Daniel Philippon: The Literature of Sustainable Meals
In his new book The Farmer, the Gastronome, and the Chef: In Pursuit of the Ideal Meal (University of Virginia Press), Associate Professor Daniel Philippon explores how intellectual agriculturalist Wendell Berry, Italian Slow Food advocate Carlo Petrini, and Chez Panisse restaurateur Alice Waters changed America’s relationship with food through their writing and advocacy. Researching the book led Philippon to activities not usually associated with literary studies: planting and harvesting vegetables on a central Wisconsin farm; assessing grapes in a vineyard in Italy’s Barbaresco region; making mayonnaise in a chef-led cooking class in Lyon, France. The logistics of this type of research could be challenging, says Philippon, but the relationships created were essential.
“It’s the relationships of people and the land through time that matter the most,” he says. In the book, the reader sees the daily practices the three food writers championed in their writing: Berry’s generative place-based communities, Petrini’s integrated “food communities,” and Waters’ collaborative kitchens. Philippon examines these visions alongside his own practical experience with farmers and makers and cooks trying to create and contribute to more sustainable food systems. Eggs are broken, sometimes by mistake, and pallets dropped (yes, there is comedy); ideals tested and sometimes abandoned (yes, there is loss). “I hope readers emerge with a better understanding of how deeply practice is bound up with ethics,” says the professor. Readers will also emerge with ideas about good kitchen design and what makes a craveable hotdish.
Philippon is the author of Conserving Words: How American Nature Writers Shaped the Environmental Movement. He served as Senior Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Germany; Fulbright Scholar at the University of Turin and University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy; and Visiting Professor at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon in France. His teaching in classes such as “The American Food Revolution” and “Coming to Terms with the Environment” has been honored with the U’s Morse–Alumni Association Award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education and the College of Liberal Arts’ Motley Exemplary Teaching Award. He graciously answered our questions via email.
How did you come upon the book’s form, switching between personal stories and scholarly argument?
The braided narrative emerged organically through the writing process. I knew I wanted my analysis of these writers’ texts to reflect the specific contexts in which I found myself, and the natural way to do that, it turns out, is simply to pivot back and forth. This makes it sound easy, of course, but it was actually quite difficult to decide which contexts to pair with which texts. What I learned was really just a reinforcement of what I already knew: writing is hard work, especially if you value your readers. It should all appear seamless.
Could you talk about the idea of scale discussed in the book: whether and how sustainable food systems can be expanded?
Writing the book forced me think about how scale intersects with values. Berry literally “grounds” his ethics in affection for a particular place, much like one person might love another. Does it matter that we can’t love everyone in the same way we might love a spouse or a child? This is a foundational dilemma, which also applies to debates about effective altruism: do I have the same moral obligations to those who are more distant from me as I do to those with whom I am close, either physically or emotionally?
Just because we may not be able to “scale up” Berry’s valuation of the small family farm to feed eight billion people does not mean we should turn every farm into a factory. We can pursue both environmental sustainability and social justice; we don’t need to choose between them. And we can also acknowledge that small and large farms are not our only options; there is a vast “agriculture of the middle,” just as there are many medium-size possibilities between the extremes of artisan production and Big Food.
Why is it important to break down the binaries of the food sustainability movement, such as fast versus slow food, as you do using theorist Donna Haraway’s idea of “situated knowledges"?
Binaries rely on essentialism for their power, so that each side appears fully distinct from the other, and they also imply hierarchies, which have the potential to become oppressive and fuel inequality. Yet each side of a binary is in fact implicated in the other, much like each part of the yin-and-yang symbol contains a portion of the other: “fast food” always contains elements of “slow food,” and vice-versa. Haraway offers one way of deconstructing these binaries through her emphasis on embodied knowledge, which allows for less essentialist, more complex understandings of all kinds of binaries, whether fast/slow, local/global, or nature/culture.
You taught sustainable food courses while you were writing the book. What did you learn from your students?
For those of us in the humanities, classrooms are our laboratories, and many of the ideas in the book emerged out of conversations I had with my students. For example, a critical part of the conclusion, on how social change happens, was the result of my needing to work through this question in almost every course I teach. The key insight is that writers can help change our ideas and values, and eventually our practices, not only on an individual level but also on a systemic one: they can help change the social norms about what is and is not acceptable. And once that idea resonated with my students, I knew I was onto something.
The book is enriched by female characters doing things not typically thought of as female (e.g., farming) and male characters doing expected female things (e.g., feeding family). The scene of you baking around your mother's death reads like a thanks to her for nourishing you.
I’m happy to hear that the gratitude I felt toward those who fed me—intellectually as well as physically and emotionally—came across in the book. My mom’s role in the final chapter, as a symbol of that nourishment, became clear only after her death, but I hope it can serve as a tribute by extension: not only to her but also to the many strong women I encountered in my research and writing.
What’s the next project?
I’ve begun a project on the literary history of sustainability, as told through the homes of American writers. It builds on my interest in sustainable food in the kitchen to address allied concerns about water quality, climate change, and biodiversity loss, as well as the role in tackling them of technological innovation, cultural diversity, and degrowth. We’ll see where this project takes me!