Savoring Alternative Food

School gardens, healthy eating and visceral difference

Jessica Hayes-Conroy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135014926
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Advocates of the alternative food movement often insist that food is our "common ground" – that through the very basic human need to eat, we all become entwined in a network of mutual solidarity. In this challenging book, the author explores the contradictions and shortcomings of alternative food activism by examining specific endeavours of the movement through various lenses of social difference – including class, race, gender, and age.

While the solidarity adage has inspired many, it is shown that this has also had the unfortunate effect of promoting sameness over difference, eschewing inequities in an effort to focus on being "together at the table". The author explores questions of who belongs at the table of alternative food, and who gets to decide what is eaten there; and what is at stake when alternative food practices become the model for what is right to eat? Case studies are presented based on fieldwork in two distinct loci of alternative food organizing: school gardens and slow food movements in Berkeley, California and rural Nova Scotia. The stories take social difference as a starting point, but they also focus specifically on the complexities of sensory experience – how material bodies take up social difference, both confirming and disrupting it, in the visceral processes of eating.

Overall the book demonstrates the importance of moving beyond a promotion of universal "shoulds" of eating, and towards a practice of food activism that is more sensitive to issues of social and material difference.

Part 1
Table settings

1 Exploring visceral (re)actions

We are our molecules; our deepest fears, joys, and desires are embodied in the chemical signals of our neurotransmitters. But we are also creators of meaning, making up—and made out of—our histories, our idiosyncrasies, our crazy plot-lines, our unpredictable outcomes. How are we to make sense of the fact that we are both?

(Brison 2003)

As social science research reaches further into the human body as both a theoretical scale and an empirical location, philosopher Susan Brison’s question seems to me at the crux of such inquiry. Her question is not necessarily new to fields like geography, women’s studies or philosophy, but it importantly places the body at the center of our social and spatial questions—including questions about the food we eat. How are we to make sense of the fact that we are, like the landscapes that feed us, both biological and social, molecules and meaning, matter and discourse?

I want to begin to answer this question first by looking at the concept of “nature’” and its relationship to the human body. Nature as both an idea and a material thing is given particular form through the human body, and especially through bodily experience. Notions of naturalness and pre-social purity abound in discussions of bodily sensation and judgment, and these sensations and judgments are in turn lent a sort of felt legitimacy through their understood status as “natural.” This interplay between (often subconscious) cognition and physical bodily sensation is at the heart of what I conceive of as “the visceral”—the fuzzy place in the body where molecules and meanings, or matter and discourse, collide. Just like nature itself, the visceral is far from a pre-social phenomenon, and yet it is often discussed and experienced as such. In fact, many people use the terms natural and visceral interchangeably when discussing bodily sensations and judgments. Visceral, it seems, has emerged in the English language as nature qua bodily feeling. But despite the limits and dangers of this current usage, it is nevertheless a useful concept, worth both critiquing and retrieving as an analytical tool.

The visceral as (not so) natural

In popular culture, visceral reactions are commonly imagined (and experienced) as “natural” in so much as they are assumed to derive from biological and chemical processes within the body. Importantly, these processes are frequently deemed to be apart (somehow) from the body’s role as author, thinker, and social actor, eschewing the role of cultural experiences and social differences in the formation of visceral reactions. In relation to SGCPs, a good example of this is taste. Taste is a visceral reaction with many dimensions, and can refer both to broad cultural and aesthetic partialities, and also to preferences for specific cuisines and culinary specialties. In both the broad and specific meanings of the term, taste has been shown to be influenced greatly by one’s social positioning (Bourdieu 1984). Yet in common language, many of the SGCP leaders I talked to discussed taste (for food in particular, but also for food practices like eating slowly or eating at a table) as ultimately a pre-social matter:

The actual taste of the ingredient is not the determining factor, because you know what? A McDonald hamburger tastes like crap. It is not taste, it is marketing, it is social pressure. Once you get over all the rest of it, a fresh picked tomato actually tastes better.

(Leader, NS, emphasis added)

Activist: Cheetos are never “good” food. They are a product of production. Who you are does alter your consciousness, but …

JHC: Not your taste buds?

Activist: Hmmm … I don’t know.

(Activist, CA)

In these examples, individual preferences for food are imagined to be complex and are acknowledged to be muddied by social pressures and capitalist reproduction. But, “once you get over the rest of it,” our material bodily impulses to choose certain foods over others, as expressed through the biological work of taste buds, for example, are assumed to exist as a pure, pre-social molecular force towards (the right) behavior. Importantly, because these SGCP leaders consider taste in such pre-social terms, they also regard eating as, ultimately, a universal experience. In so far as SGCPs encourage sensory-based learning (as opposed to intellectual learning), the programs are imagined and promoted as spaces that give “equal access and equal opportunity for all students to engage with food,” particularly because “all you have to do is use your senses” (Teacher, CA). The implication here is that through sensory perception alone, all students will naturally come to the same (visceral) conclusions about what tastes good.

