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.
