[MUSIC PLAYING]
Good evening, everyone.
Thanks for coming out on a snowy
night after a very sunny day
yesterday.
It's kind of a shock.
I'd like to welcome all
of you to Boston College
and to this evening's event in
BC's Park Street Corporation
Speaker Series, Health,
Humanity, and Ethics.
I'm Amy Boesky.
I'm chair of the English
Department and director of BC's
minor in medical humanities,
health, and culture.
And with my colleague,
Jim Keenan from Theology,
who unfortunately is
away this evening,
we direct BC's Park Street
Corporation Speaker Series.
The Speaker Series
launched in 2016.
We've have a thematic
bond each year.
And this year we've
been exploring
the health of the planet.
We've had a really
wonderful group of speakers
and tonight are really
fortunate to have
Willis Jenkins with us, who
has had a long day of travel.
Had to go south to come north.
And we're really
glad that he's here.
The goal of the
Speaker Series is
to address timely issues in the
intersecting fields of health,
humanity, and ethics.
We are greatly appreciative
both of the corporation
and the late Father Quinn,
whose generous commitment
to civic conversation
and the common good
aligns so well with the
mission of Boston College.
So we're honored this evening
to have Willis Jenkins with us,
whose talk will be titled,
"The Ethics of Food
and the Health of the Planet."
Willis will be introduced
by me colleague
Andrea Vicini from BC's School
for Theological Ministry.
Following the talk, there
will be time for questions.
And if I could ask you now
just to silence cellphones
and other things that
beep as we welcome
Andrea who will introduce
this evening's speaker.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
As Professor Boesky
just said, we
are very grateful to
welcome Professor Willis
Jenkins at Boston College.
After his studies
at Wheaton College
and the University of Virginia,
where his training focused
on contemporary
environmental ethics
and the classical
Christian theology.
Professor Jenkins taught
at Yale University
as Margaret Farley
Professor of Social Ethics,
while at the same time,
he had an appointment
at Yale School of Forestry
& Environmental Studies.
Since 2015, he teaches
at University of Virginia
as Professor of Religion,
Ethics, and Environmental
Studies, and co-director of the
Institute for Practical Ethics.
Currently, he's also directing
an environmental humanities lab
that develops transdisciplinary
reflections on coastal changes
at the University of Virginia's
Long Term Ecological Research
site funded by the National
Science Foundation.
At the University of
Virginia, his courses
study religion, ethics,
and global environment,
global ethics and
climate change,
the moral ecology of food,
environmental ethics,
and method and inquiry
in religious ethics.
His courses are
further confirmation
of his ongoing
research interests.
Professor Jenkin's
research explores
intersections of
religious ethics
with environmental humanities.
In his first book project,
Ecologies of Grace--
Environmental Ethics
and Christian Theology,
published in 2008, he undertook
comparative theological
readings in the context of
modern environmental questions.
His book won the John Templeton
Award for Theological Promise.
More recently, his
interests broadened
to interpret other models
of religious engagement
with environmental
thought, including
the relations of ethics
and environmental sciences,
particularly Christian social
ethics and its reckoning
with economics and
political violence.
As a result, he published
The Future of Ethics--
Sustainability, Social Justice,
and Religious Creativity,
published in 2013.
And this book won an American
Academy of Religion Award
for Excellence.
Moreover, Professor
Jenkins is also
interested in reflecting
on method as well
as on global ethics by
focusing particularly
on climate ethics and the
morality in Anthropocene.
Together with the co-edited
Routledge Handbook
of Religion and
Ecology, published
last year, and recent
articles on plutocracy,
on virtue ethics in climate
discourse, and of Pope Francis,
his remarkable list of
peer-reviewed articles,
book chapters, and
scholarly lectures
confirm his outstanding
expertise and commitment
in reflecting ethically
on sustainability.
And in promoting sustainable
conditions of life
for our planet.
Finally, he's currently
writing a book
on how the ethics
of food matters
for post-natural
environmental thought.
Tonight's lecture on
"The Ethics of food
and the Health of the
Planet," witnesses
his interest in food studies.
Without further ado,
Professor Willis Jenkins.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Professor Vicini
for a really kind and attentive
introduction.
There's so many good
people in this room
and I just want to thank
you for being here.
And for those of you
who don't know me,
I want to start off by
alleviating anxieties
that you may have.
If you came tonight for this
lecture slightly worried
that a professional ethicist
is going to tell you
what you're obligated
to eat, I'm not here
to prescribe for you a diet.
I understand that Michael
Pollan has been here already
in this series, so you've
received the food rules.
[INAUDIBLE] about that.
Instead, I want to try
and think of this space
between the ethics of the food
and the health of the planet.
So I'm going to explore
possible connections
between arguing over food
rules and interpreting
ecological change
at smaller scales.
And specifically, I'm going
to test the possibility
that everyday food ways
may carry the potential
under certain conditions
to function as sites
of deep cultural change.
And in a period of
cynical climate politics,
that holds the possibility
that reforming food ways
can nourish a kind of
long-term ecological hope
even in dark times.
One other disclaimer.
So I teach in religious
studies as we know.
And I'm going to use
some religious examples
at some point to make
these connections
between the ethics of food
and the health of the planet.
But I want to be
clear from the outset
that it's not my view
that you need religion
to make these connections.
Although it is possible
that you will leave here
thinking that I have in a sneaky
kind of way argued just that.
We'll see.
So let me start from
a religious case.
Scholars of religion
have an enduring interest
in food rules among the
Abrahamic traditions.
The distinctions there are
especially well marked.
Judaism eats kosher,
Islam eats halal,
Christianity marks
its difference
by prohibiting
food prohibitions.
And each has a distinctive
feasts, and fasts,
and many local
variations on the rules.
And I'm interested in a
particular set of variations,
the emergence of
eco-kosher, eco-halal,
and a Christian
vegetarian movement
to re-institute prohibitions.
[LAUGHTER]
So these variations, they
are interesting because they
bear disruptive potential
for their traditions.
In so far as religious food ways
produce a particular identity,
revising them can
call into question
the authorizing logic that
connects the religious body
to its symbolic order.
If the rational
for eating halal is
that it has been revealed that
some foods are permissible
and others are forbidden,
and not because halal
is more hygienic, or
humane, or healthier,
then an eco-halal can
seem almost disobedience
in its excess of dietary piety,
adding new stipulations that
are not grounded in
the Quran or Hadith
by referring to contemporary
ecological ideas.
And indeed, eco-halal is
regarded in just that way
sometimes with
suspicion for departing
from the culinary expression
of Muslim identity.
And so too, for eco-kosher
and Christian vegetarianism,
revising the food
way renegotiates
the logic of identity
expressed in the food region.
So what to make of
those variations?
What's going on there?
Keep that question in mind.
And then I want to turn
to planetary scales--
"A Cultivated Planet."
Jonathan Foley, an ecologist,
writes with many colleagues
on a widely-cited Nature
article of that title
that agriculture
is a massive driver
of global environmental
change, pushing
multiple systems
beyond what science
of the global resilience
call safe operating
space for humanity.
