FRAMING THE ISSUE OF FOOD

Submitted By: Gabriel J. Gerzon

Senior Honors Thesis

Communication and Culture Program

Clark University

April 2011

Advisor: Matthew Malsky

Department of Communications

Second Reader: Professor Jaan Valsiner

Department of Communications
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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION.............................................................................................................5

BACKGROUND ON SOCIO-POLITICAL FRAMING..............................................7

Disciplinary Background..............................................................................................................................9

THE POWER OF FRAMING: RATES OF ORGAN DONATION..........................12

INTRODUCING TWO OF AMERICA’S EXISTING DEEP FRAMES ON FOOD

............................................................................................................................................15
Deep Frame #1: ‘Food as Fuel’...................................................................................................................16
Etymology of Fuel, Food & Nutrition......................................................................................................19
‘Food as Entertainment’............................................................................................................................20

Deep Frame #2:‘Consumerism’ and Its’ Semi-Surface Frames: ‘Modernism’ & ‘Health
Individualism’ ..............................................................................................................................................23
Consumerism............................................................................................................................................23
Health Individualism.................................................................................................................................24
Modernism ...............................................................................................................................................26

Conclusion....................................................................................................................................................27

Meritocracy..................................................................................................................................................33

Episodic vs. Thematic Framing..................................................................................................................34

Conclusion....................................................................................................................................................35

A Briefer on Reframing...............................................................................................................................36

Enlightenment Reason: A Barrier to Reframing......................................................................................37

Reframes That Are Actually De-Frames, & The Mythology of the Western Diet................................37

Civil Disobedience Vs. Non-Collusion........................................................................................................39

REFRAME: SUN-BASED FOOD OVER OIL-BASED FOOD.................................43

How “Industrial Agriculture” Relies on Oil.............................................................................................43

Reframe: Industrial Agriculture as Oil or Petrochemical-Based...........................................................46

Nutritional Deficiency of Petrochemical-based Food...............................................................................46
Nutritional Integrity of Sun-based Food...................................................................................................47

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Conclusion....................................................................................................................................................48

REFRAMING FOOD AS FUEL...................................................................................50

Energy from Other Sources........................................................................................................................50

The Uncaring Corporate Food Structure..................................................................................................52

FRAMEWORKS MOST EFFECTIVE REFRAMES................................................54

Food and Fitness Environment Frame......................................................................................................55

The Runaway Food Model..........................................................................................................................56

Lakoff’s Critique of the FrameWorks Institute.......................................................................................57

FOOD WITHIN THE LARGER PROGRESSIVE FRAME.....................................59

The “Silo Problem” and The Larger Frame.............................................................................................59

Focus on Food...........................................................................................................................................60

THE LIMITS OF FRAMING........................................................................................61

Disciplinary Limits......................................................................................................................................62

LIKE ALL OTHER BRANCHES OF COMMUNICATIONS THEORY,

FRAMING HAS LIMITATIONS. ................................................................................62

A COMMITMENT TO FINDING FRAMES THAT RESONATE WITH

VARIOUS STRAINS OF THE PUBLIC REQUIRES RESOURCE-INTENSIVE
RESEARCH. APPROACHING SOCIAL ISSUES LIKE FOOD FROM A
FRAMING PERSPECTIVE ALSO NECESSITATES A LONG-TERM
ENGAGEMENT THROUGH A PROCESS OF VALIDATING HYPOTHESIZED
FRAMES THROUGH RESEARCH AND TESTING. ...............................................62

SUSAN NALL BANES, CO-FOUNDER OF FRAMEWORKS, HERSELF NOTES

THAT THE SFA MODEL “DIRECTS ITS ATTENTION TO THE MOST
COMMONLY HELD CULTURAL FRAMES, LEAVING IT VULNERABLE TO
CHARGES THAT IT OVERLOOKS MINORITY VIEWS IN FAVOR OF THE
MOST WIDELY SHARED FRAMING SOLUTIONS, AND THAT IT DOES NOT
PAY ADEQUATE ATTENTION TO THE VIEWS OF POLICY ELITES THAT
CONTROL THE POWER STRUCTURE WITHOUT REGARD TO PUBLIC
OPINION.” IT IS INTERESTING THIS POTENTIAL CRITICISM STRONGLY
RESEMBLES THE ONE LAKOFF OFFERED UP IN OUR PERSONAL
COMMUNICATION.......................................................................................................62
Cultural Limits.............................................................................................................................................62

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The State-Corporate System.....................................................................................................................62

Biological Limits: The Primitive Hardware of the Modern Human......................................................64

Biological Exploitation.............................................................................................................................64
Neurological Considerations.....................................................................................................................65

Conclusion....................................................................................................................................................67

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTS......................................................................................70
Professor George Lakoff.............................................................................................................................70

Food Writer Mark Bittman........................................................................................................................83

Professor Noam Chomsky...........................................................................................................................89

WORKS CITED..............................................................................................................92

ENDNOTES.....................................................................................................................97

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Introduction

Eating is perhaps the most intimate, important relationship mankind has

maintained with the Earth throughout existence, but unlike many animals genetically

hardwired to know exactly what to eat (the koala’s appetite for eucalyptus leaves or the

cow’s penchant for grass), humans can digest almost anything nature offers. This ability

has allowed humans to flourish all over the globe. However, our remarkably versatile

digestive system presents a dilemma—we are responsible to choose wisely from a variety

of food options. Food psychologist Paul Rozin coined this problem the “Omnivore’s

Dilemma,” a phrase recently co-opted by popular food author Michael Pollan. To get

around this dilemma, humans have relied on their culture’s accumulated wisdom on diet

and health to sustain them. Accordingly then, the biggest determinate of what humans eat

is culture.

I found it strange then that my culture, American culture, would extol and

promote foods, such as red meat, dairy, sugar and refined grains, which I came to know

as unnecessary or even health-adverse. I became interested in understanding how and

why America deviated from the “traditions in food ways,” which “reflect long

experience… [And] a nutritional logic,” of our not-so-distant ancestors.

As will become apparent, I, and many of the researchers I draw upon, see this

deviation as a major problem. If, as Michael Pollan writes, “our problem around food is a

cultural problem,”1 then it too is a communications problem—a problem that can begin to

be solved with clear, honest dialogue.

In this thesis, I explore how the communications tool known as “framing” can be

used to talk about the realities of our current food system and the need to change it. I am

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interested in devising communication strategies that enable the public to understand the

state of America’s food system more accurately and in a broader context to move people

away from blaming individuals for poor health and towards systematic and community-

based solutions that address the fundamental problems of industrial agriculture and

corporately controlled food. This is a thesis for those who are excited about the prospect

of an equitable, safe and sustainable food system but are unaware of how potent,

engaging and persuasive framing can be in the context of message exchange within food

discourse.

I will begin with an explanation of what frames are, followed by an interesting

example of how frames unconsciously shape deeply personal decisions.

Then, I will examine two of the predominant food-frames in America and analyze

how they took root.

The five wide-ranging, discursive sections on “reframing” explore the craft of and

ideas for new, effective conceptual models that convey the need for transformative

change to America’s food system.

Finally, I will examine the disciplinary, cultural, and biological limits to the use of

framing.

This thesis is primarily informed by personal interviews conducted with Noam

Chomsky, George Lakoff and Mark Bittman, which are referenced throughout and can be

found in full in the appendices. The work of George Lakoff and the FrameWorks Institute

provided the inspiration for many of my own ideas.

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Background on Socio-Political Framing

"Every frame defines the issue, explains who is responsible, and suggests

potential solutions. All of these are conveyed by images, stereotypes or

anecdotes." –Charlotte Ryan, Prime Time Activism.

Cognitive linguist, scientist and communications expert George Lakoff has

popularized framing in recent years, thought it has long been an invaluable tool for

psychologists and psychotherapists looking to bring about critical changes in patients’

interpretive awareness. Lakoff stresses the comprehension and utilization of framing as

essential to any communication strategy that seeks to persuade people by advocating new

ways of looking at old problems. In the field of Communications, framing is used to

analyze the conceptual frameworks that undergird cultural establishments such as media

and academia. These institutions shape popular opinion and define the parameters of

discourse. Framing has wide-ranging cultural implications that are complimented by

understandings of Social Constructionism, hermeneutics, action-research and analytic

methods.

Sociologist Irving Goffman was the first to suggest in the late 1960s that we think

in terms of frames after closely observing social institutions and practices. “To make

sense of what he observed, he used the metaphor of Life as a Play: each form of

institution or practice is like a drama, with players, dialogue, and relatively well-defined

actions.”2 Researchers following in Goffman’s steps refined his ideas by positing that

frames essentially give contextual awareness and perspective to our experience. The

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whole idea behind socio-political framing is that people do not “approach the world as

naïve, blank slate receptacles who take in stimuli,” but are rather “sophisticated veterans

of perception who have stored their prior experiences as an organized mass.” We

categorize our prior experiences of the world into classes of expectation that “the world,

being a systematic place,” usually confirms.3 The use of frames is crucial to social

development since they “work symbolically to meaningfully structure the world."4

Frames represent a sort of heuristic, or mental shortcut, which allows our minds to

quickly analyze a situation by drawing on past experience. For example, when we walk

into a restaurant and are greeted by the waiter, we have certain expectations of how the

interaction will go based on past experience; we expect him/her to ask us what we would

like to eat or drink, act courteously, and so on. If he/she were to stray in some way from

the waiter-schema we constructed over time, such as inquiring if you were free to baby sit

next weekend, our preconceived ‘restaurant frame’ would be violated. Frames stress

certain aspects of situations or issues and leave others out. Frames cue a specific

response. You are at a restaurant to eat, and your waiter is there to facilitate the exchange

of money for food. Your waiter’s love life, political persuasions, etc. are left out of the

interaction because they are not pertinent to the specific response both parties seek.5

Framing has tremendous implications for media production and consumption, not

just everyday interactions. Media influences how people think about and interpret ideas

and issues—particularly how they think about social problems. If one can understand the

operative frames at work in various social and communicational contexts, one can also

begin to understand the underlying principles or value system on display.

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Disciplinary Background

A thorough understanding and successful application of framing requires

multidisciplinary approach. Framing draws heavily on sociology, communications,

anthropology, psychology and cognitive science. Advances in cognitive science in the

past twenty years have allowed scientists to peer into how our minds work like never

before. This has given communications experts a new and exciting body of hard evidence

on which to base their methodology. George Lakoff explicates the eight “Lessons from

Cognitive Science” he has learned on framing in his book Talking Points. This list helps

one arrive at an accurate grasp of what framing is:

1. The use of frames is largely unconscious.

2. Frames define common sense.

3. Repetition can embed frames in the brain.

4. Activation links surface frames to deep frames and inhibits opposition frames.

5. Existing deep frames don’t change overnight.

6. Speak to biconceptuals (political independents in Lakoff’s parlance) as you speak

to your base.

7. The facts alone will not set you free.

8. Simply negating the other side’s frames only reinforce them.6

Lakoff uses the term “deep frame” to draw a distinction between what he sees as the

critical differences between “deep frames” and “surface frames.” Surface (as in

superficial) framing refers to catchy slogans, cunning perlocution and clever spin, all of

which may or not be truthful. Such frames are pithy, particular messages on specific

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subjects. Their key characteristic is that they are only effective when they evoke or

trigger deep frames, or frames that speak to and forge connections with underlying

principles or value systems. Conservative ideology is a deep frame of a kind, while

phrases like “the liberal elite,” or “activist judges” are surface frames that buttress the

conservative deep frame.7

Compared to the other branches of Communications, little research had been

conducted on this topic until this decade. Framing and its applications have been

discussed in relation to politics, terrorism, media violence, etc. but almost never with

food, food politics and the American Diet until the FrameWorks Institute (hereafter,

simply FrameWorks) began investigating how people think about the issue of food four

years ago.

Drawing on the work of Erickson, Iyengar, Lakoff, Watzlawick et. al., The

FrameWorks Institute appears to be in the vanguard of framing food and many other

social issues. Since its’ founding in 1999 by Susan Nall Banes, FrameWorks has “been

conducting research into how Americans think about a wide variety of social issues—

from child and adolescent development to global warming to rural issues to race—with

the goal of engaging the public in collective solutions.”8 They look at the frames

“currently in the public consciousness and how those frames influence public policy

preferences,”9 as well as investigate potential ‘re-frames’ that can help elevate an issue

onto the public agenda.

One such social issue FrameWorks examines is how Americans think about food.

The three head writers that author FrameWorks research papers on food-framing, Axel

Aubrun, Andrew Brown, and Joseph Grady, all hold PhDs and write in an

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accessible, non-academic manner. This accords with FrameWorks mission to “advance

the nonprofit sector’s communications capacity,” since many in the nonprofit sector are

neither academics nor communications experts.10 Aubrun et al. have ten food-framing

research documents available for download, all of which were written between 2005-

2008. The W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Food and Society Program provided their

funding.11

The most accessible medium for the public and nonprofit sector however is the

interactive web slideshow titled, “Talking Food Systems E-Workshop.” FrameWorks

uses this highly visual medium to effectively engage the reader/viewer and enhance

comprehension of their research findings on how citizens currently think about America’s

food system. Most importantly, they provide narratives and rationales that help “lead the

public to a more informed understanding of the need for systematic change.”12

I was unable to find any peer reviewed critiques of FrameWorks’ research, so I

am led to believe their findings are relatively uncontroversial, at least within progressive,

liberal circles. There is overall a scarcity of academic research on this topic, perhaps

because the nature of the research almost obliges the researcher to take an involved,

action-orientated stance which certain academic institutions may not encourage.

Additionally, the application of framing in sociopolitical settings was only popularized

relatively recently. The fact that a reputable non-profit institution such as FrameWorks

has spent so much time, energy and resources on finding out how best to frame social

issues indicates how powerful and persuasive they believe framing to be when used

truthfully and successfully.

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The Power of Framing: Rates of Organ Donation

Frames are largely subconscious organizing principles that define how we think

about and conceptualize social issues. They stress certain aspects of an issue or situation

while ignoring others. Their goal is to cue a specific response. If one can understand the

operative frames in various social contexts where communication is paramount, one can

also begin to unravel the underlying principles, motives and value system on display.

Becoming aware other people’s subconscious of framing can unlock secrets to

improving one’s own communicative prowess. It can mean the difference between

eliciting the desired response and falling on deaf ears. To highlight this point, I will

introduce an example in which one group of experts succeed in cueing the desired

response by using language that evokes a favorable frame, while the other overlooks the

role of framing and fails.

The example involves various European countries’ rates of organ donation.

Before delving into an analysis, examine the graph below that shows the percentage of

Europeans who indicated they would be interested in joining organ donor programs in

their respective countries:

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Graph Source: "Dan Ariely Asks, Are We in Control of Our Own Decisions?” Lecture. TED, Dec. 2008.

Clearly, there are two groups of countries: Blue Countries, which donate

infrequently, and Red Countries, which donate frequently. Keep in mind it is not as if the

Blue Countries purposely wanted few participants to join the program. In fact, the

Netherlands sent out a letter pleading their non-participants to join which only boosted

the rate of enrollment to 28 percent. Also note that the contrast is not easily explained by

cultural or religious differences since countries we generally consider alike, such as

Sweden and Denmark, fall on opposite ends of the graph. The question is, why were Blue

Country’ drivers so loathe to join while Red Country’ drivers were so willing?

The answer lies in the opposing ways the Department of Motor Vehicles framed

the question on the license form. In Blue Countries the form read: "check the bow below

if you want to participate in the organ donor program." In Red Countries, the form read:

"check the box below if you do not want to join the organ donor program." Blue Country

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drivers did not check and did not join the program, while Red Country drivers took the

same course of action, not checking, but this time they have joined. This apparent

paradox supports Tversky and Kahneman’s proposal that “seemingly inconsequential

changes in the formulation of choice problems cause significant shifts of preference.”13

Blue Countries evoked an opt-in frame while Red Countries evoked an opt-out frame,

which turned out to have an enormous effect on the chosen behavior. This simple change

in the question’s structure reveals that most of us utilize a frame based on a philosophy of

inaction or non-engagement. By avoiding spontaneous decisions we are less likely to

commit ourselves to things we could later regret for any number of unforeseen reasons.

As a result, a “don’t act” or “don’t interfere” frame often influences our interactions with

the outside world. Dan Ariely explains how we critically undervalue the power frames

play in determining our day to day choices:

We wake up in the morning and we feel we make decisions... we open the closet
and decide what to wear and open the refrigerator and we decide what to eat...
what this is saying is that much of these decisions is not residing within
us...they're residing in the person who is designing that form.14

Frames are enormously influential in setting the default response, and the above

example is merely a surface frame. If surface frames are able to manipulate significant

personal decisions such as becoming an organ donor or not, it is likely that deep frames

have an ever greater influence on setting preferences around similarly personal decisions

such as what we eat.

