The Cookie War
Kerri
On Monday, just one week after we had started this project, I walked through the door with my arms full of papers to grade, despite the futility of bringing them home. Like many of my colleagues, I have a terrible habit of taking student papers on a “field trip,” a teaching term that means taking work home and then bringing it back the next day without having graded anything. I do this at least once a week. I have good intentions, but by the time I get home, I’ve been working for ten to twelve hours and don’t want to do anything but spend time with Christopher and the kids—our dogs, Viola and Horatio, and Mrs. B., our perpetually perturbed cat. This night was no different. When I stepped inside, Christopher was waiting for me with the dogs close at his heels. They had me surrounded.
“Hi,” he said, smiling, as he took my bags and papers from my hands. “I need you to do something for me.” I didn’t trust his smile; it seemed like he was up to something.
“Can I have a minute to walk in the door?”
“Nope, I need you to hold this for me so I can take a picture.”
I didn’t want my picture taken. I had been at work late that night; Christopher had dinner-making duty so that we could eat as soon as I got home. The long day had left me exhausted, and I needed to eat dinner and take a shower to wash the twelve hours of high school off my skin. Next thing I knew, a handwritten sign and a wooden spoon were thrust into my hands. Christopher moved me into the light and told me to smile. I played along. After all, he had gone out of his way for me that weekend to make pancakes. Besides, I knew that food would come sooner if I complied. I gave my best take-the-damn-picture-so-I-can-eat-or-I-may-kill-you smile, and the camera clicked away.
I still didn’t know what had gotten into him. It seemed as if inspiration struck my otherwise rational partner while he prepared our forty-cent serving of beans and rice, which had been getting cold on the stove as we fretted over the pictures. The sign I held proclaimed September 8 “National Beans and Rice Day.” Christopher hoped that it would catch on. He wanted it to be a day when we would “celebrate the simple beauty in a mound of rice and the delicate texture of a pile of beans, so that all who come after us will know how seriously we take our food.” I laughed at his excitement about his new national holiday; maybe it was the lack of food or the delirium from spending too much time at work that contributed to the giddiness. We started that week energized, but we didn’t know that a gritty battle of the wills would ensue.
By Wednesday, it became apparent that the novelty of our project would not last much longer, at least not for me. So far our blog had attracted a few more readers than we had planned. We figured that our parents and friends would read it, but others had found us and were following our journey as well. Friends and coworkers of our friends and family were now also reading. Christopher’s mom’s fifth-grade health class was reading it, too. I knew that if people were interested in what we were doing, then I would have to keep going, but I felt myself starting to struggle with the regimen. I wanted more food than the diet allowed; it consumed my thoughts. I wanted a burrito. A warm tortilla holding not just some beans and rice, but chock-full of lettuce, tomato, and avocado prepared in the hands of a professional, someone who knows how to fill the tortilla almost to its bursting point and then lovingly wrap it so that nothing will slip out. I wanted to drench it in salsa and savor my side of extra crispy French fries.
Since the meager dollar-a-day portions didn’t satiate my hunger, food became the focus of my existence. When we weren’t preparing food, we were eating. When we weren’t eating, we were thinking about eating. It became increasingly impossible to ignore the abundance of food surrounding me, and the fact that I couldn’t have it. Not only that, but I began focusing on the amount of food I saw wasted. It seemed that every day I saw people throwing away perfectly good food. For us, waste wasn’t an option. Everything was accounted for; every grain of rice and every pinto bean had a price tag. No longer did I toss the scraps of our food to the dogs while I cooked. Every night they followed me around the kitchen, tails wagging in hope that I would drop something, but I was vigilant. We precisely measured out every bite, and we not only appreciated the food that we had, we cringed at the idea of something going to waste.
I saw the most waste at school. I winced when I witnessed sandwiches tossed away, half-full bags of chips pushed by the wind across the campus, and once-bitten apples left in the quad to rot. One of my students habitually throws unopened granola bars and bags of chips into the trash if they aren’t the flavors he likes. I wondered if his parents had any idea that their son threw away the food they worked hard to provide. I thought about whether this was a consequence of the largely affluent area where I teach, or just the way teenagers take food for granted. But the waste didn’t stop with the students.
At our midweek staff meeting during the second week of school, the administration provided lunch, and my coworker Dave sat at my table with his taco, chips, and salsa. My recollection of the meeting is hazy, but I can still remember the smell of the salsa. I spent half of the meeting drooling and trying to use my telepathic powers to get him to eat the last few bites so I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore. The voices of administrators, eerily reminiscent of the “waah waah waah” of Charlie Brown’s teachers, droned on in the background. Their announcements became indecipherable, and their mandates landed nowhere near my consciousness. I focused on the food languishing on Dave’s plate. For the first time, I considered breaking the rules. I didn’t entertain the thought for long, but it took all of my willpower to not reach over and snag a chip. Walking back to my classroom, I couldn’t help but wonder what would become of the leftover trays of Mexican food. I hoped that someone would have the decency to pack up the rice and add it to a homemade soup. I imagined the beans being plopped into reusable containers and carried home as side dishes for dinner. I envied the person lucky enough to sequester the salsa and use it later. There is a reason why salsa has surpassed ketchup as America’s number one condiment; never before had I felt such food envy. The idea that Wednesday’s lunch could become Thursday’s trash left me feeling disgusted. I realized that I would have to start spending more of my lunches working alone in my classroom so I wouldn’t be surrounded by people wasting perfectly good food. Our rules said we could have free food only if it was available to everyone. If this free food hadn’t been limited to my school’s staff, I would have eaten my fill, then hovered around after lunch to see what I could take home.
