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Food and culture war

I was talking with my folks the other day about points of conflict between my sister Ruthie and me. One of them had to do with our approach to food. Said my dad, “Ruthie wouldn’t have gone to Whole Foods for hell.” That I do some of my shopping at Whole Foods was something she […]

I was talking with my folks the other day about points of conflict between my sister Ruthie and me. One of them had to do with our approach to food. Said my dad, “Ruthie wouldn’t have gone to Whole Foods for hell.” That I do some of my shopping at Whole Foods was something she disdained as a sign of poshness. (Did she think I was Simon Marchmont? Probably.) My guess is that it wasn’t Whole Foods that was literally the problem, but what Whole Foods symbolized to her: the larder of privileged people who waste money on expensive food.

This was one of those things it was impossible for us to discuss, for various reasons particular to our relationship (more on which in the forthcoming book). As I told my admirably frugal and practical-minded sister once, she was right: we do spend a greater proportion of our money on food. (For some reason, it didn’t make much of a difference that we bought much of our meat directly from small independent farmers; in the culture war, farmer’s markets are Stuff White People Like — by which I mean they are defined solely by their ridiculous, but very real, Posh Nosh excesses.) Anyway, we do spend more of our money on food, because food matters a lot to us, both aesthetically and from a health perspective. While it is true that we allocate our food budget differently than she did — she bought more processed foods and snack foods than we did; we put the money we might have spent on those things toward buying other foodstuffs — the fact is it’s more expensive to buy fresh fruit and the kinds of things that are common in our house than it is to buy more mainstream American fare. But, as I said, it’s worth it to us, and if that means we have to cut back on some other expense, that’s something we did, and we’ll do. As with so many things about life in our country these days, it’s hard for people to have conversations about certain lifestyle choices without a lot of defensiveness on all sides.

Anyway, I bring all this up in light of this post  comparing the calories consumed by Europeans to Americans, correlated with the amount of money we spend on food. Europeans take in about the same number of calories as we do, but spend 50 to 100 percent more on food than we do. And they have less than half the obesity rate that we do. Cliff Kuang:

Granted, Americans don’t walk as much as Europeans do. But the obvious thing you have to conclude is that we simply eat cheaper food that’s worse for us. Again, that’s no surprise given the amount of fast food and processed food that Americans eat. The real question is why we eat like that. I’d place the blame squarely on the 1950s, and our wholesale embrace of mechanized food after World War II. In those days, fast food, canned vegetables, and cheap chicken became a sign of America’s progressiveness: Cheap food, in the days after World War II, were a marker of the roaring economic progress we were making. Cheap food, in other words, was a source of national pride before it became a national habit. Europe, by contrast, had no such industrial miracle. Instead, they simply held onto the food traditions that they always had–of home cooking, for example.

To flip it forward a bit, I would argue that Europeans are willing to pay more for better food because what they eat is so wrapped up with national pride and cultural identity.

I’d say Cliff Kuang is onto something. I’ve rarely encountered in this country the kind and degree of cultural pride in local food and food traditions that’s common in Europe. The idea that you would willingly pay more for food with a localist pedigree is still fairly alien to American culture. Mind you, I’m talking in the abstract, not the particular. It’s offensive to criticize someone struggling to put food on the table for not being open to paying more for tomatoes at the local farmer’s market. I get that. My point is more general. Europeans aren’t all rich, but even working-class Europeans are willing to spend a greater proportion of their money on food. I think there must be a middle ground here, but it’s hard even to talk about these questions because there’s so much cultural anxiety bound up in this topic. Which is just bizarre, if you think about it, but that’s reality.

By the way, if you haven’t seen it, Mary Eberstadt’s wonderful 2009 essay about moralizing about food and sex is a must-read. Excerpt:

One more critical link between the appetites for sex and food is this: Both, if pursued without regard to consequence, can prove ruinous not only to oneself, but also to other people, and even to society itself. No doubt for that reason, both appetites have historically been subject in all civilizations to rules both formal and informal. Thus the potentially destructive forces of sex — disease, disorder, sexual aggression, sexual jealousy, and what used to be called “home-wrecking” — have been ameliorated in every recorded society by legal, social, and religious conventions, primarily stigma and punishment. Similarly, all societies have developed rules and rituals governing food in part to avoid the destructiveness of free-for-alls over scarce necessities. And while food rules may not always have been as stringent as sex rules, they have nevertheless been stringent as needed. Such is the meaning, for example, of being hanged for stealing a loaf of bread in the marketplace, or keel-hauled for plundering rations on a ship.

