Empty calories
In 2021, Eleven Madison Park, one of the most vaunted and expensive restaurants in the United States, made a much-hyped but ultimately short-lived foray into serving all-plant food. Somewhere in this vegan phase, a pair of tenured professors, Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg, excitedly availed themselves of the new menu. But the experience was odd and off-putting, they relate in their new book, Feed the People! Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make It Even Better. The meal included a serving of gai-lan tied with a single noodle wading in soy sauce with shaved truffles on top. Their verdict: “Rarified pleasures that, for the most part, aren’t all that pleasurable.”
Dinner was supposed to be an event, something whose benefits would compound days and weeks later as they told friends and family about every detail. The next day’s first meal was supposed to be nothing more than a convenient bit of soon-forgotten, hangover-killing sustenance: imitation bacon sandwiches consumed outside a New York City bodega. But as it turned out, breakfast was everything that dinner was not. It was pleasurable. It was memorable. And perhaps above all, it was a usable rhetorical device.
I roll my eyes when politicians go to the Iowa State Fair or the Faith and Freedom BBQ in South Carolina to be photographed eating turkey legs and ribs off paper plates, in a shallow attempt to show off their populist bona fides. And it’s not much better when a couple professors try the same gambit with their imitation bacon sandwiches, realizing in a moment of egalitarian awe that the breakfast of working stiffs can taste pretty good.
Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg present their sandwiches as a populist riposte to the expensive dinner from the previous night and thus use it to bifurcate the many varieties of gastronomic experience in America: Food with an agenda is expensive, unattainable for all but a small sliver of highly privileged people—and bad. Food without these politics sprinkled over it like so many truffle shavings is cheap, plentiful—and good. As they put it in one mushy line, their fake bacon sandwiches were “simple, savory, familiar, filling…environmentally and politically righteous.”
I’ll admit I wasn’t thrilled to pick this book up; I might even be exactly the wrong person to review it. I first heard about Feed the People! while shopping my own book, a history of the fast food industry. Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg’s book was also sold to publishers as a work about fast food. By reviewing a book that could one day share shelf space with my own, I risk looking like a guy trying either to take a couple rivals down or to leech off their success, or both.
But I’ve decided I feel OK about it. Feed the People! doesn’t have a lot to say about fast food. In fact, it doesn’t actually have much to say about anything. The whole thing is mostly composed of diss tracks against the likes of Wendell Berry, Alice Waters, and Michael Pollan, served alongside hackneyed paeans to the wonders of food technology. What might have been a helpful invocation of systemic realities to correct a popular tendency to conflate lifestyle choices with policy instead offers few insights to people who’ve read some of the other books on the subject, including the ones they reintroduce every so often to deride. If the takeaway from the last generation of popular food system critiques was that consumers have power and should use it for change, Feed the People! makes the argument that consumers have already exercised their power in favor of an immovable status quo. It’s not so much a counter to the earlier analytical error as a sassy rehash.
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Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg spend much of the early part of the book lamenting a chain of critical writers that starts with Wendell Berry, the Kentucky bard and gentleman farmer who died August 31. Berry’s 1977 book, The Unsettling of America, proposed that the industrialization of American agriculture that occurred when chemical manufacturers shifted their wares from the war effort abroad to fertilizer at home did more harm than good for virtually everyone involved. The book was popular enough in its own time. But his critique spawned a disciple in the East Bay in the form of Berkeley journalist Michael Pollan, whose 2006 ultrabestseller, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, remains a guiding light for eaters all over the world who like to talk about their food.
Pollan, who based his own update to Berry’s takedown of the modern food system heavily on the (mostly uncredited) research of Berkeley resident and UC Santa Cruz professor Julie Guthman, brought a literary component to a culinary movement that Alice Waters had started at Chez Panisse, the Berkeley restaurant she opened in 1971 that pioneered a combination of simple ingredients and high prices that has been a signature of California’s highbrow food scene ever since. After getting involved with the nearby Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in what became a highly publicized attempt to prove that school lunches could be made with produce grown on site, Waters eventually put out a book herself—a “manifesto” that reads exactly like the thing it is: dining table ramblings transcribed and shaped into essay form by some younger admirers.
Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg clearly envision an audience of people who have read these books, or more likely, who have heard the names and basic arguments tossed around in casual conversation, on podcasts, and on public radio. Yet anyone who’s read The Omnivore’s Dilemma will find that, despite coming decades after those books, Feed the People! has few new facts to add to the conversation, only new spin on the old ones.
Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg root their argument in a version of history that is essentially about apolitical technology running its natural course. Fertilizer and mechanization allowed farmers to grow more, and big food corporations with massive distribution networks could move just about any food the system made to anywhere else in the country. Given the choice between either making more food and selling it to more people or sweating over ox-drawn plows, farmers made the obvious choice, the authors tell us. That Berry and his disciples have lamented it ever since only showcases their ignorance, if not their moral bankruptcy.
“Berry seems to believe that because his old-fashioned farmers were more righteous, they chose less technologically sophisticated farming methods,” the authors write. He “doesn’t seem to consider the possibility that farmers in the past used less sophisticated technology less because of their virtue and more because they did not have access to better technology.” It’s a mistake that conflates “unchosen poverty” with “disciplined righteousness.”
But the story of how agriculture became so saturated with processed foods and meat, and of how agribusiness came to abuse farmers as a matter of course, is as much about policy as it is about technology, and one doesn’t have to go back centuries to see when things changed.
Today’s modern food industries really took shape around the Second World War, when flash-frozen and freeze-dried foods became standard components of the American diet. The more variety they were exposed to, the more food buyers wanted, prompting the food processors to grow larger and more powerful.
Yet even if food processors wanted to dominate the emerging system, the government prevented their takeover. Right up until the early 1970s, federal agricultural policy—informed both by the poverty of the Great Depression and the ecological catastrophe of the Dust Bowl—was still guided by the imperative to protect farmers and farmland. “When farmers began to produce too much and prices began to fall, the government would pay farmers to leave some land fallow, with the goal of pushing prices up the following season,” Tom Philpott explains. “When prices threatened to go too high, the payments would end and the land would go back into cultivation.”
The in-built preference for balance went away with the Nixon administration and the tenure of Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, who changed the underlying priorities of federal policy, from protecting farmers to protecting grain traders and processors. “Rather than use federal policy as a check on farm output”—and prices—“Butz saw it as a lever to maximize output,” Philpott writes. Agrochemicals and farm machinery had entered mass production during the war as well, but it was the policy change that compelled farmers to use that technology to its maximum extent so as to ensure those commodities remain cheap. Growing nothing but corn and soy was a detriment of farmers, but it gave processors everything they needed to churn out more processed foods and more meat than ever before.
You can draw a straight line from those policy changes to our modern food system. But for people like Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg who are eager to defend the system more or less as it is, it’s easy to see this sequence of events as a technological inevitability, if not a moral victory: Big Ag won because it’s the best. It feeds people, they tell us, and we should celebrate it for that reason.
“Have you eaten at your local Waffle House lately?” the authors ask on the book’s opening page. They’re fans of the waffles, they say. (Or Rosenberg is, at least. Dutkiewicz is a vegan, and Waffle House makes its waffles with eggs and half-and-half—a discrepancy they never address, perhaps because doing so would require addressing the way choice is invisibly circumscribed in the current system.) “Waffle Houses are the product of a food system that, for all its warts…manages to democratize and scale access to food and its many pleasures in a way unparalleled in human history.”
What’s true of Waffle House is true of McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and Burger King, of Red Lobster, Texas Roadhouse, and Applebee’s: The whole collection of chain restaurants spanning the United States (and the world) is a marvel of logistics and engineering, and our world today is unimaginable without it. On that point, I’ll heartily agree with Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg. But one could say the same thing about the atomic bomb. The fact that these things shaped the world isn’t a reason to call them ethical, nor does it mean that pondering a world where such innovations are unnecessary is a waste of time.
Consider the problem of monopolies and cartels—another issue that screws farmers and consumers but that came about not because such ordinary people wanted it that way, but because loosened antitrust regulations allowed a few big companies to get even bigger than they already were.
