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The ghosts of taste: food and the cultural politics of authenticity
Kaelyn Stiles •O
¨zlem Altıok •Michael M. Bell
Accepted: 16 February 2010
Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
Abstract We add a political culture dimension to the
debate over the politics of food. Central to food politics is
the cultural granting of authenticity, experienced through
the conjuring of relational presences of authorship. These
presences derive from the faces and the places of rela-
tionality, what we term the ghosts of taste, by which food
narratives articulate claims of the authorship of food by
people and environments, and thus claim of authenticity. In
this paper, we trace the often-conflicting presences of
authenticating ghosts in food along a prominent axis of
current debate: the local versus the global. The three cases
outlined here—Greek food, Thousand Island dressing, and
wild rice—illustrate the recovery and suppression of the
lingering spirits of both local and global faces and places in
what we taste, and show the mutually interdependent
consequence of culture and economics in food politics.
Keywords Place Food Localism Food systems
Agriculture Authenticity
Introduction
A cheeseburger is more than a bun, a beef patty, and a slice
of cheese. A cheeseburger, like any item of food, is a
complex set of relations, social and environmental.
Such an observation, even of a cheeseburger, has
become a hallmark of the local foods movement, which
uses phrases such as ‘‘from farm to table’’ to make this
point. In the state of Washington, the Cascade Harvest
Coalition ‘‘represents the diverse range of Washington
interests for healthy food and farm systems, from the farm
gate to the dinner plate’’ (Cascade Harvest Coalition 2007).
Or, in New York State, the Farm to Table Initiative of
Earth Pledge advocates ‘‘good food, close to home’’ (Earth
Pledge 2006). Niman Ranch promotes its network of 500
pasture-based family farmers with the The Niman ranch
cookbook: From farm to table with America’s finest meat
(Niman and Fletcher 2005), emphasizing sustainability,
animal welfare, and traceability.
But McDonald’s, it appears, agrees, which presents an
analytic puzzle for those who see a relational understand-
ing of food as a challenge to corporate food ways. At least
McDonald’s recently claimed as much in its own ‘‘farm to
table’’ campaign (McDonald’s Corporation 2005). Vonetta
Flowers, winner of a 2002 Olympic Gold medal in bob
sled, presented this glitzy Internet infomercial, explaining
that,
I want to know that the foods my family enjoys are
high quality. And McDonald’s has opened their
kitchen doors to share the source of some of their
foods. So come with me for a behind the scenes tour
and discover how McDonald’s most popular meals
make their way from the farm to the table.
These contrasting narratives of the relations of ‘‘farm to
table’’ open the door to the approach we take in the analysis
of food politics. Most previous debate has focused on
political economic approaches, such as the conventional-
ization thesis in organic agriculture (Best 2008; Guptill
2009; Guthman 2004; Hinrichs 2003; Legun forthcoming;
Rosin and Campbell 2009) and the debate over whether
local food initiatives represent the promotion of neoliberal
subjectivity (Allen and Guthman 2006; Guthman 2007;
K. Stiles (&)O
¨. Altıok M. M. Bell
Department of Community and Environmental Sociology,
University of Wisconsin-Madison, 350 Agricultural Hall,
1450 Linden Drive, Madison, WI 53706-1393, USA
e-mail: kstiles@ssc.wisc.edu
123
Agric Hum Values
DOI 10.1007/s10460-010-9265-y
Kloppenburg and Hassanein 2006; Smithers et al. 2008).
Our purpose is not to contest the value of political
economic analysis of food politics. However, the discus-
sion in these debates tends to bring culture in mainly as an
effect of economics—continuing, at least by implication,
the hierarchy of base and superstructure that has long
characterized most political economic work. Unless it is
more broadly contextualized, the critique of neoliberal
subjectivity, in which capitalist relations encourage us to
try to shop our way to a better world, manifests this
hierarchy by making consumption an effect of capital. In
contrast, we take a political culture approach that, com-
bined with political economy, provides that broader context
by considering culture and economics as interdependent in
food politics.
We trace the power of political culture through narra-
tives of food authenticity. Central to these narratives of
authenticity are what we will term the ghosts of taste: the
conjuring of presences in food, which make claims of
appropriate social relations. These ghosts include the faces
and places of relationality, by which food narratives claim
authorship of food by people and environments—farmers
and farms, say—and thus claim authenticity. The ghosts of
taste are symbolic connections that people make with their
food either through labels, commercials, or histories. From
these everyday se
´ances come spirited possessions that can
shiver the physical sensations of taste, shaping what, and
whom, tingles the tongue. The ghosts of taste reveal
themselves in the ways we perceive the quality or taste of
food. They enliven food with the phantoms of people and
environments and can also enliven claims of food as
property—as the possessions of particular faces and places.
The ghostly gastronomy of authenticity thereby connects
political culture and political economy.
What is striking in the two narratives of ‘‘farm to table’’
that we sketched in the article’s opening, and in the three
extended cases that make up the bulk of this paper, is how,
out of the myriad possibilities, each narrative activates
particular ghosts of faces and places in what we taste. In
the case of McDonald’s, the ghosts arise from dominantly
(but not exclusively) global faces and places. All food,
even a McDonald’s cheeseburger, derives its authenticity
by prioritizing certain connections or social relations over
others. The local foods movement predominantly invokes
the ghosts of the local. These different ghostly presences
inure in the specific politics each food embodies, on whose
behalf the ghosts of taste argue.
The faces and places of authenticity
Let us consider in more detail the relations McDonald’s
invoked in its farm to table infomercial. ‘‘There are few
things more American, or more deliciously fun, than a
McDonald’s cheeseburger,’’ the infomercial effuses. ‘‘A
McDonald’s hamburger patty is 100% pure USDA
inspected beef—no additives, no fillers, no extenders,’’ it
contends, adding that OSI Industries ‘‘has been McDon-
ald’s quality beef suppliers since the restaurant opened its
doors more than 50 years ago’’ and ‘‘employs some of the
strictest inspectors in the business today.’’ The viewer
hears about the ‘‘Tennessee bun process’’ which, in ‘‘a
sleek, state of the art bakery,’’ makes the buns ‘‘using the
traditional sponge and dough method.’’ But even though
the facility ‘‘bakes an amazing 60,000 buns per hour’’ its
‘‘volume does not compromise quality because people like
Foster Hawkins make sure it doesn’t.’’ Mr. Hawkins, a bun
inspector, then appears to explain that ‘‘when I taste the
McDonald’s regular hamburger bun, I’m looking for a nice,
bready, yeast flavor, with a nice, subtle, toasted hint.’’ And
then the scene shifts to the cheese, affirming its source
from ‘‘quality suppliers such as Kraft, a brand you already
count on for great taste’’ with a ‘‘special blend of pas-
teurized American cheese developed especially for
McDonald’s.’’ Along the way, the viewer sees images of
inspectors in hair nets, computerized equipment, the well-
maintained corporate exteriors of these facilities, and the
corporate logos of McDonald’s suppliers like OSI (one of
the world’s largest food processors, with facilities on six
continents), the Tennessee Bun Company, and Kraft. In
these ways, the infomercial allows McDonald’s to respond
to consumers’ demands to know the origins of their food,
albeit with little reference to farms or farmers, aside from a
shot of waving wheat and a brief image of a tree (which we
discuss later).
