Such a long journey

First: Full credit to Rohinton Mistry for my borrowed title for this post.

I started this blog as a way to ruminate about the trials and celebrations of working through my PhD dissertation. It seems, at great long last, that journey is done. Well, I'm finished the PhD, but I have a feeling the journey will continue. I'm not sure where it will take me or how I will get there. I'm also not sure yet what that means for this blog. Maybe it's time to let it close, or maybe it will renew itself in some altered form. I'm not sure. My first task is to rest, celebrate, and recuperate. Then I'll figure out the rest, both for this blog and the next leg of the journey.

When I opened my files to create this post, I was struck by how much of the last few posts, and even some of the earlier ones, actually made it into my dissertation in some form. Some of these posts triggered ideas. Others were building blocks of major ideas that formed the basis of a chapter. Either way, evidence that this was a good thing for me to do.

I've learned a lot about food these last years. Mostly, though, I've learned how important it is to trust the process. Turns out it really was about the journey, and these writings were an important part of that. I've been taking immense cathartic pleasure in shredding papers and cleaning out files that I no longer need. I'm not quite ready to shut down this space, so for now, I will let it rest.

It's not all about me (or you)

I've been diving back into the literature this week, trying to find ways to address some of the results I found from my dissertation research, which is about the disconnected nature of the food system and what to do about it. I also came across an interesting article in Grist about personal righteousness and food system change.

As I see it, there are three ways to act for those of us who are unhappy with the current system. The first is to opt out. Disengage. Find a way to eat the way we want and do it. Decide to eat only local, or organic, or biodynamic, or eat stuff we've grown ourselves, gleaned, gotten straight from the farm, bought through co-op, or "insert personal values criteria here." Another option is to create parallel alternatives that operate alongside the mainstream. Start a buying club, set up a fair trade system, create alternative sourcing streams, or buy food that's ethically certified. Or, we can try to change the system. Do what we can to make the system more fair. Try to create change in existing rules and regulations, encourage the supermarket to bring in different kinds of products, or lobby the government. 

I've been writing about people who are resisting the disconnection of the mainstream food system in different ways and for different reasons. My personal circles are largely made up of people who eat in ways that are not "the norm." My recent ruminating about the theories and motivations behind all this is making me realize how easy it is for ideology to sneak in without people even realizing it. I think most people who do those things I listed above have good intentions, but it's so easy to get caught up in what we're doing, focus on our own personal choices, and forget the deeper purpose. Most people who are unhappy with the current food system want healthier food, more sustainable production, or an end to social and economic injustices. 

One of the ways to support the changes we want is to vote with our dollars. It sounds very democratic. Voting, after all, is a central tenet of democracy. I do think that changing how and what we buy supports change on some level—if we don't make an effort to buy from local farmers who are stewarding the land, encouraging biodiversity, and growing great quality produce, they won't be able to keep doing what they're doing (and what they're doing is important). But . . is changing our purchasing decisions really helping to create change in society, or is it helping us eat better and feel just a little bit self-righteous in the process? 

I don't mean to suggest that we shouldn't do these things. I vote with my dollars as much as I can. I buy local, seasonal produce. I try not to support companies that I see as causing harm. I go to the farmers' market. I buy cage-free eggs. And I rarely go to a regular supermarket. Buying products that match our values certainly helps ensure that those producers have a livelihood and keep producing such products. But is Safeway suddenly going to start stocking cruelty-free animal products or supporting local farmers if those of us who think about these things simply go elsewhere and leave it at that? No. Do we risk excluding or thinking less of those people who, by choice or necessity, don't buy the same food we do? Yes.

I am also acutely aware that "voting with your dollar" is a luxury for people who have enough dollars to "vote" with. I can buy organic fruit at Whole Foods and shop at the farmers' market every week and grow vegetables in my nice backyard (in a city where backyards are at a premium), and I eat well because of it. But the single mom with two minimum wage jobs living in a basement apartment, the recent refugee who works nights cleaning toilets to support a family of six, or the person depending on social assistance are not going eat any better unless the whole system changes. 

