In Defense of Alice Waters
Friends and readers have been inquiring whether, given my previous praise for what I’ve called Alice Waters’s “culinary conservatism” (on which see more from Alan here and here), I’d have anything to say about Julie Gunlock’s criticisms of her project in the virtual pages of National Review Online. To be perfectly honest I’d much prefer just to let this one slide, but I’m pretty sure that bloggy ethics rule that out … so here goes.
Let’s begin with a story. I am, as it happens, presently working through some issues in ethical theory with a group of Berkeley undergraduates, and as is not at all uncommon in these sorts of circumstances I seem to be the only person in the room who thinks that value claims are more than an expression of Humean sentiments. “Murder is wrong”, say I. “But not always!” comes the reply. “Perhaps”, I grant, “but sometimes it is wrong, which just goes to show that rightness and wrongness are parts of the objective world.” “But how do you know?” comes the utterly predictable response. “For what would you say to someone who disagreed with you?”
At this point my tendency is to get rather agitated and ask them what they would say to someone who disagreed with them on whether the available fossil evidence proves that there once were dinosaurs, and this tends at the very least to throw them for a loop. But in the present context that’s neither here nor there: the immediate relevance of exchanges like this one lies in the disturbing extent to which subjectivism has corroded the foundations of our public discourse; hence “I think” or “To me” precedes nearly every sentence, senses of have taken the place of the real things, nonsensical talk of subjectivity waits lurking around every dialectical corner, and so on. But now compare my Berkeley undergraduates to Ms. Gunlock:
The truth is, organic food is an expensive luxury item, something bought by those who have the resources. Those who can afford it and want it should have it (my emphasis – JS), but organic food is not a panacea for the world’s ills.
Suppose we grant Gunlock the point about expense and luxury – though I’ll return to that in a moment. But why not just: Those who can afford it should have it? How exactly does “want” matter? (Are there cases in which people shouldn’t have what they want?) Is it really that impossible to wrap one’s mind around the idea that, just as there might be genuine relationships of superiority and inferiority among ways of life or novels or works of art or music, so the same might hold for what we eat? Can it be true that the very same movement that gives us the classicism of the New Criterion and George Will’s case against blue jeans is unable to recognize that our meals might also be part of what constitutes our lives as noble or, as the case may be, not? The “purpose of food”, writes Gunlock, “is nourishment” – but of course while that may be true enough for dogs and cats and horses, it’s no more true in our case than it is that the purpose of sex is procreation, the purpose of architecture providing shelter, or the purpose of music passing the time. Would the world really end if we allowed considerations other than wants and the almighty dollar to impact our choices about what we bring to our table?
And as to that almighty dollar: Gunlock quotes Waters as acknowledging the increased cost of local and organic food, though adding that “people [will] simply have to make the choice between expensive grapes and Nike tennis shoes”. Not good enough!, objects Gunlock:
What [Waters] fails to appreciate is that some people can’t buy those tennis shoes either.
Really? You think so? I mean, is this supposed to be news? No doubt Waters, squishy liberal that she is, is at least a bit sensitive to the fact that not everyone can afford to eat well; that doesn’t rule out, however, the possibility that those who can eat well, should, and that if you’re lucky enough to face the choice between grass-fed beef and cable TV it’s probably the latter that ought to go. As in any other case, figuring out what’s right demands attention to particular circumstances rather than universal rules; but given Gunlock’s rhetoric, it hardly seems “condescending” to say that matters pertaining to what the Slow Foodies like to call gastronomy often gets pretty short shrift in such deliberations.
Does eating well mean always eating organic? No, it doesn’t – and I’m quite confident that Waters wouldn’t dispute this. Nor does it mean always buying locally, always buying seasonally, always knowing your producers, and so on. But perhaps more than anything else, what eating well demands is cooking well, and then eating what you’ve cooked around a table and as a family: hence if there’s anyone who should be criticizing Waters’s case for buying fresh ingredients (lots of trips to the store!) and doing such things as cooking your own beans (takes hours!), it should be those parents who, unlike Gunlock, don’t or can’t manage to stay at home. But once again, making the case for the noble or virtuous nature of a certain way of life doesn’t mean making that life binding on everyone; Waters knows fully well that not all families manage to have a stay-at-home parent, and that those families with two working parents will have to cut corners when it comes to meals. This doesn’t, however, preclude her thinking that whenever it is possible, cooking should be given its due.
Look, though: I’ve joined in on criticizing Waters before, and the Slow Food people pretty much cut off contact with me after a pretty caustic column that I wrote for Culture11 about the genuinely out of touch and – dare I say it? – elitist elements of San Francisco’s “Slow Food Nation” extravaganza. It’s one thing, though, to raise criticisms of the way a message is being delivered, and quite another to use those criticisms as a tool for clumsily bludgeoning that message’s content. Grunlock of all people should be sensitive to the need to choose one’s words carefully … and NR, for that matter, shouldn’t lose sight of the possibility that attention to taste and respect for the wisdom of the past might have something to teach us about how we ought to eat.
