Revisiting voting with our forks and an early book recommendation

Also measuring preservation level should be a thing

Back in 2019 when we started this whole food spending tracking thing, we skipped the traditional holiday card that year and instead sent our family and friends a newsletter with an analysis of our food spending. I titled that newsletter ‘Shitty Housewife Gets Nerdy’, and in subsequent years, some newsletters had subtitles. In 2021, I’d subtitled it ‘In Which I Try Not to Sound Like a Pompous Twat’. You see, that was the year that we started voting with our forks. 

I had spent years up to that point reading a lot about the American and global food systems, food politics, and the food industry. For a long time, my interest in food was largely academic, and didn’t really translate into any differences in the kinds of food we purchased, cooked, and consumed. Food as theory and food I ate were two distinct things. 

And then 2020 happened. A pandemic, supply chain disruptions, and the world shut down. We turned to new ways of acquiring food: we started getting fruit and veg from a CSA, we made our first order from Farm Foods (sadly now closed), we got our groceries delivered. This major global upending of our lives was enough to make me think that maybe I should reconsider where we sourced our food and do what the reporters, writers, and academics liked to call vote with our forks. 

So towards the end of 2020 and in 2021, that’s what we started to do: vote with our forks. I’ve written about it before in more detail (click on the link in the previous sentence, if that wasn’t obvious), but in short, it basically meant we tried to buy meat and other animal products (primarily milk and eggs) that were from producers (farmers) that practised regenerative agriculture, pasture-raising, grass-feeding, and were organic. We subscribed to the CSA that we sporadically bought from in early 2020. We bought Maple Hill milk and Vital Farms eggs. 

In subsequent years, that grew to buying more and more of our food at the farmers’ market, buying the best quality ingredients we could easily find (I’m thinking mostly here about the metric tonne of flour I seem to be buying from King Arthur* on a regular basis). This also led to a lot more cooking from scratch because it meant I had greater control over every component of a meal or baked good and we could also avoid ultra-processed foods. 

We’re about four years into this whole ‘voting with our forks’ thing, and I’ve been thinking about it because of a book I read recently. I’ll get to the book later, but for now, a few reflections on what this has been like, four years on.

We’ve ruined (a lot of) food

A lot of store-bought or restaurant food doesn’t taste as good now. We’ve become used to the homemade, from scratch, with excellent ingredients for a lot of things and we’re now a lot more selective about the foods-away-from-home we consume. This is especially true of various breads and baked goods (bagels, flatbreads, rolls, sourdough… none of those are bought anymore).

Voting with our forks isn’t just about voting to spend your food dollars with one business over another. It’s also a vote to cook. It’s a vote to spend time and energy on cooking and baking. On washing and chopping vegetables, on measuring ingredients, on stirring and kneading and steaming and roasting and baking. It’s looking at every convenient thing the food industry is offering up and saying, ‘No thank you. I’ll make my own nuggets and chips tonight.’

Your preservation level: a new health metric?

In The End of Craving, Mark Schatzker talked about how there may have been negative, unintended consequences of vitamin fortification in the American food system. In Ultra-Processed People, Chris Van Tulleken talked about all of the different ways ultra-processed foods affect us. By cooking from scratch using the best quality ingredients I can easily find and afford, I am hoping to not expose my family to the risks that Schatzker and Van Tulleken (and many, many, many other journalists, doctors, and academics writing about such things) discuss. In thinking of the lessons from these books, I often wonder how preserved we are (as in, how many preservatives and additives have we avoided?) compared to people on a Standard American Diet. If preservation can be measured, what percentage preserved are we? What an interesting number that would be. Imagine if you could gamify your diet and have the goal of lowering your preservation number. It could be the new cholesterol!

The cost: who can pay?

Voting with your fork in the ways I’ve described take a lot of both time and money. In my last post, I wrote about our food spending in Q1 2025 and how it was drastically, dramatically, significantly higher than it was in 2019. Yes, our family has grown by a person since 2019, and there has been a pandemic and inflation and cost of living crisis. But a lot of our personal increase in food expenditure is because of our choice to vote with our forks. It is a choice I would make again and again (and in fact I do make this choice again and again), but I am well aware that this is not a choice that everyone can make. This I think is utter bollocks. 

