White Heroes, Racial Purity, and the Media

A previous version of this blog post stated that no blacks were interviewed.  This was incorrect, as Mark Bowen is African American.  The error was regrettable.

Apologies to my few readers for not posting sooner, but I'm 5 of 6 chapters down on my dissertation and we have a paper ready for publication.  I have been working.

But, something caught my eye today: an article in Grist on local food in Alabama.  I found this to be amazing piece that really captures how whiteness is reproduced in the media.

First of all, one of those interviewed and none of the organizations covered are black.  This gives one the impression that local food is a solely white affair in Alabama.  But, this is clearly not true.

The Federation of Southern Cooperatives, which saves black land and organizes mostly black cooperatives of small family farmers, has been in operation since 1967, and grew out of the Civil Rights Movement.  Alabama has not one, but two HBCU agricultural universities, Tuskegee and Alabama A&M.  So, clearly the fight for the small farm has been in existence far longer than Jones Valley Urban Farm, the Front Porch Revival, or Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network.  In a fine example of how whiteness distorts reality, a fight that has been led for over forty years by black-run organizations is transformed into a fight led by trendy white heroes.

Furthermore, the claim that somehow the white side of the local food movement doesn't appeal to the white bourgeois is suspect at best.

Food has always been a way to affirm and reproduce identity. During Jim Crow, food practices acted as a way to reproduce white racial purity.  In her dissertation To Live and Dine in Dixie: Foodways and Culture in the Twentieth Century South, Angela Jill Cooley argues that because food was ingested and literally became to body of the consumer, it was strictly policed by racial mores.  Eating the right food was paramount to reproducing a healthy, pure, white body, and therefore part and parcel to the culture of Jim Crow.

Today's healthy lifestyle justification for local food is a similar purity narrative.  Propagated by elites and cultural producers, healthy lifestyle similarly reproduces white purity by relegating alternative food practices to marginal status.  As one member of the Health Action Partnership stated to me, "even when (black) people have access to good food, they don't know how to cook it.  They cook it with too much oil, and it cooks all the nutrients out of it."

The healthy lifestyle argument for local food is more about reproducing the status of those consuming it than about the actual health of the consumers. (One thinks of the numerous fundraising dinners with Frank Stitt or Chris Dupount and how their highly unhealthy food all of the sudden becomes healthy because it is fine dining).  Under both Jim Crow and modern food ways, the "pure food" is backed by the perceived legitimacy and objectivity of science, with whites using science to validate their foodways as objectively superior.  The white side of the local food movement, with its overarching focus on health and purity, is absolutely an elitist endeavor.  (I love how they talk about it not being elitist and then talk about Frank Stitt and Chris Hastings as the "original local food revolutionaries" three paragraphs later.)  Anyone who argues otherwise is selling something.

So what does all this mean?  Well, it means that there are deep racial divisions within the local food movement, divisions that are reproduced by media outlets, and which are reflected in the broader culture.  There are divisions in the local food movement because there are divisions in the local culture.

What can be done about it?  One thing is to hold media outlets like Grist accountable for their product.  What Grist did was simply lazy, but it had the unfortunate quality of marginalizing the groups that have led the fight for the small farm for decades.

Another thing that can be done is to host anti-racist workshops like the one Magic City Agriculture Project is hosting beginning next week and continuing for six months.  This Allies training will focus on cultivating resistance to white supremacy and building community around this resistance.

Why Health is Really a Stand-in for Class

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu reveals in his seminal text Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste that lifestyle is a function of an individual's position in society.  In "America's Fittest Cities," Atlantic blogger Richard Florida shows how those lifestyles are a function of uneven economic development in the US. In the rankings of the fittest Americans, "fitness" tracts roughly onto the division of labor between American cities.

Working class, poorer cities are "unfit," while wealthy cities with heavy knowledge industries are "fit."  The lifestyle dubbed healthy by the CDC and others is the lifestyle most appropriate to the labor market best characterized as post-industrial, information-oriented, and "creative," while the least "fit" lifestyles are associated with heavy industry and manufacturing, remnants of an older economic paradigm.

Think of it this way: the assembly line nature of fast food is more congruent with vertically integrated heavy industry or Fordism, while farmer's markets are more in line with creative, flexible, knowledge-based industries.  Foodies are more or less producing the food system of neoliberalism and flexible accumulation.  In other words, the people who have the "healthiest" lifestyle are the most affluent and they use the notion of health to legitimate and generalize the culture and lifestyle associated with affluence.

Simply put, the idea of an objectively healthy lifestyle serves more to legitimate the wealthy than it does to actually address the health needs of the exploited.

As I have said in previous posts, good food is a human right, and what counts as good food or a healthy lifestyle should be determined by those living that lifestyle - not by technocrats at the Health and Human Services and the Center for Disease Control.  These organizations base the assumptions of fitness for their research on the lifestyles of the elite.

For instance, the CDC's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (creepy name), on which the AFI is based, opens the exercise section with the question "During the past month, other than your regular job, did you participate in any physical activities or exercises such as running, calisthenics, golf, gardening, or walking for exercise?"  So the activity of an auto mechanic or construction worker during their regular job doesn't count as exercise?  Obviously, the question is remarkably biased in favor of those who do sedentary work and exercise for leisure - biased in favor of the lifestyle of the wealthy.  By the very structure of the survey, a working class person cannot be as fit as an elite.

Of course, there are negative health effects to not being wealthy, such as lack of adequate food and stress, but food activists should connect these to the unevenness associated with economic development and not try to generalize one, elitist culture of health and fitness for everyone.  At its root, food injustice is economic injustice.  This should be the starting point.