A Matter of Taste

A farmers' market devotee's semi-reluctant argument for inviting scientific innovation to the dinner table

Rebecca Tucker

• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781770565555
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How farmer's markets and organic produce became synonymous with "good food" and why they shouldn't be.

How did farmer's markets, nose-to-tail, locavorism, organic eating, CSAs, whole foods, and Whole Foods become synonymous with "good food"? And are these practices really producing food that is morally, environmentally, or economically sustainable? Rebecca Tucker's compelling, reported argument shows that we must work to undo the moral coding that we use to interpret how we come by what we put on our plates. She investigates not only the danger of the accepted rhetoric, but the innovative work happening on farms and university campuses to create a future where nutritious food is climate-change resilient, hardy enough to grow season after season, and, most importantly, available to all—not just those willing or able to fork over the small fortune required for a perfect heirloom tomato.

Tucker argues that arriving at that future will require a broad cognitive shift away from the idea that farmer's markets, community gardens, and organic food production is the only sustainable way forward; more than that, it will require the commitment of research firms, governments, corporations, and post-secondary institutions to develop and implement agri­science innovations that do more than improve the bottom line. A Matter of Taste asks us to rethink what good food really is.

1
Good Food™

A great meal is an experience that nourishes more than your body.

– Ruth Reichl, Delicious!

You’ll never know how good something can be until you change your act and maybe risk it, and if you’re wondering how good a cracker can be, you’ll never know until you try a Triscuit.

– 1970s jingle for Triscuits

For as long as there has been commercial interest in the mass production of food, there have been efforts to make it seem as wholesome as the stuff that grows on farms (or the stuff that eats the stuff that grows on farms). And to make consumers feel that opting for the newer, faster, more convenient approach to dinner (which might come from a can, a freezer bag, or a takeout window) was not only a safe idea, but a good one – ‘good’ as in nutritious, as well as in virtuous.

One advertising cliché used to suggest this equivalency involves transposing processed items with the whole foods they might replace on your dinner table. Early advertisements for Kraft Dinner, that all-Canadian pantry staple, sold the boxed mac and cheese as Kraft ‘home cooked’ dinners. A McDonald’s print ad from 1969, meanwhile, ran beneath the text ‘Jimmy’s mother knows McDonald’s hamburgers are 100% beef’ – the food was wholesome, in other words, because it was approved by that stalwart bastion of domesticity: the matriarch. The TV series Mad Men played off this, too, in its fictionalized 1969 ad campaign for the chain Burger Chef: in her pitch, Peggy Olson uses the proximity of the household television to dinner tables to illustrate how modern families are starving – ‘and not just for dinner,’ she says, but for attention. The campaign tag, ‘Family supper at Burger Chef,’ says precious little about the food itself, but uses the convention of the family dinner table as a way to say, in not so many words, ‘This is just like dinner at home – if not better.’

Of course, this is all marketing magic – Kraft Dinner, McDonald’s, and, presumably, the fictional Burger Chef are as processed as processed can be (just look at the colour of the, ahem, ‘cheese’ involved). Falling for the idea that tucking into a box of Kraft Dinner – especially now that the formula has been rejigged to include no artificial colouring – or serving one to your family is a forgivable offence, if food-based decisions do in fact require forgiving, makes sense, given the prominent tag lines and slogans that claim it’s wholesome for you, for your family, and for the planet.

In fact, similar marketing messaging goes into KD’s virtuous-seeming counterpart. Having purchased both (for research, and for hunger!), I know that Annie’s Homegrown macaroni and cheese – an organic boxed pasta option – is a little different from Kraft Dinner in taste (less salty) and caloric value (about a third lower). But the way both products are sold is not altogether different: Annie’s uses a cute bunny as the mascot for its entire product line, suggesting nostalgia, childhood, and, again, wholesomeness; a 2017 Kraft ad titled ‘Family Greatly’ has parents discussing how challenging it is to find time to be a perfect parent (luckily, KD takes only about ten minutes to make). Where these two paths diverge in the woods is most evident when you dig into each company’s mission statement: for Kraft, it’s ‘helping people around the world eat and live better.’ For Annie Homegrown: bringing organic food to, ahem, ‘everybunny.’

On the surface, this seems like an instance of apples and, well, fancier apples. But the difference between ‘better’ food and ‘organic’ food is significant. For one thing, ‘better’ – which we’ll take here to mean healthy, or healthier – is subjective, and open to debate: one person’s healthy might be another person’s sodium-rich. But organic is a set-instone concept, enforced at a federal level in the United States and Canada, and defended fiercely by its disciples as the best option for you, your family, and your planet. You can evangelize for Annie’s, because you can evangelize for organics. And many do. It’s much more difficult to evangelize for ‘better food,’ even though that’s what we all really want, because that term isn’t as concrete. Annie’s has the advantage of being on a clearly defined side.

