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Food, Culture & Society

An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research

ISSN: 1552-8014 (Print) 1751-7443 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rffc20

Let Them Eat Organic Cake

Meghan Lynch & Audrey Giles

To cite this article: Meghan Lynch & Audrey Giles (2013) Let Them Eat Organic Cake, Food,
Culture & Society, 16:3, 479-493

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/175174413X13673466711967

Published online: 29 Apr 2015.

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Food,
Culture
Society
&
volume 16 issue 3 september 2013
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Let Them Eat Organic Cake


DISCOURSES IN SUSTAINABLE FOOD INITIATIVES

Meghan Lynch
University of Toronto

Audrey Giles
University of Ottawa

Abstract
Sustainable food initiatives have increased over the past decade; however, they remain
a fringe lifestyle and have failed to become part of the dominant North American food
culture. In this article, through an examination of several popular texts that aim to
educate the public about sustainable eating, we argue that a main cause of this failure
is the lack of a critical examination of the underlying relations of power that inform
discourses about sustainable eating initiatives. We identify and discuss four dominant
discourses apparent in the texts: sustainable food initiatives are empowering for those
involved in them; people engage in unsustainable eating practices because they are
uneducated; recipients of sustainable food initiatives are passive; and sustainable eating
is affordable for all. We conclude by positing the need for texts that promote sustainable
food initiatives to go beyond the rhetoric of participation and empowerment, and to
address the complex issues that account for the lack of adoption of increasingly necessary
sustainable food initiatives.
Keywords: sustainable food, critical discourse analysis, popular texts

Introduction
The past decade has seen a rise in two, seemingly oppositional, food trends. Across
Canada, successful food sustainability initiatives such as community gardens, fruit
DOI: and vegetable school programs, and farmers markets have become increasingly
10.2752/175174413X13673466711967
Reprints available directly from the
popular (Canadian Co-Operative Association 2008; Elton 2010; McIntyre and
publishers. Photocopying permitted by Rondeau 2011). Yet, simultaneously, unhealthy dietary habits and associated
licence only Association for the
Study of Food and Society 2013 diseases, along with unsustainable ways of eatingi.e. the consumption of foods

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Meghan Lynch and Audrey Giles Let Them Eat Organic Cake

that are shipped long distances, produced with the use of pesticides and fertilizers,
pre-packaged, etc.continue to increase in prevalence, particularly among
societys most vulnerable: those below the poverty line (Canadian Co-Operative
Association 2008; Che and Chen 2001; Raine 2005; Williams et al. 2006; Taylor et
al. 2005). Consequently, to better understand why sustainable food initiatives been
met with limited success, researchers have called for more reflexive and critical
research into sustainable food systems (Dupuis 2009; Dupuis and Goodman 2005;
Hinrichs 2003; Winter 2003). Although many different factors account for the failure
of sustainable food initiatives to become part of dominant culture, we argue that a
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main cause is the limited critical examination of the underlying relations of power
that inform discourses about sustainable eating initiatives.
One of the most pervasive messages of sustainable eating initiatives involves
encouraging people to be aware of their foods origins (Guthman 2008). The
assumption underlying this advice is that once people have an awareness of where
their food comes from, they will be immediately impelled to make food decisions
that are more ethical and in line with sustainable eating initiatives (Guthman 2008).
Yet, when local food advocates offer suggestions that amount to little more than
snippets instructing people to know where your food comes from, buy local or
grow your own food, they delegitimize the constraints many individuals face in
attempting to follow these deceivingly simple instructions (McIntyre and Rondeau
2011). Instead of offering such ineffective statements, advocates of local food need
to develop suggestions that consider the broader context and barriers that exist in
peoples lives that inform their food choices (McIntyre and Rondeau 2011).
Reluctant to critique sustainable food programs, many sustainable food scholars
and advocates instead embrace these programs as solutions to the more
mainstream unsustainable, globalized food system (Guthman 2008; Hinrichs 2003).
However, voices of dissonance have been gaining strength, with local food systems,
in particular, being examined more critically.
Local food systems began in response to the globalized food system, which relies
upon the production of highly valued foods in developing countries being shipped
to developed countries. In this system, workers in developing countries are paid
low wages, a condition necessary for the food to be sold at cheap prices in affluent
developed countries, but results in a system that reinforces unjust working
conditions in developing countries (Barndt 2008). Many food activists claim the
solution to such an unjust system lies in local food systems, and describe localized
systems as pure, depoliticized and inherently caring (Dupuis and Goodman 2005).
For these reasons, many academics, activists and authors have embraced the local
food system approach (Dupuis and Goodman 2005). Other researchers, however,
have called for a closer examination of local food systems, as despite claims by
many activists and popular authors, local is not a virtuous setting that merits
immediate acceptance (Guthman 2008; Winter 2003). For example, just what can
be deemed local and who gets to make such a decision has resulted in some
viewing local food systems as elitist pursuits (Dupuis and Goodman 2005; Hinrichs
2003). In fact, the term defensive localization was created to describe how some
local food systems work to protect local members from outsiders (Hinrichs 2003).

