"The stewarding of small miracles"

Thanks to those of you who joined for our live conversation with Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg, the authors of May’s book Feed the People! last Wednesday. It was a stimulating chat about their book and the ideas within it.

For an hour, we discussed many of the topics that the book brought up—from their problem with new food writers like Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman, to how to reenvisage the food system, to the promise of cellular agriculture. And we still didn’t get to cover everything!

But here’s an edited version of our conversation, I hope you enjoy it.

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Bobbie: To me, the argument in this book is that you believe that a lot of people who talk about rebuilding or improving the modern food system are focused on an elitist, backward-looking version of what good food is, and that the vision that they have is doomed to failure.

You say that meaningful change would be more successful if we admit a couple of important things: First that the industrial food system is pretty amazing, because it consistently delivers tasty and inexpensive food to millions of people, and that's really important; and second, that it's not perfect, so you propose a set of ways to make it better without jettisoning what's good about it. At a basic level that’s about more realistic economics around farming and labor, less reliance on animal products, and reworking our understanding of what's healthy and what's not. Does that seem like a fair summary? What’s right and what’s wrong about that? 

Gabriel Rosenberg: One way of putting it is that we want people to recognize, first and foremost, that everything that they eat is a product of the industrial food system, and that includes both nutritious and sustainable food, and unhealthy and unsustainable food. These are all products of the same industrial food system, and there's very little that's available for consumption that isn't produced through the same system of industrial supply chains, even though in some cases it may be artisanal, or boutique, or aestheticized in some way. 

At a fundamental level, your spinach salad is also an industrial food product. We want to say that the spinach salad is great because it's nutritious, or it's great because it has less of a carbon footprint than the bacon cheeseburger, and we want to think, therefore, that somehow it's not an industrial food product. But it actually is an industrial food product: It's a product of the same sort of benefits of scale, reliability, standardization, and high quality regulation. 

Once you sort of reckon with that fact, then, if we want to reduce what are some very pressing and very serious problems associated with the food system—which might include the serious environmental costs associated with food production; the terrible working conditions of many food workers; the lousy diets that many people in both Europe and the United States seem to have—if we want to make real progress on that, we need to engage first and foremost with that reality of what what the industrial food system is. And once we can sort of recognize that, we can begin to think about constructive engagements with it that are going to operate at scale to make really, really big aggregate changes in terms of these negative outcomes. 

The way we like to think about it is pretty straightforward: How do we make the average meal fairer, more sustainable, more nutritious, and more delicious, rather than thinking about how at the very edges we can make the perfect idealized farm-to-fork Chez Panisse-perfect meal. We want to ask a different question: How do we make as many of the average meals as possible a little bit better? 

Jan Dutkiewicz: If you're looking for the genesis of this book, it comes from a review we co-wrote of Mark Bittman's Animal, Vegetable, Junk back in 2021. Bittman is writing in this tradition of Alice Waters and Michael Pollan and the rest of these sort of American New Food writers—and Wendell Berry, of course, the progenitor of it all—and he's basically trying to do an analysis of what's wrong with the food system and how to make it better. It’s very Omnivore’s Dilemma-esque, in the sense that he recognizes many of the problems with the food system, that his analysis of the symptoms is more or less there. But when he turns to solutions, he just goes to these hyper-aestheticized, hyper-localized, non-scalable ideas—“eat heirloom radishes and regenerative beef from the farmers’ market” solutions—which just quite simply aren't up to the task. So what we really wanted to do is write a book that brought some realism and pragmatism and real politics and real political economy back to a sort of progressive vision.

Why do you think that those writers so successfully captured the conversation about improving food?

GR: One way of thinking about it is that the New Food Movement and the new food writing that comes out of it—certainly since the 1970s 1980s and 1990s—was deeply intertwined with the emergence of the modern environmental movement, all of which is kind of an outgrowth of the new left movements, both in the United States and in Europe of the 1960s and 1970s. And they have a lot of well-earned suspicion of institutions. It’s characteristic of left critique in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and the aftermath of the exposure of the excesses of Stalinism, that we can't really trust large-scale institutions or states to do right by small people, and that we need a kind of cultural transformation. 

This is a core kind of like new left argument, and the kind of logic that emerges from Wendell Berry, which then gets applied to the food system… is that we need cultural change around what people want from their food system, and that they're going to do it through social networks that operate outside of institutions. To the extent that there will be institutions involved, they'll make their own institutions, and they'll be local, and they'll be small, and they'll be embedded within real communities. 

