What unites them is that each of them are usually (or in some cases always) pleasures furnished by the modern, conventional, industrial food system. Yes, you can find expensive and local artisanal versions here and there, and, heck, you may even have eaten a sliced tomato you plucked from your very own vine. But unless you live somewhere where all those items are grown and always in season, you access food pleasures the same way most other people do: Ingredients are brought to you from all around the world, and you purchase them at a grocery store or restaurant where you don’t need a reservation.
If you’ve never heard of Wendell Berry, you have almost certainly read a book, seen a movie, engaged with a social media post, or eaten a plate of food that was shaped by his writing. Berry’s writings helped to launch both the farm-to-fork culinary movement and what is called the New Food Writing, the renaissance of journalistic books published since the 1990s that have sought to diagnose the ailments of the contemporary food system and usually dismiss industrial, “fast” food as worthless sugary garbage corrosive to both America’s teeth and its soul. If you flip through the pages of books by the journalist Michael Pollan, the food writer and restaurant critic Mark Bittman, the celebrity chef Alice Waters of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse restaurant, the activist and founder of the slow food movement Carlo Petrini, or nearly any other book written about better food and a better food system, you’ll find numerous references, most glowing, some overwrought, to Wendell Berry. But Berry’s model is a bad one for food system reform. His most famous essay, “The Pleasures of Eating,” is really more of a list of practical shopping and eating chores for consumers: (1) “Participate in food production to the extent that you can.” (2) “Prepare your own food.” (3) “Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home.” (4) “Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist.” (5) “Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production.” (6) “Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening.” (7) “Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species.”
Improving the pleasures of the industrial food system, while reducing its harms, is where democratic hedonism comes in. The term was coined by Yale professor and political theorist Joseph Fischel to describe a novel approach to sexual ethics, a call to “think more boldly and strategically about democratized access to pleasure and intimacy.” But the concepts both of hedonism and of democracy as a tempering influence apply just as well to food. Democracy demands a pluralistic and inclusive account of what a good life is, who gets to define it, and who is entitled to it. From this perspective, making sure everyone has abundant access to pleasure should be a social project that inspires collaboration, care, mutuality, and solidarity: for other people, for our common planet, and even for the animals with whom we share it.
Pleasure and choice in society are not equally distributed. Not everyone has the same menu, and some people can only select from limited and unappealing options. Social position, limited resources, energy, and time, and uneven knowledge shape access, and the result is that some pleasurable snacks are too high in the cupboard for some people to reach. And other people have handy stepladders that they’re just not sharing. Meanwhile, people often do things they do not want to do because duty, care, responsibility, and necessity compel them. The gendered labor of food preparation, for example, means that common foodie clichés about the “pleasures of cooking” or avoiding “processed” foods can intensify sexist household burdens or, at the very least, be experienced very differently by men and women. All of this means that democratic hedonism requires that sensual pleasures must be analyzed in relationship to some tempering intersocial goods: capacity, access, and pluralism.
Similarly, following scholars and activists of disability, an emphasis on access requires that we consider how social structures, the built environment, and political power shape the menu from which we select. Sometimes we have to proactively reshape the world to ensure that everyone has adequate access to the things that make up a good life, building new infrastructures that expand access to people who would otherwise be left out. Expanding access to pleasures for some will require imposing costs on others. More funding for school lunch programs, for example, could require taxing pleasurable luxuries such as thick cuts of steak. Too bad!
Considered this way, democratic hedonism pushes us to ask how we can build a society of abundant and accessible pleasures. The good news is that the extraordinary productivity of American farming already makes abundant and affordable food pleasures possible. Improving the American food system further will require engaging, improving, and fairly distributing modern agriculture’s productivity, not tossing it on the compost heap.
Excerpted and adapted from Feed the People!: Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make It Even Better by Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg. Copyright © 2026. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Hence then, the article about what the foodies get wrong about food reform was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( What the Foodies Get Wrong About Food Reform )
Also on site :