Scrawled in Wax

Though the neighbourhood I live in has a myriad of choices for cafes aimed at foodies and left-leaning hipsters – replete with spreads of organic coffee, vegan cupcakes and gluten-free date squares – the place I was sitting in was rather nondescript. It was a bit west of the action, in Koreatown, and was decorated more like a cafeteria than  downtown cafe. There were two types of coffee – regular and Irish Cream – and you could get very ordinary things like scrambled (battery) eggs on store bought bagels.

I sat there, with three screens spread out before me (laptop, ebook reader, smartphone), typing away. Something about how ordinary this place was helped me work.

Then, as I worked, my phone chimed its two-tone orchestral note, and I saw my mother had sent me an email. The subject line read “oh, we have to make these cookies”. In the email itself, there was a link and another line that read “well really, I mean that you have to make these cookies”. This is my life, perfectly encapsulated: in a cafe frequented by other harried students and writers too proud to work at a Starbucks, I write abstract ideas about the changing nature of the self and technology only to interrupted by an email from my mom linking me to a baking recipe.

Yeah, the recipe for ‘the One Cookie you Should Bake this Holiday‘ looked grand. But it was the comments underneath that caught my eye, because they seemed so strangely incongruous with a recipe for a Christmas cookie. One read “sugar is like a magnet for cancer”. Another re-did the recipe with unbleached flour and a list of organic ingredients, proclaiming ‘it would be healthy if…’.Yet more debated whether organic was really healthier, or if people shouldn’t even expect such a thing as a healthy cookie.

Call me nuts, but I thought this was interesting.

There’s something odd here, I think. People are struggling with their knowledge of something connected to ‘health’ and ‘nutrition’ and ‘science’. They’re concerned. They want to know what the best thing is to put in their bodies. We all do. We read nutrition labels and obsessively pore over every new study. In my case, I pay particular attention to the ones that say red wine is good for you.

But in at least a couple of ways, people are also working to perform their knowledge: first, to display a command of the contemporary by expressing what they know about ‘food’, in the way some might have once had an encyclopedic knowledge of music or an understanding of economics; and secondly, to express resistance to what they perceive as a broad historical, industrial trend that has corrupted our relationship to food, nutrition and health, taking it away from the natural and organic and substituting economic concerns for those of health and happiness.

These people are what we can safely call foodies.

And as I’ve pontificated before in 140 characters or less, while what I call ‘food nerds’ are people into the culinary arts, foodies are much more. They are, among other things, concerned with the connection between the production and consumption of food and the more general ills of late-capitalism. Food nerds like cooking; foodies like understanding why they should be cooking with organic, locally-sourced vegetables.

At times, this is about the the personal political: the small choices we make in consumption and behaviour that mark out a kind of political choice in how we engage with the world. At others, however, it turns into a game of one-upmanship, peer-pressure and self-righteousness, those bugbears that have always been the dark, rotting underbelly of the left. Food becomes another kind of marker of an activist consciousness, in part, perhaps, because it is one that can be performed through consumption. There is no better anti-capitalism than the one you can display through purchasing.

It’s an idea that Peter Meehan takes up in T Magazine. There he writes about what happens when an activist awakening reaches a kind of tipping point, and instead of being a political movement, a situation arises in which one’s capacity to perform one’s mastery of a certain kind of knowledge becomes a kind of currency within a given culture or subculture.

Meehan illustrates the downside through a couple of anecdotal examples in which he or others are chastised or treated with condescension for the choices they make concerning food. The problem?

And I’m left to wonder: Is all this righteousness going in the right direction? Or will the snake eventually eat its own tail? What originally drew me to so many of these better-practice/better-flavor foodstuffs was the joy, the passion behind them. What I’m worried about is that as the food thing gets trendier and trendier, at some point the know-it-alls will scare off the casually interested. Maybe even their fellow foot soldiers. Is that sustainable?

This is the sneaking problem. Health and nutrition as discourses of knowledge have turned into markers of class and social currency, and the divisions those categories foster are reproduced through a discourse of ‘health’. Those who know behave responsibly; those who don’t betray the world and themselves.

I think there’s a really important think piece waiting to be written on this phenomenon. But more than just poking a bit at foodies a little too much into local and organic, the idea of how particular assertions of knowledge can galvanize people against your viewpoint, regardless of its veracity or defensibility is, I think, one of key issues of our time. Left-right divides, Islamist terrorism, race relations, or even the gay marriage debate in the US – all of these engender dynamics of either moral righteousness or superciliousness on both sides that potentially aggravate rather than ameliorate the conditions for a kind of resolution or acceptance. When you are told consistently that your political viewpoint is the product of ignorance, you are not exactly chomping at the bit to switch sides.

Food is a locus for an incredibly complex network of late-capitalist relations. Projects like Foodprint are working hard to understand how it all works and how we might work to change it. But it seems there’s at least some risk that ethical eating may become another instance in which ethics is co-opted by a need to perform the appearance of ethics, and your ‘foodprint’ will be another way in which you are judged according to a coercive norm not equally accessible to all.

* * *

If you ever come over – and if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you might have done so or might do so in the future – what I cook for you will, I’d like to think, be hearty and tasty, and will probably prepared with a fastidious care bordering on the obsessive.

But it may not be made from organic produce; and some of it may have even traveled here from California. It’s not because I don’t care. It’s that, presented with a set of largely material constraints, I’d make a decision that on that night – in the low light, in the haze of red wine, quiet, sparkling music, and soft murmurs between friends – I’d want to insist on a moment of aesthetic pleasure, even if our mutual politics had, for various reasons, to fall by the wayside. And maybe that won’t be so bad, because it’ll be an exception to the rule. It’ll just be a night, where we’ll sit lethargically after eating a touch too much, so that the next day as we wander down Bloor, we have the happiness, hope and resolve to – oh, I don’t know – maybe pop into a cafe full of reclaimed wood and order an organic, fair-trade coffee and a locally sourced vegan cupcake.