Eating Anxiety: The Perils of Food Politics

5. The Year of Eating Politically

. 93 5 T H E Y E A R O F E AT I N G P O L I T I C A L LY W e n de l l B e r r y fa mou s ly de c l a r e d t h a t “eating is an agricultural act,”1 and recent trends in food activism have announced that eating is a political, economic, environmental, aesthetic, and ethical act as well. While the obesity debates enact demands for individual responsibility and public health and so stand out as a marker of the cultural politics of blame, approaches to the political economy of food in the United States call attention to the ownership of seed technology and farm subsidies but find their popular support almost entirely around the demand to buy responsibly grown foods. Just as moral and aesthetic judgments about overweight bodies shifted over the twentieth century relative to new technologies of production and accumulation, a shift in the terms of responsible food at the opening of the twenty-first century— in particular, a shift from valorizing“organic” to“local”—reflects a changing nature of capital accumulation under globalization. Further, just as Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche used a series of digestive metaphors to disrupt the assumptions underwriting liberal politics, the specific terms of food activism today reflect a particular understanding of the shape of the political subject and the terms of political engagement. Current trends in food politics—in particular, the valorization of farmers ’ markets and the emergence of “local” as the badge of responsible food—often stand in uneasy alliance with the terms of liberal ontopolitics . In one sense, advocating an ethical relationship with the land and direct, face-to-face encounters between producers and consumers, the movement seems to promote what Murray Bookchin has called a “moral economy” in which decisions about production and consumption are guided by ethical regard rather than profitability.2 But at the same time, exhortations to “buy local” correspond to a model of citizenship that 94 . T H E Y E A R O F E A T I N G P O L I T I C A L LY impoverishes traditional modes of political action and democratic control . Reducing politics to consumerism and economics to ethics, current approaches to responsible foods and food activism tend to reflect the actual foreclosure of political possibility. By relocating political action to the actual and metaphorical space of the market, these trends reflect a subordination of political discourse to the terms of global capitalism and a neoliberal condition in which it is only in the rhetoric of consumer choice that Americans can imagine wielding power. These trends thus veer toward postpolitical fantasies that differ in content but not in form from the neoliberal promise of a harmonious society governed only by voluntary contracts and individual responsibility. Though food activism is typically couched in promises of democracy and equality, it often erects barriers to these ideals by charging the market with the responsibility for realizing them. Despitethemanifestoverlapbetweenthecallsfor“organic”and“local” foods, these movements are rooted in distinct idioms that respond to very specific historical conditions; both are animated by anxieties about the health of individual bodies and bodies politic, but the turn to locals reflects a realization that this health is threatened less by industrial pollution and nuclear annihilation than by the erosion of national sovereignty, the changing nature of political space, and the looming exhaustion of the earth’s oil supplies. But like its predecessor, the dominant articulations of the promise of local foods reflect more than anything else a deep suspicion of conventional politics and the wholesale colonization of the political imaginary by the logic of the market. Local Is the New Organic Histories of organic foods in the United States invariably point to the 1960s, a periodization that owes to scientific, political, and ideological developments of the decade. Before the invention and rapid appropriation of chemical pesticides and fertilizers by American farmers in the 1940s, all foods were what would today pass for “organic.” And between Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), which catalyzed concerns about chemical pesticides such as DDT, and Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet (1971),whichtiedglobalhungertotheindustrializationoftheAmericandiet, Americans saw a rapid proliferation of books and organizations promoting a return to small-scale, organic agriculture, and alternative diets (vegetarianism , macrobiotics) linking food choices not only to concerns about [3.149...