Embodied Food Politics

Michael S. Carolan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317144939
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

While the phenomenon of embodied knowledge is becoming integrated into the social sciences, critical geography, and feminist research agendas it continues to be largely ignored by agro-food scholars. This book helps fill this void by inserting into the food literature living, feeling, sensing bodies and will be of interest to food scholars as well as those more generally interested in the phenomenon known as embodied realism. This book is about the materializations of food politics; "materializations", in this case, referring to our embodied, sensuous, and physical connectivities to food production and consumption. It is through these materializations, argues Carolan, that we know food (and the food system more generally), others and ourselves.

Chapter 1
Thinking About Food Relationally

Canned mushrooms … I loved them as a kid. Their saltiness and texture made for a delicious combination. I have a memory—I must have been about six—of going to a pizzeria while on a trip with my parents and sister. Like always, we ordered a pizza with a variety of toppings, including mushrooms. When it arrived I’m sure I demanded the first piece and hastily took a bite. My taste buds betrayed all expectations. With disgust I asked my parents about the oddly shaped, offensively tasting objects in front of me masquerading as mushrooms. They’re fresh mushrooms, I remember them saying. It was not until University that I ate fresh mushrooms again. I grew up, you see, in a small town (about 350 people) in northeastern Iowa. Fresh mushrooms were not available in our local grocery store, though they are today. That was then. Today I enjoy fresh mushrooms even more than canned.

I share this story with others, usually in the setting of the kitchen with someone leaning over a chopping board slicing these delicious fungi. I am then typically asked to account for this transformation. I guess I just didn’t know better, was my standard response. I did not give that response much thought until recently.

I have long been fascinated by the subjects of knowledge, cognition, and perception, particularly from the angle of embodiment. What I have learned, and my own research has only strengthened my convictions, is that understandings of the world are inextricably shaped by lived experience. There is no mind, no mind’s eye or disembodied reason, at least as those “things” are traditionally conceived in the Anglo-American analytic tradition that places a premium on a free and autonomous rational faculty. Rather, what we call mind, thought, cognition, and knowledge are all effects of active bodies, of bodies-in-the-world. Andy Clark (2008) uses the term “supersizing the mind” to emphasize this smearing across mind, body and environment as we attempt to make sense—literally—of the world. Others speak of the embodied mind (Varela et al. 1992). Social scientists—because they too are interested in this phenomenon—evoke terms like dwelling, skill, practice, and non-representational when speaking of the supra-mental, supradiscursive processes that underlie knowledge (see e.g., Bourdieu 1995; Ingold 2000; Thrift 2004). Call it whatever you want, the underlying point throughout these literatures remains the same: we think with and through our bodies.

Some of my own recent research has highlighted how lived experience shapes peoples’ understanding of phenomena. Specifically, I have documented how different embodiments produce divergent understandings of things like “nature” (Carolan 2007, 2009a) and “countryside” (Carolan 2008). What, then, about our understandings of food? How do our lived experiences, our material practices, and our sensorial engagements shape how we think about issues related to food consumption and production?

Back to mushrooms. Traditional understandings of knowledge would view my explanation for why I once preferred canned over fresh—I guess I just didn’t know better—as an admittance of ignorance. If someone would have only told me that fresh mushrooms taste better than canned, or if I read this somewhere, then that memory from so long ago would have unfolded differently. Of course this is nonsense. I had to learn to like them. But what does it mean to say I have learned to like fresh mushrooms, since clearly this knowledge has been acquired through means other than reading books or listening to others? I am referring to a type of learning that is active and engaged, which involved (and still involves) not only eating fresh mushrooms but cooking with them, sautéing them (just writing this evokes the sounds and smells of mushrooms crackling in a sauté of garlic and butter), and eating them in the company of friends and family (food scholar Sidney Mintz [1996: 98], for example, argues that the foods we most appreciate are made through collective relationships).

I am reminded of something the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1969: number 467) once wrote:

I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again “I know that’s a tree”, pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: “This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.”

What Wittgenstein’s friend failed to grasp is how their lived experience of the world—a world populated by trees—played into their knowing of these phenomena (see also, Harrison 2000: 507). What this individual missed is that our understanding of trees is wrapped up in non-linguistic forms of knowledge that come about through our doings with all things wooden—such as taking walks in the forest, smelling freshly cut wood, dancing on hardwood floors, getting splinters, and listening to the rustling of the leaves on a cool fall afternoon. The same, I contend, pertains to how we know food.

