Food is culture, that’s a given. But what about food as pop culture? Is there a second tier of American food, an equivalent of The Bay City Rollers occupying some déclassé rank beneath Flannery O’Connor, Mark Rothko, Paul Robeson? And what do we do with that which is both, people like Chuck D. and Jack White, pizzas topped with baby arugula and farm-fresh cheese, hamburgers made of Kobe beef? Is the cuisine of the United States spread across the low- to middle- to high-brow?
At Bonnaroo this year, Mr. White twisted the universe into songs simultaneously brand new and immutably old, smudging all concepts of sonic social class out of existence. The food for sale, however, presented a more complicated arrangement. You could at the beer stands spend seven bucks on a tallboy of Coors, but also spend eight on one of dozens of microbrews in the Broo’ers Festival tent. You could spend six bucks on a slice of pepperoni pizza or eight on a bowl of green veggie curry over rice. Bonnaroo’s food, vastly more diverse than that of most public events of this size, included both the low- and middle-brow.
Except Bonnaroo is always trying something new, and this year a few lucky folks jumped on the festival’s first high-brow dining experience open to the general public. Bonnaroots, a four-course, farm-to-table dinner made entirely of ingredients sourced within 100 miles of the site, was a collaboration between the festival, Oxfam, and a non-profit named Eat for Equity. Eaters sat at long tables beneath an arbor while on a nearby stage a woman in a frog-green bodysuit played trumpet to the beat of a drummer with more hair than “Islands in the Stream”-era Dolly Parton. Cultural tiers converged.
Over the course of two, 100-person meals held Thursday and Saturday nights, folks ate local cheeses, kale and bacon salad, parmesan grits with BBQ’d red peas, Napa cabbage slaw, fresh grilled veggies, and whipped lemon cream with blue- and raspberries. Pitchers of lemonade flavored with lemon balm from the Learning Garden around the Roo post office sat on the tables. A guy sporting a pirate’s beard and something curiously like a samurai’s flared-shouldered shirt murmured, “Ohhh, man” at the sight of the cheese course. He took a bite, stood up, and declared, “Holy shit, I mean, really!!” before politely stepping away for a menthol.
A young man sitting with a girl holding a Dora the Explorer balloon told me, “Our country is the only country that doesn’t eat local food that’s grown like in the local area. Here you go to the grocery store and you see like meat and it’s been all frozen and shit from like who knows where, like fucking Nevada hell nuclear zone, and it smells like shit for like a hundred miles, but kale! I mean… kale’s what’s up!”
A ticket to the meal cost twenty bucks. That’s less than three Coors tallboys.
That young kale fan from Knoxville was dining with kids from Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Wyoming. They’d never met before, but they left the table together, and that nascent community-in-miniature is as much a concern for Oxfam and Eat for Equity as is the meal itself. Oxfam’s mission includes creating long-term solutions to poverty, and popular education and collaboration are core components of that. Meals like the
Bonnaroots dinners bring strangers together in an environment in which the problems of globalized Industrial Agriculture, the unhealthiness of processed foods, and GMOs’ concentration of the world’s food supply in the hands of a miniscule corporate minority are intrinsic to the lay of the land. These cultural trends aren’t hidden; they’re already part of the global conversation of the times, spawned by legitimate fears or broad social ruin
“People at these meals collaborate and make strategy,” Oxfam’s Music Outreach Manager Bob Ferguson told me after Thursday’s meal. “Like the guy who had never had any meal like this and just told me all about how he’s going to change the way he eats when he gets home. These things feel like tiny steps, but they’re transformative moments for people sometimes.”
Community dinners like these reframe the mistakes of What Is into the pleasures of What Might Be. They are “Big Girls Don’t Cry” instead of “Teen Angel.”
Oxfam and Eat for Equity proposed Bonnaroots for 2013’s festival but were shot down. They responded by setting up their own independent thing out in General Camping, accepting whatever donations came their way. They broke even. And when they brought the idea back to Bonnaroo this year and asked for a single meal in CenterRoo, the festival scheduled them for two. Both meals, advertised only by a single email blast, sold out in less than four hours.
