framing the issue of food
TRANSCRIPT
FRAMING THE ISSUE OF FOOD
Submitted By: Gabriel J. Gerzon
Senior Honors Thesis
Communication and Culture Program
Clark University
April 2011
Advisor: Matthew MalskyDepartment of Communications
Second Reader: Professor Jaan ValsinerDepartment of Communications
FRAMING FOOD
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION.............................................................................................................4
BACKGROUND ON SOCIO-POLITICAL FRAMING...............................................6
Disciplinary Background...............................................................................................................................8
THE POWER OF FRAMING: RATES OF ORGAN DONATION...........................11
INTRODUCING TWO OF AMERICA’S EXISTING DEEP FRAMES ON FOOD...........................................................................................................................................14
Deep Frame #1: ‘Food as Fuel’...................................................................................................................15Etymology of Fuel, Food & Nutrition.......................................................................................................18‘Food as Entertainment’............................................................................................................................20
Deep Frame #2:‘Consumerism’ and Its’ Semi-Surface Frames: ‘Modernism’ & ‘Health Individualism’...............................................................................................................................................22
Consumerism.............................................................................................................................................22Health Individualism.................................................................................................................................24Modernism.................................................................................................................................................25
Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................................26
Meritocracy...................................................................................................................................................32
Episodic vs. Thematic Framing...................................................................................................................33
Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................................34
THE CRAFT OF REFRAMING...................................................................................35
A Briefer on Reframing...............................................................................................................................35
Enlightenment Reason: A Barrier to Reframing......................................................................................36
Reframes That Are Actually De-Frames, & The Mythology of the Western Diet.................................36
Civil Disobedience Vs. Non-Collusion........................................................................................................38
REFRAME: SUN-BASED FOOD OVER OIL-BASED FOOD.................................42
How “Industrial Agriculture” Relies on Oil..............................................................................................42
Reframe: Industrial Agriculture as Oil or Petrochemical-Based............................................................45Nutritional Deficiency of Petrochemical-based Food...............................................................................45
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Nutritional Integrity of Sun-based Food....................................................................................................46
Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................................47
REFRAMING FOOD AS FUEL....................................................................................49
Energy from Other Sources.........................................................................................................................49
The Uncaring Corporate Food Structure...................................................................................................51
FRAMEWORKS MOST EFFECTIVE REFRAMES.................................................53
Food and Fitness Environment Frame.......................................................................................................54
The Runaway Food Model...........................................................................................................................55
Lakoff’s Critique of the FrameWorks Institute........................................................................................56
FOOD WITHIN THE LARGER PROGRESSIVE FRAME......................................58
The “Silo Problem” and The Larger Frame..............................................................................................58Focus on Food............................................................................................................................................59
THE LIMITS OF FRAMING........................................................................................61
Disciplinary Limits.......................................................................................................................................61
Cultural Limits.............................................................................................................................................61The State-Corporate System......................................................................................................................62
Biological Limits: The Primitive Hardware of the Modern Human.......................................................64Biological Exploitation..............................................................................................................................64Neurological Considerations.....................................................................................................................64
Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................................66
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTS......................................................................................69
Professor George Lakoff..............................................................................................................................69
Food Writer Mark Bittman.........................................................................................................................82
Professor Noam Chomsky...........................................................................................................................88
ENDNOTES.....................................................................................................................91
WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………………………………...102
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Introduction
Eating is perhaps the most intimate, important relationship mankind has
maintained with the Earth throughout existence, but unlike many animals genetically
hardwired to know exactly what to eat (the koala’s appetite for eucalyptus leaves or the
cow’s penchant for grass), humans can digest almost anything nature offers. This ability
has allowed humans to flourish all over the globe. However, our remarkably versatile
digestive system presents a dilemma—we are responsible to choose wisely from a variety
of food options. Food psychologist Paul Rozin coined this problem the “Omnivore’s
Dilemma,” a phrase recently co-opted by popular food author Michael Pollan. To get
around this dilemma, humans have relied on their culture’s accumulated wisdom on diet
and health to sustain them. Accordingly then, the biggest determinate of what humans eat
is culture.
I found it strange then that my culture, American culture, would extol and
promote foods, such as red meat, dairy, sugar and refined grains, which I came to know
as unnecessary or even health-adverse. I became interested in understanding how and
why America deviated from the “traditions in food ways,” which “reflect long
experience… [And] a nutritional logic,” of our not-so-distant ancestors.
As will become apparent, I, and many of the researchers I draw upon, see this
deviation as a major problem. If, as Michael Pollan writes, “our problem around food is a
cultural problem,”1 then it too is a communications problem—a problem that can begin to
be solved with clear, honest dialogue.
In this thesis, I explore how the communications tool known as “framing” can be
used to talk about the realities of our current food system and the need to change it. I am
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interested in devising communication strategies that enable the public to understand the
state of America’s food system more accurately and in a broader context to move people
away from blaming individuals for poor health and towards systematic and community-
based solutions that address the fundamental problems of industrial agriculture and
corporately controlled food. This is a thesis for those who are excited about the prospect
of an equitable, safe and sustainable food system but are unaware of how potent,
engaging and persuasive framing can be in the context of message exchange within food
discourse.
I will begin with an explanation of what frames are, followed by an interesting
example of how frames unconsciously shape deeply personal decisions.
Then, I will examine two of the predominant food-frames in America and analyze
how they took root.
The five wide-ranging, discursive sections on “reframing” explore the craft of and
ideas for new, effective conceptual models that convey the need for transformative
change to America’s food system.
Finally, I will examine the disciplinary, cultural, and biological limits to the use of
framing.
This thesis is primarily informed by personal interviews conducted with Noam
Chomsky, George Lakoff and Mark Bittman, which are referenced throughout and can be
found in full in the appendices. The work of George Lakoff and the FrameWorks Institute
provided the inspiration for many of my own ideas.
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Background on Socio-Political Framing
"Every frame defines the issue, explains who is responsible, and suggests
potential solutions. All of these are conveyed by images, stereotypes or
anecdotes." –Charlotte Ryan, Prime Time Activism.
Cognitive linguist, scientist and communications expert George Lakoff has
popularized framing in recent years, thought it has long been an invaluable tool for
psychologists and psychotherapists looking to bring about critical changes in patients’
interpretive awareness. Lakoff stresses the comprehension and utilization of framing as
essential to any communication strategy that seeks to persuade people by advocating new
ways of looking at old problems. In the field of Communications, framing is used to
analyze the conceptual frameworks that undergird cultural establishments such as media
and academia. These institutions shape popular opinion and define the parameters of
discourse. Framing has wide-ranging cultural implications that are complimented by
understandings of Social Constructionism, hermeneutics, action-research and analytic
methods.
Sociologist Irving Goffman was the first to suggest in the late 1960s that we think
in terms of frames after closely observing social institutions and practices. “To make
sense of what he observed, he used the metaphor of Life as a Play: each form of
institution or practice is like a drama, with players, dialogue, and relatively well-defined
actions.”2 Researchers following in Goffman’s steps refined his ideas by positing that
frames essentially give contextual awareness and perspective to our experience. The
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whole idea behind socio-political framing is that people do not “approach the world as
naïve, blank slate receptacles who take in stimuli,” but are rather “sophisticated veterans
of perception who have stored their prior experiences as an organized mass.” We
categorize our prior experiences of the world into classes of expectation that “the world,
being a systematic place,” usually confirms.3 The use of frames is crucial to social
development since they “work symbolically to meaningfully structure the world."4
Frames represent a sort of heuristic, or mental shortcut, which allows our minds to
quickly analyze a situation by drawing on past experience. For example, when we walk
into a restaurant and are greeted by the waiter, we have certain expectations of how the
interaction will go based on past experience; we expect him/her to ask us what we would
like to eat or drink, act courteously, and so on. If he/she were to stray in some way from
the waiter-schema we constructed over time, such as inquiring if you were free to baby sit
next weekend, our preconceived ‘restaurant frame’ would be violated. Frames stress
certain aspects of situations or issues and leave others out. Frames cue a specific
response. You are at a restaurant to eat, and your waiter is there to facilitate the exchange
of money for food. Your waiter’s love life, political persuasions, etc. are left out of the
interaction because they are not pertinent to the specific response both parties seek.5
Framing has tremendous implications for media production and consumption, not
just everyday interactions. Media influences how people think about and interpret ideas
and issues—particularly how they think about social problems. If one can understand the
operative frames at work in various social and communicational contexts, one can also
begin to understand the underlying principles or value system on display.
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Disciplinary Background
A thorough understanding and successful application of framing requires
multidisciplinary approach. Framing draws heavily on sociology, communications,
anthropology, psychology and cognitive science. Advances in cognitive science in the
past twenty years have allowed scientists to peer into how our minds work like never
before. This has given communications experts a new and exciting body of hard evidence
on which to base their methodology. George Lakoff explicates the eight “Lessons from
Cognitive Science” he has learned on framing in his book Talking Points. This list helps
one arrive at an accurate grasp of what framing is:
1. The use of frames is largely unconscious.
2. Frames define common sense.
3. Repetition can embed frames in the brain.
4. Activation links surface frames to deep frames and inhibits opposition frames.
5. Existing deep frames don’t change overnight.
6. Speak to biconceptuals (political independents in Lakoff’s parlance) as you speak
to your base.
7. The facts alone will not set you free.
8. Simply negating the other side’s frames only reinforce them.6
Lakoff uses the term “deep frame” to draw a distinction between what he sees as the
critical differences between “deep frames” and “surface frames.” Surface (as in
superficial) framing refers to catchy slogans, cunning perlocution and clever spin, all of
which may or not be truthful. Such frames are pithy, particular messages on specific
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subjects. Their key characteristic is that they are only effective when they evoke or
trigger deep frames, or frames that speak to and forge connections with underlying
principles or value systems. Conservative ideology is a deep frame of a kind, while
phrases like “the liberal elite,” or “activist judges” are surface frames that buttress the
conservative deep frame.7
Compared to the other branches of Communications, little research had been
conducted on this topic until this decade. Framing and its applications have been
discussed in relation to politics, terrorism, media violence, etc. but almost never with
food, food politics and the American Diet until the FrameWorks Institute (hereafter,
simply FrameWorks) began investigating how people think about the issue of food four
years ago.
Drawing on the work of Erickson, Iyengar, Lakoff, Watzlawick et. al., The
FrameWorks Institute appears to be in the vanguard of framing food and many other
social issues. Since its’ founding in 1999 by Susan Nall Banes, FrameWorks has “been
conducting research into how Americans think about a wide variety of social issues—
from child and adolescent development to global warming to rural issues to race—with
the goal of engaging the public in collective solutions.”8 They look at the frames
“currently in the public consciousness and how those frames influence public policy
preferences,”9 as well as investigate potential ‘re-frames’ that can help elevate an issue
onto the public agenda.
One such social issue FrameWorks examines is how Americans think about food.
The three head writers that author FrameWorks research papers on food-framing, Axel
Aubrun, Andrew Brown, and Joseph Grady, all hold PhDs and write in an
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accessible, non-academic manner. This accords with FrameWorks mission to “advance
the nonprofit sector’s communications capacity,” since many in the nonprofit sector are
neither academics nor communications experts.10 Aubrun et al. have ten food-framing
research documents available for download, all of which were written between 2005-
2008. The W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Food and Society Program provided their
funding.11
The most accessible medium for the public and nonprofit sector however is the
interactive web slideshow titled, “Talking Food Systems E-Workshop.” FrameWorks
uses this highly visual medium to effectively engage the reader/viewer and enhance
comprehension of their research findings on how citizens currently think about America’s
food system. Most importantly, they provide narratives and rationales that help “lead the
public to a more informed understanding of the need for systematic change.”12
I was unable to find any peer reviewed critiques of FrameWorks’ research, so I
am led to believe their findings are relatively uncontroversial, at least within progressive,
liberal circles. There is overall a scarcity of academic research on this topic, perhaps
because the nature of the research almost obliges the researcher to take an involved,
action-orientated stance which certain academic institutions may not encourage.
Additionally, the application of framing in sociopolitical settings was only popularized
relatively recently. The fact that a reputable non-profit institution such as FrameWorks
has spent so much time, energy and resources on finding out how best to frame social
issues indicates how powerful and persuasive they believe framing to be when used
truthfully and successfully.
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The Power of Framing: Rates of Organ Donation
Frames are largely subconscious organizing principles that define how we think
about and conceptualize social issues. They stress certain aspects of an issue or situation
while ignoring others. Their goal is to cue a specific response. If one can understand the
operative frames in various social contexts where communication is paramount, one can
also begin to unravel the underlying principles, motives and value system on display.
Becoming aware other people’s subconscious of framing can unlock secrets to
improving one’s own communicative prowess. It can mean the difference between
eliciting the desired response and falling on deaf ears. To highlight this point, I will
introduce an example in which one group of experts succeed in cueing the desired
response by using language that evokes a favorable frame, while the other overlooks the
role of framing and fails.
The example involves various European countries’ rates of organ donation.
Before delving into an analysis, examine the graph below that shows the percentage of
Europeans who indicated they would be interested in joining organ donor programs in
their respective countries:
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Graph Source: "Dan Ariely Asks, Are We in Control of Our Own Decisions?” Lecture. TED, Dec. 2008.
Clearly, there are two groups of countries: Blue Countries, which donate
infrequently, and Red Countries, which donate frequently. Keep in mind it is not as if the
Blue Countries purposely wanted few participants to join the program. In fact, the
Netherlands sent out a letter pleading their non-participants to join which only boosted
the rate of enrollment to 28 percent. Also note that the contrast is not easily explained by
cultural or religious differences since countries we generally consider alike, such as
Sweden and Denmark, fall on opposite ends of the graph. The question is, why were Blue
Country’ drivers so loathe to join while Red Country’ drivers were so willing?
The answer lies in the opposing ways the Department of Motor Vehicles framed
the question on the license form. In Blue Countries the form read: "check the bow below
if you want to participate in the organ donor program." In Red Countries, the form read:
"check the box below if you do not want to join the organ donor program." Blue Country
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drivers did not check and did not join the program, while Red Country drivers took the
same course of action, not checking, but this time they have joined. This apparent
paradox supports Tversky and Kahneman’s proposal that “seemingly inconsequential
changes in the formulation of choice problems cause significant shifts of preference.”13
Blue Countries evoked an opt-in frame while Red Countries evoked an opt-out frame,
which turned out to have an enormous effect on the chosen behavior. This simple change
in the question’s structure reveals that most of us utilize a frame based on a philosophy of
inaction or non-engagement. By avoiding spontaneous decisions we are less likely to
commit ourselves to things we could later regret for any number of unforeseen reasons.
As a result, a “don’t act” or “don’t interfere” frame often influences our interactions with
the outside world. Dan Ariely explains how we critically undervalue the power frames
play in determining our day to day choices:
We wake up in the morning and we feel we make decisions... we open the closet and decide what to wear and open the refrigerator and we decide what to eat... what this is saying is that much of these decisions is not residing within us...they're residing in the person who is designing that form.14
Frames are enormously influential in setting the default response, and the above
example is merely a surface frame. If surface frames are able to manipulate significant
personal decisions such as becoming an organ donor or not, it is likely that deep frames
have an ever greater influence on setting preferences around similarly personal decisions
such as what we eat.
To begin this study of framing and reframing food in America it is necessary to
first determine what existing deep frames influence public thinking on the issue.
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Introducing Two of America’s Existing Deep Frames on Food
The following analysis of existing deep frames attempts to answer the question
what kind of cognitive backdrop allows for “a deliberate veil between what you’re eating
and what you’re allowed to know about it.”15
The two frames that will be discussed, the ‘Consumerism’ and ‘Food as Fuel’
(hereafter, FaF) frames, have shaped America’s cultural consciousness on food in
pervasive and pernicious ways that hinder a constructive dialogue on food policy. The
frame-terms ‘Consumerism,’ ‘Modernism,’ and ‘Health Individualism’ are borrowed
from FrameWorks. This analysis is limited to a discussion of American food culture.
The ‘Modernism’ and ‘Health Individualism’ frames are distinct from the
‘Consumerism Frame’ but have similar effects and implications, and so have been
included as “semi-surface” frames. They are semi-surface frames in that they only make
sense within the larger ‘Consumerism’ frame while still retaining enough nuance and
depth to warrant their own classification. They are more than just clever spin within the
‘Consumerism’ frame.
It is worth emphasizing that, as the phrase ‘deep frame' implies, these are largely
unconscious mechanisms that can at certain conceptual junctures conflict with one
another. This is indeed is part of the larger point—there is currently no overarching
conception of either how our food system works or what our relationship to food is or
should be. There are only competing storylines that promote various aspects of the status
quo while obscuring the potential for systematic change. One such we will explore is the
FaF and ‘Food as Entertainment’ tandem.
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Deep frames speak to and forge connections with underlying principles or value
systems that have been built up and ingrained over many years. In this case, decades of
mass commercialization, modernization and commodification of innumerable goods and
services have influenced America’s value system. It is important to recognize the
existence and effects of these deep frames precisely because they are so fundamental to
America’s mainstream worldview and culture. I must contextualize my observations by
stating that, generally speaking, mainstream culture has become corporate culture in my
view—most of us work for, buy from, and are entertained by corporations.
These unconscious frames, rife with instability and omission, are taken for
granted as the base layer of our culture’s reality. It is essential to question the role and
legitimacy of persistent cultural frames. The following frame-examinations do so within
the context of food discourse.
Deep Frame #1: ‘Food as Fuel’
The FaF frame includes many cultural and commercial surface frames that are not
within the purview of this thesis. Rather, the focus will be on the frame’s psychological
and etymological aspects and not its many manifestations in commercial culture (save the
introductory example below). I am more interested in how the frame is buttressed by an
implicit conceptual metaphor: Food is fuel, and thus the body is a machine.
At one point in Ratatouille, a memorable animated film about a French rat named
Remy who dreams of becoming Paris’s top chef, Remy’s gruff father, Django, gets fed
up with his son’s culinary choosiness:
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“Django: [to Remy] Food is fuel. You get picky about what you put in the tank, your engine is gonna die. Now shut up and eat your garbage.”16
This quote reflects a traditional, “calories in, calories out” nutritionist dogma, i.e.
your energy output depends entirely on how much energy (calories) you consume. While
it is not within the purview of my thesis to give this nutritional fallacy full treatment, it
must be noted that this industrial view of nutrition is empirically false.17 It assumes
several aspects of our physiology, which science now understands to be interdependent
and dynamic, are autonomous and static. The major problem with the FaF frame is that is
assumes all calories are created equal—in other words, the equivalent caloric energy of
an apple and a slice of cake are qualitatively the same. This assumption neglects the now
widely accepted notion that foods are more than the sum of their nutritional parts, and act
synergistically with one another and the body. “We see the body as a machine, not as
evolved to nature,”18 which obscures the fact humans evolved with specific plant-based,
unprocessed diets. FaF obscures how America’s new dietary staples (red meat, dairy,
sugars and refined grains) mark a radical departure from what our not-so-distant
ancestors relied on for sustenance.
