Feed Your Fam on $3 Per Person, Per Day!, Part 2
This Seattlest contributor knows when to throw in the towel. Yesterday, we published a piece called "Feed Your Fam on $3 Per Person, Per Day," taking a shot or two at a shopping guide from Grocery Outlet. In the comments, we were generally thrashed for characterizing it as un-healthy, so we decided to go to the experts--on food, nutrition, and health--and see what they had to say, appreciating that we don't know everything. We'd planned to publish a few opinions together, but the first one came back so decidedly not on our side that we decided to run it on its own. If any more responses come in, we'll post those too.
Lou Bendrick, a columnist at Grist and the author of Eat Where You Live: How to Find and Enjoy Fantastic Local and Sustainable Food No Matter Where You Live, offered us the following:
From a sustainability angle (my gig), I could tear that list apart — the the mercury-laden tuna, the hormone-infused ground beef, etc...BUT, sweet Jesus, three dollars a day? For a family of four? It is heart-breaking. I have to doubt that there were better and affordable alternatives at a discount grocery. (I've never been there but I'll bet they are not selling bulk quinoa.) Honestly, the menus and list are not that bad (hey, hard boiled eggs for a snack and advocating sprinkling nuts into salads) if you take into account that whoever composed it (and I think that they did it with care) was working within a deeply flawed food system and probably used the food pyramid, a product of that system. Also, it’s hard, if not impossible, not to bring up the subject of class when it comes to the topic of tightening food budgets. We have a caste system that makes it difficult for lower-income Americans to make good choices. People are going to get testy, if not outraged, about this subject...which is good.
So, apparently that's that. It's true one could find fault with it on some fronts, but if a sustainable food expert (currently working on a piece about healthy food on a budget) tells us that this was put together with care and that the biggest problems with it are essentially structural, well, we're big enough to admit we were wrong. Sorry.
