by Mark Greif
Today we participate in a late modernism and even a postmodernism of food. We witnessed, after the triumph of a previously unquestioned project, a characteristic latecoming struggle around the nature and direction of progress. First, in the late 1960s, came reactions against the inhuman technical character of food science and “agribusiness.” Critics in this phase pitted themselves against consumer capitalism. This initial reaction was romantic and primitivist, associated with the late-1960s counterculture and the movement “back to the land,” just a few decades after productivity gains had led an agrarian population to leave it. It brought a call to the East for mystic authenticity in the culture of “health foods”—tofu, brown rice, yogurt, seaweed, wheat germ, made from the live spirits and microbes excluded in industrial processing. (These were the parts that were said to live and germinate, against an antiseptic modernist technics of death: the Bomb and pasteurization were made by the same culture. I rely on the historian Warren Belasco, who has extensively documented both the actions and the imagination of the early food counterculture.) This counterculture, too, introduced its own countertechnics of food-medicine, in remedies either Western but crankish and eccentric (like the chemist Linus Pauling’s early championing of Vitamin C, a scandal in its time) or Eastern against the West (macrobiotics, acupuncture).
Soon a more flexible capitalism proffered a new set of options that allowed the dissolution, or simply the side-by-side juxtaposition, of opposites, and a new field of cooperation. The standard of “health” perhaps foreordained that the dropouts would deliver themselves back into the hands of experts. Proselytizing pioneers of the counterculture became the arbiters, physicians, and best friends of an expanded version of the Western capitalist culture they believed they had critiqued: figures like Andrew Weil, MD, the “healer,” and the organic “growers” of Cascadian Farm. The conceit of magic pre-existing “natural” remedies and supplements and minerals (red wine, chocolate, “fiber,” “antioxidants,” et cetera) was brought under the mantle of medical testing and food enhancement. Food scientists and processors ceased to fight their former opponents, as they were licensed by the counterculture to process and formulate new concoctions and mine new markets evaluated, not by opposition or refusal, but along the common metric of health. The postmodern moment can be identified whenever the tug of war between “scientific” food progress and “humane” food reaction produces more business for both sides. In our moment, the options exist in plural, and the most self-satisfied individuals graze from two troughs, the scientifically fashioned and the organically-romantically grown, with the same rationale of “health” for both.
(Food science, to make this clear, was not intrinsically evil or flawed, and the food counterculture was not just about optimizing toothsomeness and health. Both possessed utopian desires. Whenever utopians present the substance of their wishes and fight to make them actual, a fair number of their dreams will come true, often because the triumphant ideas have won less philanthropic allies. The best hopes for humanity will be used to pick the pockets of mankind.)
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The contemporary transformations of food are associated with a new impersonality imparted to the field—making of eating a “hobby,” one pastime among others.
I was watching a beauty pageant on television when it introduced video of the young women contestants addressing the camera about their favorite reliefs from schoolwork and pageantry. What were their hobbies? Many listed “eating.” I suppose you could hear “eating,” not “cooking,” as a victory for feminist equality. It’s not housework. Since, though, presumably, these women must constantly not eat for the sake of their figures and their competitiveness, the hobby pleasure of eating becomes slightly sinister. It seems like the frenzied entertaining that rides atop an alternative housework, when the body is the single-occupancy house.
New food entertainments have changed the character of the tradition devoted to cooking and dining. It has given interest in food an increasingly abstract character, as a “spectacular” function of food can be divided off from its practical, gustatory function. We learn to take our foods at a remove. First, the contemplation and nutritional analyses of our foodstuffs becomes a semi-autonomous “scientific” sphere independent of any particular meal or mouthful. Second, our entertainments create a standpoint of satiety or disinterest from which you can contemplate food without hunger and find pleasure in that contemplation.
We’ve had an explosion of “food writing,” as the bookstore category is renamed from “cooking” to “food.” We have memoirs in food, novels with recipes, high literature that expands to absorb a “canon” of twentieth-century food writers from A. J. Liebling to M.F.K. Fisher to Ruth Reichl. Chronicles appear of a single comestible through history, cod or salt. The newsstand purveys magazines that range from the scientific purism of Cook’s Illustrated, to the aspirational luxury of Gourmet, to the academicism of Gastronomica. The Food Network delivers twenty-four-hour TV programming devoted to cooking and eating: interminable specials on barbecue, semi-celebrities peddling the delights of chipotle. (In Harper’s a few years ago, a well-meaning critic devoted himself to exposing that channel’s programming as “gastropornography,” trapped by the same leveling action between food and sex that makes all of our basic bodily desires into just one thing.) And late at night on TV, between the other paeans to desperation (“Been in an accident?”; “Foreclosure problems?”), are the pitches for miracle metabolism supplements, fat-burning capsules, and colon cleansers.
