaps do not realize outside our borders, and even within, that hunger is still a prevalent affliction in every city. Hunger is a serious condition that American families deal with daily. Hunger is a condition that affects everything from concentration at school, to physical development, to personal dignity and family pride. It has long been established that the problem with hunger worldwide is not production; the earth can sustain enough food for the people at this point. The problem is distribution, and the hold up is capitalist greed, and nothing else.
But in a microcosm of the global problem of distribution based on the need for capitalist profit, what is available, via local distribution, throughout the classes is reflective of societal order, most surely. Pretty much if you trace the ownership of land, you get to an ownership of the food. That makes sense…but those who control ownership of the land and food, are not above the heartlessness of controlling the distribution of that food they control. They are willing to make people homeless to drive up rents when they already own several homes, personally. They are capable of withholding food from the hungry just to drive up prices too. They can actually get whole masses of workers to exploit themselves endlessly in a land they are paying to stand on, for food they are paying to grow and pick…class is reflected in food all along the way.
So in America, the poor eat at "food banks." The way food banks work, on the whole, is this strange system where Americans clean out the long-expired food in their cupboards and give it to the poor, patting each other on their backs, for their willingness to share and care about the poor. Anyone who has really been hungry and has gone to the food bank in hunger, knows what to expect. There is a certain "food bank" fare. I knew it as a kid; I knew it as a mom and my kid knows it. My son, who is almost 21, recently commented that he wanted to go to a food bank just to see if he could find some old Teenage Ninja Turtle fruit snacks. When I mentioned that to another friend who has been poor, he commented, "yeah, they have "vintage food" at the food bank." Indeed, my son's point was that you could find nostalgic things at food banks. But is that really the best a society with so much wealth can do?
Most of the food pyramids I looked at while researching this article, had approximately 4 levels. The top levels were to be eaten less, and the bottom levels to be eaten more. Usually the top level was sweets and fats. The next level had things like dairy, nuts, fish, and meat. The next level usually was fruits and vegetables. And the lowest level was bread, pasta, rice, grains, etc. There is an "actual" food pyramid, showing what Americans really eat at http://www.vegsource.com/articles/milk_pyramid.htm. Interestingly, that pyramid is the exact inverse opposite of all of the other pyramids, basically.
So what would be in the "food bank" food pyramid? Well, we can start with the top level of sweets; that could include 15 year old pudding snacks and expired cake mixes. The next level could include for dairy; non-refrigerated American aka "government" cheese, and reconstituted dry milk. For fish, dented cans of tuna would suffice. I decided that the entire next level of the food bank food pyramid should be peanut butter. Below that, we would find the usual fruits and vegetables category. That would include dented cans of fruit cocktail, grape jelly, Teenage Ninja Turtle fruit rolls from the 1980's, and fruit flavored Kool Aid. For the vegetable side we would have dented cans of vegetables, tomato soup, potatoes growing arms and legs, and the Reagan standard, ketchup. The bottom level would be stale and moldy breads and rolls, and USDA bags of pasta, legumes, beans, rice, and oatmeal.
Often the quality of food is prescribed by the communities they are in. I have seen food banks in Los Angeles with *no* food on the shelves for people who came in. Then I saw a bizarre scene on Bainbridge Island in Washington. There, people have way too much money, and their food bank has this set up where high quality foods are lined up like store shelves, and the people coming in for food take this grocery list and shop, basically, saying what they want on the shelves. Then the volunteers there bag it up for the person to leave with. This food bank had crazy food. The local store there flew bread in from Paris daily. When it was one day old, they threw it out for the next day's shipment. So we were eating bread made in Paris three days prior from the food bank on Bainbridge.
The food bank experience is pretty predictable. Americans throw the same things out at food banks, for decades now. I ate that food as a child, and I ate it as a parent.
Food banks are heavy on expired, and dented cans of, foods. There are exceptions, such as in rich communities where there are 1) few poor people to use the food bank, and 2)
consumer-driven people in the neighborhood, thus they give newer food to charity. But on the whole, this food bank pyramid correctly reflects the food situation of many living in
America, supposedly the richest country in the world, in the 21st century.
Kirsten Anderberg. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint/publish, please contact Kirsten at kirstena@resist.ca.