(Cross-posted at Upturned Earth.)
It’s astonishing to me that a piece at a purportedly conservative website could heap so much praise on our industrial food system without so much as mentioning the vast array of government subsidies and market interventions, or the various externalities, that actually make all that “cheap” food possible. I guess sneering at liberal elitists makes for better copy.
— Lee · Apr 21, 12:52 PM · #
This post is eliding three distinctions. First there is the distinction between moral wrongs that harm others (e.g., murder) and those that don’t (greed, for instance, unless it leads to dishonesty). Second, there is the distinction between moral wrongs and aesthetic or other objectively determinable wrongs. Liberality (like that of Sarah Palin) is objectively better than stinginess (like that of Joe Biden), and Shakespeare is objectively better than Robert Service, but only the first dichotomy involves moral qualities, and only moral qualities have imperative consequences. Third, there is the distinction between tastes and values. Courage is objectively better than cowardice, but vanilla ice cream isn’t objectively better than chocolate ice cream.
So I agree that home-cooked natural food is objectively better than processed food heated in the microwave, but it isn’t clear that this results in imperative consequences. Unless everything that is objectively better is also morally better. But there would have to be a lot of axiological heavy lifting which I haven’t seen to support the statement “You SHOULD prefer Shakespeare to Robert Service.” It’s perfectly defensible—though hardly my own style—to prefer reading Robert Service to reading Shakespeare, as long as you don’t fall into the idiocy of claiming that he is better than Shakespeare. To take another example, I spend a lot of my spare time doing genealogical research, when I could, with the same amount of time and the same sources, be doing social history. I’d be the first to concede that social history is more important and worthwhile than genealogy, but it isn’t what I mostly feel like doing. So there.
— y81 · Apr 21, 01:30 PM · #
I certainly understand that distinction, but it’s perfectly possible to give content to “One should prefer (and pursue) those choices that are aesthetically/gastronomically/musically/etc. superior” without reading the ‘should’ as the same as the imperative of morality; an Aristotelian wouldn’t put much stock in this distinction, of course, but singling out a special moral domain shouldn’t preclude making meaningful (and true!) claims about how certain non-moral ends are also intrinsically worthy of pursuit.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 21, 02:20 PM · #
I didn’t say that the author didn’t understand the distinctions I made, only that the article elided them. For myself, I don’t agree that non-moral distinctions generate any imperative at all, but I’d be happy to read and consider any arguments to the contrary.
— y81 · Apr 21, 11:16 PM · #
Well how about: “p is true, so you ought to believe that p“; or “The Picasso is superior to the piece of art you found at the yard sale, so you ought to prefer the Picasso”. Sure read like imperatives to me, and valid ones to boot.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 22, 03:21 AM · #
My third sentence above does not convey what I meant to say. Simply put: Isn’t it true that all imperatives involve ethics, to some degree?
— JSearle · Apr 22, 07:28 PM · #
Hey John,
I feel like there’s something tricky going on. This discussion between y81 and you is certainly interesting. I guess I’m just wondering: if I should prefer (and pursue) Picasso, but don’t, then what do we say about me or my values? Isn’t it true that if someone is culpable for her disordered aesthetic values, then that person is doing/believing something wrong(ly)? How do we divorce ethics from imperatives?
Maybe I’m missing some fine-grained distinction.
— JSearle · Apr 22, 07:36 PM · #
“What [Waters] fails to appreciate is that some people can’t buy those tennis shoes either.
Really? You think so? I mean, is this supposed to be news? “
Perhaps you didn’t see the interview with Waters, so don’t realize the tone in which she delivered her Nike comment. It was with a scoff as she choked down a $2.36 grape. Her point was pretty plainly “If you buy Nikes but not expensive grapes, you are a moron.”
Read in that context, Ms. Gunlock’s response seems a tad different. It’s not offered as news to the reader – it’s offered as news to Ms. Waters, who has proven again and again how out of touch she is with real life. The segment on 60 minutes concludes with her cooking a “simple breakfast that anyone could make before work” in her kitchen. Her $50,000 kitchen, that includes a fire to cook over and state of the art stove. This “simple meal” would’ve taken any average cook about 30-40 minutes to prepare. She’s out of touch.
And I say this as an organic eating vegetarian who enjoys Ms. Waters’ restaurant. There are good points to be made about organic food. Waters seems unable to make them. Her only talent is telling other people what they should do.
— b · Apr 23, 09:32 PM · #