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Thus, negative consequences can result when local food systems are uncritically
accepted and denied of possessing power struggles that can occur just as easily on
a smaller scale as they do on a larger scale (Dupuis and Goodman 2005).
Researchers should instead critically examine local food systems for power
relations and not simply accept the belief that if globalized food systems are the
problem, then localized systems represent the solution (Dupuis and Goodman 2005;
Hinrichs 2003).
The failure to acknowledge and engage with a critical examination of peoples
differing lifestyles, motivations and barriers is readily apparent in many popular
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books and articles that aim to educate the public about sustainable eating. These
books promote the discourse of the importance of a localized food system in food
and environmental sustainability, with the local being framed as the context needed
for ethical norms and values to thrive (Dupuis and Goodman 2005). With this strong
message on the importance of localized food systems in ensuring sustainable food
systems, people are urged to support local farmers, consume healthier diets, and
sustain the local food supply through purchase of local foods (Elton 2010; Pollan
2008). These texts focus on isolated stories of success and presumptuously criticize
or ignore the reasons why many people do not adopt the proposed approaches to
sustainable eating.
In this paper, we use critical discourse analysis to argue that sustainable food
initiatives need to be presented in such a way so as to recognize the struggles and
challenges faced by many who do not engage in sustainable eating initiatives. To
understand how the Canadian public is learning about sustainable food initiatives, we
focus on works by popular food sustainability authors. We posit that the burgeoning
field of food sustainability could be improved by the greater adoption of a critical
approacha recommendation echoed by many others working in sustainable food
research (Dupuis and Goodman 2005; Hinrichs 2003; Winter 2003). Specifically, we will
focus on dominant discourses that appear in popular texts, as to date this area has not
been examined by researchers. Although many excellent sustainable food research
initiatives exist, we argue that many texts, especially those that have become popular
with the general public, produce and rely on several dominant discourses: sustainable
food initiatives are empowering for those involved in them; people engage in
unsustainable eating practices because they are uneducated; recipients of sustainable
food initiatives are passive; and sustainable eating is affordable for all. These
discourses perpetuate uneven relations of powerthe very relations of power that
advocates suggest sustainable food initiatives can undermine.

Method
Van Dijk has aptly noted:
Food,
Culture
Society
& groups have (more or less) power if they are able to (more or less) control the
acts and minds of (members of) other groups. This ability presupposes a power
volume 16 base of privileged access to scarce social resources, such as force, money,
issue 3 status, fame, knowledge, information, culture, or indeed various forms of
september 2013 public discourse and communication. (Van Dijk 2003: 355)

