Food and Social Movements (2024)

Warren Belasco

Reformers attempt to invent a better future by changing the unjust present. The paradox is that in attempting to move forward they are often constrained by views, values, recipes, patterns, and structures inherited from the past. Three time zones thus contend for the attention of social movements—yesterday, today, and tomorrow. No wonder most mortals prefer to focus on matters of moment, especially when it comes to daily meals, whose origins and consequences are far less immediate than the pleasures of the here-and-now.

In a sense food reformers attempt to complicate an already multifaceted process by which people decide what to eat. Daily food choices are determined largely by an intricate negotiation between considerations of taste and convenience. Both of these determinants are complicated enough. Taste is a product of biological, psychological, and cultural conditioning; once embedded at a very early age taste preferences are difficult to change. Food choices are also shaped by convenience, i.e. the availability of particular ingredients, tools, energy, time, and skills, as well as the ability to afford them. To this interaction between taste and convenience, activists seek to impose a third, highly moralized and politicized factor, a sense of responsibility. Responsibility may be defined as a willingness to pay the full costs of one’s meal. Such costs extend beyond the immediate market price of a product to what economists call the “externalities,” the wider, often unseen, long-range consequences of consuming it. These consequences may include the effects of production on the people who produce it (farmers, food workers), the acute and chronic health costs to consumers (foodborne illness, diabetes, cancer), and the impact on resources available to future generations (e.g., soil, energy, water).

Included in these remote costs, environmental educator David Orr writes, are “1) things of value that cannot be measured in numbers; 2) things that could be measured but that we choose to ignore; and 3) the loss of things that we did not know to be important until they were gone.” Romantic rebel Henry Thoreau put it succinctly in Walden (1854), an account of his own attempts at radical personal reform: “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”1 Urging conscientious citizens to consider “the long run” effects of their behavior, Thoreau invoked the ethic of intergenerational equity found in many conservation-minded cultures, ranging from the Iroquois’ motto, “In our every deliberation we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations,” to the Amish proverb, “We do not inherit land from our fathers. We borrow land from our children.” In sum reformers want us to take a multidimensional look at the food chain. Rather than focusing mainly on what’s on our plates at the moment, activists want us to consider how the food got here, who got hurt along the way, and whether that meal might do more harm in the future.

For food activists a morally clean plate does no harm. Beyond that rather negative attribute, a clean plate also signals virtue. If “we are what we eat”—and more telling, if we are what we don’t eat—then food becomes a medium through which to voice social identities and distinctions. Reformers are no more discriminatory than anyone else. All cultures moralize about food, particularly when distinguishing between group members (clean plate) and outsiders (dirty plate). But not all cultures draw such distinctions armed with the economic, sociological, and political tools of modern food reformers, who generally voice two sets of concerns about the modern industrialized food system. The first centers around the seemingly poor quality of the product itself: massified, mediocre, bland, artificial, alienated, adulterated with additives and toxins. The second involves how it is produced: large-scale corporate farming, processing, and distribution that ruins the environment, exploits farmers, animals, and workers, colonizes distant countries, and favors richer consumers while depriving the poor of their rightful share of the bounty. In short, modern food is perceived as uninteresting, unnatural, dangerous, and inequitable. When viewed through the lens of “we are what we eat,” modern food becomes a largely negative reflection of modern life itself. Hence the paradox: reformers want to move us forward but they often tend to rhapsodize the pre-modern past.2

Not all modern periods have been beset by such nostalgia. Indeed for much of recent history the cornucopian ethic—more food for less money, maximum production by whatever means necessary—has reigned supreme and unchallenged.3 Cornucopians believe that the tools of modern science and industry are the best weapons against mankind’s historic enemy, hunger. In practical terms this has entailed an emphasis on technological innovation, territorial expansion, and business rationalization, all of which have combined to raise agricultural productivity much faster than population growth and have served to head off the global famine and food wars predicted by British economist Thomas Malthus in his classic Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).4 Thanks to industrial food production, the pessimistic Malthus lost at least the first few rounds in his debate with cornucopian philosopher the Marquis de Condorcet, who had argued that through technological ingenuity, “a very small amount of ground will be able to produce a great quantity of supplies of greater utility and higher quality.” 5 But Malthus also had a third debating partner, socialist anarchist William Godwin, whose followers argued that mankind would be best fed not so much through the technological fixes advocated by Condorcet as by anthropological fixes such as dietary reform (particularly less resource-intensive meat), less greed, and more social justice. For the Godwinians radical redistribution of income and power would produce a healthier, more equitable food system. Demographer Joel Cohen summarizes this three way debate over the future of food: while Malthus advocated “fewer forks” (population reduction) and Condorcet argued for “bigger pies” (more production), Godwin promoted “better manners” (democratic socialism).6 Most food reformers have followed Godwin’s lead in defining a morally clean plate as one that is more ascetic, egalitarian, and “traditional.”

