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Tag Archives: food revolution

Do Americans Love Food?

31 Thursday Jan 2019

Posted by Dwight Furrow in Contemporary Food Culture, Food History

≈ 2 Comments

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food revolution

eating in front of tvThe food revolution has come to the U.S. The past several decades have witnessed the emergence of farmer’s markets and a focus on local food sources, high quality cheese and coffee producers throughout the country, a robust specialty food arena, Michelin starred restaurants in most major cities, and entire TV networks devoted to food. Very little of this existed 30 yrs. ago.

Yet:

  • The average U.S. household devotes the smallest proportion of its expenditures on food than almost any other country.
  • As women moved into the workforce throughout the 20th Century, men showed little inclination to take over household chores resulting in a massive loss of cooking skills and food knowledge as convenience foods became the norm.
  • The average U.S. adult spends 75 minutes per day eating, about 35 minutes a day in food preparation and clean-up, and 5 times that amount watching television.
  • We employ nearly 10 million people in food service and preparation—most of these jobs are low-paying, high stress, physically demanding, and insecure.

One might conclude from these facts that typical Americans don’t care much about food as long as it is plentiful, fast, and cheap. The American way of eating is plowing through a bag of chips while watching celebrity chefs on the Food Network cook.

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The Hermeneutics of Mayo Haters

13 Monday Aug 2018

Posted by Dwight Furrow in Contemporary Food Culture

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

food revolution

shrimp-with-quite-tooIn an article entitled “How Millennials killed Mayonnaise, boomer Sandy Hingston wonders why, at her summertime family gatherings, few eat her formerly prized, mayo-slathered macaroni salad, Waldorf salad, or deviled eggs. In the face of generational change she notices what no longer appears on the condiment table:

I racked my brain for the source of this generational disconnect. And then, one holiday weekend, while surveying the condiments set out at a family burger bash, I found it. On offer were four different kinds of mustard, three ketchups (one made from, I kid you not, bananas), seven sorts of salsa, kimchi, wasabi, relishes of every ilk and hue …

What was missing, though, was the common foundation of all Mom’s picnic foods: mayonnaise. While I wasn’t watching, mayo’s day had come and gone. It’s too basic for contemporary tastes — pale and insipid and not nearly exotic enough for our era of globalization. Good ol’ mayo has become the Taylor Swift of condiments.

Well, I’m far from being a millennial but this comparison to Taylor Swift is unfair to Swift. Millennials may not have much income these days but they nevertheless have good taste.

Hingston can’t quite figure out why mayonnaise is no longer popular arguing that “mayonnaise isn’t bland; it’s artfully blended. It’s an evocation of the homogeneity of that old, dead American dream.”

That’s faint praise. After considering several implausible explanations for mayo’s demise, she settles on identity politics:

The only reason for this raging mayophobia is a generation’s gut-level renouncement of the Greatest Generation’s condiment of choice.

Ah no. The reason for the demise of mayonnaise is that it masks the flavor of anything you put it on, an effect made much worse when mayonnaise fans insist on shoveling gobs of it on even the most delicate of flavors. I had a fresh seafood sandwich the other day that could have been beef or liver, or beef liver for that matter, it had so much mayonnaise on it.

And as Hingston points out this was its purpose:

One of the reasons for mayonnaise’s early popularity, according to public health historian David Merritt Johns, was that it served to disguise flaws in the ingredients it coated — potatoes past their due date, flabby cabbage, tuna that was less than pristine. Young people like my daughter somehow seem to have extrapolated this masking function from condiment to culture; for them, mayo quite literally whitewashed America’s immigrants into eating dull food.

Yes they did and if mayo fans are now paying for it, well it’s a well-deserved comeuppance. They don’t call it the food revolution for nothin’.

The American Food Revolution

01 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by Dwight Furrow in 3 Quarks Daily Column

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American food, food revolution

My Three Quarks Daily post for this month is up. It addresses the main theme of American Foodie. Why have Americans come to embrace food as an art form?

Recapturing Our Sense of Taste

17 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by Dwight Furrow in Contemporary Food Culture

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Tags

food industry, food revolution

sugary foods

Image from ZME Science

If there was any residual doubt that the time has come to take back our sense of taste from the food industry, this interview of Michael Moss, author of Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, will remove it.

The development of a food product involves extensive consumer surveys in search of that product’s “bliss point”—the “perfect amount of sweetness” that would guarantee we acquire a craving for the product. But this involves not only sweet products such as ice cream or cookies:

The food companies have marched around the grocery store adding sweetness, engineering bliss points to products that didn’t used to be sweet. So now bread has added sugar and a bliss point for sweetness. Yogurt can be as sweet as ice cream for some brands. And pasta sauce — my gosh, there are some brands with the equivalent of sugar from a couple of Oreo cookies in one half-cup serving.

