The centrality of food to human life for sustenance, pleasure, and sociability often leads those involved in the politics of food to claim a similarly central place, yet the growing literature in this area is, in part, engaged in exploring and articulating the relationship of food politics to politics in the United States more generally. This effort is complicated by multiple realms of food activism that have their own intricate and tense relationships. In Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice (2011), Jill Harrison clearly depicts tensions among food reformers, alternative farming organizations, antitoxics activists, and the farmworker justice movement. The books under review make useful contributions by helping readers navigate these relationships.

In Labor and the Locavore, Margaret Gray marshals her extensive research on agriculture in the Hudson River Valley to interrogate assumptions in the locavore movement that small and local is equivalent to wholesome and just. Gray’s focus is the development of a locavore food ethic that confronts farmworker injustice, thus bringing these two areas of food politics into, at minimum, conversation with each other, if not full-scale integration. Her research is based on ten years of closely following agriculture in the Hudson River Valley, attending meetings, visiting farms, and conducting more than a hundred interviews, as well as extensive historical research. The details make for gripping reading and often pique a desire for an even richer, more extensive discussion of her case study.

Gray’s evenhandedness in portraying farmer and worker perspectives gives her research a deep sense of credibility. Further, her critical skill is penetrating and engaging, as displayed by her unpacking of paternalism to reveal authoritarianism and deeply embedded inequality (pp. 53–61). All in all, Gray’s success in uncovering injustice within the locavore movement in the Hudson River Valley is irrefutable. Although she does much to bring two realms of food activism face-to-face, her work addresses a limited audience, as she takes the locavore perspective to be generally unproblematic and thus speaks primarily to those who share her locavore convictions. One is left wondering what she might reveal if the considerable critical skill evident in her discussion of paternalism were directed at the locavore stance itself. Her silence on this topic undermines the title’s claim of making a comprehensive food ethic. In addition, the author leaves unresolved the tension between, on the one hand, the structures that perpetuate injustice for farmworkers, discussed at length in her chapters on workers and farmers, and, on the other, the paradigm of consumer choice, which appears in full force in her conclusion as she calls for consumer education and transparency in the marketplace, exhorting her readers to buy local (pp. 145–48).

Chad Lavin’s provocative and ambitious work, Eating Anxiety, explores the same tension extensively as he addresses how the activism of food reformers and alternative agriculture relates not only to U.S. politics (though he does not include producers/workers in his analysis) but also to Western political thought. Lavin’s opening sentence claims that “food has emerged as one of the more pervasive issues in political struggle, popular entertainment, and humanist scholarship” (p. ix). Further, he claims that eating blurs the boundary between human bodies and the external world, between public and private, and thus offers a “singular opportunity for examining understandings of identity, authenticity, and responsibility that form the backbone of contemporary political ideologies” (p. x). He aims to use food to reveal “the tenuousness of the ontological assumptions of liberal political thought” (p. xii) asserting, that for Americans, food is saturated with fear and anxiety (p. xiii).

The first half of the book is organized to establish dieting as liberal ideology, locate the privatization of food in the seventeenth century, and establish “the digestive turn” in political thought in the work of Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche (p. 55). The digestive turn is a shift from focusing on the legal apparatus of the state typically associated with Hobbes and Locke to a politics of appropriation, transformation, and assimilation. As such, the digestive turn is a shift from “the conceits of objectivity and sovereignty” with subjects who are composed of the world rather than detached from it (p. 66).

At the outset, this project raises many questions, some of which are provoked by claims that seem extreme. Are Americans really wrought with anxiety and fear about food? Maybe some Americans some of the time, but in comparison to other political struggles related to inequality, oppression, education, and a changing workforce, it hardly seems central. Although food politics have become more prominent due to a proliferation of books and movies, the various strains remain marginal despite the obvious centrality of food. The Organic Trade Association estimates that organic food sales in 2013 comprised only about 4% of the total market. The increasing popularity of restaurants, cooking classes, cookbooks, and celebrity chefs as part of foodie culture hardly seems like a symptom of anxiety. Throughout, Lavin seems to equate suspicion and distrust for multinational corporations and regulatory agencies with anxiety, yet these are often closely tied to particular events and critiques and may lead to action, whereas anxiety is often more diffuse and generalized. Such objections to similar claims made throughout the book do not ultimately invalidate Lavin’s argument, but they do undermine the overall credibility and may limit the audience. He asserts that the changing boundaries reflected by the digestive turn threaten our terms for understanding politics and then moves to claim that this can also explain why “Americans today approach food with such fear” and “pronounced unease” (p. 67). This overstatement of the fear associated with eating is not necessary to his argument and may weaken rather than strengthen it.

Other questions reflect the usefulness of Lavin’s contribution to political theory and the study of food politics. For example, his mining of boundaries makes one wonder why eating is “singular” in the opportunity for examining boundaries. Why not breathing, which brings particles from the world into our bodies continuously? Skin must surely be our most obvious and important boundary, and a sensitive and permeable one at that. Sight and sound help us negotiate the world and may be readily construed as crucial to our boundaries. Increasingly, human bodies are viewed as ecosystems inhabited by billions of microorganisms. How does this bear on the constitution of the human subject in political thought? Lavin’s engaging and systematic inquiry of digestion in political thought invites other inquiries.

In the second half of the book, we see the analytical fruits of his labor as the author examines, in turn, obesity politics, the locavore movement, and vegetarianism. His exploration of the meaning of obesity argues that it, like the digestive turn, challenges the centrality of norms of self-control (p. 80), choice, and personal responsibility (p. 82). This chapter compliments Julie Guthman’s important book on this subject, Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism (2011). Lavin’s critical examination of the notion that local is a proxy for all good things about food is an especially important contribution to the food politics literature, as it makes a convincing case that the move to opt out of conventional agriculture veers toward “postpolitical fantasies” (pp. 94, 103), a retreat from public life (p. 104), and a reduction of citizenship to consumerism (p. 109). Although the locavore movement aims for a reformed food economy that has little resemblance to the industrial agriculture that dominates today, it is firmly located in neoliberalism, as calls for a “gentler capitalism” dismiss the role of state action while celebrating autonomous spaces and sovereign landholders (p. 107). As Gray so clearly shows, these small farms are often the site of injustice for workers.

Lavin has no prescription for action but concludes that the digestive turn has not yet developed a vocabulary “for thinking about politics and democracy” (p. 152), but that confronting our anxieties and acknowledging our vulnerabilities may make it more possible for us to savor democracy (p. 154). There are some significant omissions, such as ideals of unrealistically thin women’s bodies, the implications of environmental toxins in obesity, and the position of food workers. One could quibble with a use of history and science that seems convenient rather than a consistent methodological commitment. Nevertheless, Eating Anxiety offers a creative and useful contribution that will foster discussion and further inquiry for those interested in the politics of food.