While cornucopians occupy the default, hegemonic position in this three-way debate, there are times when dissenting views have come through more loudly. This chapter will focus on three cycles of American reformist activity—the Jacksonian (1830s-40s), Progressive (1890–1920), and Countercultural (1960s–70s) eras. An immediate question for the historian concerns the context for such ferment: what provokes and enables activists to take up food reform as a medium for wider social change? There are five preconditions for the sort of preemptive, pro-active responsible eating we are looking at here.

First, the food supply system has to be large enough that producers and consumers are somewhat unknown to each other. Such “distancing” may be the result of imperial conquest, territorial expansion, urbanization, capitalist development, technological evolution, or all of the above. The food supply chain has been lengthening for a long time, as seen in a 1701 report on the British East India Company, one of the first modern multinational food conglomerates. As a result of this company’s entrepreneurial and paramilitary efforts in distant lands, affluent British consumers did not need to give much thought to how their tea was sweetened or how their wine grapes were harvested:

There are times when such remoteness can seem miraculous and beneficial, for as cornucopians maintain, being able to access the world’s bounty is a privilege, and even more so if it can be done without effort on the part of consumers.8 When it comes to much-prized meat in particular, it can be very convenient to be oblivious to how living creatures are converted into chops and steaks. Historian William Cronon argues that the meat-packing industry encourages and indeed thrives upon “forgetfulness.”9 The ideal modern consumer, according to farmer-poet Wendell Berry, is the “industrial eater…who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical.”10 As Ann Vileisis recounts in Kitchen Literacy (2007), it took the combined efforts of marketers, scientists, educators, and consumers themselves over two centuries to cultivate and perfect such ignorance.11

But there are times when the separation of consumers from producers can seem alienating enough to provoke a moral panic. In each of these three periods the food industry had recently expanded in reach and structure, leading to concerns about greedy, irresponsible marketers taking advantage of their newfound size and anonymity to exploit consumers and workers. In the Jacksonian era, these worries were instigated by the rise of complex urban food markets and commercial services, especially restaurants and bakeries. Steamboats and canals enabled Eastern bakers to purchase wheat from unseen Midwestern suppliers rather than from local millers who had to be more accountable for what they put in the flour. Following the dictates of “we are what we eat” such arrangements symbolized wider social and economic ills. “Commercially baked bread was only a metaphor of the Jacksonian marketplace itself,” Stephen Nissenbaum writes, “a place of fevered chaos, laden with products manufactured by invisible men and corrupted with invisible poisons. Anonymity encouraged conspiracy.”12 In the Progressive period transcontinental railroads produced large corporate “trusts,” particularly the meat conglomerates made notorious by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906).13 In the 1960s the most striking distancing came through the rise of giant suburban supermarkets and fast food chains; indeed suburbanization itself replaced farms and further separated “eating and the land.” The most telling metaphor was “plastic,” which was used to describe not just the food, but an empty, alienating suburban middle class culture.14

Second, feeding the paranoia wrought by distancing, a lively intellectual infrastructure of published reports, news, and commentary warns anxious consumers about the unseen consequences of their behavior. Each period had highly competitive news industries—the virulent “penny press” of the Jacksonian era, the “yellow press” of Progressive muckrakers, and the insurgent “underground” press of the 1960s. Sensationalistic investigative journalism exposed deceit and also gave voice to radical views and proposals. Not coincidentally each of these periods experienced a boom in utopian experiments, most of them involving collaborative food production that shortened the distance between field and fork. While very few of these communities survived, they did produce a highly influential body of news stories, memoirs, novels, and cookbooks that recruited more interest and encouraged imitators. The 1840s were particularly famous for its Grahamite boardinghouses and Fourieristic Brook Farm and Oneida, the late nineteenth century for its popular utopian novels featuring communal gardens and cooperative housekeeping, and the 1970s for its organic farms, cooperative stores, and natural foods restaurants. The most recent round of countercultural social experimentation also yielded a bumper crop of publicity-savvy celebrity chefs whose mission has been to relocalize food production and thus restore a sense of intimacy and responsibility to the food chain.15

