Monday, December 31, 2007

Word of the Year: Locavore

Happy New Year to all. As usual, the media is engaged in its rhetoric of retrospection. Last night while taking care of the cat of a friend who is out of town, I turned on the TV and found out about the "hottest" fashion trends for 2007 and 2008: animal prints are really going to be the thing. Zebra, in particular, is the hottest new trend. In the midst of the vacuous infotainment reporting, I thought if you can't "beat 'em, join 'em." Hence, this posting on the "word of the year." Mark Meisner from SUNY-ESF told me a few weeks ago that the word of the year is "locavore." Of course, I had to rush out and do a little research since this trend is one that I find more interesting than the latest "animal print" statement. So here is the scoop.

The New Oxford American Dictionary announced that its word of the year for 2007 is “locavore.” Locavore, according to the Oxford University Press blog, is a term used to describe the popular practice of “using locally grown ingredients, taking advantage of seasonally available foodstuffs that can be bought and prepared without the need for extra preservatives.”

A locavore is a person, but a locavore is also part of a movement, which “encourages consumers to buy from farmers’ markets or even to grow or pick their own food, arguing that fresh, local products are more nutritious and taste better. Locavores also shun supermarket offerings as an environmentally friendly measure, since shipping food over long distances often requires more fuel for transportation.”

Locavore came about in that laboratory of human innovation known as San Francisco. Four women coined the term in an effort to get local residents to eat a 100 mile diet comprised of local foods. Jessica Prentice, one of the four women, is actually credited with coming up with the word. You can read her story here.

http://blog.oup.com/2007/11/prentice/

I've been interested to hear people use the word locavore. I've heard some folks refer to themselves as such recently, so it does seem to be circulating. A few years ago, people referred to themselves as "foodies." Will they know switch to locavores?


Accompanying the discussion of Locavore is an accompanying literature of the locavore, punningly represented in the Columbia Journalism Review as “New Grub Street.” Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser are key representatives of this trend, although there are dozens of titles that play out the key inquiry question: "If we are what we eat, what does that mean? Where does our food come from?" Pollan puts it well when he notes in the _Omnivore's Dilemma_ that we have reached an interesting point in our history where we need an investigative journalist to unravel the mystery of our food supply.

I'm particularly interested in a comment he made in a recent interview where he noted that:

"I know as a writer I've learned that you can't pitch a story on agriculture to an editor in New York, but if you call it a story about food, suddenly people are interested."

I think he's right about that.

There's a BURNING interest right now in Food writing and local food. The recent flurry of responses on the WPA listserv about food writing was pretty striking.
--the rhapsodic food memoir (e.g., Ruth Reichl) or a variation of it such as the "Coming Home to Eat" kind of memoir (Nabhan, Kingsolver)
--the discursive cookbook that is half recipes, half proclamation about local food (Alice Waters, Lappe and others)
--the investigative journalist take on food (Pollan, McKibben, Schlosser, and others)
--academic books on the culture, politics, and ethics of food (Nestle and others)
--let's not forget the agrarian essayists and memoirists, nonfiction writers who get short-shrifted sometimes because they mention the FARM, the actual origin of all food. Books like the recent one by Scott Chaskey about his organic farm, though, have a market and the Canadian TV show "Manic Organic" suggest there is a whole market there for the "farmer guide" to show the public from whence their food comes....
I won't get into all the documentaries about the food supply and farming, but they are worth exploring in another posting.

I'm fascinated by the idea that "food" sells and it is the lens through which to sell writing about agriculture and farming. Pollan even goes so far as to suggest we retitle the "Farm Bill" the "Food Bill" so people will actually pay attention to this archance bit of legislation and figure out how many billions of dollars we are paying out for corn subsidies to keep the high fructose corn syrup industry running--the same industry that is an engine for our obesity epidemic.

The Oxford blog says locavore a word to "watch," and I agree. I think it's worth watching the nonfiction "literature of the locavore," which I'm doing in an article I'm writing right now.

Saturday, December 15, 2007

Snow and Drafts

Where is that noreaster we have been promised? I guess it is slated to arrive tomorrow. I have to admit I wimped out and ran on the treadmill today instead of braving the cold. I did not go outside to run as I usually do on Saturdays. I need a large shaggy Siberian Husky to make me go out on a day like this or a crazy running partner who is undeterred by temperatures.

I'm reading 751 drafts, making comments, and enjoying all the work everyone produced this semester. It's great to see where everyone is taking the work of the course via individual projects.

Hey, Jon (Benda), send us part of your dissertation to read, and when you are you coming stateside so we can invite you to give a talk to the department? I will follow up on the reference you gave me about Chinese Rhetoric and the scholar you mentioned from Penn State.

Last but not least:

Everyone (well, maybe not everyone) is leaving town for the holidays, and while I'm often leaving town at this point, too, I have to admit some relief at not having to brave airport lines or train station delays. I won't be home for Christmas (well, home is actually here), and a part of me is relieved. Good luck to all vacating Syracuse for the holidays.

