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New Theory Page: Visual Literacy and Solidarity

fc — Wed, 05 May 2010 16:38:58 +0000

Image Credit: AmericanTeenMovie.com

I recently posted a new page on "Visual Literacy and Solidarity" to the "Theory" section of VIZ. It passes back over some of the material from my posts this semester on food, food culture and food policy, but I also couldn't resist encroaching on Rachel's pop-culture territory with a few references to The Breakfast Club and Kanye West (to be fair, though, the movie is named after the most important meal of the day).

My main goal was to illustrate that no one is "literate" in general, that visual literacy (or cultural literacy, etc.) does not exist in a vacuum. Literacy implies a set of skills and a range of knowledge, and, since the criteria for assessing literacy are set by particular groups of people in particular times and places, demonstrating literacy is often a substantial claim of solidarity, a performative presentation of evidence that we belong to the group because we "know our stuff." Such a performance can, in turn, be a powerful rhetorical tool: instant ethos, just add water.

So, if you know why the picture at the top of this post is funny, then you're one of the cool kids. If not, you could click over and read the theory post, or (if you're one of the smart kids) you can probably figure it out with the picture below.

Image Credit: IMDB.com

And remember to eat a good breakfast, for your mother's sake (Mother's Day is Sunday, May 9).

Image Credit: Flickr.com

New Media, Old-school Agriculture

fc — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 15:31:42 +0000

Image Credit: screen capture from CookingUpAStory.com

I sat down in front of the television this Tuesday to watch the PBS premier of Dirt! The Movie on Independent Lens. I had been looking forward to seeing this documentary about the soil cylce and its importance on agriculture, health and geopolitics, and I had even planned to write about it for this week's post. As you can see, that plan fell through: I went in expecting a dirt-y movie, but mostly what I got was a mess. While there was plenty of titular soil in Dirt!, the film came across as a random collection of dirt-related vignettes that were either purely repetitive or entirely unrelated. In all fairness, cutting the film down to fit a one-hour running time may be responsible for the disjointed presentation, but most reviews of its Sundance screening agree that it is an unnecessarily rambling documentary. Needless to say, I was disappointed, but I had spent that morning talking to David Parry about the effects of internet technology and networked space on the established institutions of democracy, and as POV took over my television screen with its adapted running of Food, Inc., I began to think about documentary films-- and, in particular, films that intend to effect social and democratic change-- in the online time and space of the internet. Thinking about documentary film within a networked social space reminded me, fortuitously, of Cooking Up A Story, an internet hybrid that bills itself rather oddly as "an online television show and blog about people, food, and sustainable living." More about soil, sardines and the web-lives of food-docs (including video) after the break.

While the creators of Cooking Up A Story ("CUpS" for short) consistently refer to their site as a "television show," CUpS is much more sophisticated and interesting than television on the internet. Thanks to Hulu, most of us are by now familiar with what television looks like on the internet: it plays on demand and works with a different advertising model, but otherwise it remains remarkably faithful to its broadcast incarnation. By contrast, CUpS is a multi-format, multi-media collection of documentaries, lectures, interviews, opinion journalism and more; they offer, by their own account, "Doc Shorts," "Video Interviews," "Essays," "How-to Cooking Videos," "Family Recipes," "Video Shorts," and "News Around the Web."

Clearly, this is something other than a television show. The content and even format of CUpS have a lot in common with websites like Zester Daily, Civil Eats and even Chow, but the emphasis on micro-documentary films sets CUpS apart from those sites as well (and is, I am guessing, why they call it a "show"). Most of the other food-issue sites online follow more of a "print" model and use video primarily as supplementary material. Along with an emphasis on food, all of the videos and articles on CUpS comes pre-packaged for online networking: everything is eminently bloggable, embeddable and, in a word, share-able. As online space becomes as much about connection as it is about communication, CUpS model might have some substantial advantages over web-based mirrors of magazine and television formats.

A brief, somewhat representative sample of their video content might include 1) a conference presentation from the Senior Science Manager of the Monterey Bay Acquarium's Sustainable Seafood Initiative (the publishers of the Seafood Watch guide to sustainable seafood):

2) a continuing-ed style video from SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education funded by USDA) discussing the benefits of no-till commercial farming:

3) a short-form documentary about an organic dariy farmer:

4) and an interesting interview with Mark Bittman about his new book Food Matters:

The collection is ecclectic, but the format is of, by and for the internet and won't run into cross-media problems like the re-editing of Dirt! for television. In fact, the episodic, semi-related, often interchangeable segments of Dirt! would probably have worked better broken down and dispersed as smaller docs, and a web-friendly sharable format would almost certainly work better for community building than the "screening toolkits" posted on Dirt! The Movie's website. Rather than generating community activity and espirit d'corp from scratch, socially concerned docs ought to consider utilizing the communities people already inhabit online by generating material that is web-friendly from its inception.

Satire Sandwiches: Stephen Colbert's Thought for Food

fc — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 15:50:12 +0000

Image Credit: screen capture from ColbertNation.com

Food policy can be pretty disheartening stuff: anything that combines environmentalism, worker's rights and public health in a single topic is likely to include bad-to-terrible news pretty much every day. With the Senate underfunding the Child Nutrition Act, bluefin tuna set to go extinct and Dirt! The Movie preparing to air on PBS, even my fairly-high tolerance for crisis fatigue was wearing thin this week. Thankfully, Stephen Colbert was there to talk me off the ledge. As is often the case, Colbert managed to make life livable with his pringle-and-whipped-cream-like blend of irony and humor-- two remarkable human capacities that are often undervalued because they elude satisfactory explanation by rhetorical, literary or philosophical models. While even Jon Stewart's comedic analysis of politicians and pundits can often be as depressing as it is amusing, Colbert's satiric send-ups consistently manage to wink their way through all kinds of maddening news stories and leave me with a crisp, clean finish. His new "Thought for Food" segment lives up to those expectations. Rather than attempting (and almost certainly failing) to explain the jokes, I thought I'd share a few videos and comment as needed. More on Colbert, corn-surpluses, advertising and unholy sandwiches after the break.

Colbert began his "Thought for Food" segment in mid-March. His second installment covers a lot of the ground that I have written about recently on this blog. He begins, appropriately enough, with some novel uses for corn-- when subsidies artificially supress the price of corn while simultaneously creating massive surplusses, you get... well, you'll see. He ends with his own take on Oliver's Food Revolution.

