March 15, 2011: Discussion Questions: Food

[Emilie Dubois]

Mary Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal,” reprinted in Food and Culture: A
Reader, eds, Carol Counihan and Penny van Esterik (Routledge 1977),
pp. 36-54.
Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann , 2009, Foodies: Democracy and
Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape, (Taylor and Francis), chs TBA
Alison Leitch, “Slow Food and the Politics of Pork Fat: Italian Food
and European Identity,” Ethnos Vol 68(4): 437-462.
Julie Guthman, “Fast food/organic food: reflexive tastes and the
marking of ‘yuppie chow’ Social and Culural Geography, 4(1):45-58.
Thompson, Craig J, and Gokcen Coskuner-Balli. 2007. “Enchanting
Ethical Consumerism: The Case of Community Supported Agriculture.”
Journal of Consumer Culture, 7:275-303.
Gill Seyfang, 2008, The New Economics of Sustainable Consumption
(London: Palgrave), ch 5.

[Tom Laidley]

I’m going to state this rather simply: In my mind, the organic/local/’conscious’ food movement is beset  by a number of problems, some of them foundational and begging to be addressed. First, let’s talk about price and availability. When it’s not moralizing outright, the rhetoric is usually characterized by a castigation of conventional markets, supply chains, and price points for food (the implication being that food is simply too cheap, and needs to reflect real costs). I’m going to talk about the latter point first- it’s a popular one, and there is something to that. Of course food costs, especially for meat, are artificially low. Nevertheless, when I roll my eyes at Michael Pollan saying with a straight face that us paying the lowest proportion of our income on food in history is inherently bad, I can’t even imagine the reaction of somebody who makes less, and has to feed kids. Maybe this critique is not theoretically sophisticated, but the rhetoric is just so often tone deaf I’m left wondering how it can really ever achieve widespread success with the American public, to say nothing of lots of other places in the world. And really, isn’t this about broadening these practices so more people can embrace them? Well, you wouldn’t really know that from all the critiques of how this movement is being co-opted by large agricultural businesses. To me, those detractors are missing the point. Of course they’re “co-opting” it; if they didn’t, this would never get beyond Berkeley or Cambridge. Advocates like to reduce everything to subsidies, but that’s only part of the story. A reallocation of subsidies does not suddenly and magically introduce efficient economies of scale into supply chains in a manner conducive to giving people food that is sustainable *and* affordable. If economists know the price of everything and the value of nothing, it’s fair to say sociologists know the value of everything and the price of nothing. This is not a secondary problem; it’s an existential one. Can local, organically grown food that isn’t at some point in the process handled by a big company with lots of ways to get it to your plate (as opposed to a farmer in a pickup meeting at an open-air market, which probably would result in more carbon emissions, if anything) even be feasible for most people? This leaves aside problems that are even bigger, like yield per acre. If yield per acre goes down, does that not suggest we might have to knock down more forest for food production? I’m not optimistic about industrialized agriculture, but neither am I in regard to organic food being some panacea when it comes to environmental problems, or at least offering a way to reconcile solving those while simultaneously confronting social issues. Other problems are logistical- there are many places where local food either isn’t feasible lots of the time, or simply isn’t desirable to consumers. Let’s take a lesson from cigarette cessation strategies: Telling people they’ll live longer if they eat root vegetables all winter *will not necessarily be effective* (Nor will taxing the s__t out of unhealthy foods). When I see people huff and puff about Wal-Mart carrying organic food, I think it can basically be interpreted as what Johnston and Baumann are describing, writ small.

[John Petroff]

This week's articles made me critically consider the idea of eating
locally produced food. As Tom pointed out, some regions are not
capable of providing a variety of food throughout the entire year.
This problem combined with the taste of consumers, including foodies
who list bananas as their favorite fruit, causes me to question the
rationality behind local consumption as part of ethical consumption.
Imagine the hydrogen economy where food can be transported any
distance without adding carbon emissions to the atmosphere. Is local
consumption still a priority? Foodies who are so environmentally
conscious must be aware that oil will not be around forever. Do they
consider local consumption a temporary emphasis until an alternative
to the carbon economy is implemented? Even in the shorter term, if the
most delicious organically grown vegetable in the world were
transported from Sydney to Boston by way of a wind-powered ship, would
foodies still not purchase it? The best argument for local food has to
be taste. Locally grown and thus more recently harvested food tastes
better than food that becomes stale as it is shipped across the world.
Somehow I suspect that this characteristic of local consumption has
been more influential in its popularization. If the world economy does
somehow convert to a sustainable energy source, I would imagine that
local food production would become less important. The de-emphasis of
locally grown food however would absolutely not take away from the
importance of organically grown food. I am not sure which of those two
distinctions is more important to ethical consumers now, but I foresee
organic standards rising in relative importance.

