If you click on a link at Arts and Letters Daily, where you’ll end up is an ideological crapshoot. Today I found an article about why political conservatives should embrace the growing movement to rethink and rebuild America’s culinary culture even though its promoters are people like Alice Waters and Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver. The author, a gentleman named John Schwenkler, takes pains to disarm his audience by noting that on the surface Waters et al. are indeed not their sort, before going on to acknowledge that they have some good points–namely, that building a locally-based food culture helps to build a denser fabric of communal life, and that transmitting a culture of growing and cooking and eating to children can help in their socialization as well as their education.
Schwenkler’s argument does not entirely convince me that he is my sort, although I imagine we could have a good time swapping recipes for the odder contents of our respective CSA boxes. He seems to think that the development of dense local food cultures will diminish general enthusiasm for “centralized government” by emphasizing the role current systems of regulation play in supporting corporate agriculture. Looking at the same phenomenon, I hope that the creation of a culture that encourages people to feel they have a stake in their communities and a connection to their neighbors would encourage people to develop ties to one another and a sense of responsibility for collective well-being, which would in turn encourage some forms of centralized government to grow. But then, he sees the relationship between corporate agriculture and governance as something intrinsic to the function of government, where I see it as a devil’s bargain between two groups of selfish rich men out for the main chance in which the political process has been used as a tool. Nonetheless, we’re walking along fairly well together, writer and reader, ruminating about the benefits that a move away from junk food-land might bring to our social and political culture, until I am rudely awakened from my dream of philosophical reconciliation.
Referring to a comment of Michael Pollan’s that the inability of all Americans to afford high-quality food is shameful, he describes it as a “puzzling line,” adding that while that inability is a sad thing that we should work to fix, “life’s inevitabilities do not warrant our shame.” Taken out of context he’s absolutely right, but I would hardly call the distribution of wealth in the USA one of “life’s inevitabilities.” An inevitability, vis-a-vis our eating habits, would better be described as something like our presence in the food chain. We are dependent on other beings to provide us our sustenance whose interests and lives are taken so that ours might flourish. That’s the kind of fact that there’s no getting around. What Schwenkler calls life’s inevitabilities I would call human coincidences– no single decision got us to where we are now, but that doesn’t mean that we have to stay here.
At this point I’m tempted to veer off into a rant about politics, but that’s a lot of baggage to throw onto a short article whose major thrust I completely agree with despite the differences in underpinnings. We’ll never know what would happen if America embraced mindful eating en masse unless it does, in fact, happen. But there is a large difference between his basic principles, as expressed in this article, and mine, and it was published in a magazine called “The American Conservative.” The article takes a much more restricted view of human agency, our collective control over (and responsibility for) our circumstances, than I consider valid; “inevitable” is only a step away from “natural.” That’s a pretty big difference.
I think it’s much harsher to tell someone “I don’t care what you think so much as I think your thought process is wrong” than it is to say, “I don’t agree with you” based on outcomes. I have a hard time imagining this country sitting down and having that discussion. I have a hard time imagining myself having that discussion– it looks like I need to add “formulate a credo” to my to-do list.
But still– “life’s inevitabilities?” Really, now.