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Interested in the ways in which power is employed within texts on sustainable food
initiatives produced for consumption by the Canadian public, we employed critical
discourse analysis to understand the power relations at work in various texts by
Michael Pollan, Sarah Elton, Wayne Roberts and Charles Levkoe.
We first selected texts by Michael Pollan (2001, 2003, 2006, 2006b, 2008) as he
arguably dominates the field of sustainable eating in North America. Pollan is a
professor at the University of California, Berkeley, a writer for the New York Times,
and has appeared in a range of media outlets, including television and radio shows.
His books have also made the top ten lists of the New York Times and Washington
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Post. We also selected the works of three Canadian authors. The first of these,
Locavore: From Farmers Fields to Rooftop GardensHow Canadians are Changing
the Way We Eat (Elton 2010), documents the range of local initiatives occurring
throughout Canada. Elton is a food columnist for the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation and has had work published in The Globe and Mail and Macleans
magazine. Locavore is a national bestseller, was named one of Amazon.cas top
fifty books of 2010, and was selected as a book for the David Suzuki Foundation
Book Club. We also selected the No-Nonsense Guide to World Food (Roberts 2008),
which presents a global perspective on sustainable eating initiatives. Roberts is a
Canadian food policy analyst who has worked on the Toronto Food Policy Council,
the City of Torontos Environmental Task Force, Community Food Security Coalition
and Food Secure Canada. The final selected text was a journal article by Charles
Levkoe (2006), which appeared in Agriculture and Human Values, and examines
the transformative power of community gardening in a Toronto-based community
organization. By using Levkoes article as an example, we hope to show, in the
words of Dupuis and Goodman, strong parallels between the academic literature
on alternative, localized food systems and the rhetoric of food activism (Dupuis and
Goodman 2005: 360). Analysis of these representative texts provides an important
perspective on how understandings of sustainable food initiatives are being
produced for Canadians. Because discourses produced by experts play a large role
in shaping apparently legitimate opinions among the general public, these texts are
a rich site of analysis for the purposes of the study at hand.
Critical discourse analysis is a method of analysis that can be used to analyze
all forms of talk and text (Gill 2000). Discourse can be understood as an
interrelated set of texts, and the practices of their production, dissemination, and
reception, that brings an object into being (Phillips and Hardy 2002: 3). Discourse
is thus language that reflects social order, but also language that shapes social
order (Jaworski and Coupland 2006). Discourses exist within a discursive field,
which is comprised of multiple, competing discourses. Not all discourses carry the
same amount of weight; indeed, some, known as dominant discourses, are
privileged over others due to social relations of power and are thus viewed as true
or right.
Critical discourse analysts are interested in understanding the ways in which
social realities, especially unequal power relations, are constructed and maintained
through discourse (Phillips and Hardy 2002)that is, how discourses privilege and
advantage some people and not others. Jaworski and Coupland have noted the

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motivation for doing discourse analysis is very often a concern about social
inequality and the perpetuation of power relations (Jaworski and Coupland 2006:
5); indeed, critical discourse analysts work to expose and resist social inequalities
(Van Dijk 2003).
We read the aforementioned texts and examined them for the ways in which
they portray sustainable food initiatives and the ways in which these portrayals are
constructed through and rely on apparently commonsense understandings of our
social world. Four main discourses emerged: (1) sustainable food initiatives are
empowering; (2) people engage in unsustainable eating practices because they are
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uneducated; (3) participants in sustainable food initiatives are passive recipients;


and (4) sustainable eating is affordable for all. Our goal in identifying these
discourses is not to suggest that all consumers must become intimately familiar
with social theory in order to enact change; rather, we argue that it is important to
make visible the discourses within sustainable food initiatives that, though
seemingly positive and benign, can serve to reaffirm unequal relations of power.

Discussion

Sustainable Food Initiatives Are Empowering


A dominant discourse within the texts under study is that sustainable eating
initiatives can address inequalities through including marginalized peoples involved
in food production, and lead to their empowerment. This is readily apparent in
descriptions of vegetable gardens, which are produced as offering spaces that can
galvanize people from diverse backgrounds (Levkoe 2006: 90), or messages that
relearning simple skills such as planting can be an empowering act (Levkoe
2006: 94). Indeed, urban agriculture, community gardens and organic farmers are
frequently described as cultural cure-alls in texts that lack any discussion of the
complexities in failed programs that have been well documented in research (e.g.
Elton 2010; Levkoe 2006; Roberts 2008). Instead, rhetoric of empowerment
through increasing confidence, encouraging citizenship, and community
development is ambitiously claimed by many authors (Guest 2005; Guthman
2008).
One of the most commonly employed, vaguely-defined terms in sustainable food
initiatives is empowerment. Despite this, the ways in which empowerment has
been measured and contextualized in local understandings of the term have been
vague (Rowlands 1995). This lack of clarity begins with the power portion of the
fashionable term. Power can assume a variety of meanings depending on the type
of power, the definition drawn upon, and its effects on society (Rowlands 1995).
Accordingly, the meaning of empowerment is intrinsically involved with
Food, interpretations of the term power (Rowlands 1995), so it needs to be understood
Culture
Society
& as a term that is historically and culturally-bound. Because the abilities of a
particular group of people can be viewed as socially constructed, programs that
volume 16 emphasize empowerment have been advised to do more than focus on beneficiaries
issue 3 participating in decision-making processes, and instead to examine issues of power
september 2013 relations inherent to social construction (Rowlands 1995). To strengthen assertions

