I’ve finally started work on “Making a Meal of It,” a podcast about reimagining how food and humans relate to each other, the bites that bind and divide us, and the complexities of being a thing with a stomach. Production will take place over the fall of 2023, with a planned launch in early 2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As a teacher, writer, and artist working in\u2014and with\u2014food, I\u2019ve been researching and teaching about this fabulous subject for many years. I do this from what I call a \u201cgeneralist\u2019s perspective,\u201d taking a broad view that regards food from all sorts of angles, whether cultural or political, environmental or social. I\u2019m a cook and a mixologist, an artist and a designer. I\u2019ve taught in universities and kitchens, and have consulted to companies like Pepsi and Kraft as well as Slow Food International and different research centres dealing with sustainability and food systems. Overall, I try to put things together so as to see some of the bigger patterns within the making, eating, and disposing of food. I\u2019m also interested in how food, food culture, and food systems produce contradictions: joy and fear, hunger and satisfaction, exploitation and empowerment, and, most of all, that extraordinarily layered and perpetually confounding thing we call humanity.<\/em> Most of all, I want to share these perspectives, so that more of us can be more attentive, more interested, more empowered, and more creative when it comes to our food.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lots of other people who work in food dig deep into a specific idea or subject. They\u2019re what we call specialists<\/em>\u2014experts in history or biochemistry, cuisine or agriculture, economics or the senses. I am incredibly grateful for their work, because we need those details in order to understand how to grow, process, transport, and acquire our food in ways that nourish us while also supporting livelihoods and long-term planetary health. But we also need folks like me\u2014the people who look at the big picture, or who wonder about the ways in which things like language and cooking both reflect<\/em> our societies and standards AND are the tools with which we construct them. Because that\u2019s the thing about food: we make it, and it makes us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That reciprocal relationship is what makes food so complex. We\u2019re in it. It\u2019s in us. We live in the environments that generate our food, and when we eat food, we also generate ourselves. At the same time, when we grow and process the food we eventually eat, we generate all sorts of other things: pollutants, waste, trauma, disease. Food is the single biggest and most important ecology that any of us participate in, and almost everything that humans do\u2014whether it seems like it\u2019s related to eating or not\u2014comes back to food. Our cities and transportation routes, our language systems and scientific devices, our resource extraction and economic markets are all, in one way or another, connected to food. Because if we don\u2019t eat, we don\u2019t exist, and if we don\u2019t exist, what good is an autoroute or a computer?<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the same way that everything is about making food<\/em>, I often say that everything is made of food.<\/em> Televisions, buildings, and clothing\u2014even poetry, philosophy, and love are made of food. What? Huh? If you\u2019re starting to think that I\u2019m making food a bit too important<\/em>, then you are not alone. Lots of people think I\u2019m a bit bonkers when I talk about food and it\u2019s centrality. But think of it this way: anything that a human makes, whether it\u2019s a physical object or an abstract concept, is made out of the labour, ideas, and materials that bodies produce by burning calories. And where do those calories come from? Food.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But how is love made of food, or beauty? Isn\u2019t it the reverse? Don\u2019t we say that really great food is made of love, and not the other way around? And when we call some really beautiful dishes works of art, aren\u2019t we just exaggerating for effect? Art made of food? Seriously?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, it comes back to what I said earlier\u2014if we don\u2019t eat, we don\u2019t exist. And if we don\u2019t exist, we don\u2019t imagine, conceive of, design, fabricate, produce, or use anything<\/em>. Eating is the starting point. (Hmm, actually, let me offer a quick aside: Sex and reproduction are also pretty critical for humans to exist, but there are plenty of podcasts about sex. In fact, though, we\u2019ll come back later in this series to the ways in which food and sex parallel each other in many different ways. Including some ways that make us try to hide just how important and complex and challenging they are to what we think is good and fair and healthy. Okay, end of my aside.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unfortunately, due to a whole bunch of reasons, the idea that food is the beginning of everything\u2014not to mention our most central need, duty, and responsibility\u2014is one that we tend to ignore. Food is so vast that it\u2019s overwhelming to think about constantly. When I was doing my master degree in eco-gastronomy in Italy a bunch of years ago, I realized how difficult it is to spend all your time thinking about food. My colleagues and I went a bit cuckoo spending 24\/7 on the subject. At a certain point in the program, despite our fascination with food and our dedication to it as our focus of study, we had to distract ourselves. It was like trying to process the entire universe of thought and action inside each of our tiny and frazzled brains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was back in Italy that I realized why the industrialization of food production and consumption had been so successful. Before the industrial revolution, about 50% of all human labour was dedicated to making food. Globally, that meant that one out two people, on average, spent all their time growing, harvesting, preserving, cooking, and serving food. Nothing else. To be freed up of that constant focus would have been extremely liberating and very appealing to most folks. So when mechanization came to farming, and when steam engines were introduced into food processing, it was a huge relief. Even more, when the 20th<\/sup> century rolled around and families were given the option to buy foods that were quick and convenient to prepare, they jumped at the opportunity. It not only saved time, it saved a lot lof mental effort and even mental health. Of course many other social and political changes also happened in the 1900s, including technological advances and the movement to better redistribute labour between the sexes, and that also supported a shift towards processed foods. (Again, we\u2019ll get into gendered work and labour politics in future episodes.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n The upshot is that, in Westernized and industrialized countries, food has become simplified. Or so it is made to appear by the large corporations and institutions that control a lot of our food supply. They want consumers to not spend too much time thinking before buying. In fact, however, food, food culture, and food systems are more complex than ever. It\u2019s just that what we are presented with in our supermarkets, restaurants, and mass media is designed to make food seem <\/em>simple. Easy to buy, easy to eat, easy to dispose of. Overall, it has become much easier to not think too much when it comes to our food. But in the overlapping relationships between simplicity and complexity, things have started to fall apart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Recomplexifying food, without making it complicated, is what this podcast is about. I will be taking you on trips through the fabulously weird spaces of supermarkets and restaurants, kitchens and the internet. I\u2019ll help you to large servings of meat and mushrooms and booze and ferments. We\u2019ll explore the politics of fat activism, and the environmental challenges of fishing and foraging. There will even be an episode dedicated to pudding. Yep, from Swiss Miss single servings to the etymological roots of boudin noir and the sweet treats that the English serve at the end of the evening meal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Do you want food to become both more understandable AND more extraordinary, more grounded AND more magical? Do you want to tease things apart and figure out new ways of being an eater, as well as new ways of respecting and being grateful for what you eat? Do you want to let food re-gain its place as the starting point for everything\u2014from poetry to economics to digital technology? Do you want to do all this without making your food a source of anxiety, confusion, and other problems?<\/p>\n\n\n\n