Take the example of the apple and the slice of cake. The sugar molecules in the
apple are fundamentally different than those in the cake, which were likely concocted in a
food-science lab in the form of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Sugar as it is
“ordinarily found in nature… gives us a slow-release form of energy accompanied by
minerals and all sorts of crucial micronutrients we can get nowhere else.”19
But FaF remains a powerful, enduring understanding of our relationship to food. This
metaphor constitutes the basis of our conceptualization of food and reveals an outlook on
food borne out of the Industrial Age. The frame views food as an undifferentiated fuel
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used to feed our most precious machine: the body. There are many implications of this
frame. Here are a few:
•It takes a dominant stance against nature—an industrial view of agriculture.
Many in the middle and lower classes are appreciative for processed meals because
they simply do not have access to fresh organics foods or the money and time to
prepare meals. Food preparation is seen as a chore, not as a communion with the
Earth or a part of everyday family life. Many meals are not eaten at the dinner table
but in front of the TV or in the car.
•Those who are selective about their food choices, i.e., choose unprocessed non-
industrial scale crops, are seen as people with the means and time to do so. These
choices are seen as attributes of an elite lifestyle only available to the well-to-do. As a
result, those who do value preparing unprocessed organic foods and sharing meals
with family and friends, such as those involved in the “Slow Food” movement, are
scorned as pretentious idealists.
•It prevents the average consumer from seeing organic as qualitatively distinct from
traditional, and vice versa—whether conventionally or organically grown, a carrot is
just a carrot. However, one meta-study found that organic produce is “25% higher in
phenolic acids and antioxidants,” which are crucial too good health.20
•We value quantity over quality—if it’s all about the same quality of fuel, one might
as well get the most fuel one can for as cheaply as one can. Whether the market has
responded to consumer preference for more calories or consumer preference simply
acclimatized to a market intent on churning out more processed food is up for debate.
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The two likely reinforced one another. Regardless, the reigning philosophy of the
industrial system is to produce bigger yields, not healthier crops.
•If all calories are seen as equal, convenience, shelf life, and taste all become more
important than nutrition. We want the most easily obtainable, longest lasting, best-
tasting fuel. Since man can make food just as good as or better than nature, it is fine
to manipulate the compositional form of foods with preservatives, colors, stabilizers,
and artificial flavor.
• One judges food by the same metrics one judges machines: “uniformity, reliability,
predictability, cleanliness, are seen as highly desirable, while ‘natural’ is often
associated with dirty, unpredictable, etc.”21
Etymology of Fuel, Food & Nutrition
The word fuel naturally reminds us of fire and firewood since they were
mankind’s first true fuels. Our ancient relatives did not worry what kind of tree it was as
long as it burned brightly and kept them warm, except maybe to seek that type of tree out
in the future. Analogously, we in the modern West don’t care which gas station we use to
fill up our tanks—price is the foremost concern since the quality of fuel is essentially the
same anyplace.22
This mentality comes from the 19th century when scientists took what they had
learned about the combustion of fuels and began applying it to food. The term calorie was
in fact first used to measure the energy content in fuels and was then applied to food,
thereby turning food into a fuel.
We can begin to reconceptualize food in a deeper way if we explore the original,
deeper meaning of food and related words:
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Food comes from the Germanic root fod, which means to tend, keep, to protect, to
guard, and to feed. Notice these words all connote relationship and connectivity.23
Nutrition, nurture, nurse and nourish all come from nutrix, meaning a woman
who nurses a baby.24 Inherent in the image of the breastfeeding mother is the larger sense
of nourishing the child not only through the milk, but also through love, touch and
connection—all the levels that a mother brings to the relationship.
Tracing the original meanings of these words reveals how our conception of food
and nutrition has been narrowed down over time to the limited materialistic concept of
‘fuel’ while leaving out the spirituality and relationship that surrounds it. Our limited
concept of food as something that sustains our health by providing energy is “a strange
idea,” as Michael Pollan views it:
If you travel around the world…you learn that people have eaten for a great many other reasons—pleasure, community, communing with nature, (expressing) identity…and we eat symbolic foods to express a spiritual relationship. All are equally legitimate reasons to eat other than health, but for some reason we have reduced it down to this one thing.25
The concept of food as just a fuel to fill up on is an outmoded understanding that
has led the average consumer to make decisions that contribute to poor health. The
industrial ideology behind it encourages people to treat their bodies as machines to be fed
periodically without real regard for nutrition and health concerns. FaF encourages a
culture in which meal preparation and eating together as a daily ritual are seen as
impractical and unnecessary.
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‘Food as Entertainment’
One of the equally misconceived ways in which we view food is as cheap, quick
source of diversion—‘food as entertainment’ (hereafter, FaE) I’ll only briefly elaborate
on this since I believe this idea already resonates widely—most of us have spent a few
evenings mindlessly noshing on Cheezits or Doritos while we watch our favorite
television show.
This frame is less akin the communal, celebratory sense of “pleasure” Pollan
alludes above and more akin to Freud’s “pleasure principle.” For one, the excessive
amount of fat, sugar and salt in the processed food we eat now can actually change the
brain in a manner not unlike that of a habitual smoker or heroin addict. Researchers found
that “rats fed a diet containing 25% sugar are thrown into a state of anxiety when the
sugar is removed,” and that “their symptoms included chattering teeth and the shakes –
similar…to those seen in people withdrawing from nicotine or morphine.”26 It seems that
the slogan for Pringles brand potato chips is more bluntly honest than they would have
you believe: “Once you pop, you can’t stop.”I
I bring the FaE frame to light because while it initially seems to create confusion
when paired with FaF, it actually makes sense within the “food as relationship” context
discussed, and counterbalances FaF in an important way.
If we implicitly understand food as sign of relationship and intimacy, then solitary
binging is not so bizarre—when intimacy is not immediately available, we use food as a
replacement. When we don’t know how to satisfy our hunger for love, we overindulge on
a substitute that fills the surface cracks of a deeper gulch of desire. Paradoxically then,
I See the Primitive Hardware of the Modern Human on page 64.
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we overeat in social situations as well, such as when a group of friends do not put down
the chips and dip until they have scraped porcelain. Overeating can be socially enforced
to promote a spirit of fraternity.
In this way, FaE counterbalances the passionless utilitarianism of FaF which is
unfulfilling for a culture that takes such delight in escapism and diversion. Context is
crucial in determining which frame is activated—FaF is cognitively substantial on a
Wednesday afternoon lunch break that precedes an important meeting, but is meaningless
on a lonesome Saturday night. FaF is used especially in institutional settings while FaE is
used in both solitary and inter-personal settings. FaF is overly utilitarian and materialistic
while FaE is overly egoistic and hedonistic. Mainstream corporate culture allows the
individual to pick either one depending on circumstance, since both favor their financial
interests by encouraging more eating than is necessary.
Globally, we have long seen food as much more than just fuel, or more recently,
entertainment. It should be said that of course FaF is literally true in some sense—food
provides us with the necessary fuel, or energy, we need to “run.” The problem is that it
has become the primary metaphor for understanding the purpose of food in American
culture.
The etymological origins of “food” and “nutrition” show that the essence of food
is more akin to relationship than to fuel. In the relationship between a mother who nurses
and cooks for her child, one sees caring, connection and love. But the relationship that
exists between the contemporary corporate food structure and the consumers they feed is
one based on impersonality, indifference and, quite often, exploitation. It seems most do
not recognize this outrage, having been inculcated to see food through one-dimensional
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frames that detach food from nature and nurturance. Most Americans do not conceive of
food in terms of relationship (to one another and nature) not because it is intellectually
difficult to do so, but because it is unfamiliar. Most, I believe, have not considered this
perspective before. I hope to have conveyed that FaF and FaE offer only limited
understandings of food that often betray humankinds’ longstanding ideas about what food
means and represents.
Deep Frame #2:‘Consumerism’ and Its’ Semi-Surface Frames: ‘Modernism’ & ‘Health Individualism’
Consumerism
Americans that do see past the folly of FaF and FaE still generally have no
working conceptual model of the food system as a whole.27 This lack of understanding
allows food to slip into a consumer paradigm whereby what you eat becomes one of the
definitive markers of your social status. For instance, one generally does not find Whole
Food’s and McDonald’s patrons running in the same social circles. There is, of course,
historical precedence for this—monarchs and royalty have long displayed their wealth
and superiority by eating expensive, faraway foods at the expense of the masses. It is true
that food has long been inequitably allocated, but never as perversely obscured as it is
presently: “to the degree that food is a commodity and the public identifies as consumers,
the food system and its role in their daily lives is largely invisible.”28
Even though it is a basic human need, food is subject to the same commodifying
forces as sneakers and cars. Food is seen first and foremost as a consumer issue—
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choosing where to shop or eat out, selecting your groceries, deciding to buy conventional
or organic—are all seen as issues of individual choice.
But the marketplace is skewed in favor of junk-food since corporations gain from
catering to our most unhealthy cravings. ‘Consumerism’ promotes an extreme laissez-
faire food-marketplace that is fundamentally at odds with good health—here are just a
few examples of why:
Nearly all soda manufactures switched from cane sugar to HFCS in the 1980s
when corn subsidies made it cheaper to produce. HFCS has also been
unequivocally linked to the rise in obesity.29
There’s more money in dissembling nature and putting it back together than selling
it whole. The whole foods nature produces on its own are cheap, but the most
profitable foods are the highly processed ones that can only be produced in a
handful of processing plants owned by certain corporations.
Instead of simply selling whole wheat flour, a densely nutritious product, most
producers chemically separate the grain into white flour, which can be sold as
white bread to the not-so-nutritionally minded, and wheat germ, the healthy part
of the grain that can be sold to the nutritionally minded. Finally, the bran can be
sold separately as a fiber supplement. Look at all the streams of revenue created
by separating a food that was already complete in and of itself.
Health Individualism
Framing scholar Shanto Iyengar has suggested that “American culture predisposes
one to hold individuals responsible…simply by virtue of growing up in America, we
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learn to hold individuals responsible.”30 Accordingly then, FrameWorks has found that
many consumers reason within a ‘Health Individualism’ frame that suggests it is “up to
the individual to make smart, healthy choices about food and exercise.”31 This pattern of
thinking shuts off what FrameWorks has termed ‘linked fate,’ or the “idea that what
happens in one community affects society as a whole.”32 When citizens see food
primarily as an issue of individual choice it obscures “systematic contributors to health
disparities—such as poverty, racial discrimination, or exposure to environmental toxins,”
and the “larger systematic aspects of the policy issues involved.”33 When disparities are
acknowledged, they are attributed to either a lack of knowledge or willpower.
It also limits the responsibility of society to affect those choices when food is not
seen a shared resource like air or water. If it is an every-person-for-him/herself matter it
does not warrant protections against commodification and privatization. Thus, the ability
of the government to counterbalance the Corporate Food Structure, whose profits derive
from artificially manipulating what nature gives us for free, is limited. As Lakoff
reminded me in our personal communication, “(there is a) Big Ag problem. This is a
monetary thing, and the conservatives are for a radical free-market.”34
‘Health Individualism’ could not resonate if our society did not already value a
“radical free-market” that masquerades as an expression of genuine individual choice.
Lakoff contends our culture is captivated by 17th century Enlightenment ReasonII, a
model of human decision-making that helped rid us religious domination during the
Enlightenment but is “empirically false.”35 ‘Health Individualism’ is dependent on our
espousal of certain debatable Enlightenment ideals, namely that “language is neutral
II See page 36 on “Enlightenment Reason.”
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(and) just fits the world; that everybody has the same reason and it works by logic; (that)
it’s just a matter of telling people of the facts and they’ll reason to the right conclusion.”36
Modernism
One of the most esteemed values of the ‘Modernism’ frame is ‘more, more,
more’—“Everything we've done in modern industrial agriculture is to grow faster, fatter,
bigger cheaper.”37 This frame supports the seemingly commonsensical view that most of
the outcomes of our relentless, technology driven march-of-progress are desirable, and it
is futile and naïve to resist what amounts to a force of nature. It gives an air of
inevitability to the corporate takeover of food, particularly through sophisticated mass
marketing techniques.
The type of thinking this frame promotes elevates the importance of convenience,
speed and standardized products and teaches consumers to desire those traits. “The
implicit idea of fast food is to satiate yourself as quickly as possible,” observes one
researcher at the Rotman School of Management who found in an experiment that people
exposed to fast food logos were more likely to accept smaller immediate payments rather
than wait a week for larger payments. She suggests the results “represent a culture that
emphasizes time efficiency and immediate gratification” that puts people’s “economic
interest at risk.”38
‘Modernist’ thinking has not just reorganized how we value time and money—it
has impoverished the quality of our crops in the fast food industry’s quest for uniform,
controllable crops.39 Though many consumers might be unaware of such findings, most
concede they often feel hurried and that they know the modern diet to be rather
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unhealthy. ‘Modernism’ encourages the public to accept worse health and an overall
stressful and hectic life as inevitable. Within this frame, citizens are encouraged to see
encroachments on their personal lives as unavoidable sacrifices that must be made if they
are to succeed in the modern world.
For example, it is an effective frame for proponents of pesticides and genetically
modified (GMO) crops because it de-emphasizes reasonable, often rightful, concerns
citizens have as to whether or not such agricultural practices are wise. It’s “futile and
backwards”40 within this frame to fret over the nutritional degradation of industrial crops
or to resist Wal-Mart’s takeover of the local grocery store one has patronized for years.
Organic, local produce, even if it’s a bit healthier, is dirty, unpredictable and so requires
modern improvements. Even when harmful effects of industrial crops or processed foods
are known, the frame pushes us to consider them as desirable and forward-thinking while
simultaneously considering “whole, organic, fresh foods as regrettably lost artifacts of a
bygone era.”41
Conclusion
These existing deep frames encourage problematic thinking and are rooted in a
certain socio-cultural ideology that citizens retain the right to question. After all, for
thousands of years the human diet was guided by the accumulated food-wisdom of
distinct cultures bounded by geographical limits. The arrival of Western hegemony,
however, ushered in an era unconstrained by these age-old restrictions. Globalization
opened the floodgates to the transcultural sharing of food-wisdom. This new paradigm of
global food-wisdom means many Americans can have access to indigenous foods of
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other cultures, such as the arrival of Andean quinoa in America.42 This access and new
global food knowledge has had an immense influence on what and how we eat. It is, in
many ways, an enormous achievement to have made regional food cultures more
accessible to everyone.
However, the profoundly new, unconstrained relationship to food the West
cultivated also left us further entrenched in the Omnivore’s Dilemma: what do we eat
when we can all of a sudden eat practically anything? After all, “traditional culinary
practices are the products of a kind of biocultural evolution”43–the Corporate Culture
simply hasn’t been around long enough to compile “a deep reservoir of accumulated
wisdom about diet and health and place.”44
With the pernicious and pervasive influence of these deep frames on mainstream
food-thought and culture, the West has been remarkably liberal with its food policy. This
is meant not in the usual political sense, but in a cultural sense. Michael Pollan explains
that “one of the hallmarks of a traditional diet is its essential conservatism. Traditions in
food ways reflect long experience and often embody a nutritional logic that we shouldn’t
heedlessly overturn.”45
Yet the ‘FaF’ frame (seen in our reconceptualization of food as fuel and not
relationship), the ‘Consumerism’ frame (seen in the commodification of food), the
‘Modernism,’ frame (seen in the scientific engineering of food), and the ‘Health
Individualism’ frame (seen in the outlook on health as a purely individual matter), have
helped overturn such “nutritional logic.” The empowering news is that these deep frames
can be uprooted from the public’s outlook if advocates provide a coherent conceptual
model of the food system as a whole. Eating, “our most important engagement with the
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natural world,”46 has been cleverly co-opted by corporations that don’t so much engage
the natural world as endlessly and erratically manipulate it. Food advocates have failed to
preclude food from the destructive forces of commodification, and the results have and
will continue to be disastrous for our personal, global and environmental well being.
This failure is not only food advocates’ cross to bear. The cognitive hurdle nearly
all progressive advocacy groups fail to clear is the “Silo Problem,”III as Professor Lakoff
labels it. “Advocates’ work is often anchored by a set of ideas that amount…to self-
contained paradigms that are largely insulated from other issues, and therefore do not
effectively contribute to a bigger picture of the food system and its meaning.”47
Individual issues revolving around food are almost never linked around a larger
progressive frame, which will be explored in a later section. Instead of thinking about
progressivism, advocates focus solely on their particular issue or interest.
This is not to disparage the tremendous work various advocacy teams do. In our
interview, Lakoff spoke of their traditional communications approaches as not “wrong,”
but “ineffective.”48 Advocacy groups, which are often run by concerned citizens, not
communications experts, often base their strategies on traditional approaches. Their
communications strategies have long encouraged “little picture,” or episodic,
understandings of food and environment issues when in fact they are all inherently linked
in their purposes. Lakoff contends that individual advocacy groups would strengthen
their clout by linking their particular issue with others that also fall under the umbrella of
progressivism to create a movement.
To help us understand the food system and transform it to meet the real social,
cultural and nutritional needs of Americans, a thematic approach to framing that links
III See page 58 for more on the “Silo Problem.”
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food to a larger progressive frame it is required. As FrameWorks Institute puts it, “one of
the more effective tools for raising the salience of an issue is to crystallize it as a clear
conceptual model in people’s minds.”49
The section after next explores how to craft frames that represent preliminary
attempts at raising the salience of food for more Americans. There is an extreme
disconnect between reality and perception when, for example, “a whopping 87 percent”50
of people want GM food labeled (so they can avoid them) at the same time it has become
“almost impossible for citizens to stay GM-free.”51 This paradox is just one of many that
have arisen from our lack of cultural insight into where our food comes from.
Before exploring how to craft new frames, an explanation of the origins of the
deep frames will provide a foundation for greater understanding.
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Where Our Existing Deep Frames Come From: Lakoff’s ‘Strict Father’ View
of America & Episodic Vs. Thematic Framing
←Deep frames are not just supported by surface frames, but by powerful conceptual
metaphors as well. Professor Lakoff posits that one of the most fundamental and
unquestioned metaphors our country abides by is “the Nation as a Family.” We speak of
‘founding fathers,’ ‘daughters of the American Revolution,’ and ‘Homeland Security,’
among others.52 Additionally, he proposes there are “two idealized versions of the family
that would correspond to two idealized versions of the nation.”53 He proposes that the
Strict Father Model (hereafter SFM) is embedded in the conservative deep frame, and the
Nurturant Family Model (hereafter NFM) in the progressive deep frame. These models
represent the main two divergent ways in which Americans are raised.
