Feeding Frenzy

Define “foodie”, if you can. It’s a nebulous word, one that seems to have come into being around the same time as cooking shows made the leap from daytime telly to primetime. Does it mean someone who loves cooking, or just eating? We already have perfectly good words for those, like chef, epicure, gourmand. The reason “foodie” is set apart is because these days, it has taken on a greenish tinge. It’s rare to talk to someone who thinks seriously about climate change issues or renewable energy solutions who is not also at least curious about organic food and sustainable argriculture.

Being a foodie in America is pretty special. We live in a land of plenty: we have a vast array of ingredients available and the means to buy them. We used to define a gourmand by the variety and quality of food she chose. Delicacies from every cuisine were her provenance. But Sushi bars, French bistros, Italian trattorias, and Ethiopian restaurants began sneaking around every corner. TV cooking show hosts convinced a large part of their audience to try things like tripe and sweetbreads. You can pick up quail at any halfway decent supermarket. Nothing was sacred anymore! So foodies popped up, with parameters for the new elite: How far did that grass fed beef travel? Are the eggs from free range hens? Is this bread made with wild yeast? Is this milk from a local dairy?

Organic food has been a big deal for a long time. Not necessarily with that label, of course, but before the supremacy of the supermarket, even Americans preferred food from their garden or from local farmers. Small farmers can still use pesticides…but it’s just hard to achieve quite the same level of sprayed-on waxy kill-all that the big guys can. When “slow food” kicked off in the 1960s, spurred on by people like Alice Waters of Chez Panisse and Nancy Silverton of La Brea Bakery, it was a revolution. This was barely two generations after WWII, and already we had become a country so addicted to fast food, huge markets, TV dinners, and one-stop shopping that it required a revolution to even lay the stage for foodies.

The extent to which foodies lust after organic and local foods is clear in the number of concessions even standard chain grocery stores have made in that direction. And why? I think that rising consciousness of climate change has encouraged discussion of the cost of everyday living. The carbon cost. The answer to that question about how far your beef had to travel has two layers of meaning: one, foodies know that in general, the less time food has to spend on a truck or ship to reach your plate, the better for your taste buds; and two, the longer the travel time, the higher the carbon cost of your meal.

It doesn’t stop there: organic food companies tout their sustainability, leading food retailers to do so as well. Image is essential. Whole Foods markets, not wasting a moment of impulse buying time, even have carbon offsets for sale next to the cash registers. Much of this advertising is opaque or misleading, and the organic food industry seems to have most people convinced that giant industrial monoculture farms that refrain from the use of certain chemicals are somehow blessings for the environment, when in reality they’re not so different from their conventional brethren. (This is partly why foodies are into the locally-grown thing.)

I think why this interests me so much is that we’ve got this elite class of people, the real foodies, pushing for sustainable practices, taking into account the carbon impact of the whole process of producing, distributing, and consuming food. And they’re elite. They’re not supposed to do that! Elite classes are all…you know…elitist. But this movement is populist in the extreme. If we make our food practices truly sustainable, it would fundamentally change the way distribution systems work in the US. It would drastically affect trade; taxes; farming subsidies; the kinds of lightbulbs used in supermarket aisles; the kind of fuel used to power farm equipment; the imagination runs wild. Well, mine does, anyway.

I can hardly begin to get into a well-rounded discussion here of the pros and cons of this vision of the future. The biggest question is whether or not organic agriculture is sustainable in the long term, taking into account diminished yields (ie, profitability) and the vast, deeply ingrained existing system. I don’t know. But I sure hope so.