For local food efforts like Niman Ranch and the Cascade
Harvest Coalition, ‘‘farm to table’’ is about renewing the
local relations of food. They emphasize making personal
connections to farms and farmers through what is often
called ‘‘food with the farmer’s face,’’ or through the faces
and places of heritage in ‘‘heirloom’’ crop varieties (cf.
Jordan 2007). The prominent local food advocate Elliot
Coleman calls this ‘‘real food.’’ As Coleman puts it, ‘‘The
interesting thing about Real Food is that everyone knows
what it is. Real Food is the stuff that comes from the
farmers’’ (Newbury and Phelps 2005). From this perspec-
tive, hardly anything could be less place-based and face-
based, and thus less authentic, than a McDonald’s
cheeseburger.
So what is going on? One easy answer rooted in political
economy is that McDonald’s wants to make money, and
that their infomercial perverts widely popular cultural
language for economic ends. But that answer misses the
opportunity to understand why this cultural language works
and how McDonald’s and local food advocates can marshal
it to such different ends. McDonald’s use of the farm-to-
K. Stiles et al.
123
table narrative is in such a different key that local food
advocates would likely regard its claim as the antithesis of
authenticity. But although the key may be different,
McDonald’s plays many elements of the same tune, cen-
tering on the authenticity of place and face, likely in
response to local food narratives—albeit with quite dif-
ferent resonances.
Let us consider place first. McDonald’s farm-to-table
infomercial connects to place by claiming that ‘‘there are
few things more American’’ than one of its cheeseburgers
with its ‘‘American cheese,’’ but also to a finer-grained
sense of place through the images of factory production
lines, laboratories, and buildings, and through the idea of a
‘‘Tennessee’’ bun process. The food comes from
‘‘McDonald’s kitchen,’’ the infomercial comforts, whose
doors their food to table campaign opened. The precise
locality of these finer-grained places was unspecified, or
even unspecifiable, as in the notion of a McDonald’s
kitchen that Vonetta Flowers described in the infomercial’s
opening lines. As well, there is a geographic vagueness to
the claim of connection to America and, to a lesser extent,
Tennessee. The campaign presents all these as global
places, as opposed to the spatially specific sense of local
places constructed by local food advocates. But this is a
placed-based language nonetheless.
Plus, faces are connected to this food. Vonetta Flowers.
Foster Hawkins. The unnamed workers in lab coats and
hair nets. And the brands with their logo-faces—OSI, the
Tennessee Bun Company, Kraft—distinctive visages
whereby we may recognize a sense of relation. McDon-
ald’s presents what we might term global faces, the inter-
national logo, the world-renowned athlete, the
representative food quality assurance specialist, as opposed
to the spatially specific local faces of the farmers that the
local food movement exhorts us to reconnect with.
Moreover, McDonald’s tries to conjure a sense of
authenticity that one can trust. McDonald’s primary claim
of authenticity was what we call the global real of science,
government safety standards, governmental safety stan-
dards exceeded, and consistent products that never vary in
their quality and taste no matter the volume, as opposed to
what we call the spatially specific local real of knowing on
a day-to-day basis the producer of your food. Both are
claims for food authenticity, despite the different bases of
their assertions.
It is hazardous to dichotomize the local and the global,
however, and McDonald’s ad writers are clever enough to
appreciate the potential loss of rhetorical power that can
result. If a product’s case can be made on both the grounds
of the local and global, why not use both, all other things
being culturally equal? Vonetta Flowers and Foster Haw-
kins may be global faces, but their speech and self-pre-
sentation are in cadences that viewers can immediately
recognize as specific to ‘‘America’’ as a locality, however
big, underscoring McDonald’s claim of the American-ness
of the cheeseburger. McDonald’s local connections also
extend beyond America to Asia as illustrated in the edited
volume, Golden Arches East (Watson 1997).This book
explains how, in five Asian settings, McDonald’s has
become a local institution by culturally embedding itself in
local values and traditions, a process that seems to have
been as much driven by the consumers as the corporation.
These comforting and local familiarities lend a friendly
kind of local real to the potentially alienating pitch of a
purely global real. But there are limits to how far
McDonald’s is likely to ever depart from the global nar-
rative of the ghosts of taste, limits set by the interaction of
political economy and political culture. By focusing their
narrative of the ghosts of taste on non-spatially specific
imagery, McDonald’s is in a far better position to market
their products across the globe.
It is also important to note that the local real of local
place and local face is not necessarily local in the food-
miles sense, as Hinrichs (2003) and Kloppenburg and
Hassanein (2006) both observe. For example, Niman
Ranch sells its farm-to-table products all across the US, and
fair trade ventures like Britain’s Fair Tracing Project seek
to give face and place ‘‘to individual items so that they can
be tracked, and their stories recorded, as they move from
farm to table,’’ with ideas such as ‘‘transnational CSAs’’
(Community Supported Agriculture) (Rich 2007) and ‘‘fair
miles’’ (Chi et al. 2009). This suggests that what makes the
food both ‘‘local’’ and ‘‘real’’ for these advocates is that the
food is local to a specific, knowable locality and the spe-
cific, knowable people in that locality, not necessarily that
the food comes from close at hand. The local food move-
ment is sometimes criticized as being mainly food-miles
based (Allen and Guthman 2006; Dupuis and Goodman
2005), but our reading is that the narrative is broader
(Kloppenburg and Hassanein 2006) and indeed predates the
notion of food-miles, as in the centuries old French idea of
terroir. The core idea lies in claims to the distinctive,
irreproducible properties of specific places and faces as
sources of authenticity, as opposed to the non-specifiable,
and therefore freely reproducible, claims of the faces and
places of the global real.
Ghosts and authenticities
But although they do so in different ways, both narratives
of farm to table make their case for authenticity through the
conjuring of specific ghosts of taste. To taste is to tran-
scend—to cross boundaries of body and space. Substances
from elsewhere enter the here-and-now locale of our own
embodiment. Eating is an extension, a connection; it is, as
The ghosts of taste
123
both local food advocates and McDonald’s emphasize, a
relational act. To experience food is often to experience the
cultural power of the ‘‘ghosts of place’’—the sense of the
presence of those who are not physically there (Bell 1997).
These might be ghosts of ownership, of the historical past,
of a personal past, or of any of the myriad claims social life
engenders. In all of these ghosts, we sense social relations
of place and our own place in those relations. So too with
food. To experience food as a relational act is to experience
in that food the presence of those who are not there—
lingering spirits that we sense in the food—whether that be
the inspectors in McDonald’s corporate kitchens or the
farmers in the local farmers market. To experience food
relationally is to experience food as possessed, possessed
by the faces and places of food and the relations of face and
place these mutually imply.
Ghostly as these possessions are, however, nothing
could be more real—and more political. The feelings we
have about food cannot be reduced to the materiality of
food or to economic practices. We see a cheeseburger
before us. We do not see the forms of labor that produced
it, the people who did that labor, and the places of those
people and that labor. Yet it is these unseen attributes that
conjure for us the real relations of the cheeseburger, the
real relations that possess it. This sense of possession is as
well a sense of the political, for to possess is both to
attribute presence and to deny presence—to attribute some
presences and to deny others. Possession thereby can
become ownership, a sense of rightful possession. The pun
here is no accident. Possessed food is food with claims on
it, and is thus immediately cultural and economic in its
ramifications.
It is these claims that we taste in debates over the
authenticity of food. Local food advocates typically invoke
the notion of authenticity in the sense of the local real, with
its authorship by local places and faces. But some scholars
have started to unpack this notion of authenticity and the
ways in which representation of authenticity is negotiated
for new markets. The construction of authenticity must
occur within the parameters of changing food regulations
and requirements, creating contradictions between tradi-
tional production techniques and new global realities
(Tregear 2003; Grasseni 2003; Pratt 2007). But whereas
previous literature focused on the relationship between
authenticity and markets, we seek to extend this conver-
sation into the realm of culture by contending that
authenticity is any claim of presence through a claim of
authorship. Indeed, ‘‘author’’ is the etymological root of
authenticity, focusing our thoughts on presumptions of the
originators of the thing under consideration. Culturally, we
in the West grant a special, and generally strong, claim of
possession to authors, those deemed to have originated or
given birth to a thing or a place. Not all ghosts claim
authorship; as we note above, some may only claim legal
ownership, for example, as with possession of commodi-
ties. But from a claim of an authoring presence, whether
that presence be a place or a face, or both, come potential
claims for the rights of possession that transcend merely
legal claims.
The ghosts of taste, then, are the sense of real presence
in food of the places and faces of the social. To the extent
that all food is experienced socially, all food has ghosts.
We experience these real faces and places in memories,
anticipations, emotions, feelings of trust, and other expe-
riences of social relations and possessions that are evoked,
or not, when we consider particular foods. To taste food is
to taste the embers of sociality. It is often as well to taste
conflict over the ghostly presences of the authentic, to the
extent that these ghosts are experienced as authoring
presences. As we will describe, the ghosts of taste are not
only in the mind, but even in the tongue, influencing the
flavor and tang of the material food in our mouths.
In the three cases that follow, we trace the conflicting
presences of these authenticating ghosts along that promi-
nent axis of current debate: the local versus the global. This
axis is by no means the only potential basis for the acti-
vation of difference in the ghosts of taste. We highlight it
here in order to offer another perspective on this increas-
ingly complex literature. We trace first the suppression of
global faces and places in the production and consumption
of authenticity in Greek ethnic restaurants. Second, we
track the conflicts over the recovery of local faces and
places in the constitution of authentic Thousand Islands
dressing. And third, in the case of wild rice, we investigate
how competing claims of authenticity can turn into claims
for legal ownership. In all three cases, then, we interrogate
food’s ghostly politics of the real—and of the real politics
of both culture and economy.
Case 1: Greek restaurants
Parthenon Gyros, a family-owned restaurant located on a
busy downtown street in Madison, Wisconsin, is almost
impossible to miss with its off-white Doric columns. The
name ‘‘Parthenon Gyros’’ is mounted on the main beam in
the quintessentially Greek font, the same font you see on
the label of many brands of feta cheese. At lunchtime, the
gyro meat slowly turns on a skewer, and is straight ahead as
you walk through the door. Your ears fill with music from
cheerful strings, also unmistakably Greek. Ordering gyro
sandwiches is quick. You could be eating in about 2 min:
thinly sliced pieces of meat, onions, tomatoes, and yogurt
sauce overflowing the pita bread. In the dining room, Greek
columns and photos of ruins of ancient Greece, as well as
modern harbor scenes, line the walls. The food and the
de
´cor transport you to Greece.
K. Stiles et al.
123
But from where was the food transported to you? The
guy behind the counter answers that the meat comes from
University of Wisconsin provisioning; ‘‘pita, tomatoes
and onions and other things’’ all come from a wholesaler
in Chicago, as does the baklava. For all their place
specific referents, many ethnic foods are now global
commodities, and Greek food is no exception. Olives,
feta cheese, pita bread, beef, lamb, tomatoes, and lettuce
are exchanged in the global market. This means the gyro
sandwich you bite into in the US likely does not feature
ingredients from Greece. Even in Greece, most ingredi-
ents of the gyro sandwich you bite into might not be
from there. Greece is a food import-dependent country. In
2004, Greece imported $6.2 billion in agricultural and
food products and exported $3.2 billion (USDA Foreign
Agricultural Service 2006). But if it is not the origin of
the ingredients, then what is it that makes Greek food
‘‘authentic’’?
It is probably not the way that it is prepared. Although
consumption of frozen foods is increasing in Greece, per
capita consumption of frozen foods remains among the
lowest in Europe with only about 30% of households
having freezers and the same percentage with microwaves
(Synodinou 2001). Yet most Greek restaurants in the US
use at least some frozen products and have freezers and
microwaves as well as automated tea and coffee makers
and likely other cooking equipment not commonly found in
Greek homes. Nevertheless many in Madison still find
Parthenon Gyros transporting, and therefore it retains both
global and local authenticity.
This sense of authenticity remains because many con-
sumers of Greek food either do not know about or overlook
these potential threats to the presence of Greek face and
place in the food they taste at Parthenon Gyros. For them,
the ghosts remain, and they hardly seem presences that the
owners of Greek restaurants would like to exorcise—quite
the reverse. But when someone recognizes the globaliza-
tion of Greek food, a threat to authenticity, and thus to the
physical taste itself, emerges. Take this participant on a
web forum, who asks for advice on an authentic Greek
place to eat in Britain:
By authentic I mean cooked by Cypriots because in
the UK it seems that a lot of Greek restaurants I go to
the chefs aren’t Greek and because of this the food is
never the same as it is at restaurants with Greek
chefs….It’s not that I have anything against chefs of
other nationalities; it’s just never the same. For
example, you wouldn’t go to a Chinese restaurant and
the chef was Indian and expect it to be the same, so
basically I would really appreciate it if anyone knew
of any decent restaurants where the food is of high
standards. I hope I haven’t offended anyone. I’m not
snobby; it’s just my girlfriend is Greek so I know the
difference (Authentic Greek Food 2006).
Cultural relations limit the economic reach of what can be
marketed as authentic Greek food. The threat to taste posed
by non-Greek chefs in Greek restaurants is not limited to
the UK. For example, small Greek restaurants in the US are
typically run by families, although not necessarily by
Greek families. In fact, many Greek restaurants in the US
are owned and run by immigrants of Arab descent. Yet they
present themselves as ‘‘Greek’’ restaurants, suppressing
some presences in the food they offer and conjuring up
others. Take one Greek restaurant in central Texas,
operated by first-generation Arab immigrants. Responding
to a question about why they do not call their restaurant
Syrian or Arab, one of them explained: ‘‘People here know
this name, Greek food. Do you think people would come
here if I called it Syrian food or Arab food? Especially
after, you know, what happened [referring to September
11]?’’
Thus in the case of some Greek restaurants, we see the
suppression of the global, of the non-local faces and places
with relationships to Greek food, in order to produce an
authenticity based upon the local real, and thus to gain
sales. Other ghosts of taste are imaginable for Greek food.
For example, one might imagine, in some settings, a Greek
restaurant that celebrated its cuisine as a rich product of
Arab, Persian, Turkish, and Greek cultures. After all, one
of the reasons that Arab immigrants are represented in the
Greek restaurant business is their familiarity with Greek
cuisine and the broad similarity of the food of all the
countries of the eastern Mediterranean. Such familiarity
and similarity is no coincidence; it is a product of history.
For several centuries Greeks, Arabs, Persians, and Turks,
among others, lived under Ottoman rule. Many of the items
on the menu of a Greek restaurant—such as dolmades,
babaghanoush, moussakka, tzatziki, salata, and baklava—
are common to these disparate cultures’ cuisines as well.
But one narrative is limited by the reach of others. To
recognize the diversity of Greek history in this way would
run counter to widespread representations of a cultural
‘‘clash’’ between West and East—between Greece, the
cradle of Western civilization and the forerunner of Wes-
tern democracy, and the so-called ‘‘Arab world.’’ It seems
to us that such counter ghosts of taste, ghosts that do not
reproduce and solidify imagined boundaries between West
and East, would be very much worth savoring in Greek
food. But, alas, we generally like our ghosts of taste to be
pure, simple, and readily understandable, particularly as we
are standing outside on the street deciding which restaurant
to try and perhaps coming to a decision among a group of
friends. Culture limits economy, but economy also limits
culture.
The ghosts of taste
123
Such immaturity of the palate’s politics, if we may term
it that, has its parallels in other ghosts too. Indeed, consider
the Parthenon itself, the icon of many Greek restaurants.
The name of the temple, Parthenon, derives from one of the
epithets of the Goddess Athena to whom the temple was
dedicated. Parthenon refers to the Goddess’s unmarried and
virginal status; her purity. But in purity there is almost
always suppression, ghosts exorcised as others are con-
jured. Call it the ‘‘Parthenon effect’’—an effect whose
transporting powers probably every owner of every Greek
restaurant anticipates customers will feel.
Indeed, the Parthenon effect has been applied to the
Parthenon itself. That most recognized example of Greek
architecture itself is majestic, pure, and authentic arguably
for what it suppresses. Shortly after the Ottomans took
control of Greece in 1456, they added a minaret to the
Parthenon. The minaret remained a part of the Parthenon,
for centuries, right at the heart of the Acropolis for all to
see. The minaret’s base and stairway are inside the Par-
thenon today, still intact, but its top portion was removed
following Greek independence in the 19th century, ren-
dering the minaret invisible from the outside. Similarly, the
constitution of ‘‘authentic’’ Greek food actively renders
invisible some of the presences that could constitute it.
Authenticity, nevertheless, is as much about what is left
outside the frame as it is about what is inside.
Case 2: Thousand Island dressing
Thousand Island dressing is not something that commonly
invokes the passions. At least this must be confessed for the
industrialized glop that most people know as Thousand
Island dressing: that pale pink melding of two other highly
industrialized products, catsup and mayonnaise, with a
variety of other processed components including dehy-
drated onion, green hamburger relish, garlic powder,
pickles, and occasional substitutes for the catsup, such as
tomato soup or chili sauce. Some recipes do suggest a
modicum of fresh ingredients, such as a bit of chopped
green pepper or cucumber. But it is mostly an open-some-
bottles-and-combine sort of thing—if you do it at home.
And why bother? With something so processed even in its
ingredients, there is little, if anything, to be lost in pur-
chasing a bottle of the stuff right off the shelf. Indeed, there
is one recipe (currently online at cooks.com) for Thousand
Island dressing that, in an exuberance of the aesthetic of
industrialism, even includes bottled Thousand Island
dressing as a principle ingredient in Thousand Island
dressing one makes at home. There can be few more
industrialized food products on the planet, and few that are
more widely available. We have made something of a
small hobby of collecting Thousand Island dressing labels,
and have found them from the US, Canada, the UK,
Germany, the Philippines, the Netherlands, the Ukraine,
Poland, and Israel. A globalized goo.
