Abstract
In this chapter the analysis places Jewish foodie hostility toward Judaism within a wider dismissal of religion and even culture as realms offering useful values and practices. In his approach to food politics, Pollan holds strongly modernist, materialist, and rationalistic views, along with, though perhaps more than, other thinkers about food and food systems, and despite his rhetoric promoting alternatives to the Western industrial–agriculinary complex. In tandem with his self-contradictory dismissal of culture and cultural traditions, Pollan’s neoliberal stance leads him to prioritize individual choice when it comes to foodways and then only when based on “rationalist” political or scientific criteria. Metaphysics and spirituality are denied, found seemingly only in and around food itself, though seemingly only when detached from any specific, concrete traditions.
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- 1.
On Pollan’s politics, see Chad Lavin, “Pollanated Politics, or, the Neoliberal’s Dilemma,” 3 November 2009, http://www.politicsandculture.org/2009/11/03/chad-lavin-pollanated-politics-or-the-neoliberal%E2%80%99s-dilemma.
- 2.
I follow here the compelling analysis of Benjamin E. Zeller , “Quasi-Religious American Foodways: The Cases of Vegetarianism and Locavorism,” Religion, Food, and Eating in North America, ed. Benjamin E. Zeller , Marie W. Dallam, Reid L. Neilson and Nora L. Rubel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 294–312.
- 3.
Understanding Pollan as an avowed secularist gains solidity from critiques of the excesses and aporias of secularist programs, for instance, that of William E. Connoly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
- 4.
Julie Guthman notes Pollan’s Manichean polarizations in an excellent and wide-ranging critique, “Commentary on Teaching Food: Why I Am Fed up with Michael Pollan et al.,” Agriculture and Human Values 24, 2 (June 2007): 261–264.
- 5.
On this binarism, which Pollan, among others, rightfully wants to challenge, see Janet A. Flammang, The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), esp. Chaps. 7 and 8.
- 6.
New York: Timber House, 1984.
- 7.
Zwart, “Short History of Food Ethics,” 120.
- 8.
See, inter alia, Terrence Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011); Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991).
- 9.
Kelly Donati, “The Pleasure of Diversity in Slow Food’s Ethics of Taste,” Food, Culture and Society 8, 2 (Fall 2005): 230, quoting Arik Dirlik, “The Global in the Local,” Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, ed. R. Wilson and W. Dissanayake (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 32.
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Schorsch, J. (2018). Pollan on Culture and Religion. In: The Food Movement, Culture, and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71706-7_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71706-7_4
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