Season 2, Bonus Episode: “I Don’t Know.”
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE:
On Today’s Episode:
An excerpt from my interview with Michael Lansing - a somewhat rude awakening about food choices, virtue signaling with food, and why going local may not be all it’s cracked up to be when it comes to changing the food landscape of the U.S.
With Special Guests:
Michael J. Lansing is Associate Professor of History at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, MN. A historian of the modern United States, his current book project is Enriched: Industrial Carbohydrates and the Rise of Nutrition Capitalism—a history of factory-processed grains and the hidden logic that drives contemporary food systems. He is the author of Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2015) as well as commentaries in MinnPost, BillMoyers.com, and Zócalo Public Square.
The Was Is Could Be podcast is produced by Liz Russell at To Eat and To Love, LLC. Each episode is carefully edited by Joshua Rivers of Podcast Guy Media, LLC. Our theme music is made by Neil Cross and published by ImageCollect Publishing.
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Liz Russell Narration:
At the end of my interview with Michael Lansing, I asked if there was anything we missed or needed to talk about. I do this with everyone. It turns out, we had missed a vital conversation. Take a listen.
Michael Lansing (Historian):
Anytime one of us as an individual makes a choice about food in any venue, we're actually also making a choice about the relationships we have with other people, either people we know or people we don't know, and it's impossible to separate those two things.
Liz Russell:
So let me ask you this, not to, not to go into a huge other tangent, but what do you think that means for our relationships with farmers? You know, the local movement is all about getting to know your local farmer and knowing where your food comes from. That's one of the relationships I assume you're talking about could be one of them. Is there value to making sure that you have that relationship, even if you do buy industrialized food too, but that you know where food comes from and that, you know people who are purveyors in food?
Michael Lansing (Historian):
I think that that's an important piece of the puzzle, but it can't be mistaken for the entirety of the puzzle. In other words, the return of artisan food and careful attention to knowledge of where your food comes from and local food, which in and of itself is a kind of hotly disputed term. You know, it's easy to say, well, local food has fewer climate impacts, but it actually depends what you're measuring. It depends what the food stuff is because our food systems are so complex. It's very easy to kind of fall into that trap. Like, oh, well I got this with the farm 20 miles away. So I know it has a lower carbon footprint than this other food product that I might have bought. That's very similar. And it's like, well, actually that's more complicated. So I would, I would say that yes, getting to know where your food comes from is absolutely important. Spending some time doing that is very important, but don't necessarily mistake that for the end of what you need to do.
If you're gonna think about food more broadly, both in terms of your own personal health and then once again, in terms of the society, the broader society's health. So when I say anytime that you make a choice about food, you're also making a choice about people that you know or don’t know, I’m also saying that you’re making a choice… When I go to my co-op and I buy a box of Cascadian Farms crackers, maybe I'm doing that ‘cause I have a particular allergy or maybe I'm buying rice cakes because I'm gluten sensitive or, you know, even when it comes to these questions of individual health and I'm making a food choice, I'm actually also making a choice about the person who's receiving assistance to get their food or the person who's making a lot of money off of my choice to buy rice cakes. Those relationships are also deeply embedded in that choice, which is why individual consumer choice or individual consumer knowledge is not necessarily enough. Once again, we have to think systemically about food and of course people have been doing that. That's what much of the local food movement is about is how do we create an alternative system or an entirely new system. But that's probably the subject for another podcast.
Liz Russell:
I know. It's almost sort of mind blowing. In a way, I'm a little bit surprised my reaction to you saying that is actually sort of freeing and I don't know if that's okay. I don't know if that's a good thing, but because you say that I'm like, oh, well that means I can worry less about it. It makes me feel like, because it's bigger picture, I can almost worry less about it. And I don't know where that comes from. I'm gonna… that's really interesting.
Michael Lansing (Historian):
There's so much virtue signaling in certain middle class circles and upper middle class circles around food. Food is one of the primary virtue signals like, oh, this couple is coming to dinner tonight and I made sure that I went out and I got organic broccoli. And the fritatta that I made that has that organic broccoli in it, it comes from local free range eggs, et cetera, et cetera. And if you don't run up those flags, if you don't do that virtue signaling, you'll be critiqued by your friends, right? It's a very judgemental culture. So that's probably why you feel some sense of freedom. For me, my answer to that particular question comes out of some very academic questions that have been posed to me. So as I'm working on this book about the rise of industrial carbohydrates made from wheat in particular, but grains more broadly, which really is a history of Pillsbury and General Mills and eventually Cargill, all three of which were or are based here in Minneapolis strangely enough, it makes no sense when you think about it, but because the particular history of wheat growing in America, they're based here.
One thing that fellow professors have said to me over and over is, well, what does the alternative look like? What does the alternative look like? And finally this spring, these historians of science looked at me and said, well, if you're talking about the need for the systemic change, what would a socialist food system look like? And I looked at her and I said, I don't know. Right? But that's what I've been thinking about is how do we make certain things legible in our food culture and take so much of this really good energy in what you and I call the food movement and redirect it away from virtue and shaming and individual “oh my God, I need to know all this,” and think more systemically about it. How can we, how can we create a system of regulation that actually protects consumers in 2020?
How can we create a system of petrochemical free agriculture? How can we continue? How can we keep some of the distribution systems that industrial food has created over the last 150 years, but turn them to very different ends? How can we make sure that sugar isn't added to every single product because of human physiology and the need to make our tongue convinced that it tastes better ‘cause there's sugar in it? How do we make sure that 1% of the population isn't making billions of dollars off of choices that not just poor people are making, but middle and upper middle class people are making around food? To me, that's the next thing that the food movement has to think about. It has to think about its own privilege, needs to think about who's excluded from that and how they're excluded. We need to think about this virtue and the judginess of the food movement and think about how we can work together and build relationships together to think about this, not just as an individual consumer choice, but as a systemic societal choice. There's work to do.
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