On Sunday a friend and I went to the launch of The Edible City: Toronto's Food from Farm to Fork (Coach House Books), a new collection of essays about food in Toronto. The ballroom of the Gladstone Hotel was packed, quite literally standing room only--I think the organisers were a little taken aback by the turnout. (To their great credit, there was actually plenty of antipasti for everyone; thus the potentially catastrophic faux pas of not having enough snackables at a foodie event was averted. Having said that, a wag of my very clean finger for the fact that it was all plattered finger food--just as we reach the peak of the swine flu season, and in a city already dealing with residual paranoia from its SARS experience in 2003 ... if I weren't curren
tly embracing freeganism, thanks to my chronic inability to manage a budget, the sight of all those sticky fingers diving into piles of olives and massaging cheese chunks might have been enough to have me sticking to liquids. Then again, maybe not. There were some very good pickles--I'm a sucker for a pickle.)
Five of the contributors formed a very knowledgeable and entertaining panel moderated by Dick Snyder (editor of City Bites magazine), and following the panel, a Q and A session with the audience brought up some of the issues that we are starting to hear more and more about these days--eating locally, eating sustainably, looking at the way we used to do things before Big Agriculture became such a monolithic force in the production of our food. Sometimes I wonder if there isn't a bit of an "everybody's having babies" effect in operation in the food scene in Toronto--you know, as soon as you start thinking about babies, you notice them all over the bloody place. It's sometimes hard to judge whether there is a collective coming-to-consciousness about good food and good eating, or whether it's just that since I got interested in it, it's all I think about and therefore all I see. But events like this are pretty strong evidence for the existence of a genuine "food movement": they are happening more frequently and getting bigger, which can only mean the number of people who want to talk about food--and its myriad of social, ethical, environmental, and personal implications and associations--is growing. Fast.
The friend that accompanied me to the launch was on a similar panel a couple of weeks ago, and on that occasion she said something that really struck me. Brooke moved to Toronto from Australia--actually from a neighbourhood very near me in our hometown, although we didn't know each other then--at almost exactly the same time as I did last year. She was a dietitian and had become dissatisfied with trying to cure the effects of lifetimes of bad food habits. She said that when she arrived in Toronto, "it was like the food movement here hit me in the face". She started thinking preventatively instead of curatively, and got interested in all of the non-profit organisations doing incredible work around food in Toronto. Her new job involves going into schools and teaching kids, practically and using real food, about what food is and why it is so important; she loves her job, which now involves nurturing a love of good food and teaching kids to eat well right from the start.
I guess the reason I mention this (and the reason it seemed appropriate to open this post with discussion of a book about eating) is because I see some parallels between the way we have thought about food and the way we have thought about literature. The recent passing of Ray Browne, the founder of pop-culture studies, serves as a reminder that there was a time (many would say it's still with us) when literature was thought of in fundamentally dichotomous terms. There was "high" and "low" culture, and there were "good" and "bad" books. These latter specimens--variously called sensation fiction, pulp fiction, trash fiction, genre fiction--have been thought of as books that were bad for you, which, if consumed in quantity, could lead to some kind of psychological, spiritual, or emotional malady, a dumbing-down, a degradation of the higher faculties. To say that we think of literature as food--consumable, pleasurable, potentially harmful--is not a facile comparison; the evidence that the two are inextricably linked in our minds is all around us. Take this telling phrase from the New York Times' obituary for Ray Browne: "For some, this ecumenicalism [in the study of popular culture] is part of the field’s appeal. For others, it is precisely what makes it seem unfit for scholarly consumption."
We like to tell ourselves that (to an extent) we've left the paradigm of worthy/not-worthy for thinking about literature behind; but I wonder about whether it bears any relation to the way we have thought or are currently thinking about food? One of the curses of "foodism" and "foodies" has been the tag's almost unshakeable association with snobbery, exclusivity, and a gastro-elite, who, thanks to their fat wallets and supposedly refined sensibilities, are attuned to a "higher appreciation" of food that is unavailable to the everyday commoner, who eats muck like sliced white and (gasp) Kraft Dinner. But the people in the room at the book launch on Sunday didn't seem like snobs--they seemed like genuinely interested, informed and involved people who were overwhelmingly concerned to get the control of our food away from a handful of huge consortiums, and back in the hands of the masses--they were concerned not to tell people what to eat, but to ensure that the individual has a choice in what to eat.
Is the notion of "democratisation" relevant here? Since popular culture became a legitimate field of study, many in academia, and especially feminist studies, have revisited and recuperated the literary fiction that was once reviled; and reviled it may have been by some, but it was also read by many. (It's not called "popular culture" for nothing.) So how can our changing approach to literature over the last couple of centuries inform the debate that now seems to be growing around food? Are the food snobs losing their battle to tell the rest of the world what to eat, or--to play devil's advocate for a moment--is it simply that a new generation of do-gooders has arisen to take their place, self-righteously extolling the virtues of local, organic, and sustainable from their ivory towers, totally missing the fact that the rest of Western society is quite happy with the way things are, thank you very much, and doesn't want to hear the bleatings of the vegetarian lefty soy-latte sippers while trying to enjoy their Big Mac?
