You are what you eat?

Last night's dinner was a big salad.  Nope, there was no argument or disagreement on who gets credit for it ;)

It is a healthy meal even though it had cheese and oil and carbs!  Damn healthy while being damn tasty.  Unlike the ultra processed foods that are the curse.

Don't worry--this is not a post about the virtues of being vegan or vegetarian or about eating salads.  Nor am I going to argue that that the old days before processed foods were better. Nope. In fact, even students in my classes know how much I critique the "bad old days."  I have also blogged often quoting people like Rachel Laudan that we are much better off thanks to not having to grow our own greens, raise our own cows, make our own breads, ...

If we romanticize the past, we may miss the fact that it is the modern, global, industrial economy (not the local resources of the wintry country around New York, Boston, or Chicago) that allows us to savor traditional, fresh, and natural foods. Fresh and natural loom so large because we can take for granted the processed staples—salt, flour, sugar, chocolate, oils, coffee, tea—produced by food corporations.

Eating, in these modern times requires some kind of a ethos. A culture.  We need to think long and hard about it.  "Never has food been delivered in such abundance, so far, or so safely."  And this requires a new ethos, writes Rachel Laudan.

I agree with Laudan.  Even the big salad that we had is case in point.  We didn't grow the greens that went into the salad.  We didn't make the olive oil or the vinegar. We didn't make the paneer that we fried and added to the mix.  Yes, you read that correctly--fried paneer.  Nor did we bake the baguette.  "Never has food been delivered in such abundance, so far, or so safely."

And I agree that in developing a new ethos, we first ought to acknowledge this:

I find the complexity thrilling; the human ingenuity that has so improved our food, impressive. Yes, the systems are flawed, but they always have been. There never was a golden age when everyone in a given society was fed without environmental problems, social and economic inequalities, or nutritional inadequacies. Modern food systems have reduced the proportion of the globe’s population that goes hungry even as that population has soared. They have made safe, fresh food available in cities of a size not even imagined a century ago. They have expanded culinary options so that much of the world can enjoy dishes invented half the globe away. And they have unlocked the secrets of taste that chefs rely on.

From that point of departure, how do we develop a culinary ethos that will be about our health, about the environment, about justice, about ...?

Abandoning the slogan “Our food system is broken. We must fix it” would be a good start to this ethos. It is at best unhelpful, at worst misleading. “Our food system” suggests a monolith, perhaps even a conspiracy, with problems that no one except a chosen “us” has noticed or is trying to improve. “Broken” suggests that in the past this imagined food system was whole when it never was. Instead of such sloganeering, I urge continuing the steady, ongoing work of identifying and solving the multiple problems of our multiple food systems so that, without exploiting workers or endangering the earth, the riches so many have come to enjoy can be spread yet further.

Yes.