On the basic liberty to eat what you like

Contrary to popular reports, the recent School Food Plan for England and Wales does not call for packed lunches to be banned. However, the idea of a ban, mooted by Henry Dimbleby – one of the report’s authors – is interesting because of the response it has provoked. Dimbleby suggests that a blanket ban might be unwise because “There's a strong libertarian streak in the English”. Sure enough, ‘Fleet Street Fox’ raises the spectre of totalitarianism in the Mirror, describing the idea in the following terms: “So [packed lunches] must be banned, he says. Not improved. Not guidelined. Not discussed. Just banned, like thought in China.” The frothy outrage is reminiscent of the common objections to the proposal of ‘Meat Free Mondays’ in certain dining halls – presented as a matter of freedom and rights.

In general, the idea that people should have the ability to decide for themselves what goes in their own mouths is surely uncontroversial. This is a fairly clear example of the sort of autonomy that anybody with any sympathy for liberalism is bound to respect. Yet at the same time, there are very few freedoms which are entirely unconditional or unconstrained, if for no other reason than to avoid them restricting other valuable freedoms. On what grounds might it be morally legitimate to override this freedom?

The most obvious argument is the paternalist one – where a freedom is likely to be misused in a way harmful to the agent, it is sometimes right to require them to act in a more prudent way. This is the logic behind requiring people to wear seatbelts, or prohibiting them from taking harmful recreational drugs. In the case of compulsory school meals, the government or school would be taking away children (or parents’) freedom to choose their own lunches, because the negative consequences of these actions for their health are too great.

A second argument posits that compulsory school lunches are legitimate because children are incapable of full autonomy, and so infringing their freedom is less morally significant. Because children are generally less informed, not fully educated and perhaps not capable of full rationality yet, their choices are less worthy of respect and protection. In most countries, children below a certain age – usually 16 – are not judged capable of deciding that they don’t want to go to school.

This argument is complicated by the fact that most children don’t have much control over their diet anyway – their parents decide what they eat. In this case, the question is the more contentious one of whether the state or parents should have control over children. The most plausible response is that both should have a role to play – the state should not dominate child rearing, but nor should it treat children as the property of their guardians, free to treat them as they wish. Just as children cannot unilaterally decide to quit school before they reach an appropriate age, nor can their parents decide to pull them out. This is because in certain cases it is necessary for the state to protect the interests of children from their parents.

Finally, compulsory school lunches can be defended on the grounds that they enhance freedom in the long term. For a start, improving a person’s physical health means that they are likely to be able to do more physically strenuous things for longer as they get older. Moreover, there is the possibility that school meals will introduce children to different tastes, ingredients and styles of food, and alert them to different food cultures, or ways of relating to food, thus expanding their set of options.

These arguments are not at all mutually exclusive – indeed, they feed off one another. The paternalistic argument is all the stronger for the diminished autonomy of children and if its benefit involves greater freedom as well as better health. The paternalistic argument gives a justification for overriding parents’ desires for their children.

Together these arguments suggest that a ban on packed lunches is not a clear infringement of liberty. However, it still remains up for debate whether these are good enough reasons with positive enough effects to justify such a heavy-handed measure.

False Consciousness in Food and Film

According to Mark Kermode, an important part of a film critic’s job is “explaining to people why they haven't actually enjoyed a movie even if they think they have”. In his article in The Guardian on Sunday, he suggests that people who liked Pirates of the Caribbean 3 only did so because they have been weaned on mindless blockbusters, and have forgotten or are unaware that film can be any better. In his words, they are “simply suffering from the cinematic equivalent of long-term deprivation of the basics of a civilised existence”.

Kermode’s sentiments make an interesting contrast with those of Peter Preston, writing in the same newspaper the following day. Whereas Kermode’s essay is a polemic against the state of modern Hollywood cinema, Preston offers a nostalgic reminiscence of Britain’s culinary past. Stumbling upon one of his mother’s old cookbooks, he contrasts its parochialism to the ambition (or pretentiousness) of modern food. There is a suspicion of anything too exotic, and the majority of ingredients seem to come out of cans. It’s all corned beef, baked beans, tinned soup and (for some reason) pineapple rings, assorted in ingenuity-stretching combinations.

This was not good food as we would recognise it today. Peter Preston knows that. Reading his article made me feel queasy rather than appetised (though that might have something to do with the psychological aversion to corned beef I developed working in a deli). It was just the food eaten by people living under post-war austerity who knew nothing better.

Notice the similarities between these descriptions of food in 1950s Britain, and contemporary film. In both cases, we have a group of people whose aesthetic taste has been dulled by a lack of exposure to ‘quality’ produce. Yet while Kermode sees this as a problