A Growing Appetite: The Emerging Critical Rhetoric of Food Politics

Have you heard about Soylent? Not the foodstuff in the old movie with Charlton Heston, made, shockingly, from people or “peee-pull!” Soylent is the food hack by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs designed to help hipsters chill when faced with the daunting decision of what to eat. The new Soylent combines oat flour, soy protein, flax, cocoa powder, and Emergen-C in a pasty drink to provide all the nutrition the body needs to thrive, or at least code all night.¹ Casting sustenance as an engineering problem, Soylent is designed not only to fuel the body but to reduce the environmental impacts of food production, in a manner that departs from the now more familiar paths of the organic and local food movements. Is Soylent part of the utopian/dystopian future of food? That this seems possible suggests the degree to which questions about food, its meaning, and its future are thrown open in the spirited and multifaceted debate that constitutes discourse about food today—from Morgan Spurlock’s film Super Size Me to best-selling books such as Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the popular hits about food keep coming as questions of what to eat and why trend higher.²

For rhetoricians, the obsessive rumination over food and the management of appetite is also an ancient story. In the unfinished dialogue the Critias, Plato gives us a glimpse into the environmental impulse that led to his critique of rhetorical excess.³ Here, Socrates, the foil of classical rhetoricians, predicts our times by complaining that the fever pitch of the market with its relentless drive toward consumption leads to environmental devastation. It is not surprising that he would turn to food and cookery as the primary metaphor for attacking rhetoric’s role in generating the hypnotic state that leads to the destruction of both soul and body. Soylent, like many diets and other food fads, may be seen as extensions of the fear and anxiety that accompany the monumental abundance and consumptive excesses of modern food culture. While eating is among our most personal behaviors, it is increasingly recognized as a political activity, particularly in a world dominated by corporate food production on a mass scale that has turned the means of sustenance and traditional rituals of identity and community into the parade of products and brands that is the fruit of a hydrocarbon economy.

The interdisciplinary field of food studies has burgeoned in recent years and includes methods and perspectives from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Scholars of communication may find this body of research particularly compelling, as it brings critical attention to the relationship between food, power, culture, and excess. Further, a condition of this discourse is that it is never quite complete but consistently points to a richness beyond its boundaries...