Summary Of The Perils Of Food By Chad Lavin

The contemporary American writer Chad Lavin’s position that food is a political issue (Lavin, 2013, x), and eating is a political agent (Lavin, 2013, xxviii) is widely accepted today; his picture of food and eating is indeed vaguely reminiscent of the American anthropologist Sidney Mintz’s assertion that there are always political and economic forces behind our food consumption (Time, Sugar, and Sweetness. 1979). It is extremely intriguing to take an in-depth examination of the politics behind food, because I found that through the lens of food and eating, Lavin innovatively explored the tensions between “digestive subjectivity” and “sovereign subjectivity”, globalization and food localism, social control and consumer autonomy (Lavin, 2013).

It’s Lavin’s firm belief that, in reality, the identity of human beings is way more dynamic and amorphous. Lavin argued that we should view ourselves as “digestive subjects”, since eating blurs three fundamental and critical borders “between self and world”, “between public and private,” and “between human and nonhuman” (Lavin, 2013). His assertion is that our digestive functions allow us to constantly encounter the external world, and our ever-changing identities form through this extraordinarily vibrant process (Lavin, 2013). In my eyes, Lavin has put up a tension between his concept of “digestive subjectivity” and the liberal concept “sovereign subjectivity”; such tension gretely challenges all the long-existing political ideas. To better understand his concept, we should have a closer look the aforementioned

Advocators of food localism believe that social order can be achieved or altered through “bottom-up technologies”, meaning everyone voluntarily takes his or her individual responsibilities (Lavin, 2013, xiv). Nonetheless, Lavin suggested that it’s nearly impossible to take the control of food back to an individual level (Lavin, 2013, xiv). Owing to the prevalent corruptions that are occurring in governmental institutions, self-reliance or self-governance under the notion of neoliberalism is hard to come to fruition, For instance, Lavin quoted words from Barry Glassner, asserting that the public has started to take the lucrative dietary science and federal guidelines with a grain of salt, since governmental institutions often pay more attention on profits (Lavin, 2013,