Imagine that a few years in the future, on a family road trip, you’ve stopped at a Waffle House. It hasn’t changed, too much, though now “there’s mycelium-based steak and Impossible burgers for the patty melts.” Red meat is off the menu, and your uncle is kind of cranky about it. Tipping has been replaced with a living wage, real eggs come with an up-charge, and the “guy manning the waffle iron” has a “black company polo [that] is emblazoned with the number 5: five years as a partner in the Waffle House co-ownership program in the chain of union-staffed, union-managed franchises that now make up most of the restaurant’s stores.” The coffee, in this Waffle House of the future, is “as average as ever.”
This prompt is how Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg conclude their book Feed the People!: Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make It Even Better. Waffle Houses inspire Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg because they “offer a vision for food grounded in popular, accessible, and abundant pleasures for all.” The chain exemplifies the book’s compelling notion that a better food system requires “democratic hedonism.” Put another way, the authors insist that America requires “an approach to politics that sees moral value in the simple pleasures that people experience in their daily lives,” one that “favors political, collective, and institutional actions to expand access to those pleasures.”
This call for a qualified hedonism is a refreshing departure from some of the dominant voices in early foodie culture: Wendell Berry’s idealization of the yeoman small farmer and his accompanying attempt to frame work as pleasure, for instance, or Michael Pollan’s excessive suspicion of processed foods. It is also the grounds for what seems, to me, to be an imminently sensible series of policy proposals.
Each chapter of Feed the People! is hung on anecdote—reporting trips to vegan creameries; Super Size Me–style gonzo-journalism experiments where one author spends a month drinking only Huel; psychological profiles of large-scale Iowa corn farmers. If these anecdotes both parody and rely on the micro-tropes of the food-memoir (waxing rhapsodic about the soup of one’s grandmother, or encounters with charismatic small-business owners), they also foreground the personal and ethical stakes of the book’s sensible policy vision. In the chapter that juxtaposes a trip to PS56 in the Bronx and a farmers’ market in Durham, North Carolina, for instance, Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg manage to acknowledge both the “romance of community gardens and farmers’ markets” and lay out the ways these interventions expand food availability, or the mere presence of fresh food, instead of real food access, which would require said food to be affordable. In their place, they suggest a series of reforms that feel, in their telling, almost within reach: changing SNAP eligibility requirements to track cost of living, passing policies that reduce housing costs and boost the minimum wage to provide budgetary slack, expanding free school lunches and structurally incentivizing vegetable-forward meals on institutional scales.
These are the kinds of deliciously pragmatic solutions that Feed the People! comes back to again and again. Their farm policy interventions, for instance, rely on shifting profit incentives: extending crop subsidies and insurance beyond corn, soy, and wheat; closing “agricultural exceptions” so as to force producers or consumers to “internalize costs of production currently borne by society writ large”; and disincentivizing inefficient land use like producing ethanol, animal feed, and meat. Hedonism, in their vision, is enabled by a whole lot of regulation, a whole lot of leveraging the carrots and sticks of capital to redistribute the gains of highly productive modern agriculture.
In this call to adjust instead of dismantle the system, Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg are aware they leave themselves open to charges of failures of imagination. They anticipate that critics from the left “will call reformism insufficient, and perhaps, conservative” insofar as none of their suggestions include a “hard reset.”
It is a challenging moment, to be sure, to affirm the functionality of the current food system: Feed the People! comes at a time when the race and class reckonings that shifted food discourse in the early 2020s are no longer in the spotlight, when restaurant kitchens are shutting down to avoid ICE raids, when food prices are being driven skywards by senseless war. And as Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg themselves confess, “we must grudgingly admit that it’s hard to imagine writing a food book in 2025 that would prove as influential as foodie books in the 1990s and 2000s because of how social media, embedded advertisements, and paid health influencers now shape dietary advice and eating habits.” It is also a moment when the food movement’s political allegiances are rapidly shifting. If the caricature of the community garden and local produce aficionado was a certain kind of soppy liberal, these affiliations no longer map quite so clearly onto a left-right spectrum. Farmers’ market devotees have found a surprising ally in RFK Jr., with his campaigns against processed foods and glyphosate. Social media communities devoted to sourdough baking and chicken husbandry are an established pipeline to alt-right views, crumb shots the gateway to tradwifery.
