copyright © Rebecca Tucker, 2018
first edition
Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also gratefully acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Tucker, Rebecca, 1986-, author
A matter of taste : a farmers’ market devotee’s semi-reluctant argument for inviting scientific innovation to the dinner table / Rebecca Tucker.
(Exploded views)
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-55245-367-4 (softcover).
1. Food supply. 2. Food industry and trade--Moral and ethical aspects. 3. Food industry and trade--Economic aspects. 4. Sustainable agriculture--Moral and ethical aspects. 5. Sustainable agriculture--Economic aspects. 6. Agricultural innovations.
I. Title. II. Series: Exploded views
| HD9000.5.T83 2018 | 363.8 | C2018-904953-7C2018-904954-5 |
A Matter of Taste is available as an ebook: ISBN 978 1 77056 555 5 (EPUB), ISBN 978 1 77056 556 2 (PDF).
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Dedicated to my nonna, Enrica, through whom all food had power.
Introduction
Consider the Dunkaroo
For the uninitiated, or anyone who doesn’t self-identify as a ‘nineties kid,’ I guess, Dunkaroos were small, individual-portion-size plastic bins of cookies, adjoined to even smaller plastic bins of cake frosting. The crunchy former were meant to be dipped into the creamy latter. It was an absolute masterstroke of snack-food concepting: sugar on sugar, with a customizable delivery mechanism. When I was in grade school, these were the It Snack. But they never once entered my lunch box.
My mother ran the house, as far as food was concerned (as far as a lot of other things were concerned, too). And she had (and has) a strict sense of what constituted food fit for her family to eat. This discriminating sense of good food vs. bad food, born partly of her upbringing in an Italian immigrant household where even peanut butter was foreign and processed, and partly of a typically parental sort of common-sense, five-a-day-style healthy-eating ethos. Broadly, this meant that packaged foods – junk foods, in other words – were verboten. Specifically, this meant no Dunkaroos.
But I lusted for them. I lusted, too, for Vachon snack cakes filled with oily, cloud-white cream; for chocolatecovered granola bars studded with chocolate chips instead of nuts and seeds; for actual chocolate bars, scaled down to kid size and packed alongside Lunchables (for which I also lusted, despite not having any idea of what bologna tasted like); for snack-sized bags of potato chips, for cans of soda – for all the things the other kids got to eat for lunch, but from whose consumption I was prohibited by a mother who didn’t think children (or anyone) should eat processed foods.
So I stole them.
I wanted what I could not have so badly that I snuck into my classroom during recess and raided my classmates’ backpacks. Over time, I was so emboldened by my successful string of thefts that I started pilfering candy from my teacher’s desk. I’d eat it on the way home, or in my bedroom, after dark. Eventually, overcome by guilt – and having been almost caught in the act – I fessed up to my parents, my teacher, and the principal. It was kind of traumatic, and it was all because of junk food.
This didn’t change anything in our pantry at home. As far as everyone – myself included – was concerned, I was a deviant and a transgressor, tempted by sugar and MSG; what I wanted was Bad Food, and I was bad to want it.
This conflagration of actions of moral good (and moral bad) and one’s eating habits is not a revelatory idea, not even when applied to the petty lunchtime crimes of a tenyear-old girl. Our eating habits have long been defined in part by a sense of morality, of separating the good food from the bad food. We are meant to feel a certain way (virtuous, clean, pious) when we eat ‘good’ food, and the inverse (out of control, irresponsible, ugly) when we eat – or simply desire – food that is ‘bad.’
But what constitutes food on either side of the moral divide has been a moving target. For my mother, and her mother, good food meant food whose ingredients they recognized – nothing processed, nothing boxed. Over time, that understanding would have evolved to include a few twentieth-century conveniences, like store-bought crackers, supermarket eggs, and cured meat from a deli counter instead of a neighbour’s basement. But despite these few concessions to modernity, my childhood eating habits were remarkably, unusually (and, if you were to ask me, infuriatingly) clean and, well, good.
In 2018, however, those twentieth-century conveniences – the boxed crackers, deli meats, and probably-not-freerange eggs – don’t quite pass muster. In response to the industrialization of our food systems, food that is recognized as good is no longer simply food that is healthful; the moral needle has moved toward food that is organic, food that is local, food that supports a farmer whose name you know, and, perhaps above all else, food that has been affected by as little human intervention as possible.
Stretched to its logical conclusion, this new food moralizing should mean we’re all buying food that saves the planet. But stretched to its practical conclusion, this has simply meant that feel-good foodie-ism has become more of an aesthetic than a powerful political movement.
Despite years of proselytizing from luminaries like Mark Bittman and Michael Pollan, farm-to-table cooking and farmers’ market shopping remain rarefied practices, possible on a recurring (never mind constant) basis to those with not only the surplus money it takes to buy into these supposedly sustainable systems, but the surplus time to spend learning why they ought to. Farms and markets, despite their salt-of-the-earth origins, have become the arenas of the elite. And as the global population skyrockets while the average household income for younger generations continues to stagnate, it is increasingly impractical to imagine that food-system salvation will be delivered in a Williams-Sonoma farmers’ market tote. The belief in one’s moral goodness should have nothing to do with how much locally grown kale is in one’s diet. And besides, the unflappable attachment to farmers’ markets and organic produce can be damaging in its own right; obstinate partisanism, in food as in politics, doesn’t seem to be moving the needle much these days.
I am confident in the belief that our broken food systems are fixable. And I’m not alone. At the University of Guelph’s Arrell Food Institute, for instance, Evan Fraser, the Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security, is leading a think tank called Feeding 9 Billion, aimed at developing food systems that will feed the planet’s population once it hits its projected nine billion people in the year 2050. Fraser, one of Canada’s – and, indeed, the world’s – most prominent voices on food security and the future of sustainable food, believes that vertical farming, artificial intelligence, and data-based farming are key to the future of food. In Florida, Kevin Folta, a horticultural sciences professor, is advocating for the adoption of crop-saving genetic technology. Kimbal Musk (yes, Elon’s brother) has started an ‘accelerator’ for urban farming. John Deere is adopting smart farming machinery that uses GPS technology and machine learning to eliminate waste and create efficiencies. In New York, a company called Agritecture has cornered the market on urban-farming consulting, tapping into the controlledenvironment architecture industry – essentially, indoor farming – that