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Meghan Lynch and Audrey Giles Let Them Eat Organic Cake

of sustainable food initiatives for empowering people, further clarity is needed in


descriptions of the mechanisms of this empowerment.
Community gardening, in particular, is often presented as a panacea, with
gardens described as having something intrinsically good in them. Levkoe (2006)
frequently describes how working in a garden breaks down stereotypes of race,
class and gender, and claims that gardening brings about a heightened sense of
self-esteem (Levkoe 2006: 96) and that food justice activism has the ability to
increase the confidence of those involved (Levkoe 2006: 90). He also claims
that many who have felt powerless (Levkoe 2006: 95) have been transformed by
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the capacity of the garden to break down traditional, hierarchical power dynamics
(Levkoe 2006: 95). Descriptions for the mechanisms through which this apparently
empowering transformation takes place are, however, missing from his text, though
it is known that issues of intolerance and unequal power relations are not absent
in such local social interactions (Guthman 2008; Hinrichs 2003). Furthermore, even
the assertion that community food gardens can ensure locals with access to local
foods and improve food security has not yet been supported by research
(Kirkpatrick and Tarasuk 2009).
This highlights a need for more resistance to discourses on sustainable food
initiatives that rely on grand claims that fail to critique the programs (Guest 2005)
or provide evidence to support their claims. Fortunately, there are examples of this
critical approach in the academic literature on community gardens, such as
Weeding out failed practices: A case study of community gardens in rural Mali
(Ward et al. 2004), where the authors describe the challenges faced by communities
dealing with such issues as land availability for gardens. They also suggest ways in
which other sustainable food programs could be improved; for example, by critically
examining the self-perceived honesty of participants in response to questions about
the gardens, as well looking at the ages of volunteers to determine who is included
and who excluded from participation (Ward et al. 2004). Perhaps one of their most
interesting suggestions for researchers to improve community gardens involves
looking at whether participants participation in the programs prevents them from
engaging in other developmental acts (Ward et al. 2004). For instance, by taking a
critical approach, Wakefield et al. (2007) found that participants in a community
garden program in Toronto felt increased stress in their lives due to fears over
vandalism, litter and lack of appreciation. They also found there were concerns
over the safety of participantsespecially as the majority were women. As such,
an approach that engages with the challenges involved in sustainable food initiatives
should be used to temper overly positive discourses of sustainable food initiatives
as inherently leading to participants empowermentdiscourses that could actually
be counterproductive by creating unrealistic expectations and blinding people to
the intense challenges involved (Guest 2005).

People Engage in Unsustainable Eating Practices Because


they Are Uneducated
A discourse prevalent throughout the texts involved presenting sustainable eating
practices as a simple solution to a simple problem: people are merely unaware of

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the destructiveness of their current unsustainable eating practices. Such a


discourse relies on labeling people as uneducated and assumes they all possess
the means necessary to successfully adopt sustainable ways of eating, rather than
acknowledging that they are complex individuals who live in an equally complex
world, rife with unequal relations of power. This argument has been already
identified by some working in sustainable food research who have argued that texts
presented to the public reduce complex social problems to individual behaviors
and ignore research that disconfirms the simple solutions they present (Dupuis and
Goodman 2005; Guthman 2007). Popular authors, such as the ones critiqued in this
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article, describe issues in well-established neoliberal language of individual


