Thoughts on consumption and virtue.
I'm about a quarter of the way into Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, which I cannot recommend highly enough. That man can make non-fiction both edifying and enjoyable to an extent I've seen few other authors pull off, and so far this book surpasses both The Botany of Desire and A Place of My Own (both of which I also liked). In the first section on corn, he explains that part of the rising popularity of processed foods resulted from the allure of modernity and purity confirmed on them by science. (Well, that and really clever marketing.) They were better than natural, because unlike plants and animals, which grew to ensure the continuation of their own species, processed foods were engineered with our needs in mind. Lately, the value spectrum has flipped with "natural" rising up on top in marketability. This doesn't mean that whole foods are supplanting processed ones, but that the "goodness of nature" is being reengineered into our food, turning it into "food systems" and "nutraceuticals." (Again, better for us than in its unalderated form.)
This got me thinking about my own eating (or more specifically, food-buying) habits. I've been trying to avoid the more processed of processed foods for years, and ever since I've learned to cook I've preferred to make as much as possible from scratch. In the past year or so, I've been making more of an effort to buy foods that can be described by one or more of the following terms: local, sustainable, organic, fresh, fair-trade. After reading Pollan's explanation for the meteoric rise of processed food in the U.S., I started contemplating my purchasing practices and the way I talk about them, and I realized that (in some parts of public discourse) this kind of consumerism is coded as virtuous, educated, discerning, and morally superior. This isn't exactly news to me, but I haven't thought about it in depth before -- probably because it meant I would have to stop secretly congratulating myself for making these changes. There are good (or at least superficially persuasive) reasons for why buying these kinds of foods are "better" -- it promotes local businesses (which we're told is good, especially if they're small), it creates market incentives for returning to agricultural practices that don't have accellerating environmental fallout (which I'll outright say I think is good), it can mean a better quality of life for the organism destined to become our dinners (and I'll skip the digression into the philosophy of mind debate), and supposedly I'm making a sacrifice of money/time/brainpower in seeking out these "more ethical" alternatives. In return for these sacrifices, we supposedly get enhanced health plus the moral high ground, which comes with bragging rights masked as edification of our more ignorant peers.
Still, at the bottom of it all, we're talking about virtue having been reassigned from one commodity to another, and as the changes in my buying practices demonstrate, I'm the target market for the packaging of ethics with your meal. And I'm trying to peer behind the curtain to see the values that make this marketing so effective. There's definitely nostalgia for the way we "used to" live and "used to" eat (though I somehow doubt my shtetl-dwelling ancestors ever saw a brick of tofu or a bunch of bok choi). There's the valuation of health (which in a rapidly sickening nation is loaded with all sorts of ties to class and luck both). There's a sheen of sophistication (hey, I've heard the Europeans still make meals of actual ingredients that were grown by actual farmers). And there's our good old Puritan value of restraint (as I'm not just eating any old thing that comes to hand -- I'm taking time, I'm making an effort).
Still, I think any close analysis of the contents of my kitchen would show that my purchasing and eating habits are driven by the virtuous illusion rather than actual fact. A Big Mac is too processed for me (plus, gross), but my soy yogurt wasn't. When I'm not too lazy, I buy my dry goods in bulk from Winco, and I've got no idea where the hell their rice comes from. And I'll shun a Hungry Man TV dinner, but I'm convinced for no good reason that the frozen foods isle at Trader Joe's is better for reasons beyond just the taste. So my virtuous purchasing is apparently limited to fresh and perishable, where their origins take the fewest steps to trace. (And even then I'm pretty much taking the supplier's word for it.) And my ability to do even this is a result of my privileged circumstances; check it out:
1) I live within a mile of a local-food-carrying vegetarian coop, a regional natural-foods chain grocery, a local bakery chain, and an open-air produce market specializing in regional, organic, and Food Alliance produce at low prices (hi, Uncle Paul's -- really, you guys should shop here).
2) I'm in a part of the country very well-suited to agriculture, with everything from dairies to wineries to a gazillion different kinds of produce.
3) The marketing of "green" took off in this city years before I got here, giving local businesses an incentive to cater to this newly growing and profitable niche.
4) I'm an upper-middle class twenty-something with no children, no debt, and enough disposable income that I can spend more for fresher and more "ethical" food.
So where does this leave me? Well, I've definitely going to own up to the fact that my willingness to inconvenience myself seems directly related to the experiential benefit I get (food I make from fresh ingredients really does taste better to me than processed food) and to the virtuousness I confer on myself for doing so. Meanwhile, I haven't gone vastly out of my way to really educate myself about the sources of the food I'm buying (i.e. by looking beyond the person selling it to me for information) and their various impacts on environment, workers, owners, etc. Basically, I'm buying in to the hype and not currently doing much else to better the world around me. That said, though, I'm not going to quit buying these virtuous foods just because I'm going to try to stop stroking my own ego for buying them. I really do believe it's important to support small producers who are practicing sustainable agriculture, because they're getting pounded by industrial agrobusinesses everywhere except this niche market. And I am healthier for being knowledgeable and selective about what's going into my body. Finally, Pollan made a good point -- even in our relatively recent evolution, we weren't eating anything more processed than cooking, curing, or salting made it. (Even canning is only about 200 years old.) Because we're omnivores, we've adapted pretty well to processed foods -- but that's not what our evolution tailored us for, and we're starting to see the health fallout on a scale big enough to actually impact us as a species. (When obesity affects 1 in 5 adults in the U.S., and 1 in 3 children born in 2000 is expected to develop diabetes, I think we can say that being poorly suited to our diet is starting to effect survival on a considerable scale.)
