Is the Industrial Food System Actually Good?

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It’s a provocative question to ask. The food system is subject to constant criticism, with a range of critiques concerning its nutritional, environmental, and social deficiencies. The idea that the industrial food system drives outcomes worth amplifying and possesses virtues meriting celebration flies in the face of the last 30 years of food writing and reporting.

Feed the People departs from this prevailing narrative. The authors, scholars Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg, reckon that the food system and its industrial nature actually have a lot worth celebrating, and that its current structure can serve as a valuable template from which an even better food system — one that better prioritizes access, labor rights, and the environment — can be built on top of. At its core, they argue that the industrial food system has good bones and that a project of improvement in lieu of wholesale restructuring offers a superior path for the food politics of the future.

The book adopts an ethical framework called democratic hedonism. Originating in sexuality politics, the concept holds that pleasure is a moral good core to the human experience (the hedonism component), and that access to pleasurable experiences should be an explicit goal of civil society and public policy (the democratic component). Democratic hedonism also holds that personal preferences regarding what experiences are pleasurable hold no moral weight in of themselves, and that choices that limit the sorts of pleasurable pursuits an individual seeks should only be instituted because of their impact on other humans or the broader environment. So, for example, if the foods one finds pleasurable come with significant environmental harms or infringe on the rights of others to live a healthy and dignified life, it’s reasonable for access to those foods to be restricted in some manner until such issues can be remedied. It’s a project of access and plurality, not of prescription. Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg argue that food is the perfect avenue for the public promotion of pleasure. Food is a near-universal source of pleasure, and it’s an area of consumption where governments can reasonably effect change.1

This centering of individual pleasure as a source of political motivation leads to a heady critique of a popular tendency of food writing, epitomized by folks like Michael Pollan and Wendell Berry. These writers, who advance a food politic defined by eating “correctly,” are heavily criticized in the book:

“Berry and his many followers — be it with pens or chef’s knives in hand — have suggested ad nauseam that ordinary people are brainwashed by agribusinesses and fast-food restaurants. They suffer from food false consciousness. The sensual delights they derive from, say, a Waffle House waffle are shallow, empty, and beneath respect. We say that those pleasures are real and compelling, which is why, when they are also harmful, they can be disastrous. In contrast to Berry, we think taking other people’s pleasures seriously, even and especially when we don’t share them or when they are harmful, is the first step to identifying satisfying but less harmful alternatives.”

They similarly decry the propensity of food criticism to devolve into “selfishness, narcissism, and snobbery” and structure their program around the notion of preserving individual agency to pursue delicious eating. Furthermore, they criticize the food movement’s demands that consumers commit themselves to more chores around food, citing Berry’s list of recommended consumer actions, which include tasks like “deal directly with a local farmer” or “learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening.” They argue that saddling eaters with more tasks around food is anathema to actual change. That better eating does not need to come with more labor.

“When Berry is stripped of his high-minded platitudes, his chief anxiety is about ignorance, and his vision of pleasure is rooted in the satisfactions of work and knowledge, not the satiety of food. You might be looking for lunch, but Berry is hunting for meaning. ‘The thought of the good pasture and of the calf contentedly grazing flavors the steak,’ he writes. Does it?”

Eccentrics like me who take joy in reading books about pawpaws, growing our own mushrooms, or taking a Saturday to tramp around the local elderberry orchard do not possess morally superior eating habits by virtue of our preferred food-centric pastimes, and we should not dictate the recreational choices of others or demand people sink even more time and energy into the act of nourishment. Any food system solution that demands more of people’s time is not conducive to greater levels of pleasure for the vast majority of consumers and, for Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg, does not constitute an equitable food politics.

With this framework established, the authors set about sketching out what a political program for the food movement would look like if based on a foundation of democratic hedonism.

Their chapter on cattle and the environmental impact of dietary choices acts as an effective stress test of the place and limits of pleasure in a food politics based on democratic hedonism. They are unequivocal about the harms of animal agriculture and strident in their belief that shrinking the size of animal operations is an essential part of reducing agriculture’s carbon footprint. Despite the immense pleasure that meat, egg, and dairy products confer, animal agriculture’s outsized planetary impact is framed as incompatible with the food system of the future.

But Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg are not content with the wholesale elimination of a significant source of pleasure from our national diet. They are equally impassioned by the prospect of alternative proteins delivering comparable sensory and flavor experiences while jettisoning the ecological outcomes of industrial meat production. Products like plant-based or cellular meats, designed to mimic the taste, preparations, and dining routines of animal products at an accessible price, are encouraged as an eco-conscious way to preserve the experience of biting into a juicy steak or tangy cheese. Public support for researching and producing these alternatives at scale is promoted as an essential exercise of democratic hedonism — using the resources of government to responsibly deliver these enjoyments to the masses while curtailing the excesses of industrial meat production.

