American pie; how rich?

You have to eat. Regardless of economic or educational hierarchy, regardless of physical or mental strength, regardless of will, want or wage, everyone has to eat. All are created equal in the eyes of the almighty apatite. What we eat defines us politically. Food on average travels 4,000 to 5,000 miles in America. Taking beef and dairy out of your diet can have the same effect as driving 8,000 less miles a year. The carbon dinner plate is adding a bitter flavor to the all-American comfort.
In America, the poor don’t have the convenience of guilt; pocket book voting is a privilege granted only to those with a pocket book. In Los Angeles, the poor don’t pine over ingredients to make their meal more eco friendly, they just don’t cook. The problem has gotten so bad city council created a moratorium on building fast food establishments in inner city communities. Nationwide, the highest rates of obesity and heart disease related to eating cheap calorically dense and fat rich fast foods lie in households making between $20,000 and $30,000 a year. In my neighborhood mercado they simply don’t sell fat-free anything.
Once on tour in Plattsburgh, New York, I met a kid named Blake working in a coffee shop. Plattsburgh is a tiny hippie college town with less than 19,000 people in upstate New York. In the winter, it’s cold; in the summer, it’s hot. Food there was something families did to ease the grip of the elements. Blake made his body a testament to his family’s comfort and tradition. He had a half stack of his mothers flapjacks tattooed on the inside of his left bicep. He had his family’s kitchen table tattooed on his rib cage. These were images in which he found comfort; they were the tools used to build tradition and solidarity.
The median income in Madera, California is less than $30,000 a year. Bye far Madera’s most successful and profitable export is Methamphetamine. It’s a sad dark place directly in the center of one of the richest, brightest states in America. The Fresno Methamphetamine Task Force regularly finds drug coffers in public housing filled with one-gallon Ziploc bags of crystal meth.
When my band stayed in Madera, we slept on the floor of a public provided apartment with three overweight sisters, one of their overweight daughters, one very irritated boyfriend and a fry daddy. No one in the house was over 20, and all of there lives were in some way intertwined with meth.
We met them at our show and they generously offered their home and food. As usual we were in no place to be picky, and we were grateful for their hospitality. On the road, some of the most generous were those with the least to give, those who can only afford to believe in things like music. These are the kinds of people that offer their homes to traveling nobodies but don’t make enough money to be concerned with buying organic. These are the kind of people that can be consumed by dreams of get rich quick schemes like Avon, Herbalife and slinging crystal.
The refrigerator was stocked with typical frozen food-stamp fare. The government had provided them with nutrition fit for a heart attack; taquitos, fried tacos, deep-fried frozen burritos, deep-fried chicken, fish and hamburger patties, Tampico and push-pops. We started the fry-daddy, we ate, we slept and we left. The family didn’t cook with passion; there were no traditions, no kitchen table, no seasonings defining the pallet of unity and love. Food took on a scary role in Madera, it was something the family was ashamed of, because of where it came from (welfare not a paycheck), something that alienated them.
In this country the rich are gladly accepting the alienation of healthy, eco-friendly eating. Eating Green is a welcome burden to those wealthy enough to swallow it, not only does it show a deeper consciousness but deeper pockets as well. Recipes are lost to ingredients, and thus the importance of family is lost to the shallow political statement a meal can make.
So here we have these two extremes. The impoverished, struck with heart disease and diabetes, losing family identity to convenience and subsidy. And the rich, flaunting the luxury to sacrifice for the political impact of their diet. Neither are identifying culturally with their food. Both starved for the substance behind their sustenance. The poor will never get a Big Mac tattooed to their ribs. The rich will never get an organic locally produced jar of hummus on theirs.
Eating is something you must do, but feeling full is something taught to you.