To begin this study of framing and reframing food in America it is necessary to

first determine what existing deep frames influence public thinking on the issue.

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Introducing Two of America’s Existing Deep Frames on Food

The following analysis of existing deep frames attempts to answer the question

what kind of cognitive backdrop allows for “a deliberate veil between what you’re eating

and what you’re allowed to know about it.”15

The two frames that will be discussed, the ‘Consumerism’ and ‘Food as Fuel’

(hereafter, FaF) frames, have shaped America’s cultural consciousness on food in

pervasive and pernicious ways that hinder a constructive dialogue on food policy. The

frame-terms ‘Consumerism,’ ‘Modernism,’ and ‘Health Individualism’ are borrowed

from FrameWorks. This analysis is limited to a discussion of American food culture.

The ‘Modernism’ and ‘Health Individualism’ frames are distinct from the

‘Consumerism Frame’ but have similar effects and implications, and so have been

included as “semi-surface” frames. They are semi-surface frames in that they only make

sense within the larger ‘Consumerism’ frame while still retaining enough nuance and

depth to warrant their own classification. They are more than just clever spin within the

‘Consumerism’ frame.

It is worth emphasizing that, as the phrase ‘deep frame' implies, these are largely

unconscious mechanisms that can at certain conceptual junctures conflict with one

another. This is indeed is part of the larger point—there is currently no overarching

conception of either how our food system works or what our relationship to food is or

should be. There are only competing storylines that promote various aspects of the status

quo while obscuring the potential for systematic change. One such we will explore is the

FaF and ‘Food as Entertainment’ tandem.

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Deep frames speak to and forge connections with underlying principles or value

systems that have been built up and ingrained over many years. In this case, decades of

mass commercialization, modernization and commodification of innumerable goods and

services have influenced America’s value system. It is important to recognize the

existence and effects of these deep frames precisely because they are so fundamental to

America’s mainstream worldview and culture. I must contextualize my observations by

stating that, generally speaking, mainstream culture has become corporate culture in my

view—most of us work for, buy from, and are entertained by corporations.

These unconscious frames, rife with instability and omission, are taken for

granted as the base layer of our culture’s reality. It is essential to question the role and

legitimacy of persistent cultural frames. The following frame-examinations do so within

the context of food discourse.

Deep Frame #1: ‘Food as Fuel’

The FaF frame includes many cultural and commercial surface frames that are not

within the purview of this thesis. Rather, the focus will be on the frame’s psychological

and etymological aspects and not its many manifestations in commercial culture (save the

introductory example below). I am more interested in how the frame is buttressed by an

implicit conceptual metaphor: Food is fuel, and thus the body is a machine.

At one point in Ratatouille, a memorable animated film about a French rat named

Remy who dreams of becoming Paris’s top chef, Remy’s gruff father, Django, gets fed

up with his son’s culinary choosiness:

“Django: [to Remy] Food is fuel. You get picky about what you put in the tank, your

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engine is gonna die. Now shut up and eat your garbage.”16

This quote reflects a traditional, “calories in, calories out” nutritionist dogma, i.e.

your energy output depends entirely on how much energy (calories) you consume. While

it is not within the purview of my thesis to give this nutritional fallacy full treatment, it

must be noted that this industrial view of nutrition is empirically false.17 It assumes

several aspects of our physiology, which science now understands to be interdependent

and dynamic, are autonomous and static. The major problem with the FaF frame is that is

assumes all calories are created equal—in other words, the equivalent caloric energy of

an apple and a slice of cake are qualitatively the same. This assumption neglects the now

widely accepted notion that foods are more than the sum of their nutritional parts, and act

synergistically with one another and the body. “We see the body as a machine, not as

evolved to nature,”18 which obscures the fact humans evolved with specific plant-based,

unprocessed diets. FaF obscures how America’s new dietary staples (red meat, dairy,

sugars and refined grains) mark a radical departure from what our not-so-distant

ancestors relied on for sustenance.

Take the example of the apple and the slice of cake. The sugar molecules in the

apple are fundamentally different than those in the cake, which were likely concocted in a

food-science lab in the form of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Sugar as it is

“ordinarily found in nature… gives us a slow-release form of energy accompanied by

minerals and all sorts of crucial micronutrients we can get nowhere else.”19

But FaF remains a powerful, enduring understanding of our relationship to food. This

metaphor constitutes the basis of our conceptualization of food and reveals an outlook on

food borne out of the Industrial Age. The frame views food as an undifferentiated fuel

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used to feed our most precious machine: the body. There are many implications of this

frame. Here are a few:

•It takes a dominant stance against nature—an industrial view of agriculture.

Many in the middle and lower classes are appreciative for processed meals because

they simply do not have access to fresh organics foods or the money and time to

prepare meals. Food preparation is seen as a chore, not as a communion with the

Earth or a part of everyday family life. Many meals are not eaten at the dinner table

but in front of the TV or in the car.

•Those who are selective about their food choices, i.e., choose unprocessed non-

industrial scale crops, are seen as people with the means and time to do so. These

choices are seen as attributes of an elite lifestyle only available to the well-to-do. As a

result, those who do value preparing unprocessed organic foods and sharing meals

with family and friends, such as those involved in the “Slow Food” movement, are

scorned as pretentious idealists.

•It prevents the average consumer from seeing organic as qualitatively distinct from

traditional, and vice versa—whether conventionally or organically grown, a carrot is

just a carrot. However, one meta-study found that organic produce is “25% higher in

phenolic acids and antioxidants,” which are crucial too good health.20

•We value quantity over quality—if it’s all about the same quality of fuel, one might

as well get the most fuel one can for as cheaply as one can. Whether the market has

responded to consumer preference for more calories or consumer preference simply

acclimatized to a market intent on churning out more processed food is up for debate.

The two likely reinforced one another. Regardless, the reigning philosophy of the

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industrial system is to produce bigger yields, not healthier crops.

•If all calories are seen as equal, convenience, shelf life, and taste all become more

important than nutrition. We want the most easily obtainable, longest lasting, best-

tasting fuel. Since man can make food just as good as or better than nature, it is fine

to manipulate the compositional form of foods with preservatives, colors, stabilizers,

and artificial flavor.

• One judges food by the same metrics one judges machines: “uniformity, reliability,

predictability, cleanliness, are seen as highly desirable, while ‘natural’ is often

associated with dirty, unpredictable, etc.”21

Etymology of Fuel, Food & Nutrition

The word fuel naturally reminds us of fire and firewood since they were

mankind’s first true fuels. Our ancient relatives did not worry what kind of tree it was as

long as it burned brightly and kept them warm, except maybe to seek that type of tree out

in the future. Analogously, we in the modern West don’t care which gas station we use to

fill up our tanks—price is the foremost concern since the quality of fuel is essentially the

same anyplace.22

This mentality comes from the 19th century when scientists took what they had

learned about the combustion of fuels and began applying it to food. The term calorie was

in fact first used to measure the energy content in fuels and was then applied to food,

thereby turning food into a fuel.

We can begin to reconceptualize food in a deeper way if we explore the original,

deeper meaning of food and related words:

Food comes from the Germanic root fod, which means to tend, keep, to protect, to

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guard, and to feed. Notice these words all connote relationship and connectivity.23

Nutrition, nurture, nurse and nourish all come from nutrix, meaning a woman

who nurses a baby.24 Inherent in the image of the breastfeeding mother is the larger sense

of nourishing the child not only through the milk, but also through love, touch and

connection—all the levels that a mother brings to the relationship.

Tracing the original meanings of these words reveals how our conception of food

and nutrition has been narrowed down over time to the limited materialistic concept of

‘fuel’ while leaving out the spirituality and relationship that surrounds it. Our limited

concept of food as something that sustains our health by providing energy is “a strange

idea,” as Michael Pollan views it:

If you travel around the world…you learn that people have eaten for a great many
other reasons—pleasure, community, communing with nature, (expressing)
identity…and we eat symbolic foods to express a spiritual relationship. All are
equally legitimate reasons to eat other than health, but for some reason we have
reduced it down to this one thing.25

The concept of food as just a fuel to fill up on is an outmoded understanding that

has led the average consumer to make decisions that contribute to poor health. The

industrial ideology behind it encourages people to treat their bodies as machines to be fed

periodically without real regard for nutrition and health concerns. FaF encourages a

culture in which meal preparation and eating together as a daily ritual are seen as

impractical and unnecessary.

‘Food as Entertainment’

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One of the equally misconceived ways in which we view food is as cheap, quick

source of diversion—‘food as entertainment’ (hereafter, FaE) I’ll only briefly elaborate

on this since I believe this idea already resonates widely—most of us have spent a few

evenings mindlessly noshing on Cheezits or Doritos while we watch our favorite

television show.

This frame is less akin the communal, celebratory sense of “pleasure” Pollan

alludes above and more akin to Freud’s “pleasure principle.” For one, the excessive

amount of fat, sugar and salt in the processed food we eat now can actually change the

brain in a manner not unlike that of a habitual smoker or heroin addict. Researchers found

that “rats fed a diet containing 25% sugar are thrown into a state of anxiety when the

sugar is removed,” and that “their symptoms included chattering teeth and the shakes –

similar…to those seen in people withdrawing from nicotine or morphine.”26 It seems that

the slogan for Pringles brand potato chips is more bluntly honest than they would have

you believe: “Once you pop, you can’t stop.”I

I bring the FaE frame to light because while it initially seems to create confusion

when paired with FaF, it actually makes sense within the “food as relationship” context

discussed, and counterbalances FaF in an important way.

If we implicitly understand food as sign of relationship and intimacy, then solitary

binging is not so bizarre—when intimacy is not immediately available, we use food as a

replacement. When we don’t know how to satisfy our hunger for love, we overindulge on

a substitute that fills the surface cracks of a deeper gulch of desire. Paradoxically then,

we overeat in social situations as well, such as when a group of friends do not put down
I
See the Primitive Hardware of the Modern Human on page 64.

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the chips and dip until they have scraped porcelain. Overeating can be socially enforced

to promote a spirit of fraternity.

In this way, FaE counterbalances the passionless utilitarianism of FaF which is

unfulfilling for a culture that takes such delight in escapism and diversion. Context is

crucial in determining which frame is activated—FaF is cognitively substantial on a

Wednesday afternoon lunch break that precedes an important meeting, but is meaningless

on a lonesome Saturday night. FaF is used especially in institutional settings while FaE is

used in both solitary and inter-personal settings. FaF is overly utilitarian and materialistic

while FaE is overly egoistic and hedonistic. Mainstream corporate culture allows the

individual to pick either one depending on circumstance, since both favor their financial

interests by encouraging more eating than is necessary.

Globally, we have long seen food as much more than just fuel, or more recently,

entertainment. It should be said that of course FaF is literally true in some sense—food

provides us with the necessary fuel, or energy, we need to “run.” The problem is that it

has become the primary metaphor for understanding the purpose of food in American

culture.

The etymological origins of “food” and “nutrition” show that the essence of food

is more akin to relationship than to fuel. In the relationship between a mother who nurses

and cooks for her child, one sees caring, connection and love. But the relationship that

exists between the contemporary corporate food structure and the consumers they feed is

one based on impersonality, indifference and, quite often, exploitation. It seems most do

not recognize this outrage, having been inculcated to see food through one-dimensional

frames that detach food from nature and nurturance. Most Americans do not conceive of

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food in terms of relationship (to one another and nature) not because it is intellectually

difficult to do so, but because it is unfamiliar. Most, I believe, have not considered this

perspective before. I hope to have conveyed that FaF and FaE offer only limited

understandings of food that often betray humankinds’ longstanding ideas about what food

means and represents.

Deep Frame #2:‘Consumerism’ and Its’ Semi-Surface Frames: ‘Modernism’ &

‘Health Individualism’

Consumerism

Americans that do see past the folly of FaF and FaE still generally have no

working conceptual model of the food system as a whole.27 This lack of understanding

allows food to slip into a consumer paradigm whereby what you eat becomes one of the

definitive markers of your social status. For instance, one generally does not find Whole

Food’s and McDonald’s patrons running in the same social circles. There is, of course,

historical precedence for this—monarchs and royalty have long displayed their wealth

and superiority by eating expensive, faraway foods at the expense of the masses. It is true

that food has long been inequitably allocated, but never as perversely obscured as it is

presently: “to the degree that food is a commodity and the public identifies as consumers,

the food system and its role in their daily lives is largely invisible.”28

Even though it is a basic human need, food is subject to the same commodifying

forces as sneakers and cars. Food is seen first and foremost as a consumer issue—

choosing where to shop or eat out, selecting your groceries, deciding to buy conventional

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or organic—are all seen as issues of individual choice.

But the marketplace is skewed in favor of junk-food since corporations gain from

catering to our most unhealthy cravings. ‘Consumerism’ promotes an extreme laissez-

faire food-marketplace that is fundamentally at odds with good health—here are just a

few examples of why:

• Nearly all soda manufactures switched from cane sugar to HFCS in the 1980s

when corn subsidies made it cheaper to produce. HFCS has also been

unequivocally linked to the rise in obesity.29

• There’s more money in dissembling nature and putting it back together than selling

it whole. The whole foods nature produces on its own are cheap, but the most

profitable foods are the highly processed ones that can only be produced in a

handful of processing plants owned by certain corporations.

• Instead of simply selling whole wheat flour, a densely nutritious product, most

producers chemically separate the grain into white flour, which can be sold as

white bread to the not-so-nutritionally minded, and wheat germ, the healthy part

of the grain that can be sold to the nutritionally minded. Finally, the bran can be

sold separately as a fiber supplement. Look at all the streams of revenue created

by separating a food that was already complete in and of itself.

Health Individualism

Framing scholar Shanto Iyengar has suggested that “American culture predisposes

one to hold individuals responsible…simply by virtue of growing up in America, we

learn to hold individuals responsible.”30 Accordingly then, FrameWorks has found that

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many consumers reason within a ‘Health Individualism’ frame that suggests it is “up to

the individual to make smart, healthy choices about food and exercise.”31 This pattern of

thinking shuts off what FrameWorks has termed ‘linked fate,’ or the “idea that what

happens in one community affects society as a whole.”32 When citizens see food

primarily as an issue of individual choice it obscures “systematic contributors to health

disparities—such as poverty, racial discrimination, or exposure to environmental toxins,”

and the “larger systematic aspects of the policy issues involved.”33 When disparities are

acknowledged, they are attributed to either a lack of knowledge or willpower.

It also limits the responsibility of society to affect those choices when food is not

seen a shared resource like air or water. If it is an every-person-for-him/herself matter it

does not warrant protections against commodification and privatization. Thus, the ability

of the government to counterbalance the Corporate Food Structure, whose profits derive

from artificially manipulating what nature gives us for free, is limited. As Lakoff

reminded me in our personal communication, “(there is a) Big Ag problem. This is a

monetary thing, and the conservatives are for a radical free-market.”34

‘Health Individualism’ could not resonate if our society did not already value a

“radical free-market” that masquerades as an expression of genuine individual choice.

Lakoff contends our culture is captivated by 17th century Enlightenment ReasonII, a

model of human decision-making that helped rid us religious domination during the

Enlightenment but is “empirically false.”35 ‘Health Individualism’ is dependent on our

espousal of certain debatable Enlightenment ideals, namely that “language is neutral

(and) just fits the world; that everybody has the same reason and it works by logic; (that)

it’s just a matter of telling people of the facts and they’ll reason to the right conclusion.”36
II
See page 36 on “Enlightenment Reason.”

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Modernism
One of the most esteemed values of the ‘Modernism’ frame is ‘more, more,

more’—“Everything we've done in modern industrial agriculture is to grow faster, fatter,

bigger cheaper.”37 This frame supports the seemingly commonsensical view that most of

the outcomes of our relentless, technology driven march-of-progress are desirable, and it

is futile and naïve to resist what amounts to a force of nature. It gives an air of

inevitability to the corporate takeover of food, particularly through sophisticated mass

marketing techniques.

The type of thinking this frame promotes elevates the importance of convenience,

speed and standardized products and teaches consumers to desire those traits. “The

implicit idea of fast food is to satiate yourself as quickly as possible,” observes one

researcher at the Rotman School of Management who found in an experiment that people

exposed to fast food logos were more likely to accept smaller immediate payments rather

than wait a week for larger payments. She suggests the results “represent a culture that

emphasizes time efficiency and immediate gratification” that puts people’s “economic

interest at risk.”38

‘Modernist’ thinking has not just reorganized how we value time and money—it

has impoverished the quality of our crops in the fast food industry’s quest for uniform,

controllable crops.39 Though many consumers might be unaware of such findings, most

concede they often feel hurried and that they know the modern diet to be rather

unhealthy. ‘Modernism’ encourages the public to accept worse health and an overall

stressful and hectic life as inevitable. Within this frame, citizens are encouraged to see

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encroachments on their personal lives as unavoidable sacrifices that must be made if they

are to succeed in the modern world.