It is important to support those things we value to the extent that we can, but if we really want change we need to do more. So go ahead and opt out. Buy Fair Trade certified chocolate (especially that, because we all know life is better with chocolate). But remember that it's not just about you, or me. It's about (all of) us.*
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*Personal disclosure: I have often been guilty of being either excessively rigid in my food decisions or racked with guilt about not always eating the absolute most local/sustainable/just/seasonal/fairly traded/organic/small-scale/etc. food that it is humanly possible to eat. 

What's wrong with romance?

I was sitting in my garden, reading the paper over morning coffee, when I was happy to see a few articles on local food in the Focus section of Saturday's Globe and Mail (July 7, 2012). There was an article about public agriculture—growing edibles in public spaces for public consumption—and a commentary by Margaret Wente about the dangers of locavorism.

The ideas in the commentary seemed contradictory and confused. Wente raved about the joys of seasonal, local produce, but claimed that local farming was unsustainable, contributed to food insecurity, and tied us to the land like serfs. She questioned the romanticization of farming and people's desire to "look in the eye the people who grow your vegetables," but insisted that she will continue to patronized the farmers' market because she loves the sense of community.

So which is it? In a word: neither. Wente, like so many who argue for or against an issue, is only considering the extremes. She equates the goals of local food advocates with a return to subsistence farming that would tie us to land and make us victim to the fickleness of climate and soil. She expresses seasonal harvests in terms of feast or famine—we either have so much it is wasted, or we have nothing to harvest. She claims that industrial scale agriculture is more efficient because farmers can specialize in crops suited to their land and trade them over long distances. She even contends (without evidence) that avoiding chemicals and genetically modified crops are responsible for poverty and food insecurity in Africa.

Some of these points are valid, but the argument runs thin.Can't we eat local or regional produce when in season, or least consume things grown as close to where we live as possible? Why buy fruit from Mexico when the same things are in season here? Supporting local agriculture doesn't preclude engaging in food trade entirely (the coffee I was drinking while reading the paper being a case in point). We can grow what works well and import the rest. Even when we import, getting things from halfway across the continent might be better than getting it from halfway around the world—it would be fresher, and might keep us a little more closely connected to the seasons and the land. Food is not like other commodities such as clothing or computers. It is perishable. More importantly, it is intimate.* Food comes from living matter, and we fully consume it by integrating it into our own biological makeup when we eat. As for Africa, it's complicated, but there is a lot of evidence to suggest that production of export crops has not addressed poverty and that local production of locally adapted crops for local consumption improves food security in poverty-stricken regions.

What's wrong with the middle way? People on both sides of this debate seem to forget things like medium scale agriculture, regional farms that may be 400 miles away instead of on the other side of the planet, eating as local as possible without getting militant or ideological about it. I agree with Wente's point that "the farther we get from life on the land, the more we romanticize it."** I don't agree with her interpretation of the issue.She goes on to say how, because of our romanticization, we have become unrealistic in our views of agriculture. I would argue that our distancing from the realities of food production instead reinforces the importance of having farms nearby (or as near as practical) and of interacting with people who actually grow food. Even if you never go to a farmers' market or buy direct from a farm gate sale, having farms in the region where you live will expose you to some of the realities of agriculture. Thinking about and caring about agriculture doesn't require you to become a back-to-the-lander. After making all her arguments against the locavore movement, Wente closes her piece by saying that she will continue to go to the market because she loves the sense of community and fabulous seasonal produce, despite the inefficiencies. The point that is so often missed here is that efficiency is not the only thing of value in society, or even in the economy. That sense of connection, of community, and that awareness of the wonders of fresh seasonal food is important. Period. Do I think we should all be fed only from community gardens and CSAs?*** No. But that doesn't mean those things aren't essential. They can provide great food, but their real value may just be in the community that is built in the spaces between the efficiencies.
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*Food was first called "the intimate commodity" by Tony Winson in his 1993 book by the same title.

**This relates to the phenomenon of distancing that I am addressing in my PhD dissertation.

 ***CSA is community supported agriculture, a system in which consumers pay up front for a share of the season's harvest.

Lighter idli, or gateway food?

I've been thinking about McCain foods again, particularly their efforts at entering, or creating, the frozen food market in India. Stephanie Nolan's May 22 article in the Globe features McCain's new frozen idli caught my attention recently. (Idli are a popular breakfast dumpling made from fermented and ground lentils and rice.) The article talks about how McCain has struggled to convince Indians to buy frozen food, because people think food that's not made and eaten fresh is also not healthy or tasty. Sounds like a wise food philosophy to me, but from McCain's perspective, this is not good for business. So, they are not just trying to promote their products—they are trying to shift the way people think about frozen, preserved, or "old" food entirely.

The Indian population creates a conundrum here. While people generally don't like to eat food that has been prepared in advance or, in many cases, outside the home, urban lifestyles are changing in ways that create a real demand for convenience. According to the Globe article:

Rapid social changes in India – a huge growth in people living in nuclear rather than extended families; more households with two adults working; less comfort with live-in domestic help; plus more aspirational desire for packaged and processed foods – make this a market with huge potential. Consumer analysts say it is now about 300 million people strong.

The interviews I conducted in India for my dissertation support this. People told me that household and social changes were creating a huge demand for convenience food, and that was making it difficult for people to cook from scratch and eat as they traditionally had done. Many important traditions around what and how people eat were being threatened in the process.

McCain sells western style frozen foods (like french fries and potato patties) and frozen versions of Indian foods. One of their recent products is frozen idli, and they undertook a major promotion campaign to get people to try them. Apparently, the frozen idli are catching on with some people. McCain attributes this to the fact that they developed specialized grinding equipment for their factories that mimics the traditional stone grinder, creating a better texture than people get at home using electric grinders.

To me, industrial idli production is an interesting technological innovation, but I think it should be viewed with caution. First, it still doesn't make a perfect idli—the article says that many people don't like them unless they are soaked in sambar, the soupy curry normally served with idli. Second, while the product may be good for McCain's sales figures, it doesn't begin to address the problem that people no longer have time to cook food. This could be the start of a very slippery slope toward western style diets. Idli and sambar are Indian dishes, but the frozen, microwavable instant meal is very much a western habit—a habit that also includes pizza pops, neon breakfast cereals, spray-on pancake batter, and all manner of substances manufactured to resemble food. Once the idea of pre-made food becomes acceptable, people start to get used to the "not quite like grandma used to make" taste, and the whole system of industrial food starts to become normalized.

Do I think it's a good thing that McCain has found a way to make their frozen idli more palatable? In a way, yes. If I was going to eat an instant meal, I would at least want it to be as good as possible. Is it that simple? No.

Maybe the answer is to find ways to structure social life—whether in India or the West—so that people actually have time to cook and eat together. Maybe there could be local idli shops like we in the West have (or had, depending on where you live) neighbourhood bakeries. Maybe there is a way to improve electric grinders so people can make decent idli at home without spending hours hunched over a set of grinding stones. I don't know. What I do know is that allowing ourselves to become completely disconnected from growing and buying and preparing and cooking the food we eat has not improved health, happiness, or how we support one another in community.

So please, dear India, don't get sucked in by a light, fluffy dumpling. It could be a gateway to things in your pantries you might not even recognize as food.

How did real become revolutionary?

Photo: www.mccain.ca

I've been reading some recent news on McCain Foods and came across a (sponsored) Globe and Mail article called McCain's "real ingredients" revolution pays off. Basically, McCain has started to use only actual food ingredients in many of their frozen food products. As the article puts it: "As part of the It’s All Good initiative, Florenceville, New Brunswick HQed McCain has reformulated the recipes for over 70 of its pizza, pockets and potato SKUs to include only recognizable ingredients." Don't ask me what they put in there before, but you can read all about the current plan here.

On balance, I think this is a very good thing. Never mind that the driving force behind an initiative like this is undoubtedly marketing, I'm happy to see that a major brand has committed to using actual food ingredients in their products. One my consistent issues with the food industry is the almost unavoidable array of highly processed "food" products that are manufactured from apparently edible constituents into something resembling food. They come with long ingredient lists consisting of modified and reconstituted substances, chemical additives, conditioners, artificial colours, flavour enhancers, preservatives, and occasionally some actual food. I've often thought the labels should include a statement along the lines of:

"Product may or may not contain actual food."