And depending on how we
count, semi-cultivated forest
agriculture takes
up half or more
of the arable, ice-free
land surface of the planet.
So major planetary
systems have been
reshaped by how we feed
ourselves-- planetary
nitrogen, the phosphorous
cycle, are now
dominated by agricultural
fertilization, which
has more than tripled
the natural background
rate of cycling for both.
Agriculture is also a major
contributor to global warming,
accounting for maybe 30% of
greenhouse gas emissions, which
is twice the
transportation sector.
It's the major determinant
of freshwater consumption.
And agricultural land
use has historically
been one of the most important
factors in biodiversity laws.
Or, another way to think about
it-- through agriculture,
a species that represents
about 0.5% of Earth's biomass
captures a quarter of the
planet's primary productivity.
So we should image
the challenges
of global environmental
governance
taking place on a farmed Earth.
That's one way to think
about Anthropocene--
the proposal that
human influence
pervades so many
planetary systems
that we should image
ourselves as living
in a new epic of national
history-- out of the Holocene
and into a post-national
period named
after the species remaking
the planet in its image.
And yet. even so, this
massive agricultural system
does not feed every
member of that species.
As you know, about 1
billion humans lack food.
Or in other words, 1
out of ever 7 humans
lives in chronic malnourishment.
And meanwhile, several billion
just above that threshold
aspire to eat
better than they do.
Particularly, as
their incomes rise,
they want to eat
more animal protein.
And moreover, global
population is still rising
and projected to reach
about 10 billion by 2050.
Meeting the basic needs
of that growing population
while delivering the diet
that higher income people seem
to demand will
require a doubling
in agricultural output.
And that's without any
increase in biofuels.
So agriculture represents
an already massive system
of energy capture and
faces intense pressure
to deliver even more.
Drawing down-- to use a metaphor
from the climate movement--
is not an option.
And one of the most important
anthropogenic drivers
will environmental change.
Indeed, it seems, to
meet human hunger,
cultivation of the
planet must intensify.
Is that even possible?
David Tilman and
Michael Clark, two
of the most authoritative
food system researchers,
find that daily food demand
in the wealthiest countries,
mostly because of their
demand for animal-based foods,
requires producing
8,000 calories of food
to deliver 3,500 to each person,
of which about 25% is wasted.
But that seems to be the
diet that people want.
For as incomes rise,
humans everywhere
are demanding more meat
and more disposable
products with empty calories.
You can't see that at all.
That is a graph that
says as incomes rise,
people want more meat.
So Tilman and Clark estimate
that the global average diet,
if you include forecast of
global per capita income rise,
would have to have 31%
more meat, 58% more dairy,
and feed about 2
million more people.
And that diet, finds
a research article
in the Proceedings of the
Natural Academy of Sciences,
would consume all of humanity's
carbon budget in 2015
and more than double
the amount of nitrogen
that can be safely added
to planetary systems.
In other words, it would be a
disaster for planetary health.
But maybe it would also be
a disaster for human health.
So these three Harvard
public health researchers
summarizing their
findings in the Journal
of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences
write that replacing red meat
with nuts, fish, poultry,
legumes, would be
optimal for human health.
That's a picture of the
Harvard Healthy Plate.
And it just so happens they note
that red meat has the highest
emissions impact.
The diets that would
promote human health
and environmental sustainability
broadly intersect, they say.
Tilman and Clark, those food
system ecologists, they agree.
So they assess--
I'm sorry, these
graphs are not as--
I'll just tell
you what they say.
I can't believe [INAUDIBLE].
These scientists assessed
the greenhouse gas emissions
of three diets with
better health outcomes--
so, three diets that are
recommended by nutritionists--
Mediterranean,
pescaterian, vegetarian.
They find that, if these
were globally adopted,
it would reduce greenhouse gas
emissions by a third to a half.
A dietary transition in
that direction-- basically,
away from ruminant meats
and toward plants--
would cancel out the food
demand from population growth,
leading to net-zero growth in
agricultural sector greenhouse
gas emissions.
So that's a snapshot of food
systems and planetary health.
And I think there's
two basic takeaways.
One, we have to thoroughly
rethink what agriculture is.
Settler imaginations
often think of agriculture
as a humanized domain
captured from wilderness,
from pure nature, and
[? set to ?] productive humans.
Among several problems
with that idea
is that the influence
of humans, obviously,
no longer stops at the
borders of protected areas.
The whole planet,
including its forests,
now bear the mark of
human cultivation.
The surface of the planet,
it's not farms and cities
and wilderness.
It's a humanized domain
with, more or less,
intensively managed regimes.
So in that "Cultivated
Planet" article,
Foley's basically asking
us to think about Earth
as one big farm.
And he writes this.
"Until recently, most
agricultural paradigms
have focused on improving
production, often
to the detriment
of the environment.
Likewise, many environmental
conservation strategies
have not sought to
improve food production."
And basically, we have to
overcome that dichotomy.
So we have to rethink human
interaction with biosphere
reserves as productive in
addition to protective--
or at least, we have to pay
attention to the farm work
that we are asking our
biosphere reserves to do--
absorb nutrients, filter water,
pollinate [? rocks, ?] so on.
And we also need to rethink
about how agriculture might
be protective in
addition to being
productive-- to be protective
of ecological systems
on which we all depend.
For settler North
Atlantic societies,
that means a tectonic shift in
ideas of nature and culture.
But it's not as if
that's something
that we have not heard before.
That human health and ecological
health coincide is totally
unsurprising to agrarians
like Wendell Berry,
and [? Jean ?] [? Lodgkin, ?]
and Wes Jackson and Norman
Wirzba, who have been voices
from that long tradition that
connect political health,
moral health, body health,
and soil health.
We'll come back
to the agrarians.
There's a second takeaway.
The global average diet
appears that it must change.
In fact, it must reverse, moving
in exactly the opposite way
from its current
direction, and transition
toward eating more products
from ruminant animals.
All of the ecological analyses
support that basic takeaway.
Key planetary systems
cannot support the expansion
of current forms of
animal agriculture.
Yet none of those
analyses have an idea
for how that reversal,
of course, might happen--
except in one clue in the
data from Tilman and Clark--
which is inscrutable to you.
But there's an arrow
pointing to a data point.
This shows that the one
country that does not
follow this trend--
this is [? coming out here ?]
underneath-- that
as income rises, it
doesn't want more meat.
And that country is India.
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah, because food is
intimately connected
with how we understand
ourselves and our world.
And the connections of
religion and identity
are some of the strongest bonds
between food and identity,
which makes it very
hard to change,
but very powerful when
they do begin to change.
OK.
So now, I'm going
to say something
about culture, identity,
and food waste,
starting from a
very funny history--
a cultural history of the
feast by an archaeologist named
Martin Jones, who has a
hypotheses about where
modern grain
monocultures came from.
He asked, well, why did
wheat take over the continent
of Europe 1500 years ago?
It's not because it
was easier to grow
or because it produced
more calories.
Rye and barley were better
adapted to the local soil.
They could deliver more
nutrition, he says.
Jones thinks that wheat
won because the push
into white bread followed
the growth of Christianity.
