Intervention
Taste as a human right?

I have previously posted about a conference I'm organizing at the University of Oregon entitled Food Justice: Community, Equity, Sustainability. The conference is an experiment in gathering scholars from the humanities, natural sciences, social sciences and law together with activists, farmers, chefs, winemakers, and policymakers. In the spirit of fostering cross-disciplinary thinking about the history and future of food, we've organized sessions around, for example, GMOs that include legal scholars and literary critics. In a conversation today about one of our keynote sessions ("Food Futures"), a provocative question arose: How do we make delicious food and the pleasure in food a human right? Or put differently, what would it mean to reframe taste as a site of justice and democracy rather than of high culture? (Amy Bentley, an Associate Professor of Food Studies at NYU, helped to frame this marvelous question.)

Taste—as an aesthetic and as a social category—has become a vibrant area of inquiry in the humanities. Consider Denise Gigante's Taste: A Literary History and Robert Appelbaum's Aguecheek's Beef, Belch's Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections as well as Timothy Morton's edited volume Cultures of Taste / Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism. This scholarship offers a revisionist geneaology of taste, one that positions bodily, gustatory, and fleshy experiences of food as absolutely central to aesthetic judgment.

To understand how food functions in contemporary discourses of taste, we must turn not to scholars but to journalists, chefs, and farmers. I'm thinking of Michael Pollan's bestselling book The Omnivore's Dilemma, David Mas Masumoto's pastoral text Epitaph for a Peach, and Alice Waters Chez Panisse restaurant and foundation. All three have served as provocateurs, I would argue, to the structures of globalization, industrial agriculture, and fast food. And they have done so by advocating for the palate and the stomach as nothing short of the foundation for culture.

If this sounds grandiose, it is. But both Pollan and Waters, along with other writers, chefs, farmers and food visionaries, seem to have ushered in (or perhaps given voice to) a new cultural zeitgeist––one that sees farming, gardening, cooking, preserving, and eating to be lost arts in need of renaissance. In the United States, this zeitgeist has come under attack as elitist and rarefied. I have made this argument myself by contrasting the romance with heirloom vegetables, slow food cookery, and "locavore" diets in The Omnivore's Dilemma to the call for farmer livelihood and food sovereignty in the writings of environmental justice leader Vandana Shiva.

This conflict between taste and equity—or between pleasure and power—seems central not only to contemporary food politics but also to underlying conceptions of aesthetics, on the one hand, and justice, on the other. Which returns me to my opening query, which I would now put this way: Can we reframe taste as a human right –– as a site for justice, equity, and empowerment? And if so, how do we define aesthetic taste (and the cultural work it does) to include considerations of cultural difference, struggle, and contestation aswell as considerations of pleasure, distinction, and status?

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