"Worst Person in the World": George Leef

A submission to Keith Olberman's "worst person in the world" list: conservative pundit, George Leef, for mocking Julia C. Ehrhardt's article, "Towards Queering Food Studies: Foodways, Heteronormativity, and Hungry Women in Chicana Lesbian Literature." Per the title of his article, he asks, "Can You Find the Fake Course"? With the creativity of a juvenile delinquent, he pretends that someone made a course based on the title of her article and, by implication, suggests that any serious study on topics outside the heteronormative, white (& free-market loving) male doesn't possess any "bodies of knowledge." Apparently Chicanas, lesbians, food, and literature are devoid of knowledge, or maybe it's the specific combination that empties knowledge from these categories, he doesn't say. (He also mocks actual course titles--the Adultery novel, Queer Musicology, and Whiteness: The Other Side of Racism--complaining that students would benefit more from a course in logic. Funny, since he commits a number of logical fallacies throughout).


Although the article is poorly written, his initial image of queer Chicana literature and food as epistemologically lacking brings up some interesting questions about image. No single category seems to offend Leef. He never provides a reason why Chicana lesbian literature lacks knowledge, he only complains that such study takes up university money and valuable student time. Indeed, it is likely he can't articulate why he hates Chicana lesbian literature. He simply does. 


Rather, the combination--queer, literature, Chicana, and food--produces an emergent image, one too progressive for his conservative, cultured-yogurt sensibilities. Emergence, a process in which  novel images, behaviors, or phenomena arise from interactions, helps explain what Leef clearly cannot explain: his fears about food in Chicana lesbian literature. In fact, Moraga captures the emergent image in the title of one of her plays, "The Hungry Woman: The Mexican Medea." Chicana lesbians are hungry, possessing appetites for food and sex. The mythic figure of the Hungry Woman is covered in mouths, which threaten to eat much more than what Leef can control. Similarly, as third world countries (like new agricultural countries) threaten to become totally independent of transnational agri-businesses, the politicians and lobbyists subsidizing transnational industries are beginning to feel a collective fear. They don't have control over the Other. 


The fake academic, the pseudo-researcher, the pundit, the phony, the worst person in the world. George Leef. 

The Heteronormativity of Consumer Relations

The received wisdom of consumerism, both as a science and as a behavior, takes a binary approach to understanding consumers. The marriage between the consumer and a given industry or institution functions as the paradigm for nearly all business. But for academics, and even for companies whose primary motive is profit, this binary perspective places severe restraints on creative thinking. Imagined as a binary relationship, a type of heteronormative marriage, the consumer-industry coupling offers a feeling and image of stability. It focuses on one aspect of the economic system where the exchange between consumer and "producer" appears straightforward: one offers a product, the other purchases the product. The systems of debt, today signs of unsustainable economic growth, remain invisible. And as Marx argues in Capital, we never see surplus value, the profit and congealed labor that makes many markets fundamentally unequal.

Tourist destinations offer as part of the leisure activities a narrow focus on the acts of exchange, downplaying any images concerning debt. Consumer-industry exchanges, in fact, become leisure activities. Going shopping provides the pleasure of purchasing and exchange, a fleeting escape from the debt that increases with every escape. The mythic marriage between consumer and industry becomes a dominant form of escape, not just an unquestioned coupling resonant with heteronormative relations.

Co-evolution, in the meanwhile, with other people, objects, plants, technologies, spirits has been ongoing, building a store of relations that can be called upon to challenge the dominance of consumer-industry couplings. Recent cultural research in animal studies, embodied in scholars like Donna Haraway, draw attention to the way humans and pets co-adapt to environments and even produce new ecologies that share only weak links with consumerism. Eating practices--vegetarianism and veganism--often bring into relief our powerful links with animals and the affective character of food, its capacity to induce certain feelings in us. Whether these are queer modes of consumption or not remains a question of their capacity to connect us to a diversity of actors, rather than any narrow focus on what goes in to our mouths.

Restaurant Menus as Filters: Distributed Visuality as Constraint

Andrea Broomfield, in a Gastronomica article on the Titanic dining menus, demonstrates that despite the tripartite class segregation aboard the ship the bill of fares actually encourage patrons to "see their potential" rather than "feel their place" (41). Among third class passengers, for example, roast beef marked a cuisine normally reserved for higher classes. Upwardly mobile foods attracted a new market of third class passengers by placing them in a new food assemblage not found on other large ships. Even in offering a limited number of items the restaurant menu opens passengers to new horizons, including all the imaginative baggage of the American Dream. 

The sense that third class travelers were embarking on a new path, whether the promise of class mobility was actual or not, is a type of distributed visuality affording them a new picture of what is possible. The image roast beef conjures is a worldmaking one, not simply reflecting economic conditions but producing an image of economic reality--of the U.S.--that invites exploitation. Of course, the consequences of the American Dream, much criticized, are far from perfect, the capacity of inducing a feeling of potential through a restaurant menu remains a powerful, if commonplace, strategy still in use today. Distributed visuality, as an invitation to other possible food worlds, is as much a filter or constraint upon material cultures as it is a line of flight away from hackneyed categories, stale ideas, and old images. 

Marek Korczynski and Ursula Ott argue that the restaurant menu enables by constraining, "It lends shape and pattern to the plethora of alternatives that are available in many social spheres in contemporary society" (913). A type of visual activity, the menu helps structure what J.J. Gibson's adherents call the affordance landscape, which helps decide possibilities for action. A menu positions us as actors, Korczynski and Ott explain, providing us with the opportunity to make a meaningful choice. We experience ourselves as autonomous subjects; we gather pleasure through seeing ourselves as sovereign subjects. In a world where institutional constraints often incite disciplined routines and make docile bodies, experiencing ourselves as autonomous subjects can become a pleasurable escape from everyday pressures. Distributed visuality, then, risks being employed as an autonomy machine, affording us "false" choices that only reify hegemonic institutions. 

But in a complex system, distributed visuality like the restaurant menu teeters between chaos and order, a far-from-equilibrium state, and placed in the right niche--given the right environment--it can create lines of flight, new affordances, and actuate new capacities towards a re-visioning food. 

Sensory Distribution

About year or so ago Pizza Hut put out a commercial evoking the five senses. A character would go crazy looking at a pizza, another would go nuts smelling the pizza, and so on. Of course, for viewers watching the ad, the senses were largely semiotic constructs rather than experiential realities.

Sniffing was another visual tool at the disposal of marketers. But merely evoking the senses fails to achieve the complexity that distributed visuality entails. 

Distributed visuality, a vision of interdependence among human and nonhuman actors, also draws on visual studies' association of vision with knowledge (John Berger's articulations, for example, in Ways of Seeing). That ways of seeing correspond to ways of knowing suggests what is at stake when looking at food, what scopic regime tends to dominate. If not a disembodied vision, like Cartesian perspectivalism, then at least a de-historicized vision arguably dominates our way of seeing food. While I doubt the Pizza Hut commercial could be considered embodied--it abstracts eating practices into a weird cartoon-ish world--it definitely doesn't offer room for personal narrative, let alone collective memory. Other than some personal work experience in this food industry, where can I recite a history that connects me to the ingredients, or to the place where the tomatoes were grown. More than being a locavore, I'd like to know my food at more than a sensual level. 

Meredith Abarca writes about a type of sensory epistemology, sazón, which she locates among working-class Mexican and Mexican American women. Rather than quantify ingredients, measuring out a cup of flour for example, these women measured ingredients according to the taste of a dish. They seasoned, added sazón, according to their own subjective taste. This subjective, perspectival dimension, what Abarca calls al gusto, invites personal experience, memories, and stories into the picture of cooking. Not only are all the senses engaged, but they are subjectively enacted through cooking. Cooking, then, becomes a form of seeing and knowing the world, a distributed visuality that accounts for senses and stories. 

The point of (r)evolutionizing how we see food through sazón and other distributed visualities may actually be a rather straightforward task. I certainly don't mind eating Pizza Hut. But shouldn't the ahistorical fast foods, and maybe even the faux-historical mass marketed exotic foods (certain culinary tourist foods), be the exception? Our jouissance can come from rarely eating out, rather than rarely eating a home cooked meal. 

Overlooking Local Actors: Taking Pollan to Task

Globalization, as Marxist geographer David Harvey admits, has led to a multicultural fusion at all scales, the local, regional, and global are populated by diverse cuisines not just homogenizing agro-business or McDonaldization. Local and regional scales, in other words, are as much products of globalization as the world-system. As such, our cognitive processes and the food images we conjure are distributed among actors at different scales: transnational corporations, national governments, municipal institutions, community organizations, and individual people. During the carb-craze when bread got a bad rap, I heard everyone from government officials, to doctors, to my friends weighing in on the Atkin's diet. As Michael Pollan has pointed out, this craze was a just a symptom of the U.S.'s long-established eating disorder. A national image emerged from the interlocking of actors at different scales.