It's a really nice vision! The problem, of course, is that it doesn't work, and in fact it abandons the state and institutions as sites of political struggle, and that abdication and abandonment of those institutions is deeply corrosive because precisely the forces that we would like to critique, those are the ones that storm into and capture those institutions, because these critics of the left look with such paranoia and such suspicion on any kind of institutional action. It's gotten to a point now that if we look at this from four and five decades on, what's going on in the United States with RFK Jr. and the so-called MAHA movement of Make America Healthy Again, we could describe it as a kind of horseshoe effect.

We want to ask how can we change the rules for everyone? What are the policies? What are the institutional changes that are going to help everybody? Leaving it up to individual consumers to sort out who the good guys are and who the bad guys are leaves behind precisely the people who we have the most responsibility to protect and help. 

You talk about this idea of “democratic hedonism” in relation to food—that good food can be really enjoyable too, and not just worthy.

GR: There's a sort of fundamental dissonance within a lot of food writing, which is that it heaps scorn on the food that—if we wanted to talk about the revealed preferences of behavior—most people actually enjoy a lot. That it's actually the thing that gives them the most pleasure in what is often a pretty difficult and crowded day, and so that's like a lot of the junk food and the fast food that a lot of food writing sort of dismisses with a hand swipe. There’s this idea of food false consciousness: the Dorito really only tastes good because you've been brainwashed into it, and what you'd really like is this meticulously constructed, home-cooked meal that really expresses a full, deep knowledge of the ecosystem around you. I think we're just skeptics of that at a very basic empirical level. If you look at the farm-to-fork mantra, the locavore way of eating, most people actually don't find it to be as pleasurable as is required to outweigh the costs, and that’s not true of the Doritos or the Taco Bell or any of these other kinds of options. And that's a serious stumbling block for anybody who actually wants to make changes to the food system. If you just hand wave away people's preferences and what they actually like and say “oh well, that'll we'll just solve that later on,” then nobody's going to go along with your food revolution. 

We don't want to say that McDonald's or Taco Bell or Pizza Hut are the greatest food in the world, but you might do a lot more for the world if you made those meals marginally a little less harmful rather than trying to convince people that they should only be eating farm-to-fork. As we say, we're here to liberate the Waffle House.

JD: There's a weird tension when talking about food. On the one hand, we know that in order to address the big food system problems—especially environmental ones—we need to change everyday diets. But then no one wants to talk about the demand side as a component of actual, serious change. For example, I'm vegan, but as anyone who's tried to convince people to go vegan using ethical argument, or using reams of peer-reviewed evidence will know, it's just very hard. Once you dig past the easy defense mechanisms, you ultimately get to habit and pleasure, right? People just say: look, I don't want to give up this pleasure. 

So then the question becomes how do you change that, and this is a question for veganism, for healthier eating, for whatever else. We think that a good approach to food—which is why, for instance, we're so bullish on things like alternative protein—is that yes, there has to be dietary change, but the more you can achieve particular aims while lowering the switching costs for the average consumer, the better. For example it's much easier just for someone to swap out dairy milk for oat milk than it is for someone to just give up milk altogether. 

I find it interesting that the folks are categorically suspicious of what people choose for themselves, while at the same time deciding that what they choose for themselves is fine. 

JD: Precisely. And the food system is quite unique. In a lot of other sort of big picture systems there's very little latitude for individual action. If I flip the switch to turn on the lights on my wall, I would prefer for that light to come from renewable energy, but that's a question for energy producers. And what I'm after is the light, and there's no difference in the light whether it comes from wind or whether it comes from fossil fuels. Whereas, with food, people actively make choices multiple times a day in a way that's largely unconstrained. So you have to start thinking about ways to actually shift independent, disaggregated individual choice to achieve some food system outcomes.

One thing I’ve heard recently from people is that while alternative protein had a moment, it’s fading away again. While there may be some ups and downs with consumer demand, it seems to me that we are light years ahead of where we were a decade ago. So how you look at that? And what consumer enticements do you think can bring people into this better system. Obviously one of the advantages of the industrial food system is that it has great scale and that can drive down price. But what levers are there to use beyond that?

JD: I think scale and price are very important, given what we know about how consumers make decisions—which is primarily price, taste and habit. But the zeitgeist around environmental issues has shifted quite dramatically in the last few years. At the start of the alt protein boom, there was constant talk about climate change, about environmental issues. Greta Thunberg was sort of our global hero. But there's been a very effective attack against all protein by various cultural warriors and by the meat industry, tying all protein products to questions of being ultra-processed or unhealthful or “industrial” which has been relatively effective. 

But I do think it's a matter of timescale. These products are now well established: you can go to a Burger King or A&W and get a plant-based burger. There's Oatly, I mean, Oatly single-handedly changed the game. There might be a little bit of a retraction that might have to do with bad messaging, it might have to do with the product still not being, not being entirely on par, not being entirely convincing analogs. 