behavior and personal responsibility. Neoliberalism involves the privatization of
public resources and spaces, minimization of labor costs, reductions of public
expenditures, elimination of regulations seen as unfriendly to business, and the
displacement of governance responsibilities away from state (Guthman 2008). Once
individuals are given better information, they are all apparently capable of choosing
to act more responsibly, as behavior change is believed to depend upon an
individuals values and attitudes (Shove 2010). With this neoliberal framing, it
should come as no surprise that popular discourses promoting local food
movements devote little time to issues related to the time and extra work involved
in being able to eat locally or the gendered nature of food provisioning (McIntyre and
Rondeau 2011).
Pollans (2008) solutions for increasing the publics acceptance of sustainable
food initiatives preponderantly involve individual education and choices and show
little acknowledgement of the actual complexity of peoples daily lives. For example,
while research has shown that the lack of family mealtimes results from complex
interconnected reasons, Pollan (2001, 2008) presents this practice as a simple
choice, and provides little advice on how families can cope and adjust to the
additional work involved in eating locally. Instead, he states how, if people consider
their familys health to be important, they will find the time (McIntyre and Rondeau
2011). Unsurprisingly, texts that draw upon his work have presented similar
viewpoints. Roberts (2008) argues that how people typically eat foodin the car,
in front of the television, and suchis a choice. Such an argument fails to recognize
that eating is connected to larger life issues such as overworking or the need for
employment, stress, instability, etc.
Elton (2010), too, ignores issues that do not confirm her simplified presentation
of sustainable eating initiatives in Canada. For example, she states that in certain
provinces it is illegal for most city-dwellers to keep chickens or produce raw milk
cheese, but she neglects to discuss just why this is sothat is, the issues and
challenges that would emerge if she were to describe the conflicting views of those
Food, actually involved in such practices. She also describes land as protected and
Culture
Society
& unavailable for urban agriculture, but fails to give serious consideration to
differences in values, and simply dismisses such issues rather than providing
volume 16 examples and strategies for overcoming resistance. More surprisingly, even in
issue 3 academic writing on community gardening, researchers such as Levkoe (2006) have
september 2013 claimed that there are straightforward explanations for the rise in unhealthy eating

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Meghan Lynch and Audrey Giles Let Them Eat Organic Cake

in Canada, and have asserted that many adults simply prefer the ease and
convenience of a drive-through to taking the time to prepare and enjoy a healthy
meal with family or friends. Yet, families who attempt a local food diet have revealed
its practical difficulties, including reservations about messages from local food
campaigns that fail to encompass the broader factors that influence how foods are
acquired (McIntyre and Rondeau 2011). For instance, in a study that examined a
group of farmwomens opinions on acquiring locally-produced foods, these women
described a number of stressors and competing demands that constrained even
their ability to participate in a local food system (McIntyre and Rondeau 2011).
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Our findings corroborate assertions made by Guthman (2008), who describes


consumer choice as the most central organizing theme in contemporary food
politics. It follows, then, that the objective of most sustainable food advocates is to
provide people with better information so they can make the right choices.
Contrary to what these texts induce the public to believe, a wealth of research has
found that peoples food choices are influenced by numerous complex factors and
that behaviors will not change simply because people have been educated about the
right choices. Public health educators and researchers have elaborated the
complex factors that are integral to any consideration of changing peoples
behaviorand simply educating people is not enough to effect lasting change (Lytle
2005). For example, common barriers with regard to fruit and vegetable
consumption involve access to affordable healthy foods and transportation, along
with too-ready access to fast food restaurants, in addition to time and price
(Mikkelsen and Chemini 2007; Omar et al. 2001). Research that has examined why
parents make certain food choices for their children has found that parents feel
they have little control over what their children will eat and are focused more on
providing food that is enjoyable rather than making decisions based on their
knowledge of health and nutrition (Bolling et al. 2009; Stratton and Bromley 1999).
As can be seen, between the authors and those whom they wish to adopt their
initiatives, there would seem to be a gulf of misunderstanding regarding the
contexts of peoples eating practices. That gulf signifies a myriad of factors,
including attitudes, beliefs, education levels and economic status. Recipients of
sustainable food efforts are intelligent, capable people who often live in cultural
and social contexts that are very different from those of the individuals who create
or promote the programs. Yet, as can be seen in these texts, recipients who would
present challenges to the presumption of merely educating them as a viable solution
are marginalized in favor of people who readily adopt the programs, a practice that
encourages the authors to deem themselves best situated to identify and ameliorate
apparent deficits in recipients lives. Absent in the texts are presentations of views
of those who do not support sustainable eating initiatives, which further drives the
assumption that participants always welcome external expert help. For example,
although Elton (2010) claims that neighbors, in a suburb where some have small
farms and others, dont mind the smell of manure (Elton 2010: 118), she
canvassed only those who farm. She similarly describes interviewing people who
moved from the city to become farmers, yet there is no mention of speaking to
anyone who chose not to make such a move or who made a move in the opposite

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direction. It is also interesting that Elton often describes how she traveled far and
wide for interviews for her book, yet when the subject is a non-organic company,
she settles for reading promotional material on their website (Elton 2010: 198).
Consequently, to affect the behaviors of a community, educators need to
understand that peoples behaviors are influenced by the fluid interactions among
their social and physical environments, their own perceptions and beliefs, and the
responses that are generated by their behaviors. Thus, authors, researchers and
educators need to de-emphasize reliance on neoliberal discourses of individuality
and instead take greater account of family, peer, school, community, environmental
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and societal factors (Lytle 2005), an accounting that is absent in the texts used for
analysis in the present article. The foregoing complicating factors should serve to
render puzzling Roberts claim (referring to a speech by Pollan) that doing the right
thing is easy (Roberts 2008: 23).