But Kraft has the advantage of price. A box of KD sets you back $1.47 at Walmart, and Annie’s Homegrown Organic Macaroni & Cheese costs about a dollar more. So it’s not entirely clear whether, in this example – and many others – organic is the better option for everyone, every time. Not everybunny can stretch their grocery budget, but everybody deserves better food.

The reason for KD’s low cost is, of course, not exactly a pretty picture – it’s a mass-produced product, one made relatively cheaply from relatively cheap ingredients. But the reason for its continued, entrenched existence – and the continued, entrenched existence of packaged meals like it – has a bit more nuance. In his 2004 book In Praise of Slow, Canadian journalist Carl Honoré charts the treacherous rise of processed. Referencing the meal-in-a-pill from the fictionalized future of The Jetsons, Honoré says, ‘Even growing up in a foodie household, I remember liking the idea of an all-in-one meal pill. I imagined gulping it down and heading back outside to play with my friends.’ Indeed, the real-life convenience-food revolution that was happening in the early 1960s, when The Jetsons was on the air, was born of a newfangled need for speed and convenience; as North American families were engaged in rapid urbanization, and as more North American women entered the workforce to keep up with a burgeoning consumer culture, cooking three square meals from scratch was becoming an untenable luxury.

The value – both personal and economical – of fast-and-ready, however, precedes the TV dinner by a few decades, at least in the West. ‘Hurry,’ Honoré writes, ‘took its place at the dinner table during the Industrial Revolution. In the nineteenth century, long before the invention of the drive-thru burger bar, one observer summed up the American way of eating as “gobble, gulp and go.”’ (Indeed, judging from the information I’ve gleaned from my Italian family, this was uniquely American: traditionally, my Mediterranean ancestors wouldn’t walk down the street with so much as a cup of coffee, much less a full meal.) ‘As our forebears moved into cities and lost touch with the land,’ Honoré continues, ‘they fell in love with the idea of fast food for a fast age. The more processed, the more convenient, the better.’

Hence a heady period of processed foods invading sitdown restaurants and at-home kitchens, with Campbell’s soup pridefully listed on diner menus, and TV dinners replacing Sunday roasts (which, Honoré points out, enraged men who believed their wives were growing lazy). The ads changed, too: Kraft Dinner, for instance, became ‘How to eat well, in spite of it all,’ touting the boxed meal’s ease of preparation; McDonald’s emphasized low prices and convenience over wholesomeness.

The reliance – particularly in North America – on fast, cheap foods resulted in a snowballing growth of the industries in which those foods are produced. And with that growth came certain sacrifices. The industrial pace of packaged-food production changed the way we eat, but also the way we farm. And the capitalist motivation for the development of these foods may have meant minimal concern for environmental sustainability or nutritional density.

These changes, if you consult the champions of sustainability, mean we have fast/junk/packaged/processed foods to blame for any number of social and literal ills. We’re fat because of sugar and dumb because of fat; we’ve ruined the planet with the commodity crops we grow to make Twinkies and feed McDonald’s-destined cows; we don’t know our families because we spend more time in front of the computer, wolfing down space food, than at the dinner table, where surely we’d bond with each other in the candlelit fantasy of some better time.

Not that there’s a shortage of data on how our current food practices are damaging both our bodies and our planet. An estimated 26 per cent of earth’s farmable land is used to grow livestock feed that will be given to pigs and cows that will be transformed into highly processed products; the sheer amount of packaging involved with processed foods has had and will continue to have an astronomical environmental impact; and the cost – both literal and to our planet – of transporting packaged goods from processing plant to grocery-store shelves is significant. And, in truth, we do all seem to be in pretty rough shape.

So it’s tempting to blame processed food – a tidy little scapegoat with, from a sustainability POV, few redeeming factors. Plus, it’s kind of evil: the people who make it have designed this type of food to tap into our desires. They make it, and they make us want it bad enough to buy it over and over again.

In his 2015 book The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth about Food and Flavor, Canadian food writer Mark Schatzker – who defines junk food as ‘food that tastes like something that it is not’ – explains how food scientists have engineered packaged, processed foods to have such big, bold, obnoxious flavours that we have come to distrust big, bold flavours when we encounter them in nature: we have forgotten that food can taste remarkable on its own, because we are so used to food tasting remarkable through additions, subtractions, and adjustments.

