Time For Lunch

posted by Geoff Andrews at Saturday, April 16, 2011

In a recent BBC Radio Scotland lunchtime interview, I was told by the interviewer - possibly in a hurry for his supermarket sandwich - that we don’t really have time for lunch anymore. Those that do (and I imagined him pointing the finger) are clearly a privileged minority, wandering around farmers’ markets at their leisure, while ordinary folk went about their business in harsh times with great velocity. In fact, ‘fast’, normally seen as the key to enlightenment and progress, was now seen as the austere and inevitable condition of modern life. Inescapable. Time for lunch? Must be joking.

However, those that see the erosion of the lunch hour as a necessary consequence of the recession underestimate its wider social value. The situation in schools is one example and has produced big debates on both sides of the Atlantic. Slow Food USA’s ‘Time For Lunch’ campaign was an ambitious project aimed at influencing the Child Nutrition Bill, and in particular raising the meagre $1 dollar a day school lunches. It was launched in 2010 with 300 eat-ins and 20,000 people involved in a nation-wide network. The overall goal is to take lunch seriously and to provide all kids with healthy sustainable food that tastes good. Such a campaign gets to the core of the ‘cheap food economy’, making the link between health care, diet, the production of food and the environment. The campaign provides another clear illustration of how the way we eat defines how we live.

In Britain, our own school meal campaigns, led by Jamie Oliver and others, have had their own impact, though the new coalition government has threatened recent progress by involving McDonald’s and other fast food monopolies in health policy. But the problem is more severe than that and goes beyond school meals. We are in danger of forgetting about lunch entirely. The British ‘lunch hour’, the product of a wider historic struggle for working conditions down the years, is now in jeopardy. In fact, according to the campaign group ‘Bring Back Britain’s Lunch Hour’, launched by the online recruitment firm Monster, 19% of British people take 15 minutes or less for lunch, while 10% never take a break. They found that one of the most favoured lunchtime activities was the ‘power nap’.

In 2010, apparently thinking along similar lines, Unison, Britain’s largest trade union, launched a ‘Reclaim your lunch hour’ campaign to combat workplace stress with a free picnic for members. Yet, the current recession and widespread financial insecurity is likely to curtail Britain’s lunch hour further as employees seek to economise as much as possible. The sandwich next to the computer, or employees remaining ‘chained to the desk’ as Monster refers to it, is already a familiar sight in offices across the country.

Long lunches have unfortunate connections with the ‘business lunch’ culture of the 1980s. These ‘yuppie’ years, associated with arrogance, excess and drunkenness, have given lunch a bad name. Even in food conscious Italy, the ‘Milano da bere’ (the ‘Milan you can drink’), in which Silvio Berlusconi first made a public impact with his TV networks, the Italian corporate world embraced such gastronomic horrors as Pasta con salmone affumicato. In Britain long lunches are inevitably equated with big drinking.

We have no need to return to those years. Yet, ironically, the current alcohol-free fast and work-dominated lunches have brought different problems. On the one hand this reflects a prissy managerialism which has replaced convivial eating with a rigid live-to-work culture. If lunches take place at all, these are dull business affairs with specified outcomes to be achieved by the time the bill arrives. Ordering wine in such company is like swearing in public; dessert, clearly frivolous and off-message. For the majority, lunchtimes have become individualised and anonymous, with employees furtively returning to consume their sandwiches in front of the computer. For all its acclaimed sophistication, global-speak and service ethic, corporate culture has more than done its bit to erode the simple pleasures of life. There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but soon there may be no lunch at all.

Let us propose the ‘Slow Lunch’. The best lunches I enjoyed recently have been in Badellino’s restaurant in Bra, Piemonte, Italy, while researching my Slow Food book. They were long and delicious, with seasonal local produce always on the menu. But they were also convivial. My companions were a rich mix of Slow Food afficionados and locals, with our hosts Giacomo and Marilena cheerfully putting up with the eclectic diet of football, food and politics. Slow Lunches needn’t be solely an Italian phenomenon. In Balthazar, the bustling Manhatton bistro, waiters are admired for their ‘civil inattention’ to the diners, rather than grabbing your plate as soon as the fork hits the table or bringing the check before you have asked for it.

Therefore, we shouldn’t think of Slow Lunches as the pursuit of hedonistic pleasure or only possible in Italy. They are good for work too. Not for the ‘points mean prizes’, how- to-motivate- your- workforce-for-better-performance kind of way. Rather, for generating ideas and exchanges, intellectual promiscuity and above all for reviving one of the simple pleasures of life.

The New Food Movement

posted by Geoff Andrews at Monday, April 04, 2011

Open Democracy 4 April


The international food debate has exploded over the last decade, extending from the many banal and trivial TV programmes - “food pornography” as some call it - to the proliferation of local food groups, the development of ideas of “slow food”, and a burgeoning interest in all aspects of the food economy. A broader politicisation of food is evident in the emergence of some unusual political alliances and new political subjects - the gastronome, the dinner-lady and the small farmer (the last of which has reached almost cult status in the rapidly evolving food movements in the United States).

Indeed, I would argue that the movement around food in the US is one of the most significant of modern times, drawing as it does both on the traditions of the 1960s-1970s and the energy of the new social movements. Food has become - to use an older phrase now being recycled by contemporary activists - the “edible dynamic” at the heart of mainstream economic and environmentalist debates (see The Slow Food Story: Politics and Pleasure [Pluto, 2008]).