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Thought for Food - Corn Diapers, Fatty Foods & Jamie Oliver

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Fox News

The third and latest installment of "Thought for Food" focuses on marketing processed foods. The centerpiece of the segment takes aim at KFC's new "Double Down" "sandwich". If you thought Colbert's Pringle-RediWhip creation was a bad idea, then you'll love this bacon sandwich with fried-chicken buns. Oddly enough, the fist time I logged on to ColberNation.com and watched the video of Stephen roundly panning the fried mass of animal protein, the banner ad at the top of the page was selling-- wait for it-- KFC's new Double Down sandwich (I guess that when your food is a publicity stunt, any attention is good attention). It reminds me of Michael Pollan's "rule" about not eating anything you've ever seen advertised.

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Thought for Food - Mentally Ill Advertisers & German Cupcakes

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Fox News

One important effect of satire like the Colbert Report comes from creating a space in which we can release the engery, frustration, angst, etc. that are stirred up by serious social problems. They can be refreshing without being escapist. As Kierkegaard puts it in his "Concept of Irony," works like this can disarm us, and being taken off-guard can be a valuable experience for people locked in an entrenched debate. Humor can give us critical distance from even deeply held values (an effect Bakhtin notes when writing about parody and the sacreligious), and even when it doesn't bridge differences and open new lines of dialogue, that temporary distance lets us catch our breath and rest our passions. Ok, that's all the speculation I have in me today. I'll leave you with a video of Colbert interviewing Jonathan Safran Foer in which Stephen gives the world's greatest description of free range chicken eggs.

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Jonathan Safran Foer

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Fox News

Victory Gardens and Retro Propaganda

fc — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 17:16:02 +0000

Image Credit: Joe Wirtheim

In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess that I have always had a soft spot for "victory gardens" and mid-century propaganda. It may be a result of the countless times I watched Bugs Bunny steal carrots from the Saturday-morning victory gardens of my childhood (how many of us were introduced to serious political concepts like shortage, rationing and military conscription through the Flatbush intonation of Mel Blanc?). It may have been the vintage singns and posters ("Loose Lips Might Sink Ships") hanging on the wallls of the local burger joint that was a favorite haunt of my grandfather. Whatever the reason, my eye is always drawn to the bold fonts, severe angles and jingoistic slogans of WWII era posters, particularly those aimed at action on the home front. This week, while trolling for vintage design and espirit d'corps, I came across "The Victory Garden of Tommorrow," Joe Wirtheim's modern day art/propaganda campaign that repurposes and reinvents the genre. More on Wirtheim's project, refurbished propaganda and mobilizing the population after the break.

Wirtheim describes his work as "an art project posing as a propaganda campaign for new, American homefront values. The message style draws from American mid-century homefront propaganda, and the messages essentially draws from 21st century needs as found in the current environmental sustainability movement. The campaign is designed to access America’s history of ingenuity to overcome adversity, and apply those values to fighting modern problems." Wirtheim does much more than repackage or redeploy turn of the century images. He borrows from the iconography of the era, and simultaneously participates in the urgency of the earlier propaganda and gives us a wink through their campiness. Compare Wortheim's "Break New Ground" with this New Zealand contribution to Great Britain's "Dig for Victory" Campaign.

Image Credit: Joe Wirtheim

Image Credit: Imperial War Museum

While the pitchfork and foot in "Break New Ground" are certainly an homage to the British series, Wirtheim has translated the poster's wartime austerity into a new aesthetic register. The posters share essentially the same goal-- they both want you to start growing your own food-- but they rely on substantially different rhetorical appeals. The paucity of the British campaign is well suited for an audience facing the shortages, rationing and hardships of a protracted war. There are no unneccesary embelishments, just the bare earth, the blank sky and the task at hand. It resonates with both the English stiff upper lip and the mid-century penchant for martial drama.

Wirtheim's poster presents another argumenta altogether. His cityscape teems with life as plants sprout not only from the ground but (prophetically) from every roof on the skyline. As urgent as America's food crisis may be, Wirtheim isn't speaking primarily to people who are confronted daily with scarcity and want, so he presents growing your own food as an inviting pleasure rather than a stern duty. (The Chuck Taylors give us a pretty good hint about the range of his intended audience). The friendly-looking worm (who appears to have stopped by to watch the digging and chat with us) and the plump little fly add a playfulness and whimsicallity that would be entirely inappropriate in the British campaign, but they are pitched perfectly for an urban gardening movement that idealizes compost and earthworms. The brown-and-green palette reinforces the "dirt and plants" focus of the poster and fit within a recognizable iconography of organic farming and environmental awarness. The patch on the trouser leg makes a subtle argument about living a non-consumer, environment friendly lifestyle that borrows from the WWII era concern with scrap, necessary trips and "making do" in general (a sentiment that was sadly not shared by the Bush administration that encouraged Americans to buy on credit while it began borrowing heavily to finance two foreign wars).

Image Credit: NH.gov

Wirtheim also borrows from post-war iconography to craft his new American propaganda. His project is, after all, not just any victory garden: he presents the Victory Garden of Tomorrow, and several of the posters draw heavily on the campy futurism of the 1950s and 60s. As he does with the war posters, Wirtheim updates and revises the images while holding onto a tongue-in-cheek version of the original sentiment (in this case, unbridled Jetson-esque optimism).

Image Credit: Joe Wirtheim

This last poster works in yet another iconic image and emphasizes Wirtheim's conscious connection to the environmental movement. Over the shoulder of the Meyer-lemon growing lego-spaceman, Wirtheim includes a version of Earthrise, a photograph taken by William Anders on the Apollo 8 mission and often viewed as one of the single most galvanizing images of the environmental movement.

Image Credit: NASA.gov

Earthrise reminds us in dramatic fashion that our earth is a tiny island home in the cold, dead vastness of space. Wirtheim's image--a mix of space-age camp and environmental realism, reminds us that (since none of the mid-century dreams of space colonization by our century have panned out) the way we grow our food-- and the way we treat the earth in the process-- has lasting effects for us as individuals and for the entire planet.

Cook Something (for School Kids)!

fc — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 15:31:12 +0000

Image Credit: screen capture from JamieOliver.com

In last week's post, I introduced chef Jamie Oliver's campaign for real ("proper") food in the US (complete with its own ABC television reality show), and I discussed Oliver's plea that we, as a country, begin cooking real food (as opposed to eating industrial food) in our kitchens at home. For many Americans, busy schedules and limited cooking experience make this call for planning, buying, prepping and cooking scratch food at home a rather tall order, but even this potentially daunting lifestyle change looks like (forgive the pun) a piece of cake compared with the second half of Oliver's initiative: providing scratch meals twice daily in public schools. More on Oliver, Chef Ann Cooper, mind-boggling bureaucracy, and hurculean tasks after the break.