Strict Father Model Nurturant Family Model
Paternalistic Parental Parity
Father Must Protect Family From Cruel World
Parents Must Impart Sense of Caring and Responsibility to Family
Father as the Sole Merited Moral Authority Parents Work Together to Set a Moral Template
Core Values: Discipline, Obedience & Punishment
Core Values: Empathy, Empowerment, Community
Favors Competition Favors Cooperation
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Lakoff believes that, mapped onto politics, these models help make sense of the
partisan divide between conservatives and progressives over the proper role of
government, which should be viewed metaphorically as the “parental unit” within this
analogy. It should be said that, strictly speaking, neither model is better than the other.
Effective parenting and governance clearly incorporates elements of both.
Mapping the SFM onto the existing deep frames, especially ‘Consumerism’ and
its’ semi-surface frames, reveals their foundations. Insofar as our discussion is concerned,
the principal implication of the SFM on conservative thought is that “people are…greedy
and unscrupulous. To maximize their self-interest, they need to learn discipline, to follow
the rules and obey the laws, and to seek wealth rationally. The market imposes
discipline…it rewards those who acquire such discipline and punishes those who do not.
The market, from this perspective, is fair and moral.”54
The effects of such thinking are marked in our food discourse. Seen through the
‘Consumerism’ and ‘Health Individualism’ frames, the obesity epidemic is a crisis of
personal responsibility—unhealthy eaters lack the discipline, and hence morality, to make
smart dietary choices. Conservative catchphrases, such as “respect the judgment of the
marketplace,” suggest that any government intervention in the marketplace, even in
service of better public health, is immoral and interferes with the wisdom of the market’s
invisible hand.55 It is impossible to find the system at fault if conventional wisdom states
that the sick and unhealthy are that way of their own moral deficiency.
This is problematic since the conservative agenda (and thus the SFM) has
received preferential treatment in the media and “dominated political discourse in
America over the past thirty years.”56 Mainstream discourse does not treat the models
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equals, and consequently “conservative ideas are being passed off as ‘mainstream’ ideas,
which they not, while progressive ideas are being characterized as ‘leftist’ and
‘extremist,’ which they are not.”57 This has pivotal implications for the nature of the
political frames Americans think within since “not only is the media the main source of
American's information about public affairs, it also directs how we think about particular
social issues—whether, for example, we consider them to be individual problems
necessitating better behaviors or whether they are collective, social problems requiring
structural policy and program solutions."58 When individuals are to blame, systematic
changes to the food system is elusive.
Meritocracy
Conservatives who oppose systematic changes to the food system often
misrepresent one of America’s most treasured and influential values: Meritocracy.
Meritocracy is the idea that those with the greatest talent, ability, skill and determination
are the ones who make it to the top of the socio-economic ladder. It is a noble ideal that
gives legitimacy to our society’s capitalist structure. However, the persistence of endemic
poverty, social, racial and economic discrimination and the exorbitant cost of higher
education suggest we live in a rather incomplete meritocracy. The problem with believing
that we live “in a society where those who merit get to the top” is that we also then
believe that “those who deserve to get to the bottom get to the bottom and stay there.”59
The implications of this value on how we view personal health are similar to those of the
SFM that informs the existing food frames— it is never the market or society’s fault if
individuals, even millions upon millions of individuals, are unhealthy. Their ill health
within this frame becomes “not accidental, but merited and deserved.”60
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Episodic vs. Thematic Framing
The narrative of obese people as undisciplined, lazy addicts is preferred by
mainstream corporate media because blame can be easily and seemingly accurately doled
out. “Television loves sagas in which someone wins and someone loses.”61 The
comparatively complicated narrative of a corporately controlled food system that
strategically foists increasingly unhealthy products on consumers goes untold because
mainstream media “abhors long, tedious, complex stories and will usually ignore them if
possible.”62
Shanto Iyengar made sense of this partiality by proposing there are two types of
framing, episodic and thematic. "Episodic framing depicts concrete events that illustrate
issues, while thematic framing presents collective or general evidence.”63 He argues
convincingly that episodic framing, focused on discrete events such as crimes and
disasters, dominates mainstream media. By contrast, thematic frames place public issues
in a broader context by focusing on general conditions or outcomes, such as climate
change or campaign finance reform. These stories, because they require in-depth viewer
engagement and a host with a nuanced understanding complex issues, do not run nearly
as often.
Favoring episodic over thematic framing has a definitive effect on how people
come to view a given social issue influences and whether or not they see the need for
individual-level solutions or “broader social or institutional solutions…When news
frames public issues narrowly, as problems of specific people or groups, support for
policy proposals plummets. When a media story highlights conditions and trends, by
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contrast, public support for policies to address the problem increases dramatically."64 The
point is that different frames set up different policy solutions.
←
Episodic Frames Thematic Frames
Individuals Issues
Events Trends
Psychological Political/environmental
Private Public
Appeal to consumers Appeal to citizens
Better information Better policies
Fix the person Fix the condition
Conclusion
These two models help elucidate the backdrop for the existing food frames the previous
section explored. The overarching message, which explicitly manifests in ‘Consumerism’
and the semi-surface ‘Modernism’ and ‘Health Individualism’ frames, is that the system
cannot be blamed for matters such as eating that ultimately come down to individual
responsibility and choice. While this is in no small way true in a sense, it is also true that
the “system is rigged to make the most unhealthful calories in the marketplace the only
ones the poor can afford.”65 This has left consumers fighting an un-winnable uphill battle
against a corporately controlled food system. Next, we look at the craft of creating new
frames that elevate thematic issues around food onto the public agenda.
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The Craft of Reframing
The use of reframing and communication theory can help communication experts and alternative food advocates convey the need for transformative positive social change while providing the public with a clear conceptual model of the current American food system. Benefits of abiding by the values ingrained in the reframes discussed include improved health, vitality and productivity, greater national security, cleaner environments, and a secure future of food for posterity.
A Briefer on Reframing
Reframing refers to a change in the context of the message exchange so that
different interpretations and outcomes become visible to the public.66 "To reframe means
to change the conceptual and/or emotional setting or viewpoint in relation to which a
situation is experienced to place it in another frame which fits the 'facts' of the same
concrete situation equally well, or even better, and thereby changes its entire meaning."67
Our experience of the world is based on the categorization of the objects of our
perception into classes. Cognitive science teaches us “once an object is conceptualized as
the member of a given class, it is extremely difficult to see it also as belonging to another
class” because “frames are physically present in our brains.”68
Thus, the cultivation of new deep frames requires a sustained program that causes
the mind to see “alternative class memberships.” Once these reframes, or alternative class
memberships, take root in cognition the previously limited view of reality becomes
unworkable.69
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Enlightenment Reason: A Barrier to Reframing
Persuasive reframes remain elusive in the case of food and many other
progressive issues. George Lakoff argues the primary reason for this is a sustained
communication program does not fit within Enlightenment Reason, the prevailing
backdrop that anchors most progressive advocacy activities.70 He argues that most
progressives don’t see the problem with their existing communication strategies because
they take a literalist approach to persuasion—i.e., that people should and will reason to
the right conclusions given the facts. Progressives “won’t set up a communications
system because that would be propaganda. God forbid we should go out there and tell
people what we believe and what the facts are and keep saying it over and over…they’re
not going to listen…because they believe in Enlightenment Reason.”71
If Lakoff’s assertion that many progressive advocacy groups view
communications systems and strategies as “propaganda” is correct, they are no doubt
doing a disservice to their cause. It is not just defeatist but fundamentally inaccurate to
view progressive reframes as the equally ill-advised counter-spin to right-wing
ideologues. Propaganda and spin are framing by fraud. They are misapplications of a
valuable instrument in the same way a hammer can be used to construct a shelter or
destroy one.
Reframes That Are Actually De-Frames, & The Mythology of the Western Diet
There is fundamental deception that arises out of the language used to talk about
framing, especially in the case of food reframes. The forthcoming proposed reframes are
genuine attempts at both engendering a return to a holistic relationship to food and
reversing the destruction caused by existing frames by way of intermediary, transitional
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reframes. Since the conception of food I am interested in is akin (though clearly not
identical) to that which existed before mainstream corporate culture, the term “de-
framing” or “un-framing” is perhaps more precise than reframing. I am most interested in
how frames can be used to help return Americans to the non-commoditized, apolitical
and holistic relationship to food our ancestors enjoyed. Western culture is ultimately
responsible for originally reframing food as fuel, commodity and symbol of social
standing. My interest lies in encouraging advocates to discredit these reframes and to
expose the natural way of looking at food as a source of life.
Irving Goffman, considered the father of framing, speaks to this point when he
elaborates on “fabrications,” which refer to “the intentional effort of one or more
individuals to manage activity so that a party of one or more others will be induced to
have a false belief about what it is that is going on.”72 This in turn calls to mind what
Roland Barthes said about the nature of myths, namely that a myth “does not deny things,
on the contrary…it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification.
It gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but a statement of fact.” In the
sense used by Barthes and by notable mythologist Joseph Campbell, a myth does not
equate to a misconception or a misrepresentation of the truth as we use the term in
everyday speech. Rather, a myth is a meaningful “story containing a deep structure” that
is “important to the culture” and allows it to “deal with its anxieties and deep
insecurities.” It does so by “abolishing the complexity of human acts” and organizing “a
world which is without contradictions.”73 Put simply in the modern lexicon, a myth is an
operating system.
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One example of our culture's mythology around food is the apparent contradiction
of America’s reliance on and celebration of oil-intensive methodsIV of food production
that if continued indefinitely will in due time lead a collapse.74 The natural “anxieties and
deep insecurities” associated with this contradiction are abolished by a mythology of
agriculture without limits. This myth has gradually embedded itself in American culture
in order give “a natural and eternal justification” for the unsustainable instruments of the
Western Diet that represent a radical departure from the food-ways that sustained
traditional cultures for thousands of years.
Though it not within the purview of this thesis to address this issue
comprehensively, the corporations that constitute the America’s industrial agriculture
arrangement have succeeded in fabricating a misleading mythology around food for the
purpose of short-term financial gain.75
Civil Disobedience Vs. Non-Collusion
Beneficial reframes that erase these outmoded, inequitable fabrications can only
arise out of minds that are acutely aware of the conflicts industrial agriculture engenders.
The problems associated with industrial agriculture cannot be solved with the same
consciousness that created it. The proposal to return to localized food production on a
macro-scale is, at present, such a progressivist one to mainstream corporate culture that
an element of “civil disobedience” or “dissidence” is inherent. Food advocates must
accept that, to lesser or greater degree, “they are cast out of the existing structures and
placed in a position of conflict with them.”76
IV See How “Industrial Agriculture” Relies on Oil on page 43.
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I want to look closely at the phrase “civil disobedience” however, and see if it
truly fits the nature of what I’ve proposed.
If a measure of credence is given to Lakoff’s Strict Father Model of the United
States, it is fairly obvious how “civil disobedience” is a problematic phrase. One of the
very worst things a child of the nation (the strict father) can be is “disobedient.” The
father is “the Decider, the ultimate moral authority… His authority must not be
challenged.” As Lakoff goes on to explain, the capitalist market itself is viewed as such a
father figure, an idea implicit in the oft-used phrase “let the market decide.” “The market
is seen as both natural (since it is assumed that people naturally seek their self-interest)
and moral (if everyone seeks their own profit, the profit of all will be maximized by the
invisible hand.”77 In this model there is no room to question the decisions the market
arrives at. “There isn’t going to be civil disobedience. Who would be disobedient?”78
Lakoff asked rhetorically during our interview. Should one disobey, one is will be
punished—one of SFM’s most prized highly regarded values.
Thus, it is crucial for food advocates to communicate that their intent is not to
disobey the almighty marketplace in any malicious, anarchistic sense. Civil disobedience
is not malicious or anarchistic but based on non-violence. However, I would say that this
phrase does not accurately describe what needs to be done to reframe the food system
since it is something that individuals can do without necessarily becoming a part of a
larger movement of civil disobedience. Though implicit in advocates’ goals is a
questioning the value structure of corporate capitalism, this is likely not a productive
place to start from. Instead of “civil disobedience,” I adopt a phrase my father, author
Robert Gerzon, coined: “Non-Collusion.”
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“Collusion” comes from Latin colludere, which means “to play together.”
Collusion, e.g. transacting, with the corporate food structure amounts to giving it your
support, or “playing” with it. It is not a stretch to liken the corporate food structure to a
bully that you were always wary of playing with since he never treated you well, yet you
never stood up to him because you feared vengeance and ostracization. To engage in non-
collusion is to say, “No thank you, I don’t want to play your game anymore; I don’t get
anything out of it.” To not collude is to cease passive acceptance of an unfavorable
situation.
Those engaged in non-collusion do not try to dismantle the corporate stranglehold
by force or with mean-spiritedness, but by creating new economic realities from the
bottom up. It is has been shown time and time again that flurries of short-lived boycotts
do little to dent the corporate food structure. Instead, advocates must encourage like-
minded citizens to begin “building the foundation of strong local living economies (and)
establish and support locally owned human-scale businesses and family farms that create
regional self-reliance in food.”79 This includes building and supporting localized food-
infrastructure, comprised of Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs), farmer’s
markets, local grocers, among others. As journalist Michael Ruppert says, “localized food
production is the most fundamental key to human survival.”80 Such an approach actively
challenges the prevailing corporate food structure in a way that promotes our values
instead of attacking theirs.
Changing the defining stories of mainstream culture is possible. The hurdles that
stand in the way of reconceptualizing our relationship to food are immense. Attractive
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reframes, based on universal core values such as honesty, compassion, stewardship and
social-responsibility can help get us there.
With this knowledge in mind, we are now able to turn to the reframes I came
across and/or developed with the greatest potentiality.
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Reframe: Sun-Based Food Over Oil-Based Food
One of the most general problems in the public’s default thinking is that people tend to be unaware of the processes of food production. This section aims to increase public awareness of the crucial differences between an Oil-based food system and a Sun-based food system.
How “Industrial Agriculture” Relies on Oil
Many people are familiar with the term “industrial agriculture,” also known as
“conventional agriculture,” “agribusiness” or (in liberal-leaning circles) “Big Ag.” These
terms describe a system of agriculture reliant on the use of herbicides, pesticides and
synthetic or petroleum-based fertilizers. It is an energy-intensive system that requires
“disproportionate amounts of water and fossil fuel.”81 Perhaps the most potent statistic is
that we would need 1.5 earths to be sustainable at our current rate of resource
extraction.82 “Put another way, it now takes a year and six months for the Earth to absorb
the CO2 emissions and regenerate the renewable resources that people use in one year” 83
An understanding of “Peak Oil” is crucial to understanding why the “1.5 earths”
figure is a compelling indictment of “industrial agriculture.” Peak Oil is the point in time
when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of
production enters terminal decline.84 The evidence for this concept, and the imminent
threat it poses global stability, is unequivocal and convincing:
•New oilfield discoveries have been declining steadily for 40 years despite extensive exploration with the most advanced technology, and most importantly, finding giant new
fields is becoming ever more rare. Recently, major oil companies have had to cut their production growth targets. In 2002, the world used four times more oil than was found
from new sources. –The Oil Depletion Analysis Centre85
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• By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 MBD." – The US Joint Operating
Environment 2010 report86
• Shell estimates that after 2015 supplies of easy-to-access oil and gas will no longer keep up with demand. –CEO of Shell, 22nd January 200887
There is little evidence that suggests the industrial system can adapt in time due to
its inherent and overwhelming reliance on oil. Michael Ruppert (a former LAPD officer,
investigative journalist, and founder of From the Wilderness, a newsletter dedicated
investigating political cover ups that at one time had 66 members of Congress
subscribed) cogently expands on how industrial agriculture relies on unsustainable levels
of fossil fuel use throughout the chain of production in the 260-word monologue below.
To emphasize his point, I have boldfaced each of the thirteen times he uses the word “oil”
and/or derivates of it:
The topsoil on which food is grown now is nothing more than a sponge onto which we pour chemicals that we get from oil and natural gas. Without the chemicals the soil has been turned into a junk-heap…so when you plant a crop now, what happens is you drive an oil-powered machine that…plows (the crops), and then you drive another oil-powered machine and it drives along and it plants (the crops). And then you irrigate, and how do you irrigate? Well, the water is pumped by pumps that are powered by electricity, which comes from either coal or natural gas. The next thing you do is fertilize. All commercial fertilizers are made from ammonia, and the feedstock for ammonia is natural gas. So you have ammonium-nitrate fertilizers that are then sprayed on by another oil-powered vehicle, then the crop dusters come along that are powered by oil, (and they) spray pesticides that are all made from petroleum.
Then when it's time to harvest you drive another oil-powered machine and you harvest it. You use another oil-powered machine to drive it to a place where it's processed. Then you wrap it up in plastic, which is oil, and you put it in another oil-powered machine and you drive it “x” number of miles to a food distribution warehouse where an oil-powered machine brings it to your supermarket. The way food is grown, moved, and produced around the world is an enormous waste of hydrocarbon energy...there are 10 calories of hydrocarbon energy in every calorie of food in the industrialized world.88
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As Michael Ruppert illustrates, there is a way to use language to reveal the barely-
hidden truths of industrial agriculture. Part of the disconnect between public perception
and the stark reality of an agricultural system in grave danger can be attributed to the
term “industrial agriculture” itself. For example, other instances in which the term
“industrial” is used descriptively include “Industrial Revolution” and “Industrial
Society.” Advertisements also use qualitative terms such as “industrial-strength” and
“industrial-sized” to communicate “very strong” and “very large,” respectively. It would
seem that within corporate culture, the connotations of “industrial” are, on the whole,
rather positive. Of course, many who regularly read the works of Mark Bittman, Michael
Pollan, et al. have already reorganized their perception around the word “industrial.”
Such writers use the adjective in a pejorative sense when describing the problems with
conventional agriculture.
Overall, the term “Industrial agriculture” fails to convey the reckless disregard for
resource sustainability the system exemplifies—it is an ecologically destructive form of
agriculture. The label we give our system of agriculture has important framing
ramifications—it is the most noticeable surface frame when engaged in food discourse. A
different term could evoke more accurate connotations.
While I have and will continue to use the terms “Corporate Food” or “Corporate
Food Structure/System” as an alternative for “industrial agriculture” in some
circumstances, I submit that a categorization beyond so-called “industrial” and so-called
“organic” is necessary in exposing their most important, underlying difference: how the
crops themselves are spurred to growth.
Michael Pollan, apparently with advice from Professor Lakoff,V introduced a term
V See page 72.
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in his book In Defense of Food that elicits a vivid reconceptualization that moves beyond
the limited comparison of industrial versus organic: Sun-based food versus Oil-based
food.