This changing landscape makes their project both more urgent and more awkward. It is more urgent, given our health secretary, to expose the history of UPFs as a category designed to facilitate epidemiological research, not to measure a given food item’s nutritional quality. It is more urgent to trace the Jeffersonian pastoral fantasies that shape RFK Jr.’s farm policy and the lingering agricultural exceptions.
But it is also more awkward, given the contours of the present, for Feed the People! to frame itself as a sustained riposte to the “foodie.” While the critique of Berry’s agrarian fantasies is both necessary and satisfyingly executed, Feed the People! sometimes seems to rest on an outdated caricature of the foodie, stuck in the locavore memoir boom of the 1990s and 2000s: someone both fundamentally snobby and curiously joyless.
But the foodie—and the spectrum of food writing—have evolved quite a lot. As Jaya Saxena wrote in 2018, “the biggest sea change in food writing, media, and thought over the past decade has been a thorough disregard of the snob.”1 As the term became more capacious, it also became the subject of numerous postmortems. “What Was the Foodie?” Jo Livingstone wrote for the New Republic in 2019, suggesting that food culture’s mainstreaming has also resulted in an intensified politicization. “Who Was the Foodie?” Alicia Kennedy wrote in a piece published in November 2025 in the Yale Review, on Ruby Tandoh and Marion Nestle’s new books. Tandoh, for her part, argues that “foodies have infiltrated so much of the culture that the word is almost meaningless. Who isn’t a food person these days? … In barely sixty years we’ve gone from being too psychosexually stunted to even get excited about food, to talking about almost nothing else.”2 In her own 2025 assessment of the “Life and Death of the American Foodie,” Saxena makes a similar point. “To be called a ‘foodie’ now,” she writes, “is the equivalent of being hit with an ‘Okay, boomer.’ But while the slang may have changed, the ideals the foodie embodied have been absorbed into all aspects of American culture.”3
The foodie, in other words, is no longer synonymous with Portlandia-style concern over chicken provenance. It is both passé and ubiquitous, a concept so morphed by the confluence of paeans to diet Coke and farm labor exposés that it has become hard to parse. When Rosenberg and Dutkiewicz assert that “the foodies get neither the empirics of agriculture nor the concept of pleasure right,” then, it is an allegation in need of a subject.
At stake in this ambiguity is the very pluralism that Rosenberg and Dutkiewicz so carefully espouse. For instance, something that does not even merit an index entry in their book is agroecology: “the fundamental redesign of farming systems based on ecological science and traditional knowledge to produce sufficient yields by enhancing interactions amongst all organisms—humans included—in the agroecosystem.”4 While it would be foolish to expect a book subtitled “Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make It Even Better” to offer a robust case for agroecological frameworks, Feed the People! sometimes seems to collapse the entirety of scholarship in the field into another form of the small-farm fetish. Foodies, they suggest, would rather “stick their heads in the fertilizer pile of an imagined agrarian past than find large-scale solutions to the problems of the present.” These unnamed “food writers or academic proponents of backward looking agroecological models of food production,” they write, tend to “wave away the bad histories and pragmatic infeasibilities” of the approach.
In an effort to expose these bad histories, Feed the People! spends quite a lot of time dismantling Wendell Berry’s claims that the Jeffersonian family farming practiced in the beginnings of the 19th century was ecologically sustainable. The authors illuminate how the small farmers of the era actually tended to address soil exhaustion with westward colonial expansion, and cash-flow problems with ruthlessly exploitative child labor. They find it telling that Berry has little to say about Indigenous land management strategies. His nostalgia for an agrarian past, they pointedly note, does not include the kinds of pre-Colombian large-scale polyculture, irrigation, and crop rotation practices that were, as they argue elsewhere, often “more ecologically sustainable than colonial agricultural practices.”5
And yet, the book follows Berry in simply ignoring those practices, just as they critique him for doing so. If not entirely surprising, this seems like a missed opportunity.