Because at the center of the
Christian ceremonial feast
was an airy bread that
needed to be made from wheat.
And the dark breads made
with local grains in Europe
became associated with
Paganism, and were
abandoned as territories
came under the control
of Christendom.
Historical patterns of serial
agriculture, argues Jones,
follow the shifting boundary
between Pagan and Christian
Europe.
Under the culinary
sign of the Eucharists,
wheat bread came to
symbolize civilization.
And that association
endured through
the Protestant
Reformation, which
altered everything
else about communion,
but not wheat as an ingredient.
So wheat followed Christian
settlers around the world.
If Jones is even-- if he's even
partially correct about that,
his account suggests
that a religious feast
has shaped one pathway
by which humans are now
changing the climate.
The bread of daily
tables following
the cultural preferences
developed in the symbolic world
of the communion table.
Wheat agriculture now
terraforms huge swaths
of the Earth's surface, which in
turn influences how the planet
regulates thermal energy.
That does not mean that climate
change is a direct consequence
of the New Testament any more
than it is of eating meat.
It just illustrates
that modern paths
of agricultural
production can be
shaped by a culinary
aesthetic that
was, in turn, shaped
by connections
of food and religious identity.
And of course, that
culinary aesthetic
was also influenced
by the interests
of industrial agriculture.
So we get germless,
long-shelf-life Wonder Bread.
To be clear, I am not
saying that Christianity
is to blame for Wonder Bread.
I'm saying that
if Jones is right,
Wonder Bread was made possible
by a cultural affinity
for wheat that was elevated
by the Christian feast.
And the possibility of us
sharing a derisive laugh
at Wonder Bread has
been opened, I think,
by newer and different feasts.
The developing connections
of food and identity
in the emergence of what's
called the alternative food
movement which is
happening around the world
There seems to be this
remarkable rethinking
of our food systems through a
kind of political [INAUDIBLE],,
the slow food
movement in Europe.
Food sovereignty,
especially powerful
in South America and
sub-Saharan Africa,
and indigenous political
thinkers everywhere.
Locavorism and food
justice in North America.
And, of course, there's been
new interest in long-standing
vegetarian and vegan options,
around which all matter
of further qualifiers
may gather--
free range, organic,
non-GMO, fair trade,
animal welfare certified,
bird-friendly, forest-fed,
heirloom, heritage, paleo.
So we're living in this time
of remarkable political and
cultural interest in food,
not only among foodies,
but among social
reformers of many sorts.
Books about the meaning
of food are bestsellers.
And the most famous of the
food writers, Mike Pollan,
suggests that what unites these
many movements is a shared
recognition that the
industrial food system is
unhealthy and unsustainable.
And the various ways that
movements have developed that
basic criticism-- they're
forced to revisit [INAUDIBLE]
of identity and
inherited foodways--
maybe disrupting them,
maybe repairing them.
It's not an accident, I
think, that Pollan's own book,
The Omnivore's
Dilemma, is dense with
a quasi-religious vocabulary.
Pollan refers to the
karmic price of a meal,
to industrial agriculture
in terms of a fall,
to local food and
redemption tropes.
And he closes the book by
describing his perfect meal
in terms of purification, grace,
sacrament, and karma, again.
It's confusing.
But I think he's reaching
for a religious metaphor
because he's trying
to give expression
to the depth of meaning at
stake in changing foodways.
Patricia Storace,
commenting in the New York
Review of Books about the spate
of recent publications on food,
writes that "what makes the
new range in possibility
in writing about
food exciting is
that we're witnessing
a rare tectonic
shifting of a deeply rooted
aesthetic and moral hierarchy."
Storace remembers that
Confucius cultivated manners
in eating as a
philosophy of life
because for him, the
practice of eating
was a microcosm of how humans
should govern themselves
in the world.
That helps explain why
intentional departures
from the conventional table
manners, culinary arts,
or agricultural
habits of a society
can disrupt entire
cultural regimes.
Ways of eating often
connect cultivation of self
with governance of nature.
As food movements ask us to
rethink inherited foodways,
they make work to reassess
the cosmologies carried
by those foodways.
The counter-cultural turn away
from germless, monocrop wheat
products to whole,
heritage grains
is part of a generational
reversal in North America.
Many now actually disdain white
bread and associate dark bread
with health, and
perhaps especially
the bread that tastes
of local yeast, that
are made from ancient grains.
What drives that kind of change?
OK, Bon Appetit drives
part of that change, yes.
But there may be some
aspect of what Storace
is describing as
this tectonic shift
in deeply-rooted
moral hierarchy.
The causes of [INAUDIBLE]
in the food movement--
there are many, obviously.
They're contextually diverse.
One aspect that
I'm interested in
is this anxiety about
planetary health.
So we've just seen that the food
system puts a lot of pressure
on the planet.
And the pressure runs
the other way, too.
One of the most serious
threats of climate change
is to growing food.
When climate scientists
benchmark temperature changes
in the 10,000-year period
of human agriculture,
they are signalling that the
set of ecological conditions
in which human agriculture
developed is now vulnerable
to the implications of
having a farmer planet.
As climate change exerts that
kind of biophysical pressure,
it also exerts
cultural pressure.
For example, the idea--
just the idea of
anthropogenic climate change
destabilizes North American
imaginations of nature.
It signifies, as Bill
McKibben famously put it,
the end of nature!
Because, in US
environmental thinking,
nature has been more
natural and more valuable
the more distant it
is from humanity.
What made wilderness
sacred to John Muir
and the entire
preservation ideal that
followed after him was its
utter difference from humanity.
And in an era of pervasive
anthropogenic influence
over Earth, the conceptual
icon for environmental politics
can no longer be that nature
of pristine wilderness.
We're compelled,
for better or worse,
to think of hybrid natures--
always in relation to humans.
And while it would
have outraged Muir,
the wilderness mystic who was
always kind of embarrassed
about his farming--
while it would
have outraged him,
the conceptual icon
in US nature writing
seem to be shifting from
wilderness to food and farming.
In his book After
Nature, Jedediah Purdy,
[? a legal ?] scholar
at Duke, argues
that one reason why
food activism has become
a site of reformist
political attention
is because it allows
environmental thought
to reckon with key uncertainties
of a life in Anthropocene.
"Rather than the politics
of protected areas,
the next politics of
nature," writes Purdy,
"will be something
different and more intense--
active responsibility
for the world
we make and for the
ways of life that world
fosters or destroys."
As climate change puts pressure
on our ideas of natures
and culture, food
offers a synecdoche
of its basic challenge.
It's responsibility for a
human-made world in which we
nonetheless, as
hungry animals, remain
[? utterly ?] [INAUDIBLE].
So reforming foodways,
it offers the possibility
of experimenting with new
vocabularies in nature--
for making biocultural
lexicons in which things
can be both special
and produced,
both sacred and cultivated--
both wild and farmed, maybe.
It makes sense, then,
that agricultural tropes
begin showing up in
climate discourse.
Thinking about climate
engineering proposals,
the climate scientist
Mike Hulme has
proposed that we think
in agricultural terms.
We cultivate land-- agriculture.
We cultivate the
sea-- aquaculture.
