Draft 12.7

American Studies Senior Thesis Partial Draft Caitlin Richards 12.7.09

A note: This draft consists mainly of sections of sections; while doing research, I found that my initial question had more responses than I could have imagined, all of them interesting, many of them interconnected. I’ve looked at variety of disciplines so far, including anthropology, political ecology (which doesn’t appear much in this draft because I’m writing another final paper focusing on it), history, psychology, social movement theory, feminist theory, as well as personal accounts from autobiographies, interviews, and my own experience. I still have a lot work to do, including more research, and this is a framework that has many holes. I attempted to think as far down as many of the paths as I could with this draft, to try and imagine what my final paper might look like and anticipate what work I still need to do. Parts of it are messy and casual, others more traditional analytical. I look forward to your comments. Thank you for the support and guidance so far.

2 INTRODUCTION I visited the Yale Farm for the first time my first week of freshman year. I remember cutting an eggplant off its stem with a small knife, very slowly. I relished the task. It was a treat compared to the big changes and decisions that come up with the start of college. Manageable, tactile. Squatting in the dirt across from another freshman, a woman I recognized from my dorm, the space seemed to allow us both a little safety – literally some peace and quiet – that had been hard to find on campus. The feel of the eggplant’s skins and its rich purple color are singed in my memory. Since then, I’ve touched and seen a lot of eggplants, none as memorable, at volunteer workdays at the Yale Farm, at Farmers’ Markets, or on other farms during summers and vacations. I’ve taken the majority of my courses on topics related to agriculture, food and farm policy, or environmental ethics. These two parts of my life, the farm work and study of agriculture academically, don’t always go easily hand-in-hand. One thing I’ve gained from my seminars is an eye for the romanticization of farm work in writing, art, and policy, which is unsteady ground on which to build long-lasting change. The Yale Sustainable Food Project’s mission is based on values of environmental stewardship, education, and justice. “Every day,” it tells us, “food offers us the opportunity to engage with the world around us.” How we engage is our choice. How the Yale Sustainable Food

3 Project engages is by managing an organic farm and running “diverse programs that support exploration and academic inquiry related to food and agriculture,” including advocating for more organic and local food in the dining halls and lobbying for policy changes on a national and local level. There are many good ideas about why someone should grow her own food. As a student of the organization, I’ve learned that we can grow food as a political act. We can grow food to support equity. We can grow food to learn and become more human. We can grow food to be stewards of the land, and stewards of knowledge, that we may pass it on and lead by example. These seem like worthwhile goals, and with an interesting and unexpected set of means—growing food—from a prestigious research institution. There’s almost nothing as mundane as food. The rest of the food project’s mission grabbed me from the outset: “The world’s most pressing questions regarding health, culture, the environment, education, and the global economy cannot be adequately addressed without considering the food we eat and the way we produce it.” with a bit more perspective than I had as an 18-year-old, I would add that we can’t responsibly choose the food we eat and the way we produce it without also considering the most pressing issues with which we live. In 2006, the YSFP hired its first academic-year student interns. Before then, all student work at the YSFP had been volunteer-based, from digging the first beds to postering for workdays. Each year since

4 the number of applicants has grown, and the fall of 2009 saw a huge jump: 110 students applied for 15 jobs, causing the acceptance rate to drop from 40% in 2008, to 14% in 2009. It’s interesting to speculate about the cause of this spike.

METHODS (notes) This essay will use two intersecting approaches: the first, careful analysis based on historical information and theory, while integrating and respecting the importance of personal experience. To guide me through that tricky dialogue between academic writing and (auto)biography, I’ll rely on food-related autobiographies by Pollan and Foer, agricultural philosophy from Wendell Berry, feminist theory and work from the anthropologist Tabitha Seager, as well as others.

