VITAMIN BREAD BOOT CAMP - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 53

small-town life gracing alternative food movement literature would seem right at home on a brochure
for Focus on the Family. Perhaps most palpably, a Libertarian anti-regulation streak runs deep through
the whole alternative food movement, with conservative rancher Joel Salatin as its current celebrity
spokesman. Considering that Salatin holds a degree from the ultra-conservative Bob Jones University
and evinces fierce allegiance to the Christian Right, you wouldn't think his ideas would get far in the
“liberal” alternative food movement. Yet Salatin's outspoken condemnations of bureaucratic red tape
and what he sees as regulations hampering small-scale alternative food production earned him the title
“America's most influential farmer” and made him a minor celebrity in liberal enclaves like Berkeley,
California. 2 When it comes to lionizing the independent spirit of family farms, Left and Right can easily
sit at the same table.
Since 9/11, liberal and conservative members of the alternative food movement have also begun to
find common ground on the idea that “good food” and national security go hand in hand. Best-selling
food writer Michael Pollan crystallized this new language of food and national security. On the eve of
the 2008 presidential elections, Pollan's “Open Letter to the Next Farmer-in-Chief,” published in the
New York Times , roused thousands of urban gourmets and local foodies to unprecedented interest in the
national politics of agriculture. Transforming the U.S. food system was not just necessary for health and
the environment, Pollan declared, “it is a critical issue of national security.” A centralized food system
under the command of a few large companies was more vulnerable to attack and interruption than a
small-scale decentralized provisioning network, Pollan argued. A system that specialized in producing
gargantuan portions of junk food made the country weak and unfit to fight. 3
Members of the alternative food movement quickly grasped the appeal of national security rhetoric.
Organizers of farmers' markets, community gardens, and local food projects saw that they could use the
language of security to give urgency to their causes. As a Seattle-based locavore blog advertised, lentils
grown in the Palouse hills near my home weren't just tasty and light on carbon. Because they helped
build healthy soils and food self-sufficiency, they “might just be the ideal national security food.” 4
In part, this turn toward national security was tactical—appropriating a powerful discourse from the
right for the movement's own ends. But it also reflected a real desire. The alternative food movement
seemed to pine for the passionate intensity and personal sacrifice generated by wartime mobilization.
WWII-era posters entreating Americans to conserve food, eat less meat, and grow their own vegetables
circulated through alternative food movement websites. How can we muster that kind of national pur-
pose and urgency around our campaigns? food activists asked wistfully. As if in response to that ques-
tion, new “Victory Gardens” sprang up on college campuses across the country and environmental or-
ganizations adopted WWII-era rhetoric, asking members to observe “Meatless Mondays” as part of the
fight against climate change.
This urgent way of talking about food and security made for some strange bedfellows. For many,
like Pollan, the diet-security connection gave teeth to appeals for liberal policy reform; for others,
like the farmers' market director I quoted several chapters ago, it justified xenophobia. The racialized
specter of contaminated foreign food and threatening foreigners hovered silently over many dreams
of finding safety in local self-sufficiency. Meanwhile, public health officials and defense department
strategists took the language of diet and defense in a totally different direction: they joined forces to
frame the country's obesity epidemic as a national security threat—“the terror within,” as Surgeon Gen-
eral Richard Carmona phrased it just months after 9/11. 5
What do we gain and lose when we think of eating as an act of individual and national defense, or
when we connect dreams of “good food” to military campaigns? Where did we even get this idea that
eating could be seen as a kind of combat?