‘Idiot with a Spoon’: Adorno, Petrini, and the Oppositional Politics of Slow Food

Abstract

This essay examines the phenomenon of American celebrity chefs through the lens of Theodor Adorno’s critique of the culture industry. It asks whether the current popularity of celebrity chefs ironically parallels the popularity of fast food. Is the former just as much a part of the American neoliberal culture industry as the latter, urging Americans to look upon food as a commodifiable, entertaining industry rather than as a topic connected to social justice and our changing cultural landscape? Drawing on the work of food analysts such as Carlo Petrini, Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, David Kamp, and others, as well as the critical theory of Adorno, this essay insists that Petrini’s Slow Food mantra that food should be “good, clean, and fair” proves relevant to the American setting. It is especially “fair” that needs to be highlighted, the essay insists, for the glamour of celebrity chefs can too often blind us to the abusive socio-economic realities that accompany food. Yet this critique of celebrity chef culture is itself tempered by Adorno’s own writings, for food’s ability to challenge the mind/body dichotomy central to Western philosophy always brings us back to the “preponderance of the object.” Food is material, immediate, and sensuous, and can never be too easily coopted by ideas and ideologies. Thus the essay offers a critique grounded in the culture industry but qualified by Adorno’s “preponderant” object.