And what this does, nutritionists say, is create this expectation in us that everything should be sweet.

This obviously has implications for the obesity crisis:

I was really struck by how many people inside the industry itself hold their industry totally accountable, totally culpable for this surge in obesity that we’ve had for the last 30 years now.

The damage is especially acute for children who naturally have a craving for sweet foods.

But adults have also been harmed and not only because of health consequences. To the extent we eat food manufactured by the food industry, we have all been manipulated to prefer sweetened foods that lack subtlety and mask the incredible variety of flavors contained in unprocessed food. We no longer own our capacity to taste having traded it in for convenience and low prices.

Happily thanks to the taste revolution that has swept across the U.S. over the past few decades, we are beginning to take ownership of this important dimension of life. Industrial food companies are suffering from declining sales:

Earlier this year, almost all of them stood before investors and reported dismal earnings. And the most forthright among the heads of the food companies attributed that decline to consumers caring more and more about what they put in their bodies, wanting to eat healthier, and acting on those decisions by changing their purchasing habits, which is really hitting the food giants hard.

As I argue in American Foodie, industrial food will probably always be part of our food supply given the production and distribution efficiencies it creates. But industrial food should not exercise the kind of control over our health and pleasure that it has  enjoyed in the past.

The only way out is for each of us to take more responsibility for what we consume—and that means paying more attention to taste.

Ban the Kid’s Menu!

17 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by Dwight Furrow in Contemporary Food Culture

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Children's meals, food revolution

kids mealThis article in the National Journal details how we’ve created a generation of children who don’t enjoy food. A combination of busy, overly indulgent parents and a food industry all too willing to sell fat, sugar, and salt are the culprits:

For a generation, many North American parents have indulged children’s picky eating tendencies by sticking them in an endlessly repeating loop of chicken fingers, burgers, pizza, plain pasta, mac and cheese, and grilled cheese sandwiches. Anyone who has sat down for a meal with youngsters over the past 25 years will recognize this list of typical “kids’ foods.” Pushed out of the picture, to varying degrees for different children, are fruits and vegetables and anything else that might challenge them, from spicy delicacies to unfamiliar proteins…The 1980s and ’90s saw the advent of countless convenience and snack foods, from fruit and chicken nuggets pressed into “fun” shapes to sugar-laden yogurts and foods kids could assemble themselves. Grocery stores increasingly sold meals that resembled fast food. As Moss chronicles in Salt Sugar Fat, these products, many of them portable and/or frozen, helped transform the North American diet. Their flavour profiles, packaging, and advertising and marketing programs were often designed to appeal specifically to children with a sophistication that made the 1960s breakfast cereal explosion look limited and quaint.

And so now, paradoxically, as adults turn to exotic, nutritious, more adventurous foods, we’ve created a generation whose response to a lovely Tart Nicoise or Doro Wat is Yuk!

The solution is to take a page from the French way of eating:

Sit with children and serve them the same meal you get. Serve them challenging foods and encourage them to eat, but don’t force them. Fighting about it can create negative associations for that food. Listen to kids’ ideas about what they want to eat, but don’t turn the menu into a point of negotiation once dinner has been decided upon. Involving children in food preparation sharpens their appetites, so involve them whenever possible in grocery shopping and gardening, and let them watch you cook.

A food culture that cannot transmit its values to the next generation is no culture at all. The food revolution is sustainable only if we get the kids on board.

The Essence of American Food

18 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by Dwight Furrow in Contemporary Food Culture, Philosophy of Food and Wine

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

American food, food and identity, food revolution

dinerIn Priscilla Ferguson’s otherwise interesting book about the language of food, entitled Word of Mouth: What We Talk About When We Talk About Food, she gets seriously off track in her discussion of American food and national identity.

In contrast to the French whose sense of national identity is based on the refinement and promulgation of advanced cooking techniques, she argues that American food is about quantity exemplified in those competitive eating contests in which contestants have 15 minutes to wolf down as much of some disgusting substance as possible. Her evidence for this hypothesis is the generally large portion sizes Americans prefer, as well as the Thanksgiving celebration, which appears to be about the bounty of the harvest and the number of dishes we can place on the table at the same time.

She is, of course, correct that Americans have been known to celebrate excess. But the United States has also undergone a food revolution over the last 30 years that is fundamentally reshaping the way we think about food. And that food revolution is not a celebration of excess. Americans are increasingly concerned with nutrition, the freshness of ingredients, sustainability, flavor, and novelty all of which suggest a turn toward quality and away from excess.

