Epithets and Food Politics

Reading the Odyssey for the first time, I was immediately struck by the epithets - "Gray-eyed Athena," the "wine-dark sea" (over which Dawn seems to be constantly spreading out her "fingertips of rose")...they were striking enough to worm into my 13-year-old memory and stay there, long after I had forgotten the plot.

The epithets in Homer are important. The epithets in Shape magazine are also important - "heart-healthy whole grains" and "artery-clogging saturated fat." At one point when I was hunting down nutrition information for something or other, I found an entire page that read like that: "kale is full of bone-building calcium, filling fiber, immune-boosting Vitamin C, inflammation-busting antioxidants..."




This kind of unconscious association-by-repetition is just a kind of hypnopaedia. The epithets sneak into our language when we're not paying attention, and they get under our skin incredibly well. The number of people who show up on /r/Paleo assuring us all that they've taken the skin off their chicken, or that they're only using a "tiny tad" of olive oil, or wondering whether bacon isn't "too fatty" or whether rice is OK if it's brown rice instead of white is truly astonishing. Presumably, if they've already found Paleo, these are people who are consciously questioning the MyPlate guidelines. But they still can't break out of the subconscious conditioning. It's become part of their "common sense," and runs somehow deeper than the nutrition advice they can identify as actually being nutrition advice.

It's interesting to me to think about where these epithets come from in the first place. When magazine editors slot them into sentences, I doubt they're actually thinking: these are what Orwell calls the "phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse:"

If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious...You can...simply [throw] your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you -- even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent -- and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

 He goes on to say:

A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself...And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity. 

The subconscious conditioning is all the more disturbing to me because the people publishing it aren't aware of what they're doing. I doubt we have a little bureau of Helmholtz Watsons in the editorial room of each of these magazines, busily engineering us all to be good little citizens and embrace the right kind of zippy-peppy health-conscious lifestyle: breezily tallying up our calories and grams of fiber, indulging in carefully portion-controlled treats, and engaging in scientific discourse only to the extent useful for guiding us to and fro from one product to the next. That seems to be the intended outcome, but intended by whom?

The obvious next step up the ladder would be the Mayo Clinics of the world, the doctors who dispense this advice from a position of firsthand authority. But I'm having a hard time crediting them with the conspiracy theory model either. This particular ideological practice seems to have taken on a life of its own, embodied and self-perpetuating in the way we act it out.

This is what makes it hard to fight. But it's also what makes it fun to subvert (I'm thinking of culturejamming here).