[L Carfagna]

Douglas makes an argument for the social component of food, where the ordered system of a meal “represents all the ordered systems associated with it” (80).  Food and the action of eating has always contained a status element (like the eating clubs at Ivy league schools). The foodies in Johnston and Baumann’s work take food beyond its instrumental purpose (sustenance), and frame food as having the central qualities of authenticity and exoticism.  Foodies practice both inclusion and exclusion in their lifestyle, committing to a faux populism that steps across class lines while simultaneously denying their existence.  Finding a “hole in the wall joint” or eating “ethnic food” is seen as both an act of uninvited solidarity and exoticism.  Labeling foodies as omnivores is almost misleading – the issue isn’t that they’ll eat anything or try anything.  Such a label implies that they eat without evaluation.  Quite the contrary, they seek distinction in their practices and are able to fit all foods into a perceptual frame, like Bourdieu describes.  Foodies are a status group and much of their status depends on economic capital as well as cultural capital. 

 

Food is important, not just because of its instrumental purpose of sustaining us, but because the production of it has put our existence in jeopardy.  I wonder if this love affair with food that foodies have developed depoliticizes food?  Sure, there are those foodies who are really concerned about where food is coming from for reasons of sustainability and social justice.  But generally, it seems to me that foodies turn food into status consumption and it also seems like the association with the “ordered system” of status is more salient than the ordered systems of (unsustainable) production.  

[Hyemi]

The most interesting article for this week is “Foodies” of Johnston
and Baumann. In “Foodies”, Johnston and Baumann examine how eating and
drinking as everyday practice legitimate and reproduce social
ideologies of status and distinction and show how the contemporary
food discourse are combined political and ethical issues with
traditional gourmet concerns altogether through conducting in-depth
interviews with thirty people and textually analyzing gourmet
magazines and the dining section of major American newspapers. I am
greatly fascinated by the authors’ views of approaching the act of
eating - an everyday practice in terms of a cultural capital. I can
learn a lot from their extensive considerations regarding the
relationship between the omnivorous nature of democracy and elitism,
the relationship between consumerism and citizenship, and the
relationship between politicization and aesthetics. Several questions
that arose after reading this article are how foodies overcome a
dilemma related to rejection against personal pleasures and how
foodies can negotiate two ways to egocentric consumers or citizens
with community spirit. Also, I am wondering if selecting gourmet
magazines with a commercialized view, as a research object, can
deliver a reality of foodies discourse well.

Also an interesting article, “Deciphering a meal” explores the social
meaning and encoded message of food found in social relations, showing
a connection of food customs and socio-cultural symbol and value in
Hebrew dietary laws through Mary Douglas’s view. Douglas states that
eating and drinking as everyday practices reflects cultural beliefs
and values. Foods or meals are structured and contain social events.
Also, foods can be categorized based on social categorization and have
a contrasting social meaning - inclusivity and exclusivity according
to intimacy and distance. Douglas broadens her analysis to a case of
the Israelites. Her analysis on Hebrew dietary laws is very fresh to
me. According to Douglas, the common meal was affected by three rules
related to the holiness and classification of animals: (1) rejection
of certain kinds as unfit for the table, (2) of those admitted as
edible, the separation of the meat from blood before cooking and (3)
the total separation of milk from meat. The standard of rejection,
namely what we can call “impurity”, is summarized as seen the
following: “anomalous creatures are unfit for the altar and
table.”(74). The criteria or standard is applied to the Israelites’
social lives or events such as marriage. Douglas lets us realize that
foods or eating patterns/habits represent our society’s own social
beliefs and values. After reading this article, I came to think of the
traditional Korean meal pattern. The meal pattern is very different
compared to the Western one. We are served many stressed main dishes
and unstressed dishes at once. I am wondering how the Korean meal
pattern can be interpreted in terms of social belief and what
different Korean meal patterns have origins that come from the Western
meal pattern.


