Resistance is Not Futile

As I have argued in earlier chapters, the Slow Food, do-it-yourself ethos is incompatible with the drive for profits and efficiency and thus is relatively immune to corporate takeover. This ethos of artisanal production and aesthetic consumption occupies a different time and space from the concerns of the boardroom and stock market. The exceptions, of course, are operations such as Whole Foods and Eataly, businesses that capitalize on our craving for good taste. Whether these represent a model of the future of taste or an anomaly I’ll leave to the business professors to decide. The food revolution is not antibusiness if the businesses remain responsive to the aesthetic and ethical concerns of their customers.

On the production side, excellent food cannot be conceived in a corporate boardroom where shareholder profits must come first. When consumers demand fresh ingredients with a local connection and menu items that are responsive to changes in local tastes, they throw up barriers to corporate control because they resist the standardization that is necessary to maximize profits. Furthermore, great restaurant cooking is possible only when done on a small scale, because the chef or owner must be close enough to the final product to exert iron-handed control over the kitchen. There is a reason why great restaurants feature someone in authority watching every dish that goes into the dining room. This function cannot be shunted off to an employee with no vested interest in the fate of the business. Even the small chains run by celebrity chefs require him or her to exert direct control over the training and monitoring of satellite operations.

The food movement is about the way food gives pleasure, and it encourages community via a social space at some distance from the influence of big corporations. That distance is part of the point. What ties the movement together is a love of particularity. Michael Pollan reports that for Alice Waters, “it was not politics or ecology that brought her to organic agriculture, but rather the desire to recover a certain taste—one she had experienced as an exchange student in France.’’^ Particularity is not about merely having a unique experience. It is about the object of the experience itself, its irreplaceability, the personal connections it enables, and “aura” of place from which it emanates, to borrow a term from Walter Benjamin.

It is this love of particularity that fuels the food revolution and resists the homogenization and standardization that maximizes profit for the production paradigm. If consumers really want particularity and originality, they can find it in the preoccupations of the food revolution. However, it would be a mistake to be too sanguine about the prospects of social change given the resilience and ingenuity of global corporations, and the hard fact that feeding the world may need the economies of scale they enable. Global food and wine businesses have shown some ability to maintain their market share by adding originality and authenticity to their sales portfolio. Especially in the wine business, even large corporate producers strive to maintain their romantic image and advertise their products as more authentic and unique than their competitors. Appellation control and loving references to terroir, along with massive investments in tourist experiences that highlight local traditions and culture, keep them in the game, usually with the collaboration of all levels of government and civic associations interested in promoting local business. Every locale with any eye on the future is trying to brand their location with marks of distinction to ground their claims of particularity in the interests of greater profit, and these initiatives are often funded by the corporate sector.

But at least these initiatives can sometimes be influenced by the locals if the politics are right. Local communities engage in debates about too much commercialization, traffic, and how to go about preserving the local flavor. Which flavor to preserve is a highly contested issue, and in some cases this can result in preserving a way of life that resists commodification and the harms of excess development.

The ever-present danger for the corporate sector is that the more we come to value authenticity, originality, and particularity, the less patience we have with the homogenization required for commodity production. If communities start to throw out the fast-food chains in favor of local options, we might have a real revolution on our hands. With all their nostalgia-mongering, the faux-authentic marketing machine might be creating the conditions for its own demise. If global capital is to avoid destroying the particularity that supports their profits, then they must allow local developments that are less than profit maximizing in order to avoid alienating producers who don’t appreciate the exploitation of their creativity and customers looking for uniqueness and originality. There is potential for real change here. It is worth noting that despite the apocalyptic warnings of doomsayers there are spaces in capitalism for cultural initiatives to open up new possibilities. There is in fact more revolutionary potential in this search for particularity and authenticity than is generally acknowledged.