Professor Laudan, what are you getting on about exactly?
In a piece entitled “Towards A Culinary Ethos for the 21st Century”, you propose several frameworks for understanding both our food history as a country and proposing a “culinary ethos” as you refer to it. In the end, you walk away with a conclusion that the first step in developing such an ethos for the 21st century is to abandon the slogan “our food system is broken, we must fix it”, which is described as being
“…at best unhelpful, at worst misleading. “Our food system” suggests a monolith, perhaps even a conspiracy, with problems that no one except a chosen “us” has noticed or is trying to improve. “Broken” suggests that in the past this imagined food system was whole when it never was. Instead of such sloganeering, I urge continuing the steady, ongoing work of identifying and solving the multiple problems of our multiple food systems so that, without exploiting workers or endangering the earth, the riches so many have come to enjoy can be spread yet further.”
This call to action is many things, most of them fundamentally disappointing to me as a student of history and practitioner in food systems spaces. This piece, and its final conclusion, are ahistorical, cobbling together a series of assumed relationships that have little material basis in reality. It ignores, through intention or via oversimplification, years of food systems work conducted by a multitude of disciplines and organizations that directly feed to the notion that the dominant food system requires reform and change. And that yields the last issue — that in never asking where such the notion of our food system comes from, you perpetuate an intellectual violence against those most directly affected and living through the experience of our food systems, attempting to depoliticize and diminish a specifically political program of increasing economic and political agency within our food system.
It’s not that there isn’t material to be agreed upon: our layers of production and supply chains operate in a way that has changed what we eat, how we eat it, and the expectations we draw from our food supply greatly in the last 60-plus years. But how we read that story matters; Mike Davis pointed out in his “Late Victorian Holocausts”, sometimes grand narratives of history, in the work of simplifying complex events down to more digestible stories, obscure important voices and eliminate the agency of responsible parties. And in your historical framing of America’s moral economies of food there’s a lot of, shall we say, abridgment that goes on. The civil rights movement may have used restaurant counters as a protest stage, but their political call to action wasn’t about eating “like everyone else” — it was about political and legal agency and the rights of full citizenship. The detailing of the Industrial Revolution, the Westward Expansion, as just things that happened that changed our relationships to food and not as intentionally pursued parts of a national policy program feels jarring, especially given their impact on varying foodways. To talk of a counter-culture cuisine or moral critique of food production starting only in the 1960’s means rejecting not just the work of those like the Frances E. Willard (on food purity and women’s work) or Sheila Hibbens (on diet), but Upton Sinclair, FH King, and WEB Du Bois, who were pointing out failures in systems of production and labor and their impact on agricultural, urban, and minority communities of their time. The frameworks you shoehorn food history into aren’t chronologically consistent nor necessarily contemporary with each other, and raised my eyebrows for the sweeping generalizations and inaccuracies they make.
The generalizations matter because these narrative frameworks are not neutral; if there’s a simple nobility to the republican ideal, the social democratic counter cuisine has disappeared, overturned by conscious capitalism. Or, in some romantic solipsism promoted by college students, Michael Pollan, and Alice Waters, it’s responsible for holding back progress in the underdeveloped world. And while there’s an admission that no food system is perfect, you are seemingly willing to give all benefit of the doubt to the existing predominant system of food production, while reducing criticisms of it to an opposition to plenty and progress — never minding that most criticism of the food systems that exist is that they not only fail to provide plenty, but that they actively hinder the progress of communities through the lack of political and economic agency within them. These voices do not exist in your reading, or if your citations of Pollan, Waters & Petrini ought to be enough, ventriloquizing them without acknowledging their belief that food that is “good, clean and fair” is a political right (for Petrini and Waters, at least) is intellectually convenient for you, but is frankly a dishonest interpretation of their words and work. What is really gained by eliminating the voices of the food sovereignty movement, the voices of labor history, minority history, and environmental history, those data points and those lived experiences? That environmental sustainability hasn’t been part of the picture? Maybe read nearly a century of affairs, from Bennett to Rachel Carson to critiques of why monocultures may be bad in Sub-Saharan Africa and see that they have been part of the conversation for those who cared to look or think on them. To quote from Davis in the conclusion of Late Victorian Holocausts: 'How do we weigh smug claims about the life-saving benefits of steam transportation and modern grain markets when so many millions, especially in British India, died alongside railroad tracks or on the steps of grain depots?’’ The same can be said of the argument you pose here.
Getting rid of the statement “our food system is broken, we must fix it” is a form of intellectual violence, as is repurposing the moral economy of food that underlies it in the ahistorical fashion you ask for. In your final section, you ask for a depoliticized action, one where a sort of bureaucratic scientism will save the day and deliver an optimal ethos. That vision denies the history of those affected and the needs that they voice, as if the systems that gave us this supposed abundance did not also design much of its harms. There are legitimate, intricate and interconnected harms — economic, environmental, social, political, historical and otherwise — that lead many to say the food system is broken. Their call that “we” must fix it is a call to action, to claim agency that for many has been long denied, restricted, or limited, oftentimes through bureaucratic or political means. It is a reclamation of political agency for what is fundamentally a political project — not a nostalgic Romantic mythology. The first stage of engaging with as complex a notion as a culinary ethos is understanding the stakeholders and hearing them, not speaking over them with half-thought through pronouncements that nullify their experiences and community histories. As Amartya Sen wrote, there are “disastrous consequences of fierce economic inequality combined with a drastic imbalance of political voice and power…that exemplify a wider problem of human insecurity and vulnerability ultimately related to economic disparity and political disempowerment.” The type of history that you tell, Professor Laudan, is engaged in a politics of removing voices from the table by pretending as if they do not exist, in history or the present. And that is what makes me angry about your piece, Professor Laudan — you have elected to silence these histories and claim their words as your own, without even acknowledging them, and you have pretended to disavow the politics of your decision to do so.