“It’s time to get cooking!”? A Rebuttal to Christopher Kimball’s “Cook America.”

This isn’t the post I had planned for today, but sometimes you have to make room for timely pieces.
The mid-month newsletter is usually for paid subscribers but I decided to make this one for everyone. If you enjoy my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. If you are already a paid subscriber, thank you for your support.

---

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

“Today, I am calling for a new national initiative called Cook America. Let’s put cooking and home economics back into public schools. Let’s teach the next generation how to cook healthy food with little money and a dash of kitchen smarts.” Those are the words of Milk Street’s editor and founder Christopher Kimball in the Editor’s Note, titled “Cook America,” of the September-October, 2024 issue of the magazine. A noble idea, to be sure, but not in this context.

Kimball, who has founded several prominent food media companies, addresses the relationship between diet and food deserts in the United States. A food desert is an area where residents lack access to affordable, healthy food options. They can be in rural areas, but inner cities, including New York City, Chicago, and others, have been the main focus of food desert research. The USDA also includes low income as a criterion for an area to be deemed a food desert. Many people living in food deserts don’t have a car, further compounding the access problem.

For a long time, the theory was that people who live in food deserts have poor diets and increased health problems caused directly by the lack of access to fresh and healthy foods. They essentially survive on heavily processed and fast foods. Kimball starts with that assertion, but quickly shifts to a study showing that it is not lack of access to fresh food that creates poor diets. Those poor diets, according to the study, do not change even when a full-service supermarket comes to those communities. Scientists are split on the issue. Some say access, others, like the authors of this study, say otherwise. Kimball is fully on board with the conclusions of this study, and wonders whether having access to fresh and healthy food matters much. He asserts that “if a full-service supermarket arrives in a food desert and diets don’t change, then it is time to review why people cook what they do at home.” Things are complicated, he says.

Despite this assessment of complexity, the remainder of the piece is his exceedingly tone-deaf and simplistic explanation of why people eat the way they do. His conclusion is that poor people simply cannot cook, they had no tradition of cooking in the household as they were growing up, and, worst of all, Americans have an addiction to junk food. These afflictions, he explains, affect not just people in food deserts but also the wealthy in households with sufficient access to fresh foods. He dubs those household – poor and rich alike – “culinary food deserts.” These assertions are not false, but Kimball misses the mark on much of the supporting evidence for his claims. He is deeply out of touch with the communities he claims to want to serve with his Cook America initiative – an initiative that seems to be a pipe dream anyway.

The first piece of supporting evidence for his claim that it’s not access to food that matters but cultural attitudes towards food is his experience on a trip to Calabria, Italy. This was the point in the piece that turned it from “I can entertain this argument” to “this is an out of touch take.” Calabria is, in fact, one of the poorest regions in Italy, but they are categorically not a food desert, which Kimball acknowledges. As such, they do have a long tradition of cooking cucina povera, which, as Kimball explains, is the art of “using inexpensive ingredients to produce excellent food.” A tradition that, he explains, Americans don’t have. The United States does have a tradition of poverty cuisine despite Kimball’s claim. But assuming we didn’t, to carry on a tradition of poverty cuisine based on fresh, cheap ingredients, you have to have access to those foods in the first place. And you have to have had access for generations.

That has simply not been the case for many of the people who live in food deserts in the United States. Those are communities of poor, often black, people who have for generations been excluded from the sort of access to fresh food that would reasonably lead to a tradition of home cooking. So of course, when a supermarket arrives in a food desert, food attitudes cannot, and do not, change immediately.  

This comparison between Calabria and American food deserts is also problematic because the cost of food is not as simple a topic as Kimball would like it to be. Chickpeas, pasta, anchovies, beans, greens, etc. are a big part of cucina povera and they are cheaper, Kimball explains, than processed foods in small convenience stores. In Calabria, that is. This is just not the case in the United States. It is a very well documented phenomenon that it costs more to buy fresh vegetables, for instance, than it costs to buy a few things from the McDonald’s dollar menu, or a bag of chips, or a box of Kraft Mac & Cheese, among other processed and fast-food items. Calorie for calorie, “junk” food is cheaper.

