Meal kit delivery services rhetorically appeal to middle class consumers who have busy lives, but want to eat good quality food without the hassle of grocery shopping and meal planning. In this paper, we advance three arguments to explore the cultural phenomenon of these meal services that are growing exponentially across the United States and in other countries. First, such meal kits, in their efforts to provide meal and ingredient variation, decontextualize food cultures while promoting a consumer sense of cosmopolitanism. Second, meal kit companies have attempted to address environmental concerns of waste production, but many of those problems have yet to be resolved despite rhetorical appeals to the contrary. Finally, while such meal kits do not address fully the challenges and problems of global food production and capitalist systems, they do confront those who use them with some of the realities of where their food comes from and what kind of waste it produces. We ultimately argue that such companies manifest the return of the repressed through the material and rhetorical production of food and waste even as they employ diverse cultural food options and erase those cultural origins at the same time. Meal kit delivery services' interactivity and confrontation with waste distinguishes them from traditional food media. Despite their investment in the performative dimensions of cooking as a way to reconnect with the food system, they also miss opportunities to address gender, culture, and waste, which limits the radical potential of that performativity.
The aims of food sovereignty need to be underscored to counteract the prevalence of food insecurity media discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic. La Via Campesina's inclusion of interacting with others in their definition of food sovereignty helps sustain food autonomy through shared food practices among populations deemed to be at risk. Key to sustaining autonomy is a revision of how food sovereign voices are mediated in documentary media. Documentary media often claim to amplify the voices of the powerless, a move that rings of the same type of paternalism that often marks food insecurity discourse. Drawing from currents in rhetorical studies, film studies, and studies in food communication, as well as my own documentary work, I argue that voice inheres in that which grates against a neoliberal understanding of food systems and the representational modes that operate within that sphere. Developing a documentary approach that navigates the modalities of mainstream food systems discourse while underscoring long-standing interactions of marginalized people around food is key to mediating food sovereign voices across cultures, generations, and palates.
As a subset of food media meant to tantalize palates, food documentaries typically sensationalize the impoverished state of the entire food supply. This essay focuses on the food documentaries Hybrid (2000), King Corn (2007), Sunú (2015), and OMG OMG (2013), which variously treat “industrial food” as not an object of scorn but a useful category of resistance and engagement. When read through queer ecocritical and feminist materialist lenses, such films create an opening for ways of accounting for and living with the monstrosities of nature that typically arrest the gaze of sensationalism. These food films consider the family and the household not merely as units of passive consumption but as sites of considered provisioning that struggle to account for issues of food justice, food sovereignty, and ecological awareness in a world of ongoing environmental degradation.
This paper addresses the impulse to render systemic food systems issues into stories in light of ongoing challenges such as food scares, food fraud, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Such stories about food systems are seen as embodying the ideal of supply chain transparency currently in vogue and regarded as key to solving food system inequities by shedding light on them. Read in the context of documentary cinematic unveilings of unethical production practices, transparency initiatives of various types, particularly those dependent on the real-time, crypto-ensured storytelling of blockchain and digital twinning technology, would seem to provide a new model of indexicality, a new contract with social reality. However, such tracing systems and the questions they raise instead describe the way in which food—and the land, people and animals who are involved in its production—becomes fodder for various power plays.
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