The authors’ politics of pleasure hits its apotheosis, in my view, in the chapter on public assistance and feeding programs, setting their sights on SNAP and the school lunch program. Regarding the former, they mount an impassioned defense of the program for not just its effectiveness in increasing food security and access to nutritional food but for its commitment to preserving the agency of its participants. They defend the ability of participants to purchase the food they actually desire, even if products like soda or snack cakes are rich in sugar and lacking in vitamins. Ethically, they argue, the autonomy of the patron is paramount, “even if big food wins as well.” The idea that the state should impose a sort of dietary asceticism on its citizens and micromanage their nutritional choices simply because they require the public’s largess to feed themselves offends the dignity of the poor.

School lunch programs are also praised by the authors as effective institutions staffed by skilled workers that deliver massive amounts of nutritious and delicious food to the nation’s pickiest customers, all on a shoestring budget. They profile a Bronx school, exploring how menus are crafted in concert with kids, using public tasting events to trial new recipes and find dishes that kids will actually eat. This participatory approach ensures dollars are spent wisely, kids get food they actually like, and I got to learn about (and can’t stop eating) Rajma curry.

These two programs both rely on the scale of industrial food production to cheaply feed millions of people. Providing citizens with cash assistance to buy food from retail outlets allows the state to commandeer the economies of scale and modern supply chains built out by grocery and convenience stores to provide abundant choice to consumers at reasonable (historically speaking) prices. Similarly, school lunch programs use modern kitchens and industrially processed food (e.g., canned and frozen fruit, prechopped produce) to serve hundreds or even thousands of pupils daily.

This heavy praise for the scaled supply chain led to perhaps the duo’s most controversial observation: that Walmart and its sprawling, cost-controlling supply chain is a critical component of the food system that helps keep costs down for millions of consumers. While they’re not saying that Walmart is itself the solution to our assorted food crises, its ability to provision a lot of food cheaply is a win that helps keep many people in this country fed. Of course, the fact that many of their own employees receive public assistance that is passed back through their registers belies the fact that further work is needed, a fact the authors recognize. Their point is that the ideal food system probably looks a lot more like Walmart than it does small-scale solutions like community gardens. Sure, the latter is a wonderful recreational device that helps address food insecurity at the grassroots level, but it is not a systemic solution to the interlocking crises affecting the food system. They advocate we replicate the structure, not the business, of Walmart, and feed millions of people cheaply by turning the ruthless efficiency of big business into the compassionate efficiency of the democratic state.

Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg also advance the notion that scaled enterprises can more easily have democratic projects grafted upon them, such as through union campaigns. Their logic goes that larger farms are easier to organize (the ‘-er’ must be emphasized, by no means is it easy in the absolute), as their size allows organizers a single opponent to focus their energy on and makes communicating with workers simpler. When imagining a drive seeking to unionize “thousands of workers dispersed across thousands of tiny workplaces spread across thousands of miles”, the logistical advantages of consolidation for worker organizing are startlingly apparent. The authors also note that no farmworker unions, such as the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, call for the downsizing of the farms they work on. They care about pay and conditions, which are easier to bargain for against a handful of opponents instead of thousands.

In their final chapter, the authors turn their attention to the all-too-fickle practice of food processing. They begin by asserting that pleasure is an integral component of human nutrition, that when healthy food tastes good, it increases the overall consumption of vitamins, minerals, fiber, whole grains, and whatnot. Processing in the current system enables more pleasure while also expanding access to and the quality of nutritious food. Things like pasteurization make delicious and calcium-rich dairy products healthier, and canned beans and prechopped frozen vegetables decrease the amount of cooking time required while ensuring access to affordable and nutrient-dense produce year-round for far less labor.

Of course, Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg are not naïve about how processed foods, marketed carelessly, can and do negatively impact the health of eaters. That’s why they relay a call for policies to improve the quality of industrial foods and a food environment that enables healthy eating, in stark contrast to many proposals that focus on limiting or banning processing. They petition for the regulation of specific damaging practices, rules not based on the degree or complexity of processing, but that target practices due to their verifiable harm. Policies they encourage include controlling the sale of hyperpalatable foods engineered to override our body’s satiety signals, banning cartoon characters and celebrities in advertising unhealthy food to children (copying a successful Mexican law), and improving regulatory systems to identify and remove dangerous ingredients.2

Fundamentally, they are calling for the democratic control of food technology. Letting the public decide, through their elected representatives, what we allow in the food supply and ensuring that functions of convenience and flavor are balanced with the health of the citizenry. Processing opens a number of opportunities for improving our food supply by reducing the amount of labor involved in food preparation while increasing the flavors available to consumers.3 Processing can be a useful tool to improve both the pleasure and health of our food supply, as long as its motivation is derived from public service and not profit.

While I clearly have a lot of praise for Feed the People, its goals, and its arguments, I do have some criticisms of the text. I would have liked to see a more direct, critical appraisal of the problems of concentration and scale. Industrial food production and the rationalization it engenders build structural risks into the food system. Centralized supply chains carry the risk of failure, like what happened with the meatpacking worker shortage during the pandemic or the 2022 baby formula factory closure. Natural disasters, cyber attacks, and bankruptcy can all cause supply chains to buckle, and if production and distribution are overly centralized, such events can cause protracted shortages. While they advocate for regulation of the food system’s excesses and nod toward the burgeoning anti-trust movement, I would have liked more ink dedicated to laying out how anti-trust fits into their program and how the benefits of scale can be preserved while large food concerns are broken up. They contend with these issues in the abstract; I just would’ve liked more detail.

