Don’t eat anything that casts a shadow

This efficient piece of Chinese traffic art is dangerously inauthentic – says the prevailing political correctness

Do you also ever wonder why the street artist Shepard Fairey, who created the famous Obama portrait, has been demoted from cool leftist-darling to ‘Yankee hipster’? Don’t worry. The reason is that we live in an era of authenticity, where everything associated with modernity – industrialism, capitalism, individualism, secularism, mass production, consumption, standardisation, science and globalisation – is automatically banned as inauthentic and alienating. As a consequence, the Western elite live in a value system, where everything old, local, collective, primitive, raw and non-commoditised is seen as the magic key to the authenticity we think is lost somewhere in the pre-modern past.

But authenticity is not real. Let me illustrate this point by examining our relationship with foods.

Hippy from a Simpsons' episode about an activist group that opposes logging. Activists eat authentic and dress authentic – I wonder if his hat is made of cats’ hair he has turned into felt himself?

Don’t eat anything that casts a shadow

In an old episode of The Simpsons Homer’s daughter Lisa tries to get in with a bunch of environmental activists from the group Dirt First, that comes to Springfield to stop a commercially-driven logging project. She’s fallen in love with the group’s leader and tells him she’s thinking about becoming a vegan, to which he replies: “Ha, I’m a level 5 vegan – I don’t eat anything that casts a shadow.”

I remembered this clip when I was reading a diary recently from the protest of Østerild Plantage written by the activists in Politiken. It struck me how much space the descriptions of the activists' meals took up in the overall piece. I was expecting a strict focus on the natural and legal policy qualms of the people who led the protest, but evidently it was crucial to account for what was eaten in the camp and how the food was prepared. In this way the activist writes the first day “I’m helping out building some rocket ovens, a tube with a small oven underneath. This way you can cook without using much wood. We advocate renewable energy so we’ve learned this technique. It’s not permanent structures, so they need rebuilding, but potatoes boil much quicker with these kinds of tricks.”

The next day: “I’m in a corner of the circle peeling carrots for a decent meal.” And the next day: “The local protesters have gone mushroom hunting in the woods, chanterelles are in season.”

Activism without cookies from Brugsen

We’re not talking random foods here: you do everything from scratch, eat only vegetarian, hand-picking local ingredients, and you spend time and energy building the proper eco-friendly oven that must constantly be re-build and therefore requires more time and energy. There are no easy canned foods, biscuits from the supermarket or from the local takeaway in Thy.

When it's essential to the activists to tell the world that they eat as hunter-gatherers wasting loads of energy to save energy, it is of course because authentic cooking is prestigious. This is exactly what the small scene from The Simpsons describes so accurately: under the pretext of health, ethics and sustainability authentic cooking is first and foremost a status symbol. When the masses start to eat vegan, then you must sever yourself from more and more food markets and make your food consumption even more primitive, inconvenient and Spartan in order to be at the forefront – ad absurdum.

We get lost in the hunt for ourselves

The point is emphasised by the Canadian author and journalist Andrew Potter’s 2010 book, The Authenticity Hoax – How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves. Here Potter describes how – as part of an updated critique of modernity – an intense hunt for authenticity has come about, which from the turn of the millennium has become a guide for Western consumption. The point is that authenticity can never be reached since authenticity has an inherent competitive element. That is, authenticity does not exist in a metaphysical sense, but is merely a difference in status and therefore ceases to be authentic and is transferred to a state of ‘fake’ at the moment the masses reach it.

The distinction between ‘authentic’ and ‘fake’ corresponds to the distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ money, between aristocrats and parvenus or between hipsters and those who try too hard. As Potter emphasises: ”Being an authentic person, or living an authentic life (...) is a positional good that derives its value from the force of individual comparison. You can only be a truly authentic person as long as most of the people around you are not.”

Precisely because authenticity has no objective reality, but purely a social construction, the struggle for authenticity has a built-in radicalising dynamic, which leads to all sorts of absurdities in ‘authentic’ life.

Theoretically Potter draws from Thorstein Veblen’s classic The Theory of the Leisure Class and makes the claim that our time’s status race is no longer about conspicuous consumption but conspicuous authenticity (‘conspicuous authenticity’). As was Veblen’s point, the way in which you show you belong to the elite is through activities or possessions that have no obvious use-value, and as such are an opulent waste. However, such waste must be depicted in a way that makes it meaningful so that its status-enhancing function remains implicit.

According to Potter the same relates to the case of striking authenticity. Although this is nothing more than a status symbol, the elite must pretend that it has a purpose that is good for society: “Conspicuous authenticity raises the stakes by turning the search for the authentic into a matter of utmost gravity: not only does it provide me with a meaningful life, but it is also good for society, the environment, even the entire planet”.

