A Matter of Taste
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How did farmer's markets, nose-to-tail, locavorism, organic eating, CSAs, whole foods, and Whole Foods become synonymous with “good food”? And are these practices really producing food that is morally, environmentally, or economically sustainable? Rebecca Tucker's compelling, reported argument shows that we must work to undo the moral coding that we use to interpret how we come by what we put on our plates. She investigates not only the danger of the accepted rhetoric, but the innovative work happening on farms and university campuses to create a future where nutritious food is climate-change resilient, hardy enough to grow season after season, and, most importantly, available to all—not just those willing or able to fork over the small fortune required for a perfect heirloom tomato. Tucker argues that arriving at that future will require a broad cognitive shift away from the idea that farmer's markets, community gardens, and organic food production is the only sustainable way forward; more than that, it will require the commitment of research firms, governments, corporations, and postsecondary institutions to develop and implement agriscience innovations that do more than improve the bottom line. A Matter of Taste asks us to rethink what good food really is.
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Dedicated to my nonna, Enrica, through whom all food had power.
My mother ran the house, as far as food was concerned (as far as a lot of other things were concerned, too). And she had (and has) a strict sense of what constituted food fit for her family to eat. This discriminating sense of good food vs. bad food, born partly of her upbringing in an Italian immigrant household where even peanut butter was foreign and processed, and partly of a typically parental sort of common-sense, five-a-day-style healthy-eating ethos. Broadly, this meant that packaged foods – junk foods, in other words – were verboten. Specifically, this meant no Dunkaroos.
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But what constitutes food on either side of the moral divide has been a moving target. For my mother, and her mother, good food meant food whose ingredients they recognized – nothing processed, nothing boxed. Over time, that understanding would have evolved to include a few twentieth-century conveniences, like store-bought crackers, supermarket eggs, and cured meat from a deli counter instead of a neighbour’s basement. But despite these few concessions to modernity, my childhood eating habits were remarkably, unusually (and, if you were to ask me, infuriatingly) clean and, well, good.
In 2018, however, those twentieth-century conveniences – the boxed crackers, deli meats, and probably-not-freerange eggs – don’t quite pass muster. In response to the industrialization of our food systems, food that is recognized as good is no longer simply food that is healthful; the moral needle has moved toward food that is organic, food that is local, food that supports a farmer whose name you know, and, perhaps above all else, food that has been affected by as little human intervention as possible.
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