But one of us, Michael Bell, does feel passionate about
it, precisely because its globalized gooeyness has all but
wiped out a sense of place and face, despite the place
reference of its name: Thousand Island. There is a region of
the world actually called the Thousand Islands, in the
plural, and a branch of Mike’s family hails from there. We
insert ‘‘actually’’ in the previous sentence to conjure the
sniffy pride Mike feels on the subject after discovering that
most people have heard of the Thousand Islands only
through the name of a dressing, but have no idea where this
region is. Indeed, they are often surprised, generally
pleasantly, to learn that there ‘‘actually’’ is a place called
the Thousand Islands—that is the Thousands Islands in the
plural—a specific local place, not a global place on a label
unconcerned with the ‘‘actual’’ name and specific locale.
And there are the ghosts of local faces as well in
Thousand Island dressing, including, as we will come to,
Mike himself. The tourist industry in the Thousand Islands
likes to promote a locally based claim for the origin of
Thousand Island dressing. The center of the tourist trade is
a faux, 150-room Rhinelander castle built by a Gilded Age
multi-millionaire, George C. Boldt, who made his riches
managing the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. One
evening in 1894, according to a common version of the
events, Boldt’s head chef, Oscar Tschirsky, served a new
dressing to the guests staying on Boldt’s yacht, his floating
home while the castle was under construction. Everyone
loved it, and Boldt gave it the name ‘‘Thousand Island
dressing’’ (or perhaps ‘‘Thousand Islands dressing’’ in the
plural) and ordered it placed on the menu of the Waldorf-
Astoria, where it soon became immensely popular.
At least this is the story told on the main tourism website
for Alexandria Bay, New York, which lies directly opposite
the castle, now known universally as Boldt Castle (Com-
munitySights 2003). Alexandria Bay is a staggeringly
kitschy tourist town, whose main draw is its proximity to
the castle and whose main street is now a line of gift shops
hawking t-shirts, bric-a-brac, and, of course, Thousand
Island dressing, there for those who do not mind paying
double for the experience of buying a bottle in sight of the
castle.
In Clayton, a Thousand Islands tourist town just a few
miles up the river from Alexandria Bay, the chamber of
commerce website tells a different story. ‘‘Thousand Island
dressing was first served to the dining public,’’ we are
informed, at Clayton’s Thousand Islands Inn, ‘‘the last of
the dozens of turn of the century hotels’’ (Clayton Chamber
of Commerce 2007). The Thousand Islands Inn’s own site
gives the details (Thousand Islands Inn 2007). According
to this version of the events, Thousand Island dressing was
invented by Sophia Lalonde, the wife of a local fishing
K. Stiles et al.
123
guide, whose husband used to serve the dressing as part of
the shore dinners for his fishing parties. One party included
the actress May Irwin, who loved the dressing, named it
Thousand Island dressing (or perhaps Thousand Islands
dressing) and later passed the recipe onto George Boldt,
who in turn passed it onto Oscar Tschirsky, who popular-
ized it in Boldt’s hotels. A little further down the page,
there is a link to where you can ‘‘order our dressing
online!’’ in the form of three pink bottles, artfully
packaged.
And on Grenadier and Tar Islands, where various
branches of Mike’s family used to farm, and still own some
summer cottages, the residents tell yet a third story. Mike’s
elderly neighbor, Maria Angebault, claims that the real
Thousand Island dressing was invented by her deceased
husband’s French father, who came to North America as a
chef for visiting British royalty, but was hired away by Mr.
Boldt. While working for Mr. Boldt, old Mr. Angebault
invented a French style dressing whose recipe Maria does
not remember except that it was quite unlike what we know
today as Thousand Island dressing. But old Mr. Angebault
sold the rights to the name to Mr. Boldt’s head chef, Oscar
Tschirsky, who applied it to a dressing of his own, the
Thousand Island dressing of today.
Mike first heard this story 10 years or so ago from
Maria, and then, by chance 1 day, found some corrobo-
rating evidence at home in his own kitchen: his family’s
battered copy of the 11th edition of The Fannie Farmer
Cookbook (Farmer 1965). There, on page 288, one reads
that Thousand Island dressing is a mixture of olive oil,
orange juice, lemon juice, onion juice, mustard, olives,
parsley, and a dash of Worcestershire—a very French style
of dressing, which, Mike likes to point out, depends on
some fresh ingredients and is, in his view, a heck of a lot
tastier than the usual recipe. On page 289, one encounters a
dressing Fannie Farmer calls ‘‘Astoria dressing,’’ a may-
onnaise and catsup concoction that closely resembles what
is most widely recognized today as Thousand Island
dressing, albeit in this case with a dash of Tabasco and a
sizeable admixture of ‘‘French dressing’’—which Fannie
Farmer elsewhere (p. 287) describes as the ‘‘classic for-
mula’’ of oil and vinegar, which is best made ahead of time
‘‘in quantity.’’ It is a recipe that one can make merely by
opening up bottles and mixing, especially nowadays when
‘‘French dressing’’ is another of those bottles in the
dressing section of the supermarket. But there is no trace of
the name Astoria dressing in contemporary cookbooks or
supermarket shelves, which fits nicely with Maria’s story
that Oscar Tschirsky, who managed the kitchens at the
Waldorf-Astoria, renamed the dressing he had already been
serving at the hotel.
Mike’s family and the neighbors exalted when he
pointed out the corroboration in Fannie Farmer. For them,
Thousand Island dressing is an abomination. It gets the
name of the region wrong. It tastes bad, from the perspec-
tive of contemporary upper-middle-class taste. And it rep-
resents the kitschy swamping of that taste by the tourist
industry and its intrusion of the global into a local place
that, despite their current summer-only residence, the cot-
tagers of Tar and Grenadier claim as their own. They may
be just cottagers now, and feel some illegitimacy in that, but
they are all also ready to tell everyone just how long their
families have been coming up to summer in the region,
dating back a 100 years or more in some cases. In Mike’s
case, family members love to pull out a little trump card of
authenticity: the fact that, generations ago, some family
branches were farmers on Grenadier, and that the oldest
gravestone in the Grenadier Island cemetery is that of
Mike’s five-times great grandfather. Maria’s story of the
real Thousand Islands (in the plural) dressing, so dependent
on fresh ingredients like orange, lemon, and onion juice and
thus so difficult to turn into a global goo through industri-
alization, becomes another trump card of local authenticity.
Unfortunately for all the local accounts, however, an
earlier edition of Fannie Farmer’s The Boston cooking-
school cookbook (1924) complicates matters. The 4th
edition from 1924 calls the Thousand Island dressing of
1965s 11th edition ‘‘St. Lawrence dressing,’’ and calls a
mixture of Russian dressing with cream ‘‘Thousand Island
dressing’’—a recipe that seems to have completely disap-
peared today.
