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.