What the Foodies Get Wrong About Food Reform
If you want to understand why the vaunted farm-to-fork food revolution has failed to change the food system, consider some common food delights: a well-charred burger with Heinz 57; a Taco Bell bean burrito (no onions); a double-scoop of ooey-gooey ice cream; a sliced ripe tomato with a sprinkle of salt and a dash of olive oil; a strawberry pop tart; a salad of crisp lettuce topped with seared tuna, cucumber, and sliced avocado; fried chicken and a biscuit; silken tofu swimming in Lao Gan Ma’s chili crisp; wok-fired mustard greens over rice with soy sauce; a plump peach, juicy and sweet; a handful of tart cherries; fluffy waffles dripping with syrup.
What unites them is that each of them are usually (or in some cases always) pleasures furnished by the modern, conventional, industrial food system. Yes, you can find expensive and local artisanal versions here and there, and, heck, you may even have eaten a sliced tomato you plucked from your very own vine. But unless you live somewhere where all those items are grown and always in season, you access food pleasures the same way most other people do: Ingredients are brought to you from all around the world, and you purchase them at a grocery store or restaurant where you don’t need a reservation.
Our food system has a lot of problems, from underpaid workers to grisly factory farms to an obesity epidemic. But the solution isn’t to get rid of industrial food. Instead, it lies in trying to make industrially produced food better, healthier, more sustainable, and less exploitative. This approach to food reform needs the concept of democratic hedonism.
If you’ve never heard of Wendell Berry, you have almost certainly read a book, seen a movie, engaged with a social media post, or eaten a plate of food that was shaped by his writing. Berry’s writings helped to launch both the farm-to-fork culinary movement and what is called the New Food Writing, the renaissance of journalistic books published since the 1990s that have sought to diagnose the ailments of the contemporary food system and usually dismiss industrial, “fast” food as worthless sugary garbage corrosive to both America’s teeth and its soul. If you flip through the pages of books by the journalist Michael Pollan, the food writer and restaurant critic Mark Bittman, the celebrity chef Alice Waters of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse restaurant, the activist and founder of the slow food movement Carlo Petrini, or nearly any other book written about better food and a better food system, you’ll find numerous references, most glowing, some overwrought, to Wendell Berry. But Berry’s model is a bad one for food system reform. His most famous essay, “The Pleasures of Eating,” is really more of a list of practical shopping and eating chores for consumers: (1) “Participate in food production to the extent that you can.” (2) “Prepare your own food.” (3) “Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home.” (4) “Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist.” (5) “Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production.” (6) “Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening.” (7) “Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species.”
There is nothing wrong with these ideas on their face. But eating the locavore way is very expensive and time-consuming, and most people don’t find it pleasurable enough to justify those costs. Dismissiveness about material barriers like scarce time and money suggest that people like Berry lack a realistic theory of change. That’s why, to the extent that the foodie movement has accomplished much of anything, it has mostly shaped the food aesthetics of high-end consumers, the menus of the expensive restaurants that cater to them, the products and advertisements of the upmarket supermarkets and brands that sell to them, and the content of the food pages of newspapers and magazines. This is not inherently bad. Done well, the locavore food aesthetic and flavor is as defensible as any other, and there are elements of it we enthusiastically support. We just don’t think it’s up to the challenge of offering a scalable alternative to the status quo.
Improving the pleasures of the industrial food system, while reducing its harms, is where democratic hedonism comes in. The term was coined by Yale professor and political theorist Joseph Fischel to describe a novel approach to sexual ethics, a call to “think more boldly and strategically about democratized access to pleasure and intimacy.” But the concepts both of hedonism and of democracy as a tempering influence apply just as well to food. Democracy demands a pluralistic and inclusive account of what a good life is, who gets to define it, and who is entitled to it. From this perspective, making sure everyone has abundant access to pleasure should be a social project that inspires collaboration, care, mutuality, and solidarity: for other people, for our common planet, and even for the animals with whom we share it.
Most people, right and left, rich and poor, want food that is healthy and fresh for themselves and their families. Beyond that, it’s true that some people yearn for elite (and costly) experiences, but most normie pleasures are grounded in values that are tough to square with snobbishness: affordability; availability; familiar, beloved flavors, ingredients, and techniques; and convenience. Most people don’t want eating to be a tiresome chore, another laborious task jammed into a day already as overstuffed as a leaking calzone.
Pleasure and choice in society are not equally distributed. Not everyone has the same menu, and some people can only select from limited and unappealing options. Social position, limited resources, energy, and time, and uneven knowledge shape access, and the result is that some pleasurable snacks are too high in the cupboard for some people to reach. And other people have handy stepladders that they’re just not sharing. Meanwhile, people often do things they do not want to do because duty, care, responsibility, and necessity compel them. The gendered labor of food preparation, for example, means that common foodie clichés about the “pleasures of cooking” or avoiding “processed” foods can intensify sexist household burdens or, at the very least, be experienced very differently by men and women. All of this means that democratic hedonism requires that sensual pleasures must be analyzed in relationship to some tempering intersocial goods: capacity, access, and pluralism.
Examining capacity requires us to consider not only the pleasures of the moment but a more holistic understanding of what makes a good life: the pleasures of a lifetime well lived. Capacity requires us to think not just about what we are, but the full potential of what we may become. Diets that are momentarily pleasurable but that make people ill in the long term diminish their future capacities over a lifetime and can burden their loved ones, friends, and communities. This is one of the reasons nutrition and health have to stay in the picture.
Similarly, following scholars and activists of disability, an emphasis on access requires that we consider how social structures, the built environment, and political power shape the menu from which we select. Sometimes we have to proactively reshape the world to ensure that everyone has adequate access to the things that make up a good life, building new infrastructures that expand access to people who would otherwise be left out. Expanding access to pleasures for some will require imposing costs on others. More funding for school lunch programs, for example, could require taxing pleasurable luxuries such as thick cuts of steak. Too bad!
Finally, because tastes differ, democratic hedonism requires pluralism about the pleasures of food, one more invested in empowering people to pursue their own pleasures as they define them instead of smugly dictating to other people what is (and is not) tasty. Like Jan, for example, you may be perfectly disgusted by Gabriel’s desire to eat a ball of mozzarella cheese with his hands like an apple directly from the refrigerator when his husband is out of town, but that feeling has little value in a debate about whether stores should stock mozzarella cheese and whether Gabriel should buy and consume them.
Considered this way, democratic hedonism pushes us to ask how we can build a society of abundant and accessible pleasures. The good news is that the extraordinary productivity of American farming already makes abundant and affordable food pleasures possible. Improving the American food system further will require engaging, improving, and fairly distributing modern agriculture’s productivity, not tossing it on the compost heap.
Excerpted and adapted from Feed the People!: Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make It Even Better by Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg. Copyright © 2026. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.