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readrunsea's review against another edition
4.0
As a former farmhand with a grad degree in agriculture focusing on production + environment, this book is right up my very niche alley. It’s basically a long essay exploring some different facets of food systems from a consumer’s perspective. I like it because it’s pretty anti-dogma which is exactly my belief system when it comes to food production, consumption, and life in general. I spent nearly a decade steeped in the culture and day-to-day of small (like, really small on a global scale) organic agriculture. In my experience farmers are some of the most intelligent and pragmatic people on the planet, and even though they certainly have ideals and put so much heart into their work, it’s the foodie consumers who get dogmatic about food and put all kinds of value judgment on the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ way to eat. The locavore movement is inaccessible to most, plain and simple, for a ton of reasons that Rebecca Tucker does a good job of outlining. In my college days I was a Michael Pollan devotee and now find him insufferable, and he’s a big reason that locavorism exists the way it does. Tucker writes about him and his ilk (Mark Bittman, Barbara Kingsolver et al) with skepticism that I agree is warranted, without attacking them on a personal level. She also touches on precision farming and some new technologies that are being piecemeal integrated into some farming practices. Her ultimate thesis is that agriculture writ large is endlessly complicated and food-system related problems (which is like, every problem on earth) can only be addressed with nuance. Truth. So basically, I didn’t learn anything new from this but I think the average non-farm nerd would, and anyway it’s a good overview of something that defies overview by its very nature. Thanks to Coach House Books for the ARC! Opinions are my own.
tonstantweader's review
3.0
What we eat has become a moral issue of the kind that makes life harder for people whose life is already hard. Nearly everyone laments the loss of the family farm to big industrial farming, displacing the agrarian life with Roundup Ready crops and maltreatment of poultry and livestock. We want to eat good food, not just food that is healthy for us, but also safe for the environment, our communities, and the world. We want our food to taste good and feel good at the same time. In A Matter of Taste. Rebecca Tucker looks at how framing food as morally good or bad has kept us from addressing urgent issues such as how to ensure the billions of people on our planet have healthy and nutritious food while reducing damage to the environment and to our climate.
We have come to see some food as good and other food as bad on a moral level. This is a morality reserved for those who can afford to pay high prices for artisanal, organic, locally-sourced foods. As someone who relies on Food Bank’s Harvest Share to make my food dollars stretch, I think a system that requires disposable income to be “good” is not really a moral system, it’s a system of in-group and out-group class markers. Being able to name the farm where your heirloom tomato was grown is the Hermes bag of the comfortable class.
Additionally, the idea that slow and local is more sustainable than large and distant is not necessarily correct. We assume it is better for the environment to produce 1000 tomatoes that travel 50 miles than 10,000,000 tomatoes that travel 4,000 miles but really, which contributes more to climate change? If a large-scale farmer uses a high tech combine to make sure he is seeding the optimum seeds per acre using GPS and years of data, reducing waste and water, isn’t that better for the environment? We disparage the employment of underpaid migrant workers and ignore the employment of unpaid interns. The problem is, sometimes small is not better and sometimes the technologies that repel those infatuated with the agrarian past are better for the environment.
We need better, more honest conversations about how we plan to feed our growing world population, but those conversations won’t happen so long as there is a Manichean divide between good food and bad food.
As someone who relies on the Food Bank and Harvest Share’s produce to stretch my food dollar, I have no idea where my fruits and vegetables are sourced, but I assume that they won’t be classified as morally good. I reject any system that ascribes a negative moral value to not being able to afford expensive food. So, you would think I would love A Matter of Taste, but I did not.
I found much of the book interesting and I agree with Tucker that we need a middle ground that is not fractured by moralistic judgments. However, I think she wrote the book before she has settled her own mind. You see, she wants the morally good food, the locally-grown, the organic, the know-your-farmer food. She just does not want to be judged when she eats Triscuits.
Then there is the snarkiness. This makes me think this is a collection of essays written for an online magazine where snark is desirable, but snark is not the stuff persuasive writing is built on. If her goal is to persuade both sides to come together, she needs to be less judgmental of the well-off who spent $8 for a peach. Besides, you know she really wants to spend that $8 for that peach. Her heart is with the “good” food and her head is with the “bad” food. She needed to bridge that distance to write a more persuasive and coherent argument.