Slow Food USA is becoming the most powerful political wing of the international Slow Food movement. It has a rapidly growing membership and a strong presence on university campuses, and is supported by an impressive range of writers and activists (such as Alice Waters, Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser). The popularity of films like Food.Inc has touched a chord with a new generation; with more than 100,000 twitter followers, @SlowFoodUSA is now out-tweeting McDonald’s.

Britain’s Conservative-Liberal coalition government, in power since the election of May 2010, is pursuing a regressive health policy in regard to food. The health minister Andrew Lansley’s decision to involve fast-food chains like McDonald’s and supermarket monopolies in so-called “responsibility deals” threatens to halt encouraging initiatives to improve school dinners and tackle obesity and alcohol abuse.

Many of the new food movements have denounced the proposal. Jeanette Longfield of the food and farming group Sustain argues that this is the equivalent of allowing tobacco companies to decide on smoking legislation; the TV gardener Monty Don questions whether this is a “junk-food government. Yet the response from most of Britain’s centre-left, from the Labour Party and trade unions to assorted intellectuals, has been (to say the least) tepid. There has been little attempt to galvanise opposition amongst the growing movements, or prioritise food as an area where the government is vulnerable. Food, compared to other issues - fundamental as it is to so many of them - remains marginal for many on the left.

The appetite for change

This reflects a deeper flaw on much of the left (and here too Britain is something of a exception in relation to much of Europe). The enduring suspicions of sensual pleasure on the left reach a different sort of peak where food is concerned. The tendency to miss the unifying and egalitarian potential of food politics - and see only the divisive aspects - has led to their removal from some of the new movements.

The cultural underpinning here is partly that the left in Britain often confuses “pleasure” with “luxury” - in direct contravention of one of its heroes, William Morris, who condemned luxury as the “sworn foe” of pleasure because the race it entailed to provide goods for the rich had replaced the simple pleasures of life with ugliness and waste. Moreover, historians like EP Thompson (Morris’s biographer) and Raymond Postgate gave great attention to food in their accounts of early working-class movements; and Postgate went on to become the first editor of The Good Food Guide.

A positive sign here is Slow Food’s commitment to the “universal right to pleasure”, which draws on the energy of earlier social movements while arguing that everyone should have access to healthy, sustainable and good-quality food.

But more generally, the power of global capital and associated supermarket monopolies, the growing global divide between abundance and hunger, the conditions of workers in the food industry should all be at the centre of a sustained critique by the left about the new politics of food.

The food movement in the US has taken on these concerns, informed by post-1960s counter-cultural politics. Michael Pollan’s seminal article “The Food Movement, Rising” (New York Review of Books, June 2010) reflects on the ideas of the “back to the land movement”, Woodstock and the Diggers, to conclude that the current food movement encapsulates a similar focus on identity, community and pleasure.

The politics of food in the US also reflects the country’s deep ideological divide, where initiatives to tax soft drinks (the “soda tax”) go to the heart of the “cheap food economy” and its reliance on fast food and big global brands. At its simplest and most evocative, this politics is reflected in the idea of Slow Food Nation. This is more than a slogan, or simple opposition to fast food; it has become emblematic of an alternative way of living. After all, the idea as defined by Eric Schlosser expressed a form of domination that had entered into every “nook and cranny of American society” - implying that the alternative too needs to be be politically and culturally holistic.

The Slow Food Nation idea - originally the title of an event held in San Francisco in 2008 - is driven largely by a new generation of student activists, environmentalists, small producers and farmers as well as politically engaged foodies. A leading student movement in the country is Slow Food on Campus, which organises a range of “eat-ins”, boycotts of campus refectories selling GM or unsustainable food, and “buy-ins” of local organic produce from independent producers. These have had some success in changing catering policy but probably a bigger impact on what used to be called “consciousness raising”. Student-farmworker alliances have also had some success in gaining better working conditions amongst migrant workers.

Slow Food Campus was created by the Slow Food USA movement under the visionary leadership of Josh Viertel, a former farmer and youth food activist. Slow Food USA operates in quite different conditions from Italy, where the movement was founded; it is fast becoming the international movement’s most political arm in raising awareness of food poverty and inequality, and pressing politicians over the Farm Bill, school lunches, and other issues.

The taste revolution

There is no reason why the food movements should be the property of any ideological movement or political constituency. The politics of food has certainly brought together some unusual alliances, drawing in organic farmers, green activists, urban-guerrilla gardeners, and metropolitan gastronomes. The ecology of activism stretches wide, from (in Britain) the Soil Association and Sustain, which have forged effective alliances on the now-threatened school-food initiatives, to Slow Food UK, which has launched its own Slow Food on Campus.

Perhaps the one movement in Britain that embodies the energy of earlier decades is the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra). This group, founded in 1971, focuses on a wide-ranging set of concerns that encompass support for local beers and historic pubs with opposition to the power of big breweries and defence of the pub’s community role (an issue which relates directly to the availability of cheap supermarket alcohol and it association with many social problems). Camra’s impact in mixing politics and pleasure has brought it over 100,000 members, 200 branches, sixteen regional associations, and 5,000 volunteers who organise 150 beer festivals a year.

The politics of food and its implications for the new movements have been explored on openDemocracy (including in a series in 2003, and in later articles) and elsewhere. The distinctive feature of these movements is the links they make between politics, the economy, the environment and health.

The “edible dynamic” provides both a holistic critique of the way society is organised and a prefigurative approach to the future (reflected in the rise of the Transition Town movement which invests in local and sustainable food producers). Perhaps more than on any other subject, debates about food concern ways of living and the future of the planet, where - from from farmers’ markets to food festivals - citizens can taste what Alice Waters calls the “delicious revolution”.