The New Politics of Food
posted by Geoff Andrews at Monday, May 26, 2008
26 May
Food now dominates the political agendas of many Western countries. Government policies on curbing obesity, concern over factory farming and the costs of maltreatment of animals, mounting ‘food miles’ accumulated by the increasingly diverse items sold throughout the year in multinational supermarkets, as well as a rising number of alternative consumption movements and the desire for local produce and farmers’ markets, have combined to tax the minds of both politicians and activists. If we add the questions of famine and fair trade, then food becomes one of the most contested sites in contemporary politics, offering a distinctive ‘way in’ to critical discussions over the nature of globalisation and the burning human questions of our time.
This growing breadth of food issues has precipitated a variety of responses, from governments, NGOs, celebrity gourmets, health experts, scientists and environmentalists. The urgency now given to obesity and famine has been matched in its intensity by the bewildering variety of explanations, studies and policy initiatives, many of which have contradictory findings and proposals. Food has become the archetypal example of that ‘postmodern ambivalence’ where our attitudes to living are no longer governed by the same certainties about health and quality of life because many of the scientific frameworks have broken down. Experts have lost authority - in the cases of BSE, GM food and nutrition – while, on the other hand, more ‘reflexive’ individuals exercise greater autonomy in making choices on how to live. The American food writer Michael Pollan has put forward a critique of what he calls an ‘ideology of nutritionism’, in his new book, In Defence of Food; an ideology which has delineated ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ways of eating, the main consequence of which has been to forget about real food.
The social and political movements which have grown around food in recent years resonate with the earlier decisive moments of the 1960s and 1970s when the ‘personal’ became ‘political’ and social movements asserted alternatives to political parties. Indeed, the new politics of food has brought forward new political subjects; those critical consumers whose choices of what to buy and their increasing interrogation of governments, businesses and corporations over the origins of the contents of their shopping baskets, now presents a formidable challenge to policy-makers. ‘Critical’, or ‘ethical’ consumption takes a range of forms, from boycotts to campaigns and alternative purchasing patterns. It reflects a more expansive view of politics at a time of so-called political disengagement, whereby citizens are said to have become estranged from the democratic process.
Perhaps we should also talk now of the gastronome as a political subject. Jamie Oliver’s interventions over school dinners and factory farmed chickens provoked wide public debate and in the first case had a direct influence on government policy. Of course there are many contradictions with Oliver’s position, given that he is a spokesman for one of the large supermarket chains. However, the force of his argument reflected more discerning and critical views on the origin and quality of food and has clearly had some impact on public debates. This and other public controversies over ‘food miles’, fair trade and sustainability, has helped to illustrate important questions.
Firstly, that any discussion of what we eat now has to confront the way it was produced, notably the environmental context, food miles and the treatment of animals. Secondly, and more contentiously, lurking in the background of this and similar debates is the focus on pleasure. This is a much more unsettling but also very creative aspect of the new politics of food, particularly in a place like Britain where, as Bill Bryson once put it, the idea of a good time is a cup of tea and a chocolate digestive. This uneasy mixture of aspirations for higher quality of life, responsibility to the environment and awareness of global inequality, has cut across ideological boundaries with some unlikely political allies.
It is this politics of pleasure which has driven movements like Slow Food to argue that pleasure is a ‘universal right’, denied us by the nature of contemporary ‘fast’ ways of living, working and eating. Researching my Slow Food book, I met many self-taught ‘gastronomes’, including Marxist wine producers, conservative organic farmers, as well as psychologists, chemists, chefs, journalists and bankers, who run the 1000 or so Slow Food convivia (local groups) across the globe. As political leaders they perform the usual role in of chairing and minuting meetings and organising the membership, with the unusual added function of promoting ‘moments of conviviality’ in the pursuit of an ‘educated pleasure’. This is derived from greater awareness over the diversity of tastes and flavours, and dependent on the knowledge and expertise of local producers, the ‘intellectuals of the earth’, as well as the environmental conditions for producing food. It is the convergence of these concerns over health, impending environmental crisis and the desires of the palate that have given gastronomes a new status and distinguish them from the more trivial and limited outlook of the gourmet and the glutton. Carlo Petrini, Slow Food’s founder and president, has argued that the gastronome who ignores environmental questions is stupid, while the environmentalist who pays no attention to gastronomic pleasure is sad.
The rise of food to the top of government agendas has been accompanied by new developments in the academy with the growth of new food and gastronomy departments, and we can look forward to some innovative research areas. Firstly, there is the interest in gastronomy itself. The new University of Gastronomic Sciences, (http://www.unisg.it/) set up in Italy in 2004, offers students a mixture of options including food science, gastronomic literature and the sociology of consumption, and has a wine bank, restaurant and hotel on campus. This has given gastronomy the status of an academic discipline in its own right and also allowed it to escape from its elitist origins in 18th century bourgeois France to concern all matters associated with the production, cultivation presentation and consumption of food, many of which have deep historical and cultural associations.
Secondly, there is the exciting prospect of new food courses in social science specifically. Of course food has long been of interest to anthropologists, sociologists and economists amongst others. From Claude Levi-Strauss in The Raw and the Cooked to Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction , the links between food, culture and social stratification have a long history in academic study. However, we can detect some new fields which might form the basis of future interdisciplinary courses. In addition to investigations of the social and political movements that have grown around consumption, these might include the relationship between food, place and identity in the era of globalisation, where local places, in the words of Doreen Massey, ‘are not only the recipients of global forces, they are the origin and propagator of them’. In the case of food, this becomes apparent in the new tensions between the defence of local traditions at risk of global monocultures and the expansion of corporate business, with implications not only for questions of famine and inequality but cultural diversity and biodiversity. Food gives local places a sense of history and identity but these links have been a neglected area of research. Food has become an exemplary site for understanding the nature of contemporary globalisation, economic inequality and environmental crisis. Debates about class and social status are now often seen through diet and consumption patterns. These, together with the links between cultural and media representations of food and the changes in food policy, are likely to be fascinating areas of study for social scientists in future years.
Geoff Andrews is the author of The Slow Food Story: Politics and Pleasure (Pluto Press/McGill-Queens University Press 2008)