A Matter of Taste will be published December 11th. I received a copy for review from the publisher.
A Matter of Taste at Coach House Books
Rebecca Tucker on Twitter
https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2018/12/15/9781552453674/
We have come to see some food as good and other food as bad on a moral level. This is a morality reserved for those who can afford to pay high prices for artisanal, organic, locally-sourced foods. As someone who relies on Food Bank’s Harvest Share to make my food dollars stretch, I think a system that requires disposable income to be “good” is not really a moral system, it’s a system of in-group and out-group class markers. Being able to name the farm where your heirloom tomato was grown is the Hermes bag of the comfortable class.
Additionally, the idea that slow and local is more sustainable than large and distant is not necessarily correct. We assume it is better for the environment to produce 1000 tomatoes that travel 50 miles than 10,000,000 tomatoes that travel 4,000 miles but really, which contributes more to climate change? If a large-scale farmer uses a high tech combine to make sure he is seeding the optimum seeds per acre using GPS and years of data, reducing waste and water, isn’t that better for the environment? We disparage the employment of underpaid migrant workers and ignore the employment of unpaid interns. The problem is, sometimes small is not better and sometimes the technologies that repel those infatuated with the agrarian past are better for the environment.
We need better, more honest conversations about how we plan to feed our growing world population, but those conversations won’t happen so long as there is a Manichean divide between good food and bad food.
As someone who relies on the Food Bank and Harvest Share’s produce to stretch my food dollar, I have no idea where my fruits and vegetables are sourced, but I assume that they won’t be classified as morally good. I reject any system that ascribes a negative moral value to not being able to afford expensive food. So, you would think I would love A Matter of Taste, but I did not.
I found much of the book interesting and I agree with Tucker that we need a middle ground that is not fractured by moralistic judgments. However, I think she wrote the book before she has settled her own mind. You see, she wants the morally good food, the locally-grown, the organic, the know-your-farmer food. She just does not want to be judged when she eats Triscuits.
Then there is the snarkiness. This makes me think this is a collection of essays written for an online magazine where snark is desirable, but snark is not the stuff persuasive writing is built on. If her goal is to persuade both sides to come together, she needs to be less judgmental of the well-off who spent $8 for a peach. Besides, you know she really wants to spend that $8 for that peach. Her heart is with the “good” food and her head is with the “bad” food. She needed to bridge that distance to write a more persuasive and coherent argument.
A Matter of Taste will be published December 11th. I received a copy for review from the publisher.
A Matter of Taste at Coach House Books
Rebecca Tucker on Twitter
https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2018/12/15/9781552453674/
ambers's review
3.0
tw mention of eating disorders!
thank you to netgalley, the publisher, and the author for providing me with a copy of a matter of taste! first off, the very good: rebecca tucker denounces the false morality so many people apply to food, and repeatedly asks the reader to let go of their ideas of 'good' and 'bad' food. i fully agree with her here. a food item is not inherently good, nor is it bad. it's just food. it can be healthy, it can be unhealthy, it can be sustainable or mass-produced or homegrown—but at face value, eating tomato won't make you any better of a person than if you'd eaten a candy bar, and shaming foods in this way only serves to fuel eating disorders, guilt trip poor folks for the food insecurities that are out of their control, and ultimately, creates countless new issues with humanity's relationship to food.
i also agree wholeheartedly that we should be looking towards genetic modifying foods to help combat modern problems; drought or disease resistant crops for example, are inarguably relevant to this era. it's refreshing to see someone include humanity in their definition of what's sustainable. after all, if only the top 1% can afford something, then surely it is not the right path forward. if our idea of health and sustainability leaves behind marginalized groups, then what's the point of it?
