Okay this is pretty random, but the gain on my b.s. detector is set high this morning. James McWilliams writes in today’s Washington Post:
I gave a talk in South Texas recently on the environmental virtues of a vegetarian diet. As you might imagine, the reception was chilly. In fact, the only applause came during the Q&A period when a member of the audience said that my lecture made him want to go out and eat even more meat. “Plus,” he added, “what I eat is my business — it’s personal.”
I’ve been writing about food and agriculture for more than a decade. Until that evening, however, I’d never actively thought about this most basic culinary question: Is eating personal?
I don’t buy this. First of all, it is really, really, rare for a public speaker to get no applause whatsoever, even out of politeness. Second, it is the nature of public speaking that people who agree with you are more likely to show up for your talk than people who disagree with you. That’s true even in South Texas. You have to be wildly controversial to have an audience where lots of people who hate you show up. And even then, lots of people who like you will show up too. Moreover, South Texans who show up for lectures by academics are in all likelihood polite enough to applaud even a speaker they don’t like. Unless McWilliams is an absolutely abysmal public speaker, which I doubt, the assertion that the “only applause” came during a confrontational question doesn’t pass the smell test. It has the vague scent of Robert Reichism.
Even more implausible is the notion that a widely respected author on food and its place in our society hadn’t until that moment contemplated the contention that what you eat is personal. I’ve written a bit about food politics and read on the subject quite a bit as well. The claim that what you eat is personal is one of the central points in the field. Countless food writers have invoked the famous line Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, author of the important 19th-century treatise, The Physiology of Taste: “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.”
But somehow, after 10 years of writing about food, it took a question from an (allegedly) implacably hostile audience to get him to realize the importance of this argument. Not buying it.