How Canadians Communicate, vol. 6: Food Promotion, Consumption, and Controversy ed. by Charlene Elliott (review)

This volume, like so many contributions to the interdisciplinary field of food studies, opens with the well-known aphorism of the French jurist and gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin: "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are." The editor, Charlene Elliott, seeks to advance this literature by emphasizing the "telling" – the communication that takes place around food. Such a project would have benefited from greater attention to the cultural studies scholar (and University of Toronto alumnus) Tim August's observation about the statement's imperative nature; the magistrate literally assigned people to their social position based on the foods that they ate. Although the best articles in this volume reveal the power relations conveyed through the advertising, enjoyment, and debates around food, other chapters fall short in considering how failures of communication can stymie food policy-making.

Contributors examine food communication from a variety of useful perspectives. Valerie Tarasuk describes the inadequacies of Canada's nutrition-labelling requirements, including the serious overestimate of sodium levels and the lack of differentiation between information about the basic vitamin and mineral content of foods and spurious health claims made about the gratuitous fortification of processed foods. Nathalie Cooke's article on Canadian food radio moves beyond the obvious concerns over advertising to reveal the Faustian bargain of industry broadcasts, which provided free educational services in return for valuable demographic information about their audience's tastes and anxieties, like present-day Internet companies. Charlene Elliott and Josh Greenberg's account of recent meat contamination scandals explores the dilemmas for industry and regulators alike in communicating risk effectively with an understandably anxious public. The volume also includes non-academic "insider voices," such as Canadian Living magazine's food editor emeritus Elizabeth Baird, who provides a brief and insightful summary of how Canadians talk about their national cuisine.

Despite all of the current discussion of food in policy circles and popular culture, what stands out most strikingly is the widespread failure of communication, especially between activists who talk past one another. For example, debates about genetic modification (GM) break down as opponents exaggerate fears of "Frankenfoods," while proponents insist with scant evidence that billions will starve without GM crops. Lost in all of the shouting are the well-documented failures of biotechnology to actually improve yields and the costs to farmers and plant breeders imposed by contemporary intellectual property rights law – both questions that merit serious public discussion.

Rather than address such communication failures, however, the volume illustrates them with a polemical article entitled "Lies, Damned Lies, and Locavorism," by University of Toronto Geography professor Pierre Desrochers. Although Toronto has been for decades a centre of innovation in urban food production, Desrochers ignores the many nuanced academic discussions of this issue, including some written by his own colleagues. Instead, he quotes the rhetoric of locavore activists such as Michael Pollan before assembling a cast of scholarly authorities to critique this straw man version of local/global debates. (Full disclosure: I am cited among the scholarly critics of locavorism with the novel, for me, accolade of "Marxist historian.") The problem with this chapter, like so many contemporary interventions, is framing the debate between sensational extremes rather than exploring the muddled middle ground; in this case, the circumstances under which local and global systems can best contribute to the larger goals of food quality and access. If academics cannot communicate such subtleties, there can be little hope for rational policymaking.