Jake Empathy as Food

 I'm viewing this entire presentation through the lens of it being focused on food as a vehicle for "radical empathy", which Dr. Alkon defines as "getting inside one another, and learning to understand their reality" (as a side note, her usage of phrases such as "getting inside one another" was very off-putting to me throughout the whole talk. This isn't an intellectual critique, it just felt alien and uncomfortable hearing her say "taking food inside our bodies" repeatedly instead of just using the word "eating" and made the video notably less enjoyable). With this is mind I'm talking about both how I independently view food as a means of empathy, and also judging the rest of her speech by how it relates to this view.

I'll start by looking at where my mind went. It's sometimes hard to get to a simple issue through all the bureaucracy that clouds it. It's harder to understand how tax brackets can radically harm the poorer members of this country as necessities tend to be a flatter expense (when going from a $40,000 annual salary to $350,000, the dollar amount of your budget spent on food usually doesn't change much but other parts of the budget such as travel expenses can go up several times), but it's very simple to understand issues if you do it through a vehicle like food. If you want to genuinely nurture sympathy for people, bar graphs and statistical analysis are not the way you do it. That's how you try and hammer out actual legislation. Being able to say "Hey, these people are so neglected by the wider society they are actually suffering from malnutrition, obesity, or even literal scurvy in some places" is a much better person-to-person method to spark change. As Dr. Alkon said, food is a universal human experience so we inherently understand the food struggles of other people than, for example, the struggle of a traditional manufacturer who was priced out of a major overseas economy due to rising tariffs in a trade war. In an era of information overload where headlines change so quickly and the average attention span is getting worryingly smaller, being able to portray someone's struggle through something as easy to understand as food is a great idea. To put these ideas into a short sentence: I believe food can be used as a sort of mascot to understand struggles that are normally too complex to easily talk about.

However, while I'm able to appreciate the initial message, I'm not a fan of how Dr. Alkon presented the rest of her talk. My interpretation of much of the video was that she pointed out discrimination in the agricultural business and how food can be used as a vehicle of hateful rhetoric (such as food-inspired slurs). The issue is that, for the most part, I only saw her pointing things out, and not expanding past that. She says things such as "Racism is integral to every aspect of the food system", and then mentions the history of slavery and sharecropping in American agriculture and said that New York Magazine under-represented minorities when doing a cover story on urban farmers. I'm not trying to discredit these issues, but when you preface it by talking about using food as radical empathy, I am going to expect you to specifically use food as a unique means to create empathy. If I have empathy towards a slave, it's because of the horrible living conditions they're in, not because of the food. I did not better understand their poor living conditions because of the food I ate.

She did bring up how modern practices in America often make unhealthy food more affordable than healthy food, effectively pricing out the poor from being healthy. This is a good talking point, but right before this she stated that this food discrimination even impacts middle-class African-Americans. If that is true, than the price isn't the issue so what is? No answer is given. She raises many issues, but only properly explains a small segment of them. I really wish she expanded upon this idea, but maybe that's a different Ted talk that aimed at me more than this one is.

She then says she believes a solution is to start eating cultural food, since in doing so we will engage with the stories of those who are involved in this. I, on at least a personal level, completely disagree with this. I get my cold-cut combo from Subway in a cold, heartless, transactional way. Doing so with a new store selling Iraqi Qeimeh will not magically change anything. She later says that we have to get involved, but that's not a new solution to food. The solution to social issues has always been to get involved. What makes food a vehicle for radical empathy if you still need to get involved the same way you would for anything else, the vehicle was not food, it was your desire to get involved - it just so happened to be about food. She mentioned narrative cookbooks that talked about the food's history. I'm sure that works for some people, but it doesn't work for me or others like me. It's something, but it's a drop of water in a bucket.

Ultimately, I believe this topic has useful potential, but I don't like the path Dr. Alkon took with her presentation and I think the execution was shoddy in some areas (although I totally understand time constraints, she can't be pulling out tons of data and elaborating on every little point). The ideas and methods she talked about would mostly only work on people already partial to this idea - I doubt the people who walks away from this talk wanting to eat other culture's food and ask them about their people's struggles as it relates to the food are the same people who were previously detached from social issues. I see it as a dialed down version of preaching to a choir.