Similarly, scaled production systems encourage genetic uniformity in crop populations (through practices like counter-season production and how commodity markets are organized), which increases the risks of catastrophic disease and pest outbreaks crippling food supplies. How do we build genetic diversity into a scaled and industrial food system? Only touching on these issues neglects to address an important issue of the contemporary food system.

Regarding the overall writing style, I quite appreciated the book’s conversational tone that still managed to be quite authoritative. They did a great job of splicing in nuance while making sure their overall arguments were still definitive. In food writing, you normally get one or the other, so this made Feed the People quite a unique read.

But what I really enjoyed about this book is that it connects so well with several other texts I’ve enjoyed throughout the years. So, if you enjoyed Feed the People or found this review intriguing and are looking for more recommendations to add to your Bookshop.org shopping cart, I’ve got you covered.

Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg’s work, at its core, asserts that the structures and processes of the contemporary food system, while flawed and geared toward serving narrow interests, can be rehabilitated towards more pro-social goals. It’s a project reminiscent of Leigh Phillips People’s Republic of Walmart, which takes a similar approach in its analysis of the central planning innovations employed by the modern megacorporation. Another book that could greatly enrich the book’s democratic hedonism concept is After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time by Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek. This book adopts a similar concept called public luxury that argues that state resources should be used to provide high-quality amenities beyond their mandate to secure our basic needs, specifically applying it to reducing the burden of housework. Public luxury could be an intriguing principle around which a food system could be built, and it fits well with democratic hedonism’s focus on increasing access to pleasure. Finally, the books Baking Powder Wars by Linda Civitello and Something from the Oven by Laura Shapiro review the introduction of new technologies, chemical leaveners and convenience foods, respectively, to America’s kitchen. Both treat consumers as discerning actors, not mindless drones, and ask why they brought these new technologies into their household and how they actually use them. This respect for individual agency (something that consumers, especially women and mothers, are not often treated as having) pairs well with Feed the People’s centering of individual autonomy as consumers navigate the food environment.

My final thoughts on the book are that I think it’s an incredibly prescient reframing of the role of industrial processes and large-scale enterprises in building food systems of the future. The points of this book might strike some readers as just another program of incremental reform in the confines of sclerotic electoral politics, but to me it scans more as a call for the radical reappropriation of the food system for the benefit of the middle and working classes. Yes, they highlight the advantages the food system has and outline the qualities they prefer to maintain, but at the end of the day, they call for a radical shift of power. It’s a refreshing political program that seeks to take the innovations of capitalist enterprises and turn them from serving the interests of shareholders to serving the public. One that uses scale and technology as tools to guarantee pleasurable, nourishing food for every person in this country.

This book offers many takeaways that can enrich contemporary food politics. Pleasure is important, and people find pleasure in different places. Focusing on the volume of labor necessary to feed ourselves and the fact that technology can greatly reduce this burden is central to actually improving the eating experience for many. Policy interventions and solutions that utilize the scale of the existing system can be powerful tools for feeding more and more people.

While I think there are areas of their program that need work, the core project is quite sound. Any food system reformer that takes seriously the challenge of sustainably and equitably feeding hundreds of millions of people should take the arguments of Feed the People as a worthwhile critique of the food movement and a levelheaded foundation for future political projects.

I’d like to close with a quote from the book’s conclusion:

As you try to work out the components of a replacement food system, you end up re-creating many of the foundational parts of the current one. And that’s not a coincidence. We can’t have a modern world without a modern food system. And being crystal clear about this is the first step in working toward building a better one. . . . Scrutiny and regulation of new technology require serious regulatory capacity and well-designed institutions capable of monitoring large-scale problems and implementing large-scale solutions. One problem with the nostalgic, smaller-is-better line of foodie thought is that it is usually allergic to large-scale institutional thinking and design. But even as those people would rather stick their heads in the fertilizer pile of an imagined agrarian past than find large-scale solutions to the problems of the present, they are frequently right about one thing: The sad truth is that the institutions entrusted with regulating food and agriculture in the United States are currently not doing their job all that well. Restoring a measure of faith in those institutions is critical, but it requires engaging with and reviving them.

What I’m Reading, Watching, and Listening to

Rural Cemeteries Shift in Changing Times: On the social life of cemeteries in the Ozarks.

Trump Officials, Billionaires and the Quiet Reshaping of Rural America’s Public Lands: A private resort for the wealthy engineered a shady land deal, accumulating a large parcel of public land in one of the most beautiful regions of the country.

I go down to the shore: Revisiting a favorite Mary Oliver poem.

The Transit Abundance Playbook: The Institute for Progress released a collection of policy proposals designed to cut the costs of public transit projects. Love the stuff about bringing design capacity in-house.