The “weaponization of food” is nothing new, of course. For as long as there has been human conflict, food has been used as a weapon. The Romans starved Carthage. The Germans starved Leningrad during World War II. The CIA force-fed hunger-striking prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. And just this year, Russia bombed the Ukrainian port of Odessa to disrupt grain exports.
National Review, though, was getting at something different: food as a front in the nation’s ongoing culture war, a proxy for larger issues of character, morality, and patriotism.
The magazine’s finger-pointing at “the radical left” notwithstanding, it was the right that pioneered the use of food to smear its opponents—in this case, to frame liberals and progressives as “elite” pushers of the nanny state. The strategy took hold in the 1990s and evolved over the ensuing decades, as what we eat and how it’s produced became a national debate, and as culture clashes—over affirmative action, gay marriage, school curricula, abortion, and so on—seeped into every corner of our lives.
As the final decade of the 20th century dawned, the nation’s politics were changing. There was a growing clamor on the right, led by Georgia Representative Newt Gingrich and firebrand pundit Pat Buchanan, to abandon what they described as the “morning in America” pragmatism of the Reagan era and exploit the cultural divides that had opened up a generation earlier around the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the environmental movement.
Buchanan summed up the sentiment in 1988: “The Republican moment slipped by…when the GOP refused to take up the challenge from the left on its chosen battleground: the politics of class, culture, religion and race.” Buchanan’s GOP convention speech in 1992, in which he invoked a fight for the “soul of America,” is often cited as the opening salvo in the modern culture war.
While the right was reorienting around a politics of grievance, America’s relationship to what it ate was also undergoing a seismic shift. The 1980s had birthed the “celebrity chef” with the likes of Wolfgang Puck, Jonathan Waxman, and Alice Waters. “California cuisine,” a vegetable-centered approach that blew up at Chez Panisse, Waters’s Berkeley-based temple of seasonal eating, provided an earthy (and earnest) counterpoint to the fusty steakhouses and French restaurants that had long dominated the high-end dining scene. As Ronald Reagan enshrined trickle-down economics, kneecapped the federal regulatory regime, and unleashed Wall Street’s rapacious id, those who thrived in this greed-is-good era feasted on smoked salmon pizza at Spago in Los Angeles and truffled chicken breast at Jams in Manhattan.
Over the next 10 years, this highbrow “foodie” culture spread beyond the scene-makers to become something resembling a national obsession. Whereas the main concerns at mealtime had traditionally been quantity, cost, and convenience, food was now—as David Kamp described in his book The United States of Arugula—“a fundamental facet of our cultural life, a part of the conversation, something contemplated as well as eaten.”
Food, in other words, became cool.