The Year of Eating Politically¹

Wendell Berry famously declared that “eating is an agricultural act,” and recent trends in food activism have announced that eating is a political, economic, environmental, aesthetic, and ethical act as well. 2 High profile debates about free range eggs, grass fed beef, genetically modified corn, rising obesity rates, and the corporate control of seed technologies have captured the American imagination, producing not only a tremendous market for value added and responsible foods but also ubiquitous commentaries implicating the American food system in issues ranging from global warming and border security to intellectual property rights and national sovereignty. This politicization of the American diet often disrupts some of the more blindly fetishistic mechanisms of global capital by illuminating how a standard of living depends upon cheap, convenient calories often derived from the brutal exploitation of workers, animals, and land. Much more than parallel campaigns opposing sweatshop labor in the apparel industry, the focus on food immerses consumers in the contradictions of capital, emphasizing how diners literally incorporate these contradictions at every meal.