So now we must
recognize that we have
begun to cultivate the sky--
weatherculture, he proposes.
The metaphor of
cultivation, thinks Hulme,
opens a better way of thinking
about the human relationship
with the atmosphere.
As with agriculture,
the question
is not if humans should
be involved with it,
but what the criteria are
for good involvements, which
includes deciding what kind
of human-climate relationship
we want.
The intersection itself
is not a problem.
With care, a product can
be beautiful and sustained.
The problem with the
current human involvement
with the atmosphere
is that it is
haphazard, wasteful, dangerous,
unjust, and finally, tasteless-
everything you don't
want in the food system.
So perhaps now, with the
mention of climate engineering,
you're beginning to
feel some hesitation
about this post-natural shift.
Think of planetary ecology
in terms of agriculture.
If climate change-- sorry.
If climate engineering
is an implication
of this shift from wilderness
to agriculture as a place
to think about our
environments, should we really
embrace the idea of
cultivating the planet?
Hulme is not himself arguing
for climate engineering,
but he's saying, we cannot
simply reject it as unnatural.
However we want to meet
the climate challenge,
it's going to require
an acknowledgement
of the human role
in the planet--
one in which humans
co-produce Earth's atmosphere.
Is farming really the sort
of relationship with Earth
that we want?
Several leading teams
of Earth scientists
have called for reclaiming
ecological research and policy
within the concept of
planetary stewardship,
to move away from protecting
benchmarks of pure nature
toward actively designing
planetary systems.
And they appeal to the steward--
that classic figure of good
farming, where it suggests he
has a productive responsibility.
Agrarian models of
relations appear ideal.
Careful collaborations
of humans and land
seem especially attractive to
this post-natural ecological
thinking, which is
maybe one reason why
writer like Wendell
Berry and Vandana Shiva
have captured the
interest of so many,
that they make good farming
into an emblem of resistance
to industrial exploitation.
In the bio-cultural
collaborations through which
we make food, think
Shiva and Berry,
we become violent or caring,
exploitative or just.
And Hulme extends that thought
to cultivating climate.
Rather than putting
science, economics,
and politics of the
planet at the center
of the story of climate,
said the scientist,
I'm suggesting that we
put our self-understanding
of human purpose and
virtue at the center.
The basic point here is that
the ecological significance
of food systems goes
far beyond the carbon
footprint and the [INAUDIBLE].
Food systems reproduce ideas
about humanity's purpose
and character in
the order of things.
Eating is a kind
of cultural act,
Wendell Berry has famously said.
The rest of his
work explains how
agriculture inscribes
into Earth's body
the stories of who people are.
The health of the
lands from which eat,
for Berry, depicts
the implications
of the stories by which
we interpret ourselves
and our relations.
In other words, eating is
a cosmological act too.
It's world-making
and self-shaping.
He says in that way we might
think of alternative food
movements as involved in tasks
of cosmological reordering
as they respond to
planetary pressures.
As food movements develop new
vocabularies of ethical light
with nature, maybe they
move from stewardship
to permaculture,
or from settling
to unsettling, or from food
security to food sovereignty.
As they do that, they reset
the biocultural context
for what Hulme calls
our self-understanding
of human purpose and virtue.
So, to be clear, I'm not
arguing that foodways offer
solutions for planetary health.
I'm suggesting that they are
a context in which people
may reinterpret
what health means,
for us and for the
ecologies that we
are producing with Earth.
Various food ethics
carry imaginations
of ecological health
and of human purposes
in cultivating it.
Those ecologists with which
I began, the ones that
are connecting agriculture
and planetary systems,
they set the health parameters
by the minimal safe operating
space sustaining the current
form of civilization,
which definitely seems prudent.
But it does suggest a possible
range in either direction.
And we might refer
to cultivating
a planet with
living coral reefs,
for example, which
is not included
in the parameters
of Tilman and Clark,
or with [INAUDIBLE]
the landscape,
or maybe with polar bears even.
Or, in the other
direction, we might
prefer the planet as terraformed
for monocrops, optimized
for energy capture with
biotic communities redesigned
to serve the systems where
their product could be maximized
by markets and distributed
by plutocratic demand,
which is pretty much
the planet that our food
system is actually now making.
As we understand
our cuisines to be
entangled with
planetary systems,
our culinary responses
may interpret
how we imagine repairing
relations with Earth.
The chef Dan Barber has
argued for a cuisine that
expresses all the ecological
relations of the landscapes,
that moves beyond
ingredients to serve
the relations of a
working landscape.
So the example there
is a parsnip steak
served with the bread
made from a cover crop
and an amount of animal
protein proportionate
to what the soil can sustain.
Barber says of this plate that
rooted in the natural world,
it becomes a blueprint
for one big farm,
forever in flux, connected
to a larger community,
narrated by a cook
through his food.
So Barber is unusual
among chefs for the way
that his cuisine attempts
to explicitly interpret
ecological health.
And his third plate
offers a, I think,
to what might be happening in my
opening case of the eco-halal.
That alternative food
way may not become a site
for adherence to work
through uncertainties
in the relation of Islam
to a changing Earth,
and being Muslim in
the Anthropocene.
That's happening in art, because
climate change is putting
pressure on every
tradition and every culture
to interpret how humans
related to the planet.
Or to incorporate into
their stories of purpose
and character, some
account of human relations
with a human-changed Earth.
So I would not call
Barber's cuisine religious
or just the same way
as Islam, obviously.
But maybe it's "relig-ish."
It carries cosmological depths.
It's pushing leaders to
reconsider their place
and an order of
things-- their purposes
and self-understanding.
So about this cultural turn
from wilderness toward food,
I'm arguing that
foodways offer us sites
for developing a post-natural
politics of ecological health.
A politics in which
humans have responsibility
for cultivating the ecologies
in which we care and [INAUDIBLE]
independent.
If the shift from wilderness to
food in environmental thought
affects a larger
intellectual shift,
the needs of making moral
sense of the Anthropocene,
then food may well be a
site to rethink agriculture
and conservation at
once, like [INAUDIBLE]
and the other scientists
were suggesting we must.
In other words,
these new arguments
and the ethics of food may
represent a tectonic shift
from thinking of humanity
as separate from nature,
to rethinking
humanity as entangled
with biocultural relations.
[INAUDIBLE]
Like I am celebrating a great
discovery that just popped up
on Dan Barber's plate.
Let me quickly say that so many
cultures, from so many time
periods would join a thousand
contemporary indigenous
voices saying it was
stupid to make up
separate ideas of nature and
culture in the first place.
And that [INAUDIBLE],,
the contingent product
of enlightened Europe, you
are just now discovering
has a civilizational
debt [INAUDIBLE]..
They might be right.
"That was always the
trouble with wilderness,
that it reproduce a view of
humans as separate from nature.
Only people who's relation
to the land was already
alienated," writes the historian
of wilderness William Cronon,
"could hold up wilderness
as a model for human life
and nature.
The imagination of wilderness
recoils from anywhere humans
have done something
with their landscape--
from cities, from
domesticated animals,
and especially from agriculture.
And it refuses infamously
to see landscapes
made by productive relations
with indigenous peoples,
through cultivated
rainforests, for example.