Is there a real Thousand Islands dressing? We do not
care to attempt that question here. Rather, we tell this
complex story to point out the politics of its varying ghosts
of gustatory authenticity. All three accounts—those of
Alexandria Bay, Clayton, and the residents of Tar and
Grenadier Islands—represent attempts to reclaim Thousand
Island dressing as imbued with local place, not mere global
place.
All three accounts as well invoke local faces: George
Boldt, Oscar Tschirsky, Sophia Lalonde, old Mr. Ange-
bault. And they conjure the ghosts of these places and faces
in Thousand Islands dressing for particular social purpose:
to establish the authenticating presence of authorship, with
all its implications for the politics of possession. The
reality here is that the attempt to recover an authentic local
real from the global is a political attempt of both economic
and cultural significance. For Alexandria Bay and Clayton,
the tourist trade depends on the success of the region’s
efforts to market, perhaps paradoxically, the local to the
global. For the residents of Tar and Grenadier Islands, their
narrative of the dressing grants some local authenticity to
those whose economic status—upper-middle-class profes-
sionalism, with its spatial mobility—otherwise offers so
little opportunity for local claims of the real. And for all,
Thousand Island dressing is a bottle of genies, very much
The ghosts of taste
123
in the plural, the haunted taste of the faces and places of
economic and cultural politics.
Case 3: the ownership of wild rice
The Anishinaabe, the native people of the Great Lakes
region of Minnesota, come together each year on the lakes
of Minnesota to harvest rice. Historically the entire com-
munity gathered in rice harvesting camps for several
weeks, but today they use cars to commute between home
and the rice lakes. Still, the rice harvest is a big event. Pairs
of Anishinaabe harvesters, husband and wife, siblings, or
friends, take canoes onto the lakes to gather the rice. The
harvesting practices remain little changed from 2,500 years
ago. Most Anishinaabe today use aluminum rather than the
traditional birch bark canoes, but otherwise use traditional
rice harvesting techniques. Typically one person steers the
canoe through thick patches of rice with a long pole while
the other uses two shorter sticks to pull in bunches of rice
and knock the ripened grain into the bottom of the boat.
Much of the rice falls back into the lake to reseed the rice
bed for the next year.
Hand harvesting wild rice is a spiritual practice as well
as a physical act. Wild rice grows predominantly in the
Great Lakes region, although it can be found throughout
North America. During the Anishinaabe migration to this
region, they were told by the Creator to walk until they
found the food that grows on water. When they found wild
rice, they stopped. The result is a food with enormous
authenticity for the Anishinaabe; this is the food that the
Creator set aside for them and that their ancestors have
cared forever since. Wild rice still connects the Anishina-
abe to place, and still plays a central role in their economic,
spiritual, medicinal, and cultural traditions. For them, wild
rice is full of ghosts—possessed by the presences of the
places and faces of their ancestors, and even the Creator.
The Anishinaabe do not believe wild rice should be
legally owned by anyone. Their sense of the Creator’s wild
spirit is that it cannot be owned, for ownership is the very
antithesis of the wild. However, recent developments in
domesticating wild rice cultivation and in genetic engi-
neering are leading some Anishinaabe, reluctantly, to
advance a legal, material claim of possession to protect
wild rice’s ghosts and the Anishinaabe’s access to them.
Since the 1950s, the US Government and private seed
companies have transformed wild rice into a commercial
agricultural product, or what the Anishinaabe call ‘‘paddy
rice.’’ Most wild rice sold in supermarkets is cultivated,
and harvested by combines after the paddies are drained.
There is even a ‘‘Minnesota Cultivated Wild Rice Council’’
that promotes the ‘‘wild rice industry,’’ using phrases—
‘‘cultivated wild rice’’ and ‘‘wild rice industry’’—that the
Anishinaabe regard as inherently contradictory. And now
the majority of cultivated wild rice is grown outside of wild
rice’s native range, mainly in California. It is not difficult
to visually tell the difference between the ‘‘paddy’’ wild
rice and ‘‘wild’’ wild rice. Paddy-grown wild rice is a
uniformly black grain whereas non-paddy wild rice varies
in color around shades of light brown. The two are also
easy to distinguish by taste, and the Anishinaabe say that
paddy rice is the less flavorful. But paddy rice has been so
successful and widely marketed that most people who eat it
have never tasted non-paddy wild rice, and are therefore
not able to make the comparison themselves.
The Anishinaabe are particularly upset by efforts to
patent wild rice. A California company has received two
patents on varieties of wild rice (Indian Country Today
2002) while Australian researchers a few years ago applied
for a patent for genetically modifying white rice using wild
rice genes (LaDuke and Carlson 2002). There was an effort
afoot closer to home as well, at the University of Minne-
sota, to sequence the wild rice genome in 1998 (Carlson
2002). While the sequencing itself does not represent an
ownership claim, it greatly advances the possibility for
future patenting efforts.
The Anishinaabe believe that current research and
development of cultivated wild rice threatens their tradi-
tional use of, and beliefs about, wild rice. They believe that
they have both the right and responsibility to protect wild
rice. They worry the cultivated varieties of wild rice or the
genetically engineered varieties will pollute natural stands
of wild rice, undermining the Creator’s creation.
Ironically, ‘‘cultivated wild rice’’ gains much of its
market value from the word ‘‘wild,’’ which suggests it was
harvested from a wild population. Some cultivated wild
rice labels do specifically indicate the cultivated origin of
the product, such as Grey Owl Minnesota Cultivated Wild
Rice. Still, the brand makes an effort to cultivate ghosts
along with the rice, referencing a specific place, Minne-
sota, and that of a local face—the image of an American
Indian man, Grey Owl, whose feathered silhouette appears
on every package. It cultivates this through a kind of
globalization of the local, reducing local specificities to
the wild and the ‘‘all natural’’ (as the label reads) cachet of
remote Minnesota, much as Hinrichs (1998) noted for the
marketing of Vermont maple syrup, and reducing the
American Indian connection to the easily transported ste-
reotype of ‘‘Grey Owl,’’ with his generic name and sil-
houette. (Grey Owl is a historical personage, an author and
conservationist from the 1930s, but few consumers likely
realize that. Nor do they likely know that, in a further
twist of authenticity, he was actually British with no
Native American ancestry.) The label tries to allow the
product to be transported and yet still ‘‘transporting’’—still
capable of connecting the eater with the ghosts of wild
taste.