For example, it is an effective frame for proponents of pesticides and genetically

modified (GMO) crops because it de-emphasizes reasonable, often rightful, concerns

citizens have as to whether or not such agricultural practices are wise. It’s “futile and

backwards”40 within this frame to fret over the nutritional degradation of industrial crops

or to resist Wal-Mart’s takeover of the local grocery store one has patronized for years.

Organic, local produce, even if it’s a bit healthier, is dirty, unpredictable and so requires

modern improvements. Even when harmful effects of industrial crops or processed foods

are known, the frame pushes us to consider them as desirable and forward-thinking while

simultaneously considering “whole, organic, fresh foods as regrettably lost artifacts of a

bygone era.”41

Conclusion

These existing deep frames encourage problematic thinking and are rooted in a

certain socio-cultural ideology that citizens retain the right to question. After all, for

thousands of years the human diet was guided by the accumulated food-wisdom of

distinct cultures bounded by geographical limits. The arrival of Western hegemony,

however, ushered in an era unconstrained by these age-old restrictions. Globalization

opened the floodgates to the transcultural sharing of food-wisdom. This new paradigm of

global food-wisdom means many Americans can have access to indigenous foods of

other cultures, such as the arrival of Andean quinoa in America.42 This access and new

global food knowledge has had an immense influence on what and how we eat. It is, in

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many ways, an enormous achievement to have made regional food cultures more

accessible to everyone.

However, the profoundly new, unconstrained relationship to food the West

cultivated also left us further entrenched in the Omnivore’s Dilemma: what do we eat

when we can all of a sudden eat practically anything? After all, “traditional culinary

practices are the products of a kind of biocultural evolution”43–the Corporate Culture

simply hasn’t been around long enough to compile “a deep reservoir of accumulated

wisdom about diet and health and place.”44

With the pernicious and pervasive influence of these deep frames on mainstream

food-thought and culture, the West has been remarkably liberal with its food policy. This

is meant not in the usual political sense, but in a cultural sense. Michael Pollan explains

that “one of the hallmarks of a traditional diet is its essential conservatism. Traditions in

food ways reflect long experience and often embody a nutritional logic that we shouldn’t

heedlessly overturn.”45

Yet the ‘FaF’ frame (seen in our reconceptualization of food as fuel and not

relationship), the ‘Consumerism’ frame (seen in the commodification of food), the

‘Modernism,’ frame (seen in the scientific engineering of food), and the ‘Health

Individualism’ frame (seen in the outlook on health as a purely individual matter), have

helped overturn such “nutritional logic.” The empowering news is that these deep frames

can be uprooted from the public’s outlook if advocates provide a coherent conceptual

model of the food system as a whole. Eating, “our most important engagement with the

natural world,”46 has been cleverly co-opted by corporations that don’t so much engage

the natural world as endlessly and erratically manipulate it. Food advocates have failed to

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preclude food from the destructive forces of commodification, and the results have and

will continue to be disastrous for our personal, global and environmental well being.

This failure is not only food advocates’ cross to bear. The cognitive hurdle nearly

all progressive advocacy groups fail to clear is the “Silo Problem,”III as Professor Lakoff

labels it. “Advocates’ work is often anchored by a set of ideas that amount…to self-

contained paradigms that are largely insulated from other issues, and therefore do not

effectively contribute to a bigger picture of the food system and its meaning.”47

Individual issues revolving around food are almost never linked around a larger

progressive frame, which will be explored in a later section. Instead of thinking about

progressivism, advocates focus solely on their particular issue or interest.

This is not to disparage the tremendous work various advocacy teams do. In our

interview, Lakoff spoke of their traditional communications approaches as not “wrong,”

but “ineffective.”48 Advocacy groups, which are often run by concerned citizens, not

communications experts, often base their strategies on traditional approaches. Their

communications strategies have long encouraged “little picture,” or episodic,

understandings of food and environment issues when in fact they are all inherently linked

in their purposes. Lakoff contends that individual advocacy groups would strengthen

their clout by linking their particular issue with others that also fall under the umbrella of

progressivism to create a movement.

To help us understand the food system and transform it to meet the real social,

cultural and nutritional needs of Americans, a thematic approach to framing that links

food to a larger progressive frame it is required. As FrameWorks Institute puts it, “one of

the more effective tools for raising the salience of an issue is to crystallize it as a clear
III
See page 58 for more on the “Silo Problem.”

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conceptual model in people’s minds.”49

The section after next explores how to craft frames that represent preliminary

attempts at raising the salience of food for more Americans. There is an extreme

disconnect between reality and perception when, for example, “a whopping 87 percent”50

of people want GM food labeled (so they can avoid them) at the same time it has become

“almost impossible for citizens to stay GM-free.”51 This paradox is just one of many that

have arisen from our lack of cultural insight into where our food comes from.

Before exploring how to craft new frames, an explanation of the origins of the

deep frames will provide a foundation for greater understanding.

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Where Our Existing Deep Frames Come From: Lakoff’s ‘Strict Father’ View

of America & Episodic Vs. Thematic Framing

←
Deep frames are not just supported by surface frames, but by powerful conceptual

metaphors as well. Professor Lakoff posits that one of the most fundamental and

unquestioned metaphors our country abides by is “the Nation as a Family.” We speak of

‘founding fathers,’ ‘daughters of the American Revolution,’ and ‘Homeland Security,’

among others.52 Additionally, he proposes there are “two idealized versions of the family

that would correspond to two idealized versions of the nation.”53 He proposes that the

Strict Father Model (hereafter SFM) is embedded in the conservative deep frame, and the

Nurturant Family Model (hereafter NFM) in the progressive deep frame. These models

represent the main two divergent ways in which Americans are raised.

Strict Father Model Nurturant Family Model

Paternalistic Parental Parity

Father Must Protect Family From Cruel Parents Must Impart Sense of Caring and
World Responsibility to Family

Father as the Sole Merited Moral Authority Parents Work Together to Set a Moral
Template

Core Values: Discipline, Obedience & Core Values: Empathy, Empowerment,

Punishment Community

Favors Competition Favors Cooperation

Lakoff believes that, mapped onto politics, these models help make sense of the

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partisan divide between conservatives and progressives over the proper role of

government, which should be viewed metaphorically as the “parental unit” within this

analogy. It should be said that, strictly speaking, neither model is better than the other.

Effective parenting and governance clearly incorporates elements of both.

Mapping the SFM onto the existing deep frames, especially ‘Consumerism’ and

its’ semi-surface frames, reveals their foundations. Insofar as our discussion is concerned,

the principal implication of the SFM on conservative thought is that “people are…greedy

and unscrupulous. To maximize their self-interest, they need to learn discipline, to follow

the rules and obey the laws, and to seek wealth rationally. The market imposes

discipline…it rewards those who acquire such discipline and punishes those who do not.

The market, from this perspective, is fair and moral.”54

The effects of such thinking are marked in our food discourse. Seen through the

‘Consumerism’ and ‘Health Individualism’ frames, the obesity epidemic is a crisis of

personal responsibility—unhealthy eaters lack the discipline, and hence morality, to make

smart dietary choices. Conservative catchphrases, such as “respect the judgment of the

marketplace,” suggest that any government intervention in the marketplace, even in

service of better public health, is immoral and interferes with the wisdom of the market’s

invisible hand.55 It is impossible to find the system at fault if conventional wisdom states

that the sick and unhealthy are that way of their own moral deficiency.

This is problematic since the conservative agenda (and thus the SFM) has

received preferential treatment in the media and “dominated political discourse in

America over the past thirty years.”56 Mainstream discourse does not treat the models

equals, and consequently “conservative ideas are being passed off as ‘mainstream’ ideas,

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which they not, while progressive ideas are being characterized as ‘leftist’ and

‘extremist,’ which they are not.”57 This has pivotal implications for the nature of the

political frames Americans think within since “not only is the media the main source of

American's information about public affairs, it also directs how we think about particular

social issues—whether, for example, we consider them to be individual problems

necessitating better behaviors or whether they are collective, social problems requiring

structural policy and program solutions."58 When individuals are to blame, systematic

changes to the food system is elusive.

Meritocracy

Conservatives who oppose systematic changes to the food system often

misrepresent one of America’s most treasured and influential values: Meritocracy.

Meritocracy is the idea that those with the greatest talent, ability, skill and determination

are the ones who make it to the top of the socio-economic ladder. It is a noble ideal that

gives legitimacy to our society’s capitalist structure. However, the persistence of endemic

poverty, social, racial and economic discrimination and the exorbitant cost of higher

education suggest we live in a rather incomplete meritocracy. The problem with believing

that we live “in a society where those who merit get to the top” is that we also then

believe that “those who deserve to get to the bottom get to the bottom and stay there.”59

The implications of this value on how we view personal health are similar to those of the

SFM that informs the existing food frames— it is never the market or society’s fault if

individuals, even millions upon millions of individuals, are unhealthy. Their ill health

within this frame becomes “not accidental, but merited and deserved.”60

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Episodic vs. Thematic Framing

The narrative of obese people as undisciplined, lazy addicts is preferred by

mainstream corporate media because blame can be easily and seemingly accurately doled

out. “Television loves sagas in which someone wins and someone loses.”61 The

comparatively complicated narrative of a corporately controlled food system that

strategically foists increasingly unhealthy products on consumers goes untold because

mainstream media “abhors long, tedious, complex stories and will usually ignore them if

possible.”62

Shanto Iyengar made sense of this partiality by proposing there are two types of

framing, episodic and thematic. "Episodic framing depicts concrete events that illustrate

issues, while thematic framing presents collective or general evidence.”63 He argues

convincingly that episodic framing, focused on discrete events such as crimes and

disasters, dominates mainstream media. By contrast, thematic frames place public issues

in a broader context by focusing on general conditions or outcomes, such as climate

change or campaign finance reform. These stories, because they require in-depth viewer

engagement and a host with a nuanced understanding complex issues, do not run nearly

as often.

Favoring episodic over thematic framing has a definitive effect on how people

come to view a given social issue influences and whether or not they see the need for

individual-level solutions or “broader social or institutional solutions…When news

frames public issues narrowly, as problems of specific people or groups, support for

policy proposals plummets. When a media story highlights conditions and trends, by

contrast, public support for policies to address the problem increases dramatically."64 The

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point is that different frames set up different policy solutions.

Episodic Frames Thematic Frames

Individuals Issues
Events Trends
Psychological Political/environmental
Private Public
Appeal to consumers Appeal to citizens
Better information Better policies
Fix the person Fix the condition

Conclusion

These two models help elucidate the backdrop for the existing food frames the previous

section explored. The overarching message, which explicitly manifests in ‘Consumerism’

and the semi-surface ‘Modernism’ and ‘Health Individualism’ frames, is that the system

cannot be blamed for matters such as eating that ultimately come down to individual

responsibility and choice. While this is in no small way true in a sense, it is also true that

the “system is rigged to make the most unhealthful calories in the marketplace the only

ones the poor can afford.”65 This has left consumers fighting an un-winnable uphill battle

against a corporately controlled food system. Next, we look at the craft of creating new

frames that elevate thematic issues around food onto the public agenda.

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The Craft of Reframing

The use of reframing and communication theory can help communication experts
and alternative food advocates convey the need for transformative positive social change
while providing the public with a clear conceptual model of the current American food
system. Benefits of abiding by the values ingrained in the reframes discussed include
improved health, vitality and productivity, greater national security, cleaner
environments, and a secure future of food for posterity.

A Briefer on Reframing

Reframing refers to a change in the context of the message exchange so that

different interpretations and outcomes become visible to the public.66 "To reframe means

to change the conceptual and/or emotional setting or viewpoint in relation to which a

situation is experienced to place it in another frame which fits the 'facts' of the same

concrete situation equally well, or even better, and thereby changes its entire meaning."67

Our experience of the world is based on the categorization of the objects of our

perception into classes. Cognitive science teaches us “once an object is conceptualized as

the member of a given class, it is extremely difficult to see it also as belonging to another

class” because “frames are physically present in our brains.”68

Thus, the cultivation of new deep frames requires a sustained program that causes

the mind to see “alternative class memberships.” Once these reframes, or alternative class

memberships, take root in cognition the previously limited view of reality becomes

unworkable.69

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Enlightenment Reason: A Barrier to Reframing

Persuasive reframes remain elusive in the case of food and many other

progressive issues. George Lakoff argues the primary reason for this is a sustained

communication program does not fit within Enlightenment Reason, the prevailing

backdrop that anchors most progressive advocacy activities.70 He argues that most

progressives don’t see the problem with their existing communication strategies because

they take a literalist approach to persuasion—i.e., that people should and will reason to

the right conclusions given the facts. Progressives “won’t set up a communications

system because that would be propaganda. God forbid we should go out there and tell

people what we believe and what the facts are and keep saying it over and over…they’re

not going to listen…because they believe in Enlightenment Reason.”71

If Lakoff’s assertion that many progressive advocacy groups view

communications systems and strategies as “propaganda” is correct, they are no doubt

doing a disservice to their cause. It is not just defeatist but fundamentally inaccurate to

view progressive reframes as the equally ill-advised counter-spin to right-wing

ideologues. Propaganda and spin are framing by fraud. They are misapplications of a

valuable instrument in the same way a hammer can be used to construct a shelter or

destroy one.

Reframes That Are Actually De-Frames, & The Mythology of the Western Diet

There is fundamental deception that arises out of the language used to talk about

framing, especially in the case of food reframes. The forthcoming proposed reframes are

genuine attempts at both engendering a return to a holistic relationship to food and

reversing the destruction caused by existing frames by way of intermediary, transitional

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reframes. Since the conception of food I am interested in is akin (though clearly not

identical) to that which existed before mainstream corporate culture, the term “de-

framing” or “un-framing” is perhaps more precise than reframing. I am most interested in

how frames can be used to help return Americans to the non-commoditized, apolitical

and holistic relationship to food our ancestors enjoyed. Western culture is ultimately

responsible for originally reframing food as fuel, commodity and symbol of social

standing. My interest lies in encouraging advocates to discredit these reframes and to

expose the natural way of looking at food as a source of life.

Irving Goffman, considered the father of framing, speaks to this point when he

elaborates on “fabrications,” which refer to “the intentional effort of one or more

individuals to manage activity so that a party of one or more others will be induced to

have a false belief about what it is that is going on.”72 This in turn calls to mind what

Roland Barthes said about the nature of myths, namely that a myth “does not deny things,

on the contrary…it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification.

It gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but a statement of fact.” In the

sense used by Barthes and by notable mythologist Joseph Campbell, a myth does not

equate to a misconception or a misrepresentation of the truth as we use the term in

everyday speech. Rather, a myth is a meaningful “story containing a deep structure” that

is “important to the culture” and allows it to “deal with its anxieties and deep

insecurities.” It does so by “abolishing the complexity of human acts” and organizing “a

world which is without contradictions.”73 Put simply in the modern lexicon, a myth is an

operating system.

One example of our culture's mythology around food is the apparent contradiction

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of America’s reliance on and celebration of oil-intensive methodsIV of food production

that if continued indefinitely will in due time lead a collapse.74 The natural “anxieties and

deep insecurities” associated with this contradiction are abolished by a mythology of

agriculture without limits. This myth has gradually embedded itself in American culture

in order give “a natural and eternal justification” for the unsustainable instruments of the

Western Diet that represent a radical departure from the food-ways that sustained

traditional cultures for thousands of years.

Though it not within the purview of this thesis to address this issue

comprehensively, the corporations that constitute the America’s industrial agriculture

arrangement have succeeded in fabricating a misleading mythology around food for the

purpose of short-term financial gain.75

Civil Disobedience Vs. Non-Collusion

Beneficial reframes that erase these outmoded, inequitable fabrications can only

arise out of minds that are acutely aware of the conflicts industrial agriculture engenders.

The problems associated with industrial agriculture cannot be solved with the same

consciousness that created it. The proposal to return to localized food production on a

macro-scale is, at present, such a progressivist one to mainstream corporate culture that

an element of “civil disobedience” or “dissidence” is inherent. Food advocates must

accept that, to lesser or greater degree, “they are cast out of the existing structures and

placed in a position of conflict with them.”76

I want to look closely at the phrase “civil disobedience” however, and see if it

IV
See How “Industrial Agriculture” Relies on Oil on page 43.

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truly fits the nature of what I’ve proposed.

