Maybe it’s time for our food systems to break up with fear and purity culture

Saving food can be an exercise in pleasure and creativity, not scarcity and fear 

My recent article on food waste sparked several on and offline conversations about our social relationship to waste. On Substack (where my newsletter no longer lives but where I cross-post links to it) The Curious Eater (Miranda Brown) responded: 

“We’ve spent a tremendous amount of time discussing indulgence and excess this term-and its flip, the valorization of thrift in Eating Right.”

And it got me thinking about my own relationship to “eating right.” And the ways rightness carries moral baggage. 

Hippie + evangelical morality and “eating right”

In my case, I was raised in the 80s and 90s in an… intensely religious evangelical church (I’m trying to be diplomatic here), where we went to some church service or meeting or something about 5x/week. 

It was also the time when everyone was obsessed with low fat food, including my mom (do you remember those terrible yellow bottles of spray margarine? I do). 

I also also was raised in Boulder which, while a beautiful place full of nice things to eat, also carried its own relationship to eating right that was separate and distinct from, say, what “eating right” meant when I moved to Iowa in the early 2000s. I will say though that my childhood diet, heavy in whole grains and vegetables and lean meats, probably did me many favors as an adult.

I was skinny and pretty, so was off the hook in some ways when it came to moral chastisement of my life and appearance, but also weird and not terribly popular, so I was not off the hook completely. I existed in a sort of liminal space, which became less liminal when I left that church (ran screaming in the other direction is more accurate) at 16, and suddenly had not only lots of free time, but the opportunity to craft my identity and listen to my desires with greater intention. 

While I maybe didn’t articulate it then, I was beginning to untangle my relationship to “rightness” as an absolute. I remember about a year later, my mom said something about my weight, and I told her she was projecting onto me and to stop telling me what to eat or how she felt about my body. It was an early sign that the threads that severed “rightness”, or food as a moral prop or moral failing, were beginning to unravel.

They unraveled further, of course, as I started to cook for myself and buy my own groceries and navigate the kitchens of a variety of tumbledown rentals. And continue to unravel, while simultaneously reweaving themselves into something new, to this day.

There were many ways in which I was spared from the more intense ways “right eating” is policed: My mom’s body comment was an aberration, not a habit, for example, and while the church had plenty to say about my shameful, shameful female form, they had less to say specifically about the food I put into it (though I imagine were I not skinny and pretty, they would have).

Replacing morality with the pleasure of good food

Miranda’s comment also got me thinking about how reconnecting to the pleasure of food, and to abundance and creativity with food, run a lot deeper than just “less waste” (that’s nice too). 

It’s an opportunity, potentially at least, to consider how we’ve been taught to look at food and waste, the narratives we’ve been given and those we’ve developed throughout our lives, and to intentionally consider which ones we want to continue using, and which ones we are ready to replace with something else. 

Our supply chains, our relationships to labor and land and the abuse of or care for both, and all other aspects of our food systems are rooted in varying extents to the larger cultural contexts in which they exist.

And in the US, there is a certain puritanical and evangelical way of viewing the world that pervades so much of the culture, and is evident in everything from our policies to our architecture to our relationships to food and our bodies and each other (this isn’t true elsewhere, at least not to the same degree: More on that below).

What if we peeled that back, separated it somehow, from our food systems? What would that look like? What do those connections even look like now?