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Reminders
TOMORROW, the Desk Salon featuring meat industry reporters Alice Driver and Melissa Montalvo at 11 a.m. EST. Members join free; anyone who signs up gets the video link. THURSDAY, I’m at Seven Acre Dairy in Paoli, Wisconsin, presenting No Meat Required along with a vegan Puerto Rican dinner featuring their region’s produce—I talked about it with the Madison Capital Times. OCTOBER 28, I’m teaching another edition of The Self-Edit Workshop.
In July of 2020, I wrote a short piece about why I consider this phrase a “liberal platitude.” It’s become one of my most cited essays, but I find it extremely dated now. The entire piece is tinged with the kind of apology one felt needed mustering at that time to avoid Twitter controversy, and I write things in it about my identity that I don’t even believe: I was simply trying to tread as lightly as possible in a landscape that felt littered with possible explosions.
Being “extremely online” was long my default mode, but I learned that it wasn’t doing my thinking any favors. I’ve worked in the last few years to kick the habit, to scroll with a critical eye, to remember that the digital is a small slice of life even as these corporations seek to become the whole pie. Living in San Juan rather than Brooklyn helped with that, too: to live in a major urban center can be, for the creative class, the IRL equivalent of being too online. One loses sight of how most people live and, for my professional purposes, eat. If my writing has gotten better, it’s thanks to practice and perspective—and because I’m no longer writing for Twitter.
All I needed to say about the phrase, then and now, is that if you’re going to invoke it, you need to explain the politics in question—because food is indeed political, to various ends. What are the politics of carnivore and meat-heavy diets? What are the politics of loosening USDA oversight of food-borne illness? What are the politics of affluent nations enabling the starvation of an entire population, and what are the politics of how it’s framed in mainstream media? What are the politics of cutting programs that allow small farmers to sell directly to schools and food banks?
I’d say, to put it briefly: right-wing, in favor of corporate power, and climate change–denying. I’m not being glib. These are recent and clear instances of food being used as a tool of right-wing and corporate power against working people. Not naming them as such has had consequences for how people understand what’s currently happening in the United States.
What I saw in food magazines and on social media in 2020 was that this phrase was used as a gesture toward a progressive politics that was representation-driven only, not concerned with economic or environmental reality. Going through how this phrase was invoked in the past, before it became a simple statement on its own meant to garner applause from a certain type of audience, I saw that it would usually come with an explanation: food was political because of the power dynamics it was used to express, whether because someone or a group was on a hunger strike or because another person or state was withholding nourishment from others. “Food is political because…”
It starts to take on its common tenor of a simple proclamation or exclamation in the mid-2000s, which makes a lot of sense. This is when the “food movement” as such burst into more popular consciousness: an interest in where food came from, the time of Omnivore’s Dilemma.
In the last five years, it’s certainly stopped being bandied about in quite the same way. Thank God. But I also don’t think that we’re necessarily in a time of robust mainstream analysis of how food is used as a political tool, most often as a tool of the powerful to oppress. There’s so much to say, but is it being said?
I wanted to revisit this idea because of something I read in the title piece from Ben Davis’s 9.5 Theses on Art and Class that really summed up the point I’d been trying to make, over a decade before I was trying to make it:
“The actual material situation” of food access and food media were what I wanted to talk about. “Simply insisting” that “food is political” without the concrete analysis Davis is referring to regarding art is particularly useless and self-aggrandizing. It’s even more so when it comes to food—everyone does have to eat! Not everyone has to look at art.
I am consistently going back to Ruth Reichl’s work to calibrate why I expect anything at all from food media, and I found this chapter she wrote from a book called The Art of Making Magazines where she talks about transforming the L.A. Times food section particularly clarifying. This is an absurdly long quotation, but I want you to read it—this is a newsletter, after all; where else can I just paste in this many words?—because it makes me feel like I’m not nuts for wanting food coverage to get into what’s really happening in the world:
When I arrived, it had been a classic women’s section, filled with pleasant recipes and helpful hints for things like how to recycle your old nylons into pot scrubbers. And it was very timid. It offended absolutely no one.
The first week I was there, I threw out everything that my predecessor had prepared—I think it was actually on using Coca-Cola in cooking—and sent a reporter out to find out how people on food stamps were eating. And, in the course of the next few months, we completely changed that section into something that was political and really dealt with the community, and was like nothing that that community had ever seen before.
And after the first couple of issues I had one with an old man on the cover, and Shelby came in and he pointed to the word “food” and he pointed to this man, and he said, “This is not this.” And I said, “Well, you know, if you think what I’m going to do is fill this section up with pleasant little recipes, find someone else to do it, because I’m not doing that.” And he said, “But, Ruth, your readers are just women looking for a little help with their daily cooking.” Which was not the right thing to say to me.
So I gave him this speech about how food was a really serious subject. And I said, “I want to cover politics and agriculture and sociology; and I’m not going to be happy until everyone in Los Angeles reads this section. I mean, I don’t want this to be a women’s section. Men eat too. Everybody eats. Everybody should read this section.”
And he backed out of my office, shaking his head. But I had a reporter who was covering the decisions they were making in Washington that affected the price of the food you were buying. And the supermarkets weren’t happy about that story. They had thought that they owned this section, and they really didn’t want this.
But what happened was that the readers started really liking this section. And after I’d been there about six months, Shelby came in one day and he said—sort of wonderingly, because he’s not a person who eats very much—he said he had been to a party the night before where a California Supreme Court judge had told him that it was her favorite section in the paper.
And a few days later, the paper did a focus group where they were trying to get people to talk about how they clipped coupons. And all these women wanted to talk about the actual content of the section. And one woman actually said, “You know, I may never use those Cambodian recipes that you printed last week, but this is really the only section of the newspaper where I find out what the lives of the people all around me are really like.”
And the point of this, I think, is that I learned that the only way to do a magazine—because this essentially was a magazine in a newspaper—is not to underestimate your audience, ever (which is one of the things that happens continually in food sections), and to follow your heart. That the only way to have a really good magazine is to print the things you want to read and assume that it will find its own readership.
“…the only way to have a really good magazine is to print the things you want to read and assume that it will find its own readership.” So often these days, publications seem to act as though their audiences have them held hostage, but I think the writers and editors are interpreting everything backwards. Give people the real story and watch them stick around. If food is political, give people the politics, not just the chicken recipes. And anyway, the chicken is neither morally nor politically neutral.
The Desk Salon Series
Tomorrow, Tuesday, September 23, at 11 a.m. the Desk Salon Series invites Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America's Largest Meatpacking Company author Alice Driver in conversation with Fresno Bee journalist Melissa Montalvo to discuss the book upon its paperback release, as well as the ongoing work of reporting on meat processing’s effects on workers, animals, and environment. Sign up here.
The Desk Book Club
We are currently reading the classic Vibration Cooking: Or, the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl by Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor. We will have our Zoom discussion in October—the date will be announced when we return to our normal programming.
What are the politics of this pressed mallorca? It’s sourdough!
Currently Reading
On the Calculation of Volume (Book II) by Solvej Balle (thank you to the wonderful Petya Grady for generously mailing me her copy!)