Before this point, I had only a cursory understanding of how much food I wasted. Like many people, I don’t like to be wasteful, but I get squeamish if I think that food is “old” or has been in the refrigerator for more than a few days. Despite my queasiness, I always feel compelled to bring home restaurant leftovers, and with few exceptions, I let them sit in the refrigerator until Christopher eats them, or until they actually do spoil and need to be thrown out. Christopher, on the other hand, seems convinced that food cannot go bad. To me, four days is the limit for homemade leftovers; with no logical reasoning to support this, two days is the maximum for restaurant food. On the other hand, Christopher’s “method” for a food safety check is much more lax. Regardless of how long the item has been lurking in the back corners of the fridge, his process involves opening the container, smelling the contents, and then pronouncing them edible; if it’s questionable, he’ll dip in a finger and taste it. If the leftover passes muster on both the smell and the taste tests, Christopher will not only eat it, but also gladly serve it to others. We continue to disagree on this level of quality control, probably because we’ve had far different experiences with what can be considered edible.
Before we met, Christopher volunteered for a while with an organization called Food Not Bombs that works to feed the hungry with the excess food disposed of daily by the food industry. While living in the San Francisco Bay Area, Christopher was brought into the fold by one of his college roommates. This revolutionary movement, started i
n Massachusetts in 1980 by an anti-nuclear activist, grew into a worldwide phenomenon that has hundreds of autonomous chapters operating throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia. Without a headquarters, formal leadership, or support from major media outlets, Food Not Bombs has many victories worth mentioning. It was the only organization in San Francisco providing hot meals to the survivors of the 1989 earthquake. They were also the first to provide hot meals for rescue workers responding to the September 11 World Trade Center attacks, and its volunteers were among the first to provide food and help to the survivors of the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. Food Not Bombs is now working to help those most affected by the recession in the United States by organizing Food Not Lawns community gardens and housing the homeless with splinter activities like Homes Not Jails. This movement to end war and poverty has no formal leaders, and since its inception has also spawned other groups like Bikes Not Bombs, which collects and repairs used bicycles to provide to people in low-income communities. The members of this grassroots movement come from all sorts of different activist networks; many work on poverty issues, animal rights issues, and environmental sustainability projects. The strength of Food Not Bombs, like any group, lies in its diversity, and for Christopher, it helped him see food waste firsthand. His time spent turning “waste” into hot vegetarian meals gave him a broader sense of what was edible.
My outlook on waste was shaped by a different experience. The six and a half years I spent working in a grocery store taught me that the “sell-by” date is just that: the last day an item can be sold. In all reality, depending on the item, it may not spoil for another week. In fact, in early 2009, as people were becoming more economically strained, there were reports of the growing popularity of grocery store auctions, where people thronged to bid on food that had reached its sell-by date. Yet regardless of knowing that food would last a little longer, at home I still tossed out anything that reached its date.
Almost all members of my family have worked in a grocery store at some point in their lives. My grandfather owned his own store for a few years before going to work for a friend who was starting a chain in northern California. He worked for the company for thirty-two years, and much of my family has worked in stores for the chain. Because of this, I’ve always had the idea that if food looks suspicious or you can’t remember when you bought it, you should throw it out and buy a replacement. Food has never made me ill, but I worry that the day after the expiration date, food suddenly goes bad. A few years ago I told my mom this and she said, “I think you get that from me.” She has the same fear and would rather run to the store than take the risk.
In addition, I’d never had to wonder when or if I would be getting my next meal, so I’d never really considered what I was wasting. I thought nothing of letting vegetables rot in the refrigerator or tossing some item out because it might be bad. When I worked at the grocery store, it was convenient to just buy what I needed for a meal before I left work. While my coworkers pulled items off the shelves, people like Christopher waited out back to get knee deep in the Dumpster, searching for the lost treasures of a system built on product throughput. Of course, the store I worked for locked its Dumpsters. The rationale, I believe, was that they did not want to be held responsible if someone ate spoiled food and became ill. In high school, I worked at a movie theater, and every night the closing concession worker filled large garbage bags with the leftover popcorn and threw it away. Even if an employee or customer asked, they would not be allowed to take any home; it was against policy. In order to protect themselves, many companies throw out perfectly good food every day.
Once I was back in my classroom after the meeting, I started to realize the absurdity of my past fears concerning leftover food. I had thrown away too much food in my lifetime, and I could now see the wastefulness of my actions. I needed to change. My perception was shifting. My concept of “good” and “bad” food had to evolve if we were going to make it two more weeks on a dollar each a day. Even if something was past its prime, I would eat it.
