Episode 88 - Food with Shanti Chu

Ellie: 0:14

Hello, and welcome to Overthink.

David: 0:17

The podcast that nourishes soul and body.

Ellie: 0:21

I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson,

David: 0:23

And I'm Dr. David Pena Guzman.

Ellie: 0:25

and I promise we didn't plan this, but David, you and I both showed up to the recording this morning with our breakfast, so we literally have food with us, and I am eating while you are talking, or I'm going to be eating while you're talking.

David: 0:40

"Breakfast" because it's morning time for you so it is

your breakfast but it's 7: 0:45

13 p. m for me so I am having dinner in the form of a banana and Pringles. It is an extremely unhealthy breakfast with the exception of the banana.

Ellie: 0:57

I forgot! I figured breakfast since you were eating a banana, but yes, you are indeed in Europe right now And I'm in California, so we are in very different time zones. It's breakfast for me though.

David: 1:06

Yeah. And the reason I need to tell you the reason that I'm eating a banana in Pringles is because sadly, and this is connected to what we'll be talking about today. I got a major case of food poisoning this week. About two days ago, my stomach staged a revolt against the rest of my body. And it became clear that I ate some kind of contaminated watermelon that I bought from the corner store, a little store called Coccinelle, in Paris, which is just like a really cute name, and it means ladybug, and they have an adorable logo of a ladybug, but with contaminated watermelon that has ravaged my body for the last 48 hours. So I've been eating nothing but bananas, chocolate chip cookies, and chips.

Ellie: 1:55

I hate that for you.

David: 1:57

Yeah, I hate it for me and I hate it for everybody else as well. And you're eating oatmeal, is that right?

Ellie: 2:03

Yeah. I am eating oatmeal, which is what I eat most mornings for breakfast. But I switch off between sweet and savory oatmeal, and I'm eating a savory oatmeal this morning. I make a spiced oatmeal with turmeric and coriander and garlic powder. And then I put mango pickle and my partner Trevor's homemade tomato chutney from a family recipe in there. So it's like I have some Indian garnishes in there in my turmeric oatmeal.

David: 2:31

that's delicious. I've only ever had sweet oatmeal for breakfast. And I recently got into the habit of putting my protein powder before going to the gym into oatmeal as opposed to in a like a smoothie. And I really like it. So I've become a fan of oatmeal, even though it's not something that I frequent normally.

Ellie: 2:51

I wsa smoothie girl for many years, and let's just say it went through me a little too quickly. So I moved to oatmeal because it was better for my digestion.

David: 3:02

It was your watermelon?

Ellie: 3:05

Yeah, it wasn't quite my watermelon. I didn't have a stomachache, but it just, wasn't the best. We're going there. We're talking a little bit about digestion today. We'll come back to that in a minute. But David, before we get into the philosophical substance of today's episode, which does indeed relate somewhat to digestion, what are your favorite foods? I presume not bananas and Pringles.

David: 3:25

No, bananas and Pringles are terrible. For me, they are tasteless and bland. My favorite food, and you know I hate... reinforcing inadvertently racial stereotypes, but I am Mexican and I love extremely spicy food with very high acidic profiles and with very forward flavors. In that regard, I'm very much a child of my environment. So spiciness, lemon, and salt are basically the totality of my food pyramid.

Ellie: 3:59

Okay, give us a food that combines those that, that you love.

David: 4:03

Mexican food.

Ellie: 4:04

Okay, so you're going for a full cuisine.

David: 4:06

Yes, I'm gonna choose... actually, I will say my favorite cuisine in the world is Indian food. And it does meet those requirements of acid, spice, and saltiness. I would love your oatmeal.

Ellie: 4:19

Yes, I think you would like the flavors in this oatmeal then, because with the pickle there's a lot of acid, but it's not spicy because I can't handle that much spice.

David: 4:26

Well, Don't worry. I'll just bring my own cayenne pepper to appropriate your oatmeal and make it good. But what is your favorite food then?

Ellie: 4:36

Okay, you said you were worried about being a Mexican stereotype. Mine is like the most bland white person food you can possibly imagine, but I am very proud of it. My favorite food is potatoes.

David: 4:47

What? Really?

Ellie: 4:49

I love potatoes. I love mashed potatoes. I love baked potatoes. I love tater tots. I love french fries. My 30th birthday a few years ago was potato themed. We had a variety of different kinds of potatoes. Oh, potato salad! How could I forget?

David: 5:05

Oh, yes, of course. Very different than the other one. Favorite game? Hot Potato. Favorite toy? Potato Man.

Ellie: 5:16

Wait, Potato Man? That's not his name. What's his name?

David: 5:18

That's his name, no? The Potato Man. Oh, Mr. Potato Head! Oh, okay, that's what it is. I just corrected myself while pretending not to be wrong.

Ellie: 5:28

Potatoes. You can do so many things with them. They're so filling and tasty. Oh, just love a potato.

