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No One Eats Alone: Food as a Social Enterprise
In today’s fast-paced, fast food world, everyone seems to be eating alone, all the time—whether it’s at their desks or in the car. Even those who find time for a family meal are cut off from the people who grew, harvested, distributed, marketed, and sold the foods on their table. Few ever break bread with anyone outside their own socioeconomic group. So why does Michael Carolan say that that no one eats alone? Because all of us are affected by the other people in our vast foodscape. We can no longer afford to ignore these human connections as we struggle with dire problems like hunger, obesity, toxic pesticides, antibiotic resistance, depressed rural economies, and low-wage labor.
Carolan argues that building community is the key to healthy, equitable, and sustainable food. While researching No One Eats Alone , he interviewed more than 250 individuals, from flavorists to Fortune 500 executives, politicians to feedlot managers, low-income families to crop scientists, who play a role in the life of food. Advertising consultants told him of efforts to distance eaters and producers—most food firms don’t want their customers thinking about farm laborers or the people living downstream of processing plants. But he also found stories of people getting together to change their relationship to food and to each other.
There are community farms where suburban moms and immigrant families work side by side, reducing social distance as much as food miles. There are entrepreneurs with little capital or credit who are setting up online exchanges to share kitchen space, upending conventional notions of the economy of scale. There are parents and school board members who are working together to improve cafeteria food rather than relying on soda taxes to combat childhood obesity.
Carolan contends that real change only happens when we start acting like citizens first and consumers second. No One Eats Alone is a book about becoming better food citizens.
Carolan argues that building community is the key to healthy, equitable, and sustainable food. While researching No One Eats Alone , he interviewed more than 250 individuals, from flavorists to Fortune 500 executives, politicians to feedlot managers, low-income families to crop scientists, who play a role in the life of food. Advertising consultants told him of efforts to distance eaters and producers—most food firms don’t want their customers thinking about farm laborers or the people living downstream of processing plants. But he also found stories of people getting together to change their relationship to food and to each other.
There are community farms where suburban moms and immigrant families work side by side, reducing social distance as much as food miles. There are entrepreneurs with little capital or credit who are setting up online exchanges to share kitchen space, upending conventional notions of the economy of scale. There are parents and school board members who are working together to improve cafeteria food rather than relying on soda taxes to combat childhood obesity.
Carolan contends that real change only happens when we start acting like citizens first and consumers second. No One Eats Alone is a book about becoming better food citizens.
- GenresFoodNonfiction
184 pages, Hardcover
Published May 9, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 11, 2024
If I had a coin for every time I’ve asked my mom where a banana or avocado or tomato comes from and she answered with the name of the super-market she’d bought it from with a tone of incredulity I’d have… a lot of coins. “What do you mean where’s it from? The supermarket duh.” I think that’s as good an illustration as any of how alienated our at times totalising ontology as consumers makes us with respect to food.
In No One Eats Alone, Carolan foregrounds this disconnect between all the processes and consequences that go into how we relate to food and our apparently straightforward relationship with food (the “buy from supermarket and eat, or goto restaurant and eat” relationship) very well. He uses the term “social distance” to describe this disconnect, and this provides a good counter-weight to the limits things like “buy local” faces, though I still prefer alienation given its embeddedness within capitalist labour relations and the impacts of deprivation of relationality.
The interviews with Food Industry insiders (advertising execs, lobbyists, corporate nutritionists) and lawmakers are insightful in giving us a sense of how deliberately crafted our current consumer-relationship with food is, and how already-political the decisions that lead to this myopic consumer-relationship are. Historicising our present is an important task that sociology undertakes, and Carolan does this well when he discusses how our individualist orientation toward how we interact with food — that we as consumers are concerned chiefly with immediate price of food, quantifiable time to prepare, easily-located and spelled-out nutritional information — is historically constituted by contingent, could’ve-been-otherwise, processes of capital-accumulation-centering legislation, and advertisement. And (2) that it is also to the interest of Food Industry profits to frame and practice food as apolitical (despite its aforementioned already-political nature): as divorced from issues of labour exploitation, colonialism and ontological violence, ecological catastrophe, the reliance on antibiotics, herbicides, pesticides, fertilisers, and the attendent costs of all such processes (such as: more colonialism, energy use, green-house gas emissions, antibiotic resistance). And (3) that these ways of relating to food are historically, and contextually contingent — it didn’t, and doesn’t, have to be this way. How did it come to pass that the default now is we don’t have time to prepare food within our communities? Under what conditions has this started to make sense?
The focus on the importance of practicing disalienating relations with food and the documentation of how different alternative foodscapes reduce this social distance was also a highlight for me. What’s also great here is that Carolan does not uncritically endorse any alternative foodscape practices: I particularly liked the critique of FarmDrop (in their for-profit model and continual monopsonistic buyer-power relationship with food producers) and Slow Food (in its lack of attention to structural constraints that make it so people are too time-poor for Slow practices in food desired by Slow Food, and then bringing in examples of other community-based foodscapes that address things like: child-care responsibilities and transportation issues within the programmes themselves) in this regard.
