On eating well

and eating local and the icky virtue politics of wellness culture

Welcome to June and welcome to foodstuff if this is your first month!

As always, this month will include a reflection from me as well as food-related recommendations (books, podcasts, that sort of thing). 

A couple new things to note: 

1. I will now be including a recording of myself reading the newsletter. If audio is a better format for you, go ahead and visit the link below. This option will be included from here on out.

   Listen to the recording

2. In the spirit of making these essays more interactive, I’ve included a question this month. It is at the end of the essay and I invite you to respond to it in the comments. Alternatively, if you’d prefer, you can email me privately (my email is included below) and the two of us can chat about it. No pressure though! You are always welcome to interact with this newsletter in whatever way feels best.

One last housekeeping note! 

I’m used to writing for a more narrow audience– usually peers in or adjacent to the scholarly fields I engage, or dissertation committee members. I’m still learning how to do more public-facing writing. I might not always do this in the most effective way, but I want to learn! So, with that said, I am open and eager to hear how I can make this more engaging and accessible for you. 

If you have recommendations, I welcome you to reach out to me at melissa.a.montanari@gmail.com, on Instagram @melissamontanari or comment below! 

Thank you! Now, to the essay!

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In Southern Ontario, where I've always lived, the month of June welcomes new fruits and veggies into rotation at grocery stores and farmers markets. 

In the city of Hamilton, my home, I’m already starting to see the peas, lettuce, beets, green beans and asparagus colouring the shelves. When I walk into the market I can smell the familiar spring-almost-summer-sweet of strawberries, rhubarb, and cherries, which will stain my fingertips as well as the pages of my books.

Even though I’ve tried plenty of times before, I’ll still attempt to char asparagus spears into favour (I’m sorry to any asparagus lovers that I’ve just offended– I really do want to like them). 

And even though we’ve had it many times before, my partner and I will get excited about Donut Monster’s rhubarb fritter when it inevitably makes its return (sure enough, this flavour was released the very day I drafted this essay). We will share one on a bench in a sunny park.

These seasonal rhythms, the ones that mark the beginning of June, also mark the beginning of market season and local food festivals in this area that span the summer months. 

However, even here, especially here, with a wealth of delicious foods, the community fridges still cannot be filled quickly enough. My cherry-stained fingers are marks of an alimentary abundance that are not carried by everyone here.

And so, I’m thinking about what it means to eat well which, for me, has almost become synonymous with these seasonal rhythms. I’m thinking about how, often, terms like “abundance” and “healthy” and “plenty” and “fresh,” which have shaped the ways I’ve thought about local foodways, have wider, sickier implications, especially in the context of an ongoing pandemic where eating well and eating locally have been wrapped up in the push to get back to a normal that doesn’t feel good.

The wider and stickier implications that I am referring to have lots to do with mainstream wellness culture and the virtue politics surrounding food. Very briefly, wellness culture (and the wellness industry, its by-product) dictates that “good health” is synonymous with a largely white, thin, able-bodied aesthetic as well as a kind of self-fulfillment that is rooted in capitalist ideals about improvement and optimization. (You can learn more about the genealogy of wellness culture here: The False Promises of Wellness Culture)

Also, importantly, as thinkers like Emily Contois have pointed out, wellness culture maps onto diet culture in that both dictate that a person’s morality and virtue can be read on their bodies and on their plates. Contois has referred to wellness culture as diet culture’s cousin. 

The idea that food choices uncomplicatedly reflect a person’s goodness or morality is often perpetuated in the media and in familiar conversations, most notably when certain foods are referred to as either “good foods” or “bad foods.” The definitions of each shift depending on context. That said, generally speaking, “good” refers to foods that have a low-calorie content, contain an abundance of a particular macronutrient deemed desirable at the moment, are unprocessed, are organic, and/or contain a so-called superfood or blend of superfoods, etc. “Bad,” on the other hand, often stands in for foods with high calorie contents, high quantities of macronutrients or ingredients deemed undesirable, processed foods, GM foods, etc. 

Lately, with increased attention being directed toward the climate emergency, “good” has also come to refer to foods that are, either via sourcing or packaging, thought to be environmentally conscious. 

Even from these brief descriptions, you can glean how terms like “local” might easily get wrapped into the “good” category. Tropes of the local foodie or marketgoer also coalesce these ideas and shuttle them across popular culture in the so-called West. For example, the slim, affluent white woman, probably coming from hot yoga, probably climbing out of a Tesla, holding a tote bag plastered with a punchy vegan slogan is a kind of wellness archetype that is recognizable because of how it gets reproduced on social media, in television, in films, etc. Even when it is being poked fun at, it is done so in a way that reaffirms a kind of wellness hierarchy that shapes who is (and who is not) considered proximate to health and goodness. 

This is an archetype that I’ve both embodied and reproduced, to varying degrees, over the years. I am the white vegan woman with a university education popping into the market after yoga to procure organic kale (tote bag in tow). I have been read as well and good through these practices, the evidence for this being that people– cashiers and passersby– tell me how “good” and “healthy” I am when I check out, despite knowing nothing about my personal health or daily practices.

Global issues and climate concerns have, of course, also impacted the way certain foods have come to reflect the person eating them. As I mentioned before, I’m thinking about the ways local food is often conflated with “sustainable food,” both in terms of its impact on the environment, but also in terms of economics. In the context of the pandemic, eating to support the local economy has become more morally charged in the sense that one’s purchasing power has problematically come to represent their capacity for community care. The hashtag #supportlocal on Instagram, for example, is flooded with images of products and take-out food, suggesting that “supporting local” is simply a purchase-and-post transaction as opposed to an engaged and sustained practice.

All these musings are not to say, “don’t support local businesses.” They actually have very little to do with how local businesses position themselves and much more to do with broader cultural conversations about what food means and how those meanings shift over time. 

Sure, buying food locally can reduce transportation costs and support more transparency in the food system regarding production and labour. Buying food locally can also help support community members who own and work at small businesses. It can also support other kinds of community initiatives that are not for profit. I see this happening in Hamilton, with local food businesses raising wages to account for inflation while also hosting and contributing to community fridge/pantry projects and advocating for food policy changes.

At the same time, procuring food, let alone locally sourced food, can be inaccessible and, therefore, unsustainable for many. In Hamilton, nearly 12% of households report food insecurity. Rarely do conversations about local food (apart from those coming at the issue from the perspective of mutual aid) address the infrastructure of cities and the ongoing impacts of gentrification. These factors impact things like where local food vendors are located and the costs they must charge (popular areas=higher rent=higher cost to consumers). Related to this, fresh fruits, vegetables, eggs, meats, and fish, enough to feed a single person let alone a family, is not easily walked, or bussed across a city. For those who are not in cities, public transit may not even be an option.

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I’ve used “local” pretty flippantly throughout this piece, but truth be told, I’m not even sure what it means to “eat locally” on stolen land, in a nation whose borders were drawn with no regard for the food traditions and growing practices that cross it. I write this from my couch, within the territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas, also called Hamilton, as I eat a “local Ontario apple.” I am less than two hours away from the border to New York, where apples are also grown. Yet, these apples would not be considered “local” in the same way that my Ontario apple would be. 

Moreover, when so many food-producing plants that have been naturalized to this landscape are not originally from here– foods like my apple, but also, pears, grapes, peaches, wheat, etc. which came to this land with European settlers– what does a term like “local” stake claim to and at what cost? In other words, whose tastes and preferences shape a local foodscape, especially in a settler-state?

Proximity plays a role in establishing locality. And yet, proximity has been charged in the context of the pandemic. Living and working close to others does not a community make. The pandemic has exposed insidious and individualistic approaches to health and wellness that were, for a time, perhaps more thoroughly disgusted. The blatant disregard for those most vulnerable to COVID, in addition to the eugenicist and fatphobic ideologies surrounding food, nutrition, and illness, have made eating locally– as in, stepping out into one’s immediate surroundings to acquire food–potentially inhospitable and violent. 

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There are many nuances to the conversations about wellness culture and localism that I’ve not attended to. However, this newsletter is already longer that I intended for it to be, and I am trying to get somewhere, or rather, two places. I hope they serve as take-aways:

• First, when talking about food, there must be space to hold multiple conflicting things at once. I want to move away from frameworks that rely on “this or that” framing. Food isn’t a “this or that” issue; it's nuanced, dynamic,  layered and deeply contextual. “And” is a more helpful conjunction than “or”: this and that can both be true at once.

• Second, as thinkers and writers like Karen Washington, Leah Penniman, Stephen Satterfield, Alicia Kennedy, and Clarissa Wei (and many, many others but these are the one’s I’ve been thinking with recently) illuminate in their respective works, there are so many dynamic perspectives on eating well that reflect a variety of realities from around the globe. 

Related to that second point, I’ve been thinking a lot about Clarissa Wei’s Climate Cuisine podcast for Whetstone Radio and how her focus on food growing in similar climate zones around the world troubles essentialist narratives about food origins while also highlighting the adaptive, climate-informed nature of food traditions and cuisines. She outlines an approach to eating well that is informed by climate and culture.

I’m also thinking about Alicia Kennedy’s interview with Daniela Galarza of “Eat Voraciously,” in which the two discuss the importance of creating recipes with access in mind. In other words, they talk about creating recipes with ingredients that someone can buy from Walmart and how eating what is affordable and available is also part of eating well. 

As these two examples illuminate, eating well can mean many things at once that have little to nothing to do with rigid approaches to health and nutrition.

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Reflecting on what it means to eat well in our various contexts might be a place to start troubling conflations between food, wellness, and virtue. In the spirit of this, I wanted to pose a question that is open for all to consider and respond to in the comments below:

What does eating well mean to you? Or what would you like it to mean?

For me, I think eating well will always be a process in formation. I want eating well to embody and respond to the rhythms of my community; I want it to be an engaged practice that takes seriously the fact that I share space with a complex ecology of people, plants, and animals who, despite being proximate to me, are situated in the world very differently. 

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Reading

What I finished in May:

• I Hope We Choose Love by Kai Cheng Thom

  This is a short collection of poems and essays that are not food related but so nuanced and thoughtful that I had to include them!

• The Vegetarian by Han Kang

  This novel is translated from Korean and is a story about a woman who suddenly stops eating meat. The book is slim and is broken into three sections, each of which is told from a different perspective but none are her own. I’ve been really enjoying translations lately and this is no exception.

• Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings

  Dense, academic work that has been written in a really accessible way! Strings offers a thorough look at, you guessed it, the racial origins of fatphobia beginning in the Renaissance period to present-day.

• “Food Zines” Broken Pencil Issue: 94

  Basically a zine about food zines!

• Whetstone Issue: 09

  I just love Whetstone. From the stories to the visuals everything is just so beautifully crafted. This issue had food and drink stories from Turkey, Norway, California, the Caribbean, and Oaxaca. I have a print subscription (and highly recommend it if you like to have physical copies of beautiful texts), but they do offer digital copies for $10 USD.

Podcasts

• Climate Cuisine with Clarissa Wei, which I talked about above!

• Maintenance Phase with Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes- I saw SO many people recommending this podcast all over social this month and for good reason! “The Trouble with Calories” episode is fab.

Cooking

My friends and I had a picnic and I made focaccia, grilled veg, a sundried tomato pesto, a roasted garlic spread, and an olive tapenade.