As obvious as this multi-scaled process may seem, the tendency, even for Pollan, is to grant more influence to national actors (the government, national media, the CDC) and see the contributions of individual people as mediums for mainstream ideology. For Pollan, John Kellogg, the physician who invented cornflakes, appears as a scientist promoting the hidden nutritional properties of food over taste. Never mind that Kellogg's medical practices, including enemas involving yogurt, were initially not mainstream. Divorced from historical context, Kellogg's goal to remedy and prevent gastrointestinal problems common in the late-nineteenth century become footnotes (if that) in Pollan's critique of scientific discourse. Pollan sacrifices the object-oriented vision, the distributed visuality, Kellogg uses to formulate his dietary advice. Kellogg, following modern science, was convinced that gut flora--the microscopic organisms in our stomachs that help breakdown food--played a crucial role in our digestive process. He saw beyond anthropocentric approaches and sought to create a co-adaptive environment for both humans and flora. (To his credit, however, Pollan offers an excellent non-antropocentric view of distribution in his book, The Botany of Desire)

In the same way that Pollan overlooks Kellogg's relationship with or perspective on gut flora, transnational food corporations have overlooked many-a-culture's relationship with food and the land. Cherrie Moraga's play Watsonville, for example, depicts a pueblo (a people and a town) whose relationship with the lemon trees and the oak groves around them contrast against the packing of nutrient-rich broccoli into tin cans at a cannery factory that employs many Mexican and Mexican-American workers. Food for Dolores, an older Chicana who has lost two children, is as much spiritual as it is nutritional. The opening scene begins with her placing a tray of enchiladas before the "Virgen," not for human consumption but for spiritual edification. On the other hand, where Dolores works, factory workers seal food into cold, separate, and serialized containers. The presumption on the part of the cannery owners is that food is eaten for its nutritive dimensions, who cares how it is packaged, who does the packaging, and how much these workers are paid? In Watsonville, food among the pueblo is a shared material, something to share with other people as well as a type of communion between the people, their land, and their spiritual ancestors. Together, this distributed assemblage of people, land, and spirit make up the pueblo.

Actors like the pueblo, and even Kellogg, contribute to the formation of a global system. They may be the nearly invisible background material, as in the peublo in some of Alfonso Cuaron's films (e.g., Children of Men), but the repressed capacity of their brand of relationships awaits a reawakening. Oddly enough, they may, in a postmodern turn, blur the relationships between foreground and background, casting the relationships between agri-business and a series of distributed actors into sharp relief. It will be hard to ignore suffering.

Food (R)evolution: Jamie Oliver vs Grace Lee Boggs

Part of re-visioning the seemingly predominant fast-food perspective of food production and consumption in the U.S. is the now fashionable phrase "food revolution," popularized by ABC's Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution (which will be returning for a second season in 2011). The show, accompanied with the usual reality TV spectacle, has received positive reviews from some of food studies' most influential members, including Marion Nestle's review in the Huffington Post. For Nestle, the most striking scene was when a class of West Virginia grade schoolers failed to identify the most common vegetables.



Striking perhaps, but not surprising. Slavoj Zizek's frequent discussions on "unknown knowns"--those things that we don't know that we know--could help anyone wishing to articulate how, of course, we know grade schoolers are not taught about vegetables, eating habits, or food production. This unremarkable fact is culturally repressed just enough so that when we are shown some actual footage of it framed by Oliver's British disgust, we can perform a bit and shake our heads.

Grace Lee Boggs, a Detroit activist who has helped urban communities reshape their environment, offers  a twist to Oliver's reality TV revolution. In an uncanny revision of "revolution," she calls for a good food (r)Evolution: a revolution accompanied by evolution, a collective evolution out of our current mindset. On her blog, she explains,

most Americans still believe we have no alternative to the food produced by agribusinesses who care as little about our health as they do about the health of the chickens, turkeys, cows and pigs, so tightly packed in pens and cages on factory farms that the floor is scarcely visible, and where visible, is covered with excrement.

Using visual terminology, she evokes what I have called "distributed visuality," a way of seeing interdependency among multiple human and nonhuman actors. At stake in a food (r)evolution is the health of humans and animals, not to mention entire ecosystems. Revolution at the human scale, entails seeing our evolution with animals, plants, and land.

In Borderlands, Gloria Anzaldua actually uses the term (r)evolution to echo chemist Ilya Prigogine's notion of "dissipative structures" (103). (R)evolution works out the clash of cultures, she says, creating an unpredictable and more complex structure, a new breed of corn. And like corn, Boggs sees communities growing from the ground up, starting urban gardens by using the city's young people.