CRITICISM OF THE SUSTAINABLE FOOD MOVEMENT As many have noted before, there is often a tone of absolutism in the sustainable food movement; food is either local or from far away, organic or conventional, family- or factory-farmed. In essence, good or bad (McWilliams, 11). The movement’s supporters encourage us to use certain criteria, however confounding, to choose our food. Even as the study of food gains attention in science, and

5 quanitifiable results appear about the food in general, such as organic farming has a smaller environmental impact than conventional farming, it still seems tenuous to say that there are certain things all people know about food (van der Weft, et. al, 2). Michael Pollan, one of America’s gurus on the topic, says there are. For example, we know that “fresh food tastes better,” (Pollan, 17). This might be biologically true, but if that were the primary factor in people’s food choices, it would be much easier to mobilize people to buy fresh food opposed to packaged or processed. There would be more support for policies that make fresh food accessible. At this point, it’s hard to imagine any politician getting elected on that platform. Food choices are more complex than that. Seager, in her discussion of the Slow Food organization, writes that many Indian families living the United States opt for pre-packaged foods that are shipped “globally, providing ‘local,’ ‘authentic food to East Indians around the world,” (Seager, 31). Despite the absolutism in sustainable food’s rhetoric, how to eat well is not clear. There is huge effort to make it so. Many young writers and chefs have siphoned down wads of data and ethnographic research into rules that are easy to swallow, including Pollan’s “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” and the 2009 movie Food, Inc.’s “10 simple ways to change your eating habits.” In the end, what goes on your plate is the result of a personal balancing act, influenced by gender, race, ethnic background, socio-economic class; nothing short

6 of the unique mix of biological and social forces for each human being. Some people eat because they like the way food tastes, some have allergies, some choose based on moral or ethical reasons, some eat based on tradition, some are watching their weight, or eat food for comfort. Most of us have probably felt most of those ways about food at one time or another. Here’s a pickle, from a Slate article called Against Apple Picking, “Every autumn, as the leaves change and brisk winds banish all remnants of summer, many of us head to the country to participate in a feel-good seasonal tradition: apple picking. But as Daniel Gross argues in this article from October 2006, it's delusional to think that the activity is good for the environment, farmers, or the economy. Apple picking may be a satisfying ritual and pleasant day out with the kids, but it's also a wasteful scam.” And of course something that mixed in with all this is that a lot of the ways we are urged to change have to do with the things we buy. “Just as people who visit wineries end up walking away with a case instead of a bottle, it's a given that people leave pick-your-own orchards with a surfeit of apples.”

NATURE, WILDERNESS, AND THE FARM: AGRICULTURE AS CULTURE Unfortunately or fortunately for us, believing that the

7 environment is important is not the same as knowing how to relate respectfully to the environment. Obviously the environment is important. It is where we live. We would live nowhere if we didn’t live here. Rereading Foer in light of that exposed idea is almost comical: “Another thing most people agree on is that the environment is important,” (Foer, 73). This quote is also interesting because it’s written as part of a definition of the word “radical.”

SUSTAINABLE FOOD AS AN INTERNATIONAL MOVEMENT EXAMPLE: SLOW FOOD and SLOW FOOD USA (Partially considered in another essay I’m writing) I. History of Slow Food in Italy (including Petrini, Manafo and Kwan) II. Analysis of Slow Food as a transnational organization (including Robbins, Forsyth, Agrawal) a. What does the translation of the organization from Italy to the US show about the cultures of each concerning environment, political, and social values relating to food? i. Agrawal, ideas of nature 1. Nature as socially constructed 2. Counter-opinions: agriculture as the death of nature 3. Theoretical relationship between wilderness and cultivated, locating the farm in our cultural imagination On November 20, 2009, a staff member of Slow Food USA blogged about a recent project the national office in Brooklyn had undertaken. In response to its national campaign for good, clear and fair food in public schools, Gordon Jenkins wrote, “At the national office we thought it prudent to practice what we preach, so fifteen of us put pen to paper in the name of helping schools serve food that’s healthy,

8 nourishing and freshly cooked.” A small showing for a central organization to use towards political change, this was certainly more of a gesture than anything else. But it’s an one, in that it shows a dilemma of this work that no one has a clear answer to yet: there are good models for organic rural farms, organic urban farms and educational farms across region and socio-economic class. What there is not a great model for yet is an overarching organization that can promote large-scale change. It seems stingy, or at the very least misguided. President of Slow Food USA and former Co-Director of the Yale Sustainable Food Project Josh Viertel phrased the dilemma this way: “We need to find the right way to become more politically engaged; we need to overcome the perception (and at times the reality) that we are elitist; we need to create change that is relevant to the people who are hurt most by our current food system,” (Viertel, 9).

