Today's opening exercise was for students to brainstorm some keywords (a la Raymond Williams) for a class on the pleasures and poltiics of food. I am currently in between sections, but the list is already compelling. I started with the first three items, but the whole list thus far includes taste, appetite, consumption, cuisine, sweet, nutrition, refreshment, fat, health, diet, thirst, hunger, allergy, cafeteria (style), fast food, meal, calories, nourishment, starvation, and server. I'll be interested to see what comes up in the next discussion.

In the meantime, we spent some very nice time one th notion of consumption, noting the inexorably negqative connotations of most of the definitions in the OED, with destruction and waste making prominent appearances. What I think becomes compelling is when we think of food consumption in its most literal of terms through a critical framework that takes into account industrial consumption. With this reading in mind, can we ever eat without being consumers? Is the linguistic correlation between nutritive and economic consumption part of the reason that many of the most powerful economic interests in the U.S. are wrapped up in the the stuff we put in our mouths an chew every day?

I'm sitting here eating my peanut butter and Jelly sandwich, knowing that choosy mothers choose Jif, and that I choose the sour cherry preserves I'm eating in part because they had a very cool jar. Even though I'm drinking water (Deer Park, from the office cooler), I'm drinking it from a Coca-Cola bottle that I've recycled. I had a Power Bar for breakfast. The degree to which my survival-based consumption positions me in the system of American economic power, despite my desire to work against that system, makes it clear how inculcated we are with American notions of entitlement and waste.

The key for me and my students this semester will, I think, be the task of balancing the very necessary process of scrutinizing the very processes that make up and undergird our eating habits, with the equally important desire to enjoy that which we eat. Because even if Choosy mothers choose Jif, it tastes good, too.