People today tout clean eating as having less to do with losing weight and more to do about feeding yourself mindfully. But Mary MacVean claims it’s an old trick, repackaged with new vocabulary.
“There are all these ways of talking about what is essentially the same thing – a super strict control over what goes in your mouth,” she says. “It just has different names now.”
Gwyneth Paltrow’s recently released cookbook purports to not be focused on dropping pounds (but in reality promotes restrictive diets). Weight Watchers rebranded as WW, dropping the dreaded word “weight” from its name. Atkins and NutriSystem have been replaced by keto and Whole 30. But no matter the rebrands, they cannot fool MacVean, whose work revolves around branding food as a means of healing and self-care.
MacVean is executive director of GrowGood, an urban farm in partnership with the Salvation Army in Bell. GrowGood’s land covers an acre and a half with three different gardens, a chicken coop and a substantial greenhouse. Most importantly, it also provides jobs and opportunities for the 500 homeless people who live in the shelters across the street on Mansfield Way.
On a recent visit to GrowGood, MacVean strides through the garden with a group of students, giving them tastes of the nasturtium leaves and pink peppercorns freshly fallen from the tree. This, for MacVean, is the crux of the organization: connecting people to the things they eat. She believes that may help the problematic relationship people have with their food.
MacVean doesn’t remember a time in her adult life where she wasn’t concerned with her weight. In high school, she would set an alarm early to wake up before her parents, pour a little milk and cereal into a bowl and leave it in the sink so her parents would think she ate. MacVean is in the majority of women on that front – adopting habits to control her weight and appearance from an early age. A study done recently showed that 80% of women have had some issues with body image throughout their lifetime.
“I don’t know a woman who isn’t – of any age – maybe after 15 – concerned with her weight,” she says as she sips coffee at a hip Mild-Wilshire locale. The restaurant is crowded with students bent over their books and laptops and friends catching up over lunch.
There is an air of pretention that comes with any place that charges $7 for a cup of coffee, but
Mary MacVean holding seedlings in GrowGood’s nursery.
MacVean offsets it. She walked in as if she was coming straight from the garden, with a thin duffle coat and vegetable-patterned socks. She exudes a calm, no-nonsense energy which can come off as intimidating at first, because you can tell she is not interested in pleasantries. But that is a by-product of a deep care for the things in which she is passionate about. She would rather spend her words on them then chit- chat, and Mary’s big passion is food and women’s relationship to it.
MacVean started writing for the Associated Press in 1983 and was the first reporter on staff to be dedicated wholly to the topic about four years later. “I was the national editor, and I got them to let me write about food as a subject rather than just recipes. I just nagged the managing editor until he said yes.”
MacVean was onto something – the stories she wrote about food for the AP were widely picked up by publications across the country, demonstrating a growing appetite for this type of coverage.
“At the time, the federal government was doing a lot changes in labelling and regulations,” she says. The 1980s was the birth of nutrition labels, nowadays ubiquitous in food packaging. The government was also setting organic standards and taking a closer look at how Americans ate.
MacVean’s beat quickly went beyond the government and into grassroots. She wrote profiles and investigated the growing trend of community-supported agriculture. The mid-1980s were a time of change in our relationship to food. People were beginning to be curious about what was inside the factory, the package, the cookie.
For MacVean, “food is everything.” Buying, making and eating food is political and personal. Writing about food thus needed to go beyond recipes and restaurant reviews and delve deeper into how the way we eat shapes the way we live.
When MacVean left the Associated Press in 1993, after she had her first son, she took the opportunities to work in the realm of food in different capacities. She freelanced for a few years, edited some cookbooks, and when her husband was posted to Russia by the Associated Press, she moved there with her family. While in Moscow, she opened a small school for children that offered cooking classes. After three years, the family returned to the United States – more specifically, to the Golden State.
“Coming back to America, what I was most struck by was the bounty. Going to the farmer’s market and having this vast amount of local food,” she says.
She landed a job at the Los Angeles Times on the metro desk but wasn’t passionate about her work. She wanted to get back to food writing – to find a way, as she had done her whole life, to make caring about food her job.
“I did the same thing I did at the AP – I was an editor, but I started writing some food stories. The first one I did was of this guy who was a tomato-growing fanatic.
He had a little tiny yard, and the year I wrote about him, he had grown some 10,000 tomatoes. He kept track of every teeny tomato he harvested.”
Mary was shuffled around the Los Angeles Times as the publishing industry began collapsing.
As she puts it, she eventually “maneuvered her way back to writing about food through health.” She wrote about diets, consumer issues, exercise trends – the entire world of wellness, which, in a city like Los Angeles, is no small feat. One of the more shocking trends she investigated was the rise of orthorexia, a medical condition where one is obsessed with exclusively eating foods that one considers healthy or clean.
In many ways, the timeline of the growth of the diet industry is in lockstep with MacVean’s career. When she started reporting on food halfway through the 1980s, nutritional labels were barely coming into being. By the time she left the Times in 2015, obsession over what is on our plates and in our food had turned into an eating disorder for some.
MacVean partly blames this on the industrialization of our food system.
“Our grandmothers just ate. They went to the store to get flour or sugar but there wasn’t this vast array. Now there are 25,000 or 30,000 items in a given supermarket.”
There is money to be made of our eating habits, and the diet industry has capitalized on that. We are disconnected from the food we eat, often using it as a means to look a certain way, trying to find shortcuts around feeding ourselves.
MacVean is a seasoned expert on the diet industry and warns that even though talking about calories and diets is now taboo, it does not mean that dieting is less of a powerful force. It may have shape-shifted, but it has not gone away.
“Caring about nutrition is just the latest thing. It’s the latest diet, but it’s the same thing,” she says.
After leaving the Times, while figuring out her next step, she started volunteering at GrowGood, a non-profit which provides food to the residents of Salvation Army’s Bell Shelter as well as opportunities for work and healing through the garden. Now, she works as the organization’s executive director.
“I went there because I thought it would be interesting to learn to farm, but stayed because I felt that that is where the power of food was really strong.”
After years of writing about the food and diet industry, she experienced a sense of connection to the ways in which we feed ourselves. The disconnect is the big problem, in Mary’s mind. A cookie is not just a cookie, made with love – it’s a number of calories, an absence of nutrients, something you buy and shame yourself for eating.
We’ve made a culture out of demonizing food, desecrating our relationship to it. Maybe coming back to the basics and fostering a sense of connection to how we feed ourselves will help us address this problematic relationship.
What if we just ate, with gratitude instead of fear? What if we chose to believe there was no specific way to eat? No one way to look? What could we do with all the mental space we would free up? Prosper and flourish, surely, as MacVean’s GrowGood garden has.
GrowGood Urban Farm
5600 Mansfield Way Bell, CA 90201