The next morning when I walked onto campus, I saw an apple lying in the dirt. From my viewpoint, it appeared that the apple had not yet been bitten. I seriously considered going back to pick it up and stow it away for later, but I was too much of a wimp. Later that day I saw one of my students throwing away cucumber sticks and cherry tomatoes. I wanted to stop her, but I could imagine the conversation with the principal, or her parents, about why I had to beg students for their leftovers. I envisioned rumors spreading around campus about how Ms. Leonard rummaged for food in the trash cans after lunch. The reality is that people tend to waste food when there is an abundance of it, not when there is a limited supply. While I faced this issue at school, Christopher faced similar circumstances at meetings off campus.
Christopher would be traveling to East Africa with Rotary International in January; he had applied for the fellowship and was one of five San Diego county teachers selected. They required that he attend a few meetings before leaving, and all of these meetings were scheduled around meals. On the morning of our thirteenth day, he attended the district conference at the Salk Institute in La Jolla. The breakfast did not disappoint the grumbling tummies of Rotary members, but it overwhelmed Christopher. Trays piled high with fresh melon, strawberries, and standard American diet staples like eggs, bacon, and toast lined the walls. Both of our meetings made us realize the abundance of free food that we have access to, and that these opportunities for free food occur more often than we had previously thought. Again, the food wasn’t available to everyone, only to the members of the Rotary club and their guests, so it didn’t fall into our “free” category.
Our meetings weren’t the only places where we encountered the abundance of food offered to select groups of people. We like to attend lectures at the universities in our area, which almost always have cookie trays with coffee and tea. Some offer such a wide variety of catered appetizers that it seemed everyone in attendance could have had a full meal. But it doesn’t stop there. At least a few times a year, lunch is provided to us at staff meetings. At my school, the parent organization does a wonderful job of making sure that teachers know they are appreciated. We get breakfast served at the start of the year, on holidays, on teacher appreciation day, and at the end of the year, as well. The parents provide sandwiches for Back to School Night so we don’t have to rush home and back in the short time between school and the evening program; many teachers would skip dinner altogether if not for the parents’ generosity. My Associated Student Body sponsors “Teacher Javas” two or three times a year, where they have coffee, bagels, and fruit for teachers in the morning. Obviously, this isn’t the case in most jobs.
When I worked at the movie theater, we could have all the popcorn and soda we wanted during our breaks. I couldn’t begin to calculate how much popcorn I consumed that year, but this minimum wage job never provided meals or snacks for meetings. When we are concerned about where our next meal is coming from, we pause before tossing away leftovers. When we know there is a limited amount, we ration and carefully measure. In third-world countries, and in the homes of America’s poor, this is usually true. Waste is not an option. But for most Americans, we live in the land of cheap food.
This level of abundance is in part due to the fact, as Michael Pollan and others have pointed out, that most Americans are eating foods made from corn and soy. Even when you think you’re drinking something as simple as lemonade, you’re bound to be drinking syrup made from corn. If you pick up a hamburger at the drive-through, the cow you are about to eat spent nearly its entire existence eating corn, which is not what they evolved to eat. And the bun that is now home to the dead cow in your grasp most likely is sweetened with corn. Not to mention the ketchup you top it with, and the soda that helps you wash it down. All include corn.
Before becoming vegan, I never looked at the ingredients labels of what I was eating unless I was wondering about the calorie count. Once I st
arted taking a more active interest in what I was consuming, I found that in many packaged foods there seems to be an abundance of ingredients that come from a laboratory instead of from the soil. Not only that, but most foods I was eating contained corn in some form or another. According to the USDA, the United States plants eighty million acres of corn. The abundance of this product makes it an inexpensive item that it seems can be added to anything. At least this new meal plan limited our intake of Iowa’s cash crop and America’s superfood—kind of. The peanut butter we had been treating ourselves with and the jelly on our sandwiches both listed high-fructose corn syrup as one of the top ingredients. Because this food is comparatively cheap, we tend not to think as much about tossing it out. Only when there is abundance do we waste.
Despite the plenty surrounding us, by Friday of the second week the physical and emotional impacts of our dollar-diet had become more apparent. I had lost three pounds, and Christopher had shed seven. So far, my lunches were getting me through the school day, but eating on a dollar a day leaves little economic room for those afternoon snacks that keep me going until dinnertime, and on days I stayed late, I needed something more. Since I started teaching four years ago, I have been the school’s debate coach. It is a time-consuming commitment, and that’s putting it lightly. After those first three weeks of school, I already had several twelve-hour days under my belt; at least three were meetings with debate parents to let them know what was in store and to teach them how to judge at our tournaments. This was on top of staying after school for meetings with students. I hadn’t told my students about our dollar project, so there was no discussion of eating at my Back to School Night, only of how my classes would run; it was far different from Christopher’s evening the week before. In addition, I would be hosting and running our league’s first debate tournament of the year that coming weekend. Just the idea of this weekend-long event made me tired. I was drained and hungry, which in combination can make anyone cranky.
On a Dollar a Day: One Couple's Unlikely Adventures in Eating in America Page 4