As striking as Jamie Oliver's encounters with grade schoolers' ignorance may seem, the image ABC produces is first a spectacle. Real life covered in excrement. Should he begin to touch on the interweaving of government, corporations, and U.S. culture, a distributed visuality, we may begin to see  that the barn floor is covered in shit.

Distributed Visuality at the Global Scale: New Agricultural Countries

Harriet Friedman's "The Political Economy of Food: A Global Crisis," a 1993 essay published in the New Left Review among other venues, launched a number commentaries on what she calls new agricultural countries (NACs). Countries like Brazil and Thailand, considered third world countries by Western policy makers, developed distributed systems of food and agriculture that modified and even defied the dominant U.S. mercantile practice of producing food surpluses, subsidizing domestic agriculture, and using embargoes to enforce third world countries' dependence on U.S. transnational corporations. Brazil, she explains, "shifted the focus of domestic policy from agricultural subsidies to agroindustry, which increased the value of commodities and did not create surpluses" (46). A shift in "focus," Brazil's emergence as a key global player in exporting value added soy meal marks collective shift in perception among Brazilians.

The first shift in perception occurs when collectives refuse and critique the vision of the Green Revolution, the view that third world countries "lack" Western technology--genetically modified crops and chemical fertilizers--and, thus, they require intervention from Monsanto. By rejecting this position of dependance, NACs open up new visions of market dynamics. The second shift might be called distributed visuality, "a strategic mix of agricultural settlement, credit, and taxation policies to create an intensive livestock sector based on nationally produced grain and soya." Defined against the background of transnational corporate agriculture, distributed visuality invite actors to envision the economic world-system as a decentralized network not as a system reliant on any single country, institution, or rule.

There is no governing equation to economic health, especially in terms of the Green Revolution. The sublimation of genetically modified crops and laboratory produced fertilizers, perceived as the solution to world hunger, has proven only to impede in the development of local agricultural practices. Local environments, for instance, cannot sustain nutrient and water demands of genetically modified plants. Instead, each actor--that is, each country--holds a unique relationship to the world-system, the emergent geopolitical whole. Exploiting this relationship and the capacities hidden within a country's agricultural system begins with a new vision, seeing the collective body as capable of more actions than the dominant food regime would allow.

Distribution of Images, Images of Distribution

Distribution of Images 

For Benedict Anderson, national "imagined communities" emerge from productions of mass media. The printing press, for example, distributes images of, say, England nationalism on a mass scale, filling the English landscape with images that individual and collective actors interact with and maneuver through. The spatial language is appropriate to thinking about images if we are to consider images as more than Platonic abstractions. Images occupy space, a type of topological space, perhaps, not conceptualized metrically but as a network. A space beyond our local, common-sense experience of a given place. Imagined communities are image communities that take humanity into previously uncharted territory, producing cohesive collectivities out of spatially and even temporally distant actors.

In a word, images are distributed, "divided and shared among agents and structures in the environment" (Syverson 7). Really, images extend our sense and concept of the environment outwards. En"viron," a closed circuit, becomes ever larger as images introduce new encounters that extend the real and imagined boundaries of our world. It works at all scales too. Electron microscopes reveal cellular topographies, while  the Hubble Space Telescope relays pictures of interstellar gas birthing new stars. We maintain social lives over rivers of information flow, a Facebook page connecting Texas to Thailand.  

Images of Distribution

An image, as in a webpage, offers an image of distribution: those networks of friends that make up a given "community." Facebook remains constrained, however, by its templates, centralized by a company, centered around a spectator (me). An image of distribution would display Facebook under new light, a highlight of its material distribution among electrical circuits, laptops, houses, living rooms--simultaneously a socio-economic distribution among middle-classes and its deviations.

Food, a highly condensed social fact, as Arjun Appadurai says, and a material necessity, offers a potentially densely-connected, widely-dispersed image of distribution. Within complex systems of food are lines of flight connecting multiple scales and varying actors, material and social, organic and inorganic. In a nuclear age, to echo Timothy Morton, food is a plutonium hyperobject with a rate of decay beyond any individual human time scale. (Even generations may not live to tell the tale of plutonium decay, 24,100 years). The now famous commodity biographies on cod, spice, bananas, coffee  offer a snapshot of this radioactive decay, but not the whole story. Not the endless flares of distribution perpetually heating up and burning out. But capturing the entire distributed quality of a commodity is impossible, a perpetual fractal machine dynamic to the core.

An image of distribution may be enough to spark a new fire trail, a fire walk in the David Lynch sense.



Enough of a cult following has sprung up around Lynch's early-90s drama, Twin Peaks, to demonstrate the power of a new path, a new line of flight out of rote TV dramas. Down the rabbit hole we go with images of distribution.