Maybe it could go right next to the allergy warning that the product was "manufactured in a facility that processes nuts and may contain traces of nuts." Market-driven or not, eaters are much better off with products that contain actual food rather than the results of some chemistry lab experiment.

It's not all good, though. McCain and other companies (not yet enlightened about the value of eating actual food) still wield immense power in the food system. For people without the time, facilities, desire, knowledge, or ability to cook for themselves, the giant food manufacturers get to decide what they can eat. People can only choose from what is made available to them. For farmers who grow the food that ends up in these products, the manufacturers set the terms and conditions under which they must grow and sell their produce, and those terms usually favour the companies.

It's great to see the food industry responding to demands for healthier and more natural products. But it is also important to remember that buying manufactured food products is not the same as cooking from scratch. It's easy to get caught up in celebrating the small victories and forget the state of affairs in which the food system finds itself. That state of affairs, in my opinion, can be summed up by the fact that McCain's switch to using only actual food in their food products can be considered "revolutionary." How did we get to a place where food stopped containing food?

When the light bulb goes on

I love it when that happens, and it happened yesterday for what seems like the first time in a very long time. I've had a very intense couple of weeks drafting a long chapter for my dissertation. It involved a lot of concept mapping, coloured markers, outlining, and crumpled bits of paper. And a lot of staring at a blank screen wondering why it's not more obvious to me. Knowing better than to wait for everything to be crystal clear, I started writing anyway. A few days ago, I was almost finished and very tempted to throw a few thoughts down and send it out, just to be done with it for a while. My eyes were twitching from fatigue, so I thought it best not to make any rash moves. I contained myself and decided to sleep on it instead.

It was a terrible sleep - unfortunate after a 15 hour day at the computer. I only ever half slept while the names of authors I'd been citing were flowing through my mind, thinking about what I was drawing from each of their works. I fully woke up with a jolt very early in the morning and the ideas seemed to be spilling out the top of my head. I rushed to my desk and quickly caught them on a piece of paper before making my much needed first cup of coffee. Things that I had been struggling with suddenly seemed so clear.

I started reading the few papers I had been meaning to re-read. They were about concepts I've been using for years, so this was just meant to be a refresher, but that's when the light bulb went on. It was all new again, and my synapses were putting the pieces together in entirely new ways. It is amazing to me how things become so familiar that I can forget or overlook them when another concept takes over, but reading one article or even one sentence can remind me of the old idea and show how they all fit together. Even a simple rephrasing - reading someone else's take on things - can be huge. They may not be saying anything I haven't read over and over again, but different words put the mundane into a whole new perspective and help me to connect the dots.

The long history of ersatz food

I've been avoiding writing this afternoon by listening to a retrospective of food radio on CBC, the peak of which was a clip of Pierre Berton making a plea for real food back in 1967. It's a 5-minute piece that aired on the TV show Telescope following the release of The Centennial Food Guide. I've never felt so close to Pierre (although the coy expression when he compares a good meal to post-sex satisfaction is rather disturbing).

Nerdy, yes, but it's exciting to find a rationale for my dissertation expressed so eloquently by this icon of Canadiana. His description of obvious distaste for what he calls "ersatz" foods could almost put Rex Murphy to shame. I particularly like his comparison of ersatz food with artificial flowers. He also makes the point that in our modern age of time-saving technology, we should have less of a need for instant or convenience foods because we should have extra time for gardening and cooking from scratch.

It's good to be reminded that pseudofoods and their aggressive marketing – though recent in historical terms – are not brand new. Certainly more ubiquitous now than in the 1960s, these gastronomic assaults have been around for nearly 50 years. Although better quality insta-foods might be available now, there seems to be a constant stream of new products that bear no resemblance to real food. Pierre's words still hold true: "No instant food as yet has been devised that is as good as fresh food." I guess we are a nation of morons, since we seem to have accepted these ersatz foods as normal.

You can see Pierre in all his glory on the CBC Digital Archives here.