Culinary Luddism and The Downside of Slow Food

10 days ago my interest was piqued by a tweet from Jay Rayner, proclaiming that people who think “ALL PROCESSED FOODS BAD” should read an article by food historian Rachel Laudan about ‘Culinary Luddism’. In this beautifully educational piece about the culinary history of local foods, Laudan explains at great length why processing, locality and freshness are not inherently good things, especially when viewed through a historic window. You can find the original article on the Jacobin website.

In the following discussion on Twitter, I suggested that prepending ‘processed foods’ with the word ‘highly’ gives you a term more likely to fit the ‘bad’ glove that Rayner was talking about. Rachel Laudan responded, stating that we should focus on the product, not the processing.

This response irritated me, partly because of my deep seated dislike of being told what to do, but also because I felt it oversimplified the issue (perhaps for the benefit of Twitter), because process and product both carry weight, both hold vital importance.

Furthermore, I felt her article came across as very anachronistic, using historic evidence to decry ‘natural’ or ‘local’ foods when their time has passed. By the end of the dressing down, I saw some mediation in her position appear which then made sense of her argument, that local or slow food…