Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry About What We Eat by Harvey Levenstein (review)

Harvey Levenstein’s Fear of Food is an extension of his previous work tracing the development of the American public’s relationship to the evolving industrialized food system in relation to an increasingly globalized form of capitalism. For Levenstein, Americans’ understanding of what is on their plates—how it gets there, what it contains, and what it should be—is the result of the nation’s history as punctuated by specific events, which, though isolated as unique moments within Levenstein’s narrative, are situated along a continuum of the constantly changing social world. Through these circumstances, as manifest from the inextricable connection between the political, cultural, and economic, Americans come to have seemingly rapid shifts in their understandings of food and diet. Thus, while Levenstein emphasizes the paramount role of the ideologies of choice and personal responsibility in individuals’ food consumption, his focus on the hands of government, science, and industry in the formation, continuation, and renovation of American food discourse clearly reveals the historical situatedness and societal construction of personal decision-making regarding what to eat.

In this work Levenstein’s underlying dictum remains the same as in his earlier publications, Revolution at the Table (2003) and Paradox of Plenty (1992, revised ed. 2003), in which he illustrates national history through the lens of food production and consumption as centered upon the ideology of America as the land of promise and plenty, where its citizens should, and most often do, have access to the greatest possible variety and quantity of goods. For Levenstein our trouble as consumers of food—the paradox and the fear—emerges from the fact that as omnivores we harbor a natural anxiety as the wide variety of what we can consume requires that we discern and retain what foods are ‘good’ and beneficial to the body and which are ‘bad’ and potentially deadly. This leeriness and skepticism about our food is then compounded by the “growth of the market economy that has inserted middlemen between producers and consumers of food” and has resulted in “fear about what has been done to our food before it reaches our tables” (1). What Fear of Food does then is pick up on the nuance of this consumptive neurosis outlined in Paradox of Plenty. Instead of focusing on a historical narrative as he does in his earlier work, here Levenstein bases this account on nine fears that emerged since the late nineteenth century and have continued to have an impact (to a greater or lesser extent) on our understandings on the ways food is produced and which foods we should, or shouldn’t, consume.

This topical reframing of American food anxiety allows for a more in depth consideration of the production of these fears as resulting from advances in science and technology, disciplines that are direct benefactors of the capital success of American industry. Levenstein constantly draws attention to the underlying fact that what Americans recognize as scientific fact has been largely sponsored, or in the very least bolstered, by companies whose success is contingent on the ability to sell consumers more. This conflict of interest is only further exacerbated by industry oversight from a government that is dependent upon corporate interests to sustain its livelihood and the wealth of its citizens.

The final party in this consortium is the consumer who moves the economic wheel by investing an ever-increasing amount of their income (in attempting) to attain the ‘right’ commodities to ensure his or her livelihood. However, because capitalism results in inequality, this ideology of food consumption, with all of its anxieties and fears, has a target audience—the middle class. As omnivores both biologically and economically, the middle class’s financial power within the modern industrial food marketplace, which has afforded its members the ability to be discerning and choosy shoppers, is essential to the use of anxiety as a marketing tool for food commodities. The notion...