The Palatable Politics of "Healthy" Food
The political origins of lifestyle publishing, and when they were taken off the menu
(First off, welcome to the new folks joining our readership after last week’s Rabelais post. I was thrilled to spread the word about the store, and only hope that my next visit is sooner rather than later…)
This week, my students will be reading four texts that circle around the concepts of “healthy” and “easy” cooking—texts which, rather unintentionally, all come from the 1970s. In the former category, we’re looking at two influential texts of late-20th-century “plant-based” dining: Mollie Katzen’s The Moosewood Cookbook (1977) and Dick Gregory’s Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat: Cookin’ with Mother Nature (1974).
Whether we would call either of these texts “lifestyle” in their original context is hard to say—that term seems to have emerged primarily in the context of journalism, where “softer” subjects such as food, health, fashion, home improvement, and gardening became incorporated into newspaper coverage as a means of directly engaging the reader-as-consumer. (Unsurprisingly, these are all subjects which previously would have been under the purview of the “women’s pages,” which were often the only places women would be given the opportunity to write in major newspapers and the only spaces to directly address the perceived interests of women readers.) Even as these texts offered clear parameters for eating and maintaining health, what they choose to prescribe was highly informed by the politics of the day. Gregory, a renowned comedian of the 1960s, was famous for going on a hunger strike to protest the Vietnam War, and spoke of his own vegetarianism as an extension of the nonviolence principles of the Civil Rights Movement. He also saw conscientious eating as one of many ways that Americans could stop accepting the status quo and start controlling the conditions of their own lives:
“There would be a whole lot of changes in America if we Americans decided one day to start thinking. And one of the biggest and most important changes would be in the ‘traditional’ American diet. The old saying is very true: ‘You are what you eat.’ It would be more accurate, perhaps, to say: ‘You are what you assimilate.’ That is, your body literally is what you assimilate from the ‘foods’—or more frequently, ‘things’—you eat to rebuild cells and what you eliminate as waste…It is very hard to unlearn the falsehoods we have accepted as truth all our lives. So much of what we are taught—both in school and at our mother’s knee—is nothing more than accepted, handed-down opinion that simply will not hold up under cold, hard analysis or weather the test of new experience.” (2-3)
Gregory used this framework of intentional eating and living as an invitation to the world of natural foods, one that showed him “how to live” in harmony with nature and experience rather than in conflict or opposition to it. Part of that was living more intentionally in dialogue with his own body, utilizing a rhetoric that the chemist W.O. Atwater pioneered in his discussing the “potential energy of food” in the late nineteenth century. Both Gregory and Atwater use the frameworks of the “body machine”—powered better by some ingredients than others—yet only Gregory frames those ingredients as better derived from the natural world than from the synthetic one, and obligated to serve the body as “Mother Nature intended.” “What is needed in this country is as many health food stores as there are filling stations and auto repair shops. … Now that would really be a trip!”
Katzen’s approach, meanwhile, was less as a radical revolutionary and more as a cozy emissary. As designated “author” of the Moosewood Cookbook, she acted as the representative of the Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, New York, which became one of the leading models of not just vegetarian-friendly fine dining, but also a collective-owned, social justice-driven entrepreneurial endeavor. Their first cookbook in 1974 was self-published and featured an array of credited contributors, including Katzen for her design, illustrations, and editing. Even in its revised version in 1977, published by Ten Speed Press, The Moosewood Cookbook distilled counterculture cuisine into a visual and culinary aesthetic: Its whimsical illustrations, its range of plant-based ingredients and influences, its adherence to the counterculture principles of elevating “brown” and “global food” over industrialized Wonder Bread-whiteness, its representation of bodies in and around the cooking and eating experience. It was as warm and inviting as a community cookbook, yet its casseroles spoke of collectivity and a commitment to social change.
Yet unlike in Dick Gregory’s Natural Diet, the revised edition of the Moosewood cookbook seems to minimize its counterculture politics for the sake of a broader approach to living along the principles of a better life. While the book’s introduction declares that the restaurant has “no singular owner and no ‘boss’,” it also eschewed an explicit discussion of the restaurant and collective’s politics:
“There is no specific dogma attached to the Moosewood cuisine. It bases itself on wholesomeness, and tries to present itself artfully. With the exception of fresh fish (serving one weekends) we are a vegetarian restaurant. The reasons are various, ranging from simplicity of one sort (health, lightness, purity) to simplicity of another (convenience, economy). We also want to spread the notion that protein and aesthetics need not be sacrificed when you leave meat out of a meal.” (viii)
Perhaps vegetarianism is inherently political—it certainly was in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet to receive a vegetarian-friendly cookbook with no mention of animal rights, human rights, or environmental impact in the mid-1970s is a bit puzzling given the broader conversation about the ethics of eating at the time. Absent here are the powerful environmental arguments of Frances Moore Lappé’s 1971 Diet for a Small Planet, or even the plant-rooted aesthetics of Euell Gibbons’ 1962 Stalking the Wild Asparagus. Instead, in Moosewood, as in the menus Chez Panisse, was a broader appeal towards taste and pleasure: that one could experience gustatory delight even when sitting down to an alternative table. In short, Moosewood and Panisse made a marketing appeal towards mainstreaming the counterculture, and ultimately, they were way ahead of the game.
This was one of the harder weeks of my class to select readings, in part because I want students to avoid assuming that “healthy” cookbooks function as they are often marketed today, as “lifestyle” texts designed to let the reader buy their way towards a better way of life (in mind, body, or conscience). The selling points of a “healthy” text today often point to the material takeaways one will get if the reader subscribes to its formula: to drop 20 pounds, to enhance muscle development, to sleep better or work better or live, generally, more like the leveled-up experts who author these texts. This becomes an even more complicated promise when the authors themselves already lead aspirational lives. (I’m also assigning this article on the concept of “cosmic wellness” as articulated by Gwyneth Paltrow via Goop…excited to hear what students think.) The more we conflate health with beauty, the less space we leave for arguments about healthy cookbooks as about anything except aesthetics. We forget to ask whether any move to cook and eat in opposition to the SAD diet constitutes an act of political consciousness. Instead, we focus on what it means to eat with expectations for our own self-improvement, rather than with ideas about a broader table.
I doubt very much that anyone picking up Gregory’s book or the Moosewood Cookbook was doing so with an explicit intention to try and live like its authors. Rather, they were looking to people whose practices spoke to their larger values, and to the potential benefits of unconventional thinking and eating. Perhaps what we have on offer today is no less political, but buries its politics beneath a glossier, goopier surface. Though I resent the term “lifestyle” publishing for all cookbooks, perhaps there is a discreet category for which the term is wholly applicable, and very difficult to jettison.
Recommendation: I’ve been trying not to consume too much popular culture lately because of preexisting commitments, but boy did I enjoy diving into the first episode of Cunk on Earth. This seems to be tailor-made for people like me who have watched Suzy Eddie Izzard’s brilliant special Dress to Kill, and imagine Europe as “where the history comes from”, and think through complex subjects like imperialism and settler colonialism as issues best resolved with the cunning use of flags. Marvelous bite-sized mockumentary that also acts as a valuable refresher on world history (if you’re taking it just seriously enough).
The Perfect Bite: in between errands earlier this week, I stopped in at Espresso Yourself, a lovely coffee shop in Jamaica Plain. In addition to stellar coffee and breakfast sandwiches, I also took home a small amount of their homemade halva, and had to stop myself from eating the entire slab (their “marble” flavor) in one sitting. In case you’ve never had it, halva is a bit like Persian fudge, made from sesame paste, sugar, and lots of delicious flavorings and toppings. It has a distinctly crumbly texture that makes it perfect for folding into ice cream or yogurt, and this was some of the best I’ve ever had. Definitely check it out.
Cooked & Consumed: In my mind pasta is the epitome of pleasurable food, and so rarely something I cook just for myself. It’s highly impractical to make long noodles for my daughter—she doesn’t quite have fork-twirling down yet—but when it’s only grown-ups, I always go for spaghetti or bucatini, and particularly for a saucy, slightly tangy tomato sauce that’s loaded with chili flakes and crunchy bits of bacon throughout. This past Friday I made an ad-hoc amatriciana—using a bit of leftover pork belly in the freezer, but crisped to a respectable approximation of guanciale-ness, and fresh plum tomatoes instead of canned—that still felt the exact right amount of self-indulgent. Eat standing up in the kitchen from a too-big bowl, with plenty of grated Parmesan or Pecorino on top.