Plus, junk food has been finely engineered to appeal to some of our most base instincts and evolutionary cues: we often feel pleasure when we eat, which is our brains associating specific flavours with specific nutritional compounds. We feel good, in other words, because we’re getting what we need: we like the sweetness of a tomato because it means ripeness, which means a denser nutritional composition. But when we eat junk food we can find ourselves tricked into thinking we’re getting what we need, nutritionally; junk food makes us feel good, and our brains think we’re feeling good because we’re eating good food. When, in fact, we’re just eating a bag of ketchup chips that our brain receives as a chemical pleasure similar to that offered by a very ripe tomato. When I interviewed Schatzker in 2015, he pointed something else out: our brains’ correlation of flavour to nutrition might actually prevent us from overeating, when we’re eating real foods. When we eat three ripe peaches, we inherently know that we’ve gotten the nutrients we need, and we stop eating; that cue doesn’t exist with the fruit’s tangy, artificial counterpart, Fuzzy Peaches, because the nutrition doesn’t exist either – even though the flavour does.

Schatzker is an interesting player in the food-sphere of the early twenty-first century. He’s something of a moderate, as comfortable around a snack as he is enthusiastic about a science-grown tomato; more of a reporter than an evangelist for any one type of eating (though, admittedly, he does lean measurably away from packaged stuff, even if he’s not banging on doors to warn us of its evils). In other words, he’s not all that much like Michael Pollan.

In 2006, Michael Pollan released the defining tome of the foodie era that, in many ways, sought to put to rest the idea that processed food in any measure is a viable option for humanity. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, which quickly became a bestseller and earned Pollan a James Beard Foundation Book Award, sought to answer one (deceptively, beguilingly, grabbingly) simple question: ‘What should we have for dinner?’

Pollan’s book at once defined and catapulted into the zeitgeist the food-borne anxieties that would come to define the next decade for food activists and concerned diners. In it, the American journalist puts everything from factory farming to foraging to fast food under the microscope, with the stated goal of determining the best food to eat. His conclusion, practically, is that the Perfect Meal, as he calls it, is one that is partly foraged, partly hunted, and allows him ‘to eat in full consciousness.’ Which is to say that, almost immediately, Pollan gives up the idea that the ‘best’ food means, purely, the healthiest food – the food that is best for us to eat, for the sanctity of our bodies. The best food, to him, is the food that allows for a pretty significant helping of righteousness.

In the book’s foreword, Pollan notes that the question of what to eat, for humans, has historically been almost strictly utilitarian: evolutionarily, the omnivore’s dilemma – that is, the human’s dilemma – centred, first, on determining which of a plethora of available foods would not kill us, and second, on deciding which of these foods could serve as good sources of the nutrients, vitamins, and minerals we require to stay alive. A lot of the time, we figure this out by tasting things, and subconsciously associating biological responses with flavours: the collagen in bone broth might have once helped your body recover from a bad cold, for instance, which explains why you might crave chicken soup the next time you have a flu. (In The Dorito Effect, Schatzker calls this ‘biological wisdom,’ though he also explains that we’re not as instinctively wise to the evolutionary benefits of flavour as we used to be, on account of our prolonged exposure to the artificial stuff).

Pollan addresses some of this, too. ‘Many anthropologists believe that the reason we evolved such big and intricate brains was precisely to help us deal with the omnivore’s dilemma…’ he writes. ‘Omnivory offers the pleasures of variety… But the surfeit of choice brings with it a lot of stress and leads to a kind of Manichean view of food, a division of nature into The Good Things to Eat, and The Bad.’ Pollan was joined in 2007 in the pursuit of revolutionizing dinnertime by Canadian writers Alisa Smith and J. B. MacKinnon, whose The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating brought to the fore the virtuous idea of ‘locavorism’; Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life followed shortly thereafter and doubled down on the assertion that the best food is the stuff that comes from your own backyard. Pollan returned in 2008 with In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, and firebrand New York Times columnist Mark Bittman released Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating the same year.

In 2009, the moral quandary of what’s good to eat, and what’s not, hit the big screen with Food, Inc., a documentary co-produced by Eric Schlosser (who, eight years earlier, eviscerated McDonald’s and Co. with his book Fast Food Nation). The film, based on The Omnivore’s Dilemma and narrated by Pollan, was called ‘literally gut-wrenching’ by NPR and ‘one of the year’s most important films’ by the San Francisco Chronicle. Food, Inc. was nominated for an Academy Award. It lost out to dolphin doc The Cove, but that didn’t matter: the film succeeded in putting onscreen – thereby making it far more widely accessible and discussed than it was in print – Pollan’s message that eating right doesn’t just mean eating nutritiously – it means eating morally. (Not coincidentally, NPR’s review labelled Pollan and Schlosser ‘embodiments of conscience.’)

Food Inc. firmly cemented a shift in the North American consciousness, popularizing the idea of ‘sustainable food systems’ by focusing on exactly the opposite (one of the largest criticisms lobbed toward the film is that it doesn’t offer up much in the way of solutions). Up to that point, prevailing grocery-aisle concerns were largely personal:

‘What harm does food cause me when I eat it?’ Because Pollan et al. turned the lens outward, identifying systemic issues plaguing the industrial production and distribution of food in the twenty-first century, the concerns became political, ideological, and moral: ‘What harm am I doing when I eat food?’