You are being educated by osmosis, rather than having to sit down and evaluate, it is happening in a different way, through the senses.

(Leader, NS)

It is a beautiful thing to see that transition [to alternative food] happen, and it happens naturally.

(Leader, CA)

In the above quotations, nature is imagined to work through the body to bring about a certain set of fixed visceral judgments, which are interpreted (in being “natural”) as ultimately good, right or beautiful. In contrast, tastes for foods other than alternative are therefore implied to be bad and against nature, which advances the educational and political goal of SGCPs to help students “get over the rest of it.” The implication is that, at its pre-social core, anybody’s visceral reaction to alternative food will be the same.

Examining such claims is important to understanding how these SGCP leaders imagine the programs to work through the visceral body, and also how they interpret SGCP outcomes or successes. Particularly, it is important to recognize that these claims are used to frame the visceral goals of the alternative food movement as essentially apolitical, and thus inherently unproblematic. In other words, the healthy eating objectives of SGCPs appear ultimately as a common good for all students, in so far as they are presumed to be nature’s intended outcome. They also quite interestingly appear as the indisputably tastiest choices, to the extent that nature is imagined to really determine “actual” taste. Thus, in Berkeley, for example, the oft-repeated promotional sound bite for SGCPs tells us that the food kids eat at school is simply “delicious,” (see Alice Waters’ “Delicious Revolution;” Waters Online), begging the question, why don’t the students get to make this call? Rather than allowing the students themselves to assess the deliciousness of the food, this claim is made a priori, with nature’s unquestionable goodness/tastiness standing in for empirical evidence from those who actually eat/taste the food. In contrast to this, however, stand the many student complaints that I heard while working in the SGCP classrooms about the changes in school food, particularly at the level of the cafeteria:

Last year they changed our lunch program, so that it is all organic. But I stopped buying it because it doesn’t taste good. I mean, I want organic, but I want it to taste good too. Like cardboard and pears? Not cool …

(Student, CA)

We like pepperoni pizza, but we can’t have it because it is not healthy. [The teacher] told us that it was the school board that made that decision, but I [don’t understand] because [other schools] still get to have it.

(Student, NS)

Beyond disallowing the possibility that students (need to) have personal agency in the development of taste preference, claims about the “natural” and “actual” correctness of SGCP food also serve to rationalize the superiority of alternative food preference over other, nonconforming tastes (e.g. a taste for pepperoni pizza). This rationalization is particularly problematic given that the alternative food movement is also frequently characterized (even by many alternative food activists themselves) as economically elitist, racially white, and culturally European. In this sense, any assertion of a pre-social quality to SGCP food is not only questionable as a supposed fact but ultimately condemnable as a potentially pernicious rationalization of the imagined supremacy of rich, white, and western forms of knowledge and valuation over other forms of knowing and assessing food. These dilemmas clearly illustrate that the boundary between the nature and culture of taste in SGCPs is far from clear cut, and thus that the goals of alternative food are by no means beyond the bounds of social critique. Indeed, we might consider that what seems like untainted nature to some can feel more like cultural imperialism to others.

Visceral difference and visceral change

Acknowledging that visceral judgments like taste are far from pre-social, how are we to understand the (potentially positive) power of the visceral within and beyond alternative food? It seems that the metaphorical appeal and indeed the material power of the visceral in many cases come from its imagined (and improbable) attachment to “pure” nature. Certainly it is because the visceral often feels so natural—so innate—that many activists and eaters will trust it as a source of great reason. After all, when in doubt, we should just listen to our guts, right? But, if our guts are nature’s unhindered pulpit then why don’t we all crave to eat from a farmers market, or an organic garden?

My point here is that visceral judgments do influence the trajectory and outcome of many social and political phenomena—including what we eat at our tables. This is a claim that I wish to expand upon extensively in this and subsequent chapters. But, as the sheer diversity of our tastes and preferences would suggest, these visceral judgments are certainly not “pure” nature at its essence. Instead, then, I want to suggest that we begin to imagine “the visceral” as a collection of learned bodily habits towards certain bodily feelings, desires, and actions. These habits are not static and universal but are materially produced and reconfigured through various biological and chemical flows that are situated within people’s different social, cultural, and political contexts. They are our daily living out of the messy interaction, the ongoing chaotic relationship, between Brison’s (above) meaning and molecule. In this sense, visceral reactions defy the oft-presumed boundary between nature-as-molecule and culture-as-meaning, suggesting that it is instead the intersection of these supposed pure forms that propels both social and natural reproduction (Latour 1993). In this hybrid understanding, inclinations towards visceral reactions inevitably differ from person to person, group to group, and context to context—and thus, instead of “pure” universal response (based on unitary, pre-social forces), we can encounter contextualized instances and patterns of often inequitable and conflicting visceral difference, in which physical bodily matter is always already socially and differentially articulated (Latour 2004). This, of course, does not make visceral judgments any less real, any less tangible, or any less natural. But it does make them more open to critique, and also more viable as instruments of social analysis and social change.

