What We Talk about When We Talk about Food

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2009 by Phillips, Siobhan

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Or rather, what don't we talk about? And who isn't talking or listening or at least overhearing? From all sides these days comes the question of sustenance: Obama pledges to improve food safety as India sets up soup kitchens for malnutrition and Gwyneth Paltrow drafts a "family cookbook." World trade talks lock over agricultural tariffs as tomato harvesters petition to end slave labor and scientists debate the merits of transgenic grain. General Mills refuses hormone-treated milk, Cadbury's Chocolate plans to minimize cow burps, the Peanut Corporation of America declares bankruptcy. Movie theaters welcome Food, Inc. and No Reservations, Super Size Me and Julie & Julia; on TV, "Top Chef' and "The Biggest Loser" fatten their ratings. What dishes one consumes or refuses, what food products one buys or boycotts, constitute an expression of style, statement of politics, reflection of values, index of environmentalism, pledge of allegiance, and measure of health. Chew carefully, then. Swallow. Wonder when this got so complicated.

To a degree, it has always been so. "Tell me what you eat: I will tell you what you are," Brillat~Savarin challenged his readers in 1825, and his wisdom if not his brio was already old hat. Human meals serve those mixtures of raw and cooked that make up anthropological codes. Nearly every prescription or preference blends irrational faith and scientific requirements, as Marvin Harris shows in his fascinating Good to Eai~ look long enough at a seemingly arbitrary food rule (cloven hooves, sacred cows) and one can probably discover a self-preserving logic behind it, but look hard enough at an apparently sensible directive (a glass of milk, a handful of supplements) and one will like as not detect a prejudice posing as sense. Omnivorous and hungry, body and spirit, we sit down at a table spread with necessary choice; we cannot eat to live, that is, without in some measure living to eat. As Laurie Colwin once put it, then, cookery books will always "hit you where you live." What seems distinctive and disquieting now, what seems to have increased in the two centuries since BrillatSavarin shot a turkey in Hartford or even in the two decades since Colwin roasted a chicken in her New York apartment, is the number of volumes hitting us combined with the force of their impact. A nation with a lot of food books is a nation without much sense of food, as The Economist recently pointed out. Michael Pollan pinpoints the same contradiction at the start of The Omnivore's Dilemma: the market for writing about eating is a people who do not know how to eat. In what spirit, then, are we to read the remaining pages of Pollan 's book, the best food reportage of the last decade and a touchstone for the current preoccupation with better dining? Is our attention a path out of darkness or a perpetuation of neurosis? How are we to approach a contemporary shelf that runs from The End of Food to The Engine 2 Diet to The Face on Your Plate, that describes both The United States of Arugula and Fast Food Nation, that serves a Righteous Porkchop as it asks What Would Jesus Eat? and questions The Gospel of Food, that tells us How to Cook Everything, What to Eat and why Food Matters?

With awareness of history, maybe, as well as attention to current events: seeking cultural criticism as well as specifying culinary changes. The general question of culture seems to lurk behind many contemporary confusions over diet; such anxieties are particularly pressing, moreover, in a country that has long identified its culture by the very lack of one and that has often been justifiably ambivalent about this condition. America's absence of tradition precludes the sophistication of the Old Country while maintaining the egalitarianism of a New World. The condition twists anyone who tries to describe "American food" - in the face of well-defined cuisines from France or China or Italy or India or anywhere. America means an exhilarating mixture, a country where bagels, ramen, hummus, and pizza are consumed without prejudice by citizens without passports. It is a place where an improvised ground-beef sandwich with a German name can become the most popular dish. But then, America also means a confusing equivalence, a country where pizza bagels, pesto hummus, and picante ramen are as authentic as any other version. It is a place where an indistinct assembly-line beef patty is the only common taste. Perhaps the two descriptions exist symbiotically, perhaps belief in diversity demands a resistance to standards. To promote a national cuisine may be to betray our national principles.

Indeed, those principles of welcome are particularly linked to food, since the original culture of the American colonies depended on the culturally original fact of agriculture itself. Anthropologists regard the beginnings of crop cultivation and animal husbandry, 10,000-odd years ago, as the start of human civilization, and America would grant a fresh version of the same to those who claimed a piece of wilderness and planted a furrow of seeds. If one squints at the race and gender restrictions that narrowed this plan, not to mention the Native cultures that it nearly eradicated, the idea still glows with a Robinson-Crusoe-ish confidence, an Enlightenment belief in which the unlimited freedom for selffashioning begins with the back-to-basics fact of self-nourishment. To feed oneself is to govern oneself. Jefferson suggests as much in his explanations of the farmer-citizen; practicing what he philosophized, he legislated for the new republic while raising everything from artichokes to yams at Monticello. In 1782, Cr�vecoeur could draw on Jefferson's suppositions when he published Letters from an American Farmer, when his book asks, "What then is the American, this new man?," the title has already answered. Its plainspoken Farmer James even concludes a blissful reverie on American life with a hymn to American soil. "On it is founded our rank, our freedom, our power as citizens . . ." he explains. The statement still echoes: when Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry, just this past January, wrote a New York Times op-ed about "soil loss and degradation," their forward-looking and scientific advocacy invoked an age-old and ideological trust in our literal land.