A life update, and 8 minutes of Food Politics 101

From my April mini-lecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Education

Today marks 1 month since I moved across the globe to Singapore for my Fulbright-National Geographic research year. It is my third move in 6 months. As I write this at 3:41 am, I’m cognizant that even as I’ve (mostly) settled into the rhythm of living here, I still wake up disoriented most nights, reaching over to squeeze my partner’s hand, wondering where home means to me now. 

This year has honestly been too much, in every sense of the phrase. The fact that May graduation seems like three decades ago but feels like yesterday is a good indication I haven’t emotionally processed most of what’s happened so far.

I officially came out publicly this year, and am still finding my little feet in what that disclosure means as a queer person in a heterosexual marriage.

I returned to New York after nearly 4 years apart, quickly falling back in love with the city for being the same (electric and unabashed) while hating it for being the same (capitalist and blithely unequal).

I listened to friends, family, and peers as they entered new stages of life — postpartum depression, divorce, a mid-life crisis — and struggled to adapt in how I could show up for them as the Jenny of today, not the jerk with a veneer of “tough love” of my 20s, or the judgmental social justice warrior of my late 20s/first years of 30s.

I began an (extremely unelegant) polyamory journey where I’m learning the difference between being considerate of others’ feelings versus accepting responsibility for someone else’s feelings.

I saw the collective hush that fell over the world as genocide began in Palestine, the true lack of safety in the promise of “free speech.” I had never before understood gaslighting at this scale, 9/11 having been only a background reality of my early teens.

Being overwhelmed living abroad for the first time (but wait — do I even get to call myself an expat?) has been too easy of an excuse to avoid these awkward and uncomfortable transitions. When faced with minutiae of on-the-ground difficulties — like being unable to download the app I need to get into my apartment because I can’t change the country of my iPhone to “Singapore” because I don’t have a credit card issued in the country because I can’t open a bank account yet because I’m waiting for my medical clearance to receive my work visa — I’ve so far been too able to sidestep the (necessary, terrible) action of sitting, feeling, witnessing all that is unfolding.

Perhaps that’s the reason I haven’t written in so long. I’ve been embarrassed, feeling that so much has happened, yet I have pathetic little to show for it. When I compare myself to yesteryear, my old pieces seem so much more meaningful than my stagnant anxiety of today, the latent self-doubt from feeling reborn over and over. I’ve so desperately wanted to perform growth without actually growing, every time I sat down to write after a long procrastination, that stench — of self-protection, of avoidance, of dissonance — has overwhelmed my attempts.

So. This was a long-winded way to say, I’m trying to get back. Back to what, I don’t know exactly. A feeling of being myself in new contexts? A gentleness to allow myself to express what I feel, and enough forgiveness to let that expression be imperfect? Nostalgia winks that I had “all of that” once, but is that true? All I know is that for now, I feel ready to write again. I feel ready to give myself permission to not go anywhere perfectly or quickly, but just give myself space to move.

I’ll start today by revisiting the heart of what I teach, which is food (of course). This is a mini-lecture I’m really proud of and have not yet shared with anyone outside of those who attended in person. I do hope you’ll enjoy it (and maybe learn something too).

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An Introduction to Food Politics

Hi everyone, thank you all for having me today. I’m Jenny Dorsey, a professional chef, author, and the founder of a nonprofit food think tank called Studio ATAO.  

Today, I’ll be talking about how the politics of food are all around us, quietly influencing our worldviews and shaping the trajectory of our lives.  

Our relationship with food has never been one based on passive consumption. Food continues to actively drive changes in human behavior and shape our society as we know it, because our relationship with food fundamentally informs who we believe ourselves to be, and how we should act in relation to other people. 

How? 

Number one: Food has long been a weapon to create “in” versus “out” groups. 

Some of the most avid laws created by colonizers in the Americas were on what white settlers could or could not eat. In this way, food became an extension of identity and morality. For example, it was believed that eating Indigenous foods would cause Spanish men to lose their beards and, thus, their masculinity and social standing.  

As historian Rebecca Earle captures succinctly,

“Food, in other words, helped distinguish Spaniard from Indian.