Feed the People! touches on this monopoly business, but only a little. Consider these facts, which come from a Guardian investigation and don’t appear in the book: As of 2021, just four companies accounted for 58 percent of canned tomato production in the United States. Another four accounted for about 50 percent of canned beans. It’s a similar story with many other crops: A farmer’s road to market passes through one of a very few companies, giving her little power to negotiate for better prices, and ensuring the company keeps more of the profit for itself.
Stifling arrangements like these are why monopolies, duopolies, and oligopolies are “bad for the economy, and bad for politics,” Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg acknowledge. And yet, they note, some farmers (that is, the very richest ones) and the trade groups that represent them have generally come to accept consolidation, having found other ways to succeed despite selling in an engineered buyer’s market.
And that’s it. In two paragraphs, the authors of a book about industrial agriculture, who insist they are telling us “how to make it better,” have said everything they care to say on one of the biggest problems in the food system today, and with only passing acknowledgement that it’s even a problem at all. They had about as much to say about their bad dinner and breakfast sandwiches.
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Where Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg are most comfortable is not in discussing policy or even technology but in trashing the likes of Wendell Berry and his most public admirers. Among his many problems, they say, was Berry’s tendency to support small farms over big ones, which was “innately anti-urban.”
“In a world in which all food was produced on small ‘local’ farms, New York City, Los Angeles, Houston, and a thousand more cities would all either have to be starved into ruins or systematically depopulated,” they write in a passage that reads a bit like Troy McClure’s comments on the ignorance of vegetarians.
For good measure, and just in case any readers favor taking the Pol Pot approach to rural development to the United States, Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg warn us that mass depopulation of US cities would “devastate the industrial and technological bases of our society.” Duly noted.
I’ll accept that some rejoinder was needed to the wave of food system critiques from Berry and his epigones. But the trouble with the writers Berry inspired was never that they lionized small farmers. It’s that they treated consumers as the ultimate power brokers. It was only natural that those consumers with the most money to spend, and the most time to cook, shop, garden, and go to restaurants would embrace it: They came out looking like part of a morally righteous movement for doing the kinds of things they already did.
But Feed the People! does nothing to get beyond a consumer-centric understanding of the food system. It’s just cheering for a different side in the matchup between team “consumers can flex their muscle to demand more local produce” and team “consumers have already spoken and they want Waffle House.”
Sure, people get to choose which restaurant they go to or where they buy their raw ingredients, but, like the farmers, their choices are limited to the options that the food system has made available—options that tend to narrow the less money you have in your pocket and the less flexibility your schedule allows. If you just worked fourteen hours straight and got off at three in the morning needing something to eat, it may not matter that you’d rather eat a nice salad that you made yourself from vegetables from the farmers market. If you live in the South, at least, you and a lot of other people in your position are very likely to end up at the nearest Waffle House. You might even be grateful for it. But the fact that Waffle House is a necessary part of your workday doesn’t mean any criticism of it is overblown. It only speaks to the depths of the problem.
Aa politics that places taste above everything doesn’t lead to better conditions for farmers; it leads to Safeway rebranding itself as a neighborhood grocery store and Wal-Mart selling more certified organic produce.
The way so many food critics like Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food movement, and his most prominent disciple, Alice Waters, have emphasized the role of flavor in making sense of the food system fits in nicely with that consumer-centric viewpoint, and it’s also only served to further obscure the food system’s deepest problems. Just consider Petrini’s position, which he spelled out in his manifesto for the Gourmet Ghetto set, Slow Food: the Case for Taste (for which Waters, Slow Food International’s longstanding vice president, wrote a foreword). Concerned citizens, he argues, could use their tongues like needles on an ethical compass for the simple reason that morally correct food always tastes good and morally compromised food always tastes bad.
“The primary instruments that, when trained, can make it possible for anyone to choose an adequate and enjoyable diet are our senses,” he writes. “The education of taste is the Slow way to resist McDonaldization. It is not so much a question of fighting a fundamentalist war against the spread of the hamburger as it is of informing, stimulating curiosity, giving everyone the opportunity to choose.”