If a measure of credence is given to Lakoff’s Strict Father Model of the United

States, it is fairly obvious how “civil disobedience” is a problematic phrase. One of the

very worst things a child of the nation (the strict father) can be is “disobedient.” The

father is “the Decider, the ultimate moral authority… His authority must not be

challenged.” As Lakoff goes on to explain, the capitalist market itself is viewed as such a

father figure, an idea implicit in the oft-used phrase “let the market decide.” “The market

is seen as both natural (since it is assumed that people naturally seek their self-interest)

and moral (if everyone seeks their own profit, the profit of all will be maximized by the

invisible hand.”77 In this model there is no room to question the decisions the market

arrives at. “There isn’t going to be civil disobedience. Who would be disobedient?”78

Lakoff asked rhetorically during our interview. Should one disobey, one is will be

punished—one of SFM’s most prized highly regarded values.

Thus, it is crucial for food advocates to communicate that their intent is not to

disobey the almighty marketplace in any malicious, anarchistic sense. Civil disobedience

is not malicious or anarchistic but based on non-violence. However, I would say that this

phrase does not accurately describe what needs to be done to reframe the food system

since it is something that individuals can do without necessarily becoming a part of a

larger movement of civil disobedience. Though implicit in advocates’ goals is a

questioning the value structure of corporate capitalism, this is likely not a productive

place to start from. Instead of “civil disobedience,” I adopt a phrase my father, author

Robert Gerzon, coined: “Non-Collusion.”

“Collusion” comes from Latin colludere, which means “to play together.”

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Collusion, e.g. transacting, with the corporate food structure amounts to giving it your

support, or “playing” with it. It is not a stretch to liken the corporate food structure to a

bully that you were always wary of playing with since he never treated you well, yet you

never stood up to him because you feared vengeance and ostracization. To engage in non-

collusion is to say, “No thank you, I don’t want to play your game anymore; I don’t get

anything out of it.” To not collude is to cease passive acceptance of an unfavorable

situation.

Those engaged in non-collusion do not try to dismantle the corporate stranglehold

by force or with mean-spiritedness, but by creating new economic realities from the

bottom up. It is has been shown time and time again that flurries of short-lived boycotts

do little to dent the corporate food structure. Instead, advocates must encourage like-

minded citizens to begin “building the foundation of strong local living economies (and)

establish and support locally owned human-scale businesses and family farms that create

regional self-reliance in food.”79 This includes building and supporting localized food-

infrastructure, comprised of Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs), farmer’s

markets, local grocers, among others. As journalist Michael Ruppert says, “localized food

production is the most fundamental key to human survival.”80 Such an approach actively

challenges the prevailing corporate food structure in a way that promotes our values

instead of attacking theirs.

Changing the defining stories of mainstream culture is possible. The hurdles that

stand in the way of reconceptualizing our relationship to food are immense. Attractive

reframes, based on universal core values such as honesty, compassion, stewardship and

social-responsibility can help get us there.

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With this knowledge in mind, we are now able to turn to the reframes I came

across and/or developed with the greatest potentiality.

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Reframe: Sun-Based Food Over Oil-Based Food

One of the most general problems in the public’s default thinking is that people tend to
be unaware of the processes of food production. This section aims to increase public
awareness of the crucial differences between an Oil-based food system and a Sun-based
food system.

How “Industrial Agriculture” Relies on Oil

Many people are familiar with the term “industrial agriculture,” also known as

“conventional agriculture,” “agribusiness” or (in liberal-leaning circles) “Big Ag.” These

terms describe a system of agriculture reliant on the use of herbicides, pesticides and

synthetic or petroleum-based fertilizers. It is an energy-intensive system that requires

“disproportionate amounts of water and fossil fuel.”81 Perhaps the most potent statistic is

that we would need 1.5 earths to be sustainable at our current rate of resource

extraction.82 “Put another way, it now takes a year and six months for the Earth to absorb

the CO2 emissions and regenerate the renewable resources that people use in one year” 83

An understanding of “Peak Oil” is crucial to understanding why the “1.5 earths”

figure is a compelling indictment of “industrial agriculture.” Peak Oil is the point in time

when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of

production enters terminal decline.84 The evidence for this concept, and the imminent

threat it poses global stability, is unequivocal and convincing:

•New oilfield discoveries have been declining steadily for 40 years despite extensive
exploration with the most advanced technology, and most importantly, finding giant new
fields is becoming ever more rare. Recently, major oil companies have had to cut their
production growth targets. In 2002, the world used four times more oil than was found
from new sources. –The Oil Depletion Analysis Centre85

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• By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015,
the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 MBD." – The US Joint Operating
Environment 2010 report86

• Shell estimates that after 2015 supplies of easy-to-access oil and gas will no longer keep
up with demand. –CEO of Shell, 22nd January 200887

There is little evidence that suggests the industrial system can adapt in time due to

its inherent and overwhelming reliance on oil. Michael Ruppert (a former LAPD officer,

investigative journalist, and founder of From the Wilderness, a newsletter dedicated

investigating political cover ups that at one time had 66 members of Congress

subscribed) cogently expands on how industrial agriculture relies on unsustainable levels

of fossil fuel use throughout the chain of production in the 260-word monologue below.

To emphasize his point, I have boldfaced each of the thirteen times he uses the word “oil”

and/or derivates of it:

The topsoil on which food is grown now is nothing more than a sponge onto which
we pour chemicals that we get from oil and natural gas. Without the chemicals the
soil has been turned into a junk-heap…so when you plant a crop now, what
happens is you drive an oil-powered machine that…plows (the crops), and then
you drive another oil-powered machine and it drives along and it plants (the
crops). And then you irrigate, and how do you irrigate? Well, the water is pumped
by pumps that are powered by electricity, which comes from either coal or
natural gas. The next thing you do is fertilize. All commercial fertilizers are made
from ammonia, and the feedstock for ammonia is natural gas. So you have
ammonium-nitrate fertilizers that are then sprayed on by another oil-powered
vehicle, then the crop dusters come along that are powered by oil, (and they) spray
pesticides that are all made from petroleum.

Then when it's time to harvest you drive another oil-powered machine and you
harvest it. You use another oil-powered machine to drive it to a place where it's
processed. Then you wrap it up in plastic, which is oil, and you put it in another oil-
powered machine and you drive it “x” number of miles to a food distribution
warehouse where an oil-powered machine brings it to your supermarket. The way
food is grown, moved, and produced around the world is an enormous waste of
hydrocarbon energy...there are 10 calories of hydrocarbon energy in every calorie
of food in the industrialized world.88

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As Michael Ruppert illustrates, there is a way to use language to reveal the barely-

hidden truths of industrial agriculture. Part of the disconnect between public perception

and the stark reality of an agricultural system in grave danger can be attributed to the

term “industrial agriculture” itself. For example, other instances in which the term

“industrial” is used descriptively include “Industrial Revolution” and “Industrial

Society.” Advertisements also use qualitative terms such as “industrial-strength” and

“industrial-sized” to communicate “very strong” and “very large,” respectively. It would

seem that within corporate culture, the connotations of “industrial” are, on the whole,

rather positive. Of course, many who regularly read the works of Mark Bittman, Michael

Pollan, et al. have already reorganized their perception around the word “industrial.”

Such writers use the adjective in a pejorative sense when describing the problems with

conventional agriculture.

Overall, the term “Industrial agriculture” fails to convey the reckless disregard for

resource sustainability the system exemplifies—it is an ecologically destructive form of

agriculture. The label we give our system of agriculture has important framing

ramifications—it is the most noticeable surface frame when engaged in food discourse. A

different term could evoke more accurate connotations.

While I have and will continue to use the terms “Corporate Food” or “Corporate

Food Structure/System” as an alternative for “industrial agriculture” in some

circumstances, I submit that a categorization beyond so-called “industrial” and so-called

“organic” is necessary in exposing their most important, underlying difference: how the

crops themselves are spurred to growth.

Michael Pollan, apparently with advice from Professor Lakoff,V introduced a term
V
See page 72.

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in his book In Defense of Food that elicits a vivid reconceptualization that moves beyond

the limited comparison of industrial versus organic: Sun-based food versus Oil-based

food.

Reframe: Industrial Agriculture as Oil or Petrochemical-Based

Oil-based food, or “Petrochemical-based food” as I prefer, is “a great image”89

because it implicates the problems associated with Peak Oil with current methods of food

production. The central idea behind the Oil-based frame is that industrial agriculture is oil

intensive and has only been able to ratchet up production for a short while by capitalizing

on millions of years of stored sunlight, i.e., fossil fuels. It provides a method to go

beyond our usual allotment of sun-energy, promote predictable and uniform crops, and

minimize the need for human labor with increased mechanization.

However, the unsustainability of petrochemical-based food in light of Peak Oil is only

half of the reason to move towards a Sun-based food model—the other is that

petrochemical-based food is nutritionally deficient.

Nutritional Deficiency of Petrochemical-based Food

Petrochemical fertilizers contain “the big three macronutrients that plants need to

grow—nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium,”90 but lack the assortment of

micronutrients unique to unaltered soil. However, this triad of macronutrients ensures

tremendous plant-growth and immense yields for crops. Perhaps it’s necessary to mention

farmers don’t just spray oil-based fertilizers during unusually rough or unproductive

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seasons— “up to 10 million tons of chemical fertilizer per year are poured onto fields to

cultivate corn alone.”91

While petrochemical fertilizers artificially boost the overall size and yield of

crops, the USDA has found “a decline in the nutrient content of the forty-three crops it

has tracked since the 1950s. In one recent analysis, vitamin C declined by 20%, iron by

15%, riboflavin by 38%, and calcium by 16.”92

In another meta-analysis conducted by the Organic Center, a nonprofit group in

Boulder, Colorado, found that organic produce was 25% higher in crucial phenolic acids

and antioxidants. The real quantitative and qualitative difference between Sun-based food

and Oil-based food is in the “the relative presence of micronutrients such as copper, iron

and manganese, as well as folic acid.”93 This is unsurprising, as “it stands to reason that a

chemically simplified soil would produce chemically simplified plants.”94

When micronutrients are missing in the food, it means they are missing in the soil,

and soil that lacks micronutrients is essentially sick and vulnerable. It is problematic that

“most people have no idea about the nature of fertilizer…it just sounds like it… makes

the land fertile,”95 when in fact they impoverish soil quality over time. Some potential

surface reframes of fertilizers include de-fertilizers, soil simplifiers, soil depleters or soil

poisoners.

Nutritional Integrity of Sun-based Food

The Sun-based food reframe on the other hand accounts for the important role soil

plays in producing healthy crops. Since “the soil is the place from which all plant matter

gets its nutrients,”96 the main priority of any good farmer should be to nurture a healthy

soil profile. John Bemis, owner of the Hutchins organic farm in Concord, astutely notes

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that “you do not feed the crop, you feed the soil.”97 With a bit of composted manure and

the utilization of crop rotation, the soil restocks itself with decayed plant matter. In

addition, soil bacteria, microorganisms, and earthworms are important in creating a

healthy soil profile and can only thrive in uncontaminated soil. This replenishment of the

soil maintains an ongoing balance that is paramount in producing quality, nutritious crops

year after year.98

Sun-based food also necessitates localized production, another key component of a

sustainable food paradigm. Without the help of petro-chemical fertilizers, centralized

mega-farms cannot produce as much cheap food. If thought about in the existing

paradigm, this immediate falloff in production is detrimental. However, with the

unsustainability of the oil-intensive system in mind, it becomes both necessary and

empowering to return to a de-centralized system based on local people running self-

sufficient farms in their communities.

Conclusion

This is a complicated reframe since Oil-based food is currently a more plentiful

and efficient means of calorie-creation than Sun-based food—“The oldest and most

common dig against organic agriculture is that it cannot feed the world’s citizens.”99

However, “increasing numbers of scientists, policy panels and experts (not hippies!) are

suggesting that agricultural practices pretty close to organic — perhaps best called

“sustainable” — can feed more poor people sooner, begin to repair the damage caused by

industrial production and, in the long term, become the norm.”100 Recent studies

completed by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, the University of Michigan,

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and Worldwatch all suggest that an organic, Sun-based food system can meet the needs

of everyone if we decide it is a priority.101

Regrettably, the public cannot rely on the wisdom of elected officials to make it

priority: “current agricultural and public health policy is not coordinated—we heavily

subsidize the growth of foods…that… in their processed forms (e.g., high fructose corn

syrup, hydrogenated corn and soybean oils, grain-fed cattle) are known contributors to

obesity and associated chronic diseases.”102 Nearly all of the government subsidies

contained in the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act, also known simply as the

“Farm Bill,” directly promote Oil-based food production over Sun-based food

production. Here is what we currently subsidize:

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Reframing Food as Fuel

Simply put, many more Americans are seeing food as more than a necessary fuel whose
only requirement is that it can be obtained and consumed without much difficulty or cost.
Perhaps just in time, we’re saying, “Hold the shake,” and looking for something more
wholesome.103 – Mark Bittman

Energy from Other Sources

If we allow that food is more than just fuel, that it represents “our most important

engagement with the natural world,”104 it immediately changes the context of our

relationship to food. When we reconceptualize eating as an intimate act between

ourselves and the Earth we become more interested and engaged in the story behind that

food—where did it come from, how it was grown and how did it reach our plates.

We have lost the sense of sacred in our food. Indigenous peoples have always

celebrated and revered the animals they slaughtered and the crops they harvested—

because food was so scarce and so valuable it was deified. In modern America, it is

surely not—it is estimated we simply throw as much as 50% of our food straight into the

trash.105 I see little wrong with Pollan’s appraisal that “our problem around food is a

cultural problem…it’s a problem of not valuing it.”106

Not only do we under-value it, we often misemploy it. Food is certainly our

primary supplier of energy, which is the grain of truth from which FaF springs. But we

tend to think of food as our only source of energy. Thinking within FaF, it is sensible to

reach for a bag of potato chips or piece of cake when one is stressed or tired. These are

states in which we think we need an energy-boost. But eating so-called energy-dense

foods do not remedy the underlying problems. There have been, for instance, many

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studies that detail how modern American is chronically under slept and overstressed.107

We mistake our desire for deeper sleep and increased serenity for hunger pangs. It does

not help, as Pollan notes, that scientists have engineered processed food so that it is so

high in salt, fat and sugar, it “lies to our senses” and “presses our evolutionary buttons.”VI

We become reliant on processed food to alleviate complex psychosomatic states because

it powerfully triggers our brain’s reward system.

This hijacking of the brain’s reward system also causes us to eat more than our

bodies require, and overeating has the opposite effect of optimal eating. One’s mental and

physical capacities are muted while the body expends extra digesting the extra food. For

example, one of the most appealing but inaccurate factoids that goes around Americans’

dinner tables every Thanksgiving is that a natural chemical in the turkey called

tryptophan is responsible for oft reported after-dinner fatigue and sleepiness. In fact, “the

real culprits are all those carbohydrates from potatoes, stuffing, vegetables, bread and pie.

The massive intake of carb-heavy calories” is what accounts for the sleepiness and

general listlessness.108 As the documentary Food Matters explores, “food affects mood,”

Should advocates recast food in terms of a mutual relationship instead of simply a

fuel to obtain, I believe people would be more inclined to turn inward and listen to what

they are yearning for when they reach for a Snickers bar. Often, I believe, people would

realize they’re being told not to eat, but to get more sleep or breathe more deeply. The

psycho-emotional aspects of food-related diseases are complex, and in the following

writer’s view, paradoxical:

Obesity is usually taken as a symptom of excess, but in fact the reverse is true.
VI
See The Primitive Hardware of the Modern Human on page 64.

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Obesity... [is] actually a symptom of the most profound destitution ever to visit
the human race. The bloated lifestyles of the American rich harbor an inner
poverty exactly equal to the Third World poverty that enables those lifestyles.
Half the world cannot get enough to eat, and the other half cannot get enough no
matter how much they eat.109

The major reason a reconceptualization is necessary for our health is that

ultimately “you feel better, you look better, you live longer, [and] you save money…it’s

simple, safe, cheap and effective” to eat optimally.110 A minority of Americans has

already reframed food, shown in the vibrant media presence of books, blogs, web-

communities and documentaries that promote a holistic relationship to food.

A powerful reframe to FaF is possible if advocates adopt a lexicon based on

values already esteemed by mainstream corporate culture. For example, talking about

changes to the corporate food system not just so we enjoy vague notions of “good

health,” or “sustainable agriculture,” but also in terms of increased productivity,

sociability, energy and intelligence. Such ambitions already captivate Americans. To link

them to a way of eating that actually delivers on such benefits is crucial.