It may seem odd to think of food warnings and diet plans as entertainment, too. Certainly they’ve taken on the same spectacular character, though, and offer a linked way to spend our time. Should we eat wild or farmed fish? Is chocolate healthy? And is red wine? Last month, the magazine Health featured an advertisement for its Web site: “Trying to figure out what fish or vegetable is safe to eat this week?” It wasn’t a joke. Nor was it just about contamination—it concerned a weekly shift in knowledge. The whole idea of food “news” announces the end of thousands of years in which there couldn’t be such a thing as “news” in food. On one channel, we have competitive eating, broadcast as sport; on another, a weight-loss game show, The Biggest Loser. On one, how an automated factory makes Ho Hos; on another, the nutrition report. The point is not that we’re “schizophrenic” about food, as some say—celebrating gluttony and advocating dieting. The point is that although we’re collectively amused along two separate tracks, both may have a common meaning and, perhaps, purpose.*2 Their meaning lies in making food “discursive” along every axis. Their purpose? They may constitute a more fully integrated system at the level of social regulation, underlying what look like contradictory temperaments and local interests.
And this allows the step backward from immediacy that perhaps lets us think of our mortality, our bodily incarnation in its journey toward death, as likewise groomable, accessible to recipe—and preparation, and taste—if not yet subject to an absolute choice of when we die.
The most modern and elite of our eaters find that careful discriminations, taboos, and rigorous exclusions still lead down both paths without contradiction: toward the totally engineered and compressed vitamin pill; and toward the organic, sourced, inherited, unmodified “whole” food—not “made” but harvested, not altered (in this imagination) except by joyful labor. You can eat your PowerBar, product of an engineering as peculiar as most the world has known, and wash it down with unpasteurized unfiltered cider pressed by Mennonites, and on both fronts, you find it good.
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A friend of mine sighs and says he wishes he didn’t have to eat. He wishes he could take a pill that would cover all of his physical hunger for two weeks, say, or a month. Then he would have meals only when he wanted to, purely for pleasure: he would be completely free. Another friend wishes for a magic food that could be eaten all the time, in satiating quantities, in different flavors, that would require exactly as many calories to chew and digest as it contained. Truly
magic food would be calorically null. Then she wouldn’t have to monitor what she ate; she could eat the largest quantities of food she wanted, to gratify any hint of hunger, without it being incorporated into her body as weight. When a third friend is about to eat a food that has fat, especially meat fats or hydrogenated oils, he imagines the interior arteries of his heart becoming clogged with a yellow-white substance, like margarine or petroleum jelly. When he eats calories or fats, he imagines individual particles entering shrunken fat cells in his belly and seeing them stretch and become oblong. When he eats meat, he imagines it passing through his colon with a rough texture that scrapes the walls, roughening them, to make them susceptible to cancer. He conceives an evil superfat, beyond palm oil, soybean oil, and trans-fatty-acidic frying oil, one that can spread from food into every cell, hardening the arteries, clotting as plaque, making him obese. No true account of our food predicament can leave out our weird food imagination.
Taste is conditioned by ideas. The most confusing foods to taste now are those that are bad for you but delightful and delicious, and those that are “natural” or rare but flavorless. You learn to taste artificial grape flavor as “cheap” or chemical. With “refined sugar” or fried food, you say, “I enjoy having a Coke and onion rings, but I get a headache afterward”—and then you get the headache. Meanwhile, a “healthy” taste will be the aggregate of all the carrots, apples, breakfast bars, protein shakes, fruit smoothies, chewable vitamin C tablets, tempeh, green tea, and zinc lozenges that have crossed your lips. When you eat the supermarket tomato that tastes terrible, it is “terrible”; when you bite into the heirloom tomato that happens to be tasteless and watery, you adjust it to taste “real.”
Then we’re asked to picture our insides and feel toward them. “Beautify your insides”—an advertisement to young women for Metamucil, illustrated by a presumably gut-emptied fashion model complacently reclining against a drape. “Fall in love with your numbers”—the campaign for a blood-sugar-managing diabetes medication. We have developed the imagination to read advertisers’ incongruities without halting: “A jolt of health.” “All of the good fats you need, without any of the bad fats you should avoid.” “Imagine getting the benefit of a whole growing season in one tablet.” “Discover how good your body was designed to feel.” “Stress less with the best-selling, multi-award-winning anti-stress drink.” “The twenty most powerful superfoods of the moment.” “Our products are sweet. Knowing where they come from makes them sweeter.” Each sentence is worthy of contemplation.
Beside the familiar “design” perversion of the theory of evolution, the strangest and deepest implicit principle on view may be the dogma of total effect. “Everything that goes into food goes into you,” runs the frightening apothegm of one last health-food advertisement. There is nothing that goes through your body, on this principle, that doesn’t permanently change its makeup. Nothing fails to be incorporated. It is like the idea of a perfect ledger of what you consumed over a life, as if your body grew or aged differently based on every single item to pass your lips, or could be audited for the sums in different columns. Not for us, the quite reasonable supposition that the majority of what we eat doesn’t change us, that human beings have been digesting so much for so long that they eat disparate foods with identical outcomes.
