Appetite – the politics of food
[Newsletter reader Karen Throssell has published a collection of poems entitled Appetite – the politics of food, which you can buy online for $25 from Karen’s website. Here is an excerpt from the launch speech given by Anne Carson.]
Karen has brought a lot of creativity to her topic- the politics of food. In this, her 7th collection of poetry, she has turned her discussion of food and the celebration of its beauty, variety and nourishment alongside her outrage and protest at it being used to serve profit-making ends, into poetry.
It is not easy to write a political manifesto and retain lyric sensibility, to bring poetics and politics together, but Karen is in great company in this endeavour. The wonderful feminist poet Adrienne Rich describes “this impulse to enter, with other humans, through language, into the order and disorder of the world, [a]s poetic at its root as surely as it is political at its root.” Karen brings her lyric skills to this book in memorable metaphors and descriptions of food – passionate ‘cloak-swirling’ summer tomatoes or the ‘ghost’ tomatoes of August. She speaks of how her dad deplored ‘taming a mango’, the practice of cutting neat squares into a mango cheek to civilise the eating. Later she describes the ‘juicy pleats of mushrooms’. Her celebratory odes to various foods include: asparagus, porridge, tomatoes, the seed, cabbages and borsch, and the persimmon, which she describes as a “perfect sunset globe gracing the tree’s naked arms.” She also celebrates other ways to describe the humble Jerusalem artichoke: sunchoke, earth apple and sunflower.
Karen relishes the poetics of food-related activities – gardening as therapy, and composting as the alchemy of ‘earth magic’, which is the title of the relevant poem.
But Appetite is also a call to arms, a lament, for our waste and profligacy, our ignorance and neglect. It is a passionate and informed plea for us to change and come to our senses about food. Karen rails against the likes of the ‘butchers of Brazil’ and their voracious meat empires, in another poem how the search for hyper-palatability leads to obesogens, the manipulation of chemicals which drive obesity, and the worldwide rise in obesity rates, the politics of supermarkets and the loss of local shops, as well as the devastation that bulimia causes.
Karen has conjured a character who she calls ‘Voracious’ to admonish, and Voracious is the embodiment of all Karen associates with the machine that puts profits above nourishment, volume above quality. Voracious implies taking more than one’s fair share, being more than greedy, almost unquenchable. Voracious starts the book and finishes it, a warning figure about our collective commodification of food, and the various greeds which drive it. In the final poem, Karen pits Voracious against Gaia in a pitched battle. Here is an extract from the end of the poem which is Karen’s hope for change:
We need a whole system / to wipe out Voracious
Rejecting the notion/ of profit as king/ our hope is the young ones …
And it all starts/with one/ tiny seed