Discomfort Foods: The Perils and Pleasures of Knowing What We Eat

How much do we know about the foods we eat—and how much do we want to know? Alex Plakias approached this question through three related issues. First, Alex examined the significance of deception and bullshit in food labeling and marketing, and argued that often, we do not actually know what we're eating. This is not just because labels lie—the homogenization of flavors means that we may not actually have the right kind of taste experience to develop genuine knowledge of foods as familiar as grapes and bananas. Taking up this theme of variation and homogenization, Alex extended it to our aesthetic and emotional experience of food. We associate food with comfort and pleasure and avoid food that invokes negative feelings; this is an obstacle to the adoption of more sustainable practices and products, such as edible insects. The expectation of comfort leads us to seek substitutes for familiar foods, like cultivated (or 'lab-grown') meat. In doing so, it also poses an obstacle to more meaningful changes to our food systems. Alex concludes by linking these two issues via the possibility of critiquing food technology on epistemological, rather than ethical, grounds.