David: 5:34

I love that you're reasoning for this. It's just they go with anything because they don't stand out and they're filling. They're just like bland and heavy.

Ellie: 5:44

Today we are talking about food.

David: 5:46

What's the relationship between what we eat and who we are?

Ellie: 5:50

How does food propel us into community and shape our group identities?

David: 5:55

And what food systems and diets have become hegemonic in our present age?

Ellie: 6:01

We speak with philosopher and food critic Shanti Chu about the ethics and politics of food. There's a landmark essay from the 1980s by the French social scientist Claude Fischler called Food, Self, and Identity that I want to start today's episode by talking about because it provides an interesting lens on the idea that food is central to who we are. In Fischler's account, Food is both the source of hope for humans, it's an essential form of sustenance that allows us to go on living, and also allows us to shape who we are because we become what we eat, and so the better foods we eat, the stronger and healthier we become. But it's also the source of a lot of anxiety because food can also weaken, worsen our health, or even kill us. David, you experienced a small version of this with your contaminated watermelon.

David: 6:57

well, He's French. Does he talk about the watermelon from Coccinelle? I need to feel vindicated.

Ellie: 7:04

Yeah, you can write an updated 2024 version of the essay talking about this contaminated watermelon.

David: 7:10

Yeah, but I like thinking about food as a combination of hope, of course hope in the future and continuing to exist because we literally take in what we eat and it becomes part of our body. But if you eat something that is either naturally contaminated or poisonous, it could mean the end of your life. And that's very anxiogenic.

Ellie: 7:30

Absolutely. And this is because to eat is to incorporate, right? We become what we eat. And Fischler mentions that popular wisdom often takes for granted that absorbing a particular food tends to transfer certain characteristics of it to the eater. And so there is an association of red meat with giving strength. And this was a fun fact I learned from this essay. There's a phrase in French for people who eat too many turnips, because the idea is that if you eat too many turnips, you become spineless. And the term is sang de navet, which means you have turnip blood.

David: 8:07

And also in Mexico, and I think in the U. S. people say this too, that you literally become like a carrot if you eat too many carrots because it turns your skin orange.

Ellie: 8:18

It turns it orange, yeah!

David: 8:19

So it's not just that you incorporate it, in the case of the carrot, you become a carrot. Carrot doesn't become flesh. Flesh becomes carrot.

Ellie: 8:27

I think you see this anxiety in the complex emotions that we have around what we eat. Sometimes to eat something that is coded healthy has a certain placebo effect where you feel good about yourself and you feel like you have extra strength because you ate it. I personally experience this with 20 dollar smoothies from the LA grocery store Erewhon. And granted, of course there are healthier and less healthy foods, so I'm not saying that eating healthier foods doesn't actually make you feel good, but there certainly is additionally an added emotional effect and sometimes a placebo effect to eating a healthy food. And the inverse can also happen, where you can feel really badly about yourself if you feel like you ate something that is not healthy for you. And that's not just about actually getting a stomachache, it's also about this sense of moral failure or, oh, am I not doing something that's good for my long term health? I personally feel this way a lot with respect to foods that I've read are bad for you, even though they don't actually make me feel bad. have a lot of Alzheimer's that runs in my family, and so studies that have linked Alzheimer's to sugar or to gluten have made me freak out, like ah, okay, I don't feel bad when I eat gluten, but do I need to stop eating gluten because 40 years from now I might get Alzheimer's?

David: 9:45

Oh let's hope that there is no study connecting Alzheimer's to potatoes, because that will prompt a real existential crisis on your end.

Ellie: 9:53

Yeah. In all seriousness though, I think that really does provoke a lot of feelings for people, including myself, like lots of anxiety and also pinning so many hopes on the idea of eating food that's good for you.

David: 10:06

Yeah, in my case, those feelings get activated in the most intense ways. Because I am a vegetarian, when I have been to restaurants and people inadvertently feed me something that has meat in it. And I don't realize until after I've taken a couple of bites. And I've been a meat eater in the past, and I know that it's not going to have immediately disastrous effects on my health. But when it has happened, and it has a few times, it provokes a really deep sense of revulsion combined with disappointment and sometimes even a little bit of anger. And something so small because my identity is so caught up in what I eat can entirely throw off an entire day of activity in a way that very few things can actually.

Ellie: 10:55

Yeah. And so that has to do with these ethical concerns and the way that translates into actually your felt sense of what you're eating. And then I think alternatively on the opposite end of the spectrum or a different side of things, that fear that what you are eating, even if it's not associated with any ethical qualms or immediate revulsion, might be having negative effects on you, is, I think, quite salient for a lot of people, including myself. I don't know why I've talked about this multiple times on the podcast, but I think I have, so sorry I'm going to mention it again. But when I was, like, in my late 20s, I realized that I was lactose intolerant, and I went from being... An obsessive ice cream eater to completely cutting ice cream out of my diet and ice cream had been like a real source of joy for me, a special treat that I would have on, a regular lot of occasions, and I realized that it was causing headaches and stomach aches, and it was just like I had not put two and two together, and so then once I realized that what had been a source of joy for me, then suddenly felt like a threat, and I was like, Oh, I've been harming myself. Granted, it wasn't like I was killing myself through eating ice cream, but it was causing negative effects in my daily life. And the fact that I hadn't connected it to the food that I was eating, even though that was the cause, felt like I felt somehow wrong for doing that. It was like, why didn't I know this?

