Ethical eating
Richard Sennett ince I wrote in The Spectator a fortnight ago about the 'Say no to foie gras' campaign, my email has been flooded with protests. Animal-rights groups have claimed that I am wet, limp, cravenly judicious; I should have said that force-fed geese are a symbol of the evil Man everywhere does to animals. Partisans of foie gras accuse me of being a `vego-fascist'; more interestingly, several of my Sybarite correspondents have observed that the European legislation banning force-feeding is really a kind of class warfare waged against a delicacy enjoyed mostly by the well-to-do. And my friend Paul Levy, Britain's most knowledgeable foodie, says I've got the facts wrong: artisan producers do not abuse their birds; in caring human hands both geese and ducks voluntarily submit to the gavage (massage of food down the gullet) since they are programmed to overeat before the migratory season.
One thing these clamouring correspondents seem to share lies in that word `artisanal'. It seems to all a badge of honour, artisanal food suggesting the ethical as well as the tasty. In the ancient world, the artisans' honour had little to do with gentleness or kindness; Hesiod and Virgil imagined the farmer to be a noble figure because, like a warrior, he struggled with the elements; had Hesiod access to an email chat room he would surely have dismissed all this worry about cruelty to animals, since it is animals who are cruel to us.
The idea that artisans of the field and farmyard are locked in struggle against Nature passed down in time, even into the writings of medieval monks tending to plants and animals in monasteries; but slowly the rural artisan's honour began to modulate from questions of struggle to sheer skill; thus, by the 18th century, Diderot's Encyclopedia 'discovers' the deductive intelligence, curiosity about facts and self-discipline required to farm well (perhaps only a habitué of the Paris salons could claim this as a discovery). The Enlightened artisan appeared to the philosophers more largely as a thinker than as a combattant against raw nature.
The kindly artisan is a figure who emerged in the industrial era, celebrated by the followers of Ruskin and Morris: they imagined him, for instance, illuminated by the glow of a wood-burning stove, a bookbinder bent over his bench pointing out a detail in the leather to his respectful apprentice; they contrasted such a scene with factories where giant industrial presses spewed out thousands of books an hour, the factory workers sagging from fatigue, angry, drawn into themselves ... the contrast has become a cliché only because it is based on hard, persistent material fact. But Morris's followers coloured this contrast in a Romantic way by portraying the craftsman as someone more at peace with himself, a gentler soul than the industrial operative clenched in the grip of the cruel machine and its profit-crazed owner. The celebration of `artisanal food' today reflects this 19th-century scenario — a gentler way to produce food locally, in small farms which resemble the bookbinder's shop. It may be so but is certainly not the whole story.
Can you imagine a locally sourced, artisinal pot of Bovril? Aren't you grateful, when you open a tin of tuna, for the machines which sealed and sterilised the fish? And then there is the issue of quality. In my day job as a sociologist, I've been keeping tabs for the past 30 years on a bakery which has in time replaced human hands with automated scoops and rollers. The industrialised bread is in some ways better than the old versions made by hand; the automated machines have proved more sensitive to the rising dough and to temperature conditions within the ovens. To be better than a machine, the modern baker has to be very good indeed. Pain Poilane is such a bread; though it looks like a rough peasant loaf, there are few country bakers who could achieve its crust and internally consistent texture. Or take cheese. Wandering off the tourist routes of Normandy, you were disappointed by the stuff you found at ordinary farms; of course you were; Neal's Yard Dairy and Paxton and Whitfield have spoiled you; their cheesemakers are elite artisans. But at least your travels have cured you of the Romantic illusion that something is better simply because it is hand-made. And the same cure applies to the ethical artisan; 'hand-made', 'locally sourced', 'organic' — none of it implies, necessarily, virtue.
As I press the 'delete' button on the cascade of mail about cruel versus kind husbandry, I'm tempted to conclude that the moralising avoids a more unsettling fact about artisanal food: it is elite food, as much for the skills required to produce it as for the money required to consume it. Does `artisanal' equal 'undemocratic'? Ponder this philosophic proposition well, it is edgier than the image of the ethical artisan, but please do not write to me.
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