Reframe: Industrial Agriculture as Oil or Petrochemical-Based
Oil-based food, or “Petrochemical-based food” as I prefer, is “a great image”89
because it implicates the problems associated with Peak Oil with current methods of food
production. The central idea behind the Oil-based frame is that industrial agriculture is oil
intensive and has only been able to ratchet up production for a short while by capitalizing
on millions of years of stored sunlight, i.e., fossil fuels. It provides a method to go
beyond our usual allotment of sun-energy, promote predictable and uniform crops, and
minimize the need for human labor with increased mechanization.
However, the unsustainability of petrochemical-based food in light of Peak Oil is only
half of the reason to move towards a Sun-based food model—the other is that
petrochemical-based food is nutritionally deficient.
Nutritional Deficiency of Petrochemical-based Food
Petrochemical fertilizers contain “the big three macronutrients that plants need to
grow—nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium,”90 but lack the assortment of
micronutrients unique to unaltered soil. However, this triad of macronutrients ensures
tremendous plant-growth and immense yields for crops. Perhaps it’s necessary to mention
farmers don’t just spray oil-based fertilizers during unusually rough or unproductive
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seasons— “up to 10 million tons of chemical fertilizer per year are poured onto fields to
cultivate corn alone.”91
While petrochemical fertilizers artificially boost the overall size and yield of
crops, the USDA has found “a decline in the nutrient content of the forty-three crops it
has tracked since the 1950s. In one recent analysis, vitamin C declined by 20%, iron by
15%, riboflavin by 38%, and calcium by 16.”92
In another meta-analysis conducted by the Organic Center, a nonprofit group in
Boulder, Colorado, found that organic produce was 25% higher in crucial phenolic acids
and antioxidants. The real quantitative and qualitative difference between Sun-based food
and Oil-based food is in the “the relative presence of micronutrients such as copper, iron
and manganese, as well as folic acid.”93 This is unsurprising, as “it stands to reason that a
chemically simplified soil would produce chemically simplified plants.”94
When micronutrients are missing in the food, it means they are missing in the soil,
and soil that lacks micronutrients is essentially sick and vulnerable. It is problematic that
“most people have no idea about the nature of fertilizer…it just sounds like it… makes
the land fertile,”95 when in fact they impoverish soil quality over time. Some potential
surface reframes of fertilizers include de-fertilizers, soil simplifiers, soil depleters or soil
poisoners.
Nutritional Integrity of Sun-based Food
The Sun-based food reframe on the other hand accounts for the important role soil
plays in producing healthy crops. Since “the soil is the place from which all plant matter
gets its nutrients,”96 the main priority of any good farmer should be to nurture a healthy
soil profile. John Bemis, owner of the Hutchins organic farm in Concord, astutely notes
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that “you do not feed the crop, you feed the soil.”97 With a bit of composted manure and
the utilization of crop rotation, the soil restocks itself with decayed plant matter. In
addition, soil bacteria, microorganisms, and earthworms are important in creating a
healthy soil profile and can only thrive in uncontaminated soil. This replenishment of the
soil maintains an ongoing balance that is paramount in producing quality, nutritious crops
year after year.98
Sun-based food also necessitates localized production, another key component of a
sustainable food paradigm. Without the help of petro-chemical fertilizers, centralized
mega-farms cannot produce as much cheap food. If thought about in the existing
paradigm, this immediate falloff in production is detrimental. However, with the
unsustainability of the oil-intensive system in mind, it becomes both necessary and
empowering to return to a de-centralized system based on local people running self-
sufficient farms in their communities.
Conclusion
This is a complicated reframe since Oil-based food is currently a more plentiful
and efficient means of calorie-creation than Sun-based food—“The oldest and most
common dig against organic agriculture is that it cannot feed the world’s citizens.”99
However, “increasing numbers of scientists, policy panels and experts (not hippies!) are
suggesting that agricultural practices pretty close to organic — perhaps best called
“sustainable” — can feed more poor people sooner, begin to repair the damage caused by
industrial production and, in the long term, become the norm.”100 Recent studies
completed by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, the University of Michigan,
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and Worldwatch all suggest that an organic, Sun-based food system can meet the needs
of everyone if we decide it is a priority.101
Regrettably, the public cannot rely on the wisdom of elected officials to make it
priority: “current agricultural and public health policy is not coordinated—we heavily
subsidize the growth of foods…that… in their processed forms (e.g., high fructose corn
syrup, hydrogenated corn and soybean oils, grain-fed cattle) are known contributors to
obesity and associated chronic diseases.”102 Nearly all of the government subsidies
contained in the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act, also known simply as the
“Farm Bill,” directly promote Oil-based food production over Sun-based food
production. Here is what we currently subsidize:
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Reframing Food as Fuel
Simply put, many more Americans are seeing food as more than a necessary fuel whose only requirement is that it can be obtained and consumed without much difficulty or cost. Perhaps just in time, we’re saying, “Hold the shake,” and looking for something more wholesome.103 – Mark Bittman
Energy from Other Sources
If we allow that food is more than just fuel, that it represents “our most important
engagement with the natural world,”104 it immediately changes the context of our
relationship to food. When we reconceptualize eating as an intimate act between
ourselves and the Earth we become more interested and engaged in the story behind that
food—where did it come from, how it was grown and how did it reach our plates.
We have lost the sense of sacred in our food. Indigenous peoples have always
celebrated and revered the animals they slaughtered and the crops they harvested—
because food was so scarce and so valuable it was deified. In modern America, it is
surely not—it is estimated we simply throw as much as 50% of our food straight into the
trash.105 I see little wrong with Pollan’s appraisal that “our problem around food is a
cultural problem…it’s a problem of not valuing it.”106
Not only do we under-value it, we often misemploy it. Food is certainly our
primary supplier of energy, which is the grain of truth from which FaF springs. But we
tend to think of food as our only source of energy. Thinking within FaF, it is sensible to
reach for a bag of potato chips or piece of cake when one is stressed or tired. These are
states in which we think we need an energy-boost. But eating so-called energy-dense
foods do not remedy the underlying problems. There have been, for instance, many
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studies that detail how modern American is chronically under slept and overstressed.107
We mistake our desire for deeper sleep and increased serenity for hunger pangs. It does
not help, as Pollan notes, that scientists have engineered processed food so that it is so
high in salt, fat and sugar, it “lies to our senses” and “presses our evolutionary buttons.”VI
VI See The Primitive Hardware of the Modern Human on page 64.1 Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: an Eater's Manifesto. New York: Penguin, 2008. Print.
2 Lakoff, George. The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist's Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print. p. 248
3 Watzlawick, Paul. The Language of Change: Elements of Therapeutic Communication. W. W. Norton & Company, July 1993. Print. Nov. 2010.
4 Nall Bales, Susan, and Franklin D. Gilliam. Communications for the Social Good. Rep. The Foundation Center, Apr. 2004. Web. Nov. 2010. p. 33.
5 Lakoff, George. The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist's Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print. p. 249.
6 Lakoff, George. Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values & Vision. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Print. p. 25.
7 Lakoff, George. Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values & Vision. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Print. p. 25.
8 FrameWorks Institute. Changing the Public’s Conversation on Social Problems. 2009. Web slideshow. Nov. 2010.
9 FrameWorks Institute. Changing the Public’s Conversation on Social Problems. 2009. Web slideshow. Nov. 2010.
10 “Mission of the FrameWorks Institute.” The FrameWorks Institute. Web. http://www.frameworksinstitute.org/mission.html.
11“Framing Food as a Public Issue.” The FrameWorks Institute. Web. http://www.frameworksinstitute.org/workshops/broccoli/.
12 “Framing Food as a Public Issue.” The FrameWorks Institute. Web. http://www.frameworksinstitute.org/workshops/broccoli/.
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We become reliant on processed food to alleviate complex psychosomatic states because
it powerfully triggers our brain’s reward system.
This hijacking of the brain’s reward system also causes us to eat more than our
bodies require, and overeating has the opposite effect of optimal eating. One’s mental and
physical capacities are muted while the body expends extra digesting the extra food. For
example, one of the most appealing but inaccurate factoids that goes around Americans’
13 Tversky, Amos and Daniel Kahneman. The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice. Science, New Series, Vol. 211, No. 4481. 30 Jan. 1981.
14 Ariley, Dan. "Dan Ariely Asks, Are We in Control of Our Own Decisions?” Lecture. TED: Ideas worth Spreading. TED, Dec. 2008. Web. 30 Oct. 2010. <http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_of_our_own_decisions.html>.
15 Food Inc. Dir. Robert Kenner. Perf. Michael Pollan. Magnolia Pictures, 2009. DVD.
16 “Memorable Quotes for Ratatouille.” IMBD. 2007. Web. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0382932/quotes>
17 Cordain, Loren. The Paleo Diet. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2002. Print.
18 Lakoff, George. Personal interview. 30 Jan. 2011. p. 79.
19 Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: an Eater's Manifesto. New York: Penguin, 2008. Print. p. 106.
20 Kluger, Jeffery. “What’s So Great About Organic Food?” Time. 30 Aug. 2010. Print.
21 FrameWorks Institute. Framing the Food System: A FrameWorks Message Memo. August 2006. Web. Feb. 2011.
22 Fowler, Tom and Brett Clanton. “Price Trumps Brand Loyalty.” The Houston Chronicle. Web. 22 Sept. 2009.
23 Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary. 2010. Web. Feb. 2011. <http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=food>
24 Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary. 2010. Web. Feb. 2011. <http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=nourish>.
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dinner tables every Thanksgiving is that a natural chemical in the turkey called
tryptophan is responsible for oft reported after-dinner fatigue and sleepiness. In fact, “the
real culprits are all those carbohydrates from potatoes, stuffing, vegetables, bread and pie.
The massive intake of carb-heavy calories” is what accounts for the sleepiness and
general listlessness.108 As the documentary Food Matters explores, “food affects mood,”
25 Pollan, Michael. “In Defense of Food: Author, Journalist Michael Pollan on Nutrition, Food Science and the American Diet.” Democracy Now! 13 Feb. 2008. Web. 02 Dec. 2010.
26 Martindale, Diane. “Burgers on the Brain.” New Scientist, issue 2380. 01 Feb. 2003. Print.
27 Auburn, Axel, et al. All Trees and No Forest: How Advocacy Paradigms Obscure Public Understanding of the Food System. FrameWorks Institute, July 2005. Web. Feb. 2011.
28 FrameWorks Institute. How to Talk About Food Systems. 2008. Web. Feb. 2011.
29 Bray, George A., Samara Joy Nielson, and Barry M. Popkin. “Consumption of High-Fructose Corp Syrup in Beverages May Play a Role in the Epidemic of Obesity.” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Vol. 79, No. 4, 537-543, April 2004. Web. 20 Mar. 2011. <http://www.ajcn.org/content/79/4/537.long>
30 FrameWorks Institute. “How Framing Influences Citizen Understanding of Public Issues: An Interview with Shanto Iyengar.” 2009. Web. Jan. 2011.
31 Framework Institute. How Did This Broccoli Get on My Plate? Framing Food as a Public Issue. 2008. Web Slideshow. Nov. 2010.
32 Framework Institute. How Did This Broccoli Get on My Plate? Framing Food as a Public Issue. 2008. Web Slideshow. Nov. 2010.
33 Auburn, Axel, et al. All Trees and No Forest: How Advocacy Paradigms Obscure Public Understanding of the Food System. FrameWorks Institute, July 2005. Web. Feb. 2011.
34 Lakoff, George. Personal interview. 30 Jan. 2011. p. 71.
35 Lakoff, George. Personal interview. 30 Jan. 2011. p. 77.
36 Lakoff, George. Personal interview. 30 Jan. 2011. p. 77.
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Should advocates recast food in terms of a mutual relationship instead of simply a
fuel to obtain, I believe people would be more inclined to turn inward and listen to what
they are yearning for when they reach for a Snickers bar. Often, I believe, people would
realize they’re being told not to eat, but to get more sleep or breathe more deeply. The
37 Food Inc. Dir. Robert Kenner. Magnolia Pictures, 2009. DVD.
38 Marano, Hara Estroff. “Nature’s Bounty: The Far Reach of Fast Food.” Psychology Today. Sept./Oct. 2010: 44. Print.
39 Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: an Eater's Manifesto. New York: Penguin, 2008. Print. p. 118.
40 FrameWorks Institute. How to Talk About Food Systems. 2008. Web. Feb. 2011.
41 FrameWorks Institute. How to Talk About Food Systems. 2008. Web. Feb. 2011.
42 Romero, Simon. “Quinoa’s Global Success Creates Quandary at Home.” NYTimes.com. The New York Times, 19 Mar. 2011. Web. 4 April 2011.
43 Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: an Eater's Manifesto. New York: Penguin, 2008. Print. p. 174.
44 Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: an Eater's Manifesto. New York: Penguin, 2008. Print. p. 176.
45 Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: an Eater's Manifesto. New York: Penguin, 2008. Print. p. 176.
47 Auburn, Axel, et al. All Trees and No Forest: How Advocacy Paradigms Obscure Public Understanding of the Food System. FrameWorks Institute, July 2005. Web. Feb. 2011.
48 Lakoff, George. Personal interview. 30 Jan. 2011. p. 75.
49 Auburn, Axel, et al. All Trees and No Forest: How Advocacy Paradigms Obscure Public Understanding of the Food System. FrameWorks Institute, July 2005. Web. Feb. 2011. p 10
46 Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: an Eater's Manifesto. New York: Penguin, 2008. Print.
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psycho-emotional aspects of food-related diseases are complex, and in the following
writer’s view, paradoxical:
Obesity is usually taken as a symptom of excess, but in fact the reverse is true. Obesity... [is] actually a symptom of the most profound destitution ever to visit the human race. The bloated lifestyles of the American rich harbor an inner poverty exactly equal to the Third World poverty that enables those lifestyles.
50 Bittman, Mark. "Why Aren't G.M.O. Foods Labeled?” Opinion - NYTimes.com. The New York Times, 15 Feb. 2011. Web. 10 Mar. 2011. <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/why-arent-g-m-o-foods-labeled/>.
51 Andrieski, Ed. "Shoppers Wary of GM Foods Find They're Everywhere." Your Life: Health, Fitness, Food & Self - USATODAY.com. USA Today, 25 Feb. 2011. Web. 10 Mar. 2011. <http://yourlife.usatoday.com/fitness-food/diet-nutrition/story/2011/02/Shoppers-wary-of-GM-foods-find-theyre-everywhere/44163834/1>.
52 Lakoff, George. The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist's Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print. p. 76.
53 Lakoff, George. The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist's Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print. p. 77.
54 Lakoff, George. The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist's Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print. p.61.
55 Lakoff, George. The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist's Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print. p.63.
56 Lakoff, George. The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist's Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print. p.45.
57 Lakoff, George. The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist's Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print. p.45.
58 Nall Bales, Susan, and Franklin D. Gilliam. Communications for the Social Good. Rep. The Foundation Center, Apr. 2004. Web. Nov. 2010. 59 Button, Alain. “Alain de Botton: A Kinder, Gentler Philosophy of Success.” Lecture. Ted: Ideas Worth Spreading. TED, July 2009. Web. 30 Oct. 2010.
60 Button, Alain. “Alain de Botton: A Kinder, Gentler Philosophy of Success.” Lecture. Ted: Ideas Worth Spreading. TED, July 2009. Web. 30 Oct. 2010.
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Half the world cannot get enough to eat, and the other half cannot get enough no matter how much they eat.109
The major reason a reconceptualization is necessary for our health is that
ultimately “you feel better, you look better, you live longer, [and] you save money…it’s
simple, safe, cheap and effective” to eat optimally.110 A minority of Americans has
already reframed food, shown in the vibrant media presence of books, blogs, web-
communities and documentaries that promote a holistic relationship to food.
A powerful reframe to FaF is possible if advocates adopt a lexicon based on
values already esteemed by mainstream corporate culture. For example, talking about
changes to the corporate food system not just so we enjoy vague notions of “good
health,” or “sustainable agriculture,” but also in terms of increased productivity,
sociability, energy and intelligence. Such ambitions already captivate Americans. To link
them to a way of eating that actually delivers on such benefits is crucial.
61 Nall Bales, Susan, and Franklin D. Gilliam. Communications for the Social Good. Rep. The Foundation Center, Apr. 2004. Web. Nov. 2010.
62 Nall Bales, Susan, and Franklin D. Gilliam. Communications for the Social Good. Rep. The Foundation Center, Apr. 2004. Web. Nov. 2010.
63 Iyengar, Shanto. Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1994. Print. Nov. 2010.
64 Nall Bales, Susan, and Franklin D. Gilliam. Communications for the Social Good. Rep. The Foundation Center, Apr. 2004. Web. Nov. 2010.
65 Pollan, Michael. “You Are What You Grow.” The New York Times Magazine. April 22, 2007.
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The Uncaring Corporate Food Structure
The “Etymology of Fuel, Food & Nutrition” section explored how the mind
associates food with notions of caring, family and solidarity whether the food comes from
your mother’s oven or Kraft’s factory. The Corporate Food Structure has been
66 FrameWorks Institute. Changing the Public’s Conversation on Social Problems. 2009. Web slideshow. Nov. 2010.
67 Watzlawick, Paul. The Language of Change: Elements of Therapeutic Communication. W. W. Norton & Company, July 1993. Print. Nov. 2010.
68 Lakoff, George. “Identity Campaigning and Cognitive Policy.” http://www.identitycampaigning.org/identity-campaigning-and-cognitive-policy/
69 Watzlawick, Paul. The Language of Change: Elements of Therapeutic Communication. W. W. Norton & Company, July 1993. Print. Nov. 2010.
70 Lakoff, George. Personal interview. 30 Jan. 2011. p. 77.
71 Lakoff, George. Personal interview. 30 Jan. 2011. p. 77.
72 Goffman, Irving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Northeastern, 1986. Print.
73 Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by Lavers, Annette et al. New York: 1984. Print.
74 Collapse. Dir. Chris Smith. Perf. Michael Ruppert. Vitagraph Films, 2009. Netflix.
75 Food Inc. Dir. Robert Kenner. Magnolia Pictures, 2009. DVD.
76 Havel, Vaclav. “Vaclav Havel Quotes.” Web. http://www.wisdomquotes.com/authors/vaclav-havel/
77 Lakoff, George. "What Conservatives Really Want." The Huffington Post. 19 Feb. 2011. Web. 24 Feb. 2011. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/what-conservatives-really_b_825504.html>.
78 Lakoff, George. Personal interview. 30 Jan. 2011. p. 75.
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enormously successful in uprooting the traditional food-trust that historically exists in
families. This trust functions to look after one another’s well being. A major part of a
communication strategy based on reframing FaF must be to link the negative sentiments
the public has developed toward financial corporations and other impersonal mechanisms
of the corporate economy in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse with the comparable
79 Korten, David C. Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2010. Print.
80 Collapse. Dir. Chris Smith. Perf. Michael Ruppert. Vitagraph Films, 2009. Netflix.
81 Bittman, Mark. "Sustainable Farming Can Feed the World?” Opinion - NYTimes.com. The New York Times, 8 Mar. 2011. Web. 09 Mar. 2011. <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/sustainable-farming/?hp>.