Third, paradoxically, while nostalgic activists in each period idealized a seemingly lost food system comprised of neo-traditional foods produced by small, local farmers, artisans, and vendors, in voicing their analysis of modern faults, they often displayed a positivistic mindset that quantified nutritional needs and treated the body as a machine capable of scientific adjustment and improvement. For the larger global picture, many reformers carefully estimated future food supplies, population growth, and likely economic development. As anthropologist Solomon Katz has suggested, “secular morality” is guided by statistics, not theology.16 And to scare people into action, these statistics usually suggest some rather alarming trends, especially increasing rates of food-related illness and declining food supplies in the face of rising demand. As masters of the worrisome trendline, the Malthusians often play an instigating role here, as their dire predictions fan public anxieties about the future and spark an interest in alternatives that seem more efficient and equitable.17 In his two-volume magnum opus, Lectures on the Science of Human Life (1839), Jacksonian food reformer Sylvester Graham frequently employed “the aids of chemistry and physiology” to detail the ill effects of “bolted” white flour, red meat, and raw alcohol on the poorly nourished city dweller’s “lazy colon.” At the same time Graham touched a Malthusian nerve by arguing that demand for cheap wheat induced greedy farmers to deplete (or “debauch”) fragile soil, thus threatening the ability of future generations to feed themselves.18

Progressive journalist Upton Sinclair drew on the latest nutritional knowledge of microbes, protein, and calories to undergird his attack on the meat “trust.” His attacks coincided with another round of Malthusian worries about the future of grain and meat supplies. As Donald Worster has shown, these early-twentieth-century “scarcity howlers” encouraged wheat farmers to plow up marginal western drylands.19 The ensuing ecological disasters of the Dust Bowl far surpassed the agricultural “debauchery” of Graham’s period—and led to another round of Malthusian forecasts after World War II. These culminated in the exceptionally gloomy demographic predictions of Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb (1968) and William and Paul Paddock’s Famine—1975! (1967). In Godwinian response, Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet (1971) offered detailed calculations of protein complementarity and feed conversion ratios to make her case that meat consumption was both nutritionally inefficient, socially inequitable, and ecologically catastrophic. More recently environmentally minded food activists have expanded their considerations to include elaborate enumerations of “food miles” and “ecological footprints.” Such “carrying capacity” arguments were anticipated early on by Godwin’s son-in-law, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who in 1813 criticized the meat eater who would “destroy his constitution by devouring an acre at a meal….The quantity of nutritious vegetable matter, consumed in fattening the carcass of an ox, would afford ten times the sustenance if gathered immediately from the bosom of the earth.”20

Fourth, to add visceral credibility to activist calculations, basic foods must be threatened in some way, either in quality or quantity. In the West this has traditionally meant concerns about beef and wheat. Such worries often affect stomachs directly in the form of rising food prices, as well as well-publicized cases of contamination. It is no coincidence that Sylvester Graham anchored his rather wide-sweeping indictment of modern morality in his famous critique of commercial bread, the debased staff of life; conversely whole wheat bread symbolized a more coherent and life-affirming social order. Seeking justice for food workers, Sinclair focused on the meat production that symbolically and sometimes physically ground them to bits; similarly Frances Moore Lappe used meat as the focal point for her wider environmental and ecological analysis.21

Fifth, reinforcing the threats to staple foods, a host of domestic worries make people receptive to disturbing news and forecasts. These concerns may include domestic political scandals, signs of growing economic inequality, environmental disasters, bad weather, and cultural anxieties about immigrants and alien Others. In Graham’s time many of these fears coalesced around the waves of cholera that overwhelmed booming cities. In Sinclair’s period it was fear of “germs” associated with immigrants (including the Lithuanian sausage makers of the novel).22 In the 1960s it was a combination of growing racial violence, environmental pollution, and antiwar protest. These crises add a sense of urgency and missionary zeal to activist claims that something major must be done to head off future catastrophe. Small palliatives will not suffice. This apocalyptic tone is reflected incendiary titles like The Jungle, Will the World Starve?, Deserts on the March, Grapes of Wrath, The Population Bomb, Mankind at the Crossroads, Farmageddon, The End of Food, and “Harvest of Shame,” and the frequent use of sensationalistic words like “debauchery,” “poison,” “peril,” “plague,” “survival,” and indeed, “the future.”23

Many of these variables first came together in Malthus’s own time. For the British middle class, the 1790s was a period of considerable anxiety about the future—as depicted in James Gillray’s 1795 cartoon of a huge “political locust…nibbling at the remains of poor old England, left destitute by high taxes, military setbacks, food shortages, and an influx of destitute French clergy.”24 The pattern was repeated during the other cycles discussed here. During such periods of intensified worrying the archetypal stories about how to keep a plate clean tend to get dusted off and reissued. Here are eight of these storylines, though there probably are more of them:The Boycotter is the precision protester, who carefully avoids just the suspect food of the moment. Boycotts are the smart bombs of the food wars. Although the term did not enter the English language until the 1880s, when Irish tenant farmers refused to harvest crops for Charles Boycott, a detested estate agent for absentee British landlords, the practice itself appeared much earlier, as when American revolutionaries shunned British tea, or when abolitionists of the 1790s and 1830s avoided sugar produced by slaves. During the 1830s reformer Sylvester Graham became infamous for his condemnation of white bread, red meat, and alcohol as dietary contaminants that threatened consumers’ stomachs, farm lands, and public morality. During the Progressive era some reformers boycotted meat to protest rising prices and, for readers of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 expose, The Jungle, monopolistic greed and worker exploitation. In the 1960s and 70s civil rights activists targeted segregated or discriminatory public facilities, including restaurants, while grape and lettuce boycotts supported farm worker unionization efforts, and some antiwar protesters viewed red meat as a symbol of patriarchal militarism.25

