March 29: "So you're a privileged yuppie pretending to be poor?"

So mused my father when I told him that for the first week of April, I and a dozen classmates had pledged to take the SNAP Challenge: eating on the equivalent of SNAP (food stamp) benefits, $4.50/day.

My answer? "Yep."

Among those privileges is that I get to, and do, rejoice in the experience of food - an experience that extends beyond eating to discovering, sharing, receiving, experimenting, understanding, and respecting. When it comes to what I spend to access that experience, I am conscious, but not constrained. 

Food is not just calories to me. It's a social medium. Fuel for my athletic goals. An inexhaustible entry point for indulging my perpetual curiosity about human behavior.  

So why am I setting that aside?

Cynics would say this is an exercise of luxury: an advantaged, educated professional pretends to live in poverty for a week to make for heart-wrenching fodder at her next dinner party, or perhaps motivate TED to send that invitation she's been waiting for. 

What I say to those cynics is the same thing I said to my father: bingo, you're right (yeah, the TED part too). 

I enjoy being involved in food so much that I've made it my career, as a member of the food and agriculture industry. I chose to join that industry for two main reasons:
1) I see it as a basic human right that all people should be able to procure for themselves nutritious, sufficient, sustainable, and dignified food (which is not the same as simply having enough calories)
2) I am ashamed of the modern food system's inability to deliver on that. Sure, we produce a lot of calories. But if you place yourself at that point of production, and take a look up and down the supply chain, you'll see fault lines:

• The quality of those calories is highly variable
• Systemic incentives often encourage us - producers and consumers - to deprioritize quality
• Major distribution problems collectively cause 30-40% of the food we produce to go uneaten*

These are tractable problems, and I intend to help solve them, because I see public health as one of the biggest economic threats of my generation. 45 million Americans today use SNAP, meaning 45 million lack that access and dignity I spoke of. Lack of proper nutrition = impaired mental performance = insufficient education = loss of economic production, times 45 million. We NEED to solve it.  

And if you want to serve your customer's need, well, you have to go on her journey.  

Will this deliver enlightenment, empathy, and marvelous insights? Will it be like any other week, just with more Tupperware to wash? I'll come to see. 

But I already believe this: that we cannot comfort the afflicted without afflicting the comfortable.

*Source: http://www.worldfooddayusa.org/food_waste_the_facts