82 Bittman, Mark. "Sustainable Farming Can Feed the World?” Opinion - NYTimes.com. The New York Times, 8 Mar. 2011. Web. 09 Mar. 2011. <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/sustainable-farming/?hp>.
83 “Living Planet Report: Humanity Now Needs 1.5 Earths.” Business & Biodiversity Campaign. 13 Oct. 2010. Web. 4 April 2011.
84 Carney, John. "Did Wikileaks Just Confirm Peak Oil?" CNBC Mobile Home. CNBC, 09 Feb. 2011. Web. 09 Mar. 2011. <http://www.cnbc.com/id/41492809/Did_Wikileaks_Just_Confirm_Peak_Oil>.
85 Peak Oil Primer. ODAC - The Oil Depletion Analysis Centre. ODAC, 24 Nov. 2009. Web. 08 Feb. 2011. <http://www.odac-info.org/peak-oil-primer>.
86 The US Joint Operating Environment 2010 report, February 2010.
87 Mortished, Carl. "Shell Chief Fears Oil Shortage in Seven Years." The Times | UK News, World News and Opinion. 25 Jan. 2008. Web. 08 Feb. 2011. <http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/wef/article3248484.ece>.
88 Collapse. Dir. Chris Smith. Perf. Michael Ruppert. Vitagraph Films, 2009. Netflix.
89 Lakoff, George. Personal interview. 30 Jan. 2011. p. 78.
90 Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: an Eater's Manifesto. New York: Penguin, 2008. Print. p. 114.
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negligence and apathy displayed by the Corporate Food Structure. Advocates must do a
better job communicating that corporations do not feed consumers health-promoting
foods—they feed consumers foods that directly cause sickness. This is, from a moral
perspective, not dissimilar to the illegal but prevalent practice of selling relatively
uninformed buyers toxic assets for a quick profit. With a powerful communications
strategy in place, the already tenuous trust between the public and corporately controlled
91 Kluger, Jeffery. “What’s So Great About Organic Food?” Time. 30 Aug. 2010. Print.
92 Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: an Eater's Manifesto. New York: Penguin, 2008. Print.
93 Kluger, Jeffery. “What’s So Great About Organic Food?” Time. 30 Aug. 2010. Print.
94 Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: an Eater's Manifesto. New York: Penguin, 2008. Print. p. 115.
95 Lakoff, George. Personal interview. 30 Jan. 2011. p. 72.
96 Collapse. Dir. Chris Smith. Perf. Michael Ruppert. Vitagraph Films, 2009. Netflix.
97 Lambert, Craig. "The Accidental Agriculturist." Harvard Magazine. Aug. 2001. Web. 09 Mar. 2011. <http://harvardmagazine.com/2001/07/the-accidental-agricultu.html>.
98 Lambert, Craig. "The Accidental Agriculturist." Harvard Magazine. Aug. 2001. Web. 09 Mar. 2011. <http://harvardmagazine.com/2001/07/the-accidental-agricultu.html>.
99 Bittman, Mark. "Sustainable Farming Can Feed the World?” Opinion - NYTimes.com. The New York Times, 8 Mar. 2011. Web. 09 Mar. 2011. <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/sustainable-farming/?hp>.
100 Bittman, Mark. "Sustainable Farming Can Feed the World?” Opinion - NYTimes.com. The New York Times, 8 Mar. 2011. Web. 09 Mar. 2011. <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/sustainable-farming/?hp>.
101 Bittman, Mark. "Sustainable Farming Can Feed the World?” Opinion - NYTimes.com. The New York Times, 8 Mar. 2011. Web. 09 Mar. 2011. <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/sustainable-farming/?hp>.
102 Killer at Large: Why Obesity Is America’s Greatest Threat. Steven Greenstreet. The Disinformation Company, 2008 DVD.
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food can be severed when the next Corporate Food-related disaster hits.111 As the popular
political adage says, “never let a crisis go to waste.” It is only a matter of time—just last
summer 380 million eggs contaminated with salmonella were recalled from a single
factory farm that had a history of health, social and environmental violations.112 When the
next horrifying, captivating event occurs, advocates must seize by communicating that
Simon, Michele. Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back. New York: Nation, 2006. Print.
103 Bittman, Mark. “Why Take Food Seriously?” Opionion – NYTimes.com. The New York Times, 9 Oct. 2008. Web. 10 Mar. 2011. <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12wwln-lede-t.html>.
104 Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: an Eater's Manifesto. New York: Penguin, 2008. Print.
105 Nathanson, Rick. “Americans Throw Away ‘Ridiculous’ Amount of Food.” ABQJournal.com 05 Jan 20011. Web.
106 Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: an Eater's Manifesto. New York: Penguin, 2008. Print.
107 Riedel, Christine. "CDC Study of Americans' Health Finds We're Not Getting Enough Sleep." AOL News. 18 Mar. 2010. Web. 10 Mar. 2011. <http://www.aolnews.com/2010/03/18/for-better-health-dont-skimp-on-sleep/>.
"Stress in America: Key Findings." American Psychological Association (APA). 2010. Web. 10 Mar. 2011. <http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/key-findings.aspx>.108 Wanjek, Christopher. “Thanksgiving Myth: Turkey Makes You Sleepy.” Live Science. 20 Nov. 2007. Web. 31 Mar. 2011.
109 Eisenstein, Charles. "Reuniting the Self: Autoimmunity, Obesity, and the Ecology of Health (Part 2)." Reality Sandwich. 5 Jan. 2009. Web. 02 Nov. 2010. <http://www.realitysandwich.com/reuniting_self_autoimmunity_obesity_and_ecology_health_part_2>.
110 Food Matters. Dir. James Colquhoun and Laurentine Ten Bosch. Perf. Andrew W. Saul, Charlotte Gerson, Dr Dan Rogers, David Wolfe, Prof. Ian Brighthope. Passion River Films, 2009. Netflix.
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healthy, safe food is rooted in local, human-scale outfits run by people who actually care
deeply about health.
Such an event would help catalyze a sense of “injustice,” one of the three
components necessary to mobilize grassroots’ support according to Gamson and
Goodson.113 I believe that the other two components, “agency,” a “sense that it is
possible to change the conditions or policies,” and identity,” a sense that “the ‘we’ who
can change things exists in opposition to some ‘they’ with different values or interests,”114
will fall into place quickly once sufficient outrage at the “injustice” occurs.
111 Latham, A. “Study: Americans Don’t Trust Foreign-Grown Foods.” News Briefs. 14 Mar. 2003. Web. 31 Mar. 2011.
112 “Egg Recall List Update: 380 Million Eggs Recalled Over Salmonella.” HuffingtonPost.com. AP/Huffington Post. 19 Aug. 2010. Web. 19 Mar. 2011. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/19/wright-county-egg-recall-2010-salmonella_n_684995.html>.
113 Nall Bales, Susan, and Franklin D. Gilliam. Communications for the Social Good. Rep. The Foundation Center, Apr. 2004. Web. Nov. 2010
114 Nall Bales, Susan, and Franklin D. Gilliam. Communications for the Social Good. Rep. The Foundation Center, Apr. 2004. Web. Nov. 2010.
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FrameWorks Most Effective Reframes
All potential reframes FrameWorks formulates must pass the rigorous Strategic
Frame Analysis (hereafter, SFA) before they promote it as a tool for advocates. Ideally,
what comes out of the use of an SFA on a particular subject is a “simplifying model,”
which is a concrete, visual metaphor to communicate complex subjects. Here is how they
describe their process:
…(SFA) is a multidisciplinary, multi-method approach that pays attention to the public’s deeply held worldviews and widely held assumptions…it looks at the frames currently in the public’s consciousness and how those frames influence public policy preferences. It then investigates potential re-frames… that enable the public to understand social issues in a broader context, thereby moving Americans away from blaming individuals and toward systematic and community-based solutions to social problems.115
One of the most important and commonsensical findings that came out of using
the SFA is to “begin the public conversation with a value.” FrameWorks found that when
one does so, one signals “to the public what (one’s) issue is all about, at the most
overarching level.”116 This rule often goes unheeded by experts, whether they are climate
scientists, environmentalists or food-reform advocates. This is because “experts” for
various causes, exactly because they care so deeply and know so much about their subject
matter, tend to be poor content-managers. They often assume the audience is more
115 FrameWorks Institute. Changing the Public’s Conversation on Social Problems. 2009. Web slideshow. Nov. 2010.
116 FrameWorks Institute. Changing the Public’s Conversation on Social Problems. 2009. Web slideshow. Nov. 2010.
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familiar with their field and what they are talking about than they really are. As a result,
experts take certain base knowledge for granted and focus instead on specifics (which are
often negative or scary) that would only resonate strongly with fellow experts or citizens
comparatively well versed on the issue already. I have listed the values embedded in the
following reframes.
Michael Shellenberger, an environmental strategist who coauthored the explosive
and controversial essay “The Death of Environmentalism,” made a blunt criticism of
environmental advocates that food advocates should learn from. He harshly, but perhaps
astutely, pointed out that “environmentalism…is about telling people how terrible things
are and asking them to make big sacrifices.”117 This, he said, cuts against the grain of
American culture. In light of the importance FrameWorks places on A.) Announcing a
solution first and then backing up into problem definition, and B.) Starting off with a
value, this habit of experts focusing on frightening specifics may help explain why
advocates often fail to get their messages across.
Food and Fitness Environment Frame
The FrameWorks Institute suggests that one of the most effective thematic frames
in eliciting a unified, total-field image of food is the ‘Food & Fitness Environment
Frame.’ This frame takes advantage of the fact that “the most reliable predictor of obesity
in America today is a person’s wealth,” and that “the system is rigged to make the most
unhealthful calories in the marketplace the only ones the poor can afford.”118 However,
117 Everything’s Cool. Dir. Judith Helfand and Daniel B. Gold. Perf. Ross Gelbspan, Bish Neuhouser, others. City Lights Media, 2007. Netflix.
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this is a tricky, often ineffectual line of argument because it can be deliberately
manipulated or benignly misinterpreted as a “class-warfare” argument. The Food &
Fitness Environment Simplifying Model takes the truth of wealth disparity into account,
deflates potential conflict by reframing the argument around communities rather than
class. Here is the narrative that proved effective in testing:
Every town, neighborhood and region in America can be evaluated in terms of its Food & Fitness Environment. Where we live or work is one of the most important things determining whether we end up fit and healthy or not. When people do not have access to a healthy environment or opportunities to make healthier choices, they have worse health and a lower quality of life. When we improve these Food & Fitness Environments by creating adequate transportation, markets with healthy foods, and schools with physical fitness requirements, the health of the people who live and work there improves as well.119
(Values: Fairness, Prevention, Health, and Environment)
This narrative reframes good health thematically, or as a collective issue requiring
structural change and maintenance, as opposed to the episodic ‘Consumerism’ frames
that view good health as contingent only upon personal responsibility.
The Runaway Food Model
One other innovative frame that could potentially move people away from an
episodic understanding of the existing food system towards a meaningful and thematic
one is the ‘Runaway Food Model:’
118 Pollan, Michael. “You Are What You Grow.” The New York Times Magazine. April 22, 2007.
119 Framework Institute. How Did This Broccoli Get on My Plate? Framing Food as a Public Issue. 2008. Web Slideshow. Nov. 2010.
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“Experts are increasingly concerned about what they call our Runaway Food System. The way we produce food today has radically changed, and now has the power to alter the foundations of life as we know it almost by accident. Farming chemicals like pesticides and weed-killer are permanently altering our soil and water. Genetic engineering is changing the nature of the plants and animals we eat. And mile-long fishing nets are dragging the ocean floor and altering ecosystems. America needs to retake control of this runaway food system before it does more damage to the foundations we depend on”120
(Values: Stewardship, Legacy, and Protection)
This model attempts to create a new deep frame, or fundamental organizing
principle, that categorizes the huge number of episodic environmental degradation stories
within a larger, more meaningful narrative. The term ‘Runaway Food System’ is effective
because it suggests the concrete image of an out-of-control runaway train or truck. This
gut-level notion of a massive, powerful and reckless force is paired thematically with the
radical, system-wide changes American food processes have undergone in the past 50
years. It is “not too obviously metaphorical to be accepted as a ‘natural language,’”121
and provides the listener with a simple model that puts the environmental destruction we
are all aware of in tangible terms and connects it to a narrative that concerns the food on
everyone’s plate.
Lakoff’s Critique of the FrameWorks Institute
George Lakoff provided a critique of the organization and its’ founders and
mission during our interview. Lakoff’s critique brings up some coherent objections to
FrameWorks that deserve attention, but should also be taken with a grain of salt.
120 FrameWorks Institute. How to Talk About Food Systems. 2008. Web. Feb. 2011.
121 FrameWorks Institute. How to Talk About Food Systems. 2008. Web. Feb. 2011.
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His major objection is that their practices are essentially PR driven. Having co-
founded FrameWorks with Susan Nall Bales, he suggests that her framing philosophy is
that “you always give the client what they want…if you see the client doing something
counterproductive you never mention it.” Additionally, he laments FrameWorks reliance
on “traditional polling techniques,” trainings, and a belief that it’s all “about language.”122
I read the “Food and Fitness Environment” Frame to Lakoff to gather his
impression of this approach. He responded critically: “It’s a literalist approach…notice it
has a definition of a problem. And the problem is just we need to get a different frame in
there.... [and it] contradicts moral systems and it contradicts social/institutional
pressures…”123 I found this response to be somewhat unsatisfying, but I began to
comprehend his broad criticism of the FrameWorks Institute when we delved into how
crucial a “larger progressive frame” is to catalyzing social, political, and economic
change that favors the philosophy of food proposed in this thesis. “See, in general, it’s not
that this is wrong it’s that it’s ineffective,” Lakoff pushed me to consider. FrameWorks
may come up with interesting reconceptualizations, but “the problem of course is that
people don’t follow them if they’re in the lower classes.”124 Lakoff opines that despite
their best intentions, FrameWorks implicitly operates in a classist mindset.
It is difficult to say whether Lakoff’s one-time close ties to the organization help
or hinder the credibility of his criticism. While there are surely few people who know
more about what drives FrameWorks, he admitted that his departure was disagreeable. It
seems to come down to whether one thinks he is vengeful or not. However, our next
122 Lakoff, George. Personal interview. 30 Jan. 2011. p. 74.
123 Lakoff, George. Personal interview. 30 Jan. 2011. p. 74.
124 Lakoff, George. Personal interview. 30 Jan. 2011. p. 75.
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exploration is of something that is not in doubt: the need for larger progressive frame to
elevate food onto the public agenda.
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Food Within the Larger Progressive Frame
The “Silo Problem” and The Larger Frame
To focus solely on food is to succumb to the “Silo Problem,”125 a phrase Lakoff
uses to denote how individual progressive causes are usually compartmentalized instead
of incorporated and organized into a larger progressive frame. In other words, each
advocacy group tends to promote just their own individual cause—the protection of
rivers, forests, or the poor—instead of combining to form a movement with real
momentum. This is a crucial problem to address, because while progressivism “gets
amorphous from the point of view of issues, it doesn’t get amorphous from the point of
view of values.”126 I have numbered the frame’s core values for emphasis.
The larger progressive frame is simple: it’s empathy(1), you care about other people because you’re actually physiologically connected to them, it’s social as well as personal responsibility(2), meaning you act on the empathy, and it’s a principle of excellence(3). You make yourself, your community, and your country as good as possible because these problems are hard. And the result is that government should be there to protect and empower people(4).127
These are enduring values that have shaped the course of America according to
Lakoff. They should be used to connect the Corporate Food Structure to the predominant
issues of modern America—the economy, national security, and health care. For
example, it is worth knowing that every time one orders a cheeseburger instead of a
salad, one adds two and half dollars in collective long-term health care costs.128 Food, and
125 Lakoff, George. Personal interview. 30 Jan. 2011. p. 77.
126 Lakoff, George. Personal interview. 30 Jan. 2011. p. 80.
127 Lakoff, George. Personal interview. 30 Jan. 2011. p. 81.
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meat and processed food in particular, is so plentiful and cheap in the U.S. it is difficult to
get through to citizens from any one angle, whether that angle is health, the environment
or food security.
One of the missing pieces in the American conceptualization of food systems is
the sense that we face collective choices about the particular mechanisms we use to
produce our food, and that these mechanisms can be sustainable or not, equitable or not.
The larger progressive frame allows for the view that food, like water or air, is a precious
shared resource. When seen this way it is logical to vigorously protect food from the
exploitive tendencies of commodification. As Pollan says, “we have a system where
wealthy farmers feed the poor crap and the poor farmers feed the wealthy high-quality
food.”129 Since we all breathe air and drink water, those who affect them are held up to
rigorous standards are generally and theoretically speaking (bottled water excepted) not
open to commodification or private ownership.
Focus on Food
Like environmental matters, food matters are so multifarious that strict
compartmentalization can seem like a good idea. Issues such as obesity, diabetes, soil
degradation and animal maltreatment are no doubt diverse, but the overarching aim of all
alternative food communications strategies ought to be to link those problems under the
“perceptual umbrella…of corporate malfeasance.”130
128 Dubner, Stephen J. “Is America’s Obesity Epidemic For Real?” Freakonomics Radio. 25 Feb. 2010. Web. 4 April 2011.
129 Miller, Lisa. “Divided We Eat.” Newsweek 29 Nov. 2010: 44-48. Print.
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One way to strengthen such a perceptual umbrella is to revive a healthy debate on
our food policies. The public, media and even Congress and generally apathetic to food
policy matters such as the omnibus Farm Bill that is revisited and renewed every five
years. Pollan suggests this apathy comes from most people’s assumption that, “true to its
name, the farm bill is about “farming,” an increasingly quaint activity that involves no
one we know and in which few of us think we have a stake.” He goes on to say, “that the
Farm Bill is a misnomer; in truth, it is a food bill and so needs to be rewritten with the
interests of eaters placed first.”131
Pollan may or may not know it, but he’s promoting a new conceptual food frame
based around the universality of the idea “we are all eaters.” Pollan, as good
communicators do, talks in frames and metaphors naturally: “Eaters want a bill that
makes the most healthful calories in the supermarket competitive with the least healthful
ones. Eaters want a bill that feeds schoolchildren fresh food from local farms rather than
processed surplus commodities from far away.”132 This frame conjures, in just a few
small words, a powerful plea to our finest traits—our capacity for empathy, shared
responsibility, and sense of duty to posterity. If the perceptual umbrella of corporate
malfeasance was widely interpreted as an attack on our ability to sustain such values, the
debate around the Farm Bill and its effects on the quality of food and food choices would
become decidedly more interesting, lively and democratic.