The Accountant or Frugal Parent adopts the language of bookkeeping to convey concern about irresponsible behavior. In line with Thoreau’s edict, the Accountant tries to calculate and then pay the “true cost” of the food, including all the externalities. Resisting modern profligacy, the Frugal Parent values sobriety, always settles the bill, dreads being taken for a deadbeat, doesn’t want to saddle the kids with debt, and saves for the future. Seeking to balance the books of intergenerational equity, he agrees with environmentalist David Brower that “We’re hooked. We’re addicted. We’re committing grand larceny against our children. Ours is a chain-letter economy, in which we pick up early handsome dividends and our children find their mailboxes empty.”26 The ideal of sustainability—another financial metaphor—underlay geneticist Edward East’s 1924 definition of wise stewardship of the land: “The only way to treat the soil is like a bank account; husband it carefully by proper farming and make a deposit once in awhile.” Similarly in a 1994 assessment of “Earth’s Bottom Line,” environmentalist Sandra Postel suggested, “Globally, the ecological books must balance.” The rhetoric of accounting leads to a push for banking-style reforms: more “arms length” scrutiny and regulation, more transparency, more prudent investments. At the same time the sober accountant is less enamored of cornucopian technological fixes, which they might dismiss as “wondrous toys,” “childish wish-fulfillment fantasies,” and “vain and extravagant dreams of fancy.”27 The more “mature” accountant is perhaps the least romantic of activists, a denizen of the white collar world of desks, files, and bureaus. Think Progressive era USDA chemist Harvey Wiley or liberal consumer crusader Ralph Nader. But given the food industry’s vehement opposition to even the mildest of accountancy reforms—e.g., soil conservation, public lists of additives, readable food labels, verifiable health claims—an honest broker can make big waves, although these may not add up to the tsunami desired by some revolutionaries.28

The Survivalist, dissatisfied with the piecemeal protests of the Boycotter and the wonkish tinkering of the Accountant, the Survivalist shuns not just particular products but all of modern civilization. Hunkering down for Armageddon is a favorite ploy of dystopian fiction, as well as of refugees from more mainstream movements. The Survivalist has roots in apocalyptic literature, starting perhaps with Godwin’s daughter Mary Shelley, whose alienated heroes in Frankenstein (1818) and The Last Man (1826) fled to the wilderness, where they could live in vegetarian peace. In this decision to start over from scratch we also see roots in the Noah story.29 Recapitulating human evolution the Survivalist learns to hunt, gather, roast, and sow by hand. In 1845 Thoreau retreated in exhaustion from abolitionist agitation to the pastoral peace of Walden Pond. The boom in outdoor camping and hiking during the Progressive period was, in a sense, another form of Survivalist regeneration. And so too in the late 1960s did some hippies flee to the wilds of Mendocino, Vermont, and Appalachia in a desperate attempt to reset their countercultural “revolution.” Suitably much of the dietary advice during that apocalyptic period was phrased in terms of “survival,” as when The Last Whole Earth Catalog recommended Passport to Survival, a hip natural foods cookbook: “Emergency procedures and forethoughts stored here will serve you come holocaust, catastrophe, or unemployment.” Similarly a 1968 underground news column, “What to Do Until the World Ends,” advised, “Learn to eat weeds…[which when] properly prepared are gourmet delights that can keep you alive when other food sources fail.”30

Once relocated, the Survivalist splits into two variants, the Yeoman Farmer and the Utopian Communist. The Yeoman Farmer is a somewhat more evolved version of the Last Man, as he has shifted from scavenging to more settled subsistence agriculture. A staple of Jeffersonian agrarianism, the grow-your-own ethic was already somewhat outdated when voiced by Jefferson, who was well-integrated into world markets. His paeans to rural self-reliance notwithstanding, Jefferson bought produce from his own slaves while exporting his own grain surpluses and almost bankrupted his family with his lavish imports of European wines and delicacies.31 By the Jacksonian period the image was even more archaic. Sylvester Graham, scion of a dysfunctional middle-class family, lamented the disappearance the sturdy colonial mother who baked her own bread—a nostalgic notion at a time when many people patronized commercial bakeries.32 The Progressive Era also produced a back-to-the-land movement that appealed particularly to alienated urban intellectuals Helen and Scott Nearing, who retreated to Maine from radical politics in the 1920s and whose account of their experiment in vegetarian self-sufficiency, Living the Good Life (1954) became what Newsweek called “an underground bible for the city-weary” counterculture of the late 1960s.33 In turn some of those aging hippies stayed on the land long enough to profit from a renewed demand for organic produce and meat in the early 2000s—most famously the evangelical-libertarian peasant, Joel Salatin, lionized in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006).34

