THE IMAGINED PASTORAL
aka a cheeky meditation on farm to table // environmental despair // cute feelings of hope
FARM 2 TABLE
Has been a convo lately! Or maybe, lack thereof.
Let’s reflect. Slow Food began in Italy. The phrase “farm to table” is mostly attributed to Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse in the 1970s. The slow food movement was radical in its theoretical simplicity: the commitment that ingredients served in a food space have arrive directly from a farmer or a purveyor. For me, in many ways, it is inspo! And optimal. A lot of my favorite cooking moments only were born because I had direct access to a farm. The joyful connection is pretty obvious: not only are you usually getting something beautiful from somewhere beautiful, but you get to exercise presence in your cooking practice. That’s what seasonality is: grown to exist in that moment.
But the biggest undercurrent of the presentation of farm to table is, presumably, honesty. No fast food, no preservatives, no big business, no middleman, no homogenized bounty. Earth to person, person to person, farm to table.
In-between the 1970’s and now, we had a revival of farm-to-table. Michael Pollen in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, called for a sustainable interrogation of the way that we eat and its cost. Then, in the mid-aughts-early 2010s, the language filtered through new-artisanal Hipster culture and avant-hippie core. That part of what I am talking about is parodied in that Portlandia skit and exemplified in movies like Supersize Me.
Reality is always different than concept, at least deeper, and definitely more complicated. When I hear the phrase “farm to table”, I kind of also hear the word “foodie”. Both have begun to sound a little bit opaque to me. They occupy an implication in which caring about food is a choice. The assumption of choice implies some question of virtue. I think we have a different valuation of the virtuous than we used to.
THERE’S A CONCEPT
That is NOT the same thing as Farm to Table, but I think is a really useful lens to use to understand why F2T might not be occupying the same space as it did in the recent past. I ask, dear reader, that you not misunderstand me and we embark on this journey together; I am not condemning the concept or practice of F2T at all! In fact, it is the only real ethical practice because theoretically it’s what existed before capitalism and colonization. But there is a concept that hovers above the head of F2T that might lend some help in locating us in the ether of analysis.
THE IMAGINED PASTORAL
Is a concept I am obsessed with! It’s a term coined by Deborah Lupton in her Food, the Body, and the Self. The Imagined Pastoral is what we call a particular element of American folk or foodlore that represent transparency and farm-based food purity. The Imagined Pastoral is exemplified in moments like:
“growing up, grandma would milk the cow and then use it to make yogurt the next day! And then we would all sit around the table together and tell stories, laugh, and drink the beer that grandpa made from our wheat…mind you, this was before the television.”
The Imagined Pastoral can also look like a farmer’s market in a city on a Saturday. A big hat, a basket of lavender, an Apple watch on, a Chase bank glimmering in the periphery.
The Imagined Pastoral is a dialectic cornerstone that we use in representing a benevolent agrarian interpretation of the United States. It is often coded with the signifiers that maintain the most power in this country: whiteness, affluence, cis heterosexuality, Christianity.
I used the concept for a WILD paper I wrote my senior year of college, which sociologically evaluated the presence of the Imagined Pastoral in Netflix’s Chef’s Table. To explain, I’ll just quote directly from little me:
“Imagined pastoral” implies a narrative of hard farm work, transparency, and nourishment, as well as a rejection of the convenience of modernity. This introduces a dichotomy: good food, which has a connection to the land, versus bad food, which is linked to the mass production, processing, and quick gratification of industrialization. Note the word “Imagined” in describing nature: there is a sentimental and creative connection to this narrative—but it’s not real. It is an image or memory of pre-modernity and the transparency and tranquility that came with it. Additionally, it relies on the role of embodiment; the assumption of society that a person represents his or her habitus, and the social structures that have built it.”
My point here is that something about the Imagined Pastoral, however benevolent and well-intentioned it may initially seem, actually possesses significant shadow. Because we are taught to associate individuals as representatives of their cultural environments, we miss the moment in remembering that slavery was what developed modern and pre-modern agriculture in this country. The Imagined Pastoral values what is good, which is the honesty of growing your food and eating it. But the imagination ignores whatever levels of violence might have accompanied the planting of those seeds.
(LMK if u ever want to read this paper! :) it won awards from the Association for the Study of Food in Society hehe)
WHEN I WROTE THAT PAPER, IT WAS A DIFFERENT TIME. I WAS YOUNG.
It was 2016. And “farm to table” was still a phrase à la mode.
^ me in 2016. Totally a baby!
2016, 2016, 2016. What hadn’t happened yet? When I started research on that paper, Trump hadn’t yet been elected. The pandemic hadn’t occurred. I could never have PREDICTED that Y2K style would return (we were still solidly normcore!). Chef’s Table itself, which had just come out, had only three more years before it would end.
I am not so naïve to say that 2016 was as simpler time, because I don’t think that’s how history and social problems work. But I will definitely say that things had seemed simpler up until then.
2016’s news cycle was fast-paced, confusing, potent. It was also the year that we started hearing about “fake news”, the year that Brock Turner was convicted to 6-months sentence, the Russia Hacks, and Brexit. One of the top shows of the year was called Westworld.
WESTWORLD
Is something maybe I’ve written about before. I think about it a lot, weirdly… maybe because it was the only sort of Sci-Fi thing that worked for me. I think I only watched the first season. Anyway, the show is initially about an amusement park where the rich pay to go pretend to live in a universe of the old West. They interact with robots, who seem very human, and who satiate the guests’ fantastical desires to be at one with and in charge of the social and natural landscape of the Wild West. Everyone gets to be a cowboy! Then the humanoid robots become increasingly sentient, understanding the traumas that have been inflicted on them. Chaos ensues!!
