A Foundation for Food Politics

Why I return to these three books again and again.

Now that I’m being interviewed about my forthcoming book, I’m being asked how people should eat. I bristle at this question: The idea that there is any one “right” way to eat for everyone in every place is absurd. Attempts to flatten regionality and ecological reality into one big global diet are imperialist at their core, whether their goal is a “green revolution” or a half-earth rewilding. 

What people expect me to say, I suppose, is that everyone should be a vegetarian. I don’t believe that, though, because I understand many people’s nutritional, cultural, and even local ecological needs not to be in line with a meatless life. I don’t eat meat because I don’t want to eat meat, and because I know that the amount of meat consumed in the United States—the country of which I’m a citizen—is an active threat to life on the planet. I try to make it enticing for other people who inhabit this same citizenship and who have the ability to make this choice to eat less meat. 

So I answer in a sort of long-winded fashion about imagining a world no longer buoyed by resource extraction from the Global South or massive land use to serve industrial livestock production. I don’t suggest we erase the past—that would be useless, even as a thought exercise. But imagine sugar grown that first provides for its local population before being exported; imagine agricultural practices that serve the land first, provide a sustainable livelihood for those who work it, and feed regional populations. The Global North can still have its sugar and bananas, just as the Global South can still have its wheat and wine, but they’re produced in line with ecological limits, a population’s need, and do not serve first and foremost a market that benefits only a few. The world hasn’t been built for food sovereignty, but it could be set up for equitable food interdependence. People would eat what mainly grows where they are, but not just that. What can be grown at a large scale to the benefit of the global population without being a detriment to the planet or laborers would be. Basically: The global food system wouldn’t exist to make a profit. Finally, it would make sense.

This is as likely a pipe dream as wishing away centuries of colonialism rather than recognizing its pulse coursing through every system and structure, I know. Had it not been too expensive, though, my book’s epigraph would have been from Diane de Prima’s poem “Rant”: The only war is the war against the imagination. I’m a writer; the imagination is my job.

My imagination around the global food system, like many folks’, has been formed in large part by Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Mintz was an anthropologist who was called “the father of food anthropology,” and he did his fieldwork among sugarcane workers here in Puerto Rico—the place where I live, from where I claim some ancestry, and which has been instrumental in forming my personal food politics through reporting, reading, and being. I also, as a person who found her culinary creativity in the arena of sweets, think quite a bit about sugar. 

The book is about how sugar went from luxury to common commodity, how patterns of its spread throughout the world mimicked that of European power and the economy of Western capitalism. Sugar was an easy way to add calories to the diet of the proletariat without the addition of meat, fish, or poultry—and through this, it was a symbol of “development.”

Even those populations who had been consuming sugar for centuries, like Mexico, Jamaica, and Colombia, became consumers of the refined white sugar. “The use of white sugar and of products fabricated with simple syrup has spread downward from the Europeanized elites to the urban working classes, then outward to the countryside, serving as a convenient marker or social position or, at least, aspiration,” he writes. One brand of sugar sold in Puerto Rico, once a booming sugar economy, is called “Snow White”; its label depicts snowy mountain peaks, which don’t exist in the tropical regions where sugarcane can grow. You can still find it at the supermarket, but it will have grown and been processed somewhere else. There are no more functional sugar refineries on the archipelago.

The way sugar gained traction, and is one of the reasons Sweetness and Power has been so influential, is that the process by which it became standard is one that other categories have also followed. Most foods we consider a daily staple or given were once rare or expensive—meat is one of these—and became commonplace because it would serve a political or economic purpose, like getting the proletariat more calories without actually increasing their nutrition. It’s an understanding of the political construction and purposes of the foods we take for granted that Mintz provides here. And in places where both sugar and slavery’s legacies persist in their influence on the structures of daily life, the beams of this construction remain quite visible, even as they’re transformed for other political purposes. (e.g., The sugar plantation leads the way for the development of a touristic paradise and service economy.)

As Rachel Laudan writes in Cuisine & Empire: Cooking in World History, “The new dishes and meals of the urban salaried class appeared to citizens to be the new national cuisines.” Laudan takes as its subject cuisines specifically, defining cuisine as “ordered styles of cooking” that only become possible as humans took on the “unremitting burden” of cooking. Historically, she writes, the largest empires have had the most widely consumed cuisines—this is something we’ve seen shift with the emergence of the “food adventurer” and the culinary capital that comes with being well-versed in a variety of foods. 