130 Edelstein, David. Food Inc. (Review). The New Yorker Magazine, June 2009. Web. Dec. 2010. <http://nymag.com/listings/movie/food-inc/>
131 Pollan, Michael. “You Are What You Grow.” The New York Times Magazine. April 22, 2007.
132 Pollan, Michael. “You Are What You Grow.” The New York Times Magazine. April 22, 2007.
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The Limits of Framing
Disciplinary Limits
Like all other branches of Communications theory, framing has limitations.
← A commitment to finding frames that resonate with various strains of the public
requires resource-intensive research. Approaching social issues like food from a framing
perspective also necessitates a long-term engagement through a process of validating
hypothesized frames through research and testing.
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Susan Nall Banes, co-founder of FrameWorks, herself notes that the SFA model
“directs its attention to the most commonly held cultural frames, leaving it vulnerable to
charges that it overlooks minority views in favor of the most widely shared framing
solutions, and that it does not pay adequate attention to the views of policy elites that
control the power structure without regard to public opinion.”133 It is interesting this
potential criticism strongly resembles the one Lakoff offered up in our personal
communication.VII
Finally, frames are incredibly difficult to detect empirically because they are most
frequently adopted as unconscious “conceptual scaffolds.”134 Frames never spell
themselves out in their entirety, which is why continuous research is necessary to prove
what frames currently exist and which reframes might be effective.
Cultural Limits
The State-Corporate System
“The problem is not linguistic framing, but the very effective propaganda systems that are rooted in the domestic structure of power.”135 –Noam Chomsky
Frames can help begin a dialogue on changing our defining cultural narratives,
but they in themselves do not build new economic and social realities. Professor
Chomsky stressed to me the importance of the “powerful interests within the state-
VII See page 57.133 Nall Bales, Susan, and Franklin D. Gilliam. Communications for the Social Good. Rep. The Foundation Center, Apr. 2004. Web. Nov. 2010.
134 Konig, Thomas. “Frame Analysis: Theoretical Preliminaries.” Web. <http://www.ccsr.ac.uk/methods/publications/frameanalysis/>
135 Chomsky, Noam. Personal Interview. 2 Feb. 2011. p. 90.
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corporate system, which includes the media and universities, that strongly prefer certain
outcomes, and seek to restrict debate and consciousness so as to make these the only
thinkable options.”136 It is significant that Chomsky, perhaps the world’s preeminent
living socio-economic intellectual, holds that the public and private sectors have become
essentially indistinguishable. The term the “state-corporate system” suggests that the
formerly symbiotic and dependent relationship between government and business has
eroded and a new monopoly has emerged. This merging of government and the corporate
structure has severely impeded the quality of thought disseminated from mainstream
media and mainstream academia. The new paradigm has muzzled journalists, academics
and media figures with its exclusive allowance of corporate sanctioned framing.
Respected journalist Chris Hedges bemoans that “electronic and much of the print press
has become a shameless mouthpiece for the powerful and a magnet for corporate
advertising.”137
It is clear that an arrangement of dependency, favorable to the power brokers at
the top of either sector, has been created at the expense of exceptional knowledge
creation and dissemination in our society. Without corporate advertisement and funding
respectively, these institutions simply disintegrate.
This means there are few spokespersons with powerful enough voice to
meaningfully challenge the encroachment of Corporate, Oil-Based Food into American
culture. The major food corporations exert enormous influence on what people eat or
136 Chomsky, Noam. Personal Interview. 2 Feb. 2011. p 90.
137 Hedges, Christopher. “Power Concedes Nothing Without Demand.” CommonDreams.org, 14 Mar. 2011. Web. 16 Mar. 2011. <http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/14>
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don’t eat—a narrative not heard in media or academia. While it is true that what we eat
has “always been determined by a complex interplay of social, economic, and
technological forces, the centralized purchasing decisions of the large restaurant chains…
have given a handful of corporations an unprecedented degree of power over the nation's
food supply.”138 Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor under President Clinton,
substantiates this claim with veritable insider-knowledge: “from where I’ve sat…I’ve
seen Wall Street Corporations actually lobby against the public interest in favor of their
own interest because that’s the path to more short term prosperity.”139 If there is any
doubt about the success of such lobbying efforts, consider this fundamental discord: at
present, enough food is manufactured in the U.S. for every American to consume 3,800
calories per day when we need only 2,350 in a healthy diet.140 Directly as a result, we’re 5
billion pounds overweight as a nation.141 This macro-example illustrates how
corporations within the state-corporate system endeavor to further enrich themselves even
when their actions are diametrically opposed to a healthy, operable society. Even
enlightened corporate leaders in the state-corporate system cannot act in favor of the
many if their primary legal responsibility is to enrich their shareholders in the short-term.
It ultimately comes down to whether “this country is run for corporate profit or run for
the people who live here,”142 says Mark Bittman.
138 Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation. Harper Perennial, 2005. Print.
139 Porter, Michael. “Fixing Capitalism: Michael Porter & Robert Reich.” On Point with Tom Ashbrook. 15 Feb. 2011. NPR.
140 Kluger, Jeffery. “What’s So Great About Organic Food?” Time. 30 Aug. 2010. Print.
141 Killer at Large: Why Obesity Is America’s Greatest Threat. Steven Greenstreet. The Disinformation Company, 2008 DVD.
142 Bittman, Mark. Personal Interview. 10 Feb. 2011. p. 84.
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Biological Limits: The Primitive Hardware of the Modern Human
Biological Exploitation
Food is an especially unusual and complex advocacy topic because the best
efforts at effective, truthful messaging on food are undermined at every corner by
Corporate Food’s exploitation of humans’ adaptive biological food preferences. Our
ancestors’ decision to gorge on the patch of blueberries made biological and evolutionary
sense when it was uncertain when and where the next plentitude of energy and
micronutrient rich fruit would come from. We are still wired as if sugar was a rare
treasure. However, there is almost certainly a restaurant or convenience store within a
few minutes or miles from where you sit now that houses more artificially sugared
foodstuffs than our ancestors ingested in their whole lives. Taken together, the
superabundance of such stores directly and indirectly influences our culture’s dietary
decisions on a daily basis. For example, it has been shown that children who live within
walking distance of a fast food establishment are more likely to be obese.143 Humans’
adaptive biological food preferences are constantly exploited by the multibillion-dollar
Corporate Food industry.
Neurological Considerations
143 Steenhuysen, Julie. “Fast Food + Nearby Schools = Fat Kids.” Reuters.com. 24 Dec. 2008. Web. 15 Mar. 2011. <http://uk.reuters.com/article/2008/12/24/us-obesity-fastfood-idUKTRE4BN06S20081224>.
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Many thoughtful contemporary commentaries have discussed our dissociation and
alienation from the roots, actual and metaphorical, of our foods. Most implicitly contend
our relationship to food, and sense of its origination, is significantly affected by cultural
and physical environment in which we acquire it. Now, there is hard science to back up
such claims.
During our talk, Professor Lakoff brought up a type of neurons called “canonical
neurons,” which are closely related to the more well-known “mirror neurons.” Canonical
neurons fire whether you drink a glass of water or simply stare at it. Whether you “eat the
banana or you see the banana… (the) same neurons (are) firing in a certain part of the
brain.”144 Lakoff posits this has real implications for how we relate to the physical world:
“We are connected to our physical environment. But when the environment is artificial
and built…we’re not connected to nature.” Since modern humans have lived as hunter-
gatherers for more than 90 percent of our existence as a species, 145 it used to make sense
that what we saw occurred from purely natural processes. This intuition likely developed
our faculties for understanding correlation and causality and grounded our relationship to
our immediate physical environments.
The immediate physical reality of a supermarket however profoundly misleads
shoppers regarding the origin of most foods. The activity of these canonical neurons
suggests that our brains have significant difficulty fully appreciating that meat doesn’t
originate from plastic packages on supermarket shelves. If asked if we really thought that
144 Lakoff, George. Personal interview. 30 Jan. 2011. p. 79.
145 Wade, Nicholas. “New View of How Humans Moved Away From Apes.” The New York Times, 10 Mar. 2011. Web. 15 Mar. 2011. <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/11/science/11kin.html?emc=eta1>
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meat came from little sterile packages in the back of the grocery store, we would
probably scoff.
But the neuroscience tells a subtler story of human cognition—a story with
interesting implications. Lakoff posits that realizing your body is connected to nature
through constant “[connection] to our physical environment” is central to overcoming
diet-related health problems: “The real question is understanding how the body works
and how you’re connected to nature.” When food environments (or food dispensers),
such as supermarkets, restaurants and Mobil stations are “artificial and built,” we become
disconnected from the food we eat.
Conclusion
The current economic and biological incentives to eat poorly are simply too
strong for the majority of people to demand, much less adopt, a way of eating that
combines elements of the local, organic, and sun-based philosophies. “Why is it that you
can buy a cheeseburger for 99 cents and you can’t even get a head of broccoli for that?”
Mark Bittman asked me. The reason is that “we have skewed our food system towards
the bad calories.”146 This is why any deep reframes must address the fundamental fallacy
that we are all separate individuals with the capability to affect policy changes by way of
our purchasing power. The scale simply tipped too far in one direction. When you
combine ill-advised, handout-laden government subsidy programs with a food industry
that “basically got into a rhythm of trying to make their products ever more seductive,”147
you achieve a perfect storm of health and environmental degradation. Corporate Food’s
aptitude for engineering “seductive” tastes in the lab added an element of biological
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craving on top of the economic incentive to eat cheap food. Even the most skilled, honest
and persuasive framing cannot supplant these higher guiding economic and biological
inducements. Mr. Balzer, the chief industry analyst at Center for Disease Control and
Prevention, succinctly explained the decision making process of the average American
eater: “before we want health, we want taste, we want convenience and we want low
cost.”148
Framing is a potentially valuable communication tool that can help food
movement reach those already open to change, but its use won’t convert anyone to
anything or immediately cause the majority of the public to reconceptualize their
entrenched way of eating. Practically speaking, the masses will be the last to get on board
—this is the way it is with nearly all social movements. “Don’t waste time with people
who want to argue, they’ll keep you immobilized,” progressive author Daniel Quinn
advises. “Look for people who are already open to something new.”149 Trying to bully
people into accepting new cognitive frameworks can only alienate them. Many people,
many of my immediate peers included, are already open to conceptualizing a new kind of
food system that feeds everyone more equitably and healthfully. Mark Bittman
commented he too has noticed an influx of interest in rewriting food policy, noting, “the
message that I try to transmit in talks and in print seems to be more widely received than
it was three years ago…stuff is changing.”150
146 Food Inc. Dir. Robert Kenner. Perf. Michael Pollan. Magnolia Pictures, 2009. DVD.
147 Porter, Michael. “Fixing Capitalism: Michael Porter & Robert Reich.” On Point with Tom Ashbrook. 15 Feb. 2011. NPR.
148 Severson, Kim. “Told to Eat Its Vegetables, America Orders Fries.” The New York Times. 24 Sept. 2010. Web. 15 March 2011.
127 Quinn, Daniel. Beyond Civilization. Broadway: 7 Nov. 2000.
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I have not attempted to put forth a particular dogma of eating in this thesis.
Instead, I have endeavored to explore how advocates can begin crafting and
communicating new “eating algorithms—mental programs that, if you run them….will
produce a great many dinners, all of them “healthy” in the broadest sense of the word.”151
The Sun-based food frame and an understanding of food as relationship can work as such
“eating “algorithms.” We need new mental shortcuts for food. Instead of “I’ll eat
whatever’s cheapest, most filling, good tasting, and easiest to prepare,” the American
public needs a different dietary shortcut. One like, “I’ll eat only that which is Sun-based,
local and minimally processed.” Such an organizing principle could ease our transition
from an unsustainable, health-adverse oil-based system to a sustainable, nourishing sun-
based system that lays the foundation for a thriving future based on human and planetary
harmony.
149
150 Bittman, Mark. Personal Interview. 10 Feb. 2011. p. 86.
151 Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: an Eater's Manifesto. New York: Penguin, 2008. Print. p.144.
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Interview Transcripts
Professor George Lakoff
I was first introduced to Professor George Lakoff through his work on metonymy and conceptual metaphors in my Communications 101 class in which we discussed the findings of his breakthrough 1980 book Metaphors We Live By. Since then he has applied his expertise in cognitive science and linguistics to politics in an
effort to understand not just what motivates our culture’s rancorous political divides, but how each camp (Democratic and Republican) makes sense of the world. In doing so he pioneered the use of framing in a sociopolitical setting. His findings and perspective have elicited both praise (Howard Dean) and sharp criticism (noted linguist Steven Pinker).Professor Lakoff is the author of books including Moral Politics, The Political Mind, Metaphors We Live By, and Thinking Points, among others. He founded the progressive think tank the Rockridge Institute and is currently the ‘Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics’ at the University of California at Berkeley.The transcript of my telephone interview with Professor Lakoff on 1/30/2011 from approximately 3:00-3:45 EST follows. Since we had an extensive, far-reaching conversation, I have underlined what I consider to be the most important points.
TRANSCRIPT BEGINS:
Gabe Gerzon: I’m doing my Honors Thesis in Communications and Culture on framing in food discourse basically. So if I could have a minute I’d like to let you know sort of where I’m coming from on this thing.
Professor Lakoff: Sure.
GG: Okay, So I’m basically interested in devising communication strategies that enable the public to understand the issue of food in a broader context so that more people can move away from blaming individuals for poor health and towards more systematic and community-based solutions that address the fundamental problems of a corporately controlled food supply, and also just a mindset that doesn’t really value food as a precious, shared resource. I think there’s no question that what you eat is one of the definitive marker of your social class in America, in part because we don’t see it as a
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shared resource like air or water—it’s been subject to commodification in the same way sneakers and cars are even though it a basic human need. That’s why it must be stressed that the progressive values you write about in your books are on the side of the alternative food movement—the food movement is part of progressive thought and, as you say, the politics of empathy. It is fundamentally a movement about empathy, responsibility, and stresses interdependence and cooperativeness, not competitiveness.
PL: That’s absolutely right. I should tell you my own involvement in this (chuckle), I’ve known Alice Waters since 1972, uh, I’m a fan of Michael Pollan’s, I’ve read all of his stuff, you know, I agree with all of that, and I’ve written some stuff here and there about it. But yes.
GG: Well, I’m curious then, um, I’ve read a fair amount of your work, where do you—where have you written about framing—
PL: Well actually you’d have to look it up because there’s stuff um (pause) I’ve written so much stuff I don’t really remember where (laughs)—
GG: (laughs) Yeah.
PL: But yeah, and I’ve also worked with Michael on articles of his and I’ve worked with Alice on things of hers and I’ve worked with people in the Slow Food movement and so on. So yes, I understand it thoroughly and I know the arguments. I know what happened with Alfalfa this week, I know about Michael’s editorial yesterday, you know, I know about the vote coming up tomorrow—
GG: Yeah, yeah so you’re very up on it. So yeah, just to start off, what have you been thinking and what were you doing or where were you, were you talking with Alice or Michael about these things when you—
PL: Well, the problem the… (pause). I’ve said all the things you’ve said (laughs).
GG: Right.
PL: So let’s start there. You’re exactly right. Uh, but the other thing uh… (pause). Michael understands this thing, Alice doesn’t. Alice always comes off as an upper-class lady. Right? And she has no idea that she’s doing it. I mean, here she is coming out of the free speech movement in Berkley coming off as an upper-class lady when you know, in fact she’s been amazing at democratizing the food movement. I don’t know if you know all of the things she has done that have not been for her own profit but rather for—to spreading all these things over the country, you know, and that her discourse is exactly the opposite of what she’s done. So I can’t get through to her—I mean it’s just hopeless. She’s a wonderful person and she’s given the world so much, and um, but she’s blind on this issue. Michael isn’t. Michael’s terrific. Um—
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GG: Right, yeah, for some people it’s hard to appreciate the um, the language aspect of it sometimes I think.
PL: Yeah. So that I think is a really important piece of it all.
GG: Right, so yeah I’m curious then, obviously you say—you actually said it in your recent article too—that we need to use language that expresses these progressive truths, you know, talking about Obama and um, we have to develop a language that—
PL: (inaudible) my wife at the moment. Uh, (to wife) this is very important for reasons I’ll tell you in a bit. I won’t be long. (returns) Hi.
GG: Hi. I’ll try to keep it brief.
PL: Yeah, we’ve got some stuff to do today.
GG: Okay, so, so how do you envision the alternative food movement’s, you know as you call it, a cognitive policy—a set of ideas with a strategy and institutions for doing it? What are some of the key words, unconscious values we should be highlighting—
PL: It’s not just key words, you know—
GG: Right, right, we’re talking about deep fundamental frames, how people conceive it.
PL: Here, let’s talk about the issues in general. We have a problem. There are four theories of food and they both have certain ideas of food that are hard to get through. There are also conservative world views that are out there. And um, the conservative world views include things like—several things. One is that everything is a matter of self-responsibility, you know? Personal responsibility not social responsibility. So if there’s something wrong with you it’s your fault.GG: Exactly, yeah.
PL: so that’s the first piece of this. And that’s very widespread through almost half of the population at least. The second is that um—and anything else is Socialism. K? (laughs) And you have the fact that—the Big Ag problem. This is a monetary thing, and the conservatives are for a radical free market. So you have that and that’s supported by a lot of money, and people who give money to Democratic congressmen as well as Republican congressmen. So you have that problem. Also, the same organizations are major sponsors of networks. So they have all kinds of pull in the media.
GG: Right.
PL: So there’s a major issue with—around that. Nonetheless, there is a food movement happening, largely through people that are college educated (pause).
GG: Right.
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PL: And the appreciation of good food and good wine and all of that stuff, and very little understanding of how that happens. And farmers markets. So the farmers’ markets stuff is something that lots of people who are not on the left really appreciate. So this is—this is a very…That’s the first set of complications. The second set of complications is that the oil industry is involved in all of the ways I’m sure you know.GG: Right.
PL: Right? You know as Michael wrote right it’s “oil based food versus sun based food.”
GG: (chuckles) yeah, yeah.
PL: A lot of people don’t have that concept. So you’re dealing with the fact most people have no idea about the nature of fertilizer because it just sounds like it makes it fertile. Right? That’s what fertilizer means. It makes the land fertile, not that it, you know, it takes away the top soil, it poisons the land (chuckling), it’s not the “poisoner,” the “top-soil remover.”
GG: Yeah, yeah…so just right there that’s a great turn of phrase there I guess, “oil-based food versus sun based food.”
PL: Yeah, that’s what I suggested to Michael (laughs).
GG: (laughs). Yeah, that’s lovely. So yeah, is there a way to make that a commonsense principle? Like how do you get more people to—that just resonates quite easily.
PL: I think it’s one of the many ways. There are a number of issues. I think um, you know, the uh…”topsoil remover” isn’t so bad either, you know. The fertilizers are really de-fertilizers. And they are shrimp killers.
GG: Hm, right, yeah.
PL: The thing is that if you say what’s true, it sounds like you’re too extreme (laughs). That’s always a problem. You know if you say shrimp killers you have to use the image of this stuff moving through the rivers system getting into the oceans and killing the shrimp into the Gulf of Mexico. And that’s you know, an image that has to be out there—but now we have the problem of the communications system. The Republicans have this communications system and we have nothing. I’ve been writing about this for 10 years and I can’t get anyone to start it.
GG: That must be incredibly frustrating.
PL: Then there’s the problem of the environmental movement. The environmental movement doesn’t see itself as a food movement.
GG: Right, exactly.
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PL: (laughs) Because a lot of environmentalists have no taste in food. They understand that you should have local food and all of that stuff and so on, but they see the issue as global warming, or energy or preservation of the rivers and so on, but the food movement has no representation whatever (sic) let’s say in the uh, the Green Group which is the organization of the 35 major environmental movements. (Inaudible) You know, although all environmentalists will probably agree that it should be blah blah blah, and they hate the Farm Act, you know, still, it’s not seen that way. So you know? The social justice movement people see it the opposite way. They see it—they see environmentalism and the food movement as an upper-class enterprise.
GG: Yeah, that’s a big barrier, I think—Bill Maher I believe said “somehow eating well got to be elitist.” And I think that’s a huge, huge barrier there. PL: Right.
GG: I just wanted to ask if you’re familiar with the FrameWorks Institute.
PL: (pregnant pause) I started it.
GG: You started it! Okay, clearly I didn’t delve deeply enough into their—I didn’t see your name anywhere on the website.
PL: I didn’t quite start it. What happened was I got them their first grant and I was working with them.
GG: Ah, Okay.
PL: And they half understand this stuff and they half screw it up.
GG: So on what half do they screw it up?
PL: Well, um…what Susan does…Susan has the following—first of all she doesn’t understand what framing really is about, she thinks it’s just about language and PR. She’s from the PR world. And she put this together—what happened was I was doing some work with Rockefeller Brothers Fund and I was also doing some work with Susan and I didn’t have an organization, so I suggested that we do this—Susan was working with a PR organization and was going off to FrameWorks Institute, I suggested that we could get her some money to get this started. And that happened. Then—let me try to explain what she’s about. She’s not a bad person or anything like that, but she thinks this is about PR. And she thinks that um—and so what she did is she got friends—one friend who was a pollster who had previously worked for (unknown), and one friend who was checking things out in the news to see how the Right Wing was functioning and uh, she got an African-American professor from UCLA who was studying racism in the news and those were her advisors that she put together. And then I got her one of my former students to work with me and with her and that’s Joe Grady. And he first was a professor at Maryland and hated that and decided to just form a company with his high school buddy
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who was an anthropologist to do work on folk theories and on metaphors. And I did some papers with him through the Institute there.Susan did the following: Susan got most of her money from either the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, working with the UN Foundation, and with various children’s organizations. And um, what she says is “you always give the client what they want.” You never tell the client—if you see the client doing something counterproductive you never mention it. Okay?
GG: Okay, yeah.
PL: And then you go around and you give trainings and it’s about language you know, and traditional polling techniques are used. Now that goes against everything I’ve been saying as you can imagine. Well it wasn’t long before we were working with the UN Foundation and I found out they were doing something completely counterproductive and I wrote about it and she blew her top. And she said “okay, goodbye,” you know? “I have to run my business here.” And I said “okay, bye, keep your business, good luck,” you know. And um, meanwhile Joe Grady, who stayed on the east coast, he has to keep his business going too. He’s got a couple of kids and you know, so they’re making a living and they do what they do. I haven’t followed what they do—so what is there connection here?
GG: Uh, well they did some research on possible, potential re-frames tested effectively or whatever, and there was one called the “Food & Fitness Environment” Model, in which they talk about, they try to get past this sort of episodic framing of health individualism and looking at food and fitness environments as they call them, noting that when people don’t have access to uh, you know, places to exercise, fresh markets, that sort of thing that these factors, these community factors affect health way more than um, you know, individual choices in some sense. And I was wondering what you thought of that in terms of taking a more thematic approach to how communities organize themselves as a way to improve the health ailments.
PL: Okay, first of all I don’t—where did this research appear? How did you get into it?
GG: It was um—they do slideshows on the FrameWorks Institute website, they uh—
PL: See I should go look at their website then. Okay good. Okay so this is very typical of what they’re doing. It’s a literalist approach and it’s you know—notice it has a definition of a problem. And the problem is just we need to get a different frame in there. And without looking at this frame contradicts (sic) moral systems and it contradicts social/Institutional pressures we discussed. So, it’s not wrong.
GG: yeah, yeah.
PL: It’s not that—first of all it’s not sufficient. And one of the ways it’s not sufficient is that—see all of this stuff is that it’s tied up with an understanding of nature.
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GG: uh-huh.
PL: That’s why the environmental movement is screwed up. Food has to do with your relationship to the natural environment. So it doesn’t just have to do with class. See they’re accepting the idea that it has to do with class. Then they say, “what are the elements of class? Well, they’re fitness. And the First Lady is saying we need to take care of—we’re worried about fitness and we’re worried about health, and not only that the insurance companies are worried about health and fitness. What they missed of course is that the insurance companies are doing it in exactly the wrong way—they end up blaming it on you! We have health and fitness programs and we’re going to check up on you to see if you’re doing it and if you’re not we’re going to raise your premiums.
GG: Right, okay yeah.
PL: Okay? That’s missed. And so what they’re doing actually in doing it is buying into the classist stuff that you know, if they don’t do anything else, if they just do that you know, you’re going to have that problem on top of all the other problems. Now that’s not bad, because of course there is a fitness literature, there’s fitness in the newspaper, etc., but the problem of course is that people don’t follow them if they’re in the lower classes. And it’s the educated classes that are doing it. And do they have anything about the educated classes (chuckle)?
GG: Oh, no they don’t go near that, you know.
PL: And what about the sale of unhealthy food to kids?
GG: They do some stuff on uh, unethical advertising to children, I’m not as well versed on that stuff but their position is that it shouldn’t be—I’m actually not sure how radical they get on that, but you know they definitely did some research on that as well.
PL: Well they should know about it, Joe has small children so he should be very aware of it. Okay, so (deep sigh). Again, it’s not that it’s wrong. See in general, it’s not that this is wrong it’s that it’s ineffective.
GG: Right I totally agree, I don’t know if you saw Chris Hedge’s—what Chris Hedge’s has been writing recently, but he’s saying that you know, the liberal class has just been so enormously ineffective in the past 20-30 years with all these conferences and papers and patting themselves on the back morally, and he says that at this point the only real effective means of transformative change is to—um, he says civil disobedience. It seems that we’re coming up against the outer limits of exactly sort what my thesis is—what I’m writing about which is the language of it. So where’s the heart of the change—what do you see as the next step?
PL: Let me move around it because we haven’t gotten to the central problems. Chris Hedges has got the problem right and the solution wrong. I like him a lot but he’s, you know. There isn’t going to be civil disobedience. Who would be disobedient? The kids
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coming along are not (chuckles)—let me just give you a quick example on the Berkley campus. The Berkley student organization runs the Student Union. And the Student Union has food services in its basement for students. And until recently they had a Vietnamese family doing a very good job running a Vietnamese restaurant down there for students that was healthy, and clean, and cheap. And they ditched them because they could get more revenue for their projects by substituting Subway and a chain of bad Vietnamese food (laughs).
GG: How’d that go over with the students? They must not be too happy.
PL: Well, the problem is the students change every year. In two years new students will come in and no one will know. Right now Subway is not that popular—but these are people who grew up with Subway, these are people who grew up in Southern California and the Central Valley where there are malls and they are used to eating Subway. They’re not gonna know the difference. And this is to a large extent the case. Now this is not the case in the Dining Halls. In the Dining Halls the vegans have made their case and are trying to eat healthy vegetarian food. At least they’ve gotten people aware of some of this stuff. But there you are in the student Union bringing Subway in. And then you have the First Lady working with Wal-Mart. Now, that can be good. And I know all about how that happened and the history of who started working with Wal-Mart and why—I know all the people involved in this—and they’ve done some good things because Wal-Mart controls so much. You kind of have to work with Wal-Mart. And Wal-Mart has become the leading major company from the very worst company in the world to one of the better ones. Cause they’re putting in solar panels and getting rid of their excess packaging.GG: Yeah, but is that ultimately adequate and effective, or is it like FrameWorks in that it’s just not gonna be—they’re not wrong but just inadequate in the end, and you do need to be a little more confrontational and less in-bed with forces like Wal-Mart on these things.
PL: Okay, now I’m gonna tell you the worst news of all (laughs).
GG: (laughs) Okay, go for it.
PL: The problem lies in universities. And it lies in the Social Science departments of universities. Because all of these folks have been educated there—think of it this way. If you are a Republican and you want to go into politics and make money and so on, you go to college and you go into business. And when you study business you take a course in marketing and the professors of marketing study psychology and cognitive science so they know how people think. Right?GG: Yes.
PL: Republicans have no problem marketing their ideas and doing it effectively. If you’re a Democrat, what do you study? You study political science, sociology, public policy, law and economics, okay? Every one of those—I know the curricula, right? Every one of them uses Enlightenment Reason and the Rational Actor Model. And Enlightenment
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Reason is absolutely false. It comes from 1650, it was wonderful when Descartes proposed it, it was great during the Enlightenment, it helped get rid of religion dominating everything, terrific, but…it’s false. It says that language is neutral; it just fits the world; that everybody has the same reason and it works by logic. You just need to tell people the truth and they’ll reason to the right conclusion, etc. etc. Every single piece of that is false; in The Political Mind I have a whole list of all of the things that are wrong with Enlightenment Reason. It’s empirically false. And yet most of progressives and educated professors will still believe it and use it all the time. And when they use it they’re going to come up with literalist solutions that don’t do the job because they don’t see what the problem is. That’s why the real reason—and not only that, they won’t set up a communications system because that would be propaganda. God forbid we should go out there and tell people what we believe and what the facts are and keep saying it over and over. Because we shouldn’t have to say it over and over because they should just reason to the right conclusion, they’re rational. But also that’s the problem. Then we have to educate them by giving them more rationality, and that’s the thing. There’s this thing about educating people in that way. So you run into this everywhere in the liberal world. And of course the progressives who see what’s wrong with this don’t know that that’s one of the major causes because they were educated the same way.
GG: Yeah. Now are you still out there telling the Democrats this?
PL: I’ve been telling them that for 15 years.
GG: Why don’t they listen to you, George (laughs)?
PL: (laughs) They’re not going to listen to me because they believe in Enlightenment Reason and it’s in their brains! I mean that’s how their brains are set up. I know why they’re not going to listen to me, because it goes against everything they do every day of their lives! So, here is—the problem is extremely deep. And, you know, what I’m suggesting—what I’m doing now is looking at systems—they’re not setting up communications systems. So we’re going to try to do that. Things have gotten bad enough; I mean I now know enough people who are trying to change things in various areas. But the other problem is—there are several problems out there. One is the Silo Problem. People are thinking about their issue, not about progressivism, and it gets really bad in the environmental movement where one organization is for rivers another is a forest.
GG: (laughs) Yeah, there are thousands of them and if only they could sort of at least have a loose coalition of some kind you know.
PL: Not a coalition, a movement, you see? We have coalitions, but coalitions are based on individual silos.
GG: Right, okay.
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PL: At one point I was actually brought in by the Green Group to tell them what was wrong. And I told them what was wrong and they fired me! Each one of them wanted a magic word by next Tuesday for their particular interest. The problem is that you’re each separated by your individual interests, ‘of course we are we have to support our individual organizations, that’s how we do it, goodbye!’
GG: Right, right. Well thanks, George this has been great, thanks a lot—
PL: I’m not sure this helped you at all!
GG: I mean (laughs) it’s been—it just hasn’t cleaned up any of my thesis.
PL: I want to say something else. There are positive things to say. First of all, there is a food movement out there. Michael Pollen is probably the best person on this that there is. And what he’s doing is educating people through saying, “eat sensibly, eat like your grandmother did, you know, go to your farmer’s markets, care about farmers,” you know he’s saying things that are not radical and crazy but you do need to get out what these facts are. The other thing is you need to talk about all the issues from a single point of view. That is, in terms of your body, nothing is more important than food. In terms of how you function every day in your body there’s nothing more important than food. Food’s taken for granted, it’s not noticed. The second thing is the other guys are always saying we produce the food, the only reason you have food at all is we’re here producing food for the world. Now, that is bullshit, but there’s nobody explaining why it’s not. And there’s nobody talking about food as connection to nature. There’s an understanding of nature as a nurturer—and starting with food, you know? And then you say, what do you eat? And that point well, the fish are being screwed up in the oceans, there’s mercury, you have these huge cattle feeds that are screwing up the beef, you’ve following this stuff I’m sure on antibiotics, so all of this has to do with the fact that people don’t pay attention. It’s like food isn’t there. And not only that, this generation is being brought up on junk food; it’s what kids have been taught to like. And there’s another part to that—once they’re taught to like it, their brains and their bodies are set to like it.
GG: yeah, exactly. You know, we’re biologically hardwired to find as much fat, sugar and salt as we can. So it’s not a fair fight it seems.
PL: It’s not only not a fair fight but the other side knows that and is taking advantage of it. Once it gets into people’s brains as defining a taste, it’s difficult to get it out. We have a major issue here. But the center of—to understand food as part of—essential to your body and that nature is nurturing you and this connects you to nature. And the chemicals, the feedlots, the antibiotics, etc. are unnatural. They are things that go against the way your body works and against nature as a nurturer. Oil-based food is a great image.
GG: Yeah, definitely.
PL: And I think de-fertilizing—soil removing defertilizers is a good one. And the thing about genetic engineering—you see it’s the word engineering that’s sort of bad, but we
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have this metaphor of the body as a machine. If the body is a machine, then genetic engineering is right. We see the body as a machine, not as evolved to nature. So all of this stuff is problematic, the reason I’m going into it is because there’s this range of stuff you have to be aware of all the time. The center of it is your body and its connection to nature. Now, there is an important fact about the brain you need to know. You probably know all about mirror neurons by now which connect you to other people—I worked with the people who discovered mirror neurons in detail and went over all their data. And there’s another group of neurons called the canonical neurons that fire when you either perform or action or see something you can perform it on. You know, you eat the banana or you see the banana. You see the water or you drink the water, same neurons firing in a certain part of the brain. Now, what that means is we have a potential—we are connected to our physical environment. But when the environment is artificial and built—and that’s mainly what we’re connected to we’re not connected to nature. And that’s a major problem. People say “where does meat come from?” “It comes from the supermarket in plastic packages.” I asked my mother when I was a little kid where milk came from and she said “bottles.”
GG: (laughs) Yeah.
PL: (laughs) You know, I’m sorry but this is what’s going on. People don’t know where meat comes from. There isn’t an education in the educational system for it. T.V. and commercials go against all of that. It’s not just a matter of telling people of the facts and they’ll reason to the right conclusion. That isn’t how that works. The real question is understanding how the body works and how you’re connected to nature. That is the major, central focus of this. Now what people are trying to do it say “let’s tie it to style, to fashion.” That’s what Joe Grady is trying to do with the FrameWorks Institute. Fitness is a fashion, having nice abs is a fashion. Well, yes it’s tied to fashion and fashion changes then there are people who are hardwired from their childhood to not be able to do that.
GG: Yeah I agree with a lot of what you’re saying, I think we risk—some people would call organic and small-scale localized farming as going against all that we’ve developed over the past 200 years and you’re basically being archaic and in an odd-sense anti-progressive and anti-technological. You’re being naïve or uh, unaccepting of the realities of the 21st century and that sort of thing. So what do you say to that?
PL: Well its (organic) is so expensive a lot of poor people can’t afford it. On the other hand, they can afford iPhones and sneakers and other things that have to do with fashion. That argument is not a logical, fact based argument it is an argument based on accepting culture as it is.
GG: Right, for sure.
PL: These are all the problems. Ultimately, there are several things in our favor. One: the stuff tastes better. Two: It is healthier, and it does fit the fitness style. Three: people are getting more and more concerned with bodies and health. Now, the concern with the bodies is often how they look. So, the question is will you look better if you eat organic
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food. But in order for you to eat it there has to be an industry. There has to be the right people in Congress. And people don’t connect that to politics, that’s the other thing. Food and politics are about as far as you can imagine being in most people’s brains.
GG: Yeah, you almost never hear politicians—food politics mentioned in media.
PL: No. Because food and politics sound like an oxymoron. That is central. A lot of the problems are on our side. The concept social justice has nothing to do with food. The concept environmentalism is understood as having nothing to do with food. So if you go to—let me give you an example. Suppose you go to a foundation. And the foundation has its mission statement, and every foundation on the left picks six out of the usual twenty four things they can support, you know? It’s either going to be education or anti-poverty, or AIDS, or it’s going to be—you know the list. Food isn’t on there. And if it’s food it’s feeding the hungry. Which is exactly the counterproductive way to think about it. But the idea of healthy, organic food and getting rid of Big Ag, etc. is not one of the list of things foundations put down. And once they put it down, it’s the only thing they can give their money towards. Liberal foundations are shooting themselves in the foot and screwing all of us because of the way they’re structured.
GG: Is it that they really don’t get it or that they’re scared of all the big money in Big Ag?
PL: What’s happening is that they have—there’s a thing called a good portfolio that determines how people get promoted in foundations. Someone has a good portfolio if they spread the money around, give small grants, don’t keep giving it to the same folks so therefore cut people off after three years, account for every penny, and therefore don’t give your money to the lowest common denominator, and don’t give anything to build infrastructure or talent development. That is called a good portfolio in the foundation world and if you don’t have that you don’t get promoted. The practices are institutionalized in terms of advancements. So that’s one of the problems there. Of course that fits the idea of the board of trustees who come from large corporations. Who has all the money to set up a foundation? Rich people. Who’s on the board of trustees? Business people. And businesspeople may want to do good the world, but you know, anyway—these constraints are a problem…I don’t want to discourage you, but you need to have a sense of the real problems. FrameWorks isn’t made up of bad people, they’re good people.
GG: I fully appreciate what you’re saying, the problem with writing a thesis is I’m told to refine, refine, hone in, hone in, and you need to come up with something very precise and with defined parameters, and the more I get into this thing the more amorphous all over the place it tends to go.
PL: See, that’s the wrong way to think about it. It gets amorphous from the point of view of issues. It doesn’t get amorphous from the point of view of values.
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GG: Right, right. Yes, I just mean diverse issues at stake and interconnectivity but you’re absolutely right in that, as you said, it’s all part of the larger progressive frame if we can connect food to that.
PL: Well the larger progressive frame is think forward. Obama said it during his campaign and dropped it as soon as he got elected, but the larger progressive frame is simple: it’s empathy, you care about other people because you’re actually physiologically connected to them, it’s social as well as personal responsibility, meaning you act on the empathy, and it’s a principle of excellence. You make yourself, your community, and your country as good as possible because these problems are hard. And the result is that government should be there to protect and empower people. That’s it! Very simple. What happens is I go to an audience and say this and everybody will say yes, the political leaders will say yes and they will never repeat it. They’ll go back to the issues and the slogans and what they did before.
GG: Right. Alright, well professor you’ve been more than generous with your time. I appreciate you taking the time out of your Sunday afternoon to talk to an undergraduate writing his thesis—it’s been wonderful.
PL: Undergraduates writing theses change the world. And you have all the right instincts. You’re right on top of it, you can see the problems, they’re very real, and just keep going with it.
GG: Okay. Yeah. That’s great. Thanks for the words of encouragement—I plan on it.
PL: And give my regards to Sarah.
GG: I will. Take care of yourself professor. Thanks a lot.
PL: Yep. Bye.
TRANSCRIPT ENDS.
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Food Writer Mark Bittman
Clark graduate Mark Bittman is an “avid home-cook,” journalist and professional food writer. He has never had formal training nor been chef. His acclaimed cooking column “The Minimalist” appeared in the New York Times for nearly twenty years. Bittman recently ended the “Minimalist” to focus on using his Times platform “to write about the truth about
food” in a new column. He has also authored well-received cooking books such as How to Cook Everything, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, and Food Matters.The transcript of my telephone interview with Mr. Bittman on 2/10/2011 follows.
TRANSCRIPT BEGINS:
Gabe Gerzon: …Do you have anything you want to say before I ask anything after reading what I sent you?
Mark Bittman: No because I’ve already forgotten it, I just remember it was interesting.
GG: (laughs) cool, well it was sort of about framing, I’ll just go over that on more time. Framing is the study of your unconscious thoughts, values and associations with any particular, you know, public policy issue, and a lot of other things really. It defines the parameters of it—who’s responsible and it suggests potential solutions to you know, some of the problems we have with the current food system, and it suggests that human decisions are not, you know, always the rational actor model, they can be influenced by subtle cues in presentation and that sort of thing.
MB: Right.
GG: So I’m interested in how the public made—can have a more broad-spectrum view of the food system and how we can reframe, or change the context of the message exchange, food to elevate it onto the public agenda.
MB: Yeah, well, I’m interested in that too.
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GG: So then I wanted to—what I coined the Food as Fuel frame, which as you talked about indirectly, is the idea that food is just a fuel that can be obtained and consumed without much difficulty or cost, and sort of the implications for that on food decision making within the Consumer frame that limits the ability to affect policy change because food is seen as a consumer, individual-choice issue and that sort of shrouds the implications of enormous policy decisions that have a much bigger impact on what makes it to the marketplace than someone shopping at, you know, Trader Joe’s instead of at Shaws.
MB: Right. Well okay. Let me talk for minute then you need to ask me more specific questions, but uh, food is not difficult to obtain although that’s obviously a modern thing, you’re right about that at least in the United States if you have some money. But that doesn’t mean it’s inexpensive and I think one of the keys to reframing this discussion is to reveal the true costs of food.
GG: Yes, definitely.
MB: And the problem now is that we are not—you know the true costs of food are either hidden or denied or forestalled. And you’ve got environmental costs, you’ve got health costs, you’ve got real production costs, um, and all of those are being hidden. They’re being hidden by subsidies, they’re being hidden by pollution, they’re being hidden by defraying health care costs or defraying diseases that later lead to health care costs and all of those things are part of what makes up our agricultural system and our diet. So were those costs to be made more transparent, no one would go around saying food is inexpensive. And no one would go around—or fewer people would go around—wasting food, you know we waste an enormous amount, and fewer people would take their diet so lightly and say well, it’s individual choice. Of course it is individual choice, but if you’re poisoning yourself and you’re unaware of it, you’re not making a good choice. Unless you’re suicidal you’re not making a good choice. If you’re defraying health care costs and expecting someone else to pay for them you’re not making a good choice from the point of view—if you want to be a responsible member of society. So, I’m all for making choices but let’s have the information. The information is that a hamburger does not cost 99 cents, a hamburgers costs way, way more than 99 cents in hidden costs and were the costs to be exposed, hamburgers would be, say $4 or $8 or whatever the real cost is, and people would eat far fewer of them. A head of broccoli, a head of lettuce has far, far fewer hidden costs than a cheeseburger.
GG: Mmhm. Yeah, so I think the goal though is to unite people on the idea that the subsidies need to be changed because I totally agree with what you’re saying, I just fear that by saying you know, “you don’t understand the real food costs of what you’re eating,” people sort of throw their hands in the air and go “I’m doing the best I can, trying to eat as cheaply as I can”—
MB: No, absolutely. I understand that. It’s not an argument that you make—you don’t argue individually with people. You get rid of the subsidies the cost of junk food immediately goes up. I’m not saying this is a discussion about convincing individuals,
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I’m saying it’s a discussion about making—doing certain actions that will change the way that people perceive food.
GG: Right, yeah, I agree. So have you thought about what your overall conceptual model is for this new column? Are you striving for a call to action?
MB: Um (long pause) I’m…I guess the answer to that is no. Yes I’m striving for a call to action but I don’t have an overall conceptual view. I’m working my way into it. I want to write about the truth about food. That’s what I want to do. Food touches everything in everybody’s life, and no one’s writing about it in as big a platform as the (New York) Times, truthfully and frequently. So that’s what I want to do. Ultimately the overall concept winds up being, I dunno, we’ll find out.
GG: Let me put it a slightly different way. Is it accurate to say the Minimalist was in part about bringing attention to one’s own eating habits and the benefits of cooking, and the new column, whatever form it takes, is more…I almost flinch when I say this, more Pollanesque in that it’s concerned with filling in the missing big picture of our relationship to food and the impact of system-wide production decisions on our individual relationships to food?
MB: I would say the Minimalist was a cooking column and obviously I think cooking is real important, and um, the new column is a food column and eating column. It’ll talk about cooking also but it’s obviously a broader column. I’m not gonna call it Pollanesque you can call it Pollanesque if you want to. I don’t know what that means.
GG: So that sort of the tension for me is the tensions between individuals and society—you know people need to discover this on some level for themselves, but they need to be brought together on some level on sort of the base, fundamental problems. How do you see that, the interplay between individual roles and societal roles?
MB: Well individuals need to do two things: one, they need to take care of their own acts. That’s about getting the word out that this American Diet doesn’t work. I mean even the USDA sees that although they don’t do a very good job of saying it. People need to understand that fast food is not good for them; processed food is not good for them, but again, if we change the cost structure so that those things represent their true cost, that’s going to show people that very clearly. But people need to move towards a plant-based diet. That’s very simple as individuals. Society is composed of individuals too—those of us who care about these things need to work to make—to push society in the direction we see it needs to be pushed in and that means dealing with the damage to the environment, dealing with the damage to our health, dealing with global warming—these are massive issues. So it’s a question of if this country is run for corporate profit or run for the people who live here. That’s a classic, classic struggle in the United States which has really accelerated in the last 30 or 40 years, and I can’t say what’s going to happen and I can’t say what people ought to do. They ought to try to elect progressive representatives, that’s what they should try to do—and I don’t know what else they should try to do sadly.
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GG: That reminds me of something—I recently just talked to Noam Chomsky about this, and he said, I’m quoting, “the barriers are about the same as in discussing other social, economic, and political problems. There are powerful interests within the state-corporate system, which includes the media and universities, that strongly prefer certain outcomes, and seek to restrict debate and consciousness so as to make these the only thinkable options.” In other words, there are very powerful forces at work to make sure you don’t see food as a collective issue and as a social responsibility issue, and that everyone deserves access to fresh produce, that sort of thing. What’s your response to that?
MB: As usual, the only thing I disagree with Professor Chomsky about is the generalization. I would say that some or much of the media and some or much of…whatever the other brainwashing institutions he mentions, but of course it’s true other than that. It is in the corporate interest to have us see that “this is the way things are and this is the way things ought to be.”
GG: Right. So, my next question is…I get some enjoyment, and some sense that these things could be successful when I talk to George Lakoff. He recommends talking about Sun-based foods versus Oil-based foods and reframing industrial petro-fertilizers as de-fertilizers. And seems to me those are, while not the answer, it’s a more helpful way of talking about food so people can conceptually grasp how what you’re saying is fundamentally different than the existing system. I’m wondering what you think of this idea of linguistic framing and Sun-based foods versus Oil-based foods and so on.
MB: Um, I think that that’s an interesting thought and I can’t um (sigh, long pause)…I wonder if it’s that simple. If it’s that simple, if it’s as simple as saying “we’re looking at Sun-based food over Oil-based food that is an interesting distinction and that is a good frame and it makes the conversation worthwhile to me. But it’s hard for me to respond because I have to think about it.
GG: Yeah, yeah I hear you. So another thing I wanted to ask you was, uh—there’s a TED talk you gave that’s on the website—
MB: That’s actually three years old at this point, but yeah.
GG: Is it? Yeah. Well I just thought one of your last sentences was really good, you asked “won’t a diet of fruits and veggies turn us into godless, sissy liberals?” And obviously that’s sarcasm, but you did hit on an enormous cultural barrier in achieving the transformation we’re talking about. It seems we have sort of been irrationally culturally programmed with some ideas about food that just don’t make sense anymore, if they ever made sense. So how do you see your—or just how do you see our responsibility to override this food-programming we’ve been inculcated with?
MB: I think things have changed. There are more and more people who would have thought that a better diet turns you into a “godless, sissy liberal” who now think that a better diet simply makes you healthier and is less damaging for the earth. I don’t know what the numbers are, but I can say that the message that I try to transmit in talks and in
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print seems to be more widely received than it was three years ago. So I think that’s a good thing. That was a sarcastic then, and people always laughed, but I think it was more of uh—when you have Oprah talking about veganism, when you have Michelle Obama pushing a plant based diet to some extent, when you have books like Skinny Bitch and these things that are very much part of the popular culture, when the word ‘vegan,’ which was barely known in popular culture five years ago is now in common parlance, that’s a difference. Stuff is changing.
GG: Yeah, it certainly is. So if you’ll indulge me there’s this group called the FrameWorks Institute which is interested in the things we’ve been talking about and understanding how the public think about issues, sort of how they apply conceptual frameworks to them. And their testing found that this model, which I’ll read to you in a minute, is the most effective in sort of creating a concrete image of the system and conveying the sense that we need stewards of the food system and that it’s not being regulated. So, here’s what they found:“Experts are increasingly concerned about what they call our Runaway Food System. The way we produce food today has radically changed, and now has the power to alter the foundations of life as we know it almost by accident. Farming chemicals like pesticides and weed-killer are permanently altering our soil and water. Genetic engineering is changing the nature of the plants and animals we eat. And mile-long fishing nets are dragging the ocean floor and altering ecosystems. America needs to retake control of this runaway food system before it does more damage to the foundations we depend on.” So that is one frame they’re proposing that sort of fills in the missing big picture and that someone needs to be in control of this thing and no one is. It’s out of control. Do you have a response to that?
MB: It’s not a bad mission statement; I think I could probably do better. Maybe I should try.
GG: Yeah, maybe you should.
MB: (chuckles) yeah, that’s why I asked you to send me a copy of the tape. But um, it’s common. There’s nothing unusual about that statement. People are making statements like that all over the place. It’s obviously true but I don’t think if you publish it anywhere anyone’s going to notice.
GG: Right. I agree. I think just the term “The Runaway Food System” it’s not perfect, but it’s what I’m talking about in terms of how can people get a better grasp on this, and I think people are getting a better grasp on it, but I do think we need some conceptual models that—you know, we like a little bit of concreteness and I think a lot of people still don’t have a great handle on the chain of production and policy decisions, and without geeking-out on them you can communicate “look, there’s a real crisis here, you know, and we need to do something about.
MB: Right.
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GG: Okay, well as long as we agree on that.
MB: Yeah we agree on that, I just don’t think there’s anything unique about that particular statement.
GG: Yeah, fair enough. So that’s about all I’ve got for you.
MB: Okay, great. Well it’s interesting stuff, and um, like I said the questions are stimulating. So yeah send me that, I want to think about this Sun-based versus Oil-based thing and I might get back to you on that.
GG: Sure. Actually, I was just wondering on a lighter note if you had any particular dining memories that sort of made you go, “I need to do something different here with my diet.”
MB: I got an apartment my second year and I never ate in the dining hall again. And I’m sure that the restaurants there are much better than when I was there, and I’m sure the dining hall’s even better than when I was there because we’re talking forty-some years ago. But I got an apartment—it was when I started cooking and I guess I have to thank Clark for having such horrible food that I started cooking.(Impertinent dialogue removed)
GG: Alright, well thanks a lot for taking the time out of your day and I’ll send you this as an .mp3 when I get a chance in the next few days here. It was great talking to you, take care Mark.
MB: Okay, thanks for the ideas. Bye.
TRANSCRIPT ENDS.
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Professor Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky is a world-renowned linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist and political activist. He is a prominent cultural figure admired for his incisive non-partisan social and political criticisms also considered the most quoted living author in the world.
Professor Chomsky’s perspective was valuable in shaping my thesis in a number of ways. The FrameWorks Institute explains Professor Chomsky’s influence on the development of framing:
“One of the primary ways that scholars are able to elicit how frames work is by analyzing how people construct meaning through discourse. Scholarship on framing in linguistics is often traced to Noam
Chomsky’s (1957) work Syntactic Structures, which proposed that language is largely wired into our genes. This proposal was in direct opposition to the dominant theoretical perspective of the time, Behaviorism, which held
that language learning was shaped by conditioning and imitation. Chomsky’s innovations in linguistics inspired a great deal of research, across disciplines, into how language
develops and is structured. He may arguably be cited as having given rise to a particular subfield of linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics, which has made major contributions to the
study of framing.” –frameworks methodology
My interview with Professor Chomsky took place on February 2, 2011 via email. An edited transcript of email exchange follows. Professor Chomsky’s responses are italicized.
TRANSCRIPT BEGINS:
Gabe Gerzon: Hello Professor Chomsky,
I am a student of Sarah Michaels at Clark University in the Communications & Culture program. I am completing an honors thesis on the subject of food-frames. I’m interested in devising communication strategies that enable the public to understand the issue of food accurately and in a broader context so that people move away from blaming individuals for poor health and towards systematic and community-based solutions that address the fundamental problems of corporately controlled food and an outlook that
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doesn't value food as a precious, shared resource. I would be honored to have your perspective for my thesis.
I recently talked with George Lakoff. One of his more interesting assertions was that the root problem lies within universities and their reliance on Enlightenment Reason. He posits that progressives base their communication strategies on an out-dated Rational Actor Model that says language is neutral and people will rationally reach the right conclusion. He contends this is empirically false and has stopped liberals from developing an all-encompassing language of progressivism that expresses our core values of empathy, social responsibility, and cooperativeness. It seems by failing to craft such a cognitive policy over the last 30 years progressives have allowed free-market conservatives to frame food as simply another commodity of the industrial machinery. Even the legislative term for corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton, and rice is commodity crops. Quantity rules supreme over quality in the system. An irrational, dissociated food production infrastructure based on industrialist, free-market principles has arisen instead of human and health focused system.
1.) Do you agree that supposedly liberal-institutions, such as universities, have undermined their effectiveness in leveraging progressive causes (including sustainable food reform) by not seeing that an overarching, values-based progressive vision was necessary? If not, what do you see as the principal cause of liberals' emasculation especially as it relates to reforming food policy?
Noam Chomsky: “Rational actor models” come from mainstream economics, and have been sharply criticized by the left, even before their recent collapse. I don’t think they have anything to do with Enlightenment Reason. In fact, they are more like religious dogma. As for the universities, they are very much part of the state-corporate system (with a fringe of exceptions) and it’s only to be expected that they will conform pretty much to their doctrines in teaching and research. The last thing they want is a “progressive vision,” though it exists at the margins, sometimes tolerated in the universities, often outside the university system. Same is true on domestic and foreign policy and much else.
GG: 2.) Progressives must re-frame citizens' conceptual/emotional relationship to food on a fundamental level, but 'surface re-frames,' or reformatting the language used on particular subjects, may be effective as a cognitive buttress, or at rousing the attention of normally apathetic individuals. For example, Lakoff recommends talking about 'sun-based food' vs. 'oil-based food' to dispel the notion that petro-fertilizers (in fact de-fertilizers, or 'top-soil removers' in his words) are a benign, sustainable method of agriculture. In your experience, are these effective mechanisms? How much importance do you give linguistic framing of this kind? Do you have any of your own you would be willing to share?
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NC: Left and activist publications, and their other work, invariably focuses on the human issues, in fact intensively. I doubt that “linguistic framing” is of more than very marginal significance.
GG: 3.) What are the most significant barriers (psychological, social, political or lingual) you see in re-conceptualizing the food system? What would be your strategy to promote an understanding of food production that fits reality?
NC: The barriers are about the same as in discussing other social, economic, and political problems. There are powerful interests within the state-corporate system, which includes the media and universities, that strongly prefer certain outcomes, and seek to restrict debate and consciousness so as to make these the only thinkable options. That’s natural, and very well-documented. It’s true of just about everything. Take, say, the current frenzy about the deficit. Let’s put aside the fact that a deficit is arguably quite wise in a period of recession and very severe unemployment (much worse than official figures indicate). The deficit has two prime sources. About half results from the huge level of military spending, about as much as the rest of the world combined – not for “defense”. The rest mostly derives from the utterly dysfunctional privatized health care system, an international scandal. But these are barely discussed. Rather, Obama’s commission, media coverage, etc., focus on “entitlements”: social security (which adds nothing to the deficit, but is hated by privilege and power) and Medicare (which is indeed extremely expensive, not in itself – it has very low administrative costs – but because it is forced to rely on the massively inefficient privatized system).
I mention this example only because it is in the forefront of debate. The problem is not linguistic framing, but the very effective propaganda systems that are rooted in the domestic structure of power. Look at any other issue and you’ll find much the same. All very natural. It would be a surprise if it were otherwise.
GG: 4.) I would like your thoughts on the recent news that the First Lady is working in cooperation with Wal-mart to improve the affordability of healthy food choices and expand into food deserts. How do you view this news? In what context do you put it? Is it a step in the right direction, or really just a cunning PR initiative?
NC: Both, I think. Not all PR efforts are harmful. They may (by accident) be helpful.
GG: 5.) Lastly, who do you think is likely to be perceived as a trustworthy, honest messenger on this front? Many believe Michael Pollan is and should be the voice of food movement. Who do you see? Must there be a leader in this sense?
NC: I don’t think there is or should be any one leader. There’s a lot of good work on this topic: Food First, Oxfam, many others.
TRANSCRIPT ENDS.
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Endnotes
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