So perhaps the icon for
environmental thought
has shifted toward food
as people see models
for living in
urbanized environments
and through productive work with
landscapes and other creatures.
Foodways offer roots to a
reconciled relation with land,
toward imagining a
mutual flourishing
of Earth and humans."
OK.
Let me pause for a moment for
some skeptical reconsideration
here.
Can food movements really
bear such deep cultural power?
I have so far led
you down a path that
sends a dream of
whole foods that
can solve planet change by
purchasing food with a better
story about itself.
You can enjoy the $300 menu
at Dan Barber's restaurant
and have the additional
satisfaction of considering
an act of radical politics.
Is this not
[? just moralizing ?]
elite consumption?
Another critique of the turn
towards food and agriculture
and environmental thought
holds that the focus
has shifted from wild nature
because the wild has already
been lost.
The effort to protect land
and create preserves and save
the dangerous
pieces has just been
swamped by pervasive
human degradation
of planetary systems.
So with the wild gone,
the green counter-cultural
has retreated to
defending the pastoral.
Or maybe it was
there that similarly
retreated to dining well,
to an invasion of politics
by gastronomy.
But maybe they're exactly wrong.
Maybe nature needs
defense more than ever.
Maybe giving in to the
idea of the Anthropocene
is just capitulation
to a farmed planet,
to the death warrant of
polar bears and coral reefs.
Maybe the food movement
has been colonized
by the forces of
consumptive capitalism,
as so co-opted into another
era of-- a more intensified era
of colonizing the planet.
Or a still deeper critique of
the alternative food movement
holds that while
colonizing the planet,
it may also reproduce
the settler and colonial
mindset that subconsciously
warmed so many white readers
to Michael Pollan and Wendell
Berry in the first place.
Criticizing what she calls,
"the unbearable whiteness
of alternative food
movements," the food study
scholar Julie Guthman writes
that, "for some enthusiasts,
the [INAUDIBLE],,
they romanticize
the American agrarian
imaginary [INAUDIBLE]..
The explicitly
racist ways in which
historically American
land has been distributed
and labor has been organized."
Considering the way that
Thomas Jefferson's legacy
has functioned in my own
context, that seems plausible.
Some impulses to locavorism in
Montpelier Piedmont in Virginia
do indeed seem to be carried
by mostly white nostalgia
for a colonial fantasy land of
self-reliant sustainable farms
who have hardly ever
existed, in part
of the
plantation-friendly policy
that Jefferson
himself supported.
In fact, Jefferson's
agrarian narrative
of independent farmers at the
bosom of democratic virtue
repeatedly provide
the moralization
for breaking treaties and
clearing lands for expansion
of a white settler state--
a settler state,
itself still reliant
on enslaving people
for farm labor
while decimating actual
self-reliant indigenous
food systems.
So, consumers reproduce
that self-deception
when we purchase
culinary emblems
of agrarian-themed
food, instead of working
to interrupt the
food system that
continues to depend on the
structurally racist ways
on exploited labor and continues
to deplete and structurally
set their ways in the soil
for which everything lives.
So the standard American
diets from a food economy
with a plantation mindset,
while we dissenters
eat from an agrarian economy
with notions of virtue and food
production have all along
provided the moralization
for exploited labor
and stolen land.
Michael Twitty, in his amazing
book, The Cooking Gene,
writes that, "American
foodways have only just
begun to reckon with
the violence done
by plantation slavery.
How Americans eat,
and with whom we eat
are still shaped by the
legacies of white supremacy."
Twitty is therefore--
Twitter is not cautious,
but Twitty is cautious,
"toward emotionally white food
with interest in reclaiming
historical foodways,"
because his culinary
priority is,
as he puts it, "food
being a tool for repair
within the walls of
black identities."
And you can't see
the picture there,
but it shows him on settling
interest in historical foodways
by reenacting the role
of an enslaved plantation
cook on plantations.
And he called it his
Southern comfort food.
His performed point--
the alternative foodways
that may off for
black Americans a way
to resist ongoing
cultural oppression, made
of their adoption
by white Americans,
unintentionally contribute
to that oppression.
It's not just what we
grow and what we eat,
but what it means for who
we are, in body and position
as we are, and the many
different histories from which
we come.
So elite, foodie consumption
is an easy target here.
But other aspects
of the food movement
can also deflate political
confrontation with injustice.
For example, when the
Food Justice Project
supposes that
their effective way
to fight hunger in a food desert
is to start a community garden,
that can make it seem as if the
main reason that children are
hungry and sick in this country
is because their families don't
grow food as they should,
or at least that they're
food preferences are
not yet fully virtuous.
But food deserts
are not naturally
occurring features
of some landscapes,
just in need of some
urban homesteading,
and they don't reflect
consumer preferences.
They are made scarcities.
They are a result, obviously, of
food and water fleeing poverty
and flowing toward wealth.
So maybe the reason the so
many children are malnourished
in this country is because their
families have systematically
impoverished.
And so if that's true, then
maybe realistically fighting
childhood malnourishment
requires intensifying conflict
with a racist,
plutocratic economy.
So maybe busying ourselves with
community gardens and nutrition
classes just
reinforces this idea
that unhealth in our food system
is attributable to ignorant
choices, to vice.
And if only more people read
Michael Pollan's, Food Rules
we'd be better.
If only people read
those scientists,
the planetary help,
with which I began,
as they should, and then turned
to eat more plants-- if only
they knew.
If only they made better
better choices then
our personal health and
our planetary health
would be better.
So you can see the
line, the critique.
The problem is
ecological foodieism
is not just that
it's totally affluent
or it's more culturally
attracted to white people.
It's that it imagines
political ecologies
in ways that obscure injustice
and naturalize privilege.
That's a pretty tough,
unsettling critique.
And I'm not going to fully
rescue the food movement
from it.
But-- but, Twitty
suggests in that comment
about repairing black
identity from the legacies
of white supremacy by
recovering heritage foodways.
That alternative food
movements may also
work to resist or repair
systemic injustice.
The Coalition of
Immokalee Workers
has connected the field tomato
to modern slavery and help
revivify efforts for
food worker justice.
The food sovereignty movements
within indigenous networks
have brought new attention to
the way settler colonialism
continues to disrupt
indigenous food systems,
and have made reclaiming
those foodways
a practice for indigenous
collective survival.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the
food sovereignty movement
has mobilized attention to
the great land grab happening
across the global south,
as corporate and cultural
producers from
northern hemispheres
seek to lock in land
and water resources,
partially in response to
climate uncertainties created
by the global
[? agricultural ?] system.
So you can see how
adaptations to climate change
can re-inscribe the
naturalized or [INAUDIBLE]
it's caused by climate change.
So even flow food--
even slow food has
serious political roots.
Carlos Petrini, the Italian
founder of the slow food
movement has actually called
for a gastronomy of liberations,
which he says entails liberation
from unevenness, oppressions
and violence perpetuated
on environmental people--
the scandal of hunger
and malnutrition.
