In "Feed the People, Rosenberg argues that telling people not to eat fast food doesn’t change much when alternatives are too expensive or inaccessible. A more effective approach is to ask: How can you make that burger (or waffle!) better? (Photo by Simon Daoudi, Unsplash)
Why Industrial Food Is Good, Actually
Food is many things to many people: comfort, memories, gathering, tradition.
While conversations about food often turn toward nostalgia, waxing on about local, organic, from‑scratch foods, just like our great‑great‑grandparents used to eat. Gabriel Rosenberg, associate professor of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies wants us to slow things down and ask a different question.
In “Feed the People! Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make It Even Better,” available for purchase February 17, Rosenberg and his co-author Jan Dutkiewicz argue that demonizing industrial food, food that is produced, processed, and distributed at large scale, doesn’t just miss the point, it actively undermines our ability to build a fairer, healthier, more sustainable food system.
Demonizing industrial food doesn’t just miss the point, it actively undermines our ability to build a fairer, healthier, more sustainable food system.
In a recent New York Times op‑ed, “We Shouldn’t Want to Eat Like Our Great‑Great‑Grandparents,” Rosenberg points out that the past, so often held up as a food ideal, was also plagued by malnutrition, a lack of food and inequality. The book expands that argument into a case for improving the food system we already have, rather than fantasizing about one that never actually existed.
A different way to think about food
Rosenberg’s interest in food politics comes from his earlier work looking at rural America, gender and sexuality and his skepticism toward what he calls “nostalgic and highly naive sorts of accounts of rural places and rural people.” That same thread of skepticism runs through “Feed the People!”
In the book, Rosenberg continuously pushes back against the assumption that the solution to the root of the issue in the American food system lies in small‑scale, artisanal, farm‑to‑fork food products. That vision, he argues, often forgets about labor justice, ignores affordability and treats food pleasure, or the enjoyment people get from eating, with suspicion.
“We wanted to offer a progressive vision of food change that was in some sense more inclusive and pluralistic,” he says. “In particular, the book wanted to think about how we could make food pleasure more abundant for everyone, rather than trying to make everyone work harder for scarcer food pleasures.”
Instead of telling people they must stop eating fast food, processed food or using industrial supply chains altogether, the authors ask a different question: how do we as a society make the food people already eat better?
Instead of telling people they must stop eating fast food, processed food or using industrial supply chains altogether, the authors ask a different question: how do we as a society make the food people already eat better?
Key takeaways
One idea Rosenberg wants readers to walk away with is this: “We will be better served and be able to help more people if we strive to improve the average quality of conventional and industrial food, rather than trying to replace it with boutique and artisanal alternatives.”
“We will be better served and be able to help more people if we strive to improve the average quality of conventional and industrial food, rather than trying to replace it with boutique and artisanal alternatives.”
So what does that look like in real life?
Telling people not to eat fast food, Rosenberg argues, doesn’t change much when those alternatives are too expensive or inaccessible. A more effective approach is to ask: How can you make that burger better? And the answers could be: by supporting alternative proteins, improving working conditions and reducing environmental harm at scale.
The book’s recurring example is Waffle House, a chain that Rosenberg both critiques and defends. It’s undeniably flawed, but it also serves “millions and millions of waffles that people legitimately like” to a “remarkably broad and diverse constituency” around the clock. Writing it off as “garbage food” doesn’t make it disappear.
The real question is how to improve on a nutritional, environmental and ethical level without shaming the customers or terminating the employees who depend on those jobs.
Commitment to scale is central. Rosenberg points to labor movements like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers , an organization that successfully pressures major corporations to improve wages and conditions across industrial supply chains. These wins don’t come from rejecting industrial food but from engaging it directly.
“Giving people the power to improve their workplaces, even when those workplaces are industrial, is much more promising,” he says, especially when tens of millions of people depend on them.
Policy implications
“Feed the People!” is also a policy book, though not one built around a single silver bullet. Rosenberg describes the conclusion as “a broad array of smaller policies,” centered on making large-scale food production healthier, fairer and less damaging, without sacrificing access or affordability.
Policies include closing agricultural exemptions to labor and environmental laws, strengthening and fully funding regulatory agencies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and reshaping subsidies — moving them away from animal feed and ethanol and toward food grown for public consumption.
The book calls for investment in food technology, including a national food laboratory, and supports tools like carbon taxes, especially related to meat production.
On food insecurity, Rosenberg points out a sharp distinction between availability and access.
“Food insecurity is primarily not driven by an absence of availability,” he emphasizes. “It’s driven primarily by an absence of income.”
“Food insecurity is primarily not driven by an absence of availability,” he emphasizes. “It’s driven primarily by an absence of income.”
That’s why the book prioritizes policies like expanded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and universal school lunches, as well as interventions that directly increase people’s ability to eat, without relying on moralized ideas of “good food.” When everyone gets to eat lunch for free, no one is singled out for having free lunch.
Underlying all of this is a refusal to treat pleasure as a problem to be solved. Rosenberg calls the dominant food ethos as “food puritanism in eco drag.” Shame, he argues, has done little to improve diets. Making better food easier, cheaper and more enjoyable just might.
In the end, “Feed the People!” doesn’t deny that there is a serious problem with the food industry, but insists that abandoning it completely isn’t realistic. And the tools to do better already exist.
Shame, he argues, has done little to improve diets. Making better food easier, cheaper and more enjoyable just might.
What’s needed now is the political will to use them, and the humility to stop pretending we can eat our way back to a past that never fed people in the way we thought it did.