GENERATION OF CHANGE, GENERATION OF HOPE: For those of us born between 1974 and 1991, our generation has been celebrated into existence. In arguably the most historic event of our lifetime (perhaps only second to 9/11), we played an exceptional role: it was young people, we were told, who were responsible for the election of the first black President. In a U.S. News and World Report covering election results, we learned that

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Obama carried voters under age 30 by a margin of 66 percent to 32 percent. On the flip side, [sic] he won voters 30 and over by just 50 percent to 49 percent. That means that he won by a larger percentage among young voters than any president and that among voters older than that, he may not have carried states with a majority of electoral votes. In retrospect, the only winning Republican strategy would have been to pass a constitutional amendment raising the voting age to 35, (Barone, 1). When Barack Obama announced his candidacy in 2007, his speech included the word “generation” 13 times (Chaudhry, 1). “Each and every time,” he said, “a new generation has risen up and done what’s needed to be doen. Today we are called once more—and it is time for our generation to answer that call.” I include this example not to delve deeper into Obama’s use of Generation Y in his campaign, but see it as a critical moment for our generation’s definition. In 2008 some say we came together as a nation, even though the divisions along party lines are perhaps more foul than before. One thing stands out, though; Generation Y grew up. We were told we’d elected the first black president, and many of us, rightfully so, felt responsible. The experience of Obama’s campaign and election was so formative it created an “Obama Generation” (Chaudhry, 3). Amongst the words we attached to ourselves, perhaps none more salient than change. Another, which is many even more interesting, was hope. This is not a typical slogan for a youth movement, based in cities, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, engaging upper-

10 class white Jews as much as poor Cleveland Blacks. It is this mass hindsight, the responsibility that we are learning belonged to our ancestors on a bigger scale, that also plays a role in defining the America’s youth, and perhaps the world’s, in 2009. Yes, some people had more power than others. Some people consumed more than others. But nonetheless, we are looking back, and seeing more wrong than ever. Why aren’t we asking what was done right? Well, certainly it’s too big a story for one essay. Perhaps it’s too big for words alone. Perhaps the telling isn’t even the most important part. As Aristotle said, “What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing.” I.

more on rhetoric of hope and change here a. where did it come from specifically? b. What impact has it had? c. Where are some of the theoretical underpinnings?

Something looming behind all this complicated struggle to discern right action in the realm of food is what Jonathan Safran Foer calls shame (Foer, 39). In Foer’s exploration of why we eat animals, he says shame is a distinct characteristic of our relationship to nonhumans. It also seems like a largely inexplicit part of the sustainable food movement in a time of environmental crisis. We did not know. We did now realize what we were doing. We did not realize the sacrifices we were making, because we did not foresee the repercussions of our decisions. Why is it that novelists and journalists, rather than scientists

11 and academics, have become the most popular guides in the area of food? In the post-modern era, the shift in attention seems like evidence of a slow transgression, power’s layers melting into a more twisted, incoherent shape; we no longer know who to trust. The definitive reason of scholars and scientists has seemed to fall short. Definitive answers have not gotten us to a very comfortable place. This is where the rhetoric of urgency comes in. A theme first made popular during the Civil Rights movement, Obama used it throughout his campaign as well. In South Carolina on November 3, 2007: “I am running because of what Dr. King called “the fierce urgency of now.” I am running because I do believe there’s such a thing as being too late. And that hour is almost here.” I.

Urgency as tool for change a. We are the generation of hope. We have already been told that. we are the changemakers. We know what is important, the future rests on our shoulders. But we can’t do it alone. And it is a lie of humanity to assume we can. Why do we tell ourselves such? Why are we told such? To manipulate us? Or out of earnest misunderstanding on the part of our elders? b. What does skepticism mean? why does the “optimist” gain so much power here? Are we being blinded by our youth? Fear? Hope? What is the story of sustainable food telling us? What is it not telling us? Who is it talking to? Why is it so appealing? What is working?