Laudan separates cuisines into peasant, middling, and high, with “middling” being what most people eat and the difference between it and “high” cuisines having essentially been lost over time. She argues that processed and fast food, as well as high-yield, mechanized farming have been good things for mainly rooting out diseases of poverty in many places. That women are no longer forced to spend hours grinding grains to feed large families and instead can go to Walmart is a good thing, she notes, as she writes that the people who work in the food industry as of 1997 “did so, in most cases, by choice and were paid to do so.” 

“By choice” is doing a lot of work there, considering the labor conditions of meat processing, farm work, and even working at said Walmart. The reality that cooking has been, throughout history, a woman’s burden will come up again and again: This is a political use of food like any other.

I don’t disagree with Laudan that a lot of good has come with industrialization to many people, especially around leisure time and the eradication of diseases of poverty in many places, and this book—originally published in 2013—does a great service to changing the narrative that there was once a beautiful agrarian past that we have lost. At every point in our cooking history, actually, people have been suffering for our dinner, whether they were in the field, at the mill, or in the next room at the stove.

I do think Cuisine & Empire’s great achievement is as a jumping-off point for those who want to understand how cuisines have been shaped throughout history. It’s through looking at the ways in which cuisines were actively constructed, again, that we can remember how to stay alert to the ways in which they continue to be actively molded and how we can take charge of their future shape. Cuisines aren’t stagnant, but living.

That’s the purpose of Fabio Parasecoli’s Gastronativism: Food, Identity, Politics. Gastronativism is, as he defines it, “the ideological use of food in politics to advance ideas about who belongs to a community (in any way it may be defined) and who doesn’t.” Parasecoli, in this short text, is meeting a moment of political, pandemic, and climate crisis with all the tools of analysis provided by the work of folks like Mintz and Laudan.

There are exclusionary and non-exclusionary forms of gastronativism, Parasecoli writes: the non-exclusionary include those who are against globalization, the folks of the so-called “food movement,” and those who are in favor of food sovereignty. The exclusionary forms are often rooted in white supremacy, anti-immigrant, and other xenophobic or hegemonic motivations: Exclusionary gastronativism, for example, can mean that in Poland, people should eat meat, and in a India ruled by a Hindu nationalist party, people should not. It’s the same food, for the same purpose of exclusion, defined differently depending on the location and motive.

“Political controversies about food are rarely about food,” he writes, and these three texts, being ostensibly about food, are also about so much more—and it’s why they’ve been able to provide a foundation for thinking through how food is used for imperialist, colonialist, and increasingly fascist purposes. And they provide a framework for understanding how to use food as a decolonial tool (as much as I hate to use “decolonize” as a metaphor!). It’s why I go back to them again and again, and why they form the basis of analysis in the next few weeks. 

For the introduction to this series and the full reading list, see “What Could ‘Food Is Political’ Mean?”

This Friday’s From the Kitchen dispatch for paid subscribers will be the first installment in a new monthly series on my favorite and most-used kitchen tools. I will explain to you exactly why everything I reach for every day is a must-have. Last week, I provided a base for a vegan barbecue, complete with mushroom pinchos cooked over fire and beans in escabeche served with plantain chips.

See the recipe index for all recipes available to paid subscribers and consider the From the Kitchen supplement an ongoing cookbook. In addition to the new series on tools, I’ll be doing more menus like last week’s barbecue and writing up more about doing plant-based pantry cooking that includes seasonal ingredients.

Published

I binge-watched screeners of season two of The Bear last week to turn around this review of the entire ten episodes for Slate. I love this show and these characters so, so much. (As with last season, I have a more personal essay in me about why.)

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I wrote about how cookbook publishing is finally letting plant-based cooking reflect the world for FoodPrint.

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There’s a very nice, short review of my forthcoming book No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating at Civil Eats, which included it as part of their summer book list. “Kennedy admires the weird and countercultural and guides readers to see plant-based eating through a culturally appropriate, justice-focused lens,” writes Caroline Tracey, who really nailed my three narrative threads! And yes… I admire the weird…

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I’ll be in conversation with the fabulous author of Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen, which just came out in the U.S., Rebecca May Johnson on July 19 on Zoom through D.C.’s Bold Fork Books (where I’ll be making a live appearance on my book tour in September). Tickets are available!

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My small capsule jewelry collection with By Ren, whose designs are handmade in Philadelphia, is live through the end of 2023. The pearl cocktail picks would make a wonderful gift for a martini drinker!

Reading

I’ve been focused on magazines and newsletters, lately, as I figure out how I want to take this newsletter into the future! It’s very nice to think through and attempt to figure out an editorial vision for what this space could be and how it could be a more robust outlet for the food media I want to see.

Cooking

I did a small tweak to the sweet plantain caramel cake that I think made it so much easier to work with, in case you have a very ripe plantain hanging around your house. The result is pictured above!