Eating and Caring. Caring and Eating.

The problem of care when it comes to food

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So often I find myself communicating my eating practice as a reflection of the things I care about. That’s common, I guess, but there’s something about it that’s been making me more uncomfortable the more I read and think about the relationship between eating and caring.

Photo by KLIV BRAND on Unsplash. I really struggled with finding a relevant photo this month!

It’s easy to say that I avoid meat and animal products because I care about people, animals and planet. I do.

I want others to care about these things too— to care about our shared survival. In many ways, it is essential that we all do, at least a little, even if those forms of care may look different depending on who and where we are.

In her new book (!!!!) No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating,

Alicia Kennedy

writes:

It’s been clear for over fifty years that the way land is used for farming—80 percent of farmed land is used to grow feed for livestock, which provides only 18 percent of the world’s calories supply and 37 percent of its protein supply—is inefficient. This inefficient monoculture, as the cultivation of single crops is know, has dire consequences for our global ecosystems, hunger and health, and the animals and insects whose robust existence is complimentary to our human one (Kennedy 2).

These are substantiated reasons to take eating seriously. While individual consumption, Kennedy insists, is not causing the climate crisis and more must be done “on political and economic grounds,” as eaters, we’re in a tough position due to the “conditions of individual consumption” supported by institutions that perpetuate climate crisis (Kennedy 15, emphasis added). These problems—problems related to the wellbeing of people and planet— are worth directing attention towards at all levels and in whatever capacity we may. They’re not things we can opt out of.

And yet, caring about food is not an inherent virtue. Nor should it be. In a later chapter called “Meatless Plurality,” Kennedy writes about how “troubling strains of thought have been allowed to fester under the umbrella of animal welfare” many of which are reflective of white supremacy and ecofascism (Kennedy 103).

To these points, I’m reminded of Dr. Hannah McGregor’s podcast episode “On Veganism” too, wherein she touches on the different histories of white veganism and so-called “clean eating” movements, the problem with white animal rights activists, and the links between veganism and restrictive eating (as well as why vegan food still brings her joy!).

In this episode she reflects on “one version of veganism” that she traces “back to middle class white women's morality in the Victorian era” where “the coalescing of middle class identity in the 18th and 19th centuries were really attached to an idea that the middle class distinguished itself through a particular kind of feeling, a feeling associated with sympathy and compassion.” At this time, anti-vivisection and animal rights protests emerged as “a thing that sensitive white women care about.” McGregor, whose thinking on sentimentality is expanded on in her excellent book A Sentimental Education, points to how these sorts of sentimental politics are not at all a challenge to colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy, but actually part of how these systems maintain themselves, that is, a “part of how those systems articulate what white femininity means, and “it means feeling the right way about the right kinds of things…it means establishing our, and by our, I mean white women's, moral superiority through particular kinds of emotional response to violence.”

This is where I see the implications of care and caring, especially as they relate to eating, as sticky. Whose care matters, politically, socially, economically? What does that care do?

I think of how PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) and other animal rights organizations have maintained the association with sentimentality that McGregor critiques. Early in the pandemic, PETA latched onto COVID’s origin story— wetmarket in Wuhan, China— as part of their mandate against a “human-supremest worldview.” However, this was done by leveraging and perpetuating anti-Asian and particularly anti-Chinese sentiment, using words and phrases like “filthy,” “rotting flesh,” and “suffering,” to characterize wet markets in Asia. These words have undesirable and immoral connotations, connotations that have historically been used to denigrate and pathologies non-white foodways and bodies, particularly in the United States and Canada.

Indeed, anti-Chineseness in the U.S. and Canada has always relied on the symbolic-embodied implications of food and eating to frame Chinese bodies and appetites as contaminating, threatening, and perverse. For example, in 1902 The American Federation of Labour published a pamphlet called “Some reasons for Chinese exclusion,” which was alternatively titled (heads up, it’s real bad) “Meat vs. rice; American manhood against Asiatic coolieism. Which shall survive?.”