If you've been watching Oliver's Food Revolution or if you've ever heard Ann Cooper talk about anything anywhere, you know that school lunches in America must follow nutritional guidelines set by the USDA and that, according to those guidelines, chicken nuggets, tater tots, chocolate milk and canned fruit salad constitute a healthy meal while Oliver's baked chicken does not. If you haven't heard Ann Cooper (former chef for, among other people, Hillary Clinton, former head of the school food program in Berkley, California, and interim nutrition director for the Boulder Valley school district in Colorado), her 2007 talk posted on TED.com is a good representative piece.

Cooper brings up two points in this talk that are crucial for rethinking and reforming our school lunch programs: first, the role of USDA and food subsidies in determining what we feed school children, and, two, the importance of what children learn about food every day they step into the school cafeteria.

Chef Cooper is not alone in her concern about the USDA's role in the federal school lunch program. White House chef Sam Kass has also become well known for criticizing a system that puts the Agriculture Department (whose chief priority is providing markets for American agricultural goods) in charge of such an important aspect of childhood nutrition. Before being lured to D.C. by the Obama administration, Kass ran a private chef business in Chicago and held regular meetings at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museaum. Addams was, of course, a Progressive Era reformer who ran Hull-House in the midst of Chicago's sprawling slums and tenements and advocated for (among other reforms that underly what we now consider basic human rights in this country) food and water purity laws; Kass used the dining room at Hull House (a space with historical connections not only to Addams but also Upton Sinclair and other reformers) as a theatrical setting for open discussions about reforming the food system of the United States. A New York Times column from last January quoted Chef Kass from one of his "Rethinking Soup" meetings in which he accuses the USDA of using school children as a market for dumping surplus production: "The National School Lunch program also serves another vital role in our agricultural system. The government subsidizes various agricultural industries, creating overproduction in commodities such as beef, pork and dairy. This overproduction depresses prices, endangering the vitality of producers. The U.S. government purchases the overproduction it has stimulated and then disposes of the excess by giving it to schools." The National School Lunch program, he argues, is more concerned with disposing of commodities than it is with feeding children. If we don't start investing money to feed kids nutritious food, then we're going to end up spending more on their diabetes- and obesity-related illnesses (CDC predicts that, given today's food environment, 1 in 3 children born in 2000 will develop diabetes).

Whether or not we accept the sinister pictures of USDA program offered by Kass and Cooper, the fact is that most food provided through the Federal commodity program is industrial processed food high in fats and high-fructose corn syrup (and, like most of the dietary landscape of America, monstrously shaped by federal subsidies of corn and soy). Given the federal governments new vested interest in the long-term health of the American people, we can hope that it will give a higher priority to the nutritional value of the National School Lunch program. The most recent version of the Child Nutrition Act gives us some reasons to hope for a positive change even while falling far short of what child nutrition activists say we need to fix the system.

I have not seen Jamie Oliver directly address issues of subsidized non-nutrient food and the influence of the USDA. Given that he is not a US citizen and is running his advocacy campaign largely within unspoken rules of naitonal hospitality, that is probably a good rhetorical decision. American's probably would not enjoy listening to Oliver bash USDA any more than Brits wanted to hear American pundits lob accusatiosn at NHS. He does, however, provide plenty of links from his website to Cooper's, and it is hard to click a mouse on her page without coming across a critique of USDA in one form or another.

Oliver does explicitly share Cooper's concern with what we might call the "hidden curriculum" of school lunches. Near the beginning of her TED talk, Cooper points out that we send our kids off to school and tell them to pay attention and learn something. Their education does not stop at the lunch room door, and, in Cooper's words, "When you feed kids bad food, that's what they're learning." If we continue treating food the way we treat it in schools, we can't expect kids to know anything about a healthy, sustainable (in that it can sustain their lives) diet. We teach them to be dependent on non-nutrient, fat- salt- and sugar-laden industrial foods.

Two moments from the second installment of Oliver's program stood out to me in the context of food education. The first, a vegetable pop-quiz he gives to a group of first graders, is in the video below.

I could understand young kids not recognizing the whole beet or confusing cauliflower and broccoli, but it was shocking to see a roomful of six and seven year olds who couldn't identify tomatoes and potatoes (Dan Quayle couldn't SPELL potato, but at least he knew what one was). To the credit of the teacher, she took Oliver's visit as a teachable moment and, the next day, the kids had no problem recognizing eggplants, etc. (It doesn't seem to me that schools should need to teach kids "This is what tomatoes look like," but if kids don't see real food in the cafeteria, and if their kitchens at home are full of processed, industrial food, then where else will they learn it?)

The second food-education moment that stood out to me revolved around forks. Oliver prepares a meal for the students that can't be eaten with fingers or spoons, and the kitchen staff refuse to pull the knives and forks out of storage. While pleading with the administrator for cutlery, Oliver asks the school staff if they want to "bring up a nation of kids that only use thier fingers and a spoon." Some of the dispute has to do, of course, with American fears of litigation and weapons in schools, but, beyond the culture clash, Oliver has a tremendously important point. You can't eat real food with just your fingers and a spoon; you can, however, eat all varieties of industrial products and fast food with no utensils at all. What are we teaching children to eat, and how are we conditioning them to think about food if they go to school and eat all their meals with their hands? Oliver talks the school staff into at least trying out silverware as an experiment, and the segment ends in one of his first small victories of the series: he not only gets the kids proper utensils for proper food, he manages to get the principal and other school staff to interact with the kids during their lunch, encouraging them to try new foods and teaching them how to use their knife and fork. Lunch was, for a moment anyways, a positive, human, social interaction.

Significant change in the School Lunch Program will take much, much more than these token improvements. Federal beaurocracy, school district budgets, staffing shortages and equipment limitations present a daunting series of obstacles to feeding school kids real food for lunch. Oliver and Cooper have both created online tools to help. Cooper's TheLunchBox.org aims at being, eventually, a one-stop online toolkit for school lunch reform, and it houses resources for everyone from school administrators and kitchen staff to parents, students and concerned members of the community. Oliver's personal website hosts recipes for schools alongside those he provides for families to cook at home, and he also lists a number of other resources available to schools and parents (including, not surprisingly, Cooper's Lunch Box). Each site also encourages you to contact your elected officials (here and here) aiming to capitalize on the Child Nutrition Act's renewal this year (the law is reviewed every five years). Local schools and school districts will need governmental and community support if they are going to cook something for school kids.

