Jack Goody traced early literacy practices to the list. The list organizes experiences in writing. The menu, a type of list, extends what we might call our food or menu literacy. The menu extends various experiences, from the sensory to the salivary, and we, in turn, work to make sense of the meaning of such experiences. ‘The menu,’ Goody writes, ‘enables the individuals concerned to deal with variables’ (133). (119)

Then he turns to Barths, writing,

Roland Barthes writes that ‘food is never anything but a collection of fragments, none of which appears privileged by an order of ingestion; to eat is not to respect a menu (an itinerary of dishes), but to select’ (Empire of Signs 22). Senses are one such fragment or variable. This fragment contributes to an overall literacy of the menu. To have a menu literacy is to have the ability to navigate and make sense of such fragments. Menu literacy is a specific type of ordering.

And for good measure, he adds a bit of Calvin Trillin, writing,

We may live in a culture of new media, but we also live in a culture whose critics ask that everything be slowed down. When the writing of a menu is slowed down, we might believe, meaning can be better and more critically ordered. Such is Calvin Trillin’s dilemma when ordering Chinese food; he fears that the quickly written Chinese characters on the wall hide a gastronomical secret. (123)

He then quotes Trillin, who writes,

The walls were covered with signs in Chinese writing—signs whose Chinatown equivalents drive me mad, since they feed my suspicion that Chinese customers are getting succulent dishes I don’t even know about (111-112).

Of Trillin, Rice writes, “Trillin fears that calligraphy hides from him a sense of literacy” (123). There is a sense in which menus are a collection of signs to be decoded.

Supposedly, these signs have a connection to real life. Understanding that connection is part of the interpretive act. But after Derrida, we must recognize that any connection between a menu item and real life is probably more tenuous than we normally think when ordering. Think about chicken as a menu item. It is not the same thing as a real, live chicken. It may be roasted or fried. It may be seasoned 100 different ways and prepared by 100 different traditions. It may be pumped full of hormones and antibiotics or it might be free-range and fed a diet of sheep’s milk, soy and hazelnuts. The menu may say one thing, and you may be served another. In Mastering the Art of French Cooking, (Volume 2) Julia Child wrote, “You can always judge the quality of a cook or a restaurant by roast chicken” (Kindle Locations 5510-5511). She did not say that you can judge the quality of a cook or restaurant by the chicken dishes they have on their menu, but you can tell something about a cook or restaurant by the relationship between the rhetorical artifact of the menu and what you are served. How is the chicken listed and described on the menu and how is that rhetorically significant? Is the chef playing with your expectations by using elliptic language and combining flavors in unexpected ways? What does this say about the chef’s influences and training and the structure of support that brought the food before you? Is the chicken listed as free-range chicken? Is it branded by, say, Niman Ranch? What does a brand say about a chicken? What does the omission of brand suggest?

(Forgive me as I get a little inside baseball on how this applies to writing instructors.) As Rice suggests, we can read into menus. And, it might serve those of us in education well to do so. First of all, in a media landscape of microformats, it makes sense to assign short rhetorical artifacts. But more importantly, menus are great artifacts for teaching students the art of reading and writing with the database. Elsewhere (for those with access to JSTOR, here and here; these links, too, are comments on database literacy and access.), Rice writes about database logic. Jody Nicotra also writes about database logic and food in this volume. While food and databases may not seem be connected, menus are where they come together. Rice writes, “Menus are collections, fragmented selections of experiences we arrange as a composition (a meal)” (123). The same could be said of databases. And, as with anything modular, like a menu or a database, there can be modules within modules, like Russian matryoshka dolls. Thus, we are given the all-you-can-eat buffet and, more importantly, this.

References

• Barthes, Roland. Empire of Signs.
• Child, Julia; Bertholle, Louisette; Beck, Simone. Mastering the Art of French Cooking, 50th Anniversary Edition.
• Goody, Jack. The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Themes in the Social Sciences).
• Nicotra, Jody. The Urban Food Database and the Pedagogy of Attunement
• Trillin, Calvin. Feeding a Yen: Savoring Local Specialties, from Kansas City to Cuzco.