The Uncaring Corporate Food Structure

The “Etymology of Fuel, Food & Nutrition” section explored how the mind

associates food with notions of caring, family and solidarity whether the food comes from

your mother’s oven or Kraft’s factory. The Corporate Food Structure has been

enormously successful in uprooting the traditional food-trust that historically exists in

families. This trust functions to look after one another’s well being. A major part of a

communication strategy based on reframing FaF must be to link the negative sentiments

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the public has developed toward financial corporations and other impersonal mechanisms

of the corporate economy in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse with the comparable

negligence and apathy displayed by the Corporate Food Structure. Advocates must do a

better job communicating that corporations do not feed consumers health-promoting

foods—they feed consumers foods that directly cause sickness. This is, from a moral

perspective, not dissimilar to the illegal but prevalent practice of selling relatively

uninformed buyers toxic assets for a quick profit. With a powerful communications

strategy in place, the already tenuous trust between the public and corporately controlled

food can be severed when the next Corporate Food-related disaster hits.111 As the popular

political adage says, “never let a crisis go to waste.” It is only a matter of time—just last

summer 380 million eggs contaminated with salmonella were recalled from a single

factory farm that had a history of health, social and environmental violations.112 When the

next horrifying, captivating event occurs, advocates must seize by communicating that

healthy, safe food is rooted in local, human-scale outfits run by people who actually care

deeply about health.

Such an event would help catalyze a sense of “injustice,” one of the three

components necessary to mobilize grassroots’ support according to Gamson and

Goodson.113 I believe that the other two components, “agency,” a “sense that it is

possible to change the conditions or policies,” and identity,” a sense that “the ‘we’ who

can change things exists in opposition to some ‘they’ with different values or interests,”114

will fall into place quickly once sufficient outrage at the “injustice” occurs.

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FrameWorks Most Effective Reframes

All potential reframes FrameWorks formulates must pass the rigorous Strategic

Frame Analysis (hereafter, SFA) before they promote it as a tool for advocates. Ideally,

what comes out of the use of an SFA on a particular subject is a “simplifying model,”

which is a concrete, visual metaphor to communicate complex subjects. Here is how they

describe their process:

…(SFA) is a multidisciplinary, multi-method approach that pays attention to the

public’s deeply held worldviews and widely held assumptions…it looks at the
frames currently in the public’s consciousness and how those frames influence
public policy preferences. It then investigates potential re-frames… that enable
the public to understand social issues in a broader context, thereby moving
Americans away from blaming individuals and toward systematic and
community-based solutions to social problems.115

One of the most important and commonsensical findings that came out of using

the SFA is to “begin the public conversation with a value.” FrameWorks found that when

one does so, one signals “to the public what (one’s) issue is all about, at the most

overarching level.”116 This rule often goes unheeded by experts, whether they are climate

scientists, environmentalists or food-reform advocates. This is because “experts” for

various causes, exactly because they care so deeply and know so much about their subject

matter, tend to be poor content-managers. They often assume the audience is more

familiar with their field and what they are talking about than they really are. As a result,

experts take certain base knowledge for granted and focus instead on specifics (which are

often negative or scary) that would only resonate strongly with fellow experts or citizens

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comparatively well versed on the issue already. I have listed the values embedded in the

following reframes.

Michael Shellenberger, an environmental strategist who coauthored the explosive

and controversial essay “The Death of Environmentalism,” made a blunt criticism of

environmental advocates that food advocates should learn from. He harshly, but perhaps

astutely, pointed out that “environmentalism…is about telling people how terrible things

are and asking them to make big sacrifices.”117 This, he said, cuts against the grain of

American culture. In light of the importance FrameWorks places on A.) Announcing a

solution first and then backing up into problem definition, and B.) Starting off with a

value, this habit of experts focusing on frightening specifics may help explain why

advocates often fail to get their messages across.

Food and Fitness Environment Frame

The FrameWorks Institute suggests that one of the most effective thematic frames

in eliciting a unified, total-field image of food is the ‘Food & Fitness Environment

Frame.’ This frame takes advantage of the fact that “the most reliable predictor of obesity

in America today is a person’s wealth,” and that “the system is rigged to make the most

unhealthful calories in the marketplace the only ones the poor can afford.”118 However,

this is a tricky, often ineffectual line of argument because it can be deliberately

manipulated or benignly misinterpreted as a “class-warfare” argument. The Food &

Fitness Environment Simplifying Model takes the truth of wealth disparity into account,

deflates potential conflict by reframing the argument around communities rather than

class. Here is the narrative that proved effective in testing:

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Every town, neighborhood and region in America can be evaluated in terms of its
Food & Fitness Environment. Where we live or work is one of the most important
things determining whether we end up fit and healthy or not. When people do not
have access to a healthy environment or opportunities to make healthier choices,
they have worse health and a lower quality of life. When we improve these Food
& Fitness Environments by creating adequate transportation, markets with healthy
foods, and schools with physical fitness requirements, the health of the people
who live and work there improves as well.119
(Values: Fairness, Prevention, Health, and Environment)

This narrative reframes good health thematically, or as a collective issue requiring

structural change and maintenance, as opposed to the episodic ‘Consumerism’ frames

that view good health as contingent only upon personal responsibility.

The Runaway Food Model

One other innovative frame that could potentially move people away from an

episodic understanding of the existing food system towards a meaningful and thematic

one is the ‘Runaway Food Model:’

“Experts are increasingly concerned about what they call our Runaway Food
System. The way we produce food today has radically changed, and now has the
power to alter the foundations of life as we know it almost by accident. Farming
chemicals like pesticides and weed-killer are permanently altering our soil and
water. Genetic engineering is changing the nature of the plants and animals we
eat. And mile-long fishing nets are dragging the ocean floor and altering
ecosystems. America needs to retake control of this runaway food system before
it does more damage to the foundations we depend on”120
(Values: Stewardship, Legacy, and Protection)

This model attempts to create a new deep frame, or fundamental organizing

principle, that categorizes the huge number of episodic environmental degradation stories

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within a larger, more meaningful narrative. The term ‘Runaway Food System’ is effective

because it suggests the concrete image of an out-of-control runaway train or truck. This

gut-level notion of a massive, powerful and reckless force is paired thematically with the

radical, system-wide changes American food processes have undergone in the past 50

years. It is “not too obviously metaphorical to be accepted as a ‘natural language,’”121

and provides the listener with a simple model that puts the environmental destruction we

are all aware of in tangible terms and connects it to a narrative that concerns the food on

everyone’s plate.

Lakoff’s Critique of the FrameWorks Institute

George Lakoff provided a critique of the organization and its’ founders and

mission during our interview. Lakoff’s critique brings up some coherent objections to

FrameWorks that deserve attention, but should also be taken with a grain of salt.

His major objection is that their practices are essentially PR driven. Having co-

founded FrameWorks with Susan Nall Bales, he suggests that her framing philosophy is

that “you always give the client what they want…if you see the client doing something

counterproductive you never mention it.” Additionally, he laments FrameWorks reliance

on “traditional polling techniques,” trainings, and a belief that it’s all “about language.”122

I read the “Food and Fitness Environment” Frame to Lakoff to gather his

impression of this approach. He responded critically: “It’s a literalist approach…notice it

has a definition of a problem. And the problem is just we need to get a different frame in

there.... [and it] contradicts moral systems and it contradicts social/institutional

pressures…”123 I found this response to be somewhat unsatisfying, but I began to

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comprehend his broad criticism of the FrameWorks Institute when we delved into how

crucial a “larger progressive frame” is to catalyzing social, political, and economic

change that favors the philosophy of food proposed in this thesis. “See, in general, it’s not

that this is wrong it’s that it’s ineffective,” Lakoff pushed me to consider. FrameWorks

may come up with interesting reconceptualizations, but “the problem of course is that

people don’t follow them if they’re in the lower classes.”124 Lakoff opines that despite

their best intentions, FrameWorks implicitly operates in a classist mindset.

It is difficult to say whether Lakoff’s one-time close ties to the organization help

or hinder the credibility of his criticism. While there are surely few people who know

more about what drives FrameWorks, he admitted that his departure was disagreeable. It

seems to come down to whether one thinks he is vengeful or not. However, our next

exploration is of something that is not in doubt: the need for larger progressive frame to

elevate food onto the public agenda.

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Food Within the Larger Progressive Frame

The “Silo Problem” and The Larger Frame

To focus solely on food is to succumb to the “Silo Problem,”125 a phrase Lakoff

uses to denote how individual progressive causes are usually compartmentalized instead

of incorporated and organized into a larger progressive frame. In other words, each

advocacy group tends to promote just their own individual cause—the protection of

rivers, forests, or the poor—instead of combining to form a movement with real

momentum. This is a crucial problem to address, because while progressivism “gets

amorphous from the point of view of issues, it doesn’t get amorphous from the point of

view of values.”126 I have numbered the frame’s core values for emphasis.

The larger progressive frame is simple: it’s empathy(1), you care about other
people because you’re actually physiologically connected to them, it’s social as
well as personal responsibility(2), meaning you act on the empathy, and it’s a
principle of excellence(3). You make yourself, your community, and your country
as good as possible because these problems are hard. And the result is that
government should be there to protect and empower people(4).127

These are enduring values that have shaped the course of America according to

Lakoff. They should be used to connect the Corporate Food Structure to the predominant

issues of modern America—the economy, national security, and health care. For

example, it is worth knowing that every time one orders a cheeseburger instead of a

salad, one adds two and half dollars in collective long-term health care costs.128 Food, and

meat and processed food in particular, is so plentiful and cheap in the U.S. it is difficult to

get through to citizens from any one angle, whether that angle is health, the environment

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or food security.

One of the missing pieces in the American conceptualization of food systems is

the sense that we face collective choices about the particular mechanisms we use to

produce our food, and that these mechanisms can be sustainable or not, equitable or not.

The larger progressive frame allows for the view that food, like water or air, is a precious

shared resource. When seen this way it is logical to vigorously protect food from the

exploitive tendencies of commodification. As Pollan says, “we have a system where

wealthy farmers feed the poor crap and the poor farmers feed the wealthy high-quality

food.”129 Since we all breathe air and drink water, those who affect them are held up to

rigorous standards are generally and theoretically speaking (bottled water excepted) not

open to commodification or private ownership.

Focus on Food

Like environmental matters, food matters are so multifarious that strict

compartmentalization can seem like a good idea. Issues such as obesity, diabetes, soil

degradation and animal maltreatment are no doubt diverse, but the overarching aim of all

alternative food communications strategies ought to be to link those problems under the

“perceptual umbrella…of corporate malfeasance.”130

One way to strengthen such a perceptual umbrella is to revive a healthy debate on

our food policies. The public, media and even Congress and generally apathetic to food

policy matters such as the omnibus Farm Bill that is revisited and renewed every five

years. Pollan suggests this apathy comes from most people’s assumption that, “true to its

name, the farm bill is about “farming,” an increasingly quaint activity that involves no

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one we know and in which few of us think we have a stake.” He goes on to say, “that the

Farm Bill is a misnomer; in truth, it is a food bill and so needs to be rewritten with the

interests of eaters placed first.”131

Pollan may or may not know it, but he’s promoting a new conceptual food frame

based around the universality of the idea “we are all eaters.” Pollan, as good

communicators do, talks in frames and metaphors naturally: “Eaters want a bill that

makes the most healthful calories in the supermarket competitive with the least healthful

ones. Eaters want a bill that feeds schoolchildren fresh food from local farms rather than

processed surplus commodities from far away.”132 This frame conjures, in just a few

small words, a powerful plea to our finest traits—our capacity for empathy, shared

responsibility, and sense of duty to posterity. If the perceptual umbrella of corporate

malfeasance was widely interpreted as an attack on our ability to sustain such values, the

debate around the Farm Bill and its effects on the quality of food and food choices would

become decidedly more interesting, lively and democratic.

The Limits of Framing

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Disciplinary Limits

Like all other branches of Communications theory, framing has limitations.

← A commitment to finding frames that resonate with various strains of the public

requires resource-intensive research. Approaching social issues like food from a framing

perspective also necessitates a long-term engagement through a process of validating

hypothesized frames through research and testing.

Susan Nall Banes, co-founder of FrameWorks, herself notes that the SFA model “directs

its attention to the most commonly held cultural frames, leaving it vulnerable to charges

that it overlooks minority views in favor of the most widely shared framing solutions, and

that it does not pay adequate attention to the views of policy elites that control the power

structure without regard to public opinion.”133 It is interesting this potential criticism

strongly resembles the one Lakoff offered up in our personal communication.VII

Finally, frames are incredibly difficult to detect empirically because they are most

frequently adopted as unconscious “conceptual scaffolds.”134 Frames never spell

themselves out in their entirety, which is why continuous research is necessary to prove

what frames currently exist and which reframes might be effective.

Cultural Limits

The State-Corporate System

“The problem is not linguistic framing, but the very effective propaganda systems
that are rooted in the domestic structure of power.”135 –Noam Chomsky
VII
See page 57.

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Frames can help begin a dialogue on changing our defining cultural narratives,

but they in themselves do not build new economic and social realities. Professor

Chomsky stressed to me the importance of the “powerful interests within the state-

corporate system, which includes the media and universities, that strongly prefer certain

outcomes, and seek to restrict debate and consciousness so as to make these the only

thinkable options.”136 It is significant that Chomsky, perhaps the world’s preeminent

living socio-economic intellectual, holds that the public and private sectors have become

essentially indistinguishable. The term the “state-corporate system” suggests that the

formerly symbiotic and dependent relationship between government and business has

eroded and a new monopoly has emerged. This merging of government and the corporate

structure has severely impeded the quality of thought disseminated from mainstream

media and mainstream academia. The new paradigm has muzzled journalists, academics

and media figures with its exclusive allowance of corporate sanctioned framing.

Respected journalist Chris Hedges bemoans that “electronic and much of the print press

has become a shameless mouthpiece for the powerful and a magnet for corporate

advertising.”137

It is clear that an arrangement of dependency, favorable to the power brokers at

the top of either sector, has been created at the expense of exceptional knowledge

creation and dissemination in our society. Without corporate advertisement and funding

respectively, these institutions simply disintegrate.

This means there are few spokespersons with powerful enough voice to

meaningfully challenge the encroachment of Corporate, Oil-Based Food into American

culture. The major food corporations exert enormous influence on what people eat or

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don’t eat—a narrative not heard in media or academia. While it is true that what we eat

has “always been determined by a complex interplay of social, economic, and

technological forces, the centralized purchasing decisions of the large restaurant chains…

have given a handful of corporations an unprecedented degree of power over the nation's

food supply.”138 Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor under President Clinton,

substantiates this claim with veritable insider-knowledge: “from where I’ve sat…I’ve

seen Wall Street Corporations actually lobby against the public interest in favor of their

own interest because that’s the path to more short term prosperity.”139 If there is any

doubt about the success of such lobbying efforts, consider this fundamental discord: at

present, enough food is manufactured in the U.S. for every American to consume 3,800

calories per day when we need only 2,350 in a healthy diet.140 Directly as a result, we’re 5

billion pounds overweight as a nation.141 This macro-example illustrates how

corporations within the state-corporate system endeavor to further enrich themselves even

when their actions are diametrically opposed to a healthy, operable society. Even

enlightened corporate leaders in the state-corporate system cannot act in favor of the

many if their primary legal responsibility is to enrich their shareholders in the short-term.

It ultimately comes down to whether “this country is run for corporate profit or run for

the people who live here,”142 says Mark Bittman.

Biological Limits: The Primitive Hardware of the Modern Human

Biological Exploitation

Food is an especially unusual and complex advocacy topic because the best

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efforts at effective, truthful messaging on food are undermined at every corner by

Corporate Food’s exploitation of humans’ adaptive biological food preferences. Our

ancestors’ decision to gorge on the patch of blueberries made biological and evolutionary

sense when it was uncertain when and where the next plentitude of energy and

micronutrient rich fruit would come from. We are still wired as if sugar was a rare

treasure. However, there is almost certainly a restaurant or convenience store within a

few minutes or miles from where you sit now that houses more artificially sugared

foodstuffs than our ancestors ingested in their whole lives. Taken together, the

superabundance of such stores directly and indirectly influences our culture’s dietary

decisions on a daily basis. For example, it has been shown that children who live within

walking distance of a fast food establishment are more likely to be obese.143 Humans’

adaptive biological food preferences are constantly exploited by the multibillion-dollar

Corporate Food industry.

Neurological Considerations

Many thoughtful contemporary commentaries have discussed our dissociation and

alienation from the roots, actual and metaphorical, of our foods. Most implicitly contend

our relationship to food, and sense of its origination, is significantly affected by cultural

and physical environment in which we acquire it. Now, there is hard science to back up

such claims.