Participants in Sustainable Food Initiatives Are Passive


Recipients
Another discourse we identified in the texts involved the participants in sustainable
food initiatives being passive recipients rather than active in identifying their own
needs and shaping interventions. Because community members are often not
involved in the planning, some programs end up making more sense to program
creators than recipients. For example, although Roberts (2008) perceives the
current food system as an alien form of field-based food production (Roberts
2008: 67), he fails to consider how community gardens and vegetable markets may
be perceived in a similar manner by urbanites who have never experienced such
enterprises. To this point, Guest (2005), in her research into community garden
programs, found that understandings of gardening by participants were very
different from those of the persons administering the program.
Further, the programs make assumptions about the psychosocial
characteristics of participants, such as their low self-esteem and dependence on
external assistance. Such assumptions reinforce stereotypes of people living in
marginalized communities, such as that they are dangerous and that structural
poverty automatically equates to psychosocial dysfunction. Levkoe (2006) uses
many phrases that indicate such presumption, such as when he assumes that the
transition to a food democracy requires that people develop the knowledge and
skills necessary to actively participate in society (Levkoe 2006: 92). Similarly
begging the question, he argues that many of the programs relating to the
greenhouse have worked with participants to develop skills that have been lost in
modern era (Levkoe 2006: 94); and that community gardening provides them
[participants] with the rare chance to give something back to the community
Food, (Levkoe 2006: 96). There is a need to move beyond the empty rhetoric of
Culture
Society
& participation and inclusion as such fashionable phrases can often lead to
programs failing to live up to the expectations the words evoke (Pisani 2009). Such
volume 16 prejudicial rhetoric was apparent in the texts under discussion. To give one final
issue 3 example: Levkoe argues that food democracy involves people actively
september 2013 participating in shaping the food system rather than [remaining] passive

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Meghan Lynch and Audrey Giles Let Them Eat Organic Cake

spectators, (Levkoe 2006: 92), yet he fails to explain how such a lofty goal could
be reached.
One conclusion can be drawn from the foregoing critiques: if programs are to be
successful, the people whose lives are the focus of intervention and supposed
improvement must be involved in all stages of program development (Young 2001).

Sustainable Eating Is Affordable for All


One of the most important considerations involved in food choice is cost. And for
this reason, how the chosen texts constructed the cost of eating in a sustainable
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manner was particularly insightful. Despite the importance of cost, material


expense is rarely addressed in the texts; instead, access to expensive land and the
costs of building and operating a greenhouse are minimized, or the claim is made
that while organic food may cost more, the quality is better (Elton 2010: 109).
In fact, Elton is especially guilty of ignoring the issue of cost. She writes, apparently
without compunction, that the art of cheese making involves throwing out batches
of cheese (Elton 2010: 178) and that eating healthily is not about money (Elton
2010: 181). At the same time, she unwarily observes the number of SUVs parked
in front of restaurants, and remarks unselfconsciously on such expensive dishes
as beluga lentils (Elton 2010: 184). In fact, elaborate descriptions of restaurant
dishes are a prominent feature of Eltons work, such as rabbit marinated in juniper
and red wine, a meal that easily costs under $100/person (Elton 2010: 193).
Pollan (2008), too, rarely mentions the cost of healthy eating, perhaps because he
is surrounded by a population preoccupied with nutrition and diet and the idea of
eating healthily, a population that, once educated, will begin to make different
kinds of buying decisions, motivated by criteria other than price (Pollan 2006:
244).
Given that sustainable food can viewed as an elitist movementwhere food is
seen as an expression of power, where some have control over access to food while
others do notignoring the issue of cost is an especially interesting oversight.
Some classes of people use their socio-economic privilege to be selective regarding
food choice and then employ their apparently superior diet to display their power
and to define themselves as morally superior, which results in the privileged
believing they are the rightful arbiters of creating reforms to decide what others
should eat (Counihan 1992; Dupuis and Goodman 2005). For instance, Elton (2010)
notes (somewhat Antoinettishly) that people should prefer her manner of eating,
and criticizes cheap supermarket food that is packed in plastic clamshells (Elton
2010: 95). Such examples demonstrate prime examples of how unreflexive
politics operate: a small, unrepresentative group of people decide what is best for
everyone and then attempt to convert all to their view of a utopian world. In
contrast, reflexive politics involves bringing together a broad range of people to
explore changing society (Dupuis and Goodman 2005).
The authors descriptions of themselves and others involved in sustainable food
initiatives provide further evidence of insensitivity to socio-economic issues and
associated relations of power. For example, Roberts (2008) shares stories of his
life, such as how every summer his family members work as unpaid volunteers on