The minute details involved in both eating and having sex for pleasure are closely related, not only on a physical and chemical level, but also on an emotional and psychological one. The same dopamine-laden neurotransmitters in the brain are activated when risk and thrill-searching for newfound foreign experiences of food and sex are sought. For the process of pleasure seeking, ‘…sex…food…anything the brain perceives as enjoyable will cause dopamine to lock into our brain cells and build a permanent memory trace of where pleasure comes from’ (Freedman 184). It is this personalized pursuit for excitement, via culinary and/or carnal satisfaction and experimentation, which allows humans to stimulate ourselves similarly in the kitchen and the bedroom.

…food and sex are generally closely linked. They are physically linked in the limbic system of the brain, which controls emotional activity. It is not surprising that we not only link them but do so emotionally. Good food = good sex. It is this sensuality of eating that spurs the puritan and ascetic rejection of food pleasures. But the link makes sense. (Fox)

Some social theorists—Foucault, namely—argue that this tantalizing, ongoing search for culinary and carnal pleasure has much more in common than most pleasure-seeking eaters and sexual practitioners are even aware of themselves. These prime reasons consist of: purely pleasurable greed and bliss; masochistic endeavors; psychological confusion and /or substitution of the oral and phallic stages; desire for or purposeful loss of self-control; social status motives such as succumbing to trends or obtaining bragging rights; transcendence of gender and oft-established power roles with ‘foodie’ or sexual experimentation; among other reasons…(136).

As is evidenced by the quotes within quotes, the notion that sex and food are linked is common, from the realm of pop cultural diet trends to the realm of high theory. But as the last line suggests, it’s not just sex-as-in-intercourse or sex-as-pleasure but also sex-as-in-identity that is at stake. I’m going to use this as a jumping off point to talk not about sex, but about expectations. “Foodie experimentation” is one way in which we can subvert traditional constructions of gender roles. You all know I hate the word “foodie,” but Snider gets a pass; at least he uses square quotes. The “foodie” part is not the important part, anyway. (That said, I should probably examine why a diminutive term for food lover is so threatening to me.) Anyway, it is the experimentation part that allows for transcendence of gender and power roles.

Leaving sex in the bedroom for the moment, I want to focus on culinary experimentation, and not just trying new dishes at a restaurant. As any home cook knows, experimentation is vital to keeping a kitchen running. Of course we need to try new dishes, recipes, techniques, and preparations. But we also need to try on new roles. When we play with our food preparation routines, we begin to understand how malleable these rituals are. In my house, I’ve always been the one to cook. When my wife started showing an interest in the kitchen, we had to adopt new roles to allow one another the space (literally— we have a galley kitchen; we can’t both cook at the same time) to experiment. We had to negotiate who does what. We had to negotiate who gets to be the sous and who gets to be the head chef. This experimentation led to some important realizations. I realized that—even as I thought I was so enlightened for being a man who does the cooking, grocery shopping, dish washing—I was also robbing my wife of the opportunity to choose to do the kind of home-making work that can be creative and fulfilling. I was bossy in the kitchen, effectively pushing her out. In a strange twist, I was threatened when she encroached on what I had come to see, as part of my cosmopolitan identity, as the domain in which I relieved her of the oppression of housework. But I also had to recognize that this was a space where I had developed some confidence and power. I had to square my “evolved man” rhetoric with the fact that I never told her to get out of my way so I could do the laundry. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler shows us how sex and gender are socially constructed through repetitive behavior. The good thing about recognizing that is we can change the behavior. We can experiment with new roles. Experimentation allows us to break out of repetitive cycles that no longer work and to find the ones that do.

Citation

Snider, Zachary. “The Erotic Pleasures of Danger Foods.” PRE/TEXT 21.1-4 (2013): 133-65. Print.

References

• Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge Classics).
• Fox, Robin. “Food as Seduction.”
• Freedman, Rory. Skinny Bastard: A Kick-in-the-Ass for Real Men Who Want to Stop Being Fat and Start Getting Buff.
• Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction and The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self.