Cook Something!

fc — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 16:51:39 +0000

Image Credit: Screen Capture from JamieOliver.com

Most Americans who recognize Jamie Oliver (most of whom are probably foodies or Food Network fans) remember him as the hip, charming, engergetic host of "The Naked Chef" at the end of the last decade. The intervening ten years have not noticeably reduced his energy, charm or verve, but they did bring him a wife, four children and a cause. I mention his family because families--first in the UK and now in the US-- are at the heart of the telegenic Brit's adopted cause. Oliver's new show (officially premiering tonight under the name "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution") is part of a broader, trans-atlantic, multi-platform effort to change the way children and families eat. Oliver targets school lunch programs and home cooking as key sites of potentially revolutionary practices. His advice can (somewhat reductively) be boiled down to two words: cook something. More about food, families, schools, television, the internet and boyishly-handsome good looks after the jump.

Image Credit: Screen Capture from ABC.com

Full disclosure: I'm not sure that I, personally, will be able to sit through entire episodes of this show. I watched the "preview" episode last week, and the producers/editors at ABC appear to be crafting is as a mash-up of "Extreme Makeover Home Edition" and Gordon Ramsey's "Kitchen Nightmares." The overwrought music and abusive eiditing techniques strain my nerves, but I'm going to try watching anyways. Why? Because Oliver is much more than a pretty face. Oliver has been an active advocate of healthful school lunches ("proper school dinners," in UK parlance) in Britain for the last seven years, and his campaign (along with a BBC 4 program that ABC has largely copied for its "Food Revolution") played an importatnt part in meaningful shool lunch reform in the UK (here and here). While it is cerainly an uphill battle against the USDA and the agribusiness/food industry, Oliver hopes that he can add to the momentum currently building in the States (Michelle Obama's Let's Move campaign, for example) and help Americans live longer and healthier lives. For those of us who prefer reasoned (and impassioned) discourse over dramatic musical scores, Oliver's TED prize speech provides a short (20 minute) rundown of his project. (For an even shorter version, you can read this interview from, of all places, TV Guide.)

As Oliver points out, our schools are currently feeding and educating the first generation of Americans whose life expectancy will be shorter than that of their parents. Let that sink in. The "food landscape" (as Oliver calls it in his TED speech) of America incubates childhood obesity, diabetes and other diet-related diseases that will shorten the lives of today's children by years if not decades. These early deaths are entirely preventable. While Oliver does not pretent (and we shouldn't believe) that there is any single panacea that will immediately turn this trend around, he does point to an imminently achievable goal that can have dramatic (perhaps even "revolutionary") consequences: cook real food. If industrial food (often mislabled "conventional") and its mammoth doses of salt, fat and sugar are sending an entire generation to an early grave, then "proper food" (as Oliver calls it) has to be part of the solution. His two-pronged pincer movement sets its sights on school lunches and the home kitchen. (I want hold off on an extended discussion of programs aimed at reforming school lunches until next week: Ann Cooper has been fighting the good fight for years on this front, and her efforts online and in the lunch room deserve their own post.)

The home kitchen is the front line in Oliver's (and America's) battle against diet-related morbidity and early death. As he points out in his TED speech, many of the children (and their mothers, and their mother's mothers) were never taught how to cook at home. This knowledge gap forces families to rely on pre-packaged, salt-fat-and-sugar-laden, industrial food products to feed their children. Oliver wants home cooks in America to have five or six recipes they know how to cook, are comfortable making and enjoy eating. In essence, this project is about empowerment. He wants to return the means of production to families (the carrot- and celery-clenching fist in the logo-- long a staple of workers-movement iconography-- is spot-on appropriate).

Oliver is by no means the only person to have this revelation. Another notable exaple is provided by cookbook author Mollie Katzen. In an interview with Civil Eats, Katzen says, "The very basic act of cooking is becoming a radical necessity. That’s why I wrote Get Cooking, because people asked me to lay out the simple basics of how to cook. I wanted to give people the tools they need to make easy recipes, four to five things you can cook well. It sounds simple, but that’s the key to people digging their way out of bad food. They need to know how to shop and how to make food in their busy day and in a small kitchen. I wish
cooking was required in school, but until then, we’ve got to teach
simple lessons." Katzen also set up a companion site for Get Cooking through which she provides free cooking instruction and recipes. While it is, to some degree, also aimed at publicizing the book (otherwise a publisher wouldn't hear of it), the site provides people with the basic knowledge necessary to begin mastering four or five dishes and making themselves food independent.

Oliver's website, JamieOliver.com, performs a similar balancing act. While his site has all the bells and whistles we would expect from a celebrity chef's home page-- promotion of books and shows, advanced techniques and "posh" (as Oliver would say) recipes-- it also has a valuable store of simple, easily matered and delicious recipes aimed at getting home cooks cooking real ("proper") food. Niether Oliver nor Katzen are what we might call "health food" advocates (Oliver explicitly rejects the word); they aren't advocating gimmicks, fads or a 1990's version of Graham Kerr (no applesauce-for-oil substitutions here). They do make a compelling case for the importance of cooking, simply cooking. So, watch him or not, listen to Jamie and get in the kitchen.

[Correction 4/2/10: I previously misidentified the USDA as the FDA.]

Labor Archives

fc — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:42:02 +0000

Image Credit: Red Scare archive

The image above-- an anti-labor cartoon claiming that the sloth of American workers (who only want to work a measly 8 hours a day and spend the rest of the day lounging with their pipes) was endangering American competitiveness with Weimar Germany (and we know how well things worked out for them)-- could serve as "exhibit A" in the argument that entrenched interests never view ANY concession as reasonable. The 8-hour work day has by now become such a sacred cow in American society that it seems almost natural, but the 8-hour day did not spring up miraculously on the 8th day of creation. Along with many other rights and protections that we currently take for granted, it was the result of a decades-long struggle of workers against the egregious abuses of industrial captial in the heady days of its American youth. "Exhibit A" comes from Red Scare, an image database hosted by the City University of New York that documents the social upheaval of 1918-1921. Digital archives like Red Scare and Labor Arts preserve and present a history of America's labor movement through photographs, cartoons, fliers, songbooks and other visual artifacts.

When Noel asked us to prepare for the upcoming Best Practices workshop by blogging on digital archives, I immediately volunteered to cover archives focusing on labor. While this may seem like http://viz.dwrl.utexas.edu/node/522/edita departure from my typical posts on food and food politics, the history of our American food system from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle to the ongoing federal anti-trust investigation of Monsanto is inextricably linked with the history of labor. Contemporary concerns about food safety and quality cannot afford to ignore the labor conditions that underly the production of so-called "cheap" food. We cannot respect the food we buy, prepare and consume if we do not respect the men and women whose labor brings it out of the common earth.

