June 27, 2012
Justin Erik Halldór Smith On Dieting
Justin E. H. Smith in his own blog:
It may be that an older form of wisdom speaks to us through proverbs, the sort of wisdom that reeks of grandparents and people even older, that announces 'you are what you eat' as an existential truism, for example. But this sort of wisdom is for the most part drowned out by chatter, about good carbs as opposed to bad ones, about the exalted ideal ratio between carbs, proteins, and fats, about whether food should be free of some negative element or other, whether it should be raw or cooked, whether it is fitting that animals be slaughtered to produce it. And all of this chatter takes place in the mode of facticity: it is put forth as if it were entirely science, and had nothing to do with culture. The striving upper middle class thus avoids McDonald's not because it is where poor fat people go, but rather because the food served there is 'unhealthy', a term that can only conceal its normativity under a thick coat of false consciousness. And thus urban subcultures emerge that condemn gluten, or that advocate a diet based principally upon meat à la Tartare, as if there were no logic of social distinction at work, as if it were simply the case that their way of eating is the correct way, the natural way, the way cavemen ate, the way we ate before we were corrupted by the Agricultural Revolution, by modernity, by supermarkets, or some other hypothetical loss of innocence.
There is no more awareness in either the bourgeois or the Bohemian expressions of this chatter than there is in traditional folk cultures, with their highly prescriptive conceptions of how one ought to eat, that 'the natural' is a contested category, that in nutritional matters as in everything else, grand gestures and elaborate programs that spell out how to live in accordance with nature are at least as artificial as everything else we come up with. Whole Foods occupies a different cultural space than the McDonald's a few blocks away; both are however equidistant from Nature.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 07:00 AM | Permalink
Comments
The striving upper middle class thus avoids McDonald's not because it is where poor fat people go, but rather because the food served there is 'unhealthy', a term that can only conceal its normativity under a thick coat of false consciousness... Whole Foods occupies a different cultural space than the McDonald's a few blocks away; both are however equidistant from Nature.
While I love a good Marxist unmasking as much as the next person, I can't help but sense that this one was too fast and too easy. McDonalds is unhealthy, and Whole Foods is a comparative nutritional paradise. It is a classic error of too many (so-called) "postmodernists" to reduce real, objective facts to class/race/gender-based perceptions, which is just what the term "false consciousness" does in this essay. Do we have any empirical evidence that suggests that Whole Foods patrons are actually responding to class distinctions rather than these facts? Would most of them really stop going if 325 lb Brandee, mother of eight, began waddling through the door every week?
In general, a lot of food consciousness is tied to an increasing sense that there are massive global problems which cannot be solved without increased attention to our place in the global food chain. Many people have genuinely chosen to patronize "alternative" food stores because they perceive this basic fact. Perhaps a more balanced look at the food-consciousness craze might pick up on some of the less narcissistic forms that it takes.
Posted by: Joe | Jun 27, 2012 10:34:17 AM
I am as big a fan of Justin as can be, but I think Joe has a good point here. Buying fresh, whole food from local organic farmers is not snobbism or slenderness fetishism in action, any more than eating the worst food you can find is a "power to the people" gesture or a demonstration of your Marxist street cred. Regarding our food supply, we are living in either/or times: we can support and benefit from small local food systems, or we can cave to Monsanto. There's far less in-between than most educated people suspect. I recommend that readers who are seriously interested in the subject become acquainted with the work of Raj Patel and Vandana Shiva.
Again, ain't nobody like Justin -- but this time he is starting with some assumptions that are easily challenged. I believe a deeper acquaintance with food issues the world faces would actually bring about a little retooling on the semiotics of food.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jun 27, 2012 3:39:28 PM
I agree with Justin that trying to guide one's food choices by a metaphysical category of "nature" is quite arbitrary, since every culture has its own idea of what "eating according to nature" is, and everyone from vegans to Stone-Age dieters to fast-food addicts thinks they are eating "naturally."
But I also agree with the above commenters that there is in fact a science of human metabolism and nutrition, which, while its researchers don't know everything by a long shot (the functioning of the body-mind is incredibly complex), they know a lot more about than they used to. And while it is philosophically well-founded to a certain extent to hold that one's body is a kind of prison, eternally prey to one sort of torture or another from birth to death, anyone who is in a seriously painful, debilitating, or life-shortening condition which has been scientifically determined to be due to poor nutrition knows that it's no joke. And hopefully they know how to get out of that particular cell in the prison by altering their eating habits.
Posted by: JonJ | Jun 28, 2012 10:11:09 AM
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