Only quite recently has the system by which food is produced, distributed, and consumed come under intensive scrutiny by mainstream critics, following the World Health Organization’s 1997 declaration of an ‘obesity epidemic,’ the identification of a steep increase in so-called ‘diseases of overconsumption’ like diabetes and heart disease, and a series of much-publicized outbreaks of food-borne illness: ‘mad cow’ disease, E. coli and salmonella poisoning, melanine in pet food, and others. (Of course, organizations like PETA and Greenpeace have long critiqued the industrial food system but were until recently discounted as a radical fringe.) Titles like Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (2001), Marion Nestle’s Food Politics (2002), Tim Lang and Michael Heasman’s Food Wars (2004), Marianne Elizabeth Lien and Brigitte Nerlich’s edited volume The Politics of Food (2004), and more recently Michael Pollan’s bestsellers The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2007), In Defense of Food (2009), and Food Rules (2009) suggest food’s arrival as an object of political attention. The books have in turn inspired a welter of documentaries (Supersize Me, Food, Inc., Dirt), novels, essays, and op-ed pieces, along with reactionary responses by the food industry, defending demonized products like grain-fed beef, sugar, corn syrup, and GMFs. (98)

With few exceptions, these sources avow the need for changes in policy and industrial practice. In Food Wars, for instance, the authors aim to change ‘the policy choices that shape how humanity orders its food economy and on urging public policy to play a positive role in promoting the public good’ (2). Likewise Marion Nestle’s Food Politics ‘exposes the ways in which food companies use political processes—entirely conventional and nearly always legal—to obtain government and professional support for the sale of their products’ (1) (98-9)

But it is not just macropolitics where food matters. Our everyday decisions are also political. She writes,

While few would dispute the importance of interventions at the level of commercial regulations and state policy, these are not the only—or even the best—way that political change can be enacted. In fact, Gay Hawkins in The Ethics of Waste (2006) has argued that interventions like the ones described above run the risk of ‘creating moralistic blueprints for changes in consciousness’ (7). As Deleuze and Guattari have argued, politics also gets powerfully enacted at a smaller scale, through individual bodies and everyday practices—what they first called ‘micropolitics’ (229). (99)

Nicotra further explains,

Micropolitcs tends to occur in a more dispersed fashion via a variety of informal but active experiments with bodily habits and consuming practices which, as Hawkins (channeling political philosopher Paul Patton suggests, ‘are played out in between large-scale political and economic institutions and the subinstitutional movements of affect, desire, and minor practices’ (7). (99)

Nicotra uses Lev Manovich’s notion of “the ‘database logic’ that characterizes the computer age.” She looks at “a small but dynamic cluster of websites and narratives that promote an array of activities that I’ll refer to collectively as ‘urban foraging.’ (99) Her definition of urban foraging “includes fruit foraging of the type advocated by Backyard Harvest (along with Village Harvest, Fallen Fruit, Food Not Bombs, Neighborhood Fruit, City Fruit, and Veggie Trader), as well as the venerable gutter punk (and, more lately, suburban youth) practice of what is variously known as ‘dumpster diving,’ ‘freecycling,’ and ‘freeganism.’” (99-100)

These sites are political and rhetorical in their approach to everyday life and are not necessarily policy oriented. She uses the term “micropolitics” to explain the rhetorical dimensions of everyday choices, like, for example, scavenging from the trash. She writes,

While these sites clearly have a political agenda, it is not one that relies primarily on policy intervention; rather the politics encoded therein rely upon a micropolitics of local and particularized practices, habits, and pleasures. Through the logic of the database, these sites work rhetorically to attune users to previously overlooked or unknown resources, and in so doing, endeavor to produce and install a new social imaginary of food. (100)

So deeply held are our convictions about food, and so entrenched are the economic system that shape them, anyone who works outside those systems fights an uphill battle. She writes,

The habits of food acquisition that are instilled by and also comprise the basis of the industrial food system are not easily unsettled. Thus, organizations aiming to create dissonance in these habituated investments face significant pedagogical and rhetorical challenges. First they must train users to attune to food sources that their current practices and habits make invisible or at least difficult to see. And second, they must imbue this reattunement with a sense of political and social purpose. Urban foraging organizations—all of which have significant Web presences—meet these challenges in interesting ways. Indeed, examining the various rhetorical practices of these organizations provides insight into the function and effectiveness of database logic when applied to social settings. (109)

And she writes,

With an odd sort of rhythm, such catalogs of random, curious items.[...]do their persuasive work less on an intellectual level than on an affective and bodily one. Like the gradual accumulation of sand grains, the steady cataloguing of objects found in the city streets creates an abrupt shift in one’s perception of the urban environment, which consequently appears studded with a multitude of free, weirdly beautiful things. (110)

Nicotra’s piece itself exhibits a bit of this acquisitive strategy, this database logic. It pairs nicely with David Harvey’s “The Body as Accumulation Strategy,” which I arrived at via Laruen Berlant’s “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency),” which I arrived at via another chapter in this volume, Jenny Rice’s “(Un)Lovable Food.” But it is not just the logic of the database that Nicotra is talking about. That is, the database is not merely an apt metaphor. It is the underlying technology that makes possible such a movement as “freeganism.”