The Italian scholar of slow
food, [? Sarah ?] [INAUDIBLE]----
she traces the back-story
of the slow food eaters,
interpreting landscapes as a
record of violence suffered
by the rural poor,
overlaid by violence
suffered through
industrial transformation.
With no romantic nostalgia
toward agrarian past,
it seeks liberation
from the violences
written into the body of the
land, and the body of its core.
She writes, "Slow
food in Europe is
the claim for food
justice, which
means justice for the people
that eat the food, justice
for the communities
that produce it,
justice for the land that
sustain the production,
and justice for the biosphere
that enables these processes
and eventually absorbs
their effects."
And she observes that
in New York state,
slow food participants like
Colin repeat the [INAUDIBLE]
slogan, the pleasure
is political,
without actually tending
to the movement's politics.
This possibility of slowly,
deeply, countering violences
long accumulated and
inscribed into our land
I find especially helpful
in this dark period of a US
democratic justice and
environmental policy.
Legacies of white supremacy
and planetary environmental
problems are overwhelming
enough without having
to confront actual white
supremacists or cynical climate
politics of our
current administration.
Reforming foodways can work
upstream from those politics.
Which is not to say,
obviously [INAUDIBLE] we
can eat well and call it hope.
It's to say that the table
is a political gathering
and a biological assembly.
In the social and
ecological relations
we convene there at our tables.
And in the stories into
which we incorporate them,
we may be able to remember
and begin to repair
the violences that we inherit.
The politics of climate
change are difficult, not just
because of their capture
by fossil fuel interests.
Planetary problems unfold
within systems and relations
that no individual directly
causes or experiences.
And this makes them difficult
for our political imaginations
or our moral imaginations
to get its mind around.
Humanity is causing radiative
forces in the atmosphere,
but no one in
particular does that.
And the experience
of its consequences
are perceptible only through
probabilistic interpretations
unfolding in non-linear way
across unfamiliar scales
of space and time.
This is the rise of humanity
as an agent or planetary change
as divorced from the agency that
we have in our everyday world
lives.
And so it can seem to overwhelm
us at the ordinary scale.
The philosopher Bruno
Latour says, "People are not
equipped with the mental
and emotional repertoire
to deal with such a
vast scale of events.
They have difficulty submitting
to such a rapid acceleration,
for which in addition they're
supposed to feel responsible,
while in the meantime
this call for action
has none of the traits of their
older revolutionary dreams."
That's maybe one reason
why it's hard to get people
to work on climate change.
You're asking people to get
involved with a problem that
can't be solved.
And it can't be solved at the
level in which they can act.
I'm teaching a class right
now-- an undergraduate class
on climate ethics.
And I don't think they realize
how hard the ask really is.
I'm asking them to be
committed to a problem
that they can't solve
in their lifetime.
So in this very
historical moment
that humans learn
that our powers have
made us responsible
for the planet, we
ourselves overwhelmed by the
scales of [INAUDIBLE] involved.
And so we may feel powerless
to exercise responsibility.
Food is different.
No one has to convince you
that dinner is a problem,
or that you need to take
responsibility for it,
or that there are ways
of successfully doing so.
You're probably
working on that problem
right now, with an increasingly
large amount of your mind,
wondering what you're
going to have for dinner
and when is this
lecture going to end.
And what will be left for
me to eat after the lecture?
Precisely because food
is so basic and everyday,
intimately involved
in the stories that
shape our identities,
foodways offer arenas
in which to enact agency, to
interpret complex systems.
Whereas the ability
to act meaningfully
seems undermined by
global structures,
overwhelmed by
planetary systems,
food choices remain a
site of relative freedom.
It's hard, almost impossible
to escape fossil energy,
but ordinary persons
may come to sense
in a food chose, the
opportunity to choose
between biocultural
systems of sustenance.
Which I think is why all
those qualifying aggregators--
the bird-friendly and
fair trade and paleo--
why did they become important?
Because they're
offering choices between
an industrial metabolism
and some other alternative
metabolism.
And meanwhile,
precisely because food
is a material driver
of planetary systems
and global structures,
doing things with food
can be used to
register discontent
with the systems that seem
to undermine malignancy.
They allow eaters to
affiliate with alternatives.
They allow producers
to participate
in networks of responsibility
like fair trade,
or to envision
entirely different
civilizational
arrangements, which
I think is basically
what permaculture does.
The discontent-- that's
not just a possibility
for affluent consumers.
The political theorist David
Schlosberg and Romand Coles
argue that, "such a practical
discontent should not
be seen as a post-material
supportance for the wealthy."
Focusing on food desert
projects in Detroit,
they argue that by seeking,
"different material
circulations of sustenance,
some food movements
enact different possibilities
of political circulation, even
different human-earth
relations."
They call that prefigurative
politics, a way of practices
disbelief in the main
channels of circulation
by organizing and
performing alternatives.
So these food movements,
they don't necessarily
represent the invasion of
politics, but neither do they
have to explain how they
can be immediately scaled up
to a feasible solution.
Because the point
is there are sites
where individuals
and communities are
dissenting from some
biocultural system
and imagining
alternative metabolisms.
I think you could
interpret permaculture
especially that way.
The anthropologist of
morality, Mary Mattingly talks
about everyday life
as a moral laboratory
where sometimes, "the
quotidian places of life
becomes sites where we invent
new possibilities, just
in the little problems
that we face--
places where we vent an
expansion of political agency.
Places deep in the
moral imagination,
in the face of challenges that
maybe overwhelm our cognition.
Places to take our cultural
tool kits and the possibilities
of our inherited soils
and acknowledging
all of the [INAUDIBLE]
cultivating the possibilities
for them.
I'm going to close by returning
to this case of eco-halal.
In the course of
making an argument
that her fellow Muslims
should become vegetarian,
Kecia Ali, from nearby
Boston University
argues that, "People who allow
concern for animals and ecology
appropriately diminishes
the performance
of authentic Muslim identity,
while nonetheless elevating
interest in how food practices
construct a habitually
virtuous self," which
on her interpretation
is the primary goal
of being Muslim.
Islamic identity is not
sublimated to the planetary
on the view, because for Ali
the tradition contextualizes
the development of globally
concerned food practices
within distinctly Muslim habits
of self-scrutiny, hospitality,
moderation within
Muslim virtues.
So the particular
moral practices
that produced an Islamic self
incorporate planetary relation.
And the fact that they have a
broader context for developing
a virtuous person
guard against some
of those liabilities to
which I've just suggested
food movements are exposed.
So the self-scrutiny, the
hospitality and moderation
are moral habits that
help prevent vegetarianism
or any other alternative foodway
from becoming a mere consumer
identity or grounds for elitist
judgement of non-vegetarians.
And they are ideally what
separates eco-halal vegetarian
practice from other
forms of vegetarianism.
So what Ali suggests-- if I
can extend her argument more
generally, is that one way to
cultivate durable disbelief
in the moral economy
or dominant foodways
is to locate alternative
practices in some relatively
comprehensive understanding
of the purposes of a life--
on that includes some vision
of appropriate biocultural
relations with others, including
other animals, landscapes,
and maybe Earth,
and maybe even God.
And so now you think, here
comes the stinky religious
conclusion.