Farm-to-table dinners and the locavore movement have been exploding at an exponential pace across the country for at least the last decade. The increasing visibility of that movement—one started by small clutches of people and often jeered by The Far Right as high-brow and elitist—has been an essential compliment to health officials’ alarms over public health. Organic produce fills grocery aisles, and the cultural cache that thirty years ago came from consuming the newest and most inventive products from mega food corporations now comes from consuming local, fresh food. Farmers Markets have bloomed all over the country. Slow Food U.S.A. has over 200 chapters across the states. Five years ago, the only nosh on the junk food aisle that wasn’t fried was pretzels. Now, most every brand of potato chips carries a baked variety.
And you can’t get much more Pop Culture America than potato chips.
But although local eating has contributed to a renewed focus on national health, and although it is an undeniably chic way for individuals to express that focus, there is more at work than health concerns or style.
On one hand, this public shift is a shift of value from what is novel to what is tasty. Wonderbread might have looked like the height of cleanliness and American innovation, but wholegrain bread baked as it has been for millennia and eaten within a few days of creation is far more satisfying. The shift is also a shift of value from a kind of raw and reckless independence to a newer level of responsibility. The American ideal might include Dirty Harry and Howard Roark, but now we read those cultural figures taking into account the effects they have on those around them. The production of much mass-market food is incredibly damaging to billions of people.
And there is a third factor at work, one that is less a new reaction to established attitudes than the resurrection of an old reaction toward a new attitude.
Eat for Equity, the third partnering organization behind the meals, hosts in cities around the country sustainably-sourced community meals in which volunteers do the cooking, eaters pay what they can, and the money goes to nonprofit causes like environmental protection and disaster relief. Charity isn’t the driving force, though. Folks could more conveniently get online at home, donate to the Sierra Club and Oxfam, and click HBO GO onward to the next episode of Game of Thrones. For that matter, eating healthily and locally isn’t enough of an explanation for the surging popularity of locavore community eating either. After a long week spent clicking between applications at work, swiping a card to buy lunch at Chipotle, texting with a parent, and using PayPal to buy a book from a stranger on Amazon’s great electronic clearinghouse for all things large and small, a person might be best served by ordering local ingredients from Fresh Direct and cooking a relaxed dinner in his pajamas. So what gives?
“I think we all have this desire for community,” Emily Torgrimson, the founder of Eat for Equity, told me. “As connected around the world as we are virtually, I think we still have a strong desire to come together physically, and eating brings people together.”
After a generation of asserting the unprecedented ability of Technology to make a global community of lone, “connected” individuals, more and more of American society is remembering the preceding generations of community living and eating. The diners at the Bonnaroots tables talked about music and about themselves, but they also oooh’d over the food, talked about the local eating they do at home, shared strategies for increasing the fairness of the food lives of their families, shared emails and declared they would continue the discussions after leaving the festival. They formed, even if only for ninety minutes, a community addressing food issues not because food issues are important because they are exciting. In an era defined by technology, old ideas of human companionship are re-staking their claims to life
And that feels very Bonnaroo to me. American culture is pop culture and always has been because the open-market dollar, the flash of the new and different, the power of Right Now! has always pointed the way forward. There is no power on high impressing on the masses some value that only a top tier of aristocracy can appreciate and comprehend. Pop culture is not Kanye nor Little Caesar’s; it is popular: the things that we all most agree on. If we all mostly agree that tasty food made close to home and eaten regularly in the company of others is popular food culture, then it is American Food Culture. We get to choose.
That culture can be inclusive, of course. Just like the Bonnaroo community can find value in a wearisome bitch fest on the What Stage one evening and in a declaration that music is a collaboration between artist and audience on the next, we can find longevity and vibrancy in a healthy, locavore food culture while appreciating the occasional, primal need for something fatty and irresistible and fun. I certainly do. Four hours after my lemon cream and berries at the Bonnaroots table, I bought a funnel cake. It cost about a third of the whole four-course dinner. After I demolished it, I threw down to a magnificent band that fused about half a dozen strains of Rock n Roll. Their name? Diarrhea Planet.
(This piece originally ran, in a slightly different form, on PopMatters.com)