The Politics of the Pantry

The following excerpt is from Michael Mikulak’s Politics of the Pantry: Stories, Food, and Social Change.

Most of us have seen commodity biographies such as Robert Kenner’s Food Inc., filled with tragic tales of the “true costs” of cheap food in the form of obesity, environmental degradation, the death of the family farm, and the torture and confinement of animals. These cautionary tales suggest that we can attain salvation through enlightened shopping, and that decisions to buy local, sustainably produced food can literally change the world by turning us into co-producers. While economic arguments based on hidden costs are necessary, they often fail to incite more than a momentary pang of guilt. Like the over-used images of starving African children in advertisements imploring us to sacrifice less than the price of a cup of coffee a day, the guilt they arouse lingers for only a few days, perhaps a month if we are particularly sensitive. But we soon find ourselves back in old habits, craving chicken McNuggets even after seeing the pink slime YouTube video, or being enchanted by Jamie Oliver’s fierce desire for a food revolution and his generous glugs of the finest extra-virgin olive oil.

Guilt can never be enough. People have to want to eat better; they have to crave change and feel the need viscerally. As Elspeth Probyn says, “the question of how to live today can be best seen at a ‘gut’ level.” Eating ethically will always involve both a push and a pull, acknowledging the multifaceted and often contradictory layers of history, meaning, and taste that tune our bodies toward certain kinds of foods. For me, the industrial perogy simply did not resonate with my experiences; I have an almost involuntary response, a gag reflex: my body refuses to acknowledge that this thing is actually food. And yet, at the same time that I was begging for Mom’s homemade perogies, I also became obsessed with McDonald’s. As a recent immigrant, McDonald’s was something I had never experienced. Nothing of the sort existed in Soviet Ukraine in the 1980s, and what was more, my mother had an almost irrational fear of fast food, so the golden arches had a special attraction for my five-year-old mind. In addition to objecting to the cost, which was too much for a family of four that had come to the country with only five dollars to their name, she seemed to believe that I would be corrupted by the food – literally poisoned. I remember spending my first allowance on a set of McDonald’s Fraggle Rock toys that a friend of mine had collected from his much more gastronomically lenient mother. I didn’t even know what Fraggle Rock was, or anything about the power of crossmarketing, but the toys were a talisman from the golden kingdom. My mother was, to say the least, not pleased by my purchase for, while the food had not passed my lips, I had been sullied by the empire. Some time later, I came ever so close to tasting the forbidden fries when my school bus driver, in a fit of generosity, offered to treat the few kids on his route. I was overcome by a giddiness that was swiftly crushed when one of the kids on the bus said he didn’t want to stop, and we glided past that beacon of capitalist food nirvana, the smell of grease leaving a faint taste of salt on my lips and teasing me as I was once again denied entrance.

I tell this story to make a point about food and the accumulated layers of meaning that flavour our experience of eating. I suppose my mother was successful in tuning my body, for to this day, I too have a strong aversion to fast food. But the meaning of McDonald’s in that context, the power it had over my imagination, suggests something about the nature of food and the stories we tell about it, about what that knowledge feels and tastes like.

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