How Is Food Political? Market, State, and Knowledge - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 4

Michael Pollan adds to his evocation of tradition and culture the less obvious conten-
tion that eating itself “is a political act.” Embedded in this claim is a link from individ-
ual behavior to food systems, in which there are good and bad preferences. Siddhartha
Shome in his contribution to this volume uses that claim to motivate a critical look into
the theory behind political acts promoted by the “alternative food movement” with
which Pollan is associated. This movement is not just about food but about promoting a
more sustainable, environmentally friendly, and just socioeconomic order—an alterna-
tive to current trajectories. Agreement on these valued outcomes should be easy, but a
closer look uncovers deep political cleavages. Shome dissects the fault lines on both the
social vision of end states and the means of obtaining them. Alan McHughen's chapter
extends the critique of agrarian romanticism to “Mother Nature” itself: The natural, far
from being a consensual good, is a world our species has tried to overcome with tech-
nology, beginning with agriculture—in the absence of which life would be nasty, brut-
ish, and short. Yet there is perhaps no more powerful trope in the new food politics than
“natural.”
In Pollan's view of politicized eating, you not only are what you eat, but what you
eat influences what others eat; choice has externalities. How this might happen con-
cerns several subsequent chapters of this volume. Eating to reinforce specific val-
ues—organic, local, vegan, fair-wage and equal exchange, child-labor-free food, for
example—creates market demand that could change the system of food production.
Joseé Johnston and Norah MacKendrick entitled their chapter “The Politics of Grocery
Shopping: Eating, Voting, and (Possibly) Transforming the Food System.” The gen-
eral phenomenon is called “political consumerism.” This alternative politics is attrac-
tive when neither political parties nor social movements are available to make credible
vehicles for change, but it depends heavily on knowledge. How are we to know that
child labor applying pesticides is not promoted by our food choices? Or that our food
is safe? In the case of safety, the common assumption is that the state is the appropriate
mechanism for certification—though states vary greatly in what is relevant for safety
standards and how to enforce them. In value-driven ethical consumerism, labels by
non-state actors predominate. Emily Clough documents the considerable difficulty of
knowing what reality labels reflect, or who actually benefits from normatively valued
claims—it is often not the farmer. Moreover, there is a question of class and knowledge
in political consumerism:
critics view ethical food labeling as an elitist system plagued by problems of transpar-
ency, accountability, scalability, and consumer misinformation—ultimately an inad-
equate substitute for stronger state regulation.
Thus, the dilemma is: states are difficult to move to ethically principled positions, partly
because of interests in the status quo and partly because of disagreements about the
right thing to do. Livestock farmers prefer that vegans not rule. Markets offer an alter-
native to the state, via political consumerism, but market power is by no means distrib-
uted by any egalitarian or ethical principle. The fundamental political fault line is found
here between market and state: which decides what, in production, technology, and