Anyone who has gone into a grocery store lately knows this to be true. And it’s not just perception. There are many reasons why fruit and vegetables are more expensive than many of the processed foods Americans consume, but a 2022 study from the University of Warwick based on data from the United States argues that supply chain issues are largely to blame. These supply chain problems keep costs high, which directly affects how much of the products consumers buy. Professor Thijs Van Rens, one of the authors of the study, explains that “there is something wrong with the market, which is that there’s high fixed costs in the provision of fruit and vegetables. The effect is stronger when demand is low. And demand happens to be low where poor people are.”

In no uncertain terms, in food deserts, the price of fresh food and vegetables is higher than in other places. Thus, the poorer a community is, the higher the cost of the kinds of foods that are generally considered healthy. It is no wonder that poor people consume less fresh food than their wealthier counterparts. It stands to reason, then, that when a market that sells fresh food opens in a food desert, that produce will still be more expensive than other types of food. Not to mention that retailers of fresh foods have little interest in entering food deserts. And when they do, they don’t understand the demographic and thus fail. Cost, and not personal choice, is a barrier. Unaffordability is also a form of inaccessibility. Thus, access rather than disinterest or disdain towards their health and the health of their children, which Kimball implies is the case, remains a hurdle to healthy eating in food deserts and poor households.

In 2022, the Cleveland Clinic surveyed 1000 people, ages 18 and older and across income bands and ethnicities. Of those people, 46% expressed that they viewed healthy food as expensive. Only 10% believed that a fast-food diet is healthy. Eating fast food is often not the best option, they understand this, but with the cost of fresh, healthy foods, many have no choice. It is difficult to take personal responsibility for your food intake, as Kimball suggests people do, when the cheapest, most effective way to quiet an empty stomach when you’re barely making ends meet is to eat a $1 can of Van Camp’s Pork and Beans. Every time someone with limited economic resources buys food, they have to decide how best to allocate those resources. As a participant in a 2020 study expressed, “you could go to Wendy’s and get a 99-cent cheeseburger or you could go to the store and get [ingredients for] burgers for five bucks. So what are you going to do? You’re going take your fast-food option. It’s quicker, it’s easier, it’s cheaper.”

It is true that for those five dollars you would likely end up with more than one burger, but oftentimes there is only money for the one burger! Though the 99-cent cheeseburger is a relic of the pre-COVID-19 pandemic world as the fast-food industry has not been immune to inflation.

The authors of the Warwick study argue that the best way to increase the consumption of fresh food and vegetables in poor communities is to subsidize them. This seems like a much more empathetic approach than the junk food tax some American scientists have recommended, and one that would benefit all consumers rather than put further strain on those struggling economically and with little choice. We already know subsidies work; the US government subsidizes the corn industry and corn is in virtually every processed food.

But why are fresh foods more expensive? It comes down to how perishable they are. They spoil quickly so they have to be restocked more often. This means more workers, more labor, more loss due to spoilage that has to be recouped somewhere, among other things. Canned, frozen, and otherwise processed and shelf-stable foods from places like Dollar General, which are often the only places selling food in food deserts, last almost indefinitely. They also require a far smaller labor force given the relative infrequency of delivery and stocking. Some of these dollar stores do sell fresh produce, but they are mostly stocked with nonperishable foods. Additionally, produce that is destined for processing is usually picked by machine and carries lower labor costs than produce meant to be sold fresh, which is often picked by humans.

Even if healthier food was priced the same, or cheaper than, processed foods or fast foods, there is also the problem of time. Most people in food deserts, and poor people in general, are already spread thin in terms of time. They often work multiple jobs, or long hours, just to keep a roof over their heads. Of the people surveyed by the Cleveland Clinic, 23% expressed that lack of time to prepare healthy meals was their biggest barrier to eating better. In this, too, the comparison with Calabria is short sighted. American work culture leaves even wealthy people with little time for things like cooking. The difference is that the wealthy can afford to eat healthy meals, if they choose to, either by purchasing them already made, subscribing to a meal kit service, or by having someone make it for them, while poor people, on the other hand, can barely put food on the table. Yet, Kimball tells these people “it’s time to get cooking!” and his “prescription” for these problems is that “cooking has to be transformed into a pleasure from a chore.” Kimball assumes that people in food deserts just can’t be bothered with the drudgery of cooking. He places the blame for the problems that stem from living in those conditions on the individual while completely ignoring the systemic problems of the American food systems and socio-economic inequality.