Such rhetorical practices, however, would be less effective it not for the actual and metaphorical database logic that underlies them. Without the Web, urban foraging would arguably still exist only as disorganized and scattered practices, limited to fringe communities like gutter punks and the homeless; the free food resources that exist in dumpsters and on neighborhood fruit trees would be unknown and unfindable by all but a few, data without a navigation or retrieval function. The advent of the Web has helped to literally make these resources visible, and thereby to centralize foraging practices that were previously dispersed. The Web’s distributed nature even obviates the need for pre-existing organizations; the only thing necessary for what Clay Shirky refers to as ‘the self synchronization of otherwise latent groups’ (39) is some sort of platform that enables widely dispersed individuals with similar interests to organize. (113)

Finally, did you know, “usufruct,” is the doctrine in civil law that says fruit that is hanging where you can grab it from the sidewalk is yours for the taking (103)? You do now. File all that stuff away in your meatware database.

References

Backyard Harvest.
Benenson, Bill. Dirt! The Movie.
City Fruit.
Deleuze and Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Fallen Fruit.
Food Not Bombs.
Hawkins, Gay. The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish.
Kenner, Robert. Food, Inc.,
Lang, Tim and Michael Heasman. Food Wars: The Global Battle for Mouths Minds and Markets.
Lien, Marianne Elizabeth and Brigitte Nerlich. The Politics of Food.
Manovich, Lev. “Database as Symbolic Form.”
Neighborhod Fruit.
Nestle, Marion. Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition, and Health, Revised and Expanded Edition (California Studies in Food and Culture).
Pollan, Michael. Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual.
Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.
Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.
Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal.
Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.
Spurlock, Morgan. Super Size Me.
Veggie Trader.
Village Harvest.

Just a reminder, there is a No Satiation app. If you are anything like me, you like podcasts but are somewhat lazy about listening to them. Well, I know that I always stay caught up on the podcasts I like when I buy the app. This might be because I’ve already spent the dough. But it might also be because these apps are really user friendly and make listening a breeze. That’s how I got through every single episode (except the Brian Cranston one, for some reason) of WTF.

In the article “Counterintuitive: How the Marketing of Modernism Hijacked the Kitchen Stove” in From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food,Leslie Land writes about how the aesthetic of the continuous kitchen counter and smooth sleek lines transformed the kitchen into a more “designed” though less functional space. I suppose the quotes around design aren’t really necessary. But I use them to convey that type of design that trumps all else. Land writes,

A gas stove bought in 1925 was probably still working just fine in 1932, and hard times no doubt exacerbated the conservative tendencies of stove buyers, already a somewhat reluctant group when it came to adopting the latest thing.

With a nation full of useful old stoves and a depression on, the only way to stimulate consumption was to persuade buyers that the old models were seriously outmoded. But since the stoves were, by and large, perfectly adequate to their purpose, they only way to make them seem outmoded was to make them look outmoded, and that meant bringing in industrial designers, most famously Norman Bel Geddes, who eventually made his name one of the selling points of his designs.

Unlike old-fashioned industrial engineers, the designers came from the world of visual persuasion, and for them, outward appearance was just as important as functionality. Bel Geddes, for instance, had started out in theatrical design and then moved into advertising before he found what proved to be his true calling. It took a while for manufacturers to be persuaded of the designers’ usefulness, but they were almost all on board by the time the decade was half over.

No wonder. The designers sold themselves even better than their designs moved merchandise, and once the momentum was on their side no business could afford to be left behind looking old-fashioned. Between 1929 (wehen Frank Alvah Parsons, commissioned by the American Stove Company, to design a range that would be seen as a piece of kitchen furniture, came up with a couple of flat-topped beauties. called the Jonquil and the Patrician) and 1938 (when The Stove Builder, ‘Official publication of the Institute of Cooking and Heating Appliance Manufactures,’ declared ‘Streamlining now dominates all phases of the industry’) kitchen design entered the modern age. By decade’s end, the continuous counter was a catastrophe accomplie; the stove was locked at counter height; and that height was an equally locked 36 inches.(46)

So what’s wrong with good design? Well, good design is arguable. Some argue that good design is universal design. But universal design was not the objective of streamlining. Streamlining assumes that one size fits all, but universal design stresses accessibility. Both try to reach a large number of people, but how they envision those people has vast implications. The former assumes an ideal, average body for whom a 36-inch counter is the appropriate height for working comfortably. The latter assumes that all bodies are different and that working heights will have to be adjusted accordingly. Pre streamlining, stoves looked like this:

Photo by Runder Elizabeth

After streamlining, they looked like this:

Photo by waltarrrrr.