You can see what happened here: the food industry has been completely and utterly polarized. The use of the words good and bad are not without impact; the result is that every type of food falls into one camp, with little if any flexibility. But when things become brittle, they break.

In 2011, the fast-food giant Chipotle released an animated advertisement that laid out, in no uncertain terms, how we ought to feel about bad food. The spot – soundtracked by a plaintive Willie Nelson cover of the Coldplay song ‘The Scientist’ – begins with a farmer in his field, tending to a herd of eight pigs. The farm then grows to include cows, then more cows, then more pigs. Soon, there is infrastructure to match: pigs are shipped along factory assembly lines, pumped full of pills, fattened beyond recognition, and pressed into cubes, before being packed into freight trucks. The ad returns to the farmer back in his field, now at nightfall, plagued with guilt: dark storm clouds, filled with imagery of pills, industrial waste being pumped into waterways, and pigs behind bars surround his hanging head. He snaps out of it, the sun comes up, and he dismantles his farm’s buildings, allowing his pigs and cows to once again roam free. The land turns over, from industrialized to pastoral, and the farmer loads a single wooden crate into a…Chipotle delivery truck, as the words ‘CULTIVATE A BETTER WORLD’ glide onto the screen. The two-minute spot was named the world’s best TV campaign at Cannes in 2012.

The messaging in the spot was clear. It wasn’t so much ‘Eat Chipotle’ as it was ‘Feel like shit for eating anything that isn’t as ethical as Chipotle’: before the starring farmer turns back the clock on his farm, he is literally weighed down by the moral heft of his capitalist decisions. His world literally goes from dark to light when he eliminates ‘science and progress’ (sorry, Chris Martin) from his work. The spot was heavy-handed and effective, sure, but at the end of the day it is no longer entirely honest: after a devastating E. coli outbreak in 2016, the chain cut ties with local farmers by as much as 83 per cent, citing safety concerns, effectively eviscerating the core tenet of the chain’s ‘Food with Integrity’ mission and putting it in the same leagues as the McDonald’ses from which it had sought to ideologically separate itself.

In Jamie’s Ministry of Food, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver fumed over a family who preferred takeout over cooking: ‘They’ve got a plasma screen, a Sky box, mobile phones and Nike trainers, but they’ll sit on the floor and eat out of Styrofoam boxes seven days a week. There’s a new kind of poverty, and it’s fucking knowledge poverty,’ as if families ought to feel shame for spending their money on anything but farm-fresh food (and his cookbooks, I suppose, for knowledge). My colleagues are regularly apologetic for eating packaged food. In Michael Pollan’s Netflix series Cooked, the writer extolls homemade bread as essential to life as he kneads and bakes in his well-appointed New York kitchen. My friends and I swap food-science stats like baseball cards, sharing the latest research on GM this and industrial that, hoping to keep up with all the moral shortcomings of socalled ‘bad’ food, in order that it might prevent us from ever so much as remembering how good it tastes.

But Hershey chocolate is delicious. Mobile phones are essential. Packaged food saves valuable time (and baking bread takes up too much of it). Sometimes industrial food is the only option. And, with apologies to Willie Nelson, Chipotle is still a goddamn fast-food chain.

Most food shoppers are, by this point, familiar with the terminology associated with ‘good’ food, because we see it everywhere food is sold, or we’re aware of it subconsciously, at the absolute least, as words that exist. The most potent, loaded, and ubiquitous of these is, of course, organic: literally, this means food grown in the soil, without pesticides or synthetic fertilizers; ideologically, the term has over time evolved into a catch-all for food that is small-w whole, appearing on store shelves unmodified, unprocessed, unpackaged – barely touched by human hands.

Thinking more about our food is smart economically, politically, socially, and environmentally. The issue with today’s sustainable-food conversation is that it often has little to do with the actual thinking part. Instead, we’re often working in shorthand, creating an alienating, elitist system of beliefs that accompanies the eating of organic foods – or, if not organic, then whole foods, clean foods, or simply good foods – that goes well beyond the things we actually, y’know, eat. Rather than leading to improve our global food systems, empower the hungry, or guide policy, many conversations about sustainable food are often just further rehashing of the same three actions: attempting to convert junk-foodloving sinners through guilt, recruiting the wealthy to special-interest and expensive diets, and generally preaching to the choir – who are themselves blindly faithful.

For many, the zealotry with which food is approached – and discussed, evangelized about, and proselytized on – mirrors religious fanaticism. It’s not ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction Consider the Dunkaroo
• 1 Good Food™
• 2 Fresh Cities
• 3 Kill Your Idylls
• 4 Harvesting Silicon Valley
• Conclusion You Say Tomato
• Works Cited
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• About the Exploded Views Series