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a farm. Likewise, Elton (2010) describes how she grew up on a farm and travelled
all over world, thus distinguishing herself from the average person (Elton 2010:
119). Her descriptions of those involved in the sustainable food initiatives work
similarly, as when she writes about a stay-at-home mother who became a gardener
or of a man who has gone to agricultural college and then to France to learn about
cheese (Elton 2010). Even the cover photograph of Locavore deserves attention for
the way in which it illustrates the problematic contradictions being discussed here.
The cover image places on view a slim woman dressed in a trendy top, skinny jeans
and expensive designer rain bootsa model who is undoubtedly pretending to be
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a gardener, and a most careful gardener at that: there is not a speck of dirt on the
sanitized image, and likewise no sweaty evidence of any real work having been
done. Throughout the text, those involved in preferred initiatives are described in
keeping with this image, such as the tall woman with blond highlights (Elton 2010:
153), the very slim man (Elton 2010: 57), or the man who wears Versace glasses
and looks like a fashion designer (Elton 2010: 187). In recounting her experience
in one vegetable market, Elton (2010) describes her shock in seeing a man there
who did not fit her image of the kind of people involved in sustainable food
initiatives, as this man looked as if he should be making a drug deal rather than
buying fresh vegetables (Elton 2010: 140). Pollan (2006) quotes customers of one
organic farm as saying, I drive 150 miles one way to get clean meat for my family,
and he further describes the satisfaction they derive in spending a little time
taking a beautiful drive (Pollan 2006: 242). One organic farmer interviewed by
Pollan claimed his farm not to be elitist because he sold to all kinds of people
(Pollan 2006: 243); nonetheless, he made sure to signal that his food is special
(Pollan 2006: 244). According to Joel Salatin, the farmer featured in Pollan (2006),
the reformation of the worlds food economy should begin with people going to the
trouble and expense of buying directly from farmers they know, something few of
us ever take the trouble to do (Pollan 2006: 240). While Pollan describes Salatins
customers as a remarkably diverse group of people (Pollan 2006: 241), it would
be credulous to believe such a description, given that all of them are able to pay a
premium over supermarket prices for Polyface food, and in many cases, driving
more than an hour to get it (Pollan 2006: 241). As these texts consistently show,
food is not simply about fuelling the body; it is often presented as providing
opportunity for moral action by means of which people construct themselves and
others as good or bad human beings, or as the right and wrong sorts of people.
In contrast to the ingenuous claims that everyone has the capacity to spend
time and money on sustainable food, research tells a different story: in 1998/1999,
3 million Canadians were living in the kinds of food-insecure households that are
associated with poor health, multiple chronic conditions, obesity, distress and
Food, depression (Che and Chen 2001). Williams et al. (2006) examined whether single
Culture
Society
& and two-parent Nova Scotian families with two children and living on minimum
wage could afford nutritious diets (which they defined as consisting of minimally
volume 16 processed, nutrient rich foods). After surveying a random sample of forty-eight
issue 3 grocery stores and estimating household income based on current minimum wage,
september 2013 the researchers concluded that some households would be unable to afford healthy,

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Meghan Lynch and Audrey Giles Let Them Eat Organic Cake

nutritious foods for their children. Considering such statistics and knowing that
food price becomes the most important consideration in food choice when income
is restricted (Taylor et al. 2005), it is imperative that cost be addressed by those
writing about and working in sustainable food initiatives, instead of focusing only
on those who have the luxury of buying food that costs a premium over
supermarket prices (Pollan 2008). If sustainable food is ever to be made accessible
to all, these writers in particular must address critically the emplaced structures
of socio-economic inequality (Guthman 2007).

