However, the reintegration of production and consumption in the popular mass media is a highly selective endeavor and remains largely confined to the realm of lifestyles and cooking fads. Its aim is to resist the saliency of consumer activism demanding ‘a return’ to pre-industrial food systems and threatening to re-expose meat’s symbolic ambiguities. These food culture elaborating efforts thus contribute to the fetishism of consumption and reproduce the distance between today’s food consumers and the most marginalized food producers.
The cooking-show viewer would be hard-pressed to spot even the slightest glimpse of an industrial farm of tens of thousands of acres, equipped with massive machinery run by computers and satellites. Nor will she or he see the 30,000-strong pig confining facilities from where their high quality tenderloin originates, let alone images of immigrants working in dangerous and unglamourously tedious jobs in the fields or inside meatpacking plants. The food or produce that the overwhelming majority of us buy at the local supermarket, the fruits and vegetables dosed with chemicals and shipped a thousand miles before we buy them, remain largely hidden. No attempt is made to personalize the cooking show hosts’ relationship with IBP (now Tyson), the world’s most important butcher.
Framing food and cooking as a lifestyle converts the reintegration of production and consumption into a matter of individual choice. Instead of asking how and under what conditions most of the food we consume is produced, ‘cooking as a lifestyle’ discourse frames the relationship of consumers with producers as a matter of aesthetics, as an extension of consumer freedom - freedom to choose. Large corporations with control over most of the food we eat hardly encourage us to develop personal relationships with our ‘own production crews’ at the strawberry field or our ‘white hat line workers’ at our local meat packing plant. On the contrary, massive efforts are devoted to get us to identify with, and develop long-term loyalty to, the ‘brand’. For this purpose complex and massive social technologies are deployed so that brand/image (i.e., ‘Lean Generation Pork’ by Smithfield corporation) becomes separated from its practice (concentrated animal confinement facilities, open lagoons of manure, immigrant workers denied bathroom breaks).
The coexistence of two seemingly contradictory trends – attempts to reify the consumption of meat produced within a highly industrialized meat subsector and the elaboration and mobilization of consumers to reconstitute production/consumption unity in food as a lifestyle movement – reveals the highly contested and unstable character of the divide between these two realms. This divide is produced by competing ethical and ideological claims (freedom to consume, freedom to choose and other consumer rights vis-à-vis workers’ rights or environmental impacts) as well as in struggles over social distinctions, power and profits (class, ethnicity, laws and regulations, institutions that formulate and implement agriculture and food policies, tax regimes, etc.).
