By Dave Riley
There is perhaps nothing so intimate as the food we put in our mouths. In our society each morsel is personalised by an involved process of selection and preparation reproduced in myriad acts performed by millions of diners each day. But our daily physiological dependence on food can hide a much greater complexity. While the belly certainly comes first, the actual relations involved in feeding it can sometimes be hidden by a mental gravy that clouds the social significance of the act of consumption itself.
What we consume when we eat can be answered in three ways. One is that food obviously is related to nutrition. Foods have intrinsic properties that help sustain our biology. Like everything else that lives we need nutrients.
The second answer to this question is that we eat nature. Our foods are taken from the natural world and the way we encourage food from its natural environment will change that environment and change the food itself. Bread wheat, Triticum vulgare, which probably derived from the accidental crossing of two varieties of wild grass, has now been developed into more than 30,000 varieties worldwide sometimes costing up to 20 bushels of eroded top soil for each bushel of wheat produced. The significance of this is not lost on the current greening which is keen to march forward on its stomach.
The final answer to the riddle is the one that writers such as Gyorgy Scrinis in Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly No. 112 fail to adequately address. While food is a biological relationship and a relationship we have with the natural world it is also a social relationship that humans have with one another because we produce our food collectively. We are of nature and other than nature. We are biological and non-biological creatures.
Mystification
To separate what humans eat arbitrarily into "industrial cuisine" and "traditional diets", as Scrinis does, serves only to mystify the processes involved in consumption. Like everything else in our society food is a commodity. To buy it you must sell your ability to labour. To grow it you must purchase land. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
The social relations in our society are capitalist ones and almost every product of this society is the result of capitalist commodity production. As a merchant in one of Bertolt Brecht's plays pointed out, "God only knows what rice is. I only know its price!"
To call what we eat today an "industrial cuisine" serves only to obscure this preoccupation with price and profit and goes nowhere in explaining why so many cuisines have tended this way.
Where once there was forest, cattle now graze to supply far off ton plantations now occupy land that previously fed the local population who must now work for a wage to buy food to eat. Why? Is this a product of what we eat or how it is produced?
Idealising the past won't help either. "Whole grain breads and foods, beans, dairy products, vegetables, and plenty of wild and cultivated greens", writes Scrinis, "formed the basic diets of most people in agricultural societies until the modern era." This is gross generalisation. Enjoyment of such fare was only available to the peasantry in good times and the rich at all times. Who ate what was as much a class question then as it is throughout most of the world today.
In fact, the innovations that led to the extensive cultivation of wheat in England in the 18th century — so that it substantially replaced rye, barley and oats of the past — were part of those same changes that led to the triumph of capitalism in the countryside. "Following enclosure of the common lands," writes Elizabeth David in her book, English Bread and Yeast Cookery, "many agricultural families, who now had no strip of land of their own to cultivate, no place to graze a cow or even to keep a pig, no free fuel, and little hope of regular employment, were thrown on the bounty of the parish. There wasn't much of it. If enclosing the land made for more efficient farming, greater yields and more profits for the landowners, it left the poor dispossessed, poverty stricken and bitter."
An ongoing diet, traditional or otherwise, was beyond the reach of this new mass layer of paupers unless they could sell their labourpower to obtain food. Migrating to the towns, they become factory fodder for the burgeoning industrialisation. Working up to 19 hours each day, there was little time to prepare food properly or to even buy it. The working class's meager diet was exacerbated by its poor quality and high price. Workers could purchase what was too bad for the propertied classes to consume. This shift from traditional diets was not one of choice, as Scrinis seems to suggest, but one of surviving on the foodstuffs to hand, sold by small hucksters and oftentimes adulterated to stretch its weight and texture.
When the peasants were driven from the land they were forced into a new social relation which replaced production for their own use (as well as that for their lord) with the exchange of commodities instead. The ability to work itself became a commodity. The food did not change — wheat was still wheat — but their relationship with it did. Every rise of capitalist society is predated by this process.
Alienation
In one sense it is true to say that this change alienated us from our food. But this is a partial interpretation of the process of alienation. At no time in the history of human society did individual humans grow, prepare and cook all their own food. Society exists as a division of labour, sometimes of extensive complexity. If we are alienated from our food, as Scrinis says, then we are as alienated from our shelter, from our clothing, from our tools, etc. We don't all shear the sheep, spin the wool, and knit our own jumpers. We don't grow our own cotton underwear in the backyard.
In modern industrial capitalism most of us are distanced from these processes. In Australia, a mere 3% of the population produces the food for all the rest. To insist that this exile from the soil can only be overcome by intimate agriculture and more time in the kitchen obscures what is actually happening.