Let us now extrapolate out from this. What happens to our understanding of “food quality” as we become increasingly conditioned to eating and cooking with industrialized food, which places a premium on making sure its products are standardized and fit for the rigors of international travel? How are our understandings of, say, apples or beef shaped by our lived experiences of these phenomena? Equally important are questions related to the knowledges disappearing as a result of vanishing material practices. As food has become standardized and agriculture further grounded in techniques of monocropping think of all the embodied experiences lost. Today, for example, our understanding of most fruits and vegetables is limited to just a handful of varieties. Corn, tomatoes, and apples look, taste, smell, and feel little today like when Black Aztec (sweetcorn), Big Rainbows (tomatoes), and the prized Rambo (apple) populated gardens, backyards, dinner tables, and stomachs.

The relational basis of our knowledge of food has long been acknowledged. Studies dating back to the late nineteenth century showed the effects that urbanization was having on children in terms of their food knowledge. A study conducted in 1880 on 200 middle-class Boston first-graders showed the clear effects that these new urban embodiments were having on how people understood what they ate. Almost 90 percent of those surveyed did not understand the fundamentals of a wheat field, 75 percent did not know about the seasons, and “more than 60 percent had no concept of a beehive, a crow, a robin, or a bluebird, or of planting seeds or growing beans, potatoes, strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, or corn” (Vileisis 2007: 104). About once a year a study like this is mentioned in the press, making the point of how few children know that milk comes from cows or that pickles are cucumbers. Had their lived experiences been different, to include encounters with dairy parlors and “pickle days” (what my mom calls days when pickles are made), I have no doubt the children surveyed would have responded differently. More often than not these survey findings are merely a source of indignation, evidence that children need to be better educated about food and the food system more generally. But the “education” often advocated is incomplete; too centered on what is called representational knowledge—on pictures, words, diagrams, and lectures. This solution, however, is short-sighted. As the encounter between Wittgenstein and his friend illustrates, the meanings of phenomena—whether a tree or a food system—cannot be conveyed with a finger point, some words, and a picture.

Agro-food scholars have in the last decade taken a relational approach to studying the food system (Goodman 2001). Here, the concrete practices of everyday life are being draw into the methodological horizon of the analyst (see for example DeLind 2006; Goodman et al. 2010; Roe 2006; Lockie 2002; Whatmore 2002). Traditional commodity chain analyses seek to “follow the commodity” (de Sousa and Busch 1998: 252) from farm-to-fork (see also Goodman and Dupuis 2002: 6–7). The relational approach, conversely, redirects the “myopic productionist ‘gaze’ that has dominated much of agro-food studies work” (Roe 2006: 106; see also Lockie and Kitto 2000: 15; Lockie 2002: 290; Goodman 2004: 13), focusing instead upon the lived world of meaning generation (see Lockie and Kitto 2000: 13–15; Roe 2006: 113–17). This shift in analytic focus reveals the transformational potential that lies at the site of the fork. It is this site that interests me, where “things become food” (Roe 2006: 107) and food, sometimes, becomes a thing.

It would be unfair, however, to classify this book as being entirely about food consumption. Goodman and DuPuis (2002: 11) made an important observation a few years back that still largely holds true today, noting how consumption-focused food studies too often neglect the “production side of food”. Granted, social scientists make analytic “cuts” all the time, otherwise it would be nearly impossible to talk about anything (because we would have to talk about everything). But we need to be aware of what we miss when one “side” is examined at the expense of the other. Goodman and DuPuis (2002: 11) write about wanting to “build a better theoretical bridge between [historically consumption-oriented] food studies and [historically production-oriented] agro-food studies”. My goals are more modest, though I believe the approach adopted here offers a sincere attempt at erecting some theoretical and empirical connections to these otherwise opposing “ends”. Given that living bodies populate our food system it makes sense that an approach examining embodied experience would have something to say about what we eat, regardless of whether those bodies happen to be analytically lumped into the category of “producer” or “consumer”.

Learning to be Affected

“Pure” experience is a chimera. After penning one of the most familiar sentences in Western thought, “I think therefore I am”, Descartes should have added “… and what I am—my lived experience—is always-already folded into what and how I think”. You see, there is no singular consciousness; no one way to reach out and know the world sensually. Our knowledge of the world, rather, is constituted through our relationalities. And as those relationalities change so too change understandings of what is and what ought to be.