Authentic coffee with fair trade. But doubt gnaws; is it authentic enough to make the consumer cool? Or do you have to dig deeper into the soil of authenticity to make sure? In reality authenticity is unattainable, because it moves every time you reach for it

Does this lecture seem familiar? In any case, while writing this I’m drinking the organic fair trade coffee brand Clipper at Dk85 kr. per bag from Mad & Vin, and the label reads: “Clipper products are made with pure ingredients and a clear conscience. We use only the highest-quality sources, add nothing artificial and strive to improve the welfare of workers”.

Similarly, I drink smoothies by the brand Innocent, whose packaging blabbers: ”We like our planet, so we work from farm to fridge to reduce our carbon footprint and make our packaging as sustainable as possible” and ”We give away 10% of all profits to people who need it more than us”.

The two brands appear to have a superior use-value compared to conventional brands. There’s nothing less than the security of the entire human race and the survival of nature at stake. It is precisely through this kind of legitimising narrative that such brands essentially status-oriented nature remain hidden.

Organic has become mainstream

Nevertheless, Potter argues, sooner or later this will reveal itself, as it has happened with organic foods. Organic has become too mainstream, and so one can now identify a change in the discourse. Organic as a starting point has been about ingredients without pesticides; as organic has become more available there has been a re-interpretation of organic as a concept, so that ‘real’ organic today is associated with locally produced foods: “The more organic resembles the conventional and the more it is available at low cost to millions of everyday consumers, the less it is able to serve as a source of distinction. More than anything, the loss of distinction is what explains the sudden shift away from the organic to the local.”

In Denmark this shift has manifested itself in the growth in number of ‘authentic’ greengrocers such as Din Baghave, which only sells vegetables from local producers at high premium prices, as the bigger supermarket chains have made organic vegetables accessible to the less affluent consumer.

Viewed through Potter’s prism, the ‘New Nordic Food Wave’, it is not without a certain amusement to hear Claus Meyer say, as he did in a speech in Paris last year: “This is not just another trend, it is a profound shift of paradigm.” Implicit: the ‘authentic’ Nordic cuisine with hand picking, hand pickling etc. of seasonal products rests on a rock-solid rational foundation and is beyond the dynamics of differentiation that determine the rise and fall of all other gastronomy. The New Nordic Cuisine is quite simply an imperative as it also reads from the brochure ‘New Nordic Food’ published by the Nordic Council of Ministers, because it is better for society, for democracy, for animals, for the environment and for individual health.

It’s not waste – it’s the main course. If you’re at the forefront of the authenticity wave, that is

The fact of the matter is, however, that not even local, home-grown food is authentic enough, at least not compared to what the American elite has begun to put away. When even Walmart, as The Huffington Post documented a few months ago, has started to sell locally produced fruit and vegetables, one has to reject local food as the epitome of authenticity.

So, if you want to be really authentic in this day and age you’ll have to eat garbage! The local food slogan “From farm to fork”, enshrined in Danish gourmet circles, has already, in the US become “From stem to root”. This emerged last week in an article in The New York Times titled "That's Not Trash, That's Dinner". According to the article all that was previously categorised as waste products is the only right thing to eat, because so did our forefathers in their pre-industrial past, and of course then it’s far more authentic.

In this way the finest of the fine one can eat: peel, sprout, carcass, stems, roots, tops, leaves, stems and seeds. The article notes that a number of these waste products actually contains deadly toxins and therefore lists the number of the American Poison Control Center, but the morale is not to be mistaken: rather die of poisoning than be inauthentic.

Über-authentic food with insects will save the planet. And give the brave eater street credibility

Most of all it’s authentic to eat as primitive people outside the Western cultural sphere. So, insects have replaced shellfish as the elite’s preferred eating at top restaurants in the US and luxury supermarkets in Holland. Even Angelina Jolie swears by grubs, worms and beetles. The culinary phenomenon known as ‘entomophagy’ appears regularly in the food columns in The New York Times and The New Yorker, where it is highlighted as a viable alternative to meat from ‘factory-farming’ – the epitome of inauthentic food. As one of the pioneers of the insect cuisine says to The New York Times: “You really want to go green? Try this. I have my month’s meat growing in my office. It’s taking up almost no space, it’s organically raised, it’s as fresh as I want it to be and the waste from it is garden compost.” Consequently, it is good for humanity and for the planet. As it appears from the same article, the eating of some insects can cause allergic reactions, but again, rather being sick than being inauthentic.

Next year we’ll probably see Jørgen Leth munch the larva from rotten wood beams at Ruth’s in Skagen. Enjoy, upperclass.