During our talk, Professor Lakoff brought up a type of neurons called “canonical

neurons,” which are closely related to the more well-known “mirror neurons.” Canonical

neurons fire whether you drink a glass of water or simply stare at it. Whether you “eat the

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banana or you see the banana… (the) same neurons (are) firing in a certain part of the

brain.”144 Lakoff posits this has real implications for how we relate to the physical world:

“We are connected to our physical environment. But when the environment is artificial

and built…we’re not connected to nature.” Since modern humans have lived as hunter-

gatherers for more than 90 percent of our existence as a species, 145 it used to make sense

that what we saw occurred from purely natural processes. This intuition likely developed

our faculties for understanding correlation and causality and grounded our relationship to

our immediate physical environments.

The immediate physical reality of a supermarket however profoundly misleads

shoppers regarding the origin of most foods. The activity of these canonical neurons

suggests that our brains have significant difficulty fully appreciating that meat doesn’t

originate from plastic packages on supermarket shelves. If asked if we really thought that

meat came from little sterile packages in the back of the grocery store, we would

probably scoff.

But the neuroscience tells a subtler story of human cognition—a story with

interesting implications. Lakoff posits that realizing your body is connected to nature

through constant “[connection] to our physical environment” is central to overcoming

diet-related health problems: “The real question is understanding how the body works

and how you’re connected to nature.” When food environments (or food dispensers),

such as supermarkets, restaurants and Mobil stations are “artificial and built,” we become

disconnected from the food we eat.

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Conclusion

The current economic and biological incentives to eat poorly are simply too

strong for the majority of people to demand, much less adopt, a way of eating that

combines elements of the local, organic, and sun-based philosophies. “Why is it that you

can buy a cheeseburger for 99 cents and you can’t even get a head of broccoli for that?”

Mark Bittman asked me. The reason is that “we have skewed our food system towards

the bad calories.”146 This is why any deep reframes must address the fundamental fallacy

that we are all separate individuals with the capability to affect policy changes by way of

our purchasing power. The scale simply tipped too far in one direction. When you

combine ill-advised, handout-laden government subsidy programs with a food industry

that “basically got into a rhythm of trying to make their products ever more seductive,”147

you achieve a perfect storm of health and environmental degradation. Corporate Food’s

aptitude for engineering “seductive” tastes in the lab added an element of biological

craving on top of the economic incentive to eat cheap food. Even the most skilled, honest

and persuasive framing cannot supplant these higher guiding economic and biological

inducements. Mr. Balzer, the chief industry analyst at Center for Disease Control and

Prevention, succinctly explained the decision making process of the average American

eater: “before we want health, we want taste, we want convenience and we want low

cost.”148

Framing is a potentially valuable communication tool that can help food

movement reach those already open to change, but its use won’t convert anyone to

anything or immediately cause the majority of the public to reconceptualize their

entrenched way of eating. Practically speaking, the masses will be the last to get on board

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—this is the way it is with nearly all social movements. “Don’t waste time with people

who want to argue, they’ll keep you immobilized,” progressive author Daniel Quinn

advises. “Look for people who are already open to something new.”149 Trying to bully

people into accepting new cognitive frameworks can only alienate them. Many people,

many of my immediate peers included, are already open to conceptualizing a new kind of

food system that feeds everyone more equitably and healthfully. Mark Bittman

commented he too has noticed an influx of interest in rewriting food policy, noting, “the

message that I try to transmit in talks and in print seems to be more widely received than

it was three years ago…stuff is changing.”150

I have not attempted to put forth a particular dogma of eating in this thesis.

Instead, I have endeavored to explore how advocates can begin crafting and

communicating new “eating algorithms—mental programs that, if you run them….will

produce a great many dinners, all of them “healthy” in the broadest sense of the word.”151

The Sun-based food frame and an understanding of food as relationship can work as such

“eating “algorithms.” We need new mental shortcuts for food. Instead of “I’ll eat

whatever’s cheapest, most filling, good tasting, and easiest to prepare,” the American

public needs a different dietary shortcut. One like, “I’ll eat only that which is Sun-based,

local and minimally processed.” Such an organizing principle could ease our transition

from an unsustainable, health-adverse oil-based system to a sustainable, nourishing sun-

based system that lays the foundation for a thriving future based on human and planetary

harmony.

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Interview Transcripts

Professor George Lakoff

I was first introduced to

Professor George Lakoff
through his work on
metonymy and conceptual
metaphors in my
Communications 101 class in
which we discussed the
findings of his breakthrough
1980 book Metaphors We
Live By. Since then he has
applied his expertise in
cognitive science and
linguistics to politics in an
effort to understand not just what motivates our culture’s rancorous political divides, but
how each camp (Democratic and Republican) makes sense of the world. In doing so he
pioneered the use of framing in a sociopolitical setting. His findings and perspective have
elicited both praise (Howard Dean) and sharp criticism (noted linguist Steven Pinker).
Professor Lakoff is the author of books including Moral Politics, The Political Mind,
Metaphors We Live By, and Thinking Points, among others. He founded the progressive
think tank the Rockridge Institute and is currently the ‘Richard and Rhoda Goldman
Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics’ at the University of
California at Berkeley.
The transcript of my telephone interview with Professor Lakoff on 1/30/2011 from
approximately 3:00-3:45 EST follows. Since we had an extensive, far-reaching
conversation, I have underlined what I consider to be the most important points.

TRANSCRIPT BEGINS:

Gabe Gerzon: I’m doing my Honors Thesis in Communications and Culture on framing
in food discourse basically. So if I could have a minute I’d like to let you know sort of
where I’m coming from on this thing.

Professor Lakoff: Sure.

GG: Okay, So I’m basically interested in devising communication strategies that enable
the public to understand the issue of food in a broader context so that more people can
move away from blaming individuals for poor health and towards more systematic and
community-based solutions that address the fundamental problems of a corporately
controlled food supply, and also just a mindset that doesn’t really value food as a
precious, shared resource. I think there’s no question that what you eat is one of the
definitive marker of your social class in America, in part because we don’t see it as a

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shared resource like air or water—it’s been subject to commodification in the same way
sneakers and cars are even though it a basic human need. That’s why it must be stressed
that the progressive values you write about in your books are on the side of the alternative
food movement—the food movement is part of progressive thought and, as you say, the
politics of empathy. It is fundamentally a movement about empathy, responsibility, and
stresses interdependence and cooperativeness, not competitiveness.

PL: That’s absolutely right. I should tell you my own involvement in this (chuckle), I’ve
known Alice Waters since 1972, uh, I’m a fan of Michael Pollan’s, I’ve read all of his
stuff, you know, I agree with all of that, and I’ve written some stuff here and there about
it. But yes.

GG: Well, I’m curious then, um, I’ve read a fair amount of your work, where do you—
where have you written about framing—

PL: Well actually you’d have to look it up because there’s stuff um (pause) I’ve written
so much stuff I don’t really remember where (laughs)—

GG: (laughs) Yeah.

PL: But yeah, and I’ve also worked with Michael on articles of his and I’ve worked with
Alice on things of hers and I’ve worked with people in the Slow Food movement and so
on. So yes, I understand it thoroughly and I know the arguments. I know what happened
with Alfalfa this week, I know about Michael’s editorial yesterday, you know, I know
about the vote coming up tomorrow—

GG: Yeah, yeah so you’re very up on it. So yeah, just to start off, what have you been
thinking and what were you doing or where were you, were you talking with Alice or
Michael about these things when you—

PL: Well, the problem the… (pause). I’ve said all the things you’ve said (laughs).

GG: Right.

PL: So let’s start there. You’re exactly right. Uh, but the other thing uh… (pause).
Michael understands this thing, Alice doesn’t. Alice always comes off as an upper-class
lady. Right? And she has no idea that she’s doing it. I mean, here she is coming out of the
free speech movement in Berkley coming off as an upper-class lady when you know, in
fact she’s been amazing at democratizing the food movement. I don’t know if you know
all of the things she has done that have not been for her own profit but rather for—to
spreading all these things over the country, you know, and that her discourse is exactly
the opposite of what she’s done. So I can’t get through to her—I mean it’s just hopeless.
She’s a wonderful person and she’s given the world so much, and um, but she’s blind on
this issue. Michael isn’t. Michael’s terrific. Um—

GG: Right, yeah, for some people it’s hard to appreciate the um, the language aspect of it

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sometimes I think.

PL: Yeah. So that I think is a really important piece of it all.

GG: Right, so yeah I’m curious then, obviously you say—you actually said it in your
recent article too—that we need to use language that expresses these progressive truths,
you know, talking about Obama and um, we have to develop a language that—

PL: (inaudible) my wife at the moment. Uh, (to wife) this is very important for reasons
I’ll tell you in a bit. I won’t be long. (returns) Hi.

GG: Hi. I’ll try to keep it brief.

PL: Yeah, we’ve got some stuff to do today.

GG: Okay, so, so how do you envision the alternative food movement’s, you know as
you call it, a cognitive policy—a set of ideas with a strategy and institutions for doing it?
What are some of the key words, unconscious values we should be highlighting—

PL: It’s not just key words, you know—

GG: Right, right, we’re talking about deep fundamental frames, how people conceive it.

PL: Here, let’s talk about the issues in general. We have a problem. There are four
theories of food and they both have certain ideas of food that are hard to get through.
There are also conservative world views that are out there. And um, the conservative
world views include things like—several things. One is that everything is a matter of self-
responsibility, you know? Personal responsibility not social responsibility. So if there’s
something wrong with you it’s your fault.
GG: Exactly, yeah.

PL: so that’s the first piece of this. And that’s very widespread through almost half of the
population at least. The second is that um—and anything else is Socialism. K? (laughs)
And you have the fact that—the Big Ag problem. This is a monetary thing, and the
conservatives are for a radical free market. So you have that and that’s supported by a lot
of money, and people who give money to Democratic congressmen as well as Republican
congressmen. So you have that problem. Also, the same organizations are major sponsors
of networks. So they have all kinds of pull in the media.

GG: Right.

PL: So there’s a major issue with—around that. Nonetheless, there is a food movement
happening, largely through people that are college educated (pause).

GG: Right.

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PL: And the appreciation of good food and good wine and all of that stuff, and very little
understanding of how that happens. And farmers markets. So the farmers’ markets stuff
is something that lots of people who are not on the left really appreciate. So this is—this
is a very…That’s the first set of complications. The second set of complications is that
the oil industry is involved in all of the ways I’m sure you know.
GG: Right.

PL: Right? You know as Michael wrote right it’s “oil based food versus sun based food.”

GG: (chuckles) yeah, yeah.

PL: A lot of people don’t have that concept. So you’re dealing with the fact most people
have no idea about the nature of fertilizer because it just sounds like it makes it fertile.
Right? That’s what fertilizer means. It makes the land fertile, not that it, you know, it
takes away the top soil, it poisons the land (chuckling), it’s not the “poisoner,” the “top-
soil remover.”

GG: Yeah, yeah…so just right there that’s a great turn of phrase there I guess, “oil-based
food versus sun based food.”

PL: Yeah, that’s what I suggested to Michael (laughs).

GG: (laughs). Yeah, that’s lovely. So yeah, is there a way to make that a commonsense
principle? Like how do you get more people to—that just resonates quite easily.

PL: I think it’s one of the many ways. There are a number of issues. I think um, you
know, the uh…”topsoil remover” isn’t so bad either, you know. The fertilizers are really
de-fertilizers. And they are shrimp killers.

GG: Hm, right, yeah.

PL: The thing is that if you say what’s true, it sounds like you’re too extreme (laughs).
That’s always a problem. You know if you say shrimp killers you have to use the image
of this stuff moving through the rivers system getting into the oceans and killing the
shrimp into the Gulf of Mexico. And that’s you know, an image that has to be out there—
but now we have the problem of the communications system. The Republicans have this
communications system and we have nothing. I’ve been writing about this for 10 years
and I can’t get anyone to start it.

GG: That must be incredibly frustrating.

PL: Then there’s the problem of the environmental movement. The environmental
movement doesn’t see itself as a food movement.

GG: Right, exactly.

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PL: (laughs) Because a lot of environmentalists have no taste in food. They understand
that you should have local food and all of that stuff and so on, but they see the issue as
global warming, or energy or preservation of the rivers and so on, but the food movement
has no representation whatever (sic) let’s say in the uh, the Green Group which is the
organization of the 35 major environmental movements. (Inaudible) You know, although
all environmentalists will probably agree that it should be blah blah blah, and they hate
the Farm Act, you know, still, it’s not seen that way. So you know? The social justice
movement people see it the opposite way. They see it—they see environmentalism and
the food movement as an upper-class enterprise.

GG: Yeah, that’s a big barrier, I think—Bill Maher I believe said “somehow eating well
got to be elitist.” And I think that’s a huge, huge barrier there.
PL: Right.

GG: I just wanted to ask if you’re familiar with the FrameWorks Institute.

PL: (pregnant pause) I started it.

GG: You started it! Okay, clearly I didn’t delve deeply enough into their—I didn’t see
your name anywhere on the website.

PL: I didn’t quite start it. What happened was I got them their first grant and I was
working with them.

GG: Ah, Okay.

PL: And they half understand this stuff and they half screw it up.

GG: So on what half do they screw it up?

PL: Well, um…what Susan does…Susan has the following—first of all she doesn’t
understand what framing really is about, she thinks it’s just about language and PR. She’s
from the PR world. And she put this together—what happened was I was doing some
work with Rockefeller Brothers Fund and I was also doing some work with Susan and I
didn’t have an organization, so I suggested that we do this—Susan was working with a
PR organization and was going off to FrameWorks Institute, I suggested that we could
get her some money to get this started. And that happened. Then—let me try to explain
what she’s about. She’s not a bad person or anything like that, but she thinks this is about
PR. And she thinks that um—and so what she did is she got friends—one friend who was
a pollster who had previously worked for (unknown), and one friend who was checking
things out in the news to see how the Right Wing was functioning and uh, she got an
African-American professor from UCLA who was studying racism in the news and those
were her advisors that she put together. And then I got her one of my former students to
work with me and with her and that’s Joe Grady. And he first was a professor at
Maryland and hated that and decided to just form a company with his high school buddy
who was an anthropologist to do work on folk theories and on metaphors. And I did some

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papers with him through the Institute there.

Susan did the following: Susan got most of her money from either the Rockefeller
Brothers Fund, working with the UN Foundation, and with various children’s
organizations. And um, what she says is “you always give the client what they want.”
You never tell the client—if you see the client doing something counterproductive you
never mention it. Okay?

GG: Okay, yeah.

PL: And then you go around and you give trainings and it’s about language you know,
and traditional polling techniques are used. Now that goes against everything I’ve been
saying as you can imagine. Well it wasn’t long before we were working with the UN
Foundation and I found out they were doing something completely counterproductive and
I wrote about it and she blew her top. And she said “okay, goodbye,” you know? “I have
to run my business here.” And I said “okay, bye, keep your business, good luck,” you
know. And um, meanwhile Joe Grady, who stayed on the east coast, he has to keep his
business going too. He’s got a couple of kids and you know, so they’re making a living
and they do what they do. I haven’t followed what they do—so what is there connection
here?

GG: Uh, well they did some research on possible, potential re-frames tested effectively
or whatever, and there was one called the “Food & Fitness Environment” Model, in
which they talk about, they try to get past this sort of episodic framing of health
individualism and looking at food and fitness environments as they call them, noting that
when people don’t have access to uh, you know, places to exercise, fresh markets, that
sort of thing that these factors, these community factors affect health way more than um,
you know, individual choices in some sense. And I was wondering what you thought of
that in terms of taking a more thematic approach to how communities organize
themselves as a way to improve the health ailments.

PL: Okay, first of all I don’t—where did this research appear? How did you get into it?

GG: It was um—they do slideshows on the FrameWorks Institute website, they uh—

PL: See I should go look at their website then. Okay good. Okay so this is very typical of
what they’re doing. It’s a literalist approach and it’s you know—notice it has a definition
of a problem. And the problem is just we need to get a different frame in there. And
without looking at this frame contradicts (sic) moral systems and it contradicts
social/Institutional pressures we discussed. So, it’s not wrong.

GG: yeah, yeah.

PL: It’s not that—first of all it’s not sufficient. And one of the ways it’s not sufficient is
that—see all of this stuff is that it’s tied up with an understanding of nature.

GG: uh-huh.

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PL: That’s why the environmental movement is screwed up. Food has to do with your
relationship to the natural environment. So it doesn’t just have to do with class. See
they’re accepting the idea that it has to do with class. Then they say, “what are the
elements of class? Well, they’re fitness. And the First Lady is saying we need to take care
of—we’re worried about fitness and we’re worried about health, and not only that the
insurance companies are worried about health and fitness. What they missed of course is
that the insurance companies are doing it in exactly the wrong way—they end up blaming
it on you! We have health and fitness programs and we’re going to check up on you to
see if you’re doing it and if you’re not we’re going to raise your premiums.

GG: Right, okay yeah.

