The
increase in eating out or buying ready-made food can be seen as an urban
household’s mirror reflection of the commercialization of farms. More and more
time is allocated to paid work, time is seen as scarce – even though data would
say the opposite – and reproducing resources in the household, or reducing
expenses are not seen as priorities. At first it might be hard to understand
how this can coincide with a record in cook book sales and a plethora of
kitchen appliances. I recently read in a newspaper that it is increasingly
common for people in Sweden to hire chefs to help them to cook (by some
perverse politics this is even tax-deductable) and I hear that in the United
States there is a service that offers to shape your hamburgers so ’you can
lean back and enjoy’ your own perfect home-made burgers.[i]
This mirrors the fate of hunting, fishing and gardening. They have moved from
being necessities for survival to expensive hobbies where the food harvested is
no longer the most important thing. The gadgets, the experience, the nerdy
knowledge of details are all expressions of this. Some may see this development
as liberty and freedom from drudgery, other see more the loss of a feeling of
belonging, the loss of one of the main rituals for bonding, social cohesion
and a driver of unhealthy food and eating habits.
Modern
consumer demand is to a very large extent created, not only (or even mainly) by
advertising, but also by industrial and commercial processes that shape our
whole world, of which advertising is just a small component. As I have
discussed earlier, governments, the food industry, the fertilizer and seed
industry giants and the supermarkets and even speculators, influence the food
chain and the choices within it. When it is our turn to choose, most choices
have already been made, by governments, by the various actors in the supply
chain from the farmers to the supermarkets and by our predecessors. And with
the enormous concentration of power in the food chain in the hands of very few
actors those making these decisions have enormous powers over our daily food.
But the lack of real choice is masked by the enormous supply of very similar
products. The conditions under which we chose our food are a lot more important
than the choices we have. In Reconnecting Consumers Producers and Food, six British researchers who studied
alternative food schemes found that people whose food schemes offered the least
choice (e.g. subscription schemes with fixed in-season contents) often ate the
widest variety of food, more fresh food and cooked more meals from scratch.
Through a lack of choice they were encouraged (and forced) to learn new recipes
and acquire new cooking skills, and they were “in closer contact with the
natural environment through their ability to appreciate the changing seasons
and by seeing food as it comes out of the ground – misshapen or with mud on.”[ii]
The individualization and commodification of food has
been a bonanza for, and perhaps the result of, the food industry. Commercial
actors can now earn money from activities that were previously out of reach of
the market (as they were done within the household), including cooking, food
preparation and processing, feeding infants and brewing. Socialist utopians,
such as Edward Bellamy,[iii]
and the Soviet Union and the Israeli kibbutzim
had a vision that we would not cook at home. We would either get ready-made
foods from factories or eat in collective kitchens. In some Israeli kibbutzes
people were not even allowed their own kettles to make tea.[iv]
This vision, or part of it, has ironically enough now been materialized through
the capitalist food industry taking over our food supply.
(Extract from Global Eating Disorder - Order Global Eating Disorder for a
10% discount at: https://www.createspace.com/5020215 using the code: GWDZZD8D)
[i] Hochschild,
A. R. 2012 The Outsourced Self. Intimate life in market times Metropolitan Books.
[ii] Kneafsey,
M. et al. 2008 Reconnecting Consumers and Producers and Food Berg.
[iii] Fernández-Armesto,
F. 2001 Food, a History Macmillan.
[iv] Ibid.
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