The show is all about the uncanny, and consciousness, and the ruin that comes from colonization. But one reason I really liked watching the show were the shots of landscape.
^turns out it was mostly just Utah… but still!
Why am I bringing this up? Westworld, a show that is all about interrogating power and control in the midst of a vast natural landscape, came about at the same time as F2T having trended so much it was built into our cultural value system. Westworld presents the realization that the peaceful dynamics that defined a pastoral, distinctly American landscape were actually an exploitative myth. This show exposes a moment—amidst the anticipation of intense political shifts and the rise of equivocal fake news—of unsettling distrust, the kind that only a folkloric, idyllic setting can provoke in us.
SO WHAT HAPPENED??
If in as recent a past as the mid-2010s carried farm-to-table as a signifier of virtue, what changed in our culture to dislocate it? What makes a cowboy robot sentient?? Here are a few ideas.
1. Collective distrust. F2T, in avoiding the middleman, carries with it the implication of the most honest food interaction possible. As we began to live in a world in which the truth was becoming increasingly unclear, and unsettling, perhaps it became harder for us to buy into the seeming simplicity of F2T.
There’s also the thing where certain signifiers famously appease us until they don’t, or until we realize we have no idea what they mean. Words like Organic (USDA approved?? Local??) and Natural (biodynamic?? Preservatives??) involve increasing qualifications and, as a result, pacify us less and less.
2. Proliferation to the masses. The birth of F2T was revolutionary because it was a significant impact on a small community (Berkeley wooo!!) Now, F2T language is presumably everywhere. Sakara or the Sweetgreen Collab with Alice Waters and Dan Barber. In theory, of course we love the idea of everyone eating fresh farm food, sourced ethically and beautifully! In practice, it is much easier to market that narrative than to make the practice an accessible sustainable reality. Not only does mass marketing illuminate the finality of what was once a thriving trend, it dilutes the mission of doing good in the first place.
Just look at Daily Harvest, a company that delivers food “Made with the Earth in Mind” that just a couple days ago accidentally poisoned many people with their Lentil Cucumber Crumbles. !
3. We may just… have bigger fish to fry. Being a ‘foodie’ operates on the choice to determine one’s own eating experience. Choice not only implies privilege of financial and cultural capital, it also implies care and time and thought. There has been A LOT TO THINK ABOUT in recent years! I’m the opposite of a nihilist, but I can see how, when the world is truly somewhat on fire, figuring out what’s organic may have moved a couple levels down the list of urgency for the average human.
This seems like something that seems like a lot of movers and shakers in food have accepted. This little interview with chefs about the future. Sytsma starts the piece reminding us that “Ocean life is dwindling… and the massive environmental toll of livestock is only now being fully understood”, and each chef interviewed constructs an entirely plant-based dish. This connects well to the influx of substitutions that we’ve accepted and embraced of late: Beyond Burger, Impossible Burger, Just Eggs, etc. Where in the past it was easy to sniff at tempeh and veggie burgers as sad comparisons to the Real Thing itself, these new brands seem to wink at us that the Real Thing not only involves harm to animals and the planet, but also that it soon will not exist. These new concoctions play only with the silhouette of the Imagined Pastoral, outlining eggs and meat and asking: what can we fit in this space that seems empty? What future might we manufacture? Definitely not idyllic, but potentially ethical.
MUSHROOMS
So here I’ve thrown at you a lot of problems, basically. It’s a bit of a cacophony! What is the hope for the years ahead?? I don’t quite think that it’s exclusively plant-based meats or eggs that are not eggs. I reread the Food of the Future list that I mentioned above. On this list, in 2019, two chefs mention mushrooms.
They’re so cute and beautiful!!!^ from this “Mushroom as Muse” piece in the The New Yorker.
Mushrooms are kind of a fascinating continuation to this conversation. When you really think about it, they pack both physical and philosophical punch. They have to be harvested diligently and have potential to be urgently dangerous. Their flavor profile is animalistically variable: umami, meaty, butter. Mushrooms and fungi grow under the earth; they encompass our shadow.
Something collective is happening here. Michael Pollen wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma in 2006 and How to Change Your Mind, a book about the new science of pychedelics and psilocybin, in 2018. Fantastic Fungi, a 2019 documentary, regards the world as intelligent and magical, reminding us the network of mushrooms that live beneath the earth’s surface mirror the shape of the internet. Even Phantom Thread reminds us, in the midst of restrictive elegance, that mushrooms are alchemy.
So yes, when mushrooms are properly harvested, they can provide a sustainable solution to animal resources that we’re quickly draining. Though somewhat romantic, they interrupt an Imagined Pastoral because they are… literally potentially lethal. But more, the shift of a gaze from Farm to Table towards mushrooms, with curiosity and reverence, seems to be more a regard of something else. F2T is about a physical exchange from farmer to chef, chef to eater.
The question of fungi, however, is not exclusively physical. It’s also something else. It is rare in this country that we are open to sourcing both physical and emotional healing from the earth. At risk of sounding too esoteric (too late, I know), a turn towards mushrooms asks a question that seems mystical, invisible, spiritual. Beneath the ground we walk on, under the imagined farms and pasteurization and laboratories, is there salvation? How do we, how can we possibly, regenerate?