Given such complexities, to talk about viscerality is (admittedly) to try to specify the unspecifiable—a something that is constantly shifting, deeply contextualized, and haphazardly produced. It is truly difficult, if not impossible, to pin down exactly why we taste what we taste, or feel what we feel. These bodily judgments are at once internal and external, historical and immediate, probable and unpredictable. The larger spatial and temporal arrangements that at a moment produce within a body a particular craving, for example, are too numerous and disorganized to identify; and the related internal mechanisms of perception and judgment that attempt to filter and organize these arrangements are similarly copious and complex. For these reasons, as I discuss visceral reactions in this book, I will not attempt to draw direct causal linkages between certain social circumstances and specific food habits, nor will I attempt to argue that cultural differences can assuredly forecast taste preference. These stories may exist within my case studies, but if so, they are only ever partial descriptions. I want to encourage an understanding of visceral reactions in SGCPs that is much more fluid than this.

Still, I also want to argue that visceral reactions, despite connotations of animal instinct and uncontrollable response, are also not entirely out of our reach—nor the reach of others. The visceral realm is not thoroughly mysterious and unknowable, even in its complexity and specificity. Certainly the success of the advertising industry in eliciting product-based visceral responses is testament to this fact, such as when children declare that carrots packaged in a McDonald’s wrapper taste better (Robinson et al. 2007). Indeed, as geographer Nigel Thrift warns, knowledge about the creation and mobilization of bodily affect is being deployed knowingly and politically, and “mainly … by the rich and powerful” (2004, 58). Nevertheless, progressive activists also can and do pay attention to the ways in which bodies come to sense and judge and (re)act (Hayes-Conroy 2009, Hayes-Conroy and Martin 2010, Clough 2012). Visceral judgments are not passive, unthinking, “reactive” responses but instead learned and embodied behaviors that involve a series of active and often purposeful (though not always conscious) decisions. While not fully predictable, therefore, visceral reactions are certainly manipulable, and thus open to many possibilities of re-activation. I therefore want to approach viscerality as something that we can also learn to use in effecting personal and social change at a variety of scales. This is not to deny that other avenues of social change are important (e.g. policy or institutional reform), but rather to recognize the visceral as present both beside and within other mechanisms of change. To think of visceral reactions as embodied socio-spatial productions—material relationships through which we develop diverse inclinations towards certain behaviors, actions or feelings—is to take a step towards understanding visceral response as a mechanism of daily political struggle.

In the sections of this chapter that follow, I explore in more depth how academic scholarship has contributed to what I refer to in this book as “the visceral.” The examination is not exhaustive, and is also not meant to underscore minute differences. Scholars have taken interest in the body for a variety of reasons (e.g. cultural analysis, health studies, political strategy), and have discussed the body using a variety of terms and concepts (e.g. embodiment, performance, affect, and also “the visceral”). The goal of this chapter is less to explain how these interests and concepts differ as to acknowledge the progression of important ideas in regard to bodies, to explore significant areas of convergence within body-centered scholarship, and to flag places where the body has been discussed in ways that I find particularly useful for examining SGCPs. Recognizing that what any of us are trying to describe when writing about bodies is constantly in flux, I believe that it is important to recognize that there is no one right way to think about bodies, though there certainly might be mistaken or obstructive ways.

Turning (back) towards the body

Historically, academics have shied away from bodies and visceralities as topics of scholarly interest. There is a well-worn history of this in the academy, critiqued roundly and rightfully by corporeal feminist scholars, among others (Grosz 1994, Birke 2000). Indeed, bodies and their sensations and judgments have long been associated with women and notions of femininity (e.g. being ruled by emotions), while men and masculinity have been linked to rational, cognitive thought, and thus to legitimate intellectual inquiry (Brison 2003). In addition to such sexist reasons, however, academics have also turned away from the material body for much more understandable, and even productive reasons. For example, within geography, early theories of “biological determinism” had sought to explain cultural differences in individual behavior through differences in genetics and racial categorization. As these racist and sexist theories became rightfully discredited (Livingstone 1993), social theorists, including many feminist scholars, were hesitant to return to any body-centered explanations, focusing instead on analyses of social disenfranchisement and economic inequity.

In spite of this “turn away” from the body, however, in recent decades there has been much important scholarship on bodies and embodiment, including especially from corporeal feminist scholars. Much of this work has drawn attention to the body as it constructs and is constructed by our social, economic, and political worlds. Feminist scholars have pushed to recognize the body not as an isolated biological object, but as a location for the practice of social values, beliefs, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: eating sea urchin for breakfast
• PART 1 Table settings
• PART 2 Tasting difference
• PART 3 Policy and practice
• Conclusion: A thousand tiny eithers; a thousand tiny ors
• References
• Index