I'll let you in on what is probably not a very well-hidden secret: I don't think so. I think that the new food awareness we see budding everywhere around us is much more thoughtful and inclusive than that, and requires of its followers a real attempt to think carefully about attendant issues of political, environmental and social import. But I do wonder about the parallels between food and literature, and the ways that we have engaged with these two fundamental, and defining, aspects of our culture.
tly embracing freeganism, thanks to my chronic inability to manage a budget, the sight of all those sticky fingers diving into piles of olives and massaging cheese chunks might have been enough to have me sticking to liquids. Then again, maybe not. There were some very good pickles--I'm a sucker for a pickle.)Five of the contributors formed a very knowledgeable and entertaining panel moderated by Dick Snyder (editor of City Bites magazine), and following the panel, a Q and A session with the audience brought up some of the issues that we are starting to hear more and more about these days--eating locally, eating sustainably, looking at the way we used to do things before Big Agriculture became such a monolithic force in the production of our food. Sometimes I wonder if there isn't a bit of an "everybody's having babies" effect in operation in the food scene in Toronto--you know, as soon as you start thinking about babies, you notice them all over the bloody place. It's sometimes hard to judge whether there is a collective coming-to-consciousness about good food and good eating, or whether it's just that since I got interested in it, it's all I think about and therefore all I see. But events like this are pretty strong evidence for the existence of a genuine "food movement": they are happening more frequently and getting bigger, which can only mean the number of people who want to talk about food--and its myriad of social, ethical, environmental, and personal implications and associations--is growing. Fast.
The friend that accompanied me to the launch was on a similar panel a couple of weeks ago, and on that occasion she said something that really struck me. Brooke moved to Toronto from Australia--actually from a neighbourhood very near me in our hometown, although we didn't know each other then--at almost exactly the same time as I did last year. She was a dietitian and had become dissatisfied with trying to cure the effects of lifetimes of bad food habits. She said that when she arrived in Toronto, "it was like the food movement here hit me in the face". She started thinking preventatively instead of curatively, and got interested in all of the non-profit organisations doing incredible work around food in Toronto. Her new job involves going into schools and teaching kids, practically and using real food, about what food is and why it is so important; she loves her job, which now involves nurturing a love of good food and teaching kids to eat well right from the start.
I guess the reason I mention this (and the reason it seemed appropriate to open this post with discussion of a book about eating) is because I see some parallels between the way we have thought about food and the way we have thought about literature. The recent passing of Ray Browne, the founder of pop-culture studies, serves as a reminder that there was a time (many would say it's still with us) when literature was thought of in fundamentally dichotomous terms. There was "high" and "low" culture, and there were "good" and "bad" books. These latter specimens--variously called sensation fiction, pulp fiction, trash fiction, genre fiction--have been thought of as books that were bad for you, which, if consumed in quantity, could lead to some kind of psychological, spiritual, or emotional malady, a dumbing-down, a degradation of the higher faculties. To say that we think of literature as food--consumable, pleasurable, potentially harmful--is not a facile comparison; the evidence that the two are inextricably linked in our minds is all around us. Take this telling phrase from the New York Times' obituary for Ray Browne: "For some, this ecumenicalism [in the study of popular culture] is part of the field’s appeal. For others, it is precisely what makes it seem unfit for scholarly consumption."
We like to tell ourselves that (to an extent) we've left the paradigm of worthy/not-worthy for thinking about literature behind; but I wonder about whether it bears any relation to the way we have thought or are currently thinking about food? One of the curses of "foodism" and "foodies" has been the tag's almost unshakeable association with snobbery, exclusivity, and a gastro-elite, who, thanks to their fat wallets and supposedly refined sensibilities, are attuned to a "higher appreciation" of food that is unavailable to the everyday commoner, who eats muck like sliced white and (gasp) Kraft Dinner. But the people in the room at the book launch on Sunday didn't seem like snobs--they seemed like genuinely interested, informed and involved people who were overwhelmingly concerned to get the control of our food away from a handful of huge consortiums, and back in the hands of the masses--they were concerned not to tell people what to eat, but to ensure that the individual has a choice in what to eat.
Is the notion of "democratisation" relevant here? Since popular culture became a legitimate field of study, many in academia, and especially feminist studies, have revisited and recuperated the literary fiction that was once reviled; and reviled it may have been by some, but it was also read by many. (It's not called "popular culture" for nothing.) So how can our changing approach to literature over the last couple of centuries inform the debate that now seems to be growing around food? Are the food snobs losing their battle to tell the rest of the world what to eat, or--to play devil's advocate for a moment--is it simply that a new generation of do-gooders has arisen to take their place, self-righteously extolling the virtues of local, organic, and sustainable from their ivory towers, totally missing the fact that the rest of Western society is quite happy with the way things are, thank you very much, and doesn't want to hear the bleatings of the vegetarian lefty soy-latte sippers while trying to enjoy their Big Mac?
I'll let you in on what is probably not a very well-hidden secret: I don't think so. I think that the new food awareness we see budding everywhere around us is much more thoughtful and inclusive than that, and requires of its followers a real attempt to think carefully about attendant issues of political, environmental and social import. But I do wonder about the parallels between food and literature, and the ways that we have engaged with these two fundamental, and defining, aspects of our culture.
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