Yeah, I'm not
arguing that you have
to have conventional
religious beliefs in order
to situate foodways in that
broader account of a human life
and its purposes.
But I am suggesting that doing
so, insofar as foodways do
that, is an exercise of an
existential dimension that
could be aptly described as
religious or "relig-ish."
And although they come into
view especially clearly when
we see someone-- an Islamic
scholar like Kecia Ali
do it, the depths of moral
and political interpretation
that I have in mind happened
in accounts that don't think
themselves to be religious.
And I'll close with these two.
The scholar of
[INAUDIBLE],, Graham Harvey,
argues that, "Religion
is not about identifying
cognitive beliefs anyway.
Religion is," he says,
"fundamentally how
people negotiate what to
eat, with whom to have sex
and how to treat strangers."
In fact, Harvey speculates
that the first everyday problem
from which archaic
religion arose
was the awkward meeting of some
beings to eat other beings.
Religion arose,
Harvey is arguing,
as a cross-species
[INAUDIBLE] of eating.
A way of negotiating
the taking of life.
And now food practices-- modern
alternative food practices
might be trying to develop
new forms of cross-species
[INAUDIBLE].
In particular, ritual
gratitude for the creatures
who become our food may give
them a place at our table
as participants.
And it's possible to consider
some alternative foodway
that way.
It's possible to consider
locavorism and animal-friendly
food in a post-humanist,
pre-religious way,
as commensality with
landscapes, with animals,
and with a relationship
with the living world.
In her book,
Braiding Sweetgrass,
which arises from
an intersection
of indigenous thinking
and academic biology,
the Potowatomi scholar
Robin Wall Kimmerer
writes of a practical
reverence cultivated
in certain indigenous
ways of sustenance.
She goes on to say that
practical reverence is
a first step toward learning the
grammar of [INAUDIBLE],, which
she holds as necessary
for the new peoples living
on this continent.
Indigenous languages
and practices
have great aptitude for
that grammar," she says.
But Kimmerer, in what
is a controversial form
of generosity, suggests that,
"Immigrant cultures to Turtle
Island," to North
America, "may also
learn it, even in their own
grammatically impoverished
languages, and so begin
to become not native,
but naturalized to this place.
Being naturalized of
place," she writes,
"means to live as if this
is the land that feeds you.
As if these are the streams
from which you drink,
that build your body
and feed your spirit."
So if Harvey and Kimmerer
are on to something,
then certain foodways
may begin to do deep work
in the cultural headwaters
upstream from our climate
politics.
They can be practices
that let the land
work on our moral imaginations
in which relations
with other creatures can
begin to make claims on us.
They can unsettle the stories
settler people tell ourselves.
And they can name the violence
we inherit from slavery.
One step, or a kind of dark
hope in these early days
of the Anthropocene.
Even living in an America
[INAUDIBLE] whose powers are
largely celebrated by
the dominant religion
there lies the possibility
of practical reverence,
of cultivating
gratitude and knowledge
and beauty at our tables.
So I think this space
between the ethics of food
and the health of the
planet do some work for us
in a way that excavates the
potential for intentional food
practices to do
biocultural work.
But I'm not suggesting
that a particular diet
or a particular food
ethic is the solution
to planetary problems.
I'm pedalling any solutions,
dietary or religious.
I've just argues that
alternative foodways offer
the potential, at least
the analogy of a potential
that we need to interpret
our inheritances
of cultural violence
and to experiment
with growing new
things from the soil.
Thanks for listening.
[APPLAUSE]
So we have--
Javier and Andrea have the mics.
If you have a question
for our speaker,
if you could raise your hand
and I'll sort of point to
you and they will
bring a mic to you.
[INAUDIBLE] So you
briefly mentioned
how there's correlation
between an increasing
income and the amount of meat
that people kind of demand.
Yeah.
I was wondering if you have
a [INAUDIBLE] correlation
between [INAUDIBLE] and
veganism or that paleo diet?
So if you have kind of that
idea that as you have more
disposable income, you can
actually afford the three
dollars for the
actual organic fruit,
or you can buy these fancy
ingredients that [INAUDIBLE]
have created for better diet--
is that correlation-- do you
have ideas how it would be
possible to bring that type of
eating into these areas that
you were talking about
the path are very--
they just don't
have the resources
and they don't have access
to even just normal foods,
how you can bring that
type of healthy diet
into those communities.
Yeah.
It's a great question.
Certainly some parts of the
alternative food movement
do seem to rely on having
a lot of resources.
Paleo and not always but often
veganism, yes, [INAUDIBLE]..
But not other parts
of food movements.
So food sovereignty
is [INAUDIBLE]
formed in different areas.
But that often is
actually trying
to get away from the
financialization of food.
But to your good
question about--
OK, so what to do about lack of
access to healthy, good food?
And the rub-- the rub
which you rightly point is
that it looks like the kind of
food that learned people say
ought to be available both for
personal health and planetary
health is simply too expensive.
And so then it looks
like it's moralism.
So I think I--
I don't have a
solution for that.
I have two things
to say about it.
One is that the reason
that-- often the reason
that good food is more expensive
and bad food less expensive
is because bad
food is subsidized.
So the bad group is not
paying its full cost.
It's not paying its full
cost in human health.
It's not paying its full
cost in planetary health.
It's just not paying its
full economic health.
So it's unnaturally low.
The price is unnaturally
low, which makes
it more rational to eat it.
So, OK, that's a big problem.
And then our farm bill basically
reproduces that problem.
And that's probably--
any [INAUDIBLE]
of a resolution to
the kind of problem
that we're talking
about has to happen
in that macroeconomic way.
And then on the other
side of that is,
I described the
planetary situation
of families experiencing
food insecurity
in a kind of sharp way--
systematically impoverished.
Insofar as you agree with
that, then however you
think about the remedies for
systematic impoverishment
would also be part of
making good food available.
I mean, it's a good
question [INAUDIBLE]..
Thank you for your talk.
I'd like [INAUDIBLE] in
ethical terms and aesthetic
or "relig-ish" or any ways
that you want to talk about
the impossible burger.
That's another debate.
I don't know.
What do you think about that?
What do you think?
[INAUDIBLE]
OK.
But I didn't know [INAUDIBLE]
talking about that.
[INAUDIBLE] about that.
Yeah.
It's really interesting.
And then a possibility of--
well, two possibilities.
I mean, they're basically
plant-based realistic
alternatives for what people
want when they want meat.
And is there possibility
for animal flesh
that does not involve
killing animals.
So that's interesting.
So there's like two
tracts to try and get away
from the problem
of food products
which eliminate animals.
And I guess I would say I'm
cautiously interested in both.
I don't have the recoil
from it that some people do.
Some people recoil from
both of those, some people
especially from the
kind of biotech animal
tissue that doesn't
involve an animal growing
in animal protein.
I think those are really--
they're interesting.
It's hard to imagine how--
what's hard to imagine for me is
how did those foods become part
of a culturally
important foodway
such that they are [INAUDIBLE]?
That's probably
because my imagination
is slightly [INAUDIBLE].
I don't see how
that would happen.
But it very well could, right?
I mean, other crazy
foods have been invented
that are now widespread.
And often they were [INAUDIBLE].
I mean, tofu-- its history
is in Buddhist monasteries.
And there was a reason we
went through the trouble
of inventing this
kind of weird food
that then becomes basically
more or less a staple in food
societies.
Right.
So something like
that could happen.
What do you think?
Well, I have mixed
feeling about it.
I guess the one part of it
that troubles me is the--
there's a whole tradition
of vegetarianism
which associates it
with non-violence.
And the thing
about that burger--
because I actually
was served one
without knowing what it
was and started eating it.
And then after how many years?
40 years of being vegetarian,
it was an unsettling experience.
[INAUDIBLE]
The blood and the--
so that it really
is kind of trying to
reproduce in some ways
the sort of violence
of eating flesh.
So I wonder about that.
That is such an
interesting thing.
Because-- oh, well, [INAUDIBLE].
But I'm interested in
the ways that there
are forms of vegetarianism
that are deeply rooted
in non-violence.
And sometimes the
non-violence is holistic.
So it's even kind
of a withdraw from,
or a negative evaluation
of violence in nature,
suffering predation.
If [INAUDIBLE] was up here.
Yes.
[INAUDIBLE] maybe
better theological
things to say about
violence in nature.
So [INAUDIBLE] of this can carry
you, this negative evaluation
of violence in nature,
or violence in society.
And so yeah, then if you have
a plant-based burger that
is nonetheless trying to
give you a bloody experience,
what happens for
your moral formation?
I don't know.
Some psychologists would want
to run some experiments on that.
Thank you for your talk.
I think a lot of the issues that
we have within our food system
may come from problems with
the food industry itself.
And I'm just wondering how
you may stress pushing back
against big food companies
that have a financial incentive
to continue producing, maybe
foods that are unhealthy for
[INAUDIBLE].
Yeah.
Right.
What do thing?
I don't know.
Do you have any ideas?
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah.
Well that's one thing.
Right.
And that's Marion Nestle's
response, basically
who's written the book on food
politics and the influence
of the food industry, both
over eaters and over our policy
environment.
And of course her main
view is that you simply
have to intervene with
better political structures.
But her secondary view is,
you vote with your fork.
And so you can-- if
enough of you do it,
realign your incentives.
So that's one thing.
I'm interested in it,
without suggesting
that's the a solution
and hope there,
but I'm interested in what
happens in alternative food
movements that are not
interested in reforming
the dominant food
system, [INAUDIBLE]
creating [INAUDIBLE]
from the ground up.
And people do that in
lots of different ways.
And I think part
of the reason they
want to do that is because
it's a vote of distrust
in the standard
American food system.
Right.
And insofar as more people
associate the standard food
system, not only with unhealth,
but with planetary decline
or with political violence
or with exploitative labor,
that creates a more difficult
financial environment
for them, which might
[INAUDIBLE] in viable foods.
So I think the
market will respond.
Right.
The market will respond to
ethical and aesthetic food
preferences.
And then there's this
constant-- you even
see it in food movements.
There's this constant,
unsettled negotiation
of how they're going to
interact with the industry
side of [INAUDIBLE],,
which is probably
always the contextual
pragmatic negotiation.
We have one more question.
Someone back there.
Hi.
You mentioned some of the
labels around religious--
like the [INAUDIBLE] and
halal and those things,
and even the influence
of what church-goers eat
and how that played a
role in wheat farming.
Yeah.
So, what space do
you think that there
might be for these moral
institutions of religious order
to influence our eating habits?
The pope put out
[INAUDIBLE],, his document
talking about climate change.
Right.
So there you have millions
of followers, right.
So what opportunity
do you think there
might be for these
moral institutions
to kind of shift our
cultural eating habits?
So I'm interested in the
outcome of that question.
And I noticed with
[INAUDIBLE] that he's
recommending different
particular practical actions.
One of them is the
table grace, as being
an especially important response
to global ecological problems.
He didn't have a lot to say
about dietary practices,
and not much about eating meat,
for example, which could well
go in that same section.
But I think, yeah,
it definitely makes
an impact on the culinary
register of many people
when some very significant
religious authority,
or like the Dalai Lama, who
sometimes talks about food
and the compassionate life,
such that I don't know that it
makes people change their ways.
OK, so the pope said
it, and so therefore I'm
going to stop eating
burgers as much.
But I do think it's possible
that in a deeper way,
the hamburger just becomes
seen as less innocuous
and more caught in the
political and social things
that religious communities are
trying to [INAUDIBLE] against.
I see we have one more questions
and we'll finish with here.
Can you pass the mic up here.
Yeah.
We actually had it in
someone's hand back here.
Oh, you do?
Did someone else
have a question?
Yeah.
OK.
I have a question.
I was curious-- you were
talking about the way
that foodways are almost a
manifestation of identity.
They build this idea of
self a lot of the times,
if one believes they might meet
in a moral or ethical sense.
Yeah.
And so, I'm kind of
curious, throwing
in the pressure
and the motivation
of the economic
evaluation into that,
in how food is
economically valued.
And in general, can it
be economically valued?
We talk about this
kind of driver.
And the economy is a huge
part of this question, brought
up earlier how it is an
incentive to purchase
certain kinds of foods.
So I'm wondering in this kind
of bridging the gap, I suppose,
how people have economic
perspective on valuation
in the building of one's self
in the way that they [INAUDIBLE]
and the way that they build
food in respect to the way
that they put an economic
value on that food.
Yeah.
Yes.
OK.
That's a naughty problem.
It's really interesting.
Right.
So, OK.
So I'm saying that food can
be a site for moral formation
and even identity formation.
You're saying, well,
yeah, but food is also
a consumer product.
Right.
And so people have to
spend money on this.
And that's not
going to be caught
up just with their
ideas about food,
and even aside whatever kind
of constraints they have.
It's also going to be
caught up with their ideas
about what is an appropriate
amount of money to spend
on fashioning my identity.
Yes.
Very good point.
So [INAUDIBLE] what I
found especially helpful--
why I turned to Kecia Ali and
why I found her especially
helpful is she's placing
the alternative foodway--
vegetarianism for her--
within the broader context of
the moral ecology of Islam.
So the virtues
that she thinks are
at the heart of what the
formation of Muslim identity
is about.
And so it nests that inside it.
And then you have
the weighing way
of evaluating what is
appropriate and inappropriate,
proper and improper, attention
to this site of identity
formation.
Because otherwise,
yes, Americans
are very good at just
creating another form
of consumerist identity forms.
Yeah.
So maybe we'll pause
officially here,
but I think that he might
willing to take a few--
Yeah.
--questions after.
Before we wrap up, just a couple
of very quick announcement
about upcoming events in
the Park Street series.
Our next event is actually
cosponsoring the Lowell series.
So it will actually take
place on a Wednesday--
unusual for us.
Natasha Trethewey will
be coming to speak on
beyond Katrina, Wednesday
March 14th, which
is just after the break.
And then our final
speaker in the series
is Nikki Silvestri, who'll be
speaking about healthy soil
and healthy bodies.
But please join me now in
warmly thanking our speaker
for tonight.
[APPLAUSE]