Sunday, December 09, 2007

Wrap-up

Jon Benda has been posting some incredibly helpful remarks on Lu's book and on his views about comparativism. Jon, keep it coming. I'm going to point to your remarks tomorrow in CCR 751, and I also emailed them to the class to read. The very issue you point to with Lu's book in your exams came up in our class. Brian brought in the review you cited for us to look at, so your response has been incredibly helpful.

Out in the 751 blogosphere, I see people posting away, putting up their revised social history manifestos. It's good to see where the thinking is--what is the same, what has changed, etc.

I thought I'd post a few of my own revised thoughts about teaching this class as part of my manifesto update. I taught this class for the first time in 1998, then 2000 (Jon's year), then 2007 (this fall). Teaching a class three times over about a ten year time period gives me a sense of how much of a changed landscape we are seeing with respect to social histories of rhetoric. There has been so much work with recovery and reclamation scholarship in relation to U.S. feminist rhetorics, African American rhetorics, Latino/a rhetorics, Native rhetorics, and also global rhetorics. Social histories of rhetoric provide a wider lens and address a wider array of rhetorical practices.

When I first started teaching 751, the course was conceived of as more a survey of social history within the bounds of 19th-20th century U.S. culture. Clark and Halloran's edited collection was a key text, and there were some texts out that detailed the social histories of women's rhetorics. There was a beginning discourse on American ethnic rhetorics and some rumblings about global rhetorics (mostly through comparative rhetorics). But the work on social histories of rhetoric was more about white-middle class activists and public figures--the same ethic we saw perpetuated in Clark and Halloran's collection, which is valuable for its inclusion of white men and white women's rhetorics, but marked in its complete omission of the rhetorics of peoples of color.

So I believe we have, in the last six years or so, seen a shift to "cultural rhetorics" in this area of inquiry that has been profound and heartening. The work of class members reflects this shift as well.

A couple of questions/issue emerged this term that I'd like to explore further:

--The critique of figure studies. At key points this term, questions were raised in class about the limits and constraints of figure studies (the focus on analyzing the rhetoric of a particular figure or individual in the history of rhetoric). I have mixed feelings about the critique of figure studies. Yes, figure studies can be limiting and constraining and can risk replicating the kind of monumentalizing history that Nietzsche counsels us to avoid. Yet there is something to be gained from the depth and richness of examining a life and a set of rhetorical works engaged by a specific person in relation to a larger cultural backdrop/community/organization. The key here seems to be context--how is a "figure" a cultural matrix and a site for intersecting and overlapping discourses.

--The question of how to study social histories. Should one study figures and communities and cultures comparatively or is a contextual, in-depth approach better? When is one better than the other? How do we study across communities as well as flesh out specific contexts? There is a tendency and a temptation to try to "sample" as many types of works and contexts as possible. What is the right balance between inclusion and the problem of creating the cultural rhetoric smorgasbord? I have asked the class to consider how they would teach a histories of rhetoric or social histories of rhetoric course, and I'd like to pursue that question further.

--The question of rhetorical methodologies. How are we inventing rhetorical methodologies to study these new--or, in some cases, well-established, but not traditionally included-- figures, communities, practices, and traditions? What does rhetorical analysis of a historical figure or community mean, exactly? How are we reinventing or reconfiguring the vocabulary and terminology of rhetorical studies to account for different rhetorical sites and practices? What lineages are we drawing upon for rhetorical analysis? Rhetorical theories by Aristotle, Burke? Cross-cultural inquiry? Conceptual inquiry? How do specific contexts and communities/cultures dictate their own terms and circumstances? This gets at the conversation we are having about the virtues and pitfalls of comparativism.

More later. . . I have other work to do, but I did want to get down some key questions that I think arose this semester that would be worth pursuing further.

I think Reva said it best when she remarked to Laurie on her blog that she'd like to see us do some debriefing over coffee so we can process where we've been and what we've done without the pressure of deadlines and projects taking us over. I'd like that to happen, too.

I think Reva's right, and I hope Trish's idea about an electronic space for our ongoing work might be another space/place to keep us going...

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Randomness

Well, my disintegration into informality continues. I wore SWEATS to our graduate class last week. SWEATS! I have never done that--NEVER, and I have been teaching since 1988. In graduate school, a friend of mine once commented: "I've never seen you wear blue jeans to class..." He was right. I think I wore black jeans once...

What's the purpose of this blog entry? I don't know. I'm tired, I'm full of M & Ms, and I just finished reading the class blog entries. I'm excited about everyone's projects in 751, and I'm glad Jon Benda FINALLY stopped by and commented on my blog. Jon was in 751 in 2000, right, Jon?

I'm curious to see what everyone will say about Lu tomorrow. Any thoughts out there? How does Lu's text fit into what we discussed last week about ancient rhetorics and the challenge of comparativism? I'll see if I can gather together some coherent thoughts by tomorrow morning to post. Jon, if you are out there, post your review of Lu's book. I think you have one out there that I read.