It should come as no surprise that Eric Schlosser can weave a great narrative. Perhaps most famous for authoring “Fast Food Nation” and producing the movie “Food, Inc.,” Schlosser has had an illustrious career as an investigative journalist. He has delved into the seedy depths of the fast food industry to reveal truths as shocking as those described in Upton Sinclair’s muckraking work “The Jungle.” The Stanford community had the opportunity to witness Schlosser’s storytelling abilities and ponder the food movement’s tendency toward elitism at the annual Conradin Von Gugelberg Memorial Lecture.
Schlosser’s lecture began with a history of the modern environmental movement, including a critique of its later tendencies toward elitism. By focusing the wilderness-preservation effort on recreation or “improving land values around second homes,” Schlosser argued, the environmental movement became unwilling to compromise, and it lost touch with ordinary, working people. “Environmentalism, often with the best of intentions,” said Schlosser, “moved to a place where it ignored the fact that human beings are a part of these ecosystems.” Those working in agriculture tend to have a greater appreciation for just how fundamentally humans have altered and are a part of their ecosystems, but this trend toward elitism also affects the sustainable-foods movement.
Following his brief but powerful history of modern environmentalism, Schlosser moved onto his own forte: industrialized food. He began by stating that our food system has changed more in the past 40 years than in the previous 40,000, bringing attention to developments such as genetic modification, cloning and wide-scale centralization. After touching on pink slime and highlighting the fact that the typical fast-food hamburger may contain pieces of 1,063 different cattle coming from up to five countries, Schlosser characterized the movement that has arisen to address these ills. He praised colleges for the passion behind campus food activism, but he also cautioned against the danger of having a “very, very narrow base” of supporters.
Coming just a few days after a Cesar Chavez Day discussion of farmworkers’ rights at El Centro Chicano, Schlosser’s words about broadening the food movement fell on eager ears. As a young activist striving to understand my role within the food movement, it was encouraging to hear Schlosser emphasize the need for a broader social-justice emphasis.
Too often, “foodies” can focus so closely on the source and quality of their own food that they fail to recognize broader injustices within the system. As Schlosser said, we sometimes seem “to care more about endangered snails than about human beings” and “more about the taste of some Napa wine than about the migrant workers who harvest those grapes.” Though Schlosser brought up an important critique of the marginalized voices farmworkers and the urban poor have within the sustainable-food movement, these realities are changing and many food activists do care deeply about creating a system that is sustainable for every participant.
The best outcome of talks such as Schlosser’s is rarely new information but instead new inspiration. As a relatively well-informed student within the campus environmental and food movements, I did not garner a great deal of new knowledge from the lecture. This was well offset by my sense of newfound motivation at the end of the talk, but I was rather saddened that Schlosser did not provide any of his own visions for the future. He did a wonderful job characterizing the problems of industrial food systems and cautioning against the potential for activist elitism, but the talk lacked a concrete, actionable strategy for improving food systems or reducing fragmentation within the larger environmental and sustainable-food movements.
His narrative, though compelling, was also incapable of covering the nuances of these food movements in anything but broad brushstrokes. As one student pointed out during the question-and-answer section following the lecture, Schlosser’s very narrative marginalized the voices of farmworker activists and the urban poor, the individuals for which he encouraged greater inclusiveness.
Despite these shortcomings, which are often inevitable in short talks (and short opinion pieces), I walked away from Cemex Auditorium with a new sense of motivation and drive with which to pursue my activism. And I also walked out with my own vision. Though it may be trite and similarly criticized for its lack of concreteness, I hope to help create a food system that is sustainable for people and the planet at each stage in its production and processing. Stanford truly does exist in a bubble, and every activist should be wary of this bubble’s tendency to amplify existing trends toward elitism.
If you fear you’re overly concerned about the endangered snails, email Jenny at jrempel “at” stanford “dot” edu.