The most significant alienation in capitalist society is from each other. As the rural poor drifted to the cities to feed the thirst for profits, Frederick Engels recognised that the turmoil in the streets had something repulsive about it against which human nature rebelled. In 1844, he wrote of the English working class: "And still they crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance. This brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together, within a limited space... The dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each one has a separate principle and a separate purpose, the world of atoms, is here carried out to the utmost extreme." That's alienation of a depth and pervasiveness that hides the fact that we all seek nutrition by the same way and by the same means.
The society that capitalism replaced had no such system of privatised, socio-economic or personal relations and this was reflected in, among other things, its use of eating utensils. Eating was communal, as individuals shared the few available eating utensils including forks and glasses. The same piece of food was even shared as partially eaten food was returned to the serving plate to be finished by someone else. It was only with the rise of private capitalist socio-economic relations that modern "civilised" eating habits arose and we each kept our own fork and plate throughout the course of the meal.
Regardless of how individual and separate we may each feel we are all mutually dependent on one another. There is food in the supermarket because workers laboured to put it there. We produce our food collectively, but the very commodity relations in society preclude us from deciding what we produce and how we produce it. The modern diet — meat centred, supplemented by highly processed and refined grains, and foods saturated with chemicals and additives — is not an inevitable product of industrialisation but of capitalist commodity production in which everything is alienated for the sake of profits gleamed by another class.
Reasserting the collective nature of production is the only way that the environmental consequences of the human diet can be addressed. Such a process of democratisation can lead to a renewal of the communal relationship early human society had with the natural world. To blame the modern diet itself for environmental devastation serves merely to simplify the immense tasks of repair and sustainability we have before us.
While Scrinis is keen to blame the over-consumption of meat for environmental destruction the truth cannot be reduced to the farming tional source. The agricultural civilisation of the Maya in Central America died out by 1200AD probably because of overcropping of corn and beans because that is all they ate. The wheat fields in the ancient kingdoms of Mesopotamia drowned in salt bought to the fields by a complex system of irrigation. It is firewood rather than beef that is consuming the world's forests because most people on this planet cook on open fires. It is not just a case of addressing the problem of what we produce or how we produce it, but also of focusing all our social and technological potential to deal with the environmental crisis. While what is produced and how it is produced remains hostage to profit our response will remain merely superficial.
'Joys of traditional cuisine'
Instead, Scrinis urges us to rediscover the pleasures and simplicity of traditional cuisine. But in our society the only way we can do that is individually. Take "real" bread for instance. John Downes, the local sour-dough bread maker, who Scrinis enthusiastically quotes, recognises that the highest quality food is certainly available — but at a price. "Authentic bread," he writes, "is an important food having broad implications for the individual and for society. It is a medium through which to experience the essence of our civilisation. Baking it at home is currently your only choice."
Baking it at home! But like preparing the humble bean, this takes time. The joys of more labour-intensive forms of food preparation aren't possible unless we begin to replicate the social life of previous epochs. In peasant society bread was certainly kneaded and baked at home by women. Labour intensive forms of domestic life are oriented to the ideal of the nuclear family with a male "breadwinner" and a full female bread (and home) maker.
The only way this can be changed is to drastically reduce the working day without loss of pay so that we all have more time to attend to our tucker.
Unless Scrinis wants to force people into spending more of their day in the kitchen — especially men! — good cuisine might be available instead through the generalisation of industrial food preparation in high quality, low-cost publicly-owned restaurants.
The strategy that Scrinis plugs for — food co-ops — in contrast becomes a mere appendage of capitalist commodity relations. Food co-operatives which sell unprocessed, unpackaged, raw and mostly organic ingredients are, strictly speaking, another form of commodity production. This was the fare marketed by early capitalism before large-scale farming reduced the production cost to a level where further processing became inherently more profitable. Food cooperatives don't necessarily lead to cheaper meals because there are immense advantages in economies of scale. Uncle Toby's Organic Vita-Brits now readily available in every supermarket in Australia is suggestive of the dietary potential this social system has if it were oriented differently.
But one packet of breakfast cereal and a few co-operatives won't est of us will continue to eat what comes our way. To pretend that the path of re-engaging our food can only be followed through more labour-intensive forms of food preparation and growing our own ingredients, misrepresents the reality that we all confront. Unless we deal with this collectively by at least recognising in the first instance how pervasive the socio-economic relations of capitalism are, we will get nowhere in a hurry. Unfortunately, for our physiology and for our natural environment time is fast running out.