I think if we take as our baseline that we need to reduce the environmental impact of the food system, we need meat reduction, and if we need meat reduction, we need something like alternative proteins to work, because I don't think we're going to have a global vegan epiphany, as much as I'd like that to happen.

If tofu and seitan and tempeh were alt protein 1.0, and then Beyond, Impossible, et cetera are alt protein 2.0, we're like, we're still in the process of iteration. There are all sorts of production processes which have just produced basically prototypes. We haven't seen scaled cellular agriculture in the market, so I think it's also a matter of wait and see. If you take a sort of a more longitudinal global picture, there's been some pushback against cellular agriculture: it's banned in Italy, it's banned in a few states in the US. But its deployment is also in China's five year agricultural plan, so it's entirely feasible. I'm not in the prediction business, but it's entirely feasible that what's going to happen is what happened with EVs and batteries, where eventually the technology just got figured out, and then mass adoption is around the corner. It's quite possible this is what will happen with cellular agriculture or various other forms of alt protein production.

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GR: Yeah, to add to Jan's point, I think that the one way of putting this is that whether or not in the United States we continue to be global leaders in cellular cellular agriculture, as American businesses and researchers have been for the last 15 years. Or do we cease to be that because of various barriers and obstacles that are currently being thrown up by the Republican Party, mostly, and also by cultural warriors who have less partisan attachment. 

It's not that the research and technology is not going to be developed, it's that it's going to be developed elsewhere, and that means who controls it, what they have in mind, what they do with it, how they profit from it, those are decisions are not going to be made by people in the United States. If we continue down this path, it could be a potential own goal—a real problem that we are inflicting on ourselves. 

But even within the last few months in the United States, where we're beginning to see that real price pressure around beef is actually reducing consumption in ways that we didn't think was possible. So if we begin to think that the question is not only “what is the price point of an Impossible Burger or a cellular agricultural meat product?” but “what is it relative to what it's substituting for?” then that's a different issue, and that issue is also subject to political pressure and to policy pressure. 

One thing we talk about a lot in the book is that we ought to be internalizing a lot of the costs which are currently externalized within meat production. Voting electorates really do seem to have a preference for passing more animal welfare laws with real teeth, those are things that have popular support and that electorates may be willing to support, despite the fact that in the long run they might have downstream impacts on the cost of meat. When you start to think about it that way, I think that there's a lot more political strategy and policy making that's possible and that we should be thinking about, rather than a kind of fatalistic throwing up our hands and saying, “Oh, we tried the alternative meat for a year, or two years, or three years.”

One thing I enjoyed about the book was your concept—which shouldn’t be shocking, but sort of is—that the people who work in food service and production should also be able to enjoy the good food produced by that system. So let’s talk about labor. How important is paying food workers to revitalizing the whole system?

GR: I think it's important on a number of different fronts. Just at a basic level of values, it's.. it's one of the most pressing harms—certainly within the United States—is that the 20 to 30 million people who are employed in the food system are often brutally underpaid. Many of them have some of the most unsafe and dangerous work that is possible. So improving working conditions would make an enormous difference for millions of people, just to start with. 

But I also wish people would think about what we would call a coalitional analysis here. We're talking about this as a fairness issue and as a labor issue over here, and then we have all these other issues over there, which are about improving sustainability within the food system. What we're arguing for in the book is that we want to put together a large coalition that can advance good policies on both of these fronts, and we want to push back on the notion that the political coalition is going to be based primarily on an alliance between eaters and farmers. 

You've got tens of millions of people who are underpaid, who work in food systems in places like Waffle House, or in warehouses, or in supermarkets—people who work in all of these industrial food locations that a lot of contemporary food writing kind of sneers at, and there's actually a lot of them, there's vastly more of them than there are farmers. These are coalition partners, these are potential people who you can be in solidarity with, who can also help to push the other policies that may not be narrowly invested in labor politics. 

One of the few times when Mark Bittman turns away from just trusting consumers to figure out who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, is when he looks for political activism from within the food system, and he finds this organization called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. That is originally a sort of pseudo-union operating in tomato farms in Florida, and through their organizing, they've been incredibly successful at improving the wages and working conditions of agricultural workers in those tomato farms. Bittman says this is a great model, which we agree with—but the thing that's most striking to us, though, is that they do that by organizing industrial food spaces. They don't do it by going to small boutique farms. These are people working in conventional industrial farm spaces, and they're trying to get better pay. They're not trying to close down industrial food. 

