by Bonnie Azab Powell
(Watershed Media)In what is ostensibly a five-book review for the June 10 New
York Review of Books, journalist Michael Pollan has an epic essay charting the
emergence and character of the food movement. Or, as he puts it,
“movements.” They are unified, for now at least, by little more than the
recognition that industrial food production is in need of reform, “because its
social/environmental/public health/animal welfare/gastronomic costs are too
high.” (Pollan, of course, has been indispensable to the rise of this movement, even though he omits his 2006 best-seller, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, from his
list of its catalysts—among them Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Marion
Nestle’s Food Politics.)
This collection is a “big, lumpy
tent,” says Pollan:
Where many social movements tend to splinter as time goes
on, breaking into various factions representing divergent concerns or tactics,
the food movement starts out splintered. Among the many threads of advocacy
that can be lumped together under that rubric we can include school lunch
reform; the campaign for animal rights and welfare; the campaign against
genetically modified crops; the rise of organic and locally produced food;
efforts to combat obesity and type 2 diabetes; “food sovereignty” (the
principle that nations should be allowed to decide their agricultural policies
rather than submit to free trade regimes); farm bill reform; food safety
regulation; farmland preservation; student organizing around food issues on
campus; efforts to promote urban agriculture and ensure that communities have
access to healthy food; initiatives to create gardens and cooking classes in
schools; farm worker rights; nutrition labeling; feedlot pollution; and the
various efforts to regulate food ingredients and marketing, especially to kids.
Yep, that about covers it. And those factions don’t always
play nicely together. For example, animal-rights activists can’t abide what I like to call
the “born-again carnivores”—the people (like me) who used to be vegetarians
but resumed eating meat once they could get it in good (or at least
better) conscience from small farms.
Pollan finds one common point on which all the various
movement splinters can agree: that the way our food system is organized and
supported in this country has led to an epidemic of ill health. First Lady
Michelle Obama’s various forays into food politics shows just that there is awareness of that fact occurs in very high places. But the food
movement isn’t just about tearing down the unhealthy, unfair, and unclean
industrial food system, says Pollan. It’s also about celebrating the communal and gustatory
pleasures of its opposite—and that’s what makes the food movement so appealing. Farmers
markets aren’t just outlets for organic kale; they’re the new informal
gathering places to meet and make friends. They make food shopping fun again, no longer a grim sprint behind a cold
metal cart through aisles of corporate logos.
In the final part of the essay, while discussing
political scientist Janet A. Flammang’s new book, The Taste for
Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society, Pollan takes aim at a
favorite target: the corporate message that cooking is a chore and convenience food can rescue us from it. Fast food and convenience food,
writes Flammang, along with other tactics to denigrate “‘foodwork’—everything
involved in putting meals on the family table,” have wrecked the critical social institution of
the family meal, and other important food rituals, such as the
breaking of bipartisan bread that used to occur in the Senate dining room.
Reclaiming
cooking and communal eating as worthy societal activities are just two goals
the various factions of the food movement can agree on. They’ll need to find
more common ground if they hope to persuade politicians—and the rest of the country—that theirs is a cause worth backing.
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