These disciplines imposed historically on access to food and sex now raise a question that has not come up before, probably because it was not even possible to imagine it until the lifetimes of the people reading this: What happens when, for the first time in history — at least in theory, and at least in the advanced nations — adult human beings are more or less free to have all the sex and food they want?

This question opens the door to a real paradox. For given how closely connected the two appetites appear to be, it would be natural to expect that people would do the same kinds of things with both appetites — that they would pursue both with equal ardor when finally allowed to do so, for example, or with equal abandon for consequence; or conversely, with similar degrees of discipline in the consumption of each.

In fact, though, evidence from the advanced West suggests that nearly the opposite seems to be true. The answer appears to be that when many people are faced with these possibilities for the very first time, they end up doing very different things — things we might signal by shorthand as mindful eating, and mindless sex. This essay is both an exploration of that curious dynamic, and a speculation about what is driving it.

Mary’s piece primarily comes at the question from the point of view of elites who believe one should have no real restrictions on sexual appetite, but who fetishize the consumption of food. Read just a bit more of this insightful piece:

Most important of all, however, is the difference in moral attitude separating Betty and Jennifer on the matter of food. Jennifer feels that there is a right and wrong about these options that transcends her exercise of choice as a consumer. She does not exactly condemn those who believe otherwise, but she doesn’t understand why they do, either. And she certainly thinks the world would be a better place if more people evaluated their food choices as she does. She even proselytizes on occasion when she can.

In short, with regard to food, Jennifer falls within Immanuel Kant’s definition of the Categorical Imperative: She acts according to a set of maxims that she wills at the same time to be universal law.

Betty, on the other hand, would be baffled by the idea of dragooning such moral abstractions into the service of food. This is partly because, as a child of her time, she was impressed — as Jennifer is not — about what happens when food is scarce (Betty’s parents told her often about their memories of the Great Depression; and many of the older men of her time had vivid memories of deprivation in wartime). Even without such personal links to food scarcity, though, it makes no sense to Betty that people would feel as strongly as her granddaughter does about something as simple as deciding just what goes into one’s mouth. That is because Betty feels, as Jennifer obviously does not, that opinions about food are simply de gustibus, a matter of individual taste — and only that.

This clear difference in opinion leads to an intriguing juxtaposition. Just as Betty and Jennifer have radically different approaches to food, so do they to matters of sex. For Betty, the ground rules of her time — which she both participates in and substantially agrees with — are clear: Just about every exercise of sex outside marriage is subject to social (if not always private) opprobrium. Wavering in and out of established religion herself, Betty nevertheless clearly adheres to a traditional Judeo-Christian sexual ethic. Thus, for example, Mr. Jones next door “ran off” with another woman, leaving his wife and children behind; Susie in the town nearby got pregnant and wasn’t allowed back in school; Uncle Bill is rumored to have contracted gonorrhea; and so on. None of these breaches of the going sexual ethic is considered by Betty to be a good thing, let alone a celebrated thing. They are not even considered to be neutral things. In fact, they are all considered by her to be wrong.

Most important of all, Betty feels that sex, unlike food, is not de gustibus. She believes to the contrary that there is a right and wrong about these choices that transcends any individual act. She further believes that the world would be a better place, and individual people better off, if others believed as she does. She even proselytizes such on occasion when given the chance.

In short, as Jennifer does with food, Betty in the matter of sex fulfills the requirements for Kant’s Categorical Imperative.

In my family, my sister was Betty, and I … well, I’m both Betty and Jennifer, because I believe that both the consumption of food and the practice of sex have moral meaning, and must be governed by norms. I spoil everybody’s day!

(Via Andrew Sullivan).

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