This connection between labor and food is too often overlooked in the general divide between rural and urban interests (the country and the city). This cartoon from 1919 uses cliched images of bucolic country vitality and sickly urban scheming to enhance a nationalist argument that American farmers have nothing to gain from the "foreign" snake-oil of organized labor. These are, of course, the same share-croppers and dry-land farmers who would in the next decade be forced from their land by drought and abject poverty (many of whom became "Okies" who were later exploited in California labor camps).

Image Credit: Red Scare

Both Red Scare (hosted by CUNY's Newman Library) and Labor Arts (hosted by NYU's Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives) have explicitly pedagogical missions and are readily adaptable for use in the rhetoric classroom. Neither site offers images of sufficient size and quality to be useful in original research, but the images are well within the range of acceptible quality for an undergraduate class (Red Scare includes this technical note: "As they were all meant to serve as "reference" copies accessible via the Web, it was thought this quality of scan would be sufficient." Labor Arts includes some images of a substantially higher quality, but the overall size and quality of images is uneven).

Red Scare doesn't offer a search function, but the images are organized in heavily cross-referenced chronological and subject indexes; it also includes a brief guide to finding images in the archive. I had no problems finding images related to particular themes and subjects, and I stumbled on a lot of interesting material in the process. For instance, I clicked the "related images" link for one cartoon using Uncle Sam and was redirected to a page with all the archives Uncle Sam cartoons, including this gem from 1920.

Image Credit: Red Scare

Labor Arts organizes its images within "Collections" and "Exhibits." The "Collections" page lets users browse images organized by medium (buttons, photographs, pamplets, etc), theme ("civil rights," "strikes," "workers at work," etc.) or time period. The "Exhibits" present the same images collected in museum-like exhibitions about, for example, the Wobblies, Social Documentary Photography or Labor songbooks. Labor Arts also offers a fairly flexible search function; you can search for something as broad as a keyword or as narrow as an item number, and you can refine searches by organizaiton, occupation, date, ethnicity and several other criteria. A search for "farm" turned up twenty entries that included UFW posters, a "5 cents for fairness" button supporting strawberry pickers, and this picture of Woody Guthrie visiting a farm camp in 1941.

Image Credit: Labor Arts

In both its "Collections" and its "Exhibits," Labor Arts provides a substantial amount of relevant context for each image. For instance, this 1935 photograph of striking office workers is accompanied by text which points out that "had only recently won legal protection for their right to organize, with the passage of Roosevelt's National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933. The Act's famous Section 7(a) recognized for the first time the right of workers to organize into unions of their own choosing to represent their interests."

Image Credit: Labor Arts

This kind of context (along with the broad scope of the collection and its ease of use) make Labor Arts a potentially useful pedagogical tool for classroom use or undergraduate research. The fact that the archive is supported financially by several labor unions could raise questions of objectivity, but I don't see any problems that couldn't be addressed with a brief class discussion on intellectually honest use of clearly biased material (a topic that most rhetoric instructors will probably want to discuss with their students anyways).

Either archive is worth exploring and provides links to other similar resources. I am personally looking forward to digging deeper in the Labor Arts archive, but, for now, I'm off to lunch.

Image Credit: Labor Arts

Food History, Family History

fc — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:13:03 +0000

Image Credit: Screen shot from whatscookinggrandma.humanbeans.net

I first noticed the phenomenon of grandmothers cooking online when I came across Chow's "Cooking with Grandma" series. The first episode featured "Grandma Alvina" who shows her granddaughter how to cook prawn curry and coconut rice while telling the story of her 1972 move to the US from Burma. Chow has since added several more episodes in the series, and matriarchal kitchens seem to be sprouting up all over the internet and all around the world, offering their grandchildren and Youtube fans lessons in cooking and living history. More about culinary octogenarians, including video, after the jump.

A quick search of the internets will turn up, along with Chow's occasional series, a suprising variety of grandmothers holding court in their kitchens. The image above is a screen shot from "What's Cooking Grandma" a British effort at collecting international culinary wisdom and one my favorite efforts in this emerging genre (this video features Brazillian Grandma Sulzy). There are also several sites and video streams dedicated to individual women including a Youtube channel on Depression-era cooking with Clara (who is billed as a "94 year old cook author and great grandmother") and the always entertaining Feed Me Bubbe where Bayla Sher (possibly the most charismatic grandmother on the web) prepares kosher meals and teaches the Yiddish word of the day.

While all of these venues make use of different formats in different languages and on different continents, they have several characteristics in common: as with Alvina's Burmesse curry and Bubbe's latkes, these online grandmothers tend to prepare traditional recipes and narrate some amount of family or cultural history. Grandma Martha on Chow cooks candied yams for Kwanzaa with her grandson; Nana Ruth in Lancaster makes scones and blackcurrent jam (even if her canning technique isn't up to modern saftey standards); Ana Fadul shows her Brazillian grandchildren her Turkish mother's traditional recipe for kibe; and Welsh Grandma Betty, for your viewing pleasure, bakes traditional welsh cakes on her grandmother's cast iron baking stone:

I can see at least three realated impulses behind this trend in webcasting kitchen matrons. First, the contemporary wave of interest in cooking (and particularly in traditional, non-industrial foodways) helps drive interest in recipes and techniques that were perfected before the post-war rise of mass-produced convenience foods. If foodies get tired of taking advice from Alice Waters, they can turn to their own grandmothers or borrow someone else's online. Second, with the rise of restaraunts and convenience foods, many home cooking techiniques are being lost. It only takes a single generation for skills like home baking, canning, etc. to disapear from a culture's collective skill set, and webisodes of grandmothers in the kitchen are attempting to some degree to curate the knowledge of past generations. Third, since foodways are deeply personal components of human cultures, these efforts bear some resemblence to nineteenth century efforts in collecting folklore (practices that early anthropologists assumed would be destroyed by advances in science and technology). Unlike the efforts by nineteenth century folklorists, contemporary recipe collectors aren't interested in preserving a museum record of past culture. They are attempting to keep family traditions alive by passing traditional foodways on to new generations, and they are using technological advances to keep those traditions from becoming history.