PL: Okay? That’s missed. And so what they’re doing actually in doing it is buying into
the classist stuff that you know, if they don’t do anything else, if they just do that you
know, you’re going to have that problem on top of all the other problems. Now that’s not
bad, because of course there is a fitness literature, there’s fitness in the newspaper, etc.,
but the problem of course is that people don’t follow them if they’re in the lower classes.
And it’s the educated classes that are doing it. And do they have anything about the
educated classes (chuckle)?

GG: Oh, no they don’t go near that, you know.

PL: And what about the sale of unhealthy food to kids?

GG: They do some stuff on uh, unethical advertising to children, I’m not as well versed
on that stuff but their position is that it shouldn’t be—I’m actually not sure how radical
they get on that, but you know they definitely did some research on that as well.

PL: Well they should know about it, Joe has small children so he should be very aware of
it. Okay, so (deep sigh). Again, it’s not that it’s wrong. See in general, it’s not that this is
wrong it’s that it’s ineffective.

GG: Right I totally agree, I don’t know if you saw Chris Hedge’s—what Chris Hedge’s
has been writing recently, but he’s saying that you know, the liberal class has just been so
enormously ineffective in the past 20-30 years with all these conferences and papers and
patting themselves on the back morally, and he says that at this point the only real
effective means of transformative change is to—um, he says civil disobedience. It seems
that we’re coming up against the outer limits of exactly sort what my thesis is—what I’m
writing about which is the language of it. So where’s the heart of the change—what do
you see as the next step?

PL: Let me move around it because we haven’t gotten to the central problems. Chris
Hedges has got the problem right and the solution wrong. I like him a lot but he’s, you
know. There isn’t going to be civil disobedience. Who would be disobedient? The kids
coming along are not (chuckles)—let me just give you a quick example on the Berkley

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campus.
The Berkley student organization runs the Student Union. And the Student Union has
food services in its basement for students. And until recently they had a Vietnamese
family doing a very good job running a Vietnamese restaurant down there for students
that was healthy, and clean, and cheap. And they ditched them because they could get
more revenue for their projects by substituting Subway and a chain of bad Vietnamese
food (laughs).

GG: How’d that go over with the students? They must not be too happy.

PL: Well, the problem is the students change every year. In two years new students will
come in and no one will know. Right now Subway is not that popular—but these are
people who grew up with Subway, these are people who grew up in Southern California
and the Central Valley where there are malls and they are used to eating Subway. They’re
not gonna know the difference. And this is to a large extent the case. Now this is not the
case in the Dining Halls. In the Dining Halls the vegans have made their case and are
trying to eat healthy vegetarian food. At least they’ve gotten people aware of some of this
stuff. But there you are in the student Union bringing Subway in. And then you have the
First Lady working with Wal-Mart. Now, that can be good. And I know all about how
that happened and the history of who started working with Wal-Mart and why—I know
all the people involved in this—and they’ve done some good things because Wal-Mart
controls so much. You kind of have to work with Wal-Mart. And Wal-Mart has become
the leading major company from the very worst company in the world to one of the better
ones. Cause they’re putting in solar panels and getting rid of their excess packaging.
GG: Yeah, but is that ultimately adequate and effective, or is it like FrameWorks in that
it’s just not gonna be—they’re not wrong but just inadequate in the end, and you do need
to be a little more confrontational and less in-bed with forces like Wal-Mart on these
things.

PL: Okay, now I’m gonna tell you the worst news of all (laughs).

GG: (laughs) Okay, go for it.

PL: The problem lies in universities. And it lies in the Social Science departments of
universities. Because all of these folks have been educated there—think of it this way. If
you are a Republican and you want to go into politics and make money and so on, you go
to college and you go into business. And when you study business you take a course in
marketing and the professors of marketing study psychology and cognitive science so
they know how people think. Right?
GG: Yes.

PL: Republicans have no problem marketing their ideas and doing it effectively. If you’re
a Democrat, what do you study? You study political science, sociology, public policy,
law and economics, okay? Every one of those—I know the curricula, right? Every one of
them uses Enlightenment Reason and the Rational Actor Model. And Enlightenment
Reason is absolutely false. It comes from 1650, it was wonderful when Descartes

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proposed it, it was great during the Enlightenment, it helped get rid of religion
dominating everything, terrific, but…it’s false. It says that language is neutral; it just fits
the world; that everybody has the same reason and it works by logic. You just need to tell
people the truth and they’ll reason to the right conclusion, etc. etc. Every single piece of
that is false; in The Political Mind I have a whole list of all of the things that are wrong
with Enlightenment Reason. It’s empirically false. And yet most of progressives and
educated professors will still believe it and use it all the time. And when they use it
they’re going to come up with literalist solutions that don’t do the job because they don’t
see what the problem is. That’s why the real reason—and not only that, they won’t set up
a communications system because that would be propaganda. God forbid we should go
out there and tell people what we believe and what the facts are and keep saying it over
and over. Because we shouldn’t have to say it over and over because they should just
reason to the right conclusion, they’re rational. But also that’s the problem. Then we have
to educate them by giving them more rationality, and that’s the thing. There’s this thing
about educating people in that way. So you run into this everywhere in the liberal world.
And of course the progressives who see what’s wrong with this don’t know that that’s
one of the major causes because they were educated the same way.

GG: Yeah. Now are you still out there telling the Democrats this?

PL: I’ve been telling them that for 15 years.

GG: Why don’t they listen to you, George (laughs)?

PL: (laughs) They’re not going to listen to me because they believe in Enlightenment
Reason and it’s in their brains! I mean that’s how their brains are set up. I know why
they’re not going to listen to me, because it goes against everything they do every day of
their lives! So, here is—the problem is extremely deep. And, you know, what I’m
suggesting—what I’m doing now is looking at systems—they’re not setting up
communications systems. So we’re going to try to do that. Things have gotten bad
enough; I mean I now know enough people who are trying to change things in various
areas. But the other problem is—there are several problems out there. One is the Silo
Problem. People are thinking about their issue, not about progressivism, and it gets really
bad in the environmental movement where one organization is for rivers another is a
forest.

GG: (laughs) Yeah, there are thousands of them and if only they could sort of at least
have a loose coalition of some kind you know.

PL: Not a coalition, a movement, you see? We have coalitions, but coalitions are based
on individual silos.

GG: Right, okay.

PL: At one point I was actually brought in by the Green Group to tell them what was
wrong. And I told them what was wrong and they fired me! Each one of them wanted a

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magic word by next Tuesday for their particular interest. The problem is that you’re each
separated by your individual interests, ‘of course we are we have to support our
individual organizations, that’s how we do it, goodbye!’

GG: Right, right. Well thanks, George this has been great, thanks a lot—

PL: I’m not sure this helped you at all!

GG: I mean (laughs) it’s been—it just hasn’t cleaned up any of my thesis.

PL: I want to say something else. There are positive things to say. First of all, there is a
food movement out there. Michael Pollen is probably the best person on this that there is.
And what he’s doing is educating people through saying, “eat sensibly, eat like your
grandmother did, you know, go to your farmer’s markets, care about farmers,” you know
he’s saying things that are not radical and crazy but you do need to get out what these
facts are. The other thing is you need to talk about all the issues from a single point of
view. That is, in terms of your body, nothing is more important than food. In terms of
how you function every day in your body there’s nothing more important than food.
Food’s taken for granted, it’s not noticed. The second thing is the other guys are always
saying we produce the food, the only reason you have food at all is we’re here producing
food for the world. Now, that is bullshit, but there’s nobody explaining why it’s not. And
there’s nobody talking about food as connection to nature. There’s an understanding of
nature as a nurturer—and starting with food, you know? And then you say, what do you
eat? And that point well, the fish are being screwed up in the oceans, there’s mercury,
you have these huge cattle feeds that are screwing up the beef, you’ve following this stuff
I’m sure on antibiotics, so all of this has to do with the fact that people don’t pay
attention. It’s like food isn’t there. And not only that, this generation is being brought up
on junk food; it’s what kids have been taught to like. And there’s another part to that—
once they’re taught to like it, their brains and their bodies are set to like it.

GG: yeah, exactly. You know, we’re biologically hardwired to find as much fat, sugar
and salt as we can. So it’s not a fair fight it seems.

PL: It’s not only not a fair fight but the other side knows that and is taking advantage of
it. Once it gets into people’s brains as defining a taste, it’s difficult to get it out. We have
a major issue here. But the center of—to understand food as part of—essential to your
body and that nature is nurturing you and this connects you to nature. And the chemicals,
the feedlots, the antibiotics, etc. are unnatural. They are things that go against the way
your body works and against nature as a nurturer. Oil-based food is a great image.

GG: Yeah, definitely.

PL: And I think de-fertilizing—soil removing defertilizers is a good one. And the thing
about genetic engineering—you see it’s the word engineering that’s sort of bad, but we
have this metaphor of the body as a machine. If the body is a machine, then genetic
engineering is right. We see the body as a machine, not as evolved to nature. So all of this

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stuff is problematic, the reason I’m going into it is because there’s this range of stuff you
have to be aware of all the time. The center of it is your body and its connection to
nature. Now, there is an important fact about the brain you need to know. You probably
know all about mirror neurons by now which connect you to other people—I worked
with the people who discovered mirror neurons in detail and went over all their data. And
there’s another group of neurons called the canonical neurons that fire when you either
perform or action or see something you can perform it on. You know, you eat the banana
or you see the banana. You see the water or you drink the water, same neurons firing in a
certain part of the brain. Now, what that means is we have a potential—we are connected
to our physical environment. But when the environment is artificial and built—and that’s
mainly what we’re connected to we’re not connected to nature. And that’s a major
problem. People say “where does meat come from?” “It comes from the supermarket in
plastic packages.” I asked my mother when I was a little kid where milk came from and
she said “bottles.”

GG: (laughs) Yeah.

PL: (laughs) You know, I’m sorry but this is what’s going on. People don’t know where
meat comes from. There isn’t an education in the educational system for it. T.V. and
commercials go against all of that. It’s not just a matter of telling people of the facts and
they’ll reason to the right conclusion. That isn’t how that works. The real question is
understanding how the body works and how you’re connected to nature. That is the
major, central focus of this. Now what people are trying to do it say “let’s tie it to style, to
fashion.” That’s what Joe Grady is trying to do with the FrameWorks Institute. Fitness is
a fashion, having nice abs is a fashion. Well, yes it’s tied to fashion and fashion changes
then there are people who are hardwired from their childhood to not be able to do that.

GG: Yeah I agree with a lot of what you’re saying, I think we risk—some people would
call organic and small-scale localized farming as going against all that we’ve developed
over the past 200 years and you’re basically being archaic and in an odd-sense anti-
progressive and anti-technological. You’re being naïve or uh, unaccepting of the realities
of the 21st century and that sort of thing. So what do you say to that?

PL: Well its (organic) is so expensive a lot of poor people can’t afford it. On the other
hand, they can afford iPhones and sneakers and other things that have to do with fashion.
That argument is not a logical, fact based argument it is an argument based on accepting
culture as it is.

GG: Right, for sure.

PL: These are all the problems. Ultimately, there are several things in our favor. One: the
stuff tastes better. Two: It is healthier, and it does fit the fitness style. Three: people are
getting more and more concerned with bodies and health. Now, the concern with the
bodies is often how they look. So, the question is will you look better if you eat organic
food. But in order for you to eat it there has to be an industry. There has to be the right
people in Congress. And people don’t connect that to politics, that’s the other thing. Food

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and politics are about as far as you can imagine being in most people’s brains.

GG: Yeah, you almost never hear politicians—food politics mentioned in media.

PL: No. Because food and politics sound like an oxymoron. That is central. A lot of the
problems are on our side. The concept social justice has nothing to do with food. The
concept environmentalism is understood as having nothing to do with food. So if you go
to—let me give you an example. Suppose you go to a foundation. And the foundation has
its mission statement, and every foundation on the left picks six out of the usual twenty
four things they can support, you know? It’s either going to be education or anti-poverty,
or AIDS, or it’s going to be—you know the list. Food isn’t on there. And if it’s food it’s
feeding the hungry. Which is exactly the counterproductive way to think about it. But the
idea of healthy, organic food and getting rid of Big Ag, etc. is not one of the list of things
foundations put down. And once they put it down, it’s the only thing they can give their
money towards. Liberal foundations are shooting themselves in the foot and screwing all
of us because of the way they’re structured.

GG: Is it that they really don’t get it or that they’re scared of all the big money in Big
Ag?

PL: What’s happening is that they have—there’s a thing called a good portfolio that
determines how people get promoted in foundations. Someone has a good portfolio if
they spread the money around, give small grants, don’t keep giving it to the same folks so
therefore cut people off after three years, account for every penny, and therefore don’t
give your money to the lowest common denominator, and don’t give anything to build
infrastructure or talent development. That is called a good portfolio in the foundation
world and if you don’t have that you don’t get promoted. The practices are
institutionalized in terms of advancements. So that’s one of the problems there. Of
course that fits the idea of the board of trustees who come from large corporations. Who
has all the money to set up a foundation? Rich people. Who’s on the board of trustees?
Business people. And businesspeople may want to do good the world, but you know,
anyway—these constraints are a problem…I don’t want to discourage you, but you need
to have a sense of the real problems. FrameWorks isn’t made up of bad people, they’re
good people.

GG: I fully appreciate what you’re saying, the problem with writing a thesis is I’m told to
refine, refine, hone in, hone in, and you need to come up with something very precise and
with defined parameters, and the more I get into this thing the more amorphous all over
the place it tends to go.

PL: See, that’s the wrong way to think about it. It gets amorphous from the point of view
of issues. It doesn’t get amorphous from the point of view of values.

GG: Right, right. Yes, I just mean diverse issues at stake and interconnectivity but you’re
absolutely right in that, as you said, it’s all part of the larger progressive frame if we can
connect food to that.

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PL: Well the larger progressive frame is think forward. Obama said it during his
campaign and dropped it as soon as he got elected, but the larger progressive frame is
simple: it’s empathy, you care about other people because you’re actually physiologically
connected to them, it’s social as well as personal responsibility, meaning you act on the
empathy, and it’s a principle of excellence. You make yourself, your community, and
your country as good as possible because these problems are hard. And the result is that
government should be there to protect and empower people. That’s it! Very simple.
What happens is I go to an audience and say this and everybody will say yes, the political
leaders will say yes and they will never repeat it. They’ll go back to the issues and the
slogans and what they did before.

GG: Right. Alright, well professor you’ve been more than generous with your time. I
appreciate you taking the time out of your Sunday afternoon to talk to an undergraduate
writing his thesis—it’s been wonderful.

PL: Undergraduates writing theses change the world. And you have all the right instincts.
You’re right on top of it, you can see the problems, they’re very real, and just keep going
with it.

GG: Okay. Yeah. That’s great. Thanks for the words of encouragement—I plan on it.

PL: And give my regards to Sarah.

GG: I will. Take care of yourself professor. Thanks a lot.

PL: Yep. Bye.

TRANSCRIPT ENDS.

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Food Writer Mark Bittman

Clark graduate Mark

Bittman is an “avid home-
cook,” journalist and
professional food writer. He
has never had formal
training nor been chef. His
acclaimed cooking column
“The Minimalist” appeared
in the New York Times for
nearly twenty years. Bittman
recently ended the
“Minimalist” to focus on
using his Times platform “to
write about the truth about
food” in a new column. He has also authored well-received cooking books such as How
to Cook Everything, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, and Food Matters.
The transcript of my telephone interview with Mr. Bittman on 2/10/2011 follows.

TRANSCRIPT BEGINS:

Gabe Gerzon: …Do you have anything you want to say before I ask anything after
reading what I sent you?

Mark Bittman: No because I’ve already forgotten it, I just remember it was interesting.

GG: (laughs) cool, well it was sort of about framing, I’ll just go over that on more time.
Framing is the study of your unconscious thoughts, values and associations with any
particular, you know, public policy issue, and a lot of other things really. It defines the
parameters of it—who’s responsible and it suggests potential solutions to you know,
some of the problems we have with the current food system, and it suggests that human
decisions are not, you know, always the rational actor model, they can be influenced by
subtle cues in presentation and that sort of thing.

MB: Right.

GG: So I’m interested in how the public made—can have a more broad-spectrum view of
the food system and how we can reframe, or change the context of the message exchange,
food to elevate it onto the public agenda.

MB: Yeah, well, I’m interested in that too.

GG: So then I wanted to—what I coined the Food as Fuel frame, which as you talked

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about indirectly, is the idea that food is just a fuel that can be obtained and consumed
without much difficulty or cost, and sort of the implications for that on food decision
making within the Consumer frame that limits the ability to affect policy change because
food is seen as a consumer, individual-choice issue and that sort of shrouds the
implications of enormous policy decisions that have a much bigger impact on what
makes it to the marketplace than someone shopping at, you know, Trader Joe’s instead of
at Shaws.