Still, if I really want to put my ethics in action, I need to start trying to change policy so that we're not financing ever-increasing corn production to the (present or eventual) detriment of everyone but a few huge agrobusinesses, so that food surplus starts going to people suffering from malnutrition instead of being processed into nummy treats for people suffering from overnutrition, and so that it begins making economic sense to grow food in sustainable practices based on the sun instead of unsustainable ones based on a threatened supply of petrochemicals.
This got me thinking about my own eating (or more specifically, food-buying) habits. I've been trying to avoid the more processed of processed foods for years, and ever since I've learned to cook I've preferred to make as much as possible from scratch. In the past year or so, I've been making more of an effort to buy foods that can be described by one or more of the following terms: local, sustainable, organic, fresh, fair-trade. After reading Pollan's explanation for the meteoric rise of processed food in the U.S., I started contemplating my purchasing practices and the way I talk about them, and I realized that (in some parts of public discourse) this kind of consumerism is coded as virtuous, educated, discerning, and morally superior. This isn't exactly news to me, but I haven't thought about it in depth before -- probably because it meant I would have to stop secretly congratulating myself for making these changes. There are good (or at least superficially persuasive) reasons for why buying these kinds of foods are "better" -- it promotes local businesses (which we're told is good, especially if they're small), it creates market incentives for returning to agricultural practices that don't have accellerating environmental fallout (which I'll outright say I think is good), it can mean a better quality of life for the organism destined to become our dinners (and I'll skip the digression into the philosophy of mind debate), and supposedly I'm making a sacrifice of money/time/brainpower in seeking out these "more ethical" alternatives. In return for these sacrifices, we supposedly get enhanced health plus the moral high ground, which comes with bragging rights masked as edification of our more ignorant peers.
Still, at the bottom of it all, we're talking about virtue having been reassigned from one commodity to another, and as the changes in my buying practices demonstrate, I'm the target market for the packaging of ethics with your meal. And I'm trying to peer behind the curtain to see the values that make this marketing so effective. There's definitely nostalgia for the way we "used to" live and "used to" eat (though I somehow doubt my shtetl-dwelling ancestors ever saw a brick of tofu or a bunch of bok choi). There's the valuation of health (which in a rapidly sickening nation is loaded with all sorts of ties to class and luck both). There's a sheen of sophistication (hey, I've heard the Europeans still make meals of actual ingredients that were grown by actual farmers). And there's our good old Puritan value of restraint (as I'm not just eating any old thing that comes to hand -- I'm taking time, I'm making an effort).
Still, I think any close analysis of the contents of my kitchen would show that my purchasing and eating habits are driven by the virtuous illusion rather than actual fact. A Big Mac is too processed for me (plus, gross), but my soy yogurt wasn't. When I'm not too lazy, I buy my dry goods in bulk from Winco, and I've got no idea where the hell their rice comes from. And I'll shun a Hungry Man TV dinner, but I'm convinced for no good reason that the frozen foods isle at Trader Joe's is better for reasons beyond just the taste. So my virtuous purchasing is apparently limited to fresh and perishable, where their origins take the fewest steps to trace. (And even then I'm pretty much taking the supplier's word for it.) And my ability to do even this is a result of my privileged circumstances; check it out:
1) I live within a mile of a local-food-carrying vegetarian coop, a regional natural-foods chain grocery, a local bakery chain, and an open-air produce market specializing in regional, organic, and Food Alliance produce at low prices (hi, Uncle Paul's -- really, you guys should shop here).
2) I'm in a part of the country very well-suited to agriculture, with everything from dairies to wineries to a gazillion different kinds of produce.
3) The marketing of "green" took off in this city years before I got here, giving local businesses an incentive to cater to this newly growing and profitable niche.
4) I'm an upper-middle class twenty-something with no children, no debt, and enough disposable income that I can spend more for fresher and more "ethical" food.
So where does this leave me? Well, I've definitely going to own up to the fact that my willingness to inconvenience myself seems directly related to the experiential benefit I get (food I make from fresh ingredients really does taste better to me than processed food) and to the virtuousness I confer on myself for doing so. Meanwhile, I haven't gone vastly out of my way to really educate myself about the sources of the food I'm buying (i.e. by looking beyond the person selling it to me for information) and their various impacts on environment, workers, owners, etc. Basically, I'm buying in to the hype and not currently doing much else to better the world around me. That said, though, I'm not going to quit buying these virtuous foods just because I'm going to try to stop stroking my own ego for buying them. I really do believe it's important to support small producers who are practicing sustainable agriculture, because they're getting pounded by industrial agrobusinesses everywhere except this niche market. And I am healthier for being knowledgeable and selective about what's going into my body. Finally, Pollan made a good point -- even in our relatively recent evolution, we weren't eating anything more processed than cooking, curing, or salting made it. (Even canning is only about 200 years old.) Because we're omnivores, we've adapted pretty well to processed foods -- but that's not what our evolution tailored us for, and we're starting to see the health fallout on a scale big enough to actually impact us as a species. (When obesity affects 1 in 5 adults in the U.S., and 1 in 3 children born in 2000 is expected to develop diabetes, I think we can say that being poorly suited to our diet is starting to effect survival on a considerable scale.)
Still, if I really want to put my ethics in action, I need to start trying to change policy so that we're not financing ever-increasing corn production to the (present or eventual) detriment of everyone but a few huge agrobusinesses, so that food surplus starts going to people suffering from malnutrition instead of being processed into nummy treats for people suffering from overnutrition, and so that it begins making economic sense to grow food in sustainable practices based on the sun instead of unsustainable ones based on a threatened supply of petrochemicals.