The Utopian Communist is the collective version of the Yeoman Farmer. Groups of like-minded refugees from the modern world attempt to build an alternative community that will survive the coming storm and perhaps serve as a seedbed for new growth once the weather clears. As observed earlier, each of these periods experienced an exceptionally high rate of utopian community formation, as well as the literary reporting that spread their news and popularized their diets. The model had clear precedent in the Puritan “errand into the wilderness” to establish an exemplary “City on a Hill” that would attract “the eyes of all people.”35 Upton Sinclair used the profits from The Jungle to fund a rural utopian commune centered around an ascetic, vegetarian diet.36 Some feminist utopias also drew on the more prosaic model of self-sacrifice found in many poor households, where women routinely denied themselves a full portion of meat, bread, or dessert for the sake of husbands and children. For example, the women of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel Herland (1915) constructed their ecologically benign vegetarian community around what they called the “instinct” of “Mother Love”—“that limitless felling of sisterhood, that wide unity in service,” a deeply seated sense of altruism that drove them to put social needs above personal interest.37 Seeking liberation from the kitchen, some feminist utopias did welcome the mealpills, nutritive ethers, instant dinners, synthetic chops, and other labor-saving concoctions of modern food engineering. In Mary E. Bradley Lane’s astounding Mizora (1880) women ate “chemically prepared meat” that was sterile, perfectly “balanced,” and easy to cook; housewives never cooked elaborate meals for husbands because men did not even exist.38 But most utopias were of the neotraditional, whole grain variety. Although men might sometimes be seen baking bread in the kitchen, far too many communes followed the pattern of Fruitlands (1843), where Bronson Alcott’s wife and daughters did most of the cooking and gardening while men “tended to spend more time cultivating their conversations than their crops.”39 Such gender disparities were a primary reason for the dissolution of many communal experiments.

Others fell prey to founder syndrome. While these utopias were communal in intent, many utopias were inspired or managed by a single person possessing unusual spiritual magnetism. All too often these leaders outlasted or outshone their communities to serve as Yogis—another reformer archetype with great dietary influence. Hard, righteously thin, the Yogi is above or at least beyond food. The yogi eats just to live, or eats with such responsibility, reverence, and deliberation that food is conserved and cherished. The Yogi is the consummate mindful eater, immune to distancing, gluttony, greed, or waste. Bronson Alcott’s utopia, Fruitlands, was strictly vegan, and although the community failed, Alcott’s vegetarian Transcendentalism influenced generations of intellectuals and radicals. Numerous progressive activists also followed the ascetic self-discipline preached by Sylvester Graham’s charismatic disciples, John Harvey Kellogg and Horace Fletcher. Their work was in turn popularized by Upton Sinclair in the aptly named Fasting Cure (1911), written soon after the failure of Sinclair’s cooperative colony, Helicon Hall.40 In the 1960s young radicals found inner peace and fortitude in the “macrobiotic” diet advocated by Japanese philosophers George Ohsawa and Michio Kushi. (From the Transcendentalists forward, American radicals have cherished Asian ideological and dietary imports.) From the countercuisine also came the Slow Food movement, which was dedicated to reenchanting food through unrelenting opposition to anything mass, fast, easy, or mindless. In 1971 Steven Gaskin, leader of one of the more successful hippy communes, The Farm, voiced this meditative philosophy in a short poem, “How to Slow Down:” “Find a little bit of land somewhere and plant a carrot seed. Now sit and watch it grow. When it is fully grown pull it up and eat it.”41 Not coincidentally Gaskin’s partner, Ina May Gaskin, applied similar yogic principles in her popular guide to home childbirth, Spiritual Midwifery (1977).42

