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.

NPR's Images of Violent Mexico, Imagining the Authentic Meal

Is it me or is NPR doing an inordinate amount of reporting on violence in Mexico? The latest headline, "Fed Up, A Mexican Town Resorts to Mob Justice," depicts Mexico as the new Wild West, a town turned into a type of collective Batman. Today's headline stories on Mexico in Fox News and Democracy Now focus on the "protection" of Mexican journalists, rather than the epidemic violence apparently surging among the Mexican population.

NPR, our National Public Radio, continues to fuel the nationalist machinery that nation builds other countries through U.S. cultural pathways. It is not exactly imperialism, but it is not responsible journalism either.

This image of a violent Mexico risks becoming the unspoken precursor to authenticating anything identified as Mexican. The very notion of an "authentic" Mexico requires an image of violence: the "artificial" act of eating a meal becomes a triumph over the "natural" violence of Mexico. A background of violence forms the conditions against which everything Mexican must emerge.

Say No to Symbols: Evolution from HGTV to Victory Gardens

I routinely regret not investing in Scripps Networks Interactive, the parent company of the Food Network, the Travel Channel, and other lifestyle television networks. Lifestyle images are parceled into categories: separate channels focus on design, home and garden, travel, and food--even "fine" food. The boundaries between these categories, though porous, are not arbitrary; channel developers must work through the cultural materials that make any boundary cohesive. Categories are more like species, they are born at a specific historical moment and in time they will go extinct. The separation between food and home design, for example, becomes wider as the capacity to profit off these categories intensifies. Profit serves as the river separating a single species into two isolated reproductive communities, which, like horses and mules did, evolve into their own species.

Where profit flows, new species are born. (Monsanto can literally create a new species of grain as it institutes monopolistic practices over all aspects of cereal production.) When these new species are born, it becomes harder for us to see their commonalities. It is harder for us to discern their interaction in creating an image of middle-class lifestyle, for example. We focus on their extensive properties, the things that common sense tells us are different. One category clearly deals with material that potentially enters our bodies, the other deals with material that surrounds our bodies.

But these differences are merely different manifestations of a single genetic flow: the genetics of the American middle class. Just because different tools are used--a spatula for the cook and a paint brush for the home designer--doesn't mean we aren't dealing with the same image. Scripps, after all, is the parent company, embracing both HGTV and the Food Network.

Is it profitable for us, the television audience, to bring together these two species? Perhaps. No, if we think we are going to see an underlying truth: a whole picture will suddenly emerge, enlightening us to the mechanization of the capitalist system. Yes, if we accept that something new may emerge, a new assemblage, like the coupling of cattle with humans that allowed communities to become sedentary. In fact, the coupling between food images and home design images is already occurring. For example, Michelle Obama's efforts to revive the White House Victory Garden are recorded on youtube:



This new garden marks a significant change in the White House landscape and even in its design: the flow of traffic presumably increases between the kitchen and the section of the White House lawn where the garden is placed. People's material bodies flowing through doorways change the design of the House, perhaps requiring new security posts and new maintenance buildings (a shed). The link between home design and food is barely apparent in this video, but it is there.

Contrary to popular declarations that the new garden represents a "symbolic" change, echoing the symbolic change of Barak Obama's election to the White House, the actual affects of the new garden are potentially much greater. The term "symbolic" seems to imply that the garden and Obama represent something that is already visible, ready for showing off. But the election of Obama had an incredibly diverse set of reactions not reducible to any apriori images. He is far more than a symbol of African American accomplishment; his election literally changed the racial landscape of the US, if not the world: while ethnic minorities found a new role model, conservatives found a new demon. The garden combines the home design species and its kin, food image species, and produces something new, something that has yet to be clearly outlined. Like species in biology, these lifestyle species become the raw material for evolution, or perhaps (r)evolution.

Becoming Plant ala Typee

Super Bowl. Becoming plant. Not Madden, not Cardinals, not Pittsburgh, only plant.

Plant, of course, is in the spice. "Walk without rhythm and you won't attract the worm." The worm from David Lynch's Dune craves rhythm, craves spice, and consumes pattern to establish another link in its length. While its existence breathes rhythm--like we consume oxygen--it exudes chaos (carbon dioxide?). Try consuming that. Global warming. Oh my god! Hole in the ozone layer. Holes are where crap falls through. The world is a toilet. The sun shits and we consume: the Son of Christianity sacrifices body and you consume sacrament. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Time and pattern is of no consequence, it is only there for the worm. From who do you consume? Worms crap spice and we consume: oxygen, water, moola, products, sacrament...consumption. 

But let's talk fast--fast as in speed, yes, we need to act now--but lets talk starvation. 38 million people in the United States have to choose between buying food and paying bills--check it out, SA Food Bank, or the USDA. These starving, they are resistance by necessity--that imagined utopia Slavoj talks about, where we imagine because we must. I had Muslim roommates, who fasted during Ramadan. I participated, but without any direction. Because you do it, I do it. Let's do it. Starve. Come night, of course, we ate. But somewhere in that 38 million, you did not. Eat. 

Someone did not eat. Someone passed. Me, you, we...guilty. Were you eating frozen pizza? Were you guilty? Don't feel bad. Just get out and spyce up the world, man. Don't just change things, change perceptions. Wander. Float the earth and allow something to sever and something to connect. Just don't look back--Lot's wife in the Old Testament turned into a pillar of salt. We still don't know if salt is a hereditary taste or not. But if you can live with that question, then go ahead, look back. Spyce is not just seasoning--as in Iron Chef competitions--but also sea-sunning: 311 band says 'I'm free as I stare at the sea.' Check out the spyce of life, the sea-sunning of perception--see? (I'm) sunning--shining a light on you. Do you believe what you C? Aha, seeing is not so apparent anymore (is it C-ing, seaing, seeing?). But suffering is apparent--you know it exists, you've been there. If you have suffered, you know compassion. Not "no" compassion. You knowledge compassion--you have already made a type of knowledge of compassion: it is relevant, irrelevant, fake, true, believable, stupid, nice, wonderful, yada yada. It exists. 

U s e                                    i t. 

What is spice-2-spyce?

This blog is basically my working out of academic issues I need to write about. Right now, its mostly dissertation stuff. So there is a lot of stumbling, some experimentation, and vain attempts to articulate what can't be articulated. As a nice poet once said, sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.

It has also become an archive of my writing process. So, I record my attempts to carry out advice from friends, professors, and how-to-write books and websites. Part of the challenge and benefit to my current position is staying at home full-time with my infant son and two cats while my incredibly generous partner finishes her medical residency, an eighty-hour-a-week job.

I know theory is not saving lives (yet), but I'll try to sketch out my theoretical position.

My Disciplines:

main: Food Studies, Visual Studies, Complex Systems Theory

minor: rhetoric, semiotics, postcolonial theory

overarching: feminism

I bounce a lot of ideas off semiotics, so I have a traditional streak. I like structuralism. But I''ve read enough Bruno Latour to be cautious about framing debates between structure and agency. Semiotics, especially the Peircean strand from C.S. Peirce to Yuri Lotman, doesn't meddle with those terms anyways. Even Saussure, our paternal structuralist, never talks about "agency." He was a linguist, c'mon.

My philosophies:

Since I'm fashionably caught up in the complex systems buzz, I focus on processes, relationships, and becomings (rather than being, identity, or structure). In itself, this approach is nothing new. My pleasure derives from synthesizing literary theory, complex systems theory, and visual studies in order to think about food in ways that depart from historical and anthropological accounts.

Who to read:

If you're in the humanities and want to use complex systems theory, you'll first want to get an idea of how the humanities borrows from researchers studying complex systems. John Urry, Mark C. Taylor, and N. Katherine Hayles provide accessible texts that synthesize their respective fields--sociology, philosophy, and literature--with complex systems, or more broadly, with chaos theory. If you're in rhetoric and composition, Margaret Syverson and Byron Hawk provide applications that are ready to use in the classroom.

Next, check out some of the scientists who have helped make complex system accessible to people in other fields. John Holland, Francisco Varela, Ilya Prigogine, and Stuart Kaufmann have all provided interdisciplinary accounts. Melanie Mitchell, an accomplished theorist and computer scientist, offers a very nice introduction to the scientific end.

Then move to philosophers and social critics that not only borrow from complex systems but also create novel syntheses of their own; many of these thinkers, in fact, do not use complex systems, but their thoughts are easily fused within a complexity paradigm. Philosopher Manuel DeLanda offers the best synthesis of complex systems theory with social, political, and historical thought. He is accessible and translates the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze into useable language. John Protevi and Mark Bonata provide insight into DeLanda's and Deleuze's relationship to complex systems. Deleuze and Guatarri's A Thousand Plateaus, however, is an endless source of inspiration, frustration, and amusement, and it can be productively read against Donna Haraway and Slavoj Žižek--both of whom have issues with Deleuze. Jacques Derrida and Edward Said offer intellectual roads to critique and extend Žižek's Lacanian side. And speaking of Lacan, Hayles builds on cybernetics to go beyond the presence/absence binaries that Lacan and Derrida scrupulously critique.

If you want to link this short list of complex thinkers to visual studies begin with C.S. Peirce, who Derrida and Deleuze draw on. His triadic models of the sign will drive you nuts, but it is the most dynamic approach to semiotics and an in-road to understanding the way signs, language, and images are complex systems. Yuri Lotman and Mikhail Bakhtin, Russian giants of semiotics and literary theory, likewise present language and signs as complex systems. Martin Jay, Jonathan Crary, and W.J.T. Mitchell depart from semiotics, offering throughly historical accounts of vision that mesh well with the important role that time plays in complex systems.

Gender studies naturally flows from visual studies: the relationship between "scopic regimes" and gender date at least to the invention of writing; see Elise Kermani's dissertation on the mythic origins of langauge and anthropologists, like Nancy Makepeace Turner, accounts of pre-literate societies. Some of the most cited feminist, visual studies crowd borrows heavily from Western male thought: Judith Butler borrows from Foucault; Laura Mulvey and Jacqueline Rose borrow from Freud; Gayatri Spivak borrows from Derrida.

For the true intellectual juice read Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands, a text that synthesizes myth, politics, and spirituality in ways resonant with Deleuze and Guatarri's fusion of semiotics, music, and the physical sciences in A Thousand Plateaus. Read together, these texts can "queer" almost anything, making new lines of flight wherever you take them.

Spice-2-Spyce:

This is basically an attempt to create a line of flight for vision. That is, I don't do away with vision as a privileged source of perception (like anyone, I need to see the road as I drive), but by combining my interests in food studies with visual rhetoric a new way of seeing is possible. Spice-2-spyce embodies this new way of seeing. By changing "i" to a "y" in spice, the repressed maternal visual element is made salient (the phallic "i" is turned into a vaginal "y," a letter Kermani writes about extensively). The "2" and the "y" disrupt our sense of linear reading, making the word or phrase a visual display rather than a mere word. The reader can turn into a viewer, a spectator, an observer. The word "spice" has etymological roots in "species," a term used to organized reality according to "appearances."