With the former design, no bending is required to get things in and out of the oven, the legs could be shortened if necessary, wheel chairs could be wheeled up to it, and the legroom means a slight-but-constant bend at the waist is not mandatory. With the latter, there are no legs to adjust, no room for a wheel chair, and the flat front requires that you bend over the stove, rather than stand right up next to it.

Check out this podcast if you are interested in more about universal design in the kitchen.

From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food

This one is heavy. The title for this episode comes from the last line of “Woman under Siege: Leningrad 1941-1942,” by Darra Goldstein in the book From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food. The chapter is full of details about what happened during the German siege of Leningrad in World War II from September 8 1941 to January 27 1944. Specifically, it is about how women fed their families during the siege. Powerful stuff.

During theGerman siege of Leningrad, which lasted for nearly nine hundred days, over one million people died of starvation and related causes; nearly 200,000 died in February alone. The resourceful womean of Leningrad painstakingly retrieved old flour dust from the cracks in the floorboards and licked decades of spattered grease from the kitchen walls, savoring it slowly. (144)

The first two years were the worst. In the beginning of January, the Soviets opened a small corridor, and things got slightly better. But, overall between 650,000 and 1.2 million people in Leningrad died of starvation. (157)

This past Sunday was mother’s day. My mothers didn’t go through the siege of Leningrad, but they have been through their own sieges, and they have no doubt made sacrifices. I hope you talked to your mother this past mother’s day. But this isn’t just a horrible story about human atrocities. It is also about the indomitable human spirit.

The experience of the siege of Leningrad shows that even when facing starvation, people will fight to keep their humanity intact. And though their heroism was not always voluntary, women were the acknowledged saviors of Leningrad. Admittedly these women had a physical advantage over men: their better-insulated bodies enabled them to endure greater privation, at least initially. But something else was at play, which had more to do with nurture than with nature. Woman’s traditional familial and social roles made the crucial difference in their ability to negotiate through the seemingly endless days of the siege. Their primary impulse to focus first on their families helped them to overcome the forces of inertia, both physical and psychological, during the nine hundred days of extreme deprivation when continuing to live seemed pointless and irredeemably bleak. While it would be erroneous to imply that all women behaved nobly during the siege–numerous cases document the selfish, even savage, behavior of some–women made sacrifices that often proved life-saving, both for themselves and for others. (143-4)

Here is a list of things they found with some trace amounts of nutrients to eat:

• tooth powder
• Vaseline
• glycerine
• cologne
• library paste
• wallpaper paste (scraped from walls)
• glue from the bindings of torn-apart books (144)

If you think that is bad, just listen to “Episode 162: ‘The Human Cost of Art.’”

Citation

Goldstein, Darra. “Women under Siege: Leningrad 1941-1942.” From Betty Crocker
to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Woman and Food. Ed.
Arlene Voski Avakian. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2005. 143-60. Print.

Rather than arguing for a particular meal, ingredients, or proportion of the right ingredients in which to invent new ways to inscribe our waistlines and landscapes, we might admit that no matter what we do, we will still participate in activities which repeat the ways of the past. The question changes though, when we recognize the ways we repeat as problematic” (86-7).

 
      
Recipes are a good example of how mimesis operates in relation to food. Recipes are cultural representations of real food. It is a commonplace to talk about how recipes passed down through generations are a way of maintaining traditions and cultures in families and larger social units. But as quaint as bequeathing recipes is, there are also more calculated deployments of recipes. Corporations have a long history of deploying recipes in the form of corporate cookbooks to sell their products. (See: http://www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/cookbooks/?page_id=201). So when Grant urges us to “recognize the ways we repeat as problematic,” he is arguing for a systemic perspective. He writes,  
      
 

 
Rather than simply looking at good or bad environmental policies, we might do better to look at energies humans [...] exchange with their environments. One way to do this is through a rhetoric of food that understands [...] how [interrelationships] happen between land, people, memory, and lineage. (93)  

 
      
If we are what we eat, we are also what we repeat.  