David: 12:16

Yeah I suspect part of the reason for that is because we eat so many different kinds of things that it's very difficult to establish a one to one cause effect relationship between what we eat at any particular moment and then the effects that it has on our mental and emotional state, especially because often the effects of food take at least hours or days to kick in. And so how would you know that it is the dairy in particular that is causing that consequence?

Ellie: 12:48

Well, And interestingly, that kind of connects to something else that Fischler talks about, which is the omnivores paradox. He says that one of the peculiar things about being a human is that we evolutionarily are adapted to an omnivorous diet. And that doesn't mean, of course, that everybody has to be an omnivore, but like speaking in terms of the evolution of our species, we evolved to be omnivores. And this means that we can't get all our nutrients from one food. We need variety. And so there's this tendency towards variety, but also each new food that we try is potentially dangerous. And so that's where also this anxiety comes from, the idea that something that you eat might harm you or kill you. And so this is the paradox for him is that we need variety, but also we have to be really careful about which new foods we try.

David: 13:37

And that speaks very directly to what the scholar Ronald Siegel calls the arm race that exist in nature between the animal and the plant kingdoms where animals evolve in order to better eat plants in order to appropriate the nutrients, but as a way of developing a defense, plants develop all kinds of Alkaloids, for example, that are poisonous to animals and that evade the sensory Mechanisms of the animals in order to get them sick so that they learn not to eat them And so there is this kind of rat race of who's going to win, plant or animal organism that defines, in many ways, the evolution of life on Earth.

Ellie: 14:20

Wow. That is so interesting. I hadn't thought about that. And then when you do have a good food that doesn't harm you, then you get to feel really good about yourself as well. And I think one point, sorry, this is random, but I wanted to mention this is coming from Levinas who talks in Totality and Infinity about nourishment and food as being a central form of the feeling of life that we as humans have. He says that food as a means of invigoration is a form of transmuting what is other to us into the same. That's this idea of incorporation. That in Fischler, that all the way going back to Aristotle, who talks about a nutritive soul that transforms the other into the same. And as Levinas states, there's a way that we derive a self affirmation from transforming the other into the same inasmuch as it gives us energy and strength. So even if a food ultimately is going to have negative consequences for you, whether it's a day later or 30 years later, there is pleasure in eating and filling ourselves up and in feeling that immediate rush of energy that we get from the calories that he links to the feeling of life itself and actually to the formation of the self. He says we, in living from things like food, we transform our dependency into a sense of sovereignty or happiness.

David: 15:41

Mm. So I become who I am precisely because I am dependent on these other things that I conquer and make me. Yeah, and I really like this framing that we've been dealing with so far of thinking about food as a source of hope and anxiety, something that draws you out but also draws you in. And in the Republic, Plato also introduces a discussion of food with a similar duality in relation to other people. So in the Republic, Socrates gets involved with a group of men who invite him to dinner. That's actually how the Republic opens.

Ellie: 16:17

That's a classic Socratic scene. So many dinner parties in these dialogues.

David: 16:22

Yeah, so many banquets and dinners and feasts. And these men invite Socrates to dinner and drag him into a conversation about justice. What is justice? What is it in itself? Do we value it for its own sake or for the sake of the benefits that it affords us? And one of the men that is in the group, a young Athenian by the name of Glaucon, says that. We need to figure out really why we prefer justice over injustice and says, in order to figure this out, because in theory, one could say that it's better to be unjust, because then you can get away with murder. We really need to compare the just man against the unjust man at the individual level. And then Socrates makes this argument where he says why would we focus on the small scale, the individual, when we can have this whole discussion about justice at the level of the city, which is the individual writ large. And so this is what sets the discussion of what the ideal city state looks like in the Republic. And Socrates says, and I swear I'm getting to food here in a moment, this is just like the buildup, Socrates says, The reason that we need to create a polis is precisely because we have fundamental needs that we cannot satisfy individually. And the first and most important one of those needs is our need for food. And so this dependence that we were just talking about in connection to Levinas is what makes us come together and form a political unit. And so the function of the city is to provide us with enough labor and enough resources to provide for those needs. And so Socrates says to Glaucon, if you want to know what justice means, it would be basically this ideal small to middle sized community where people live together, eat a purely vegetarian diet, and live largely in connection to nature. And so it's an ideal city that is presented largely through a depiction of the dietary habits of the people who would live in it.

Ellie: 18:30

I did not remember this.

David: 18:31

Oh yeah, and Socrates goes into detail, he says, they'll have wheat, they'll have barley, they'll have wine, parentheses, in moderation,

Ellie: 18:40

Naturally.

