If you didn’t already know that food in America is more of a commodity and scientific proposal than a pleasure and practice, Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food, establishes this point. While reading through Pollan’s thoughtful and conversational style introduction and first four chapters of this “Go BIG READ” book (a UW campus wide suggested read), I was introduced to a flamboyant argument against the western diet. Pollan argues that we live in an age of nutritionalism, which has converged our eating habits down to pure nutrients and scientifically modified foods. He speaks on the idea of taking food back to its original purpose, which is not only to survive, but to know what exactly one is eating, and to maintain a healthy diet through the development of self-grown food and as Pollan puts it “common sense.”
Our culture clashing society has resulted to either fast food frenzies, or nutrition/ vitamin based diets, which lack the essential idea of enjoyment and importance in actually sitting down to a home cooked meal. I agree with Pollan’s argument to escape the industry of food base, because this is what has created habitual obesity and/or dietary downfall. Food needs to stay out of the lab and make way back to the garden and then the kitchen. We were once hunters and gatherers, now we are TV surfers and shopping cart criminals walking through frozen food and canned food isles like zombies.
CHECK THESE GREEN GUTS OUT!
One resource i foudn on a website, which agrees with Michael Pollans arguments as well, is an interview with Julie Guthman, in "Globalization, neoliberalism, obesity, local food and education", which speaks on the production and commercial strategies of food in America, which ultimately has resulted in making food a commodity and reduced it to a material need rather than a bodily necessity.
EXCERPT: Julie Guthman is an Associate Professor in the Community Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz. Her pressing and rigorous work has dealt with the ways in which organic farming movements and reform in California strain the boundaries that obtain between nature and capital and between the local and the global (Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California), with governmentality, embodiment and resistance in the age of neoliberalism (“The Polanyian Way? Voluntary Food Labels as Neoliberal Governance,” “Embodying neoliberalism: economy, culture, and the politics of fat” [with Melanie DuPuis]), and the racial assumptions that impinge community projects for the distribution of local, organic food in African-American neighborhoods (“Bringing good food to others: investigating the subjects of alternative food practice”). Her developing research examines the biopolitics of obesity in terms of race, embodiment and the evolution of alternative food practices. Among other difficult questions, in this interview Dr. Guthman offers critical perspectives on the intersection of alternative food and political subjectivity, the social, cultural and bodily impact of neoliberalism, and the possibility of responsible food criticism and radical food pedagogy in a time of crisis.
- Until later with another dose of beef & aspargus
Sincerely,
Marne Bruckner
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