Abstract
Social justice politics and consumer culture can make for odd bedfellows. In the context of contemporary neoliberalism, the pursuit of what is ‘right’ (i.e. systemic reform) and the imperatives of individualism (i.e. the pursuit of stuff and self-interest) can seem woefully incompatible. Yet the intellectual bequest of cultural studies foregrounds the power that popular culture’s materiality can exert in struggles for ‘better’, more just futures at both individual and structural scales. Progressive solidarities and structural transformation, in other words, are not always in opposition to the discourses, techniques and materialities of identity-making in the neoliberal age. Such intersections between macro and micro – and the paradoxes these generate – are at the heart of Michelle Phillipov and Katherine Kirkwood’s new edited collection about alternative food politics and its mainstreaming. Through the analytical prism of food media, this collection offers deft consideration of how systemic critiques of culinary production and consumption practices can (and do) converge with the individualised mode of address that dominates today’s consumer culture.
Where Roger Silverstone (1999) made a robust case for why we need to study the media, Phillipov and Kirkwood’s volume is a compelling argument for why we should study food media. The book demonstrates the complex political, cultural and socioeconomic work being done by food’s representation. It also underscores the media’s centrality in making, or failing to make, food meaningful. Anders Riel Müller and Jonatan Leer (chapter 2), for instance, examine the failure of media messaging to render New Nordic Cuisine – developed by elite Scandinavian restaurants – accessible and ordinary. The volume’s contributors observe time and time again how technologies of representation help shape popular ideas about what qualifies as ‘good’ food and ‘good’ food politics.
In their attention to the highly mediated and highly commercialised register of contemporary food culture, the book’s 12 chapters also highlight key tensions around what constitutes a ‘better’ culinary future, for whom and at whose expense. Abigail Wincott’s (chapter 3) analysis of the classist and racist ‘poshing up’ of once-humble carrots is a powerful case in point, highlighting how nostalgia for the British Empire is leveraged in the marketing of ‘heritage’ vegetables. The book’s interrogation of food sustainability and sovereignty gestures to the production of similar inequalities and exclusions. For example, Tanja Schneider (chapter 4) charts a troubling reframing of European food sustainability via technocratic entrepreneurialism. She shows how urban farming start-ups in Switzerland deploy an industrialised, privatised approach to local food production that delegitimises the human-scale, progressive politics with which food sustainability is traditionally linked. Meanwhile, Alana Mann (chapter 6) locates the consumerist individualism that undercuts the efficacy of food sovereignty activism in the Global North. Systemic change is not possible, she argues, if it relies only on consumer behaviour.
Through these and other chapters, this anthology makes clear that food justice is a highly contested and immensely difficult political project. That difficulty derives, in part, from the sheer volume and diversity of stakeholders invested in the fight for and over culinary meaning-making. These include NGOs, community activists, policymakers, transnational agrobusiness, small-scale farmers, certification boards, supermarkets, restaurants, digital and analogue media producers and platforms, chefs, marketers, tech entrepreneurs and of course, consumers. Motivations and ideological convictions vary greatly among and between these actors, which renders food – alternative or mainstream – an unstable discursive category. When food is at once entertainment, industry, ethics, sovereignty, lifeforce and identity, it is hard to definitively pin down its politics and delimit the cultural work those politics are doing. And that, in turn, makes it difficult to imagine not only what a better food future might look like, but also how we get there.
Difficult as the task may be, this collection offers thoughtful provocations and incisive starting points. The authors’ shared refusal to see food as a decontextualised monolith is perhaps the most important intervention. Indeed, the contributors treat the specificities of culinary production, consumption and representation as essential to understanding food and food media’s discursive power and political capacity. This deep contextualisation means readers travel around the Global North, with pitstops in Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Switzerland and Denmark. En route, we encounter a panoply of food media, including company websites, memes, GIFs, selfies, hashtags, infographics, food labels, social media platforms like Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and YouTube, newspapers, magazines, government reports, ad campaigns, documentary films and television programmes. We also encounter a range of analytical frameworks and methodological techniques – from feminist materialism to critical cultural geography, from ethnography to discourse analysis – with which to make sense of the places, media texts and technologies that circumscribe food’s political claims and agency.
In showcasing the powerful role that media play in food’s politicisation, this collection also points to the ways that the media inform popular sentiments around what qualifies as mainstream and alternative; as emancipatory and repressive; as progressive and transgressive. But the book also critiques the moral assumptions built into these binaries. For instance, by foregrounding the ways in which ethical food labelling can work to preserve industry self-regulation, disincentivise government action, and prop up dodgy production practices, Christine Parker, Rachel Carey and Gyorgy Scrinis (chapter 10) highlight the fact that what may look emancipatory can actually contribute to and consolidate a non-emancipatory status quo. Progressive optics, in other words, can be in conflict with progressive outcomes. Stephen Harrington, Christy Collis and Ozgur Dedehayir’s chapter (7) makes a similar observation in regard to veganism’s move from the margins to the mainstream in Australia. Their analysis of this move highlights the depoliticisation it performs, wherein veganism’s ethical claims and activist connotations are being increasingly overwritten by the gendered, aestheticised and commercialised language of a plant-based consumer lifestyle.
The ‘alternative’ (or the marginal or the mainstream) is not inherently progressive. The politics and ethics of these discursive constructs are neither predetermined nor fixed. This message comes through loud and clear in Julie Guthman’s (chapter 1) reflection on the gap between organic farming’s utopian vision and the movement’s actual impact on agricultural production in the United States. It turns out that the mainstreaming of organics has not had a liberatory effect; instead, it has resulted in corporate co-option and consolidation, which in turn has reproduced some of the very inequalities that food activism seeks to dismantle.
In the context of neoliberal capitalism, the link between ‘alternative’ and ‘progressive’ is especially fragile. One reason for this lies in the pervasiveness, dynamism and sophistication of contemporary marketing. As Phillipov and Kirkwood’s (chapter 12) analysis of processed supermarket food demonstrates, ‘Celebrity-branded private labels … are a powerful example of how criticisms of supermarkets – criticisms that frequently draw upon the tenets and values of the “alternative” – can be positively incorporated and repurposed by mainstream retailers’ (p. 236). When critique is thus operationalised by the market, it disrupts the politics of resistance. The politics of progressive transformation are similarly challenged by the affordances of today’s ‘networked food publics’ (Mann, chapter 6). As Deborah Lupton (chapter 8) underscores in her account of online food/body politics, ‘At the same time as exponents of progressive food politics are able to find outlets for their viewpoints and ideals, digital media also provide a wealth of opportunities for these political positions to be ridiculed and aggressively attacked’ (p. 165). Likewise, in examining the Welcome Dinner Project, Rick Flowers and Elaine Swan (chapter 5) show that digital media affordances – which make content and context mobile, and open to endless revision – can simultaneously propel and challenge progressive politics. The Welcome Dinner Project facilitates shared meals between new arrivals to Australia and ‘established’ residents, and as Flowers and Swan suggest, online visual representation of the project reinforces and disrupts racialised assumptions of belonging.
Ultimately, Phillipov and Kirkwood’s book is an important, interdisciplinary contribution to the study of food, popular culture and the media. It offers cogent and urgent analysis of the platforms, claims and vicissitudes of culinary power today, and how these impact on individual and collective projects of meaning-making. In so doing, the anthology also draws attention to the moral register through which contemporary politics operates (nb. Mouffe, 2005). That register complicates the politics of any ‘alternative’.
