aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Duck confit does not a gourmet make
One of the most difficult adjustments I had to make when moving from Manhattan to Middle Georgia was the dearth of decent restaurants. A recent piece in the NYTimes had old friends calling and writing excited to have read that we have “wine tastings, live music and dishes like duck confit and cioppino” here. 
To which I reply by quoting Slate:
...they’re all from Sysco, a Houston-based food wholesaler. This top food supplier serves nearly 400,000 American eating establishments, from fast-food joints like Wendy’s, to five-star eating establishments like Robert Redford’s Tree Room Restaurant, to mom-and-pop diners like the Chatterbox Drive-In, to ethnic restaurants like Meskerem Ethiopian restaurant. Even Gitmo dishes out food from Sysco. Should you worry that one source dominates so much of what you eat?
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! Please worry. Our food system is broke and most of us don’t know it yet.
Like any retailer, chefs need wholesalers that distribute goods cheaply and efficiently, and Sysco’s 400,000-plus item catalog conveniently sells everything a cook needs to run an eating establishment. A little more than half of their products are brand names like Parkay and Lucky Charms. The rest are Sysco-packaged items like 25-pound bags of rice, half-gallons of salsa, boxes of plastic gloves, beer mugs, dish-washing detergent, not to mention 1,900 different fresh and frozen chicken products. Whatever a cook orders is delivered straight to the kitchen door at bottom-barrel prices: One Sysco invoice I got my hands on has a 25-pound bag of Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice selling for $20.95, or about 84 cents a pound, while a 1-pound box bought through Amazon Grocery costs $2.09.
All of that seems relatively innocuous-restaurants need to make a profit, after all. But Sysco also hawks pre-packaged food. While chefs have long relied on shortcuts like freezing and using canned goods like beans and tomatoes, it’s entirely different to pass off one of Sysco’s thousands of ready-made items-ground beef burritos, vegan tortellini, quiche Lorraine pie, tiramisu cake-as homemade.
The ingredients alone on some of the pre-made items are enough to make a restaurant-goer swear off eating out. The breaded cheese chicken breast, for instance, contains monocalcium phosphates, sorbic acid preservatives, and oleoresin in turmeric. The Serve Smart Chicken is particularly frightening. While it looks natural, it consists of parts of other chicken breasts mashed together into a single, chicken-breastlike block. As the company notes on its Web site, our “unique 3-D technology gives you the look and texture of a solid muscle chicken breast, at a fraction of the cost. … Available in four great flavors: teriyaki, BBQ, fajita and original.” What Smart Chicken tastes like, I’d rather not know.
I’d rather not know either but I have a nagging suspicion that I’m more likely to have it here than he is there.
The company has a long history of championing frozen foods. Sysco founder John Baugh has been quoted as saying, ”frozen foods taste better than anything I could grow in my garden.” He started the company in 1969 when he saw an opening in the food services marketplace for a large, national distributor that would beat out local competitors through its sheer size. At the time, Baugh owned a small frozen-food company in Houston, and he convinced eight other regional food distributors to join forces to form a national conglomerate. Within a year of its start, Sysco posted more than $100 million in sales, and for the next 30 years, snapped up more than 150 local food distributors, becoming the largest in the nation. The company is about 50 percent larger than its next-largest competitor and five times bigger than the third-largest player; its boxes and cans are now as common in restaurant kitchens as salt and flour. A very partial listing of its better-known customers can be found here.
The timing of this company’s rise is right in line with the consolidation and monopolization that has occurred across the board in our food system: slaughter houses, farms of all kinds, poultry, pork & beef, fast-food and technologically enhanced nutritionalism.
The change we’ve seen in the last thirty years has altered our relationship to food in fundamentally profound ways from that which had existed on this planet for millennia. I am as techno-utopian as the next guy - I even think technology can help get us out of the mess it’s gotten us into - but first we’ve got to recognize that there’s a problem.