Contained in this pamphlet is an argument for Chinese exclusion that relies heavily on weaponizing the symbolics of food, with meat as a symbol of virility and white masculinity, and rice as a symbol of queer, perverse and undesirable consumption. Using these associations, the pamphlet aims to mobilize white labourers, to direct them to care not about the deplorable labour conditions faced by white and Chinese workers alike, but rather how the appetites of Chinese men might threaten white labour and its social, economic, and biological reproduction.

As Anna Lavis, Emma-Jayne Abbots and Luci Attala write in the introduction to their edited collection Careful Eating,

“eating and caring are inherently bound together. Normatively framed as simultaneously instinctive and didactic, both are understood as something we do and something we learn to do in order to reproduce and sustain social and biological life.

As such, the seeming benevolence of caring about food and eating is “deeply embedded in governing processes of normativity, regulation and control.” Lavis, Abbots and Attala assert that this recognition of care’s embeddedness “shifts the meaning of caring into a disposition or practice that is more than simply virtuous; it transforms into a mechanism of achieving outcomes that is at once wrapped in virtue but is also political.”

In short, this is to say that caring about food is entangled in the political and can dictate regulatory ideas of good or normative practices, citizens and bodies.

Indeed, Disability Studies scholars and activists like Alice Wong, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Sunaura Taylor, as well as scholars like Sabrina Strings—whose excellent book Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia traces histories of anti-fatness as anti-Blackness— have longs addressed the complexities of care as it is extended (and denied) to “non-normative bodies” particularly in institutional settings (ie. In practice, in places like doctors offices and classrooms, but also through policy.).

There is so much more to say on these topics— I cut out a whole section on Harvey Kellogg (yes, that Kellogg) and his food-related eugenics projects— but I think you see what I mean: Caring about food and eating is not, nor has it ever been, simple or inherently virtuous.

Caring in general is not, nor has it ever been, simple or inherently virtuous.

Indeed, beyond the world of food care is consistently weaponized. I’m thinking specifically about the “I care about children” piece, which is currently being used to deny reproductive rights and also as a way for transphobes to enact their violence.

The truth is that leveraging care can be an insidious, coercive, and oppressive tactic, on personal and systemic levels, particularly when the recipient of that so-called care, as well as the context surround that care, is excised from the exchange. This turns care and caring into some abstracted theoretical ideal as opposed to a set of complicated practices of being with others in ever-shifting political, social, environmental and economic circumstances.

I don’t have a resolution to these problems of caring and eating but I’ve been really comforted by the sorts of writing that I’ve referenced throughout this essay. Kennedy, Strings, Taylor and others have all offered essential thoughts on the complicated contexts and stakes surrounding food and eating. From the ways food has been leveraged as part of eugenics projects across species divides to how it has been used to reproduce white supremacy in quiet though insidious ways, these thinkers point out very real implications and entanglements that should shape the ways individuals and political systems move forward.

But they don’t do this by offering a neat roadmap or theoretical framework for caring or eating well. Rather, they keep with the transformative (and messy) possibilities of attending to food towards collective liberation. In this sense, they reframe caring and eating broadly as embodied investments in projects of liberation. It’s not enough to care. What does care do and for whom?

Consuming 

Books:

I finished Alicia Kennedy’s No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating and I’m so excited to see how it will shape conversations in food in the coming months and years, because it will!

If you’re not in a position to buy the book, I did notice that it is on order at the Hamilton Public Library. There’s already a few holds on the book so best to get on it quick! (Toronto library has options too, Toronto friends!)

Speaking of libraries, I’m in the midst of a library re-awakening! Libraries are the best! This past month I’ve checked out books on wood carving, foraging, cocktail making and cooking. Some I’m actively reading and others I’m just skimming or looking at the photos. It’s nice!

Essays:

I was super excited to see Eater, in collaboration with Disability Visibility Project, publish this piece on the Depression Cooking zine by Hamilton-based artist Sonali Menezes as part of their Low and Slow series!