Abstract
This essay examines the phenomenon of American celebrity chefs through the lens of Theodor Adorno’s critique of the culture industry. It asks whether the current popularity of celebrity chefs ironically parallels the popularity of fast food. Is the former just as much a part of the American neoliberal culture industry as the latter, urging Americans to look upon food as a commodifiable, entertaining industry rather than as a topic connected to social justice and our changing cultural landscape? Drawing on the work of food analysts such as Carlo Petrini, Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, David Kamp, and others, as well as the critical theory of Adorno, this essay insists that Petrini’s Slow Food mantra that food should be “good, clean, and fair” proves relevant to the American setting. It is especially “fair” that needs to be highlighted, the essay insists, for the glamour of celebrity chefs can too often blind us to the abusive socio-economic realities that accompany food. Yet this critique of celebrity chef culture is itself tempered by Adorno’s own writings, for food’s ability to challenge the mind/body dichotomy central to Western philosophy always brings us back to the “preponderance of the object.” Food is material, immediate, and sensuous, and can never be too easily coopted by ideas and ideologies. Thus the essay offers a critique grounded in the culture industry but qualified by Adorno’s “preponderant” object.
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Notes
- 1.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/feb/04/slow-food-carlo-petrini, accessed January 27, 2018.
- 2.
https://www.slowfoodusa.org/manifesto, accessed March 21, 2018.
- 3.
Carlo Petrini, Food & Freedom: How the Slow Food Movement Is Changing the World Through Gastronomy, trans. John Irving (Rizzoli Ex Libris, 2015), p. 35.
- 4.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (Continuum, 1972), pp. 120–167.
- 5.
Laurence Shames, “The More Factor”, in Sonia Maasik and Jack Solomon (eds.), Signs of Life in the USA (Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2003), p. 58.
- 6.
See Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (Harper, Perennial, 2004); see also Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: The Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin Press, 2006); Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System (Melville House, 2012); and Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (South End Press, 1999). Among the many excellent documentaries on industrialized eating, see Cowpsiracy: The Sustainability Secret (2014); Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead (2010), Food, Inc. (2008); and Forks Over Knives (2011).
- 7.
Pollan, p. 10.
- 8.
Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (Verso, 2005), pp. 48–50.
- 9.
Frances Moore Lappé, Diet for a Small Planet (Ballantine Books, 1991).
- 10.
Michael Pollan, “Farmer in Chief”, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html, accessed March 3, 2018.
- 11.
The Founder, 2016.
- 12.
https://nypost.com/2018/01/26/trump-still-scarfing-down-burgers-despite-doctors-orders/, accessed September 10, 2018.
- 13.
See Allen S. Weiss, Feast and Folly: Cuisine, Intoxication, and the Poetics of the Sublime (SUNY Press, 2002).
- 14.
David Kamp, The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation (Broadway Books, 2006), p. xi.
- 15.
See James O’Hare, “11 Famous Chefs Who Are Trying to Save the World with Food”, https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/chefs-food-world-hunger-malnutrition-efficiency/‚ accessed March 11, 2018.
- 16.
Carlo Petrini, Food & Freedom: How the Slow Food Movement Is Changing the World Through Gastronomy, trans. John Irving (Rizzoli Ex Libris, 2015), p. 80.
- 17.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/feb/04/slow-food-carlo-petrini, accessed January 27, 2018.
- 18.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (Continuum, 1972), pp. 123/126.
- 19.
Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry (Routledge, 2002), pp. 104/107.
- 20.
The Culture Industry, p. 67.
- 21.
Nick Wingfield, “Whole Foods Gets Primed with Amazon Treatment”, The New York Times, Friday, March 2, 2018, p. B2.
- 22.
Garret M. Broad, More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change (University of California Press, 2016), p. 6.
- 23.
Broad, p. 6.
- 24.
Petrini, p. 80.
- 25.
https://www.zagat.com/r/eataly-la-los-angeles, accessed March 22, 2018.
- 26.
For a full discussion of aesthetic reason, see Morton Schoolman, Reason and Horror: Critical Theory, Democracy, and Aesthetic Individuality (Routledge, 2001).
- 27.
Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (Verso, 2005), p. 50.
- 28.
Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics , trans. E.B. Ashton (Continuum, 1994), p. 181.
- 29.
Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Grete Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 166.
- 30.
Petrini, p. 27.
- 31.
Marlena White, “Eating Planet: Carlo Petrini Discusses Buying Food and Paying for Your Values”, http://www.worldwatch.org/eating-planet-carlo-petrini-discusses-buying-food-and-paying-your-values, accessed March 16, 2018. See also Petrini’s Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, and Fair, co-written with Clara Furlan (Rizzoli Ex Libris, 2013).
- 32.
https://cookingupastory.com/carlo-petrini-give-value-to-food-part-5. Translation mine.
- 33.
Ute Guzzoni, “Reason—A Different Reason—Something Different Than Reason? Wondering About the Concept of a Different Reason in Adorno, Lyotard, and Sloterdijk”, in The Actuality of Adorno: Critical Essays on Adorno and the Postmodern, ed. Max Pensky (SUNY Press, 1997), p. 39.
- 34.
Broad, pp. 7–8.
- 35.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics , p. 300.
Works Cited
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Carlo Petrini and Clara Furlan, Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, and Fair (New York: Rizzoli Ex Libris, 2013).
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Laurence Shames, “The More Factor”, in Sonia Maasik and Jack Solomon (eds.), Signs of Life in the USA (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2003), pp. 56–63.
Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (New York: Harper, Perennial, 2004).
Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (Brooklyn, NY: South End Press, 1999).
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Nick Wingfield, “Whole Foods Gets Primed with Amazon Treatment”, The New York Times, Friday, March 2, 2018, p. B2.
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Caputi, M. (2019). ‘Idiot with a Spoon’: Adorno, Petrini, and the Oppositional Politics of Slow Food. In: Khandizaji, A. (eds) Reading Adorno . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19048-4_9
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