What democratic hedonism means

Our book of the month, Feed the People! includes a few big ideas for reforming the modern food system so that we can have two seemingly incompatible things: access to tasty meals on demand without destroying society or the planet. 

Among the proposals the book lays out:

• Get a clearer picture of what farming actually looks like in the 21st century.

• Realize that many of the true costs of certain foods have been hidden from us.

• Use assistance programs to rebalance the cost of healthy eating.

• Rebalance the economics to ensure that food workers are fairly compensated.

• Use food science and manufacturing processes to improve our diets.

• Get smarter about how to measure what’s healthy and what’s not.

Now that shipments are with the vast majority of club members, I wanted to dig a bit further into the big but very simple idea that underpins Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg’s argument: that we enjoy what the industrial food system creates, and that’s OK.

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The ideas they lay out are built on a foundational concept: that there is a moral drive to expand access to pleasure—basically that we should want to make fun, tasty, and enjoyable eating available to as many people as possible.

Locking away “good” food experiences only to those with deep pockets (via expensive restaurants or haute cuisine) or convenient access to abundance (because they live somewhere like, say, California rather than Kansas) is fundamentally wrong.

This access to pleasure is what they call it “democratic hedonism.” 

This framework isn’t only used about food—in fact, as they say, it’s a concept drawn from the work of Joseph Fischel, who is mainly talking about sex and intimacy—but food is such an everyday, accessible pleasure that it creates a huge canvas to work with. What easier place to create joy than in food, the thing all of us do multiple times every single day?

The current state of “good” food prioritizes a kind of philosophical satisfaction over true sensual pleasure; it tells people what they should like instead of what they actually like, it gatekeeps the concept of what is good. Here’s one paragraph that sums things up:

“Much earnest thought about remaking the food system and the American diet tends to, often despite itself, aspire to haute cuisine. One could easily miss the appeal of common food pleasures when reading most contemporary food writing. Crack open one of dozens of foodie books about making a better food system, and chances are you’ll be met with good intentions wrapped in elitist austerity, elitist judgment, or both. Such writing assumes that only food grown or prepared the “right way,” with time-consuming, handcrafted and freshly harvested artisanal ingredients and ostensibly good politics end up, despite themselves, dovetailing with the snobbery of haute cuisine.”

I’m not sure whether the term “democratic hedonism” is the best one in the long-run—it seems a little overcomplex and politically loaded in unhelpful ways—and I think there are plenty of folks who will disagree that access to pleasure should be the way that the arc of history bends. But I do see a lot of interesting ground in their argument, which is why I wanted to share this book with you all.

While I’m here, I just wanted to note a whole side thread in this book about knowledge and honesty. It seems to me as if certain political beliefs require a fundamental, unrelenting hostility to asking questions, that seeing how systems actually work is ultimately dangerous. 

So many of the political conflicts we see today come about because people would prefer truth to remain veiled. Folks want to ban books because the ideas in them are too dangerous; they police speech or reject change because it undermines their own comfort. It’s as if knowing the truth and living a good life are somehow in opposition to each other: that we can only enjoy life if we remain ignorant. I reject that notion completely!

In Feed the People there’s a lot of this, for example, admitting that modern farming is very different from the Jeffersonian ideal—something that was maybe never really true anyway, but is certainly not accurate 250 years later when massive corporations dominate the business of agriculture and Bill Gates is actually the biggest owner of farmland in America.

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Anyway.

Whatever you take away from this book, I’m excited to say that we have the chance to talk over these points with Feed the People’s authors later this month—and you’re invited!

We’ll be talking via Zoom with Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg on Wednesday May 27 at 3pm Eastern/12pm Pacific. I’ll send out details on how to access the meeting next week: I hope you can join us.

Until next time,

Onwards

Bobbie