Where Policy Meets the Kitchen

As a member of the NYU Food Studies program, people oftentimes wonder what it is "i do". It's not an easy question to answer. As with any interdisciplinary program, Food Studies draws from a number of different studies -- anthropology, economics, botany, agronomy, sociology, marketing and cognitive science, to name but a few -- to both draw together the various elements that make the food system a system, and to inform, depending on your focus, the ways in which we can change or adapt those things. As with any sort of study, there are a number of different angles and agencies: the student trying to figure out how school food purchasing works as to better include regional farmers; the public health official looking at the best way to create alternatives to bad food habits and how to shift them; the person figuring out how to best assist businesses navigate through the various food-based regulations that can stymie smaller businesses. The person studying the evolution of Chinese-American foodways. And the list can go on. 

For me, the course of study I follow has been evolving for a coupld of years; from studying farmers markets and specialty coffee supply chains, the US Farm bill and regulatory regimes related to geographic-indicators (i.e. France's AOC system) I've been focusing on diversity. Not only in the realm of crops, tho, but biodiveristy as part and parcel to cultural and culinary diversity. To me, these topics are not that far apart; being a student of Fernand Braudel while at Berkeley, the intersection between geography, environment, and cultural/political/economic development are very closely linked. Certain foodways spawned out of the conditions that people found themselves surrounded by and existed in. Salami? The evolution of needing to preserve boar meat. Fish sauce & liquamen? The need to provide salts and flavor in spaces where salt production was not easily had. Rye bread? Because when you tried to grow wheat in those climes it died. Cholent, pot roast, brisket were all foods of poverty that evolved as dishes that met the Sabbath need to be cooked only in radiant heat left over because you technically couldn't cook it on the Sabbath. 

So too it happens with botanicals. The wines of the Rhone would not be the same if they were tempranillo and blaufrankisch grapes. The holy basil and fish peppers that flavor pho would not be replaced by jalapenos and Basilicata basil. Cuisine is filled with such things (and hence my ire when in cookbooks there is always the reference of "substitutions". You ever wonder why mom's apple pie never tastes the same when you do? it's because of the substitutions you make), and the cultural connection to the making of dishes and what grows in the ground does, in fact, matter. Nowhere is it more clear than in this recent piece in the NY Times food section, looking at the attempts to continue the foodways of second- and third-generation immigrant households in the US. 

Now you might wonder, where does food systems or food policy fit into this, and the article half-answers this. Political missions have always infringed upon cultural agency -- turn of the century firms that attempted to integrate new immigrants found spicy foods distasteful, and therefore dissuaded their production by new immigrants. Certain crops could not be found in this country, so some were grown by family gardeners, others found suitable substitutions in American produce. The American post-ww2 policies where agricultural production are concerned have had, across the board, great impacts on what is grow, and in turn, the bulk of what is considered "food" in the American cultural context. 

A friend of mine in high school told me how "he had no culture -- he was just a white kid". Nevermind that his background was Italian-Jewish, and his parents, while divorced, had each brought to the table specific memories and foodways that he could recall, but had no connectivity to. This doesn't have to be the case. And every case that is like it is a loss of cultural agency, a loss of power, one more thing that we accept as acceptable -- and that is one step away from generic products and the futuristic (as in the Italian futurist) way of looking at food merely as a bodily imput, and not as a form of sustenance in both the nutriative and vaguely spiritual way that sometimes talking about culture can be. This is not some waxing poetic for a idealized past; it is the focus on foods that bring with them a specific type of literacy -- a cultural or kitchen literacy -- that is part and parcel to the types of cultural agency that keeps people from being simply cogs in a machine, but very active agents of our own lives and societies (this argument is best laid out in the book "Kitchen Literacy" by Anne Vileisis).

Ultimately, my work is about stemming such a tide, and more particularly, doing so at mutliple levels. It's about working on agricultural diversity as to preserve and encourage cultural diversity in the kitchen. It's about economic development as part and parcel to cultural development. Doing so in places where policies can be changed that ultimately come to effect the home environment, to afford people the space to be able to do more and, as one of Burning Man's many valuable lessons come in, encourage a form of radical self-reliance, not in the sense of living off the land and off the grid, but in the sense of taking ownership in one of the most important spaces one can -- the privacy of the home and the convivium of the hearth and table.