Selling Food Ethics

The first time someone called me a “foodie,” I cringed.  I could tell he didn’t mean it particularly as an insult, or a stamp of class.  But I took it as both.  Working on my food ethics – reading everything from books on different diets like the Zone diet and Mediterranean diet to zoomed out critiques of our food system like Barbara Kingsolver and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, to memoirs about emotional eating like When Food is Love by Geneen Roth, and stories about growing food – I overhauled my eating habits and learned to be food competent while putting restrains on what I would eat, cutting out meat and then a lot of dairy and sourcing locally and from bulk commodity coops.  The memory of hunger was what spurred me on.

Being called a “foodie” – which I more or less took to mean someone who is upper middle class, wants to avoid eating food that’s harmful and have only “the best,” and thus loves Wholefoods and lives on organic, fancy foods – really hit me the wrong way.  I think I felt like he had some idea of my place in the current system, his identifying me as a “foodie” implying that my political will was a privilege (which in some senses, it is) signifying a certain background, and assuming my political will had been nicely appropriated into the status quo.  Food was a hobby with an ethical twist.

I wouldn’t be so sensitive about the term now, but I might still be annoyed.  Because it points to something that really upsets me about our culture, a sort of pitfall people’s evolving ethics can fall into out of common, human laziness or simply get bogged down in for lack of knowing what else to do.  Some folks seem to be interested in wholesome, organically produced (or not chemically contaminated), local foods as a privilege offered only to them.  They see it as “the best,” what is owing to them, a signifier of class.  Other folks seem to be interested in wholesome, organically produced, local and ethically produced foods as a privilege that ought to be extended to everyone including themselves.  That is a marked difference.

Adding a niche of ethically produced food into a system where food self-sufficiency is not being rebuilt and most folks are not getting adequate resources to change their habits is merely a way to cash in on rising political consciousness while maintaining the status quo.  An unjust system selling or allowing the sale of ethics to a privileged few is not a gateway to change.  It’s a scary paradox of capitalist consumerism, the sale of ethics, the sale of safe food, as a niche market.  It won’t disrupt the status quo.  And it is scary to think that some of us privileged enough to know about our food system, grow leery and critical of it, and to have resources enough to spend more and have access to better foods should be so easily pacified as that – we get ours, comfortable in the assumption we will always be privileged enough to get it, and we’re all set.

On Food and Class

When I moved away to college, the first major area of ethical overhaul I focused on was food ethics.  My family had gone through a financial crisis that left us destitute with no income from when I was 13 to 17, and I spent those years drastically underfed.  I was trying to figure out what to do with financial resources that were mine alone for the first time and trying to figure out how and what to feed myself.  It was my first experience of becoming educated in a system.  Learning about our food production and values, the context in which I had been taught that I was not making an ethical decision while contributing to extreme suffering and harm, showed me what I did not want to participate in.  My parents had not known how to feed themselves.  They cooked rarely, ate infrequently, and though they loved food and ate well as children on their parents’ land complete with gardens and canned goods, hunted and foraged food, I believe they saw food self-sufficiency as a sign of poverty and ready-made foods as a taste of freedom and higher class.  How they never noticed what their bodies felt mystifies me now.

Context is everything when it comes to food.  I will never forget the taste of spicy chicken sandwiches when I was only eating once a day, the crisp and oily outside and slight sting of the spice, or cold coke and French fries with dozens of packets of ketchup.  I will never be able to think of a box of brownie mix that takes only water without a fleeting sense of wonder, having found one in the back of our cupboard and not having money for oil and eggs.  Mac and cheese with tuna and generic doctor pepper were a steal, the generic brands costing only cents were the makers helping us out.  Franchise tacos left you feeling surprisingly good after and full longer than most things.

I wouldn’t touch that food with a ten foot pole now.  When I taste coke, it seems like a froth of sugared chemicals and literally hurts my tongue.  But I am not starving slightly each moment now.  There were glimpses of the food love I have now in childhood.  Tomatoes my grandmother and father grew, the red and yellow German “Candy” Stripe that I would walk outside with a salt shaker, pull off the vine, and eat until my stomach was full or bring in and cut up alongside cottage cheese.  Blueberries that grew on bushes on our property, and the magical tart and sweet, vibrant taste of pies that brought up the feel of bright sunlight and rainwater, that technically failed since they were runny, but made my chest ache, feeling how they rare they were and watching them disappear as they were eaten.  The clear, clean taste that seemed to cut straight at hunger and solve it for a time of white fish caught only hours before and cooked in a microwave under cellophane with bits of butter and lemon and seasoned salt or fried and eaten on cheap wheat bread with piles of ketchup.  The almost freakish, wild taste of morels the first time I went and found and ate them, bringing them to my mouth over and over and still not getting past the shock of the taste.

But always, always, these could not usurp hunger.  Access to food that was not nourishing or food that was but still would not be provided consistently never really solved my hunger.  Hunger is more than appetite in the moment.  I did not even recognize on a fully conscious level that I was hungry.  That was just how life was.  How it felt to me.  My bodily feelings of hunger weren’t distinct.  I dreamed about food every night, and I thought it was strange.  When I came to college, I gained ten pounds.  I thought I was getting “fat,” gaining the freshman ten or whatever, but couldn’t figure out where it was going on my body, since I seemed to look the same and my clothes still fit.  I decided it was because I was walking more and gaining muscle in my legs.  I did notice I was sleeping better and was more able to feel happy.  I thought it strange when I exercised I could do three times the repetitions I was used to, which I didn’t realize was increased energy and muscle mass distributed all over from simply being fed.  I hadn’t been at my natural body weight.

I keep sorting through the class conflict in my head.  I’m working on the part of me right now that sees things I’m longing to do like making my own pasta or grinding my own grain as a bourgeoisie activity.  What a shock it would be to my great-grandparents that producing one’s own food would feel to me like a sign of high class.  It’s complicated.  When I ask myself:  How much should I ethically spend on food?  The answer is more than many people have and more than I will have at times of financial insecurity.  Then I’m perplexed, asking myself:  Is my class status allowing me to be ethical?  How can this be?

I suppose it’s being mixed class that has me feeling that if my food ethics and food security are dependent upon my maintaining a certain class status and our society continuing to provide the same degree of opportunity to people of my demographic then I do not feel secure.  That’s the privilege that I want, food security.  I know in my bones what perhaps many of us don’t know – that class can shift.  It is not a sign of personal character whether we are allowed access to adequate, ethically produced food.  It is a sign of our society being well, ethical and just.  I’m trying to sort out how to invest in greater food self-sufficiency, find places where I can live and work that help me feel more food secure.  But I know it will be a niche, a privilege, if I do find it.  And I don’t want the broader culture, the common experience to remain unchanged.