Soda Stream product “Genesis”
A food-loving friend writes:
Yesterday you did a post on the promotion, at the popular food website Food 52, of Soda Stream, the seltzer device made in settlements in the occupied West Bank. I noticed that commenter Citizen dismissed the promotion as the work of naive “foodies.”
The line between “foodies” like Amanda Hesser of Food 52, and formerly of the NY Times (and the glossy mag promotion of Soda Stream we’ve seen), and professional marketers is thin to transparent.
Read this profile of wine marketer Anush O’Connor. Notice Ms O’Connor’s work with “Heritage Wines”–an example of her competence is “four placements per account” and getting one of her wines served at the James Beard dinner. Food journalists are notorious for having one or both feet in marketing.
One of the most insidious ways that the name, idea, and knowledge of Palestine has been disappeared is through food journalism. It’s a Cold War technique, using cultural journalism to advance political programs. One prime example of this was the Time-Life “Middle Eastern Cooking” from the “cooking of the world series”, this volume published in 1969. The word Palestine has been disappeared, though there is a chapter on Israel–an entirely separate chapter, “New Food for a New Land”– though the theme of the book is the seamless continuity of the region, shown through its food. “Nine Nations, one cuisine.”
Time-Life. No political agendas among those foodies.
Or read this obit in 2000 of Copeland Marks, a foodie who was a fervent Zionist, and Arabophobe, among other things. He was in the import-export business till he began publishing food books at age 59. So tell me what you think the “foodie” Mr. Marks might have been doing in Guatemala and Indonesia besides collecting recipes.
Mr. Marks had been in the Foreign Service and the import-export business before getting a late start writing about food. He began in 1981 with ”The Indonesian Kitchen” (Atheneum). His last book was ”The Exotic Kitchens of Peru” (M. Evans & Company, 1999), and he had recently been working on a book about the foods of the Senegalese coast. In between, he explored the cooking of Sephardic Jews and the Jewish community of Calcutta, offered recipes from Guatemala and the Himalayan rim and brought home the cuisines of Malaysia, Korea, Burma and North Africa….
While Mr. Marks’s eternal search for the exotic led him around the world, he also hoped that one day it would lead him home, said David Karp, a food writer. ”The joke was always that the next book would be ‘The Jewish Cooking of Vermont,’ ” Mr. Karp said.
I could quote you some of the “Israel” promotion woven into his books sometime. Granted, he looks to have been up to something more than marketing. But the marketing of Soda Stream in this innocuous way is a commercial way to plant settlements and settlement produce in the US, through this kind of unnoticed, contextless creation of acceptance.
Really, in trying to grapple with this reality, one can’t be too self-important. Nothing is too trivial.
The import-export business, but not a very good cook.
Maybe I’m slow but what is the connection between Mr. Marks and removing Palestine from the food books?
ugh. from amanda (remember amanda and her carbonated revelation?) a good exemple of why i love food, but hate most self-described ‘foodies’.
I wanted spritzy, optimistic drinks like everyone else, and I really wanted to get rid of the box of cheap seltzer we always had lying around for me to trip over.
Just this once, I let in another countertop squatter: the SodaStream. We’ve been getting to know each other over the past few weeks. He’s slim and unassuming. He doesn’t require an outlet. And he’s only noisy when swooshing air into tap water. My kids love him. My husband has a new toy. And I now have a small but burgeoning repertory of summer drinks.
see, she just wants ‘optimistic’ drinks, like she’s entitled to under the US constitution, no, like g-d intended for her, but she’s always tripping over ‘cheap’ seltzer. in other words, the cheap, the pedestrian, is forever trying to keep her from becoming the brilliant foodie that she is. just like mean old mother nature gave her that mug when she knows deep in her bones that she was born to be a beautiful princess. well, anyway, those nice people in the OT are there to help her attain self-actualization on all fronts. thanks, settlers! we *heart* you!
It’s a Cold War technique, using cultural journalism to advance political programs.
yep, promoting or degrading cultures thru section d of the fishwrap.
This would be an issue that would be easy for writers on Jon Stewart team to mess around with and not get in too much trouble
“Import/export”?
That’s, like, a euphemism for one of the acronyms isn’t it?
The one that went around overthrowing democracies in favor of dictators and military juntas.