If that’s a foundational argument to a new ethics of food, then anyone who has ever had a Dorito and liked it will start to feel the doubt creep in. Likewise, a politics that places taste above everything doesn’t lead to better conditions for farmers; it leads to Safeway rebranding itself as a neighborhood grocery store and Wal-Mart selling more certified organic produce. “Hey, look,” they can say from Bentonville. “We sell good food, too.”
Julie Guthman is especially wise on this point. “I don’t harbor the fantasy that individual, yuppified, organic, slow food consumption choices are the vehicles to move toward a more just and ecological way of producing and consuming food,” she writes in a lengthy critique of Pollan. “To the contrary, I think that structures of inequality must necessarily be addressed so that others may eat well.”
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Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg might see the writers they think so little of as shallow antimodern dilettantes “swallowing fantasies of a preindustrial Garden of Eden made up of small, self-reliant, and goodly family farms,” as they put it. But the book they’ve written hardly plumbs the depths, either. In different chapters, they zip off to such exotic locales as Iowa and Point Reyes to talk with farmers, or just talk about them. For whatever reason, it’s not until San Francisco that we read a quote from any of their sources, though their Bay Area contacts don’t have a lot to say, anyway. Two are food tech founders who talk up their own product, including the Peter Thiel–backed Josh Tetrick, whose Just Food Company makes a popular eggless mayo. (The authors skip over the fact that Tetrick was embroiled in controversy some years ago when Just Food got caught buying its own stuff at supermarkets to inflate sales, among some other scandals.)
In Georgia, Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg enlighten us with the knowledge that striking Waffle House workers generally like their jobs, gladly eat the food they make and serve, and favor the chain’s continued existence. They just want to be paid more than the $2.13 per hour they’re entitled to under the state’s tipped minimum wage.
Such revelations may yet surprise people who haven’t spoken with chain restaurant workers about their jobs, or worked in such an environment themselves. (A lot of Americans have done neither.) But the authors spill these insights with such vigor that the book comes off as a bit condescending to anyone who has put up with a difficult job in food service. The lesson they convey is as predictable as it is facile: Waffle House isn’t a symptom of a bigger problem, they tell us. It’s a logistical marvel—we can’t forget that part!—and a showcase of everything that’s right with our food system. Any flaws we might rightly see in it are really just cosmetic.
Again and again, the authors invoke the matter of choice with utterly unsatisfactory results. On meat, for instance, an industry characterized by immeasurable cruelty against both animals and workers, they note that packing plants have some of the highest injury rates of any workplaces in the country. As for what to do about it, they say that we should at least ask whether such jobs should exist at all.
“Labor in and of itself is not a good thing,” they write, unhelpfully. “Good labor is a good thing.” Besides, as they say from some antiseptic corner of the West Bay, Impossible Foods’ imitation ground beef makes for “a really good burger.”
But what if people don’t buy it? What if people who eat fast food burgers regularly don’t care that two professors (one of whom is a vegan) who only went to Burger King to prove a point say that Impossible Whoppers are just as good as the all-beef version? To two authors whose take on the food system gives so much weight to consumers, surely those questions matter. Yet once again, Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg only manage to summon some wishy-washy words of non-wisdom about the importance of “choice.”
“Food shoppers have agency, and they need to use it to make healthier choices, all while we should strive to create food environments that make exercising that agency easier,” they say.
The big problem, apparently, is just finding a place to buy a fake meat burger. But years of having fake meat on menus far and wide have shown the stuff to have, at best, a niche appeal. Burger King has made Impossible Whoppers a standard part of the menu since 2019, though sales of that item and fake meat more generally plateaued years ago, and McDonald’s discontinued its own offering, the McPlant, after test sales never took off.
That’s not to say we can expect McDonald’s and Burger King to come back in the near future with a rehashed attempt to sell us more. If we won’t buy the fake stuff, they’ll just sell beef and chicken, knowing full well that a local fast food outlet is, quite often, the only option available to many of us. So much for choice.
But Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg either can’t see it that way, or they refuse to. As they describe it, the reason a chain like Waffle House is an embedded feature of our food landscape isn’t because it’s exactly the kind of agro-industrial operation that US policies have been engineered to favor; it’s because people like it. And because they like it, there’s really nothing we can do to change it, other than to wish the best for striking workers and cheer on the tech lords now tinkering with fake meat formulas in the hopes that they’ll one day find a way to replace pork on the menu without anyone really noticing.
“[A]ppealing to rational decision-making to generate better outcomes can take us only so far,” the authors write in what amounts to an invocation of Petrini’s taste-centric ethics, repurposed in defense of the status quo. “You may not like the Waffle House. You may think the world would be a better place without it. But here’s the dish: No matter how you feel about it, the earnest and powerful love that other people have for the Waffle House is an empirical reality with which you must deal, and one no less powerful than the composition of soil, the price of wheat, or laws setting the minimum wage.”
For all their talk about thinking about food production and distribution as a system, the authors hardly get beyond invoking the word repeatedly. Waffle House may be rife with problems, they say, but it’s best to consider those problems in isolation, to be handled with tailored and market-friendly fixes, or solutions, to use a term that often gets tossed among Silicon Valley types and the philanthrocapitalists they sometimes become.
But authors so intent on validating technosolutions for us could at least shore up a lot of detailed arguments about the wonders of food technology, right? Not really. What we get instead is mostly a series of bromides dressed up as less-than-surprising Malcolm Gladwellish takes. Did you know that when it’s served with more sauce and breading than “meat,” the fake chicken at Panda Express is just as tasty as the real thing? Or how about this shocker: Midwestern farmers think of themselves as businesspeople, not custodians of an agrarian way of life, and they seek to harvest profits as well as calories from their acreage.
And then there’s this helpful hint to guide you through your local supermarket: “Don’t rely on social media posts from strangers, celebrities, and salesmen for your dietary advice.”
This last line is so obvious that after reading it for the fourth time, I was still unsure if they were going for laughs. (Though, I should note, if you want to buck their advice, Gwyneth Paltrow is opening a new sitdown restaurant in the West Bay just for you. She’s also opened a delivery-only outfit in Oakland, brazenly called the “Berkeley” location of her Goop Kitchen empire.)
After their roughshod tour of the novel wonders of the food system and some of its deepest problems, Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg summarize their argument thusly: “keep what works and get rid of what doesn’t.”
But cheap, plentiful food requires cheap, plentiful workers; it requires cheap commodity crops, which require overflowing, chemically-intensive monocultures laying waste to the plains. North Berkeley consumers with money and time may be able to treat the food system as an à la carte menu from which they can choose what they like and ditch what they don’t, but most people have to eat prix fixe.
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Swill like Feed the People! is probably enough to make a lot of casual readers wonder if there are not already too many food books out there. And yet the food system has inspired innumerable worthy and original volumes, some scholarly, some journalistic, some that are merely critical, and some that assess the results plainly and strive to chart a path forward. And a system as vast, complex, and subject to change as the food system leaves many more to write and publish. Contrary to what Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg argue, the first part of The Omnivore’s Dilemma was actually a lot more detailed than theirs on this subject, though it was neither the first nor the last word. Guthman’s Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California is an academic classic that dispels many of the reflexive myths about the marvels of organic farming. And Philpott’s Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It brings to the fore some inconvenient facts that Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg would rather we subordinate to our unconditional love for the technically marvelous agricultural system they so admire.
What these books do that Feed the People! does not is that they take a serious look at production. That’s where any thoughtful dissection of the food system has to go. While most people interact with food only as consumers, a critique that looks only that far without considering where the options come from in the first place is necessarily limited.
The food system isn’t a geological formation, after all. It’s something engineered through policy, and many of the most radical and most disastrous changes have occurred within living memory. We may depend on it to eat, and it may appear immovable, but that doesn’t mean we should swoon with gratitude for the narrow band of options that it presents to us daily. Why not ask for more?
Feed the People! Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make It Even Better
Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg
New York: Basic Books; 288 pp; February 2026