On Jan 28, 5:30 pm, Emilie Dubois <emilie.anne.dub...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Emilie Dubois]

In summary, an interdependent system of analogies determines the
meaning of a meal. Douglas employs Levi-Strauss’ structuralist
approach to explain how all meals contain something of the meaning of
other meals; each meal is a structured social event, which structures
others in its own image. The most important member of the series of
members is awarded the “highest” meaning given to a meal. The
mechanism of recognition allows each member to be classed by a common
structure. Douglas emphasizes that language requires cognitive work
in a similar way. Linguistic patterns perform a similar type of
sorting function that distinguishes bounded order, separating
intelligible thoughts from chaos. It limits the number of structured
recognized in the name of parsimony. Finally, it calculates the
product of all of the meanings of linguistic structures, or here
meals, by weighting those near the upper bound of recognizable members
more heavily. This structure of other meals or languages is reflected
at each point in the scale, no single unit holds the basic meaning.

What are the ordered systems of a meal in a society that defines
success primarily along economic lines necessitating longer working
hours? Has the compression resulting from economic demands distorted
our current conception of a meal by normalizing the inclusion of
convenient food options divorced from their resource intensive
production? If so, what are some of the implications of this
inclusion for the meaning and position of other types of historically
recognizable meals?

[Gerone Lockhart]

Desire and emotions is an important issue in understanding food
politics. Simply put, foodie politics seem desirable to some and less
so to others. (And this is a different point as to whether those who
are sympathetic on surveys actually are motivated organic products
when confronted with cheaper alternatives.)

The Thompson (CSA) article points out that supporters of CSA receive
"reaffirming experiences of emotional immediacy, confidence in
outcomes, direct participatory involvement, and personal engagement
that are difficult to replicate in disembedded, polit-brand
community" (45). On the other hand, Johnston & Bauman's "Foodie"
points out the need for structural adjustments to achieve the goals of
foodie politics: "Our point here that citizenship demands that
consumer pleasures be reevaluated, redefined, and even restricted to
keep them congruent with larger political objectives" (170). This
assumes that the same objectives would not be met without political
intervention (170).

In both cases, the complex of pleasure and desire--albeit differently
oriented--is integral part of understanding consumer practices. So in
order to transform practice, we have to understand the desires of
various consumers and the things (including policy and price) that
structure their choices.

[Monique]

Johnston and Baumann highlight contradictions in the ways that the
ethical dimensions of eating were framed both by their foodie
interviewees and the larger foodie press. The authors noted three
frames that the foodies engaged to describe their understanding of the
political dimensions of consuming food: consumer-ethics, political-
eating, and apolitical-eating (p164). The consumer-ethics position is
consistent with the position that consumers can influence social
change by ‘voting with their dollars’. Participants who embrace such a
frame described purchasing organic, fair trade, or humanely raised
foods as a “win-win” situation where the consumer enjoys a higher-
quality product and makes a smaller impact on the environment.
Unfortunately, as highlighted by Johnston and Bauman, the “win-win”
paradigm is based on a limited set of ethical dimensions which focus
almost exclusively on environmental outcomes: rarely are other
dimensions such as worker health and safety taken into account. So in
practice, when viewing sustainability as a multi-faceted construct, a
win-win may in fact be a losing proposition.

What will it take to reframe the discourse away from the consumer-
ethics frame to a more citizen-based political-eating model?

Given the ways that eating habits help to reinforce as well as reflect
the cultures that they are in (Douglas), what is the potential for
shifting and reshaping ideologies to make eating a more sustainable
endeavor?

[Drew Love]

As someone who is skeptical of arguments for local food, yet simultaneously an avid local food practitioner, I found this week's readings to be particularly interesting. One of the reasons I'm skeptical is Seyfang's article which frequently mentions consumer's preference for local food because they believe local food travels fewer food miles than conventional, and therefore has a smaller environmental impact. My own understanding of the food miles argument is that yes, it's true that local food travels less miles to end up on your dinner plate, but the jury is still out on whether or not that's more environmentally friendly. The cause for debate revolves around transportation efficiency. One 18 wheeler truck is capable of transporting far more food than the typical farmers market truck\van, so while that 18 wheeler might be traveling more miles, it's environmental transportation impact could be smaller than 20 farmers driving their trucks to a market. There's also the argument about greenhouses, in which a greenhouse tomato grown in Boston during the winter has a more detrimental environmental impact than one field grown tomato trucked in from mexico. The food miles argument is complex, and for it to have already become an accepted and vital part of the localvore's stump speech shows a lack of critical thought.