David: 18:41

but they'll also have like olives and salt and maybe a little bit of cheese. And if people are really feeling a little frisky, like they want a dessert, they can go and have some figs and beans.

Ellie: 18:52

Beans? Figs I can see as being the special treat, but beans I wasn't expecting.

David: 18:57

I know, but think of it as a Mediterranean diet. They're like fancy Greek beans. I don't know what kind those would be, but in combination with fig in the fourth century BCE, amazing dessert.

Ellie: 19:09

There are a lot of really good be desserts in Asian cuisines too, so yeah, maybe. Maybe I should be thinking about it more as like a red bean treat than like Yeah. pinto beans and rice, you know.

David: 19:21

like spicy beans from a Mexican plate next to figs. Anyways, so then Glaucon says, Okay, Socrates, this ideal city that you have of all these wheat cakes and drinking wine in moderation and people discussing philosophy. That sounds like a perfect society for pigs. Because there is absolutely, because there's absolutely no luxury. We're human beings. We need feasts. We need banquets. He says we need sauces and sweets and sofas and fancy cakes.

Ellie: 19:57

Yes, so I guess I don't want to, I don't want to be on the side of Glaucon because Glaucon is famously the dud, the whipping boy of the Republic. But I am with him and the idea that figs and beans aren't enough of a treat for us. I want the sauces as well.

David: 20:11

Yeah. And so Glaucon expresses this view that our relationship to food is such that we don't just want food for sustenance. We actually want food for pleasure, for luxury, and for entertainment. taste. And then that's where Socrates says that's not really my view of the ideal polis, but if that's what you want, then you need a much bigger society. You will need international trade to get all these fancy goods that you can't grow in your own city. You will need more land because the population will grow. So you will need a military. You will have to go to war, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so in the Republic, and all of this happens in book two, food plays this really interesting role as the thing that explains why we are political animals in the first place. But it also explains why the polis, as Plato understands it, eventually grows beyond its limits and has the seeds of its own destruction. Because as we all know from the Republic, the whole point of the Republic is that the city state depicted ultimately collapses. And a lot of this hinges on food.

Ellie: 21:24

As long as there's potato salad, I'm in. But it does seem like the concern that Socrates has, yeah, we would have to import the potatoes into Greece. I don't know that potatoes grow in Greece naturally. Then again, what do I know? I'm a philosophy professor, not a botanist. And yeah, correct me if I'm wrong, folks, if potatoes are an indigenous species in Greece. But it does strike me that Socrates's point that in order to meet the needs of this feast culture, we would have to have a like very large society and a lot of importing and exporting is something that we're seeing today for better and definitely for worse. So in thinking about the ethics of the transnational food industry, let's bring in an expert.

Segment: 22:13

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Ellie: 22:34

Shanti Chu is assistant professor of philosophy at the College of Lake County. She has previously published on the ethics and politics of food. With an emphasis on feminist theory, post colonial approaches, and animal ethics. She's also a food critic and has published in Time Out Chicago, Eater Chicago, and more.

David: 22:52

Shanti, it is so nice to have you with us today. Welcome to

Shanti: 22:56

Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here and it's quite an honor to have this conversation with you both.

David: 23:01

We are super thrilled. As many of our listeners know, we've done an episode on taste in the past, and now it's time for us to think about food. And you are the person to go to for this. You are a really interesting philosopher because you are a philosopher, but also a food critic. And my question to you is, how do you feel your training in philosophy has shaped your understanding of food?

Shanti: 23:26

Yeah, I think this is a really interesting question because I feel like food and philosophy have been so disparate for me at times in my life, but I think just with any kind of object of philosophy, philosophy has further complicated my relationship with that object. So from an early age on, I was always interested in food. I was a lover of food. I loved my mom's cooking, and it was when I was in high school when my mom adopted our first dog, and so I started really thinking about the relationship between what I'm eating and ethics and how I didn't see a relevant moral distinction between dogs and animals that I grew up eating, so chicken, beef, etc. And I did want to go vegan. I started, researching the factory farming industry and I wanted to really connect my principles and my ethical ideas to my actions, but I couldn't at the time because I was living at home And then it wasn't until I went to college where I was able to actually live and embody my principles through just going cold turkey vegan at the time. And then I did that for a few years and I went back to being vegetarian. But in college, I also started taking philosophy classes and specifically an ethics class was very foundational to my understanding of how my actions can line up with my principles because when it comes to social justice, it can feel so overwhelming. There are so many issues that are extremely important and it feels like this Really scary web to be a part of and to try to change but I think with food It felt like a very tangible object for me to affect social change through because I eat every day I eat multiple times a day and obviously there are you know structural changes that need to happen, but just in terms of my agency As someone who's attempting to be a moral agent, at least, I felt like I could effect that change through changing what I ate and reading more about it, and also learning about existentialism at the time, and wanting to be consistent in my actions, and also learning about feminism, feminist philosophy, I had read the book the Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams, where she highlights the simultaneous exploitation of women and non human animals. And so I realized at the time that I really can't continue to eat animals or animal products when I identify as a feminist. And I felt like there were a lot of parallels that she pointed out about the absent referent or the idea that women don't own their body parts in very similar ways to how non human animals don't own their body parts. And with my teaching of philosophy, I teach an environmental ethics and a unit on animal ethics and animal justice. And so I had read fast food nation And so fast. Food Nation also helped me think about the simultaneous exploitation of animals, slaughterhouse workers who are oftentimes experiencing sexual violence and are also undocumented, so they can't necessarily bring up these issues in court. And so as I'm writing about food and going to these restaurants, I think just the human and non human animal elements to me are highlighted through my philosophical training.