It could be argued that this food revolution is influencing only a small minority of our population and that most Americans remain mired in the dross of Super-Size Me and Big Gulps. Indeed, statistics on obesity are still dreadful. But Ferguson’s conception of American food appears in her chapter on food and national identity—the issue is not so much what we are but what we take ourselves to be. To the extent we have a food identity, it is not primarily about the celebration of excessive eating, unless we have given over the formation of our national identity to the advertisers of fast food chains. In other words, the discourse about food in the U.S., which is in part Ferguson’s subject, is not centered on the virtues of gluttony. And I’m not sure it ever has been. We have never celebrated the winners of competitive eating contests like the French have celebrated the winners of Bocuse d’Or, the international culinary competition that the French (or the French-trained) tend to dominate.

National identities are about what we admire and strive toward. A tendency to overeat is one aspect of American life but it is not what we admire, strive for or self-consciously endorse.

What then does define our culinary identity? I would suggest it is mobile eating—our tendency to eat and run, and the efficiencies to be gained through time compression. Our culinary past is notable for its efficient time management—fast food is the obvious example but so are TV dinners and packaged food in general, which exists in part because of the time it saves busy families on the go. Even the emergence of some ethnic foods is best explained by their ability to save time. Sushi need not be cooked and can be prepared ahead of time, and burritos and tacos lend themselves to efficient production and quick consumption.

So is Fast Food Nation our Bible? Are we most proud of that long tradition of Tastee Freeze, McDonald’s, and Taco Bell? Hardly. These establishments serve a purely utilitarian function in our mobile, car-obsessed society but they are not what we most admire about ourselves and they lack the emotional attachments that identities require.

Instead, I would suggest the essence of American food is the diner. Diners serve “way-station” food, designed to give weary travelers a respite from the road, and their menus consist of classic dishes that make the refugee think of home. There is a pathos to diner food—a celebration tinged with sadness at the solitude of travel—that fast-food restaurants lack.

There is a reason why one dominant trend in restaurants in U.S cities is to refurbish the diner as a hip destination where we can reconnect with American food traditions.

The Joy of Cooking

30 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by Dwight Furrow in Contemporary Food Culture, Philosophy of Food and Wine

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

food and ethics, food revolution

Pure-Ella-No-Bake-Dark-Chocolate-Mousse-Tarts2

Recipe and Photo by Pure Ella

In a very interesting post about the growing influence of food blogs especially in academia, Judith Newton makes some critically important, more general, claims about the changing status of cooking as a creative activity.

A recent development in women’s studies, for example, has been an effort to reclaim the kitchen and, in the process, to modify the tendency of some feminists to frame cooking and other forms of domesticity as inherently oppressive to women and as always enforcing a conservative status quo. Some academic feminists are now rethinking cooking as a vital form of emotional labor that nurtures and humanizes all of us, prepares us for civil society, and lays the groundwork for political community and social movements…

Many women of color, of course, have long seen cooking as a form of creativity and power and as a means of creating community solidarity in the face of ongoing struggles against racism, colonialism, and other forms of domination. (See Gloria Wade-Gayles’s 1997 Laying On Hands Through Cooking. Now, white feminists (academic and not) are also writing about home cooking as a retreat from, but also an implicit criticism of, the uncaring values of the world of work.

Indeed, a “mindful cooking,” one that takes into account the values of sustainability, economic justice, community, and caring labor is being theorized as a crucial feminist activity. Even labor intensive and time-consuming projects like fancy baking are newly valued as a means of expressing or redefining the self, of bringing intensity and joy to living, and as a form of resistance to the relentless pace of life in our work-obsessed culture.

These are important points that have ramifications far beyond debates within feminism. They explain why we have undergone a food revolution in this country.  Whatever other virtues it may have (I’m trying hard to think of one), the increasingly corporate, bureaucratic, pressurized world of work is not a place for self-expression, authenticity, creativity or care.

The world of food and wine is our contemporary retreat from all of that—a place where the intrinsic value of the joys of life can be celebrated daily. It’s the kind of modest revolution that may not make the history books but immeasurably improves peoples’ lives.

A Short History of the Food Revolution (and its future)

23 Thursday May 2013

Posted by Dwight Furrow in Contemporary Food Culture

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farm workers, food revolution, Michael Pollan, Ruth Reichl

If you want a quick history of the “food revolution”—the increased attention to all things food-related in the U.S.—you could do worse than this wonderful conversation between former NY Times food critic Ruth Reichl and Michael Pollen, the author perhaps most responsible for keeping food-related issues in the public eye.

Like so many other cultural trends, the food revolution got its start in the counter culture of the 60’s.

Pollen often has his finger on the pulse of where the food conversation is going, in part because he is often its beating heart. So this passage stood out:

I think the next chapter of the food movement will involve paying more attention to the workers in the food chain—on the farm, in the packing plants and in the restaurants. To a lot of people who care about food, all these people are invisible, but that’s starting finally to change. I think the campaign by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to improve the pay of tomato pickers in Florida has been an interesting and successful fight, one that much of the food movement supported.

Of course paying attention to workers in this country is usually forbidden by our plutocrats. I hope Pollen can pull it off.

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