Food is political. That’s not a hot take; it’s just the truth.
Every choice in a kitchen is a small political act. Where you buy, what you buy, who grew it, who picked it, who got paid, who got credit, who got left out of the story. Most of the time you don’t think about it because thinking about it slows you down. But the choices are still happening whether you think about them or not, and the ones you didn’t think about are politics too. They just go in the direction of whatever the default is.
This category is where I write about the choices.
What goes here
Posts about:
- Sourcing ethics. Why I switched my baking cocoa from Hershey’s to Equal Exchange. The Hatch chile supplier I’ve used for years and why I keep going back. The grocery chain decisions, the farmer’s market decisions, the little stuff that adds up over a year of cooking.
- Credit and attribution. African American foodways and the Southern cooking tradition. Indigenous foods and the Mexican kitchen. The named cooks (Edmond Albius, Hercules Posey, the formerly-enslaved cooks who built the canon of American food and didn’t get the books deals). Giving credit isn’t an extra step; it’s the work.
- Food justice. Who has access. Who doesn’t. Food deserts, SNAP cuts, the economics of “eating better” when “better” costs more. The honest framing of nutrition and morality (food has no moral value; people are not virtuous for eating salad).
- Current events in food. When a story breaks that touches food policy, food industry, food workers, or food culture, this is where it lands. ICE raids on agricultural workers. Industry lobbying. Restaurant unions. Cookbook controversies. The Bad Bunny Grammys win as a food story (because it was one). The stuff that comes up.
- The blog talking about itself. Why a food blog talks about slavery. Why a food blog talks about ICE. Why a food blog talks about a Grammy speech. The meta-posts that defend the existence of this category to readers who think food blogs should stay in their lane.
That’s the territory.
What does NOT go here
This is the more important list.
Recipes don’t go here, even when the recipe carries political weight. Collard greens with proper credit to African American foodways is a Recipes post (with Personal as a cross-cut for the Meemaw connection). The food-justice frame is in the body text and the credit; the category is still Recipes because the deliverable is a dish someone can make.
Personal stories that touch on politics don’t necessarily go here. A post about Sharon’s frozen whiskey sours that mentions Minute Maid discontinuing concentrate is a Personal post with a small food-industry note, not a Food & Politics post. The test: is the post’s primary work about the politics, or does the politics show up as one detail in a larger personal piece?
Food history doesn’t go here. That’s What Got Lost. Some What Got Lost posts have strong food-justice frames (Albius, MSG, African foodways) and may be cross-categorized into Food & Politics when the political work is doing primary work alongside the history. But food history with politics in it is usually a What Got Lost post, not a Food & Politics post.
The discipline is the point. Food & Politics is for the posts where the politics is the primary subject, not the seasoning.
My stance
I’m going to be honest with you about this upfront, because the alternative is making you guess.
I believe food is political and I believe the politics matter. I believe in giving proper credit to African American foodways for what they gave Southern cooking, which is most of what Southern cooking IS. I believe in food justice and the work of getting actual food to actual people. I believe that the workers who pick, pack, process, ship, and cook our food deserve safety, fair wages, and not being terrorized by federal agents. I believe in sourcing ethics, transparency, and disclosed financial relationships. I believe in calling things by their proper names.
I also believe that food is one of the great pleasures of being alive, that nobody should feel guilty about what they eat, that the 80/20 rule is sound, and that a thing being political doesn’t make it less delicious or more important than the eating of it. The eating is still the point. The politics is the part you think about so the eating can keep being good for everybody.
If any of that is a dealbreaker, that’s a fair call. There are food blogs without this section. This blog isn’t one of them.
How to read this section
The same way you read any of it: pick the post that grabs you. Read it. Argue with it in your head, or in the comments. Some of the posts in this category are heavier than others. The Bad Bunny Grammys post and the Hershey’s-to-Equal-Exchange post are not the same kind of post; they’re both here because they’re both about choices.
If you wandered in expecting a recipe and you got an essay about ICE, my apologies. Recipes is the other door. It’s right over there. I’m not offended either way.
P.S. The Food & Politics posts are some of the hardest to write and some of the ones I’m proudest of. They take longer than the recipes. The drafts go through more rewrites. The “is this the right way to say this” question gets asked over and over before publish.
P.P.S. I welcome disagreement in the comments. I do not welcome bad-faith arguments, slurs, or trolling. The moderation is firm and not apologetic about it. If you want to argue in good faith about whether sourcing matters or how to think about credit, the door is open. If you want to call me names, the door is closed.
P.P.P.S. The blog has a private post called “Preparing for Pushback” that I wrote for myself, to think through how to handle the inevitable comment-section pushback to political food writing. It’s not public. But the existence of it tells you something true: I knew when I started this section that I was choosing harder. I made the choice anyway.