K. Stiles et al.
123
The corporations trying to patent the wild rice genome
are also making a claim about authenticity and the presence
of ghosts in wild rice. But their claim is not based on the
local places and faces of tradition; they root their claim in
the global truths of science and international law. The
language of ‘‘discovery’’ of genes gives authorship to
corporate patent holders, even though the genes already
existed. The discovery process is the labor that gives sci-
entific birth to the gene, giving it acknowledged presence,
and giving presence to the scientists in their remote labs
who generated the discovery. From this presence comes the
patent’s claim of possession, of a globalized ownership,
legally enforceable, and capable of being transported great
distances.
Wild rice is intimately tied to the Anishinaabe’s cultural
identity, and they are willing to protect the rice at a con-
siderable cost. They are engaged in a battle over the pos-
session of something that they do not think should be
owned, despite the expense of the legal fees. So they cel-
ebrated when, on May 8, 2007, Governor Pawlenty
approved the Omnibus Environment and Natural Finance
Bill (H2410/S2096), which requires a study to be done on
the environmental impact of genetically engineered wild
rice before it is allowed to be planted in Minnesota (La-
Duke 2007). The locally real ghosts of the Anishinaabe
may not naturally speak the globally real language of
property law, but when forced to choose between silence
and speaking another language, the Anishinaabe help us
see the cultural and economic politics of even wild food.
Ghosts of politics
What we have been exploring is the production and con-
sumption not of food but of the meaning of food, through
the ghosts of taste. Central to food politics is how the
ghosts of taste grant authority through the attribution of the
authenticating presences of faces and places, often in the
context of considerable dispute over the manner of these
attributions. We conceptualize ‘‘authenticity’’ as a claim of
presence through a claim of authorship. Our three cases
make transparent, we hope, the complexity that results
from competing claims of authenticity as well as the
political consequences of those claims on culture and
economy.
But who has a legitimate claim of presence through a
claim of authorship? In other words, is a McDonald’s
cheeseburger as authentic as the wild rice harvested by the
Anishinaabe? The answer, sociologically, is more rela-
tional than relative. We explore here the ways that people
make competing claims for authenticity through the ghosts
of taste, and the political consequences of those claims.
The relevant sociological question is not, ‘‘Is this really
authentic?’’ Instead it is, ‘‘Who is making these claims, in
what context, and for what ends?’’ In short, we turn from
abstract criteria to practical effects. Asking these questions
leads us to the ghosts of taste, and thus to the politics of
food.
Each of our cases illustrates how people have tried to
conjure or avoid certain ghosts of taste. All ghosts of taste
are imaginary. Yet the politics of these ghosts are quite
real. In our case about Greek restaurants, the very category
of ‘‘ethnic’’ cuisine is used to refer to cuisines of ‘‘others.’’
Arab owners of Greek restaurants downplay or suppress
certain ghosts to downplay their identities, to downplay
their ‘‘otherness.’’ These ghosts are sometimes brutally real
as we saw through the hate crimes that were committed
against ethnic store owners following the attacks on the
World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 (Leong and
Nakanishi 2002). It is not hard to imagine that many ethnic
restaurants saw a decline in business around the same time
with significant consequences for their livelihoods, as well
as threats to their lives. The content of what is seen as
authentic reflects a politics of inclusion and exclusion, with
myriad cultural and economic implications. In the case of
Greek food the ghosts that are avoided are as relationally
significant as the ghosts that are included. That some Arab
Americans feel they will do better business behind Doric
columns and ‘‘Greek’’ food illustrates that the ghosts of
taste are indeed real—in their consequences.
The story of Thousand Island dressing is entangled with
that of its local challenger, Thousand Islands dressing (in
the plural). There is no way to find the ‘‘real’’ ghosts of
Thousand Islands dressing, but the stories contribute to
people’s sense of identity and ownership over both a place
and a taste. The global Thousand Island dressing is known
at the expense of the local Thousand Islands dressing, and
even at the expense of the place where it appears to have
originated. In this case of competing claims of authenticity,
the global does not only subsume the local, it practically
excludes it. The local then becomes a site of activity that
either accepts or resists its exclusion.
But, as we have said, the politics of inclusion and
exclusion in Thousand Island dressing is not a matter of
wide consequence. In contrast, for wild rice, the conse-
quences are much more significant, culturally and eco-
nomically. Central to these consequences are a contest over
the visibility of ghosts, despite their evanescent and
immaterial form. For what is seen is also a matter of what
is not. Marketing of paddy rice depends on making its
manipulation invisible (by calling it ‘‘wild’’ rice) as well as
the devastation that the commercialization of wild rice has
brought on Native communities (as a center of spirituality
and source of livelihood). In effect, it hides conflicts over
the control and manipulation of the genetic pool of the rice.
The Anishinaabe’s constructions of possession contest their
The ghosts of taste
123
exclusion, as they seek to bring to light something that is
difficult to define. As a result, they demand ghostly reck-
oning and recognition by others, as they must in a political
world. A patent claim does no less.
The visibility of the invisible and the invisibilities of
that which is visible can be found in our other cases as
well. For example, the constitution of authentic Greek food
actively renders invisible some of the presences that could
constitute it, just as the deliberately constructed view of the
Parthenon from the outside renders invisible the base of the
minaret that is part of it. The ghosts of taste are products of
overlapping geographies, contradictory stories, and social
relations that often brew conflict. Questions and fights over
identity, belonging, and possession are negotiated in the
construction of the ghosts of taste. The links we make
between food, place, and people have social implications
beyond the immediate act of eating. These implications are
the ghostly foundations of the real politics of taste.
The taste of ghosts
Among those real consequences is something we have
hinted at in the case studies, and now bring forward: How
the ghostly politics of authenticity lie upon the tongue. In
all three cases, part of the language of contestation is the
language of how a food is supposed to taste in the most
physical sense. Not only are there ghosts in what we taste,
much of what we taste is ghosts.
Take any ethnic cuisine that has developed into a widely
known restaurant experience, such as Greek food. The buzz
of ethnic eating resonates with talk of where one can get
food cooked by members of that ethnic group. In Greek
restaurants where the chefs are not Greek, ‘‘the food is
never the same,’’ wrote our web commentator. But what is
that difference? Human taste, of course, is notorious in its
variety and perversity. For every gourmand that despairs at
the thought of McDonald’s, there are surely as many who
find its food not just convenient but positively tasty. That
positive taste in authentic McDonald’s food or authentic
Greek restaurants is something that will never show up on a
photographic negative or in a food scientist’s laboratory:
the presence of ghosts.