If we want to think about a powerful food movement can emerge to really transform the food system, we have to think about how we're going to enroll workers in conventional industrial food spaces, and the way you do that is probably not by telling them “oh, your jobs are going to be eliminated, we're all going to stop eating at those places, or stop purchasing tomatoes from conventional industrial farms, it'll just be the small good guys, your jobs will go away.” I don't know that a lot of workers are going to be very interested in joining that coalition, and it's not surprising that they haven't. 

I think it tells you a lot about the class interests of the conventional food movement that we never hear about those workers. They are seldom included within the conversation, and that's because it is by and large a food movement that excludes them and does not have their interests in mind. 

JD: Ultimately gets back to having to fight these big fights around policy. The big fights around food labor protections are about wages, on-site worker protections, safety protections, the right to unionize, all of which are statutory questions. So these are all fights that have to be fought with lawmakers, and the people leading that fight in the food system are the food workers themselves. The fight for 15 started in New York City in 2014. These were workers who were getting paid a $7.25 an hour federal minimum wage, and they asked for double that to signify a dignified living wage. [New York Governor Andrew] Cuomo opposed that, and said it was a complete non-starter. Five years later, he was leading the task force phasing in the new $15 an hour minimum wage. And so these are where the fights need to be fought. 

Those are policy fights that are winnable. You can legislate better animal welfare, you can legislate different zoning laws, different interstate commerce laws around these industries. So rather than turning your back on policy, or assuming that policy is inherently captured, or assuming that policy always already works… it's quite, it's quite the opposite. All those fights start through broad coalition building, and ultimately lead to legislation and policy and regulation, which is how these things are and have to be enforced, which is why ultimately our book is a big picture set of policy prescriptions, in addition to a way of analyzing the food system, and a travelog of American food.

There’s a concerted attack happening on the regulatory system, which has been imperfect for a long time. Do you see this “burn-it-all-down” approach as a potential for renewal—we only realize what we’ve had once it’s been taken away? That there’s a benefit to realizing why these protections were there in the first place. 

GR: In my honest opinion, the damage that's been done to the regulatory state in the last few years by the current administration is very, very bad, and it would be much better if it had not happened. I'm not a believer in an accelerationist, or “we’ve got to burn down the whole system and start from scratch.” At the same time, it is the case that I think public outrage around corruption and public outrage around, frankly, a brutal disinterest in good governance, could be able to stir us to reinforce those institutions, undo some of that damage, and in the long run, maybe we'll be in a better place. I think it certainly is an opportunity, but I would not want to be passive or shrug at it. It's an opportunity only if people on the left who are interested in food politics issues get over an allergy to institutions and to state action and start really seriously making an argument that the solution here is to go back into the state and to reinforce those regulatory capacities that we've had enough of simply abandoning and blaming the state. Now is the time to recapture it and to reinforce it. 

Finally, if folks reading this want to go out and eat a meal, or make a meal, that fits the ideals you lay out in the book, where would you send them?

GR: one's easy for me, because I put it in the conclusion of the book. I spend a lot of time in Berlin, and I have a doner place and I love it, I love it. I just pop in there, and Halil, he knows what I like, he's got it there. The thing I love about it is that it’s the classic sort of Berlin doner, the consummate street food of Berlin, and it's delicious, and there's variation across different vendors, but there's a core thing and everybody has their own sort of twist on it. It's a very meaty thing, the classic doner is either chicken or beef, but within the last 10 years every doner place worth its salt in Berlin has begun to include seitan as an option, and so I love that. That's a great option for me. So if you’re in Berlin, a good donor, I like Halil’s, it's right by the Gneisenaustraße U7 Stop in Bergmanmkietz, and it's a high-quality, delicious doner. So go get you one. 

JD: I have maybe a slightly different take on the answer. Whatever meal you're about to have is going to be an industrial meal, and if you like it, then you enjoyed an industrial meal. And the question is, like, is there a way to make it more sustainable or more just through your choices or through your political actions? I'm not trying to send people to find some obscure source of pleasure. It might be a doner, it might be my favorite deli in New York, which is down the street from where I work. What we're trying to do is guide people toward the pleasures that are around them, and to reflect on the stewarding of small miracles that make them possible, and then—only then—ask how we can make them better. 

So the best meal is the one that you're about to eat? 

JD: Yeah, whether you cook it, whether you grab it on the go, whether you grab it alone, whether you grab it with friends. It’s going to be an industrial meal, and if you like it, then you've just enjoyed industrial food, and you're along with us on this journey of how to make industrial food better.

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Thanks so much to Jan and Gabriel for the conversation. Tomorrow’s the 1st of the month and so you’ll be hearing about our pick for June… it’s one I’ve wanted to share for a while, and it’s a wild ride. So buckle up!

Onwards

Bobbie