Truck Farm! From King Corn to CSA

fc — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:20:15 +0000

Image Credit: Josh Viertel for the Atlantic

Last week, I came across an article on Civil Eats by Curt Ellis (on the left in the photo above) about the mobile farm he and Ian Cheney (on the right) spent last summer cultivating in the back of Cheney's 1986 Dodge Ram pickup truck. All three of these characters (Ellis, Cheney and the old gray Dodge) will be familiar to anyone who saw their 2007 documentary feature King Corn. In that film, the men grew a single acre of corn in a small Iowa town that had coincidentally been home to former generations of Cheneys and Ellises. This time around, they are operating what is probably the world's smallest CSA on the streets of Red Hook, Brooklyn. More on trucks, farms and films after the jump.

While this little farm may not be able to grow much food (though you'd be surprised how much produce can come out of a small plot of dirt), it has garned lots of attention. Besides the attention it draws while driving through traffic, the Truck Farm has been covered by Josh Viertel at the Atlantic, Jessica Ilyse Smith from Living on Earth, Barbara Fenig at Huffington Post and (as I mentioned above) by Ellis himself at Civil Eats and Culinate, and that attention may be the Truck Farm's most important crop. Cheney puts it this way in their interview with Jessica Ilyse Smith: "not that Truck Farm is going to feed the world, but it sure is an example of how we need to start thinking outside of the box about how we can feed the world in a different way." At the end of his own article, Ellis says that "the patchwork farms and gardens sprouting up like weeds in the sidewalk cracks around New York these days may be a ways off from feeding us all, but I think they’re bringing our food system something it sorely needs: a dose of fun."

The Truck Farm documentary is nothing if not a bit of fun. Ellis and Cheney are currently working on the documentary project through their Wicked Delicate production company. As of February 2010, they have one trailer and two teaser episodes posted online. Here is the second episode:

While episode one splits its time between well-worn shots of urban decay and a tongue-in-cheek montage of the Truck Farm's construction featuring songs about a "sci-fi something" (soil) to "fill the void" (of the truck bed), this episode focuses on the rationale behind the Truck Farm: America's need to devise inventive ways to grow food and overcome the current failings of our AgriBusiness food system. Ellis tells Living on Earth that such ingenuity can play an important role in eliminating food deserts and make fresh, healthy food available to everyone, "I think that's where urban agriculture comes in. We've got all these rooftops around New York City and we've got all these empty parking spaces in New York City. We should be growing food there however we can."

This sentiment is shared by Annie Novak, one of the organizers of Rooftop Farms, a 6000-square-foot roof garden (also in Brooklyn). Novak plants one-square-foot demonstration beds at Rooftop Farms to encourage anyone and everyone to get in on growing. Paula Crossfield at Civil Eats reports, "Novak wants even beginners, or New Yorkers without much growing room to get in on the act. One row on her farm even showcases what can be done in a small plot. 'The square foot bed is an example of the amount of space a renter might have,' she said. 'We’re using that space to show that you don’t have to be confined to one tomato plant.'" Below is a picture of Rooftop Farms.

Image Credit: CivilEats.com

Cheney and Ellis (and the Old Gray Dodge) succeed in making the point that we can find new and creative ways to build a food system aimed at nourishing people. Their film King Corn, while noticeably less austere than Food Inc., follows the rather depressing circulaiton of corn and money through our current "food" system and ends on a note of disgust. The type of corn they grow is not suitable for human consumption and is only used in ethanol, artificial sweeteners, cow-killing livestock feed and other industrial corn-based products. After growing their one acre of corn, the pair of part-time farmers wonder whether they should even harvest the grain. They do eventually run the combine through their field and drive the corn-- in the back of the 1986 Dodge Ram--to the grain elevator. Cheney looks like he's going to be sick as they move the inedible corn from the bed of his grandfather's truck into the mountain of surplus grain stacked beside the already-full silo.

Image Credit: screen capture from King Corn

I get the distinct impression that Cheney's Truck Farm idea was at least partly an attempt to earn some creative redemption for all three of them. King Corn (like Food Inc. and a growing number of projects with and without Michael Pollan) makes a compelling argument that government-subsidized corn is the root cause of several systemic problems in our nation's unsustainable food industry (as well as a major contributor to chronic health problems). The Dodge's reincarnation as a mobile vegetable garden provides an additional, productive argument and a glimmer of hope. The truck's new life implies that the tools and resources currently used by our broken agriculture industry could be repurposed to really feed Americans (instead of feeding the subsidized industry of chemically manipulating and repurposing corn sugars). Call it "beating plowshares into plowshares." On a strictly personal note, I think the truck looks happier in its new life.

Image Credit: KCRW.com

Food Insecurity and the Food Environment Atlas

fc — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:27:28 +0000

Image Credit: screen shot of http://www.ers.usda.gov/FoodAtlas/

Last week, First Lady Michelle Obama introduced Let's Move, a new government initiative aimed at ending the childhood obesity epidemic within one generation. After attending the signing of a Presidential memorandum forming a special task force on childhood obesity, Mrs. Obama officially launched the Let's Move campaign at a press conference with reporters, cabinet-level secretaries and local school children. During the press conference, the First Lady introduced the Food Environment Atlas, a new website for locating "food deserts" and otherwise visualizing the availability of healthy food to households around the country. More about the Food Atlas after the jump.

I spent some time looking through the variety of maps available on the Food Atlas, and noticed a number of alarming-even-if-expected geographical correlations. I found the "Persistent Child Poverty Rate" map one of the most interesting baselines to use for mapping food insecurity in the country. (As a side note, my home state of Texas has the highest rate of childhood food insecurity in the country: more than one in five Texas children lack access to enough food to meet their basic needs at all times.)

Image Credit: screen shot from http://www.ers.usda.gov/FoodAtlas/

The rate of persistent childhood poverty in this country translates geographically into limited access to grocery stores. The map below shows the percent of households with no car who live more than one mile from the nearest grocery store.

Image Credit: screen shot from http://www.ers.usda.gov/FoodAtlas/

Lack of access to healthy foods including fresh fruits and vegetables translates in turn into a variety of chronic health problems. The two maps below show the rates of adult obesity (top) and adult diabetes (bottom).

Image Credits: screen shots from http://www.ers.usda.gov/FoodAtlas/

Taken together, these images present a rather damning indictment against the richest country in the history of the world. The truth is that many Americans go hungry every day, and even those whose stomachs are filled frequently suffer from malnutrition, defined by WHY as "A failure to achieve proper nutrient requirements, which can impair physical and/or mental health. It may result from consuming too little food or a shortage or imbalance of key nutrients (e.g., micronutrient deficiencies or excess consumption of refined sugar and fat)." Federal farm subsidies on crops like corn and soybeans make energy-dense, corn- and soy-heavy processed foods cheaper per calorie than fruits, vegetables and whole grains. As a result, low-income and food-insecure households often find the cost increase of eating healthy meals challenging if not prohibitive. The First Lady's campaign against childhood obesity as well as the federal government's attempts to reform our healthcare system and bring disease-related expenditures and long-term health costs under control cannot afford to ignore these links between income, food availability and chronic illness.