David: 26:50

So this makes me think about the relationship between food and practical ethics, because of course, food is a very philosophically rich topic, but it's also not very often discussed in philosophy. And I think maybe that could be because modern philosophy has divorced the mind from the body so much that we start losing sight of the things that feed our body and sustain us. But it also seems to me that food is philosophically interesting because it is a site where our bodily needs meet our taste for pleasure, as well as our desire for community with other people, right? So think about sharing a meal with other people around. the table. And so as a philosopher and as a food critic, how would you describe the role that food plays in relation to living the good life?

Shanti: 27:43

Yeah, absolutely. So I would say for lack of a better term that food is an essential ingredient for living the good life. I think at the most basic level of it, food is connected to health, right? We have to be able to eat in order to experience any type of fulfillment in life, flourishing, eudaimonia, and Looking back on some of the philosophers, like the ancient Stoics, ancient Greeks, they talked about and really emphasized the virtues of temperance and moderation. And temperance and moderation always, or inevitably, involve food and what we're eating, how much we're eating, how we're eating. And so the Stoics... were known to be ascetic in how they lived, what they ate. But with the stoic diet, they weren't necessarily vegan or vegetarian, but they did emphasize the importance of being moderate with how much meat one is eating. And so Plato had also talked about in the Republic, how a just society tends to be aligned with eating vegetarian and moderate. And how eating vegetarian can lead to less conflict and war with the idea of not being a part of the violence of murdering animals. So I think those are just some examples of how what we eat and the ways in which we eat can be tied to the good life with respect to health with respect to the common good in a way. I also think about, with this notion of the good life, how we're political and social beings. So I think food is definitely a site for connecting to other people, whether it's family, friends, strangers. I also, and I'm sure you both have noticed this when you eat out or go to different restaurants or different cafes, but this whole notion of Family style dining is really in right now. And oftentimes the server comes to the table and says, we're a small plates restaurant. We really encourage people to share family style. And I think I've been seeing this for like the past 10 years where there's this centrality of sharing food with people. Whereas before, when I would eat out, it would be more focused on individual plates. And this is my dish versus your dish. But I think that there's a perhaps an ever growing desire to connect with people through food as a way of maybe mediating the loneliness we might feel with being more disconnected from one another or especially with the pandemic a lot of people experience that intense loneliness and so turn to social media as a way to connect with people and now that more places are open and people are eating out again or eating together again. Food is a way for people to connect. So this idea of family style dining is really popular these days. And I'm curious what's going to happen in the next 10 years is going to revert back to individual plates or is this whole family style, small plates sharing trend. Is this going to just not be a trend, but just a way that restaurants can be a space for people to experience a good life together. And I also think food can be a non intimidating way for people to share and learn about other cultures. There are so many food travel shows on right now, or just food shows in general, where you have someone who's going to different countries and sharing a meal with an expert in that cuisine from that country, and people who don't necessarily have the means or access to traveling can get just a little taste of what eating in that culture might be like, or eating in that country might be like, and learning about, Why are these ingredients used? How are these ingredients local or indigenous to that country? So I think that those cultural elements of food can be a form of learning and exploration and curiosity in a way that's not perhaps overwhelming or intimidating and more accessible to people.

Ellie: 31:50

Yeah, and one thing I've heard about quite a bit lately is this idea that with the rise of globalization, a lot of local food cultures and recipes are truly being lost to time. And there is an increasing homogeneity of foods around the world. And this is quite worrisome if you think about Like how amazing it is that humans have created all sorts of different recipes over the course of our history in different regions using different local ingredients and a big part of that is the rise of agribusiness and monoculture. Am I using monoculture right? Speaking in a way, speaking about something I don't fully understand. But for instance, the fact that in Afghanistan, there used to be hundreds of different types of rice that were cultivated for different recipes. And now. Like American agribusiness has gotten into the Afghani rice market and increasingly incentivized farmers to grow just like one particular kind of rice. And so we're losing a bunch of the types of rice that used to be grown in Afghanistan. And in your work, you really interestingly drawn post colonial theory to talk about what you call hegemonic food systems. And so I'm curious, Like how and whether you see that in relation to this increase in globalization and the loss of local food cultures, and also what food systems you see as hegemonic in the present moment, and what does it mean to have a hegemonic food system?