There is, after all, some evidence that, at a global level, small farms “have more wildlife species, greater crop diversity, and higher yields,” even as they’re less capital intensive and are often managed with fewer inputs.6 Though there are real reductions in yield on organic farms when straightforwardly compared to chemically intensive agriculture, those same yield gaps nearly disappear when cropping systems are managed via diversification instead of crude input substitution. And recent reviews point to additional benefits from those small farms: contributions to “ecosystem services, human well-being, and higher food security—all of which large industrial farms tend to shrivel.”7
Instead of engaging with the robust literature that suggests agroecological approaches might be consistent with their own emphasis on an abundance-led food system, Feed the People! collapses uncritical valorization of small-scale agriculture with the distinct array of practices that fall under the heading of agroecology. The figure of the foodie, curiously limited to the early figureheads of Wendell Berry, Mark Bittman, Alice Waters, and Carlo Petrini, facilitates this rhetorical collapse.
Conversations about the future of food need to include a broad spectrum of approaches—agroecological and otherwise—and reflect the real variety in contemporary food culture.
Feed the People!’s first chapter opens with a riff that stages just how quickly the conversations around food and sustainability are changing. The anecdote describes the authors’ spectacularly unsatisfying experience at Eleven Madison Park, a fine dining restaurant that had gone plant based in 2021. After a parade of “hostile” noodle portions and “asceticism masquerading as minimalism,” the authors don’t find real satisfaction until the next morning, with the “greasy delight” of a plant-based breakfast sandwich. The restaurant and its fine dining brethren, they conclude, are “annoying but mostly fine.” In its commitments to sourcing, it may even be a “far more righteous” pleasure than “any number of pretentious steakhouses whose only claim to fame is ‘elevating’ their cuisine and their prices by performatively sprinkling everything with coarse salt.” The paragraph closes with a parenthetical caveat left unelaborated: “In August of 2025, Eleven Madison Park announced it was ending its plant-based experiment.”
The food world changes fast, and as a scholar of contemporary literature I am only too familiar with the incommensurate timelines of scholarly production and the pace of culture. But the caveat highlights the awkwardness of making an argument about the fundamental soundness of our food system at a time when fine dining restaurants can quietly retreat from their environmental commitments, and when that retreat is supported by the USDA’s new, steak-based food pyramid.
What do the authors wish us to make of this walk back now? What to make of an argument criticizing the Protestant asceticism of vegan fine dining that suddenly finds its subject, like the erstwhile “foodie,” to have disappeared back into mainstream culture?
Mostly, Feed the People!’s analytical frame is able to meet the challenge of interpreting a still-unfolding present. In the weeks after I began working on this review, for instance, the food world was rocked by the accusations of René Redzepi’s abusive kitchen culture.8 Feed the People!’s general suspicion of the hypocrisies of fine dining and chapter five’s thorough case for strengthening unionization rights mean this kind of revelation does not shake their foundational commitments. And in general, I appreciate the project’s commitment to pragmatic recommendations, particularly in a landscape where so much scholarship foregoes the hard work of affirmative infrastructure imagining in favor of the more comfortable task of critique.
Against this backdrop, it is Feed the People!’s subordinated commitment to social-democratic abundance that remains its most compelling intervention. While abundance discourse’s most visible US proponents might be Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s fantasy of deregulated green growth, Feed the People! joins a cast of voices who refuse to cede the term to the free market. Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg’s project aligns—albeit in a way that sometimes feels insufficiently suspicious of capitalism’s impact on new technologies—with recent calls for “radical abundance,”9 “alternative hedonism,”10 and “abundance for the 99%.”11 Their “democratic hedonism pushes us to ask how we can build a society of abundant and accessible pleasures.” “Expanding access to pleasures for some,” they continue, “will require imposing costs on others.” It will also require a “pluralism about the pleasures of food, one more invested in empowering people to pursue their own pleasures as they define them instead of smugly dictating to other people what is (and is not) tasty.”
Conversations about the future of food need that pluralism, too. They need to include a broad spectrum of approaches—agroecological and otherwise—and reflect the real variety in contemporary food culture. As one part of the abundant discourse around more just food systems, Feed the People! is a valuable provocation.
This article was commissioned by Ben Platt.