[lbo-talk] the politics of food

Asad Haider noswine at gmail.com
Thu Nov 12 10:52:23 PST 2009


Well, I think it's clear that the revolutionary diet, beyond any merely ethical considerations, must simply be the diet that produces the greatest physical strength and mental acuity, so that guns can be properly aimed, factories can be fully occupied etc.

As Mexican peasants understood, bacon fat is a primary ingredient in this kind of peak performance. Please move lard to the top of the list of revolutionary priorities.

It is likely that lard fell out of favor in the early to mid 20th century since it was easy to use contempt for agricultural life to clear the space for the industrial alternative to lard, hydrogenated vegetable oil. Since the brain is 60% fat and cholesterol, and reflects in its constitution the dietary intake of fatty acids, hydrogenated vegetable oil, which seems to cause inflammation and block communication between neurons, must really represent ideology at its purest, by introducing blocks in knowledge directly into the brain.

"Curry," by the way, a concept invented by the colonial British, is a highly political food, especially when it is a violent hybrid between the cuisines of South Asia and Southeast Asia. Tofu in Indian food, or Mexican or French food, for that matter, could be considered a significant political problem, representing the domination of the industrial soybean (commonly used to extract the oil later converted into the lard-substitutes mentioned above, after it is torn from its home and its traditional processing, usually involving fermentation or animal-based broths) over peasant culture.

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 1:17 PM, Eric Beck <ersatzdog at gmail.com> wrote:


> On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 11:52 AM, Matthias Wasser
> <matthias.wasser at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I think the question we've been avoiding is: what does the revolutionary
> > vanguard eat? A hearty lumberjack breakfast? A half-bowl of rice daily?
> The
> > still-beating hearts of Fortune 500 CEOs? And how often do they drink
> soda?
> > This is surely among the most pressing areas of research in revolutionary
> > dialectical science.
>
> Yes. I demand quantification of my diet! I just made refried beans for
> an egg-bean-cheese breakfast taco. What does that say about my
> politics? I made it myself: liberal or conservative? Refrieds are
> Mexican-peasant food: conservative because they are a dish of real
> folx, liberal because they are exotic, or revolutionary because I'm
> slumming it with the proletariat? Further complicated by the fact that
> they were black beans, a step up on the culinary chain, and I used
> olive oil, not bacon fat, to cook them; definitely an effete liberal.
> But I ate them with low-scale tortillas and salsa, so that makes me
> more ordinary, so conservative. On the other hand, the breakfast taco
> is the national dish of Austin, a bastion of liberalism. I'm so
> confused.
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>



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