While the relationship between income and diet is a fraught topic, the bottom line is that millions of Americans are not eating nutritious food. And when food is the crux of your problem, you just might need a chef to help fix things.
Enter Bobby Flay, Aaron May, Marc Murphy, and Michael Symon. These celebrity chefs recently participated in the Bullseye Event Group Players Tailgate at Super Bowl LVIII. There, they partnered with the Food Recovery Network to salvage what was left after the feast, and distribute the gourmet food to needy Nevadans.
At the tailgate, the chefs sat down with Worth to share their thoughts on food insecurity, charity events, and how they can employ their skills to feed the rich and poor alike.
Foraging in the Food Desert
Symon helped revitalize Cleveland’s restaurant scene in the late ‘90s. Since then, he’s opened half-a-dozen restaurants, hosted numerous cooking shows, and even helped promote the Food Network’s one and only foray into the world of video games.
Part of a chef’s responsibility, he told the Worth team, is to give back to the neighborhoods that help sustain your restaurant.
“It’s the communities that help make the restaurant, so the restaurants need to also help the community,” he said. “Hunger is a real problem in the United States, which is almost shocking. But it is. I feel it’s our job, as chefs, to help take care of communities and educate people on this problem that exists.”
“The thing that I find amazing in this country is that we have food deserts, places [where] families have a hard time [finding] a close place to get really good ingredients,” said restaurateur Bobby Flay, who’s been a staple personality on the Food Network since 1995.
About 19 million people in the United States live in these food deserts: low-income neighborhoods without easy access to a grocery store. The areas affected are disproportionately poor and nonwhite. Dollar stores and similar establishments thrive in food deserts by selling cheap, filling, highly processed sustenance. But healthy ingredients—especially produce—are in short supply.
“When we had [local low-income] kids draw a map of the neighborhood, they kept referring to the ‘grocery store’—and the ‘grocery store’ was the gas station,” said Symon. “That’s where they were getting their food in these urban communities. [We need to] figure out how to get the great produce, and get the product into those areas for them, at a price that they could afford.”
Flay sees progress in raising awareness. “I think that’s changing somewhat. I think that chefs have really been on the forefront of that,” he says, touting the Food Network’s ability to educate the public.
Cooking for the Rich, Giving to the Poor
Marc Murphy worked his way up through New York City’s fine dining scene and has been running his own restaurants since 2004. He’s a regular Food Network guest, and a HowStuffWorks podcast contributor. He’s also on the City Harvest council, and can even facilitate a little wealth redistribution all by himself.
“If I go auction myself off to go cook for 10 or 20 people, it can raise forty-, fifty-thousand dollars,” he said. “People that know me, they want to pay for me to come and cook in their homes? They’ve got to donate a bunch of money to go to one of my charities that I work with.”
Aaron May is another frequent Food Network guest star. He is the culinary director at Bullseye Event Group (which hosted the Super Bowl tailgate), as well as an Arizona restaurateur. For May, being a successful chef comes with responsibilities.
“We obviously want to not be wasteful of food,” he said. “You think about so many people who are food-insecure: kids, families, whatever it may be…Especially as a chef, I think it’s really important. I make my living through food.”
However, May also commented on the irony of waxing poetic about food donations at an event where attendees paid hundreds of dollars to feast on party fare.
“We’re gilding the lily here a little bit, right?” he asked. “We’ve got this embarrassment of riches in food.”
Salvaging food can indeed provide millions of meals per year for people in need. However, it doesn’t solve the underlying problem of white, wealthy Americans eating more nutritiously than the rest of the country. It’s not simply a sociological issue; it may be a matter of life and death.
The American Cancer Society recently found, for example, that living in a food desert can shave years off of a person’s life expectancy. Americans who live in high-income areas with good access to grocery stores can expect to live for 80.2 years, on average. By contrast, Americans who live in low-income areas with limited access to grocery stores can expect to live for 75.5 years. Multiply that by how many people live in a given neighborhood, and the statistics paint a grim nutritional picture.
The Sociology of Food Poverty
Food deserts present a fairly straightforward problem: There aren’t enough grocery stores in a given area. As such, the solution seems straightforward, as well. Build more grocery stores, and people’s habits will change accordingly. “It sounds like it’s a simple problem to solve,” said Flay. “But unfortunately, it’s not—even in this country.”
Food writer Kim Foster points out that when activists tried to implement supermarkets in food deserts, they often went out of business. Residents of these areas are sometimes willing to venture far afield for fresh groceries. And, if they’re not, there are bigger issues at play than distance. Cooking nutritious meals is dependent on time, skill, money, mental bandwidth, and even physical safety—many of which are in short supply in low-income communities.
“A lot of [these families have] two working parents,” Symon said. “Not only do we try to get them the right food, but they have to be able to prepare it by themselves. We used to do a thing called ‘Breakfast in a Backpack.’ It was [filled with] raw ingredients. And the backpack would come back full, from the weekend.”
While food inequality is still a pressing issue, these chefs are not the only activists addressing it. In our yearly Worthy 100 list, we honored two more contributors in the field. Catholic Health president Dr. Patrick O’Shaughnessy helps hospital patients grow food for needy communities nearby. Meanwhile, chef Chris Shepherd has set up a support network that offers both financial assistance and mental health counseling for restaurant workers.