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As ideal types, the gourmet and the foodie may best represent the imagination of food as it has subtly modulated for its most elite connoisseurs. The gourmet of past decades wed himself to a single place: Western Europe, and more particularly France. He learned to cook a single alien cuisine, French, and his time and attention went toward two basic activities, cooking and importing. He cooked a limited palette of dishes and learned a set sequence of techniques. The gourmet knew foods that lent themselves to travel: wine, cheese, sausages (or charcuterie), pâtés, later coffees and chocolates. He would have a shop in his wealthy town that sold these items (the “gourmet shop,” the “wine and cheese shop”), and as an “expert” he could match wits with the experts who worked and shopped there. Julia Child exemplified the old gourmet.
The foodie differs in having the whole world at his fingertips. There is no single preferred region. There is the globe. If his cookbooks are European, they gravitate first to Europe’s warm and “savage,” uncivilized places (Provence, southern Italy), then quickly slide to brightly illustrated new books carrying him to Turkey, Morocco, Vietnam, India. No single tradition exists for him to learn, no singular importers to patronize, but rather an ocean of ingredients that wash up on his shores—in the high-end supermarkets, which pretend to adventure among wild foods (the one nearest the n+1 office is called Foragers; Trader Joe’s represents the supermarket as a colonial trading station), in the old gourmet shops that survive on sufferance, and in the ethnic groceries, where the “ethnic” food may even include the foodie’s native, childhood cuisine.
The foodie wades out and swims in possibility. And then, surprisingly, many a foodie will deliberately restrict his range. He begins to set rules or laws for himself that make the quest for food harder and the thinking more complex. Undiscovered foods only; “authentic” restaurants only, or kitsch diners, or barbecue joints; organic food only; local or farmers’ market food; historically reconstructed food; raw food or slow food only.
A foodieism even exists of carnivorousness, or disgust: eating body parts that have become disreputable or rejected. Anthony Bourdain, traveling five thousand miles in business class to eat a sheep’s eyeball, is one type of foodie hero, the authenticity-, nature-, and experience-devouring buccaneer who acknowledges disgust only by appalling, cautious, philistine eaters. The rules or laws of his restrictions may be contradictory, operating in different food spheres; yet the true foodie can keep several going simultaneously, or slip from one regime to another. Not everyone undertakes the path of restriction, or follows it rigorously, but enough do, and the trait is essential.
The gourmet was always close to the snob. He wanted to be an aristocrat and identified with tradition. The foodie comes after the eradication of tradition’s limits. He is not like an aristocrat, but like someone who has stumbled into obscene wealth by happenstance—as, judging globally, any of us in the rich countries has stumbled into wealth by the luck of where we live, and into food wealth by our system of cheap overabundance, and our access to all the migrant cuisines that shelter in America and Europe. There is no food we can’t access. There is no traditional food, moreover, that can’t be further enchanted by our concentration, restriction, choice, and discrimination between better and worse specimens. Would you like some chipotle with your lemongrass? We add the value of our intellectual labor, our “finishing” of the world’s raw materials. Foodieism is a natural hobby for first-world professionals, ostensibly taking up the world, but referring back to domination and the perfection of the enriched, physical self.
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It would be foolish to suggest that we have not had strong critiques of the new food order. They come in two forms, and can represent a kind of fraternal warfare. First, we have exposés of our “fast-food nation” and brilliant critiques of the national addiction to corn syrup. These come from the partisans of “nature,” who fight industrial or mass food. Second, standing against them, the chef-, kitsch-, or ethnic-food-worshipping gourmands occasionally strike back. They accuse the nature lovers of tampering with pleasure, acting like killjoys, or speaking condescendingly from a position of purism (from which the gourmands also often speak, differently, but never mind).
Occasionally the two sides coalesce in a single figure. The most prominent recent voice ostensibly of the nature-oriented critique of food is the journalist Michael Pollan. His Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006) has been presented as the Silent Spring of this decade. It takes its great moral gravity from the orientation with which Pollan starts: that of the public good, the good of the environment, even the interests of animals. Yet it, too, flops over into a gourmandizing vision of a rich person’s rare satisfact
ions, and sutures the seeming incompatibilities through a double appeal to health and the environment.
Part of the book is superb, among the best expositions of its kind. Pollan does investigative journalism to dramatize the contemporary critique of corn overproduction caused by the United States’ celebrated twentieth-century mechanization of agriculture and planting of hybrids. Others have put together the analytical pieces of this puzzle of unintended consequences, but Pollan makes it live. The consequence of reliance on a single crop and the necessary introduction of artificial fertilizers has been land damage. Tractorized corn farming causes overexpenditure of fossil fuels in an artificial economy sponsored by the state (leading to carbon pollution and resource depletion). It cheapens the feed for food animals, particularly beef cows and broiler chickens, whose expanded ranks likewise add wastes to the environment, while the removal of animals from dependence on grassland allows humans to abuse them in ever more confining pens. The consequent lowering of the price of meat leads humans to eat too much of it, because they can afford it, and thus to suffer new health problems. Meanwhile, the processing of large quantities of corn into too cheap a form of “unhealthful” nutrition, in the use of corn syrup to sweeten and calorify just about every processed food, creates obesity and ill health by a second route. And corn is further processed into all sorts of tertiary food products (fillers, binders, emulsifiers) not easily found on their own in nature, with ambiguous effects on human mortality.