An article from last month's New York Times tells us that one in five Americans had trouble buying food last year. A separate article from last week's Times carried some mixed good news: individual states are doing a better job of enrolling eligible citizens in SNAP, the federal "food stamp" program. According to the same article, the social stigma attached to food stamps is also easing up do in part to the sheer number of enrollees. SNAP currently feeds one in eight Americans and almost one quarter of the nation's children. The recession has also made accepting federal assistance less objectionable; this map, also from the Times, shows the increase in SNAP enrollment since 2007. The darkest shade represents an increase of over sixty percent.

Image Credit: screen shot from The New York Times

There are other signs of progress around the country. Along with her Let's Move program and the White House kitchen garden, Michelle Obama has been vocal in support of farmers markets and other ways of bringing fresh, healthy fruits and vegetables into underserved neighborhoods. She was active in advocating and supporting a new farmers market that recently opened just blocks from the White House. On opening day, she told reporters, “I’ve learned that when my family eats fresh food, healthy food, that it really affects how we feel, how we get through the day, and that’s whether we’re trying to get through math homework or whether there’s a Cabinet meeting or whether we’re just walking the dog.’’

Image Credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Another hopeful sign comes from efforts to make SNAP easier to use at farmers markets like the one above and from local government efforts to move supermarkets and their produce sections into underserved neighborhoods. There are also a number of community and non-profit organizations working to combat hunger and malnutrition in American cities. There is hope that efforts like the First Lady's combined with legistlative action and community involvement, we won't become a country with two distinct food systems respectively feeding and starving the rich and poor.

A Modern Take on Still Life

fc — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 16:55:50 +0000

Image Credit: David Halliday on samuseum.org

Photographer David Halliday's current exhibition of still lifes at the San Antonio Museum of Art contains some stunningly beautiful and surreal photographs of food. It also lends itself to use in the rhetoric classroom and could be used for teaching lessons about visual literacy, changing contexts and visual rhetoric within communities. More about Halliday, still life and possible classroom uses after the break.

David Halliday is a New Orleans based photographer-turned-chef-turned-photographer. The photograph above is one of a series of still lifes produced in Italy using local ingredients and an old tin box. Halliday describes his "box" series, his own relationships to photography and food, and his current San Antonio exhibition in this interview on Zester Daily. In that interview, Halliday tells Liz Pearson that one direct inspiration for the series came from the Italian painter Caravaggio's still life paintings that were circulating on Italian currency when he was in the country. Halliday's subject matter (fish, vegetables, etc.) fall directly into the great tradition of European still life painting, and his use of lighting and his sepia-toned silver prints do a better job than most photographs of capturing the visual appeal of great Dutch or Italian still lifes. Many of the images make local ingredients appear like alien life-forms, like this de-familiarizing shot of a magnificent Italian cauliflower.

Image Credit: David Halliday on ZesterDaily.com

While these photographs are visually interesting devoid of context, they might provide a great way for rhetoric instructors to bring discussions of context and visual literacy into the classroom. Traditional still life paintings use fruits, vegetables, fish, pheasants and other types of produce as a doubled system of signs. The natural bounty arranged on tables or in baskets stood as signs of wealth and bounty but also as memento mori. Life is good, they tell us and their original burgher viewers, but it doesn't last. The arrangements are attractive and the subjects usually appetizing, but the produce, unlike the painting, has a very short shelf-life. Having been caught, picked or plucked, they will soon be rotting. Some still life painters, including Caravaggio, even include signs of decay (wilting leaves, shriveling grapes, flies, etc.) to drive home the point.

While they obviously look back to those Early Modern paintings, Halliday's photographs show no signs of rotting, but they do evoke the freshness and thereby the transience of their subjects. Rather than evoking a 17th century sense of mortality, Halliday's focus lingers on the food itself, and in an era of refrigerators, chemical preservatives and grocery stores that stock the same products year round, really conceiving of our food as part of a natural, seasonal cycle may be just as shocking as coming to terms with our own mortality. The change in context--the difference between pre- and post-industrial worlds--accounts for the shifting target of the images. Caravaggio's viewers could use seasonal produce as a familiar object with which to contemplate the less familiar concept of their transient lives. For Halliday's viewers, the produce itself is unfamiliar and worthy of contemplation.

This type of contemplation is encouraged by several contemporary movements away from processed preserved packaged foods and towards fresh, seasonal and even local ingredients. The Halliday exhibition was put together in part because the curator at the San Antonio Museum of Art wanted to connect the museum's mission with several changes in the local community including the opening of several new farmer's markets and a San Antonio campus of the Culinary Institute of America. Halliday's photographs dovetail with his personal interest in his own vegetable garden and the curator's interest in local farmer's markets: each moves food out of the system of global distribution and economies of scale and back into the cycle of seasons and cultivation where food is produce and not an industrial product.

Halliday's photographs might not operate in the same registers as his early-modern predecessors, but they do ultimately use images of food to make us reflect on our own lives. Rather than reminding us that life is short and we're going to die, his still life photographs remind us that our lives are part of a larger system and that the food that sustains our lives comes from the same ground to which we will eventually return.

Student Unions

fc — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:08:40 +0000

Image Credit: FairFoodProject.org

This carrot-wielding fist appears on the website housing “Fair Food: Field to Table” a multimedia presentation created by the Fair Food Project in cooperation with the California Institute for Rural Studies. The project draws on a visual iconography of labor and political activism as part of its educational outreach to university students. It also aims at turning students into educators with its three-part multimedia presentation and associated resources. More about the project,including video, after the jump.

Anyone who reads much about food culture or food politics has likely come across Barry Estabrook’s article (published last March in Gourmet, the now defunct food magazine at which he was a contributing editor) “Politics of the Plate: The Price of Tomatoes” (I ran across the story and Estabrook’s new endeavor on Mark Bittman’s Bitten blog a few months back). Estabrook’s article focuses on enslaved migrant tomato harvesters in Florida and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers,a modern day (and East Coast) inheritor of Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers mantle, that is working to protect these men and women from abuse. The Fair Food Project includes Immokalee workers along with farm workers from California and other US locations. Part one addresses the plight of enslaved and abused farm workers. Part two profiles several farms around the nation with sustainable labor practices. Here is part three, “The Advocates”:

Along with the website’s suggested reading list—including historical, fictional and photographic accounts of “Okie” migrant workers who made Californian agriculture possible during the nineteen-thirties—the Project’s visual iconography reveals a conscious sense of its own historical position(the Marxist in me wants to say “its historical struggle”). The worker’s raised fist graphically links the Fair Food Project to the long history of international labor movements, and the substitution of a carrot for the more traditional hammer or wrench makes a visual argument about the solidarity of farm workers with labor’s more traditional realm of industry. While some people may be most familiar with the fist icon through its later development in Socialist Realism, it has a long history of use by labor movements in this country, particularly in the political imagery of the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies. The Wobblies’ political aim and motto—“One Big Union”—is graphically represented in this 1917 poster that prominently features farm workers (note the pitchfork) alongside their industrial counterparts.

