Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 1
How Is Food Political?
Market, State, and
Knowledge
Ronald J. Herring
Food, Politics, and Society? The Hubris
of a Title
Even in unlimited pages, coverage of the scope of this
Handbook
would be implausi-
ble. We focus on intersections of food, politics, and society: the dimensions of food that
express both overt political action and deeper structural elements of political economy,
in societies of different scale, from villages to an imagined global community. That con-
ceptual narrowing is helpful in exploring intersecting analytical puzzles: Why should
food be political? Why is food knowledge contested?
Michael Pollen tells us that society invariably has the right answers to food questions
through a mechanism called “culture,” which operationally reduces to “mom.”
“Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom.”
Mom knows what one needs to know about food in Pollan's world, whatever the
machinations of the scientific-industrial complex built up around official nutritional
recommendations from the state.1 If your mom couldn't pronounce the ingredients, or
if
you
can't pronounce the ingredients, whatever claims are made for some food prod-
uct, it has strayed too far from society's evolutionary judgment of what constitutes “real
food.” Mom represents condensation of knowledge and norms of tradition.
Pollan's mom is a metaphor for evolutionary wisdom; ideas that persist and become
embedded in cultures are selected in the same sense that natural selection works on
species: fitness to conditions encountered over time. There is congealed wisdom in cul-
ture. The obvious inconvenience is that moms vary, but human physiology is fairly con-
stant. Ethical and normative issues are also important to moms, and they have no easy