but this is far from a perfect book. much of what tucker offers here is collated ideas from other works, rather than her own thoughts or research. it's useful in that it holds all this research in one easily consumed place, but i would've liked to read more of tucker's own thoughts on the process. furthermore, as an author, she seems very much torn. the title says this is a 'semi-reluctant argument', and that shows. tucker goes back and forth, clearly still in love with the much lauded, now lambasted, view of sustainability as friendly/local farmers, even as she supposedly argues for innovation and technology. she also glosses over some of the very relevant critiques of companies like monsanto, whose deplorable practices have done a great deal to turn people off from GMOs. perhaps this was an intentional choice, to keep things focused on the concept of GMOs rather than the current practice, but it seems neglectful at best to leave those discussions out (because GMOs may not be bad, but monsanto is disgusting).
tucker ultimately concludes that she doesn't know what we should do, only that we should employ some kind of moderation between the many opposing food ideologies in our society: a true enough statement, but not a particularly groundbreaking one.
thank you to netgalley, the publisher, and the author for providing me with a copy of a matter of taste! first off, the very good: rebecca tucker denounces the false morality so many people apply to food, and repeatedly asks the reader to let go of their ideas of 'good' and 'bad' food. i fully agree with her here. a food item is not inherently good, nor is it bad. it's just food. it can be healthy, it can be unhealthy, it can be sustainable or mass-produced or homegrown—but at face value, eating tomato won't make you any better of a person than if you'd eaten a candy bar, and shaming foods in this way only serves to fuel eating disorders, guilt trip poor folks for the food insecurities that are out of their control, and ultimately, creates countless new issues with humanity's relationship to food.
i also agree wholeheartedly that we should be looking towards genetic modifying foods to help combat modern problems; drought or disease resistant crops for example, are inarguably relevant to this era. it's refreshing to see someone include humanity in their definition of what's sustainable. after all, if only the top 1% can afford something, then surely it is not the right path forward. if our idea of health and sustainability leaves behind marginalized groups, then what's the point of it?
but this is far from a perfect book. much of what tucker offers here is collated ideas from other works, rather than her own thoughts or research. it's useful in that it holds all this research in one easily consumed place, but i would've liked to read more of tucker's own thoughts on the process. furthermore, as an author, she seems very much torn. the title says this is a 'semi-reluctant argument', and that shows. tucker goes back and forth, clearly still in love with the much lauded, now lambasted, view of sustainability as friendly/local farmers, even as she supposedly argues for innovation and technology. she also glosses over some of the very relevant critiques of companies like monsanto, whose deplorable practices have done a great deal to turn people off from GMOs. perhaps this was an intentional choice, to keep things focused on the concept of GMOs rather than the current practice, but it seems neglectful at best to leave those discussions out (because GMOs may not be bad, but monsanto is disgusting).
tucker ultimately concludes that she doesn't know what we should do, only that we should employ some kind of moderation between the many opposing food ideologies in our society: a true enough statement, but not a particularly groundbreaking one.
readrunsea's review
4.0
As a former farmhand with a grad degree in agriculture focusing on production + environment, this book is right up my very niche alley. It’s basically a long essay exploring some different facets of food systems from a consumer’s perspective. I like it because it’s pretty anti-dogma which is exactly my belief system when it comes to food production, consumption, and life in general. I spent nearly a decade steeped in the culture and day-to-day of small (like, really small on a global scale) organic agriculture. In my experience farmers are some of the most intelligent and pragmatic people on the planet, and even though they certainly have ideals and put so much heart into their work, it’s the foodie consumers who get dogmatic about food and put all kinds of value judgment on the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ way to eat. The locavore movement is inaccessible to most, plain and simple, for a ton of reasons that Rebecca Tucker does a good job of outlining. In my college days I was a Michael Pollan devotee and now find him insufferable, and he’s a big reason that locavorism exists the way it does. Tucker writes about him and his ilk (Mark Bittman, Barbara Kingsolver et al) with skepticism that I agree is warranted, without attacking them on a personal level. She also touches on precision farming and some new technologies that are being piecemeal integrated into some farming practices. Her ultimate thesis is that agriculture writ large is endlessly complicated and food-system related problems (which is like, every problem on earth) can only be addressed with nuance. Truth. So basically, I didn’t learn anything new from this but I think the average non-farm nerd would, and anyway it’s a good overview of something that defies overview by its very nature. Thanks to Coach House Books for the ARC! Opinions are my own.
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