Voting with your fork takes time, because cooking takes time. Thinking about meals, planning meals, keeping track of what you have in the fridge, freezer, and pantry, remembering who likes to eat what. Grocery shopping, updating shopping lists, remembering what items are best bought from which outlet (whether for cost or quality reasons), all take a lot of time and energy. The amount of time I spend on food and cooking is basically a job, and I’m well aware not everyone has a spare twenty hours a week to spend on food. But there are ways of voting with your forks that would take less time, and even that is beyond many people, which is where some of the bollocks come into it. Why is there no federally mandated annual leave, parental leave, sick leave, and reasonable-length work days with lunch breaks for every employed person? For a country that likes to bang on about ‘freedom’, I’m not sure Americans really understand what freedom is. 

The other thing about voting with your fork is that it costs money. Like many things in life, with food often you get what you pay for, and the higher quality ingredients and foods we’ve been buying are more expensive than their lower quality counterparts. Like time, I’m well aware that not everyone can afford to eat like this. This is not disapproval at food choices that differ from ours (How The Other Half Eats by Priya Fielding-Singh is a fabulous book about these very issues; hard recommend). But it’s a wish that everyone could afford to eat well, and there are two separate parts to this. The first, simply, is a desire for everyone to eat as well as they can afford to (both in terms of time and money). I’m reminded of this quote from Maya Angelou: ‘Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better’. The second is thinking about where the cheap food comes from, and how it is so cheap in the first place.

The real cost of food

In terms of cost, so much of the cheap food that we can buy is cheap only because the consumer isn’t paying the total cost at the checkout. But they might be paying it in their taxes, and in healthcare costs down the line. The workers in farm fields, in meatpacking plants, in the trucks delivering the food to the supermarkets? They’re the ones paying the cost. Why are the government subsidies and tax breaks going to the giant farms growing corn and soy for animal feed? Why can’t we have a system where it isn’t the largest food companies who benefit the most but instead people at every stage of the food supply chain? Why can’t we have humane working conditions and liveable wages, and the end consumer can have subsidised excellent quality ingredients and food instead of subsidised industrially produced meat and ultra-processed foods?

Voting with your fork is about food, but it’s also very much not about food. It’s about creating meals that taste good, and eating food that is good for health, for the planet, and for human and animal welfare. But it is also about equality and justice and imagining what kind of world we want to live in.

A book recommendation

I’ve been thinking about these things because recently I read a book. (Yeah, I know, I read books all the time). Marion Nestle is a food policy expert, nutritionist, writer, and one of the nation’s preeminent advocates of eating well. She’s written many books about food politics and the food industry in the US, and one of her books I really liked was What to Eat, a guide to every section and aisle of the supermarket, and the best choices you could make in terms of health and ethics. 

That book is almost twenty years old, and a lot of things in the food world have changed in the past two decades, so some of the things in the book are a little out of date. But happily, there is going to be an updated version published later this year: What to Eat Now.** I was lucky enough to be able to proofread the magnificent beast of a book, and it is glorious. Like the original, it covers every aisle and section of the supermarket, and is both a broad and detailed overview of the food choices you could make. There are a lot of books that go into detail about the things I alluded to in this post (farmworkers, food policy and politics, the meatpacking industry, truck drivers, supply chains, grocery stores), and if you fancy a deep dive into these issues, there are many great books out there. But if you just want a comprehensive overview of every category of food and how to make the best choice in terms of health, environment, human and animal welfare, this is the book you should read. It’s out in November and you can pre-order it now. 

*I mention specific brands because I do recommend them based on taste and what I can know/trust about their farming practices as a mere consumer. I’m not paid for any of these mentions; these companies don’t know that I exist.

**I’m also not paid to recommend this book, and honestly I think the book’s publishers and publicists would prefer it if I wrote about this closer to publication date. But I will probably forget by then because I have no sense of time, and pre-orders are awesome. You pre-order a book, promptly forget about it, and upon release date it’s like getting a present from your past self. …I get a lot of presents from my past self.