Abstract
How can we understand and move beyond a persistent tendency to think, write and organize about food and agriculture as if it were possible to separate a theorist’s views on gender and race from their views on farm animals? Considerable scholarship already addresses this question. This paper suggests that philosophy can contribute to the discussion by focusing a particular kind of attention on patterns of thinking. In particular, dichotomous thinking has traditionally provided grounds for separating production from consumption, and continues to present an obstacle to efforts at connecting “farm issues” to “fork issues.” Three characteristics of dichotomous thinking present particular obstacles to scholarship that would deeply integrate food studies with agriculture studies. (1) Dichotomies tend to set up not just a contrast but an antagonism between their two poles, such that to be this means to be not that. (2) Dichotomous thinking tends to erase nuance, to eliminate anything between the two dichotomous options, and to purify or “clean up” the ambiguous case or extraneous material, by shoehorning it into one option or the other; and (3) Particular groups of dichotomies operate together, such that they mutually reinforce each other to create a way of understanding the world that is more plausible because of its cohesiveness. These snarls of mutually-supportive dichotomies that are nevertheless purist and puritanical in their impact, present a real (i.e. ideological, theoretical, conceptual) challenge to creating scholarly and activist movements that integrate the best of agrarian thinking and the best of critical food studies scholarship attentive to race, class and gender oppression.
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Notes
- 1.
Rootless cosmopolitanism: I of course did not intend for my position to invoke the anti-Semitic ideology that brought us this phrase, but the link is of course made almost unavoidably. And ultimately, I must recognize that views such as mine are susceptible to being taken to that extreme. That is why I shall ultimately argue that we need to challenge dichotomies using methods other than simply offering the other horn of a dichotomy, in order to correct the extremism of the first horn.
- 2.
I submit that it might be something similar to the idea of a “focal practice” developed by Albert Borgmann. Paul Thompson describes Borgmann’s position in Chap. 4 of his book The Agrarian Vision.
- 3.
While her project is different in many respects from mine, I think that Amy Trubek’s attempt to create a distinctly American concept of terroir might be a fellow traveler to this idea. See The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir.
- 4.
I was operating in ignorance of an important tradition that was attempting to do just this sort of work. The Annales school of history, which originated in France, included such notable writers on food as Fernand Braudel. And on this side of the Atlantic, sociologists Harriet Friedman and Melanie DuPuis were doing work that explored production-and-consumption. It is surprising to me that I failed to find this work when I was researching Exotic Appetites. Is this a function of the fact that there was not yet an established concept of a “food studies scholar” and that “food studies” as a stand-alone (inter)discipline was just coming into its own? (Or was it because I was a lousy researcher?) Thanks to Alice Julier for challenging me on this point.
- 5.
See Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating.” In Curtin and Heldke, op cit.
- 6.
A recent definition of food system Alice Julier and Gil Gillespie have developed illustrates the effort to understand the relationships between and among production and consumption: “the set of complex, interrelated, and often tangled biophysical and social structures, processes, and materials that yields plant, animal, mineral, and synthetic substances that people define as consumable for sustenance or pleasure and that a population in a time and geographic areas consumes for sustenance” (60).
- 7.
See Edwards-Jones, et al. See also Sarah DeWeerdt. The two accounts together offer academic and mainstream explorations of this issue. For some of the first work on the relation between miles food travels and ecological effects, see the work of Rich Pirog and Iowa State’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. Regarding the tendency to associate the local with all things positive, see Branden Born and Mark Purcell; and Mark Purcell and J. Christopher Brown.
- 8.
Alice Julier argues that the urban agriculture movement represents an important—and growing—exception to this claim. I would agree, and would point to this movement as an important source of models and inspiration for deeply integrative work.
- 9.
Here, the work of the group known as “Twelve Southerners,” called I’ll Take My Stand is emblematic.
- 10.
He apparently now does accept women interns. The application form includes the following caveats (which are accompanied by pictures of young women and men who are, for the most part, fair haired, fair skinned): “Bright eyed, bushy-tailed, self-starter, eager-beaver, situationally aware, go-get-‘em, teachable, positive, non-complaining, grateful, rejoicing, get’erdone, dependable, faithful, perseverant take-responsibility, clean-cut, all American boy-girl appearance characters. We are very, very, very discriminatory” (http://www.polyfacefarms.com/apprenticeship/).
- 11.
See Eleanor J. Bader.
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Acknowledgements
Thank you to Kirill Thompson, Yu-chia Tseng (Christine) and the rest of the staff who organized the wonderful Conference on Agricultural Ethics in East Asian Perspective, held at the National Taiwan University in 2012. This paper was written originally for that conference, and benefits from the feedback provided by workshop attendees, and also from the experience of thinking and talking about agriculture with the cross-cultural group of attendees there. I’m most grateful for the opportunity. Thanks to Paul Thompson, philosopher of agriculture at Michigan State University. His work continually challenges me to think outside my own complacent dichotomies; particularly his recent book The Agrarian Vision. Thank you also to sociologist and food-and-agriculture scholar Alice Julier, director of the food systems program at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for commenting on this paper. Alice’s insight on the current state of food studies, agriculture studies, and food-and-agriculture studies make her my lodestar. Finally, thanks to Abby Wilkerson, philosopher, food studies scholar, and member of the Freshman Writing Program at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who operates as a food-philosophical compass for me.
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Heldke, L. (2018). Theorizing Alternative Agriculture and Food Movements: The Obstacle of Dichotomous Thinking. In: Thompson, P., Thompson, K. (eds) Agricultural Ethics in East Asian Perspective. The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics, vol 27. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92603-2_9
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