With a large portion of the book based on interviews with people embedded in communities affected by conventional food processes, it is also rich with examples of the consequences these practices have on these communities. To name just one example that I didn’t know before I read this book: did you know that turkey tails, what is now practically “local” Samoan cuisine, come from US turkey producers, and only started to appear in Samoan markets after WWII because US poultry firms began dumping these previously discarded undesirables into Samoan markets? And that despite being practically non-existent in Samoa in the 1930s and 40s, and that everyone there knows it’s “unhealthy,” it was able to be sold so cheaply (since it was otherwise literally “waste”) and required so much less time to prepare (which becomes a desirability and a need given contexts of colonialism and the integration into the capitalist economy) that it began to displace traditional foods that were both more costly and time-consuming to prepare than the imports? And and, that this is only one of the many unhealthy-and-otherwise-discarded-foods that imperial core food producers dump into markets in the Pacific Islands (e.g., Australia and NZ dumping of mutton flaps into Samoa)? Anyone with comments on the obesity rates of Pacific Islands ought to see everything in light of these contexts.
One thing that made me initially skeptical about the book was the attemptedly-conversational tone that it took, I thought it foretold patronisation and lack of criticality. Did I find it slightly lacking in terms of a more systematic structural critique of capitalism and extractive colonial relations and their connections to conventional food systems? and the limits of alternative foodscapes that don’t take sufficient account of these structural conditions? Yea no doubt. But I think the book ultimately is made better fit for purpose precisely because it didn’t attempt to cover a ground that would’ve taken another book to explain well to a popular audience. The conversational tone and popular language that it uses means that I’m now thinking this is something I can send to my dad (who is about the most uncritically Western-progress and liberal economics endorser that I know).
And yea, the most TL;DR thing I can say about this book might be that: this is a book about the sociology of food that you can get your dad to read.
In No One Eats Alone, Carolan foregrounds this disconnect between all the processes and consequences that go into how we relate to food and our apparently straightforward relationship with food (the “buy from supermarket and eat, or goto restaurant and eat” relationship) very well. He uses the term “social distance” to describe this disconnect, and this provides a good counter-weight to the limits things like “buy local” faces, though I still prefer alienation given its embeddedness within capitalist labour relations and the impacts of deprivation of relationality.
The interviews with Food Industry insiders (advertising execs, lobbyists, corporate nutritionists) and lawmakers are insightful in giving us a sense of how deliberately crafted our current consumer-relationship with food is, and how already-political the decisions that lead to this myopic consumer-relationship are. Historicising our present is an important task that sociology undertakes, and Carolan does this well when he discusses how our individualist orientation toward how we interact with food — that we as consumers are concerned chiefly with immediate price of food, quantifiable time to prepare, easily-located and spelled-out nutritional information — is historically constituted by contingent, could’ve-been-otherwise, processes of capital-accumulation-centering legislation, and advertisement. And (2) that it is also to the interest of Food Industry profits to frame and practice food as apolitical (despite its aforementioned already-political nature): as divorced from issues of labour exploitation, colonialism and ontological violence, ecological catastrophe, the reliance on antibiotics, herbicides, pesticides, fertilisers, and the attendent costs of all such processes (such as: more colonialism, energy use, green-house gas emissions, antibiotic resistance). And (3) that these ways of relating to food are historically, and contextually contingent — it didn’t, and doesn’t, have to be this way. How did it come to pass that the default now is we don’t have time to prepare food within our communities? Under what conditions has this started to make sense?
The focus on the importance of practicing disalienating relations with food and the documentation of how different alternative foodscapes reduce this social distance was also a highlight for me. What’s also great here is that Carolan does not uncritically endorse any alternative foodscape practices: I particularly liked the critique of FarmDrop (in their for-profit model and continual monopsonistic buyer-power relationship with food producers) and Slow Food (in its lack of attention to structural constraints that make it so people are too time-poor for Slow practices in food desired by Slow Food, and then bringing in examples of other community-based foodscapes that address things like: child-care responsibilities and transportation issues within the programmes themselves) in this regard.
With a large portion of the book based on interviews with people embedded in communities affected by conventional food processes, it is also rich with examples of the consequences these practices have on these communities. To name just one example that I didn’t know before I read this book: did you know that turkey tails, what is now practically “local” Samoan cuisine, come from US turkey producers, and only started to appear in Samoan markets after WWII because US poultry firms began dumping these previously discarded undesirables into Samoan markets? And that despite being practically non-existent in Samoa in the 1930s and 40s, and that everyone there knows it’s “unhealthy,” it was able to be sold so cheaply (since it was otherwise literally “waste”) and required so much less time to prepare (which becomes a desirability and a need given contexts of colonialism and the integration into the capitalist economy) that it began to displace traditional foods that were both more costly and time-consuming to prepare than the imports? And and, that this is only one of the many unhealthy-and-otherwise-discarded-foods that imperial core food producers dump into markets in the Pacific Islands (e.g., Australia and NZ dumping of mutton flaps into Samoa)? Anyone with comments on the obesity rates of Pacific Islands ought to see everything in light of these contexts.
