Food Politics Quotes

“About eighty percent of the food on shelves of supermarkets today didn't exist 100 years ago.”
― Larry McCleary MD, Feed Your Brain, Lose Your Belly

“One fact is beyond dispute: Homogenization prevents the consumer from realizing just how little fat is contained in modern processed milk, even" full fat "milk. Before homogenization, milk purchasers looked for milk that had lots of cream - that was the sign that the milk came from healthy cows, cows on pasture. Old-fashioned milk contained from 4 to 8 percent butterfat, which translated into lots of cream on the top. Modern milk is standardize at 3.5 percent, no more. Butterfat brings bigger profits to the dairy industry as butter or as an ingredient in ice cream than as a component of liquid milk. The consumer has been cheated, but with homogenization, he can't tell.”
― Ron Schmid, The Untold Story of Milk: Green Pastures, Contented Cows and Raw Dairy Products

“...despite seemingly scientific origins, dietary ideals are cultural, subjective, and political. While its primary aim may be to improve health, the process of teaching people to ‘eat right’ inevitably involves shaping certain kinds of subjects, and citizens, and shoring up the identity and social boundaries of the ever-threatened American middle class.”
― Charlotte Biltekoff, Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health

“By 1980, the economic theory of neoliberalism, with its faith in free markets, property rights, and individual autonomy, had begun to reshape cultural notions of good citizenship. The good citizen was increasingly imagined as an autonomous, informed individual acting responsibly in his or her own self-interest, primarily through the market, as an educated consumer. Dovetailing with the new health consciousness, the ethos of neoliberalism shifted the burden of caring for the well-being of others from the state to the individual and recast health as a personal pursuit, responsibility, and duty. As the burden of solving social problems and preserving the health of individuals shifted from the public to the private sector, alternative dietary ideals reinforced the increasingly important social values of personal responsibility and consumer consumption.”
― Charlotte Biltekoff, Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health

“For those of us who can and do choose to 'eat right,' understanding the cultural politics of dietary health presents a particular kind of call to awareness and accountability. Given its social and moral freight, eating right is a kind of unexamined social privilege. It is not unlike and is clearly connected to other forms of privilege that usually go unnoticed by the people who possess them, such as whiteness and thinness. Choosing socially sanctioned diets makes subtle but very powerful claims to morality, responsibility, and fitness for good citizenship. We who are lucky enough to have eating habits that align with dietary ideals or inhabit the kinds of bodies that imply we do may think that our shapes or healthy preferences are a sign of our virtue, the result of will, or perhaps nothing more than a lucky twist of fate, but history shows that there are cultural mechanisms that produce the seemingly natural alignment between ideal diets, ideal body sizes, and the habits and preferences of the elite.”
― Charlotte Biltekoff, Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health

“This is the moral compromise that since World War II has kept us going to the supermarket and restaurant instead of to the garden or the cold room. If it has brought us any security, it is the dubious sense of ease that goes with having been liberated from our responsibility for the quality of our engagement with the earth.”
― Trevor Herriot, Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds