"Edible Media" is a biweekly look at interesting or deplorable food journalism on the web.
The left has always had an uneasy relationship with pleasure -- and thus with food. For every freewheeling beatnik or free-loving hippie, there must be 10 dour left-wingers who see personal pleasure as an obscene indulgence in a world wracked by war, hunger, oppression, and environmental ruin.
Yet one of the most powerful critiques of consumer capitalism is that it drains life of vivid pleasure and offers instead "pleasure." A handmade dark-chocolate custard becomes a dull, corn-sweetened "chocolate" shake. Peddling boundless diversity and freedom, mass-market consumerism delivers regimentation, sameness, and mediocrity. As Michael Pollan showed in Omnivore's Dilemma, the dizzying variety arrayed on U.S. supermarket shelves boils down to endless combinations of two ingredients: corn and soybeans.
By treating pleasure and food as beneath responsible discussion, the left cedes too much to the hucksters who run the show. Rather than deride pleasure as a vice of the rich, the left should try to revive it as a principle for all.
That's why I was happy when the left-liberal weekly The Nation came out with its first issue devoted to food this week.
Presided over by that grand dame of the U.S. sustainable-food movement, Berkeley restauranteur (and '60s protester) Alice Waters, the issue bristles with the sort of high seriousness one might expect from the venerable political weekly.
But that's okay; food and pleasure are many things, including serious topics. In the issue's introduction, Waters sets the tone:
The pleasures of the table also beget responsibilities -- to one another, to the animals we eat, to the land, and to the people who work it. It follows that food that is healthy in every way will cost us more, in time and money, than we pay now. But when we have learned what the real costs of food are, and relearned the real rewards of eating, we will have laid a foundation for not just a healthier food system but a healthier twenty-first-century democracy.
That's good stuff. The rest of the issue fleshes out those ideas beautifully. There's Eric Schlosser's blistering exposé of how the government coddles Smithfield Foods, that corporate villain; there's a blunt assessment of Wal-Mart's move into organic food by Liza Featherstone, perhaps the retail giant's most insightful critic; and the most nuanced and thoroughly reported piece I've seen yet on working conditions on California's organic farms, by Felicia Mello.
Most importantly of all, the issue illuminates what I see as the most hopeful sign of all that the U.S. might be poised at the edge of a mass real-food revival: the urban food-justice movement. Check out (among others) Habiba Alcindor's piece about how black farmers, who as a group have had a much tougher 50 years than even white farmers, are creating markets in black urban neighborhoods.
These are all topics dear to my heart, and the articles taught me much.
I wonder if the issue's publication date, Sept. 11, 2006 (like many weeklies, The Nation dates its issues weeks ahead) was intentional. Since September 11, 2001, the magazine has seemed even more inhospitable than ever to food coverage, as the president moved the country into war without end. But to paraphrase Bush himself, such an attitude lets the warmongers win. Here's hoping that food becomes a regular Nation topic.
Comments
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Heidi Posted 8:44 am
30 Aug 2006
I found the piece about farm worker health particularly interesting. While I would like to know what the conditions are like at farms I support, I hate the idea of more produce stickers!
http://groxie.com
DIY Environmentalism
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bookerly Posted 12:53 pm
30 Aug 2006
Thanks Tom. I don't really consider the Nation as left wing (not for a number of years), but this was a great issue anyway (smile).
All of the articles were useful and informative.
And of course, I loved the labor article. Jim Cochran shows us one way to solve the problem.
The challenge for all us (not just the farmers) is to design an agricultural and economic system that not only cares for the land, but the people who work it.
And it's not just up to farmers to do this. They are part of the middle of the system, not the owners of it.
The treatment of farm workers (and the working poor) is an American shame. (Not just organic farmworkers).
We need to begin, all of us, to care, and then to think, discuss and find better ways.
patrick
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Tom Philpott Posted 8:21 am
31 Aug 2006
I think a cup of really good fair-trade coffee might do these folks some good.
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bookerly Posted 10:49 am
31 Aug 2006
Not sure where most of the Chinese coffee comes from (Vietnam is the likely source, unless it is grown here). And Starbucks doesn't sell beans (at least the ones I've been in, nor do other stores mostly). Most people don't brew at home, they consider coffee a luxury drink which is drunk at high priced coffee houses.
(These are a very lucrative business, $2.50 US for a small cappucino. You can have an entire meal for less elsewhere!)
In the states I drank the Thanksgiving Company's Organic Fair Trade Break the Cuban Boycott Dark French Roast (exact name may vary), which was quite delicious, and if you can find some, drink a cup!
Here, I mix two powdered caps and one powdered latte to get a cup of something or the other (smile).
FWIW, a lot of the Nation readers are ex-leftists, which may explain their bitterness!
patrick
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