Conclusions
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Although the past decade has seen much growth, far more change is needed in the
field of sustainable food if it is to play a part in creating a sustainable food system
in Canada and elsewhere. Currently, sustainable methods of eating remain a fringe
lifestyle in opposition to the standard Western practice, as has been observed in
Canada, the United States and Wales (Dupuis and Goodman 2005; Winter 2003). Yet,
while food sustainability authors argue that the food system is failing, they
themselves fail to demonstrate the wherewithal to address relations of power and
structural issues that result in some people being more able to participate in
sustainable food initiatives than others, and instead focus on neoliberal individual-
based solutions. The many factors involved in peoples food choices, which
undoubtedly complicate the achievement of any broad behavioral change, must be
considered if food sustainability initiatives are to succeed.
The texts critiqued in the present article advocate food sustainability on the
assumption that information and knowledge lead inevitably to change. We do not
suggest that these authors are ill-intentioned. Rather, we argue that with respect to
improving sustainable food initiatives and educating the Canadian public, many
such texts could be strengthened by engaging with critiques, especially of the ways
in which discourses produced by those involved in sustainable food initiatives rely
on and reaffirm unequal societal relations of power. We hope to have shown that
these texts simplify complex issues, and thereby produce exclusivist solutions
based on individual choices. The individual approach presented in the texts is
detrimental to sustainable food initiatives because it perpetuates socio-economic
privilege and encourages feelings of moral superiority in those who are able to
participate in such movements, yet marginalizes those who do not have the
resources to do so. Such an approach fits within the Euro-North American belief in
individual responsibility for ones life (Sumner and Mair 2008), where responsibility
for change is an individually-focused endeavor (Shove 2010). Such a fundamental
belief that success comes of individual effort can be seen in the texts in this way:
certain individuals determine that other adults should be educated on sustainable
food initiatives; the knowledgeable individuals identify the problems that they
believe to be in need of fixing; they develop or support a program that should fix
that problem. When recipients of sustainable food initiatives are unable to
participate in the initiatives designed for them, they are often blamed instead of
attempts being made to determine why the program failed the recipients. As a
result, dominant discourses and the relations of power that are used to produce

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them go unquestioned and unchallenged. This emphasis on individual choice has


significant advantages: blaming individuals deflects attention away from and
obscures the many institutions involved in structuring courses of action (Shove
2010).
As we hope to have shown, for sustainable food initiatives to grow and play a
role in the search for a more sustainable food system, it is crucial that those
promoting the initiatives learn from the research outside of the sustainable food
setting in order to strengthen sustainable eating initiatives. There is a need to
develop more effective ways of looking at the issue of unsustainable eating
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approaches that do not center on individual solutions. Of course, as some have


already argued, presenting solutions in the form of one-line slogans (i.e. eat locally
and vote with your dollars) makes for a more popular book (Dupuis 2009; Shove
2010). Framing issues in terms of human behavior marginalizes and excludes
serious engagement with other possible analyses (Shove 2010). From a research
perspective, drawing upon a range of different approaches to determine how to
best develop sustainable food systems has begun, with researchers utilizing
systems-based and actor-network approaches, but much more is needed (Hinrichs
2003). Practically, those who have been marginalized need to be involved as
equitable partners in all stages of developing sustainable food initiatives. Further,
to be successful, sustainable food initiatives need to fit within a variety of lifestyles
and to meet diverse needs. Such changes in approach need to go beyond the
rhetoric of participation, partnerships and empowerment, and must address the
complex issues that account for the lack of adoption of meritorious, and increasingly
necessary, sustainable food initiatives.

Meghan Lynch is a PhD student in Health Behavior Sciences in the Dalla Lana School
of Public Health. University of Toronto, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, 155 College
Street,Toronto, ON, M5T 3M7, Canada (meghan.lynch@utoronto.ca).

Audrey Giles is an associate professor in the School of Human Kinetics at the University
of Ottawa. University of Ottawa, School of Human Kinetics, 334 Montpetit Hall, 125
University Avenue, Ottawa, ON, K1N 6N5, Canada (agiles@uottawa.ca).

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