Essay — May / June 2007

New Grub Street

How did ethics become a staple of contemporary food writing?

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Time was, a war of words between a food writer and an organic-foods retailer would have attracted the interest of maybe seven people in your local food co-op–a bit of chatter over the brown-rice bin and everyone would move on. Those of us in a Safeway with our Perdue roasters and our broccoli avec a hint of pesticide would not have known that an argument took place. But the recent exchanges between Michael Pollan, author of the 2006 bestseller The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, and John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, are, if not squarely in the mainstream, awfully close to it.

Thanks to his perch as The New York Times Magazine’s resident food sage, Pollan is a well-known champion of the ethical superiority of small, local organic farms, and of the superior taste of their products. Whole Foods, of course, is a bringer of organic food to grateful yuppies across the country. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan describes Whole Foods as the embodiment of “Industrial Organic.” The company’s appetite for product has driven some organic farmers to scale up and become very much like the farms they were supposed to replace: organic dairies now house thousands of cows who have never munched on a patch of grass, while Brobdignagian vegetable farms ship their produce across the country, undercutting small, local farmers. Whole Foods even sells “organic” TV dinners (Pollan says one he tried “looked and tasted very much like airline food”) and, during the North American winter, has asparagus shipped north from Argentina. This would be environmentally dubious on its face, Pollan suggests, given the fuel required to ship the vegetable. In any case, it “tasted like damp cardboard.”

Mackey immediately fired back. In an open letter on the Whole Foods Web site, he said his company was committed to local farmers as well as consumer choice, and he charged that Pollan’s blanket condemnation of large farms undersold the benefits of encouraging big agriculture to eschew pesticides. The dispute culminated in February, when two thousand people paid $10 each to see a debate between Pollan and Mackey at the University of California at Berkeley. For those expecting an interenviro cage match it was anticlimactic, but Mackey did seem genuinely concerned that the industrial-organic label was going to stick to and hurt Whole Foods, despite its $5.6 billion in sales last year, and 19 percent growth.

“What am I eating?” Pollan asks in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. “And where in the world did it come from?” Those two questions, and Pollan’s ability to unpack them with an enviable, discursive essay style, have made him into a food writer who can scare ceos and, maybe, move markets. In the past few years a raft of reporters and writers have stepped forward with him to answer those twinned queries in all their anthropologically thick complexity. Their work draws together issues of taste, ethics, and politics, bridging the gap between James Beard and Rachel Carson. Much of their writing has an activist tone: last September, The Nation
brought together several environmentally conscious writers under the umbrella of a “Food Issue.” But mainstream newspapers, too, now know that their readers expect them to report on the political and ethical implications of food–and to track trends generated, in part, by the new food writers.

In 2004, for example, The New York Times hired away from The San Francisco Chronicle its star food writer, Kim Severson, who describes her beat as “food from the table out.” In recent months, Severson has written about how supermarkets have been “greenwashed” via deceptively enviro-friendly labels and packages, taken note of the neologism “food miles,” a measure of how far one’s food traveled to get to one’s table, and interviewed people who had sought out farmers’ markets after an e. coli scare involving bagged spinach. “The world of food reporting had been divided,” Severson told me recently. “You’d have an agriculture reporter who didn’t understand how a kitchen worked and a reporter covering hunger who might not understand what it took to put food on the table at night,” plus the restaurant critics and the recipe editors. Newspapers today, she adds, “are really bringing all of that together.”

Even The Wall Street Journal, about as detached from Berkeley as you can get, has been running richly reported pieces on the contests between the giants of the organic industry, like Horizon Organic, and smaller organic cooperatives to recruit new farmers as suppliers. In fact, it’s not the Journal but The Economist that’s worked hardest to foment a backlash. In December it lobbed a rotten tomato at the very idea that you can effect change by the foods you buy and eat. Far from saving the world, the venerable weekly argued, the pro-organic and pro-local-foods movement just “might make it worse.” One reason, it says, is that organic farming is less efficient than the intensive modern sort, so a wholesale switch to organic “would require several times as much land as is currently cultivated. There wouldn’t be much room left for the rain forest.”

This new species of food writing didn’t suddenly sprout out of barren soil. Writing about slow-food, you might say, has been slowly germinating, and The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation, by the Vanity Fair writer David Kamp, tells one story of its growth. Here, the roots of the organic and local-foods movements are more intertwined with the spread of good cooking than we usually think. As American food industrialized over the course of the twentieth century (bringing such taste sensations as Miracle Whip and Crisco), immigrant chefs with impeccable culinary taste maintained oases of fresh ingredients, carefully prepared, in bistros and restaurants. Some Americans, like a young James Beard in the 1930s, drew connections between those chefs’ close attention to their ingredients and their relationships with farmers, and the kind of home cooking their own mothers had done.

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Comments

Russ Parsons

Tue 22 May 2007 09:04 PM

In his essay "New Grub Street," Christopher Shea writes: "With apologies to Silver, Americans are never going to subcontract decisions about what to put in their bodies, or their kids’ bodies, to experts in white coats." But in reality, that is exactly what we have done (though our experts are more likely to be clad in coveralls than lab jackets). And that is exactly why so many of us are so fearful of so much of our food: we have left the growing of it to someone else somewhere else using methods we are only vaguely familiar with. We seek reassurance in labels like "organic" and "sustainable" (usually only partially understood), and in the endless analysis that leads to debates about carbon footprints.

Suz

Mon 28 May 2007 05:30 PM

I'm more concerned about the fear than the food. One food writer who shares my concern, Paul Hertneky, wrote this about the food-conscious in Adbusters: "These enthusiasts devour cultural output. They gorge on images and words, rapturous words, stern words, clever words, words in the mouths of stars, experts, chefs and doctors, words off the fingertips of those like me, who obsess about food, unleash our imaginations on food, craving and coveting it, loving it and fondling it, very much fearing it, and essentially having it replace sex in our middle age." http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/68/Comida_Gorging_on_Words.html