A few years ago Bruno Latour (2004) wrote an article on the training of “noses” for the perfume industry. Latour describes to the reader what is known in the industry as an odor kit. The kit consists of a series of fragrances, arranged from stark to subtle contrasts. With the help of this kit and other “tuned” bodies who already embody the necessary odor sensibilities individuals acquire a “nose” for previously unrecognizable differences in scent. What’s interesting about this case, according to Latour, is not its exceptionality. Just the opposite: to be a body is to be a body in articulation with other objects, technologies, spaces, and subjects. Being, to put it in philosophical terms, is all about “learning to be affected” (Latour 2004a: 206). To be an unaffected body is the same as being dead. Latour uses the example of the trained “nose” to force the reader to revisit conventional wisdom about it means to do science. In doing this he challenges conventional wisdom that the scientist represents an object-ive (non relational) body par excellence. In his own words:

[I]f I, a tuned nose, need the odour kit to become sensitive to contrasts, chemists need their analytical instruments to render themselves sensitive to differences of one single displaced atom. They too acquire a body, a nose, an organ, through their laboratories this time, and also thanks to their conferences, their literature and all the paraphernalia that make up what could be called the collective body of science (Latour 2004a: 209).

Latour’s point is that scientists are not unique when it comes to knowing the world; knowing—even scientific ways of knowing—presupposes bodies that have learned to be affected. It therefore follows that if knowing the world is in part a product of learning to be affected by that world the same should hold for our knowing of what we eat. Like the trained “nose” found in the perfume industry we too are tuned: to food.

A few years back I had a friend visit my home in Fort Collins, Colorado (for those unfamiliar with the town, Fort Collins is nestled against the foothills of the Rocky Maintains). Walking around town I remember him looking west to the mountains and proclaiming: “I don’t care where you’re from, those are simply breathtaking”. Allow me to quickly unpack this assertion in the light of what has just been said; after which I’ll get to the subject of food.

Rather than breathtaking, mountains during the Middle Ages were widely viewed as ominous and dangerous. Among French farmers, for instance, certain “dangerous mountains” were known as unfit for pasture—at least until the advent of certain vaccinations—as sheep that grazed on them contracted anthrax (Dubos 2007: 273). Aesthetically speaking mountains fared little better, being described in the seventeenth-century literature world as “Earth’s Dugs, Risings, Tumors, Blisters, Warts” (Tuan 1990: 72). For our ancestors, wilderness was, quite simply, too wild to be looked at through the romantic lens that many today view this space through. Microbiologist, environmental historian, and Pulitzer Prize winner René Dubos (1980:14) provides the following account of these spaces of wilder-ness:

Until the eighteenth century […] the Derbyshire peak region in England was considered wild and unfit for human eyes. In 1681, the poet Charles Cotton described it as a ‘country so deformed’ that it might be regarded as “Nature’s pudenda.” Travelers in those days were advised to keep their coach blinds drawn while traversing the region so as not to be shocked by its ugliness and wildness.

My friend’s positive understanding of the mountains is a privileged effect. The weather at 10,000 feet can change in a matter of minutes. I can only image the trepidation early travelers must have felt as they slowly made their way through a mountain pass in their un-heated/air-conditioned carriage, lacking the life-line of a cell phone and satellite navigation system and with little insight into what the next hour would bring in terms of the weather. While I frequently tell my friends about the wonderful summers along the Front Range and in Fort Collins in particular I know this experience is a socio-material effect. The ubiquity of well air-conditioned buildings (and cars) has kept me from knowing a Colorado summer like that experienced by earlier generations. Massive public works projects that now supply water to this area, for agricultural irrigation, residential sprinkler systems, and recreation (such as Horsetooth Reservoir that borders Fort Collins to the west), keep the crops growing, the grass green, and the residents entertained. This is not to suggest that previous generations did not—or could not—view Colorado summers in a positive light. According to historical accounts, many in fact did. My point, rather, is that understandings of this space—like understandings of anything—are inextricably a socio-technically mediated effect. We cannot know this space except through our relations with it. And the same, I would contend, holds for our understandings of food.