Ironically, such mindfulness could also lead reformers toward the more overtly hedonistic strategies of the Pleasure Artist. For every abstemious Sylvester Graham or Upton Sinclair there is a gregarious William Godwin, “prince of spongers,” or sensual M. F. K. Fisher, the “poet of the appetites.”43 For this city cousin of the Yogi, eating and drinking well is the best revenge—an act of personal defiance against both obscene courtly excesses as well as against modern tastelessness, particularly the variety embodied in American mass culture. The Pleasure Artist thus stretches the word “survival” from the Yogi’s spare “eating to live” to a more self-indulgent “living to eat,” albeit not too much, and within budgetary limits. Rebecca Spang has suggested that the French restaurant itself was “invented” as a late-eighteenth-century revolutionary response to aristocratic decadence, a simple, democratic place where people could sample honest, healthy fare, starting with “restorative” bouillons.44 A product of that democratizing ethos, French writer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin argued for “gastronomy” as a science of balance, discipline, and humanistic pleasure—a formula avidly sought by Thomas Jefferson’s well-known attempts to serve haute cuisine in a relatively informal, unpretentious setting worthy of “republican simplicity.”45

In the bohemian versions first articulated by nineteenth-century romantic poets, Pre-Raphaelites, and gourmands, the preservation of refined taste would wean or at least protect people from the rapidly growing, dishonest factory food system and hopefully return the food system to a sturdier craft (“artisanal”) basis. In William Morris’s influential News from Nowhere (1890), post-apocalyptic socialists enjoyed vibrant peasant foods (including the requisite whole-grained farmhouse loaf) and robust sex in a picturesque neo-medieval setting.46 The quest for culinary authenticity and populist diversity led urban progressives to the cheap “foreign” restaurants of immigrant slums, particularly the “spaghetti joints” of Little Italy and the “chop suey houses” of Chinatown.47 The countercuisine combined this affinity for “ethnic” fare with an interest in reviving the “regional.” With taste threatened by corporate fast food, traditional European “country cuisine” attracted new interest among hip gourmets. Alice Waters first cooked Elizabeth David’s “peasant” recipes for Berkeley hippies and antiwar activists.48 Espousing a “delicious revolution,” Waters would have felt quite at home in the bohemian salons of the early nineteenth century, as would New York Times food critic and Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl, who launched her gastronomic career in the leftist student ghettoes of Ann Arbor and Berkeley. Similarly, Italian communists like Carlo Petrini translated political resistance into the Slow Food movement, which was dedicated to “taste education” and the preservation of local delicacies.49 Common to all pleasure artistry was a belief that the better the food, the less one needed to eat. Conversely (and counter-intuitively), “industrial eaters” stuffed themselves precisely they did not appreciate or understand real food. Whether at a bouillon-serving restaurant of the early nineteenth century or a nouvelle cuisine bistro of the late twentieth, small but tasty portions seemed to lessen any contradiction between bohemian hedonism and egalitarian, ascetic ideals. And the bottom line was that, like the Yogi, the Pleasure Artist was virtuously lean.

While much of this culinary radicalism was associated with socialist pacifism, it is also important to note yet one more reformer archetype, the Patriot. Generally reserved for wartime, this figure advocates domestic sacrifice for the sake of the troops fighting to protect the homeland, and sometimes also for the sake of victimized civilian allies. Patriots cite wartime scarcity as a rationale for conservation and home production, as well as for research into high-tech military rations that definitely fit the “eat to live” ethic. As Harvey Levenstein and Amy Bentley have shown, both world wars offered opportunities for advocates of ascetic efficiency.50 “Leave a clean plate,” a 1917 New York State Health Department poster urged. “Take only such food as you will eat. Thousands are starving in Europe.” On the more positive side, another poster advised Patriots to “Eat more corn, oats, and rye products….Eat less wheat, meat, sugar and fat to save for the army and our allies.”51 Appeals to conserve and toughen up did work for the duration, but ardor tended to wear out soon after the armistice. First conceived to feed starving Belgians and Armenians during World War I, the “Gospel of the Clean Plate” was somewhat less compelling in the affluent, high-fat 1950s, although remnants lingered whenever news of Asian or African famines filtered into middle-class dining rooms.

In the 1960s and 1970s some hip food reformers revived martial rhetoric on behalf of the revolutionary battle for rights, peace, and justice. “Don’t eat white; eat right, and fight!” one underground newspaper food column admonished. 52 Such appeals echoed Upton Sinclair’s earlier advocacy of plain food, temperance, and Fletcherism (“the noble science of clean eating”) as the best way to shape up for the long socialist “struggle.”53 More recently some local food advocates have taken a national security theme associated with post 9–11 nationalism. For example an ad titled “Homeland Security” depicted a tomato-laden roadside farm stand, with the stark caption, “Buy Local. It Matters.” Even more reminiscent of wartime propaganda was a shot of James Montgomery Flagg’s original Uncle Sam (1916) pointing straight at the viewer, only this time the caption read “Buy Local,” instead of “I Want You.” Completing the circle of subliminal wartime allusions were new Clean and Cleaner Plate Clubs dedicated to promoting sustainable, non-industrial meals. 54

