Food for Thought

Reader beware: this is going to be a WALL-O-TEXT post.

In my last super awesome Disney Sea post I mentioned that I'm not a very reactive person. I try not to let things in my life bother me and can generally roll with the punches. However now that I'm older and have full voting rights, I find myself more interested in American social issues and politics and BOY CAN I GET WORKED UP OVER STUPID STUFF. Every once in a while I tweet something ridiculous some politician or another says about a marginalized group, abortion, religion, the president (who I helped vote into office), etc. I have pet causes that I can rant about *forever* and some things I shamefully have little to no understanding of, but I try to keep up.

One of my pet subjects is food. I became interested in some issues in food politics while working at a restaurant headed by a fairly big-name chef in Hawaii. Chef makes very conscious and vocal efforts to promote local agriculture (he tries to use as many locally grown products as possible on his menus) and occasionally brought up government policies that affect the industry. He'd talk about how new safety regulations make it harder for the smaller farms to get their products in stores while not making much improvement in the safety of the products; how Hawaii imports 80% of its food supply and that adds to our dependence on oil; all kinds of stuff I had never thought about. I hate to admit that I actually learned useful things from those torturous Sunday afternoon meetings at the restaurant, but I did.

I started reading a few more articles online or in the newspaper - things I wouldn't have even looked at before. Public school lunches became a big deal around then, as the economy was going down the drain and education budgets were being cut all over the country. You can only get rid of so many art classes and computer labs before you're forced into cutting the budget for school lunch programs. I started reading Fed Up with Lunch: The School Lunch Project, partly out of nostalgia for school lunch (which I only ate in high school, but still) and partly because of the reactions the readers and the writer, an elementary school teacher using the pseudonym Mrs. Q, had to what was being served.

Most of her posts back then consisted of a few photos of that day's lunch and commentary, varying from how the kids liked it to how she absolutely could not stomach it and threw it up as soon as she got home. Allow me to be an obnoxious hipster for a moment and say that I started reading her blog before she "made it" and was all over CNN and got a book deal and all of that. She'd give bits of information about her school and the student population - most of the kids in her classroom participated in free or reduced school lunch programs and for all she knew this was the only "good" meal they'd get all day. Mrs. Q would post link to articles on lunch programs, education legislation across America, how artificial ingredients (dyes, sugars) affected student performance and behavior, and other related topics. I found her entire blog to be informative and well-rounded, and I was happy to see her blog mentioned around the internet. She was doing something good.

After she finished eating school lunch with the kids for a full school year, she went back to her normal diet. She talks more about what she buys at the supermarket, what she cooks for dinner, and how she manages to be gluten-free and dairy-free. She now posts photos of her homemade lunches and the daycare lunches she packs for her son, which is great food porn and maybe what public school lunch should become. She still links to great articles on everything related to school lunch, helping to further my study of food politics. Her blog has more than 5,000 followers, and to me that means she must still be doing *something* right.

But with all the changes, I think she's veered away from her original purpose (as I understood the original purpose) just a little too much. Mrs. Q writes more and more about her own diet, rather than what the kids are eating, and comes off with just a little bit more privilege than she did before. She recently came under attack from her readers for writing some harsh comments about a coworker at her school who made a habit of eating school breakfast without paying for it. The ethical questions she raised were fair, but she also made comments about that person's weight and diet that were judgmental and condescending. She was called out on it, and was SO SHOCKED that people were offended. I read all the posts in regard to her comments and cringed at most of the things she said, most notably her apology where she didn't apologize for anything, how she still stood by her comments about her coworker, and that she could not be bothered to be "politically correct" all the time. If you were still offended by the things she wrote, well you can just find another blog to read because she was just being honest and people who care about being PC are too sensitive and she's done talking about it. Oh and she joined an obesity council to make up for her atrocious comments, just to prove she doesn't think fat people are bad.

I don't know if you can see how my own writing got so much more vicious as that last paragraph went on, BUT THAT'S HOW MAD IT MADE ME. I respected her a lot for the attention she brought to the issue of school lunches and education budget cuts. The fact that people were reading her blog meant that maybe people were educating themselves like I was; maybe people would start to eat healthier and push for better funding in schools and make a difference and all that crap that I shouldn't be so naive to think would ever happen but I still do. Mrs. Q was leading the way and it was awesome!

It's a little less awesome now. I'll still check in from time to time, but I don't read the blog as often I used to read it anyway. I would've been okay with the weight and diet comments had she actually apologized for them rather than giving the "sorry if YOU were offended, but YOU took it the wrong way and I didn't do anything wrong" apology. I'm not sure I can deal with her comments about being politically correct, however. If you have a strong following, a book deal, and are speaking at national conferences, you have to err on the side of caution when you say things. Her indignant responses to being called out were epic in the worst way possible. If you make no concessions for your readers' feelings and why they're offended by your comments, why should you expect them to make any concessions for you?

Sorry this wasn't a fun post, I had to get that off my chest.