Shanti: 33:17

Yeah, I tend to think about hegemonic specifically with food systems in terms of cultural domination and I think the most obvious form of hegemonic food systems would be the meat and dairy factory farming industry, as we know it, the fast food industry. I see them as being wrapped up with globalization, neocolonialism, late stage capitalism. I will say that the meat and dairy factory farming industry and the fast food industries are also part of this nutritional imperialism, where this notion of you need to eat meat, you need to eat dairy to be healthy. And if you don't, there's something wrong with you. There's something deficient. You're not going to be healthy. There's this cultural Western cultural association with eating meat and having like brain power and brain foods and this type of mentality.

Ellie: 34:17

The Jordan Peterson raw meat diet.

Shanti: 34:20

Yeah, exactly. Like it's still a thing. It's still really believed. And I think that's also with the whole Jordan Peterson thing. That's connected to patriarchy and meat patriarchy and the idea that if you're not eating meat and you're a man then you're going to be more feminine and all this fear about eating soy and what it can do to you and so I think that's just...

Ellie: 34:43

but it can give you breasts if you're a man.

Shanti: 34:45

Yeah, it just continues to be a part of how we understand food. And I think with globalization, there's a perpetuation I think of what is referred to as quote, unhealthy Western diets. And if you just travel pretty much on any continent in this world, you will see American fast food. spots. You'll see KFC, you'll see, McDonald's, whatever fast food chain there is, it's every, they're everywhere. And so a lot of these foods that are served at the fast food chain, they tend to be nutrient poor, they tend to be heavily processed foods, lots of sugar, saturated fats, and I think that's an example of the seeming notion of efficiency and the mass industrialization of food intersecting with the structure of the former colonial powers in the global north, having still this tremendous amount of economic sway and cultural sway over formerly colonized nations in the global south. And this tends to be predominantly shouldered by women of color globally, who are the ones traditionally taking care of cooking at home, food production, seed production, carrying food and water for miles, transporting it, etc. This is where the work of A. Breeze Harper, who wrote in her work, Sista Vegan, she specifically talks about Black feminism and how that can be tied to what we eat and to how veganism can be a means of healing specifically for women of color. And this idea of how "decolonizing" one's body from a eurocentric colonizer diet can challenge this notion of what she calls unmindful consumption and self harm and so using an intersectional vegan lens to think about how racism, colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy are all intersecting. And I think food is a very clear space in which these forms of oppression intersect. What I really love about her work too is that there's this unfortunate reputation of veganism being, specifically in the U. S., this white privilege thing, or privilege practice, where you have to go to Whole Foods and you have to spend a bunch of money, and it's such a misconception. I understand why it exists, or why that stereotype exists, but more plant based forms of eating have existed among Indigenous and pre colonial societies, and also... In the U. S., if you look at statistics of people who are vegan or who identify as vegan, it's disproportionately practiced by people who make less than 30k a year. And it's also disproportionately practiced more among Black or African American individuals at 4%, whereas the general population who practices veganism is at 3%. It's really frustrating sometimes when The idea of at least plant based eating is written off as well. That's just a privileged thing when I was doing research for my chapter in the Vegan Studies Lens, there were a lot of accounts where during colonization, this notion of eating meat was tied to virility and strength, and then Food was also used as a weapon of colonial assimilation through British ruled India, where Indian soldiers, who were predominantly Hindu and Muslim, in the mid 19th century were forced to bite this gun cartridge that was greased with a combination of beef and fat, or beef and pig fat. And clearly this is offensive to them. There are specific dietary rules about eating animals. And so it's an example of colonial violence forcing people to eat food that they view as unethical or that goes against their religious practices in this case. Another example of this was how meat and dairy and Western diets are viewed as a form of status. And in 1872, Emperor Meiji had changed this practice. Before, the elite in Japan ate white rice and fish and then it was changed to eating beef in public as a way of showing Hey, we eat this food and we're able to be powerful and Strong and masculine.

David: 39:09

Yeah, and in your work, you do a really good job of talking about all these different axes of power that intersect at the level of food. But of course we can't talk about the politics and the ethics of food without talking about animals, since animals are the primary victims of the violence of those hegemonic food systems that you describe. And that's how you actually began today. You began by talking about your relationship to food vis a vis your awakening in connection to, let's say, animal ethics. Even though animals are the primary victims, I would say, of that hegemonic food system, yet we're also victims of our own meat eating practices, since animal agriculture has caused all sorts of crises. It has caused pandemics, it has caused epidemics. Think about the avian flu, think about mad cow disease. There were also debates early during COVID about where it came from in terms of which animals's flesh, was responsible for transmitting the virus onto human communities. And Also, just meat eating is a leading contributor to climate change. So it's clear that our current ways of eating are not working out very well for animals or for us. And one of the things that you say in one of your publications that really made an impression on me is that because of this, it's time for us to, quote, re imagine the future of food. What does that mean for you, more explicitly?