As for the effectiveness of these various activist strategies, the historical record is mixed. Boycotts may be the most successful, but they are sporadic and temporary. Sometimes they are not precise enough, targeting all foods within a particular category, even the virtuously produced ones (Alar, spinach, grapes), and sometimes they are too precise, making invidious distinctions, say, between sugar produced by slaves (bad) and sugar produced by peons (OK), or livers from force-fed geese (bad) and livers from force-fed chickens (OK).55 Over the long run it is hard to keep track of what is on and what is off the list. Many aging baby boomers still boycott California iceberg lettuce and table grapes in solidarity with field workers, yet those campaigns officially ended years ago. In January 2010 the Ethical Consumer website listed over fifty “progressive” boycotts, most of them food or animal-related.56 That neither grapes nor lettuce appeared on the lists indicated some successful unionization by the United Farm Workers, although farm workers remained the most exploited segment of the food chain.

The persistence of such injustice and inequality also points to the weaknesses of the Accountant strategy, which pursues incremental, procedural adjustments. All too often regulatory reform winds up favoring the largest enterprises that can best afford the most skillful accountants, lawyers, and advertising copywriters. In the Progressive Era, for example, the consumerist demand for more trust in the marketplace most benefited the national brands that could be marketed as most reliable and “fresh.” Upton Sinclair’s campaign for accountability and food safety thus accelerated centralization of the food system, which was the very opposite of his intent.57 Likewise in the 1990s stricter rules for seafood safety favored large scale foreign producers, while federal regulation also fostered consolidation in the organic foods industry.58

Consumer capitalism has a remarkable ability to absorb the insurgent innovations of the underground. Bohemians in particular have long served as independent listening posts for larger corporations, who hunger for fresh ideas from the freaky frontiers.59 General Mills shrewdly converted countercultural granola and yogurt into Nature Valley granola and yogurt bars.60 Similarly bohemian restaurants spearhead the gentrification of marginal urban areas; once an underground cafe/gallery appears, the conversion of abandoned factories into million-dollar “lofts” is not far behind. For land speculators, “avant garde” foreshadows “real estate boom.” This was true long before the first hip coop or commune. Progressive patrons of cheap “spaghetti joints” in the 1890s turned shabby immigrant ghettos into a fashionable liberal districts by the 1920s. Or witness how the wildly profitable Battle Creek, Michigan, breakfast cereal industry mushroomed from the early reformist experiments of the Kellogg brothers. One also wonders how many of the Graham boardinghouses that sprang up in the 1830s to follow his dietary principles now live on as “bed and breakfasts” in refurbished “Victorian” neighborhoods.

Even when not coopted or commercialized, many clean plate strategies face another major difficulty: changing times. As crises end or shift, a sense of urgency abates. Wars eventually end, and so do their moral equivalents. Or the United States invades Iraq, and food riots in Africa are no longer news. The USDA tinkers with some regulations and grain stocks increase. Food prices stabilize, even drop. Malthus would certainly have been shocked that food supplies have outpaced population growth over the past 200 years. Conditions change, wild cards are drawn, we are constantly being surprised. Life changes, too; people get blown off course by what Czech novelist Milan Kundera calls “the unbearable lightness of being.” They get tired of being scared, compassionate, or of working too hard, especially for food, whose demands can be so unrelenting and mind-numbing. Subsistence gets boring. Cooks get cooked out. The Survivalist decides to go to back to law school in Chicago. The Yeoman Farmer realizes that life is short and decides to trade the dairy farm for a condo in West Palm Beach. Or conscientious consumers decide that rather than paying the “true cost” of their food at the farmers market, they would rather save for their kids’ education by shopping for bargains at Wal-Mart. The founder of the utopian commune sleeps with one too many comrades and the whole thing falls apart. The Yogi opens a high-end fusion bistro in Tribeca. The food business is full of such stories.

Looking beyond these inherent foibles and contradictions of cultural radicalism, we need to recognize that there are very powerful beliefs and institutions that stand in the way of responsible eating, or that make it much more complicated. Modern consumer culture prizes abundance and freedom of choice, particularly the freedom to select foods that are both tasty and convenient. The “we are what we eat” slogan can be used both to attack modern foodways and to defend them. As a Far Side cartoon quipped, “If we are what we eat, then I’m fast, cheap, and easy,” which another humorist turned into “If we are what we eat, then I’m pretty damn sweet.” Modern culture also prizes statistics and creates huge bureaucracies to calculate and promote hegemonic versions of them. Numbers are a double-edged sword—they can raise fears and they can allay them. In the United States this hegemonic infrastructure has been long centered in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and its affiliated land-grant universities.61 It is no coincidence that the USDA is the only government department actually located on the Washington Mall, closest to its dead center, the neo-classical Washington Monument, or that its main building, like so many agriculture schools, was designed to resemble an ancient temple. From these holy sites home economists, agronomists, and technocrats preach the gospel of efficiency in which a Clean Plate means a well-balanced set of enumerated nutrients grown in the Clean Fields of industrial monoculture. And if arithmetic does not calm things down, there is always mockery. Those who question these dominant assumptions are reined in by a cultural apparatus of ridicule that casts conscientious consumers as elitists, eccentrics, cultists, Cassandras, effete Francophiles, and Food Police. The Reductio ad hitlerium is a particular favorite of those who attack the “food nuts.” It is amazing how many elements of the radical critique—whether its Malthusian underpinnings, its public health orientation, or its vegetarian, back-to-nature biases—get tied back to Nazism, particularly the “Hitler was a vegetarian” cliché.62