Image Credit: "One Big Union" by Ralph "Bingo" Chaplin

The most interesting thing about the Fair Food Project is the way that it embraces and expands on this image of solidarity. While positioning itself squarely within the international and domestic history of labor movements, the Fair Food Project overtly extends this solidarity to consumers. The Project’s website is aimed largely at university students and includes information about a number of organizations students can join to collectively bargain with the people and organizations who make food-purchasing decisions on college campuses (dining halls, fast food companies, etc.). They even provide resources to help students “unionize” at colleges where such organizations don’t already exist. I find this demand-side unionization a remarkably savvy strategy for challenging agri-business corporations and the modern food-production/distribution industry. By attempting to forge solidarity between the farm workers who grow the nation’s food and the consumers who often have little control over what food choices are made available to us, the Fair Food Project and its associated organizations are reconceptualizing the IWW's “One Big Union.”

A Politics of Plating

fc — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 01:46:10 +0000

Image Credit: Evan Sung for the New York Times

A recent article in the Dining and Wine section of the New York Times led me to rethink the importance of visual culture in the current round of debates about food in America. In a shift from the usual conversation about how food is deceitfully misrepresented in branding or advertising, the article at hand got me thinking about the role played by the visual presentations of actual meals. Thinking about plating allows us to revisit the relationship between food and visual culture and reimagine sight as a creative component of foodways—instead of a predatory marketing ploy—with the potential to positively impact the ways we eat.

The role of visual culture and rhetoric in marketing, branding and otherwise selling food has received a fair share of attention lately. The opening sequence of Food Inc. (read Tim’s review here), for instance, tells us how the agrarian ideal depicted on our grocery store products masks the lurid industrialization of agribusiness. The seemingly omnipresent Michael Pollan (whose In Defense of Food is currently playing a central role in the rhetoric curriculum at UT Austin) often portrays sight as a villain, warning us never to eat anything we’ve SEEN advertised. Visual critiques of the fast food industry have even shown up in different ways on this blog (see here and here ) . For the moment, I want to ignore all of that and think about tweezers.

Oliver Strand’s Times article on the culinary uses of surgical tweezers is unlikely to draw the attention of any but a niche audience of foodies and kitchen enthusiasts, but the descriptions of plating offered by the chefs he interviewed should catch the eye of anyone familiar with theories about photography, poetry or any number of aesthetic and cultural productions:

“It’s harder to make it look like you didn’t try,” said the chef David Chang, whose kitchen crew at Momofuku Ko tweezes extensively. “It’s more difficult to make it seem it’s plated as it falls. That’s what we call it, ‘as it falls.’ It’s not rustic. It’s naturalistic. It sounds stupid, but you’re using tweezers to make it seem natural.”

There are a number of points here, but the first thing to notice is the difference between natural and naturalistic. “Rustic,” for those who don’t keep up on gastronomical lingo, is another term for “country” or “home-style” presentations of food. Rustic dishes can be accomplished with much less precision than what is typical of haute cuisine. Chef Chang wants to draw a distinction between “rustic” plating—food that actually falls where it will—and a “naturalistic” presentation that is painstakingly made to appear plated “as it falls.” Strand sees this as part of a larger trend:

Increasingly, this kind of naturalism is the look of fine dining. Symmetry and geometry are giving way to artful jumbles and cascading forms. Microgreens, for instance, seem to have drifted in on a gentle breeze. It all might look tossed together, but it’s about as accidental as a $200 bed-head haircut.

The plating should LOOK accidental, but the presentation isn’t any more natural than the dialogue in a Wordsworth lyric or the musculature in a Gericault.

So, as with the grocery store in the into to Food Inc. or the photoshopped breakfast sandwich in Tim’s post above, we find that plating presents food as something it is not. Even the industrial concerns of uniformity and homogenization seem to be at work behind the scenes: Strand reports that “Chefs say tweezers let them assemble meticulous compositions quickly, and with such consistency they look the same every time.” And we can't forget that chefs share with agribusiness and fast food the same goal of selling you food (though, of course, they have very different business models).

Despite these similarities, plating—the visual presentation of individual meals—provides us with a potential counterbalance to the visual exploitation of consumers by glossy prints of food and farms that have little to do with the product they purchase. The goal of marketing images is moving the consumer to the point of sale, and they often accomplish this goal by obscuring either the product or its origins. The grocery story is full of bucolic images of ideal farms meant to keep us from thinking about the factory our milk came from or the exploited migrant worker picking our winter tomatoes. The fast food menu board is not there as a point of reference—“your bacon cheeseburger will look like this”—but as an incitement to forget what the order looked like last time and order it again. In this system, food is a commodity, and companies want consumers thinking about the consumption, not the production, of that commodity.

Plating, on the other hand—even semi-deceptive naturalistic tweezing—draws attention to the food itself and invites us to contemplate the ingredients and the craft that went into its production. Chefs spend time plating in fine dining kitchens because they want their customers to appreciate the skill that went into planning, prepping, cooking and serving the meal, especially since those efforts can’t generally be seen from the dining room. A well arranged plate invites contemplation. While it might not force us to ask if our tuna was sustainably fished or whether our busboy is paid a living wage, it does move food out of the realm of interchangeable commodities, and, in doing so, it asks for more from us than thoughtless consumption.

Plating might be most important at home. Most of us don’t eat the majority of our meals at Corton or Momofuku Ko, so tweezer-positioned microgreens are unlikely to have much impact on our consciousness or our behavior. On the other hand, those of us who cook at home (and cooking more at home is one of the best things you can do for your health, your budget and your carbon footprint) might benefit from being more intentional with our plating. An attractive plate invites us, even as home diners, to pause momentarily and consider the food we are eating. By drawing attention to the craft of cooking, it can earn home cooks some well-earned respect (even from ourselves) and help open a space for us to be conscious diners instead of mindless consumers.