Shanti: 40:51

it's a necessary cultural economic and political change with respect to reimagining the future of food And for me this means that we cannot continue to rely on animals and exploit them for food production with respect to the factory farming industry because global meat production as you pointed out, it's a major if not one of the largest contributors of greenhouse gas emissions and all of the trains cars and airplanes in the world combined and that is Based off of the UN food and agricultural organization and so The factory farming industry, specifically the farming of cows for beef and dairy, is responsible for methane emissions, and methane emissions are more potent than CO2 emissions. Given this reality, it's just not sustainable and not possible to continue to have this farming industry at the rate and at the level that we have it at. 70 billion land animals, so cows, chickens, goats, sheep. pigs, et cetera, are killed for food every year. So just think about the global emissions that this has and will continue to cause. Animals are an extremely inefficient source of protein because of all the land and water resources that are being used. So animals end up consuming more food than they produce with lower protein efficiencies. And so as a society, We would have to adopt sustainability as a necessary moral framework for our food choices where we are meeting the needs of the present without compromising future generations. And that's clearly the opposite of what we've been doing. And so in order to adopt this moral framework of sustainability, we have to, Become as a society less individualistic and really think about how our daily actions contribute to Climate change because if we don't have an earth anymore, then we can no longer continue to exist, right? It's that simple so even just thinking about if three percent of the global human population ate vegetarian, which is 3%. An individual would save about 105 vertebrates a year. So fish, farm birds, mammals, and it doesn't require everyone to do this. It also doesn't necessarily require everyone to be vegan or always be vegetarian. But people being more thoughtful and mindful about it along with these institutional changes that have to happen and structural changes of abolishing the factory farming industry would be a necessary component. of reimagining how we produce food. I think that the rise of meat alternatives, such as Impossible and Beyond, is a good thing.

Ellie: 43:44

I was gonna ask you about this. What do you think about lab grown meat? Oh wait, you're talking about Impossible. Okay, I want to hear what you think about lab grown meat too, but anyway, sorry, continue.

Shanti: 43:51

No, I was also gonna mention lab grown meat, but specifically with Impossible and Beyond, even though Impossible and Beyond are not necessarily healthy in their very process, I think it gives people who may just really love the taste of burgers or meat an option or an alternative. And I think that having it, it's still pricey, but the price has gone down since when it first came out about six years ago. Obviously, I think that An ideal situation relying on indigenous crops and foods that are indigenous to that country or that region is ideal and but people love how meat tastes and so I think that impossible and beyond are good alternatives for that. And speaking of people loving how meat tastes, lab grown meat is definitely something that I'm interested in reading more about because there is a replication of animal protein. without harming more animals because they're harvesting cells from a living animal and they are supposedly anesthetizing them. So these small sample cells are able to be grown outside of their bodies and The scientists who are in these labs are able to control for cholesterol and fat too which is not something that happens with the factory farming industry You also think about all the hormones that people are consuming when they eat animals So I think lab grown meat is an interesting future because of the fact that you're able to also manipulate the nutrients in a way that you never, that they've never have been able to do before. I think that it's a better alternative than humane farms or humane farming, humane small farms. I'm putting this in quotes because I don't necessarily believe in them being humane.

David: 45:40

Shanti, this has been a wonderful discussion. We encourage all of our listeners to read your work on the philosophy of food.

Ellie: 45:47

And also the food criticism.

David: 45:49

Yes, your food criticism to find out where to go eat out well in Chicago. It's been a pleasure having you with us and we thank you for your time.

Shanti: 45:59

Thank you so much. I absolutely loved our conversation and you two always have me thinking. So thank you so much for that.

Ellie: 46:26

David, it was great to hear Shanti's perspective on food and its relation to what are your thoughts? Sure.

David: 46:33

As I work on animal ethics, and that means that food ethics is something that is always in the vicinity of my work. And I have a lot of thoughts about what we just talked about, including the critique of omnivorism, about lab grown meat. Also, I want to make sure that we talk a little bit about that. But first, let me begin by saying that one thing that became crystallized for me during this discussion with Shanti is the different reasons that one can have for being a vegetarian or vegan. So when we think about what motivates people to change their dietary patterns, we can point to things as different as, of course you have animal ethics concerns. That's the majority of vegetarians possibly who do it for the sake of animal welfare or for animal rights. But if we follow Shanti in believing that hegemonic food systems are also complicit in forms of violence other than speciesism, then one could articulate a feminist reason for giving up meat eating, because of the similarity between the oppression of animals and the oppression of women under meat eating patriarchy. One could also articulate a postcolonial reason for going vegetarian or vegan or even a Marxist economic justice reason given the extremely unjust and exploitative working conditions that hold in factory farms and in meat packaging factories where most of these workers are immigrant workers who work under terrible conditions. And in the same way in which, many of us choose not to say buy certain garments because the garment industry is exploitative of its workers. You could imagine making the same argument about meat eating.

