Freedom to make up your own mind

I can pinpoint the moment (actually, it was two separate moments of about 30 minutes each) when my interest in food moved beyond the kitchen.  I used to have a 30 minute walk to work and would always listen to podcasts on my journey.  One of my favorites over the years has been EconTalk hosted by Russ Roberts, an economist at George Mason University and the Hoover Institution.  Roberts has, on occasion, introduced topics associated with food on his program and on this particular day back in 2015, he was interviewing Rachel Laudan.  Laudan is an historian focused on food history and she was discussing her book Cuisine and Empire.  In it, she focused on the evolution of cooking, not recipes, ingredients, or food symbolism and she does it by examining how that evolution was dependent upon the philosophical, religious, cultural and technological contexts of a few specific cultures.  I found the interview fascinating and the book moreso.  I highly recommend it.

Serendipity is a wonderful thing. I recently finished rereading Jane Ziegelman’s 97 Orchard Street: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement and had just started The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War.  The former is a wonderful look at how five immigrant families (German, German Jews, Irish, Lithuanian Jews, Italians) sustained themselves while living in a Lower East Side tenement that is now the Tenement Museum of New York City. I can’t really tell you much about the latter because I’ve just started it, but author Robert Gordon postulates that American growth from 1870 to 1970 was actually much greater than the statistics generally show because of a number of inventions that improved the quality of life in ways that don’t show up in GDP and are not repeatable.  As they aren’t repeatable, it also suggests that the tremendous growth of that century is not sustainable in the present and near future.

What’s relevant to this discussion, though, is that I was reading a section of Gordon’s book that dealt with how a variety of factors introduced in the late 19th and early 20th century transformed American’s relationship with food.  He covered some of the same territory as Ziegelman, but also looked at rural families, people in smaller cities than New York, etc.  At the starting point of the story, for the overwhelming majority of people in the U.S. in the late 19th century, food options were limited and relatively expensive, cooking was a difficult task that took substantial time and effort, sanitation and nutrition were not significant concerns, and restaurants were only for the wealthy.  By the 1920s, fresh meat, dairy, and produce were widely available at cheaper prices, government regulations improved sanitation standards, improved kitchen appliances enabled food storage and easier cooking, German, Chinese and Italian immigrants had introduced new cooking approaches, canned foods allowed people to eat vegetables year round, and Howard Johnson’s and White Castle were democratizing restaurants.

I had both of these books in mind when I listened to Roberts interviewing Laudan earlier this week on the topic of food waste.  The conversation began with a discussion of how food waste is a far more complex topic than it first appears before moving on to a broader topic of the moralization of food.  In particular, both Roberts and Laudan consistently made the point that judgments about the “rightness” of what and how we eat is generally more complicated than most people imagine and almost always involves trade-offs of some sort.  During the interview, Roberts quoted a tweet of Laudan’s in which she said “I also like the freedom of making up my own mind about what and how I eat. I’ve been thinking about that for much of a long life.”

Well, me too, and I suspect, you too.  The thing is, that’s a remarkable statement and that freedom has only existed for a short period of time and it is far from universal. We prepare our evening meals and we think about what ingredients to buy (and whether they are organic, cheap, non-GMO, local, pretty, in-season, easily prepared, how they fit together on the plate, and do I want to eat them tonight).  We think about whether we should restock by visiting a superstore, and old-fashioned supermarket, an organic grocery, a food market, or farmstand.  We try to come to grips with the impact on agribusiness on our way of life while agonizing over the difficulties of trying to reduce the distance between our standard of living and that of other parts of the world.

I struggle with some of these issues but I’m also beginning to recognize that these issues themselves can only exist if you have passed the first threshold of having enough food to be able to make a choice.