Citation

Grant, David M. “Consuming Iowa, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Earl Butz.” PRE/TEXT 21.1-4 (2013): 77-95. Print.
      
References 
      
Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.  

Woolf, Aaron. King Corn (Green Packaging)

In the introduction, Rice and Rice write,

This issue attempts one more contradiction by merging the academic interest in food with the professional investment in food. Alongside the academic essays featured here, we are also very grateful to feature short pieces from people who work in the food industry. In this juxtaposition, we hope to further highlight the paralogic as well as the complementary, the space where two distinct interests merge and inform one another. We hope to further complicate our rhetorical interests so that we discover yet another method of communication and idea exchange that is found in food theory.

Eric Reuter’s essay is one of the pieces that is referenced in the quote above. It is included in the journal with juxtaposition in mind. But it doesn’t just bring food and farms back into the discussion of academic rhetoric. It also brings politics and laws back into the discussion. Reuter writes,

A web of state and national food laws applicable to our farm make it nearly impossible for us to make practical and economical sales of most farm products other than raw produce. At best these laws make it prohibitively expensive to produce and sell other things; at worst they outright ban products which we have been repeatedly asked to produce and sell. Our food system and laws contain no provision for or concept of a customer’s ability to make their own judgements about the quality, safety, and source of their food. (69-70)

Reuter can’t sell non-poultry meat, cheese, yogurt or other goods because of the laws in Missouri. This gets me thinking about our laws in Texas about what can be sold where. Right now, expansions to the so-called Texas Baker’s Bill (a.k.a. the Texas Cottage Food Law a.k.a. HB 970) are being debated. The Senate hearing for HB 970 takes place at 9 a.m. tomorrow. I wonder what will happen. The bill:

• Expands the list of allowed foods
• Lets you sell at a location other than your home
• Prohibits municipalities from outlawing cottage food operations through zoning

I think this is the first time I’ve been in total agreement with the “Come and Take It” set.

Citation

Reuter, Eric. “The Organic Libertarian: How Deregulation Should Benefit Small Farms.” PRE/TEXT 21.1-4 (2013): 69-75. Print.

References

Rice, Jeff, and Jenny Edbauer Rice. “Introduction.”

http://www.texascottagefoodlaw.com/

ftp://ftp.legis.state.tx.us/bills/83R/billtext/ html/house_bills/HB00900_HB00999/HB00970I.htm

https://www.facebook.com/TexasBakersBill

The following is an analysis about how the rhetorics of the environmental movement drive the material practices of food producers and consumers. My argument is that the Go Green Rhetoric constructs subjects and, moreover, certain desires in these subjects. I undertake this analysis by way of telling a modern day fable about how the global warming discourse affected the author, his consumption practices, and his worldviews. (47)

Then later, in a note, he writes,

The research for this paper has been accumulating for the past two years. Many of the people and examples I will refer to are real or at least based on real people or experiences. Other people and experiences have been made up to support the argument. (62)

The story itself is simple; it has to do with a guy who really likes yogurt he gets at the farmers market. But what it does with genre is a bit more complicated. As suggested above, Stern mixes research, fiction, rhetoric, and a little bit of psychoanalysis for good measure. But the little bit of psychoanalysis is really what the piece seems to be all about. He writes, merely, “I was suffering from what Žižek as a diagnostician, might call surplus-jouissance.¹¹” The footnote says,

Žižek, blending the Lacanian notion of jouissance and Marx’s surplus-value, creates surplus-jouissance as a mode of analysis for understanding how the subject is constituted within a realm of lack and excess. Looking to return to the unity (lack) of a pre-linguistic state, or in this case a pre-catastrophic state, the subject seeks to search out a means to retain that unity. Within capitalism, consumption of a thing, what he calls elsewhere an object a, is the connection between the lack and excess that creates the feelings of jouissance. We consume the object insofar as we think it is getting us back to the blissful unity before the gap between language and reality created the anxiety we feel as humans. But, the thing we consume, though it relieves some anxiety and creates some pleasure, merely reinforces our suffering by recognizing the impossibility of return to this state.

I’ll have to brush up on my Lacan and Žižek before I fully understand this.

Citation

Stern, Mark. “Love in the Time of Global Warming.” PRE/TEXT 21.1-4 (2013):
45-68. Print.