This same perversity of ghosts also guides the response
of Mike and his family and neighbors when they claim that
Thousand Islands (in the plural) dressing tastes much bet-
ter. Of course, as we noted, there is strong correspondence
here with class experience. The slow food taste of fresh
ingredients, home preparation, and olive oil is a taste that
the leisure time and income of wealth can afford to culti-
vate, and which becomes a habit of taste not easily over-
come, as any Bourdieuian would immediately recognize.
But there are many avenues for the expression of class in
food, from the perversities of caviar to vintage Bordeaux to
aged cheese to raw blowfish. That the upper-middle-class
seasonal residents of Tar and Grenadier choose their ver-
sion of Thousand Islands dressing shows a particularity of
taste that cannot be accounted for by class alone. Politics is
more complex than that.
A single-minded class analysis also does little to explain
the difference in taste the Anishinaabe find in hand-har-
vested wild rice versus paddy-grown wild rice. The An-
ishinaabe are mostly people of limited means, and so their
habits might be expected to go along the lines of the
cheaper food: paddy-grown. Of course, much of the wild
rice the Anishinaabe eat is free, as they harvest it them-
selves. But it is not therefore cheap, as hand-harvesting
costs a considerable expenditure of time, slow food style.
To one who has never tasted ‘‘real’’ wild rice, cultivated
paddy rice may taste quite good, but cultivated paddy rice
and non-cultivated wild rice are actually quite different in
flavor and texture. When asked how to cook paddy rice,
Anishinaabe will often say that you should put a stone in
the soup pot and when the stone is soft, then you will know
that the paddy rice is done. They say non-cultivated wild
rice is comparatively easy to cook and better tasting. The
individual grains are big, light brown, and whole, while
paddy rice grains are broken, black, and small. The distinct
taste of non-cultivated wild rice helps evoke the presence
of authenticity at Anishinaabe gatherings and celebrations.
What the Anishinaabe taste in wild rice is something
broader than class: the ghosts of social conflict, along its
many axes, and their accommodations, however imperfect.
They taste in hand harvested wild rice a pure realm of
ancestral ghosts resolved. And when they do, they may
simultaneously taste the contrast with paddy rice and its
continuing conflicts of authorship and possession.
One never tastes a single relationship alone. Taste is
always a comparative act, and it is through comparison that
we sample the economic and cultural relations of food—no
less for Greek food and Thousand Island or Thousand
Islands dressing, and their smaller politics, than for wild
rice. The pure restfulness of the authentic that we find in
the truly savored is the flavor of relations resolved, which
immediately conjures those which are not.
Concluding thoughts
In conclusion, we return to the question of local food,
applying the ghosts of taste perspective to this vigorous
debate. The exalting of organic food among activists and
scholars has been criticized because of increasing corporate
ownership in organic products and the dilution of national
organic standards (Guthman 2004). This may have pre-
cipitated a trend towards supporting local food either in
K. Stiles et al.
123
addition to or instead of food with an ‘‘organic’’ label. But
now the local food movement is also undergoing wide-
spread critique. Dupuis and Goodman (2005) argue that a
‘‘local foods’’ agenda may have two major negative con-
sequences. First, an ‘‘unreflexive’’ localism can deny the
politics of the local, with negative implications for social
justice. Second, it can lead to new standards of purity and
perfection, which can be prone to corporate cooptation.
These possibilities should be taken seriously, as they
have implications for both theory and practice. The nativ-
ism, chauvinism, class, and race-based standards of per-
fection that Dupuis and Goodman discuss could co-exist
with more ‘‘progressive’’ ideals and models of local food.
Moreover, ‘‘local’’ can be an arena in which local elites
dominate. The local is certainly not devoid of power
relations simply by virtue of being local. Hinrichs and
Kremer (2002) demonstrate in their study of social inclu-
sion that the emphasis on ‘‘community’’ in community
supported agriculture (CSA) may obscure class differences
and in practice exclude the poor.
Significantly, however, the Hinrichs and Kremer study
was funded by an organization that supports community
supported agriculture and local foods, the Leopold Center
for Sustainable Agriculture. So, are the proponents of local
food unreflexive, as Allen and Guthman (2006, p. 412)
imply in their argument that ‘‘farm to school advocates are
essentially producing neoliberal forms and practices de
novo’’?
We must avoid essentializing ‘‘local’’ food and be wary
of a falsely apolitical localism. But we must also avoid
letting ‘‘global’’ giants off the hook for the nutritionally
impoverished, environmentally destructive, culturally
homogeneous diet they spread while making claims that
are blatantly false. (An extreme example is the introduction
to McDonald’s farm to table infomercial, which features a
cup of coke on a tree!) The global agro-food system is built
on the principles of ‘‘distance and durability’’ (Friedmann
1994). It is this logic of food provisioning that the local
food movement aims to transform. One way of investi-
gating the politics of food is to analyze the claims that
constitute it. We offer the ghosts of taste as a conceptual
tool to make visible the political nature of food and to
understand the interaction of culture and economy in those
politics. Ghosts are possessive, and possession is both a
cultural and an economic act. In other words, the ghosts of
taste are not devoid of power relations by virtue of their
ghostliness. Quite the reverse: it is power’s unseen quality
that distinguishes it from mere force.
We do not set forth a set of criteria to establish the
authenticity of hand-harvested wild rice over a McDon-
ald’s cheeseburger, but we explore who gains by certain
presentations of authenticity and who loses. Claims to
authenticity are not necessarily, and by definition,
exclusionary, but our cases suggest they often are. There-
fore, a transformative politics of food would do well to not
rely on a discourse of authenticity and purity. Yet even
exclusion is not in and of itself problematic: the critical
issues should be the exclusion of whom and what and why.
From there, let our political judgments begin.
Acknowledgments We would like to acknowledge the contribu-
tions of Joe LaGarde, an enrolled member of the White Earth Res-
ervation of the Anishinaabe people.
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Author Biographies
Kaelyn Stiles is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests include
environmental sociology, medical sociology, political sociology, and
the sociology of science.
O
¨zlem Altıok is a PhD candidate in the Department of Community
and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-
Madison. Her research interests include political sociology and the
sociology of agrofood systems in the United States, Europe, and
Turkey.
Michael M. Bell is professor of Community and Environmental
Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is co-
chair of the Agroecology Program and a faculty affiliate of the
Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Center for
Integrated Agricultural Systems.
K. Stiles et al.
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