I also think John makes an excellent point in questioning local food's importance in a clean transportation future. Granted, it's uncertain how long it will take the transportation industry to become carbon neutral, and is worth investigating if it's even a possibility, but it's at least an interesting thought experiment. If transportation has zero environmental impact, what is the importance, if any, of supporting local food? I believe one of the more important benefits of local food consumption is the direct to consumer market in which local food so often finds itself. In supporting local food systems, specifically through direct to consumer markets like farmers markets, CSAs, and small grocery stores that source locally, consumer support the local economies that Seyfant cites in her own article, as well as sustaining a system that is more responsive to community demands due to local businesses difficulty in asserting hegemony. 

Wal-Mart presents another interesting challenge to local food in that if Wal-Mart has cheaper local food, why buy it anywhere else? My argument would be that Wal-mart is unresponsive to the community, with a track record of employee rights violations, and has a reputation for exerting extreme pressure on their supplier, in this case the farmer. A large part of local food activism revolves around creating fair working conditions for farmers, and I find it difficult to believe that Wal-Mart would create an egalitarian relationship between themselves and the farmers who supply them with produce. 

[Sharon]

I think the main conclusion to be drawn is that capitalism is (again) at fault, and as long as we - as a society - adhere to its values, big corporate will always prevail, and that triumph can even be justified morally (as Tom pointed out).

But what if maximizing profit was no longer the main consideration? What if ethics mattered more than money?

[Margaret Lister]

After this week's readings, I went on Epicurious to find out how I could try to eat "more locally". The readings made it clear that food sustainability is best achieved through CSA, farmer's markets, and eating food with less "miles". Unfortunately, it seems absolutely nothing is in season in Boston right now, and membership in a CSA group typically costs about $500 for 10 weeks of in-season produce. This is a common practice plaguing sustainability, and one that I struggle with. How is it that normal, middle-class persons (or limited-budget college students) can integrate these practices into their daily lives? I found that "Foodies", though well-researched and insightful, portrayed only upper-class options. Is it possible for lower-income groups to also be "foodies"? There are evident inequalities in nutrition among lower-income and inner-city groups-- can sustainability solutions effectively address these? Sharon makes an excellent point "what if ethics mattered more than money" -- but we often forget that for most people, particularly in the developing world, this is not and cannot be a real question.

[Noel Munoz]

After reading the "Foodies" article, I could not stop thinking about those individuals that decide to become political eaters. As Johnston and Baumann state it is, "a process of thinking and engaging with the food system." (p.167) As much as I would like to think about everything I put in my body, it is nearly impossible to do so. In Thompson's piece he writes how, "In the United States, over 80% of all sales in the organic category hail from brands owned by corporate conglomerates."(p.4) A shopper or any consumer must consistently be reflexive in their shopping habits to keep up with what it is going on with their foods. In an ideal world we would all be fully informed about what we are consuming, but the problem like Shannon wrote earlier is that corporations prevent that. Ethics should matter more than money, but in reality the bottoms lines of business's financial statements will decide how a majority of our food will be made and harvested. It may be too much to ask people to eat everything locally like the couple from the 100 Mile Diet, but I do think it is possible for consumers to hold corporations/supermarkets accountable for the foods they are selling people.     

[Gemma]

I am interested in Tom’s point about “co-opting.” This movement is presented with a negative connotation, but is it such a bad thing? Yes I am a proponent of buying locally and shopping at farmers markets and the like, but how much of the population has this opportunity, or even has the resources? Products at a store like Whole Foods and Eoster are going to be much more expensive than produce at Wal-Mart. Co-optation at least exposes the general population to what organic products are. Would it be possible to phase out co-optation, possibly with help from the federal government? For example, if the government forced schools and hospitals to serve local organic food would it expose more families to the benefits of organic food? Maybe these institutions could even sell this food to the community.

[Drew Love]

Hey All. Just saw this article on Grist and thought it was relevant to the discussions we were having in class on Tuesday. 

Forget Farmers Markets I Want to See my Meat in Price Chopper