MB: Right. Well okay. Let me talk for minute then you need to ask me more specific
questions, but uh, food is not difficult to obtain although that’s obviously a modern thing,
you’re right about that at least in the United States if you have some money. But that
doesn’t mean it’s inexpensive and I think one of the keys to reframing this discussion is
to reveal the true costs of food.

GG: Yes, definitely.

MB: And the problem now is that we are not—you know the true costs of food are either
hidden or denied or forestalled. And you’ve got environmental costs, you’ve got health
costs, you’ve got real production costs, um, and all of those are being hidden. They’re
being hidden by subsidies, they’re being hidden by pollution, they’re being hidden by
defraying health care costs or defraying diseases that later lead to health care costs and all
of those things are part of what makes up our agricultural system and our diet. So were
those costs to be made more transparent, no one would go around saying food is
inexpensive. And no one would go around—or fewer people would go around—wasting
food, you know we waste an enormous amount, and fewer people would take their diet so
lightly and say well, it’s individual choice. Of course it is individual choice, but if you’re
poisoning yourself and you’re unaware of it, you’re not making a good choice. Unless
you’re suicidal you’re not making a good choice. If you’re defraying health care costs
and expecting someone else to pay for them you’re not making a good choice from the
point of view—if you want to be a responsible member of society. So, I’m all for making
choices but let’s have the information. The information is that a hamburger does not cost
99 cents, a hamburgers costs way, way more than 99 cents in hidden costs and were the
costs to be exposed, hamburgers would be, say $4 or $8 or whatever the real cost is, and
people would eat far fewer of them. A head of broccoli, a head of lettuce has far, far
fewer hidden costs than a cheeseburger.

GG: Mmhm. Yeah, so I think the goal though is to unite people on the idea that the
subsidies need to be changed because I totally agree with what you’re saying, I just fear
that by saying you know, “you don’t understand the real food costs of what you’re
eating,” people sort of throw their hands in the air and go “I’m doing the best I can, trying
to eat as cheaply as I can”—

MB: No, absolutely. I understand that. It’s not an argument that you make—you don’t
argue individually with people. You get rid of the subsidies the cost of junk food
immediately goes up. I’m not saying this is a discussion about convincing individuals,
I’m saying it’s a discussion about making—doing certain actions that will change the

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way that people perceive food.

GG: Right, yeah, I agree. So have you thought about what your overall conceptual model
is for this new column? Are you striving for a call to action?

MB: Um (long pause) I’m…I guess the answer to that is no. Yes I’m striving for a call to
action but I don’t have an overall conceptual view. I’m working my way into it. I want to
write about the truth about food. That’s what I want to do. Food touches everything in
everybody’s life, and no one’s writing about it in as big a platform as the (New York)
Times, truthfully and frequently. So that’s what I want to do. Ultimately the overall
concept winds up being, I dunno, we’ll find out.

GG: Let me put it a slightly different way. Is it accurate to say the Minimalist was in part
about bringing attention to one’s own eating habits and the benefits of cooking, and the
new column, whatever form it takes, is more…I almost flinch when I say this, more
Pollanesque in that it’s concerned with filling in the missing big picture of our
relationship to food and the impact of system-wide production decisions on our
individual relationships to food?

MB: I would say the Minimalist was a cooking column and obviously I think cooking is
real important, and um, the new column is a food column and eating column. It’ll talk
about cooking also but it’s obviously a broader column. I’m not gonna call it Pollanesque
you can call it Pollanesque if you want to. I don’t know what that means.

GG: So that sort of the tension for me is the tensions between individuals and society—
you know people need to discover this on some level for themselves, but they need to be
brought together on some level on sort of the base, fundamental problems. How do you
see that, the interplay between individual roles and societal roles?

MB: Well individuals need to do two things: one, they need to take care of their own
acts. That’s about getting the word out that this American Diet doesn’t work. I mean even
the USDA sees that although they don’t do a very good job of saying it. People need to
understand that fast food is not good for them; processed food is not good for them, but
again, if we change the cost structure so that those things represent their true cost, that’s
going to show people that very clearly. But people need to move towards a plant-based
diet. That’s very simple as individuals. Society is composed of individuals too—those of
us who care about these things need to work to make—to push society in the direction we
see it needs to be pushed in and that means dealing with the damage to the environment,
dealing with the damage to our health, dealing with global warming—these are massive
issues. So it’s a question of if this country is run for corporate profit or run for the people
who live here. That’s a classic, classic struggle in the United States which has really
accelerated in the last 30 or 40 years, and I can’t say what’s going to happen and I can’t
say what people ought to do. They ought to try to elect progressive representatives, that’s
what they should try to do—and I don’t know what else they should try to do sadly.

GG: That reminds me of something—I recently just talked to Noam Chomsky about this,

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and he said, I’m quoting, “the barriers are about the same as in discussing other social,
economic, and political problems. There are powerful interests within the state-corporate
system, which includes the media and universities, that strongly prefer certain outcomes,
and seek to restrict debate and consciousness so as to make these the only thinkable
options.” In other words, there are very powerful forces at work to make sure you don’t
see food as a collective issue and as a social responsibility issue, and that everyone
deserves access to fresh produce, that sort of thing. What’s your response to that?

MB: As usual, the only thing I disagree with Professor Chomsky about is the
generalization. I would say that some or much of the media and some or much of…
whatever the other brainwashing institutions he mentions, but of course it’s true other
than that. It is in the corporate interest to have us see that “this is the way things are and
this is the way things ought to be.”

GG: Right. So, my next question is…I get some enjoyment, and some sense that these
things could be successful when I talk to George Lakoff. He recommends talking about
Sun-based foods versus Oil-based foods and reframing industrial petro-fertilizers as de-
fertilizers. And seems to me those are, while not the answer, it’s a more helpful way of
talking about food so people can conceptually grasp how what you’re saying is
fundamentally different than the existing system. I’m wondering what you think of this
idea of linguistic framing and Sun-based foods versus Oil-based foods and so on.

MB: Um, I think that that’s an interesting thought and I can’t um (sigh, long pause)…I
wonder if it’s that simple. If it’s that simple, if it’s as simple as saying “we’re looking at
Sun-based food over Oil-based food that is an interesting distinction and that is a good
frame and it makes the conversation worthwhile to me. But it’s hard for me to respond
because I have to think about it.

GG: Yeah, yeah I hear you. So another thing I wanted to ask you was, uh—there’s a TED
talk you gave that’s on the website—

MB: That’s actually three years old at this point, but yeah.

GG: Is it? Yeah. Well I just thought one of your last sentences was really good, you
asked “won’t a diet of fruits and veggies turn us into godless, sissy liberals?” And
obviously that’s sarcasm, but you did hit on an enormous cultural barrier in achieving the
transformation we’re talking about. It seems we have sort of been irrationally culturally
programmed with some ideas about food that just don’t make sense anymore, if they ever
made sense. So how do you see your—or just how do you see our responsibility to
override this food-programming we’ve been inculcated with?

MB: I think things have changed. There are more and more people who would have
thought that a better diet turns you into a “godless, sissy liberal” who now think that a
better diet simply makes you healthier and is less damaging for the earth. I don’t know
what the numbers are, but I can say that the message that I try to transmit in talks and in
print seems to be more widely received than it was three years ago. So I think that’s a

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good thing. That was a sarcastic then, and people always laughed, but I think it was more
of uh—when you have Oprah talking about veganism, when you have Michelle Obama
pushing a plant based diet to some extent, when you have books like Skinny Bitch and
these things that are very much part of the popular culture, when the word ‘vegan,’ which
was barely known in popular culture five years ago is now in common parlance, that’s a
difference. Stuff is changing.

GG: Yeah, it certainly is. So if you’ll indulge me there’s this group called the
FrameWorks Institute which is interested in the things we’ve been talking about and
understanding how the public think about issues, sort of how they apply conceptual
frameworks to them. And their testing found that this model, which I’ll read to you in a
minute, is the most effective in sort of creating a concrete image of the system and
conveying the sense that we need stewards of the food system and that it’s not being
regulated. So, here’s what they found:
“Experts are increasingly concerned about what they call our Runaway Food System. The
way we produce food today has radically changed, and now has the power to alter the
foundations of life as we know it almost by accident. Farming chemicals like pesticides
and weed-killer are permanently altering our soil and water. Genetic engineering is
changing the nature of the plants and animals we eat. And mile-long fishing nets are
dragging the ocean floor and altering ecosystems. America needs to retake control of this
runaway food system before it does more damage to the foundations we depend on.”
So that is one frame they’re proposing that sort of fills in the missing big picture and that
someone needs to be in control of this thing and no one is. It’s out of control. Do you
have a response to that?

MB: It’s not a bad mission statement; I think I could probably do better. Maybe I should
try.

GG: Yeah, maybe you should.

MB: (chuckles) yeah, that’s why I asked you to send me a copy of the tape. But um, it’s
common. There’s nothing unusual about that statement. People are making statements
like that all over the place. It’s obviously true but I don’t think if you publish it anywhere
anyone’s going to notice.

GG: Right. I agree. I think just the term “The Runaway Food System” it’s not perfect,
but it’s what I’m talking about in terms of how can people get a better grasp on this, and
I think people are getting a better grasp on it, but I do think we need some conceptual
models that—you know, we like a little bit of concreteness and I think a lot of people
still don’t have a great handle on the chain of production and policy decisions, and
without geeking-out on them you can communicate “look, there’s a real crisis here, you
know, and we need to do something about.

MB: Right.

GG: Okay, well as long as we agree on that.

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MB: Yeah we agree on that, I just don’t think there’s anything unique about that
particular statement.

GG: Yeah, fair enough. So that’s about all I’ve got for you.

MB: Okay, great. Well it’s interesting stuff, and um, like I said the questions are
stimulating. So yeah send me that, I want to think about this Sun-based versus Oil-based
thing and I might get back to you on that.

GG: Sure. Actually, I was just wondering on a lighter note if you had any particular
dining memories that sort of made you go, “I need to do something different here with
my diet.”

MB: I got an apartment my second year and I never ate in the dining hall again. And I’m
sure that the restaurants there are much better than when I was there, and I’m sure the
dining hall’s even better than when I was there because we’re talking forty-some years
ago. But I got an apartment—it was when I started cooking and I guess I have to thank
Clark for having such horrible food that I started cooking.
(Impertinent dialogue removed)

GG: Alright, well thanks a lot for taking the time out of your day and I’ll send you this as
an .mp3 when I get a chance in the next few days here. It was great talking to you, take
care Mark.

MB: Okay, thanks for the ideas. Bye.

TRANSCRIPT ENDS.

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Professor Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is a world-renowned linguist,

philosopher, cognitive scientist and political
activist. He is a prominent cultural figure admired
for his incisive non-partisan social and political
criticisms also considered the most quoted living
author in the world.

Professor Chomsky’s perspective was valuable in

shaping my thesis in a number of ways. The
FrameWorks Institute explains Professor
Chomsky’s influence on the development of
framing:

“One of the primary ways that scholars are able to

elicit how frames work is by analyzing how people
construct meaning through discourse. Scholarship
on framing in linguistics is often traced to Noam
Chomsky’s (1957) work Syntactic Structures,
which proposed that language is largely wired into our genes. This proposal was in direct
opposition to the dominant theoretical perspective of the time, Behaviorism, which held
that language learning was shaped by conditioning and imitation. Chomsky’s innovations
in linguistics inspired a great deal of research, across disciplines, into how language
develops and is structured. He may arguably be cited as having given rise to a particular
subfield of linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics, which has made major contributions to the
study of framing.” –frameworks methodology

My interview with Professor Chomsky took place on February 2, 2011 via email. An
edited transcript of email exchange follows. Professor Chomsky’s responses are
italicized.

TRANSCRIPT BEGINS:

Gabe Gerzon: Hello Professor Chomsky,

I am a student of Sarah Michaels at Clark University in the Communications & Culture

program. I am completing an honors thesis on the subject of food-frames. I’m interested
in devising communication strategies that enable the public to understand the issue of
food accurately and in a broader context so that people move away from blaming
individuals for poor health and towards systematic and community-based solutions that
address the fundamental problems of corporately controlled food and an outlook that

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doesn't value food as a precious, shared resource. I would be honored to have your
perspective for my thesis.

I recently talked with George Lakoff. One of his more interesting assertions was that the
root problem lies within universities and their reliance on Enlightenment Reason. He
posits that progressives base their communication strategies on an out-dated Rational
Actor Model that says language is neutral and people will rationally reach the right
conclusion. He contends this is empirically false and has stopped liberals from
developing an all-encompassing language of progressivism that expresses our core values
of empathy, social responsibility, and cooperativeness. It seems by failing to craft such a
cognitive policy over the last 30 years progressives have allowed free-market
conservatives to frame food as simply another commodity of the industrial machinery.
Even the legislative term for corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton, and rice is commodity crops.
Quantity rules supreme over quality in the system. An irrational, dissociated food
production infrastructure based on industrialist, free-market principles has arisen instead
of human and health focused system.

1.) Do you agree that supposedly liberal-institutions, such as universities, have

undermined their effectiveness in leveraging progressive causes (including sustainable
food reform) by not seeing that an overarching, values-based progressive vision was
necessary? If not, what do you see as the principal cause of liberals' emasculation
especially as it relates to reforming food policy?

Noam Chomsky: “Rational actor models” come from mainstream economics, and have
been sharply criticized by the left, even before their recent collapse. I don’t think they
have anything to do with Enlightenment Reason. In fact, they are more like religious
dogma. As for the universities, they are very much part of the state-corporate system
(with a fringe of exceptions) and it’s only to be expected that they will conform pretty
much to their doctrines in teaching and research. The last thing they want is a
“progressive vision,” though it exists at the margins, sometimes tolerated in the
universities, often outside the university system. Same is true on domestic and foreign
policy and much else.

GG: 2.) Progressives must re-frame citizens' conceptual/emotional relationship to food

on a fundamental level, but 'surface re-frames,' or reformatting the language used on
particular subjects, may be effective as a cognitive buttress, or at rousing the attention of
normally apathetic individuals. For example, Lakoff recommends talking about 'sun-
based food' vs. 'oil-based food' to dispel the notion that petro-fertilizers (in fact de-
fertilizers, or 'top-soil removers' in his words) are a benign, sustainable method of
agriculture. In your experience, are these effective mechanisms? How much importance
do you give linguistic framing of this kind? Do you have any of your own you would be
willing to share?

NC: Left and activist publications, and their other work, invariably focuses on the human
issues, in fact intensively. I doubt that “linguistic framing” is of more than very marginal

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significance.

GG: 3.) What are the most significant barriers (psychological, social, political or lingual)
you see in re-conceptualizing the food system? What would be your strategy to promote
an understanding of food production that fits reality?

NC: The barriers are about the same as in discussing other social, economic, and political
problems. There are powerful interests within the state-corporate system, which includes
the media and universities, that strongly prefer certain outcomes, and seek to restrict
debate and consciousness so as to make these the only thinkable options. That’s natural,
and very well-documented. It’s true of just about everything. Take, say, the current
frenzy about the deficit. Let’s put aside the fact that a deficit is arguably quite wise in a
period of recession and very severe unemployment (much worse than official figures
indicate). The deficit has two prime sources. About half results from the huge level of
military spending, about as much as the rest of the world combined – not for “defense”.
The rest mostly derives from the utterly dysfunctional privatized health care system, an
international scandal. But these are barely discussed. Rather, Obama’s commission,
media coverage, etc., focus on “entitlements”: social security (which adds nothing to the
deficit, but is hated by privilege and power) and Medicare (which is indeed extremely
expensive, not in itself – it has very low administrative costs – but because it is forced to
rely on the massively inefficient privatized system).

I mention this example only because it is in the forefront of debate. The problem is not
linguistic framing, but the very effective propaganda systems that are rooted in the
domestic structure of power. Look at any other issue and you’ll find much the same. All
very natural. It would be a surprise if it were otherwise.

GG: 4.) I would like your thoughts on the recent news that the First Lady is working in
cooperation with Wal-mart to improve the affordability of healthy food choices and
expand into food deserts. How do you view this news? In what context do you put it? Is it
a step in the right direction, or really just a cunning PR initiative?

NC: Both, I think. Not all PR efforts are harmful. They may (by accident) be helpful.

GG: 5.) Lastly, who do you think is likely to be perceived as a trustworthy, honest
messenger on this front? Many believe Michael Pollan is and should be the voice of food
movement. Who do you see? Must there be a leader in this sense?

NC: I don’t think there is or should be any one leader. There’s a lot of good work on this
topic: Food First, Oxfam, many others.

TRANSCRIPT ENDS.

91
 FRAMING FOOD

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Endnotes

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