One thing that made me initially skeptical about the book was the attemptedly-conversational tone that it took, I thought it foretold patronisation and lack of criticality. Did I find it slightly lacking in terms of a more systematic structural critique of capitalism and extractive colonial relations and their connections to conventional food systems? and the limits of alternative foodscapes that don’t take sufficient account of these structural conditions? Yea no doubt. But I think the book ultimately is made better fit for purpose precisely because it didn’t attempt to cover a ground that would’ve taken another book to explain well to a popular audience. The conversational tone and popular language that it uses means that I’m now thinking this is something I can send to my dad (who is about the most uncritically Western-progress and liberal economics endorser that I know).
And yea, the most TL;DR thing I can say about this book might be that: this is a book about the sociology of food that you can get your dad to read.
April 21, 2025
I didn't realise this was going to be a big picture sociology book, not a small picture book about eating together. It was a bit academic and a bit of a slog, but afterwards I did try making my own granola, shopping at the fruit shop and having friends over for dinner instead of going out. Perhaps it will nudge me to make more food from scratch but I think I'll continue to shop at Aldi.
May 8, 2017
I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review
3.5 stars, moving toward 4 as the book progressed.
This book was different than I expected. I thought I was going to read stories of people's experience with food in all the different ways (farmers, harvesters, industry leaders, and of course consumers) followed by what we can learn about being more conscious of where our food comes from and why it matters. Instead it was the opposite way around, the author put forward an idea about how to solve different problems in the industry with social change and used research and quotes from interviews to back up his claims. These quotes could come from different sources very quickly, leaving me a bit confused as to who said what at times.
It was dense in parts but overall a very interesting read. I learned about things I had never even heard of (ie, The Green Revolution) and was asked to reconsider some things I thought I knew about and were good ideas (Vitamin D fortified foods)
Overall this was a very interesting book, just a bit more technical, and in some parts disorganized, than I expected.
3.5 stars, moving toward 4 as the book progressed.
This book was different than I expected. I thought I was going to read stories of people's experience with food in all the different ways (farmers, harvesters, industry leaders, and of course consumers) followed by what we can learn about being more conscious of where our food comes from and why it matters. Instead it was the opposite way around, the author put forward an idea about how to solve different problems in the industry with social change and used research and quotes from interviews to back up his claims. These quotes could come from different sources very quickly, leaving me a bit confused as to who said what at times.
It was dense in parts but overall a very interesting read. I learned about things I had never even heard of (ie, The Green Revolution) and was asked to reconsider some things I thought I knew about and were good ideas (Vitamin D fortified foods)
Overall this was a very interesting book, just a bit more technical, and in some parts disorganized, than I expected.
September 4, 2017
Is there ever a time when a book challenges you to think beyond your nose?
This book did just that for me, because the author took me on a journey that I have longed to take part in but never invested my time and resources- the foodscape. Yes, you would like to call it "food system" but it goes beyond just that and involves a lot of people and the earth that produces the food too. I have engaged in a couple of agricultural activities mainly monitoring and evaluation of various organizations here in Kenya that deal with small scale farmers and reading this was a pure delight into the journey a produce makes before it's presented before me as food for consumption.
I loved the insight on the fast food industry and canned food. This is not just a look at the food industry but it is also a call to solve some problems within the industry and the author makes his case with research, interviews and social change.
I wonder what this book would be like if the author had a spin-off where he asked two sets of groups: kids( toddlers) and then teens, on their views on food and what they lean towards. I'd love to read something like that.
I did receive an advance readers copy from NetGalley in exchange for my review, and instead I have included my enlightenment.
This book did just that for me, because the author took me on a journey that I have longed to take part in but never invested my time and resources- the foodscape. Yes, you would like to call it "food system" but it goes beyond just that and involves a lot of people and the earth that produces the food too. I have engaged in a couple of agricultural activities mainly monitoring and evaluation of various organizations here in Kenya that deal with small scale farmers and reading this was a pure delight into the journey a produce makes before it's presented before me as food for consumption.
I loved the insight on the fast food industry and canned food. This is not just a look at the food industry but it is also a call to solve some problems within the industry and the author makes his case with research, interviews and social change.
I wonder what this book would be like if the author had a spin-off where he asked two sets of groups: kids( toddlers) and then teens, on their views on food and what they lean towards. I'd love to read something like that.
I did receive an advance readers copy from NetGalley in exchange for my review, and instead I have included my enlightenment.
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April 20, 2018363.8 C292 2017
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews