Food Politics: Ethics and Dirt and the Dinner Plate

Amy Bentley, a Profesor of Public Health at NYU, has this well-done* review of Food, Politics, Food Politics, Morality of Food Production, the Ethics of Foopd Systems, and what not, at the Chronicle.

The books reviewed in her essay are:

• Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany, by Bill Buford (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006)
• Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food, by Warren J. Belasco (University of California Press, 2006)
• The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan (The Penguin Press, 2006)
• The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, by Peter Singer and Jim Mason (Rodale Press, 2006)
• What to Eat, by Marion Nestle (North Point Press, 2006)

Coturnix is usually (and faithfully) on this (I mean that in a good way), so I expect that he'll add some commentary soon too, but for here, a few excerpts that get at Bentley's overarching sense of the books:

The books discussed here are concerned with food in all its broad sociocultural, environmental, and nutritional aspects, and all in one way or another are in dialogue with the current gestalt regarding food. What cultural currents underlie today's interest in and anxiety about food? First is the sheer amount of food that is available to Americans, with all the ramifications, positive and negative. The United States has become particularly adept at producing huge amounts of food, and we eat a lot more of it than we used to. The industrialization of agriculture, combined with government policies and politics encouraging the mass production of food, is a double-edged sword, of course. While it has facilitated better overall nutrition and health, it has also allowed excess and, ironically, poor health. While some critics wonder whether the uproar over the obesity "epidemic" is fueled less by health concerns and more by superficial cosmetic and aesthetic responses, there are important health concerns that can't be dismissed, such as the startling rise in Type 2 diabetes among children.

...plus, this nice summary point, which again touches on the consumption theme that has been making a place The World's Fair for a while now (here and here and here, for starters)...

Taken together, a cluster of themes emerges from these books. With various emphases, all address the ethical, health, environmental, and aesthetic issues as well as the anxieties about cultural and social reproduction that have been central to discussion about food production and consumption in the last decade.

...and the tidbit on relationships of food to human interconnection, to community, and family...

...food issues are a prominent part of the public discourse because for many Americans, careful consideration of the food one eats and serves one's family helps fill a spiritual void. As most of these authors suggest, only a return to more humane, more harmonious methods of growing, cooking, and eating will help restore a spiritual connection with the land, with our food, and with each other. This is not new, of course; thinkers from Thomas Jefferson to Wendell Berry have been preaching these ideas for years, but as we have entered the 21st century, these notions have taken a qualitatively different turn. As Jackson Lears has demonstrated about mass production in general, a century ago, many Americans felt alienated by modernism and the industrialization that severed the connection between producer and consumer; that alienation is still palpable in our relationship to mass-produced, industrial food.

And finally, from Marian Nestle, author of What We Eat (as quoted by Bentley):

"Willingly or not you participate in the environment of food choice. The choices you make about food are as much about the kind of world you want to live in as they are about what to have for dinner. Food choices are about your future and that of your children. They are about nothing less than democracy in action. I truly believe that one person can make a difference and that food is a great place to begin to make that difference. Yes, you should use personal responsibility -- informed personal responsibility -- to make food choices you believe in. Exercise your First Amendment rights and speak out. And enjoy your dinner."

*Originally not meant as a cooking pun, but then left in even when I realized it could be read as one.