From Rachel Slocum

Dear Ian and others,
Thanks for the opportunity to participate and to read these insightful posts. It’s an innovative way of doing a progress paper and both the paper and posts have referenced many sources I would like to read. What follows is some fairly specific comments on the paper (not the posts), which is all I could do at the moment.

I’d like to start by commending Ian on a wonderful paper. I like the writing style and I think it works very well to take the argument through hooks, Heldke and Duruz (among others). I appreciate the generous manner in which you’ve folded together these differing arguments. The movement in Lisa Heldke’s text from adventurer consumer to neighbour is important to recognize as is her unquestioned beginning with hooks and ending without her. (That’s also been the way my ideas have progressed through the papers cited on the blog.) Equally, the points you highlight from Jean Duruz about people’s fragility and their positions as food colonialists and anti-colonialists are great. Citing Catherine Nash’s suggestion that we need to find ways of engaging with bodies is also very helpful. There was a great paper on this subject by Jessica Hayes-Conroy and Allison Hayes-Conroy at the AAG this year.

I very much like the place you seem to end up (though you claim you have no conclusions). Then, you ask whether you’ve called for research that someone’s been doing for years—but have you called for research in certain areas? I might have missed this. In answer to your other questions about appropriate balance, underplaying, contradictions and denial, I would answer no.

I don’t think it’s still bloody mainstream at all to raise the points you do. I take Lynn Phillips’ point that some privileging has occurred in academia and certainly among the press, foodies, slow food etc. towards consumption and subjects who can. But I think you are making much larger arguments about identity, race and politics and it’s not just an overview of scholarship on what gets eaten by those who can.

And on the term ‘mainstream’, it’s unclear that you are not convinced by the term mainstream until the end. It seems an unnecessarily derogatory gesture to label some as mainstream when you’re otherwise so gracious.

Like some you cite, I first advocated reflexivity and decolonizing of the self/white organization and in collective action when I began writing about race and food. That is, I talked about my own efforts at anti-racist food change and of the ways that nonprofit organizations involved in this work might change the ways they think and act. Anyway, I think that desire to decolonize the self may be a starting point for some (many?) critical people engaging with questions of race in the US. It’s certainly what is encouraged by the anti-racist activism that I’ve been exposed to (I’ve written about this in an Acme paper coming out soon) and one could argue it’s just a liberal, individualistic response. While listening to white members of a local group trying to engage with racism and food, I kept hearing white people say we need to own up to our privilege. They were completely individualizing this owning up. An African American activist, on the other hand, is always talking about the interpersonal.

But one could also say efforts at reflexivity are a pathway toward, for instance, where Heldke ended up in her book. For all the criticisms we might level at people trying to change their consumption practices individually or collectively, it’s important to me, from a political and theoretical position, to acknowledge the fraught, fuzzy and fragile nature of these positions and the connections made through food and in foodspace. I’ve been trying to do that while admiring the work of those who have been very critical of the liberal, wealthy whiteness of alternative food and of various politics of consumption (e.g. Allen, Guthman, DuPuis, Freidburg, Bobrow-Strain). I tend to agree with these critiques but find there’s more to say.

I am not sure what you mean about beginning or not beginning with the quote you’ve put towards the end about tortillas as chapattis. What are you getting at there? I don’t remember your previous review well enough to understand what you’re saying here.

Cited
Allen, P., 2004. Together at the Table. University Park, The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Allen, P., Fitzsimmons, M., Goodman, M. and Warner, K., 2003. Shifting plates in the agrifood landscape: the tectonics of alternative agrifood initiatives in California. Journal of Rural Studies 19, 61-75.
Bobrow-Strain, A. (2008) White bread bio-politics: purity, health, and the triumph of industrial baking. Cultural Geographies 15(1), 19-40.
Dupuis, E. M. and Goodman, D., 2005. Should we go ‘‘home’’ to eat? toward a reflexive politics of localism. Journal of Rural Studies 21, 359–371.
Freidburg, S. (2003). Cleaning up down South: supermarkets, ethical trade and African horticulture. Social and Cultural Geography 4(1): 27-43.
Freidberg, Susanne, 2004. French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Guthman, J., 2004. Agrarian dreams: the paradox of organic farming in California. Berkeley, CA, University of California Press.
Hayes-Conroy, J. and Hayes-Conroy, A. (2008) Political food, ecological bodies: why the visceral matters for food based social change, paper presented at the Association of American Geographers' Annual Meeting.