Ellie: 48:28

Yeah, and when we're talking about those different reasons, I think we have to navigate the tricky space between critique that's happening on a social and political level and critique that's happening on a personal level, right? Because I think a lot of times these arguments for vegetarian or veganism instantly become like personal attacks on individuals who eat meat. And so I think I would want to maybe hear more about how we can seek. A world that has more food justice. without necessarily condemning individuals who are eating meat. And I didn't hear that in your point necessarily, David, or in Shanti's, but I think so many people can hear that when arguments about vegetarian and veganism come up, that I just want to really name that as well. And this is always a challenge when we're talking about social and political philosophy and ethical choices that we make in relation to one another. And one thing I found surprising was her noting that Veganism doesn't necessarily track class, because I think she's absolutely right that there is like this narrative in our society that to be vegan is to be wealthy and to have a certain amount of class privilege. But at the same time, I guess it also makes sense from a different perspective when you just think about the cost of meat, too, right? When I think about the people I know who are all about that paleo diet which is a very specific type, especially in Los Angeles those folks tend to be pretty wealthy. And certainly, I think... Like some of the least expensive foods that you can buy are rice and beans or other vegetarian foods.

David: 50:03

And not only does vegetarianism and veganism not coincide with our expectations concerning class, but also concerning race, because a larger proportion of African Americans are vegan than their representation in the general population. So the idea that it's also not just upper class, but white upper class, then seems to be doubly unfounded.

Ellie: 50:27

Yeah, and what did you think about the discussion of lab grown meat, David?

David: 50:31

So I went to a conference in Berkeley, California last year, where the subject of lab grown meat was pretty central. And for utilitarian reasons, I support lab grown meat as long as the original sourcing of the cells is done in a quote unquote ethical manner from the standpoint of animal welfare. Philosophically, I still have some objections to it because it still symbolizes and is the eating of animal flesh, just disembodied and separated from a living organism. But what I really want to say about this is that I do think we need to prepare for a lab grown meat revolution. Because when I went to this conference in Berkeley, a large number of the attendees were not even academics or activists, they were venture capitalists. It was my first conference in the academic circuit that I've ever gone to in which this was true. And it's because there were these like startups and these hedge funds looking for where to invest money that have identified lab grown meat as the next great quote unquote disruptor of the market.

Ellie: 51:43

Last year was cannabis, now it's lab grown meat.

David: 51:46

And next year, it's going to be lab grown cannabis sourced from ethical meat.

Ellie: 51:53

I think the point about lab grown meat is also interesting from the perspective of that anxiety around novel foods that we talked about in the beginning of the episode because I'll just be honest here. For some reason, The idea of lab grown meat grosses me out. And that doesn't mean that I wouldn't eat it, especially over if I had the, if it were widely available and I could eat it, I would definitely choose it over eating meat from a living animal who's been, or I guess,

David: 52:19

Who has definitely been killed.

Ellie: 52:23

yikes, okay, sorry, I would definitely, yeah, choose to eat it over a real, the meat of a real animal. However, Something about picturing a petri dish of cells that are becoming steak triggers a disgust reaction for me that I think Claude Fischler would associate with the anxiety about novel foods, which is evolutionarily explained by the fact that novel foods have been dangerous for our ancestors, even as we need to seek them out in order to get nutrition.

David: 52:53

Yeah, and maybe a hesitation just over the Franken-element, the fact that it is something that is produced through technology rather than quote unquote through nature, even though, of course, we know that most of the meat that we eat from quote unquote natural animals. They're not really natural animals at all. They've been denatured by animal agriculture and agribusiness. But yeah, I think the disgust at the technological artificial origin is the obstacle that whatever this new wave of interest in lab grown meat Whatever it is, it will have to overcome that.

Ellie: 53:29

Well, And our whole discussion with Shanti, whether we're speaking about this novel form of food or the problems with our economy, our global economy of food from a gender and postcolonial lens, makes me think that as appealing as Levinas's idea that eating is a fundamental source of our self affirmation in which we're transforming the other into the same. It's somewhat naive because it overlooks the way that our very food is part of this broader economy that includes other beings, that includes animals, and so on and so forth. And Levinas famously wants to say that eating doesn't involve the other as other because it's just like a transmutation of the other into the same. I think you could argue following our interview with Shanti that that point involves a failure to recognize the other people, often in the global south, who are producing the food, and, the animals who are being eaten, and so on and so forth.

David: 54:28

Well, And It also seems like it ignores the second stage of eating food. Because the first stage, which is intake, is where the other becomes self. But then the second expulsion moment is when the self becomes other.

Segment: 54:44

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Consider supporting us on Patreon for exclusive access to bonus content, live Q& As, and more. And thanks to those of you who already do. To reach out to us and find episode info. Go to overthinkpodcast. com and connect with us on Twitter and Instagram at overthink underscore pod. We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant, Emilio Esquivel Marquez, and Samuel P. K. Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.