“Vote with your fork”

“Vote with your fork” (or “Voting with your fork”) appears to have been coined by the Boston-based nonprofit organization Oldways Preservation and Exchange Trust in the 1990s. A similar political expression (cited in print since the 1930s) is when people “vote with their feet”—that is, people move from a poorly run government to a place where government is well run.
 
“Vote with your fork” means that the personal choice of food (such as organic food or food grown locally) is a vote for that food and against other food. A website title reminds that there are “3 Votes a Day.” Food authors Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle have often used the “vote with your fork” saying.
 
   
Oldways Preservation and Exchange Trust
Our Founder and Oldways’ Story
K. Dun Gifford (1938-2010)
Founder and first President of Oldways
K. Dun Gifford founded non-profit Oldways in 1990 to promote healthy eating and drinking, with programs that help consumers improve their food and drink choices, encourage traditional sustainable food choices, and promote enjoyment of the pleasures of the table. As Oldways’ original president, Dun guided the organization through its initial two decades with creativity, enthusiasm, and political vision, until his untimely death in May, 2010.
   
Oregon Environmental Council
Vote With Your Fork!
What we eat changes our health, our environment, local economies, and our connection to home. Oregon’s livability is shaped by our food choices.
 
“What should we have for dinner, honey?” is a surprisingly meaningful question. What we eat changes our health, our environment, local economies, and our connection to home. Oregon’s livability is shaped by our food choices.
 
3 Votes a Day
VOTE WITH YOUR FORK
Exercise your power as a consumer and Vote With Your Fork! Where you choose to buy food has a big effect on your world.
Buying local, sustainably grown fruit, vegetables, milk, meat and grains is a vote for independent businesses, small farms and diverse landscapes.
Buying conventionally grown, processed foods is a vote for feedlots, homogenous fast food chains, and petroleum fueled industrial agriculture.
   
Google Books
Fed Up:
Women and food in America
By Catherine Manton
Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey
1999
Pg. ?:
“Voting with your fork” is the axiom of a group Jenkins directed for many years, Oldways Preservation and Exchange Trust, a Boston-based nonprofit organization that seeks to educate people about traditional ways of handling food.
 
New York (NY) Times
May 7, 2006, 8:30 pm
Voting With Your Fork
By MICHAEL POLLAN
(...)
A couple of weeks ago we all paid our taxes. Whenever I write that check, I can’t help but think of the various uses to which that money is put. Whatever your politics, there are activities your tax money supports that I’m sure you find troublesome, if not deplorable. But you can’t do anything about those activities — you can’t withdraw your support — unless you’re prepared to go the jail. Food is different. You can simply stop participating in a system that abuses animals or poisons the water or squanders jet fuel flying asparagus around the world. You can vote with your fork, in other words, and you can do it three times a day.
 
So this column will take the form of a discussion about how to cast those sorts of votes.
 
Food Safety News
Nutrition & Public Health
In the Food Revolution, Vote with Your Fork
by Cory Minderhout | Oct 25, 2010
Much of what we eat and how we eat it is decided by politicians and on Wall Street, according to Marion Nestle.
 
Nestle, author and public health and sociology professor at New York University, discussed the corporate and political influences on American agriculture industry during a recent appearance at the University of Washington in Seattle, part of the school’s “Food: Eating your Environment” lecture series.
(...)
The food industry needs to be more socially responsible, but consumers can force that by taking personal responsibility for what they eat.
 
“You need to vote with your fork,” Nestle told her audience.
 
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