Kimball chastises parents for feeding their children fast, junk, and processed foods. He berates them by saying that they are “making choices that will condemn their kids to unhealthy lives.” But sometimes food is not just nutrition or health. Food has other types of values. Sometimes junk food feeds the soul. As part of her dissertation research, Dr. Priya Fielding-Singh studied several families of varying socio-economic status in California. She found that most parents, regardless of income levels, wanted to feed their children a healthy diet. Yet, the difference between the realities of the affluent and of the poor were striking.

All parents received regular requests for junk food from their children. Wealthy parents reported that they regularly shot these requests down. Poor parents, on the other hand, indulged their children frequently, for reasons that have everything to do with their economic status. Fielding-Singh explains that saying “no” to their children was a daily experience for poor parents, so when their children asked for something they could say “yes” to, they just did it. She goes on to explain that honoring these requests showed the children that the parents loved them, and made the parents feel “a sense of worth and competence” in an environment where those feelings don’t come easily. “Poor parents honored their kids’ junk food requests to nourish them emotionally,” she explains, not to harm their health, even if that sometimes happens. But all that Kimball sees is parents causing their children to develop diabetes years down the line. His assertion that cultural attitudes towards food were to blame was partly right, just not in the way he meant it.

These emotional values we give to food also explain why often things don’t change in food deserts when a supermarket arrives. As Fielding-Singh explains, “these interventions won’t change what food means” to poor families. Lifting people out of poverty, on the other hand, would go a long way to change their relationship with food. Food isn’t, and has never been, just about fueling the body. Anyone who has spent any time thinking critically about food knows this. This is one of the tenets of the fields of Food Studies and Food History.

Christopher Kimball’s complete detachment from the lived experiences and the history of the communities in food deserts and other economically depressed areas is astounding. Claiming that poor people in the United States don’t have a tradition of poverty cuisine is erasure. Surely, a food personality like him has heard about Southern food, which was poverty cuisine, or cucina povera, as he insists on using, before it became fashionable. Nose-to-tail, or from the rooter to the tooter, was a necessity of being poor before it was co-opted by elite chefs and turned into a buzzword. Despite these traditions, some of the areas most affected by food deserts are in the South. Surely, he has heard of Gullah Geechee cuisine, which evolved within the context of poverty, slavery, and the need to just make do in less than hospitable conditions. Appalachian food, too, has traditionally been poverty food. Before ramps became the must-have item of the spring, the smell they left behind after being consumed gave people away as being poor. Eating ramps, which must be foraged, meant that people were too poor to buy food at the grocery store. Appalachian food, it turns out, is now chic. Not only does the United States have several traditions of poverty cuisine, but we also have the tradition of taking those cuisines, “elevating” them, putting them on rich people’s plates completely detached from their origins, and often making them inaccessible to the people from where the foods originated. 

This is not to suggest that someone outside of these communities can’t understand the internal issues and present plausible solutions to combat food insecurity, diet, and health problems. Of course they can! But suggesting that poor people and people in food deserts just need to learn to cook to overcome these problems is one of the most shallow, out of touch, unthoughtful, un-empathetic, uncompassionate, and uninformed answers to his very valid question of why people cook what they do at home, or why they eat how they do. This is a repackaged version of telling struggling folks beaten down by a broken system to just pull themselves up by their shoestrings.

The answer to that question is much more complex, as is the solution to the poor diet epidemic that Kimball claims can be fixed by teaching people how to cook. In fact, the entire premise that these people don’t know how to cook is misguided at best, and an outright straw man at worst. Of the people surveyed by the Cleveland Clinic, only 20% reported that their barrier to eating healthier was their lack of cooking skill. It’s not that teaching people to cook is a bad idea, useless, or unhelpful, it’s that there are much bigger problems to tackle here. Access to fresh food matters, economic status matters, issues in the supply chain matter, systemic problems in the food system matter, and most of this is not individuals’ shortcomings. But rather than engage with the topic in any meaningful way, Kimball chooses to indulge his savior complex while at the same time condemning the people whose daily lived experiences are shaped by these issues. Solving the nutritional problems in food deserts and other poor communities requires more than a single-prong approach. This is a deeply complicated issue, which Kimball would have known if he had bothered to do so much as a cursory Google search before so confidently writing this Editor’s Note. 

“It’s time to get cooking!”? Easy for him to say when he was born in one of the wealthiest areas in the United States and has never known a day of poverty or food insecurity in his whole life. “It’s time to get cooking!”? As if the idea had never occurred to poor people! “It’s time to get cooking!”? The audacity! 

---