Thinking about our knowledge and understanding of food and the food system more generally in this manner—that is, as something that we do rather than as something that we objectively acquire—radically alters the parameters of the debate surrounding food production and consumption. For instance, I routinely come across arguments that speak of how “[w]e are hardwired to love the taste of fat, salt, and sugar” (Wansink 2007: 180). This biological fact, which I have no reason to dispute, is then used to argue that our attraction to fast food is both inevitable and natural—after all, it’s rooted in our genes (see also Allman 1995: 50; Cartwright 2000: 47). Not only does this essentialize taste but it also washes away the initial visceral resistant put up by bodies that had not yet learned to be affected by industrial food. Anthropologist Melissa Caldwell (2004: 15), for example, when studying the introduction of McDonald’s food in Moscow, reports that many respondents initially did not like its taste. One individual went as far to explain “that he had tried it and could not understand why a person would eat such food more than to try it once” (p. 15).

To evoke the words of Latour, Muscovites (like me with fresh mushrooms) had to learn to be affected by McDonald’s and its food. The Ronald McDonald’s army is made, not born. This in itself is a very important point. If we recognize that it took work to make bodies tuned to fast food (and industrial food more generally) then we must recognize that the reverse is also true—that there must be, if you will, a “re-tuning” toward alternative foods and food systems if we want those alternatives to be sustained over the long run. It therefore comes as no surprise to me when I hear school administrators talk about how students frequently “choose” the less healthy meal when given the option of, say, French fries or a salad. That “choice”, it turns out, is just one point of a whole series of material connectivities; connectivities that otherwise go ignored when all one looks at is the moment of purchase. As documented in the following chapters, so called consumer “preference” is produced and maintained through practice—through literally doing those tastes over and over again. It’s insincere to say we ought to let those preferences alone dictate what food is provided and how that food is produced when today’s dominant preferences were produced through non market means.

The relational approach adopted here also says something about food politics: that removing the “choice” of McDonald’s French fries from school cafeterias, eating whole foods, and even growing one’s own food are all profoundly political acts. Political theory often speaks of politics as involving only subjects. The vulgarities of materiality—of emotion, impulse and other corporeal activities—have no place, it has long been argued, in reasoned discourse. Along these lines, Hannah Arendt (1958: 80-89) makes a distinction between “action” and “work”. The former refers to the turn-taking discourse we often ascribe to (ideal) political debate. Work, in contrast, involves those activities one engages in for survival. Arendt believed political debate ought to be insulated as much as possible from the material realities of everyday life so as to minimize self-interested behavior. Jürgen Habermas (1984: 86) makes a similar distinction in his writings on communicative action, in which actors in society seek to reach common understanding by reasoned argument, consensus, and cooperation rather than through action strictly in pursuit of their own goals. Yet this view clings too stubbornly to Descartes’ legacy, in that mind—the prime mover in Western cosmology—is privileged over the “dead” realm of the material (Law and Mol 2008: 134-6).

The problem with this conventional understanding of politics is that it is premised upon a world that does not exist. There is no purely rational faculty divorced from the materialities of everyday life. Given that the world is smeared—or populated by “hybrids” (Latour), “monsters” (Law), and “Cyborgs” (Haraway)—we had better get used to talking about how relations have politics too. For if our understandings of what is and what ought to be are shaped by our material connectivities, then any change in those connections ought to have an effect on how we view the world. A relational (food) politics thus avoids the thorny problem faced by analyses grounded in a more conventional view of politics and the liberal humanism therein presupposed in that it actually can say something about why we should care as well as being instructive in cases where we don’t (Braidotti 2006: 119; McEwan and Goodman 2010: 110).

Situating the Book Conceptually and Empirically

This book seeks to make conceptual and empirical contributions to the field of agro-food studies by entering into the subjects of food and food politics by way of the lived experience. In doing this, I hope to provide the reader with an understanding of the grip on food nurtured through community supported agriculture (known commonly as CSA), heritage seed banks, and backyard chicken coops. My choice of the term “grip” is intentional. As used by the Maurice Merleau-Ponty (see for instance, 1992: 289-90), grip is a metaphor to convey how we know the world. It speaks to knowing as a richly socio-historical, thoroughly sensuous experience that does not just happen but which involves constant bodily adjustments as we seek its maximization. Clasp your hands together. Notice how you cannot tell where one grip ends and the other begins. The same holds for perception in general. The knower and the known constitute the “understanding” produced. We too are clasped with the world. And within this embrace lies our knowledge of food.

So what competencies, knowledges, and sentiments do the embodied practices cultivated in thes...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Thinking About Food Relationally
• 2 Some Backstory
• 3 Making Sense with CSAs
• 4 Thinking with Heritage Seed Banks
• 5 The Sensibilities of Chicken Coops
• 6 Cultivating Communities
• 7 Steps to an Ecology Of Social Change
• References
• Index