Given the uncertain track record of conscientious consumption, it is appropriate to ask whether the Gospel of the Clean Plate yields substantial political change. Should we try to eat responsibly? No doubt, for once we see the consequences of our actions it is hard to put the blinders back on. But is it the right strategy? Will personal transformations yield broader political change? It is easy to deceive ourselves into thinking that voluntary action is sufficient. And yet, despite an extraordinary amount of personal consumer activity, hunger persists, food workers are exploited, and global warming proceeds apace. Engineering social change takes a lot more than the sum of individual acts of grace.63

Politics aside, it is hard enough to change a food system. Paul Rozin has argued that the most effective behavioral changes are those that result in active and enduring disgust for the foods that are considered to be risky, whether meat, sugar, or canned soup.64 When all is said and done, perhaps the most time-tested of clean plate strategies are those that are rooted in orthodox theology and nativism, which are quite effective in embedding disgust for the impure and alien. But neither of these strategies seems all that compatible with liberal humanism, or the scholar’s quest for truth. Historians may have trouble watching or approving the blatant invention of tradition by Slow Food and other locavores. Perhaps it is expedient, as Sylvester Graham did, to create foundational myths about righteous breadbaking colonial mothers, but is it ethical to distort the past that way? The same might be asked of the current tendency of food activists to exaggerate the degree to which Grandma’s food was healthier, tastier, and more responsibly produced. As even a cursory look at global food history reveals, the past was no picnic.

And despite the efforts of fundamentalists, whether observant Jews or French terroirists, to maintain their tastes and taboos, even these cuisines are under considerable pressure from global consumer capitalism. Tackling the Wal-Marts and Tysons of the world may take a lot more than cleaning your own plate. Indeed it may take sitting down for lunch with people who actually like bacon cheeseburgers and fries. This issue came up in the early days of the countercuisine, when food coops debated whether to carry sinful white bread or meat; while some members were in favor of carrying such taboo items as a way to make alliances with the working classes, most chose not to—and either went out of business, or became gourmet food boutiques.65

Conversely, keeping a clean plate does not guarantee a clean world. President George Bush ate sustainably produced organic/local/seasonal/fusion meals for years, with no apparent impact on his environmental, foreign, or social policies. Similarly during the 2008 U.S. election, the “red-meat” Republican vice presidential acceptance speech by moose-hunting Sarah Palin was written by Matthew Scully, author of an eloquent plea for ethical vegetarianism, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy (2002).66 At almost the same time, protesters who were camped outside Bush’s Texas ranch dined not on the righteous vegan fare long associated with antiwar events but on a high-fat feast of meaty lasagna, barbecue, and chicken-casserole.67 Neither George Bush nor his antagonist Cindy Sheehan easily fit the “we are what we eat” model.

Indeed, using food reform as a medium for a wider social agenda might not be the most effective strategy after all. While putting food at the center of political concerns has the advantage of rendering issues more immediate, there is the danger that matters of diet may hijack the wider agenda. Sylvester Graham became more famous for his advocacy of whole wheat than for his abolitionism. Frustrated that consumers may have missed The Jungle’s point about the mistreatment of meatworkers, Sinclair famously lamented that he had “aimed for the public’s heart and by accident hit it in the stomach.” A similar misdirection may have occurred recently with labor reporter Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, whose grisly slaughterhouse scenes may be better remembered than those about the problems of food workers unions. And Frances Moore Lappe, caricatured as “the Julia Child of the soybean circuit” after the surprise success of Diet for a Small Planet (1971), eventually left her own foundation, Food First, to make political change more clearly the primary focus; tellingly, the word “diet” did not appear in the name of her new organization, “The Small Planet Institute.” In each case, food was a handy way of gaining attraction but also proved to be something of a distraction from the wider concerns of the activists.

It may be time to stop trying to change the world by fixing our diets. “We are what we eat” notwithstanding, these case studies show that systemic change does not flow automatically from eating better food. Dietary reform is a worthy goal in itself, but melding it with morality may make it harder to invent either a better food system or a better world.

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