I just realized this is where all the cool kids are hanging out, so here’s a contribution to the “problematic articles” collection.
A Plea for Culinary Modernism: The obsession with eating natural and artisanal is ahistorical. We should demand more high-quality industrial food.
Wow. “Culinary Luddism” is a new one to me. It’s so funny to me how Luddite is such a universal slur in the technoculture. The term is hard for me to reject because of the implications of skepticism of technological progress, and hard for me to embrace because it still feeds into the idea that work and production are fundamental values.
"I cannot accept the account of the past implied by Culinary Luddism, a past sharply divided between good and bad, between the sunny rural days of yore and the gray industrial present. My enthusiasm for Luddite kitchen wisdom does not carry over to their history, any more than my response to a stirring political speech inclines me to accept the orator
as scholar.
The Luddites’ fable of disaster, of a fall from grace, smacks more of wishful thinking than of digging through archives. It gains credence not from scholarship but from evocative dichotomies: fresh and natural versus processed and preserved; local versus global; slow versus fast: artisanal and traditional versus urban and industrial; healthful versus contaminated and fatty. History shows, I believe, that the Luddites have things back to front."
It’s almost as if the criticism of history being written by the victors is relevant when considering wild food vs. industrial food. But really, I think there is a point to be found in here that glorifying “traditional” “organic” monoculture farming doesn’t get us very far.