‘Indians aren’t people and cassava isn’t bread,’ runs an aphorism from colonial Venezuela.”

To assert dominance and rationalize colonial rule, Indigenous diets, which were primarily plant-based, including ingredients like nopales, as you see on the left, were forcibly replaced with European diets high in meat, wheat, and sugar. This remains the global norm today, a reminder for all of us that colonialism lives on through our everyday actions.

This use of food to ostracize groups of people is not some relic of the past. 

Consider the bat soup video that went viral at the start of COVID. Even if it was later debunked, its implicit messaging about the Asian diet – and thus, Asian people – created a narrative of danger and unwanted foreign influence at the height of pandemic fears. And the results speak for themselves: in 2021, hate crimes against Asian Americans rose 342%. 

Two: Controlling the food supply is the ultimate mechanism for controlling people, because food is a direct throughline to power. 

In the Great Plains, white settlers were actively encouraged to exterminate buffalos to starve Indigenous people of their ancestral food supply. In the span of just 10 years, the buffalo nearly went extinct, and Indigenous nations were forcibly relocated to new lands and subjected to eating rations of highly processed foods like flour, sugar, and coffee — which has had lasting, negative health implications on reservations.

When I speak of control, I don’t mean just physical – it is also mental, by controlling the narratives through which our society is built. And what is more core to the mythos of America than Thanksgiving? 

Every year, we actively lie to our children about some idyllic Thanksgiving between the Pilgrims and the Indigenous Nations that never happened. This is no accident: post-Civil War, our government desperately needed a political tool to regain control of a divided America. Thanksgiving became the perfect solution to not only project an image of unity, but quietly reinforce who exactly “America” was meant for.  

Three: Food structures our approach to social and economic problems. 

If I asked everyone here, “What is hunger?” we would probably have 50+ answers. Everyone has their own experience with hunger, so who can classify others as “hungry,” and what is the “right” solution to alleviate that hunger? 

Eliminating hunger is massively complicated, so the U.S. government has opted for something much more straightforward: filling a Calorie deficit. The concept of Calories were coined by chemist Wilbur Atwater in the 1890s, and subsequently turned a wide variety of foods into interchangeable widgets that do, technically speaking, stop hunger.

Pictured here is a popular international hunger relief tool, known as corn-soy blend or CSB, that is made from — you guessed it — corn and soy, and tastes like ashy cardboard.

Fixating on Calories allows our government to cognitively distance itself from addressing the larger systems that enable hunger, like poverty. Along with rejecting culturally relevant food as being less “efficient” for hunger relief, these are shining examples of the deeply engrained paternalism in how the U.S. responds to social problems.

Capitalism plays an important part as well. The U.S. just so happens to have a massive agricultural surplus of corn and soy, turning hungry people abroad into a new market opportunity. Domestically, programs like the Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP) allow giant agribusinesses to “donate” mass-produced foods made from these crops to low-income mothers, children, and the elderly in exchange for a tax write-off.

This abdication of responsibility by our government to ensure an accessible and nourishing food supply for its citizens has long been a fixture in American politics. As President Nixon famously said,

“Instead of government jobs, government housing, and government welfare, let the government use its tax and credit policies to enlist the greatest engine of progress ever developed in the history of man — American private enterprise.” 

From these examples, I hope it’s clear how much food informs some of our most basic structures in society: it organizes our social hierarchies, the development and enforcement of our laws, and the design of our economic systems. Food shapes our identities by telling us what version of ourselves is “right,” and what perspective we are meant to use when looking within, and at one another.  

These hidden messages behind our food mirror the “hidden curriculum” we often talk about in our schools. As educators, we have an opportunity to teach our students the very real power of food every time we think about food, read about food, talk about food, consume food, and share food with one another. It is our responsibility to acknowledge, embrace, and grapple with the influence food has had, and will continue to have, on how students engage with the world for the rest of their lives. 

So I’ll end with this quote from legendary Representative John Lewis, which I hope sums up the key points from this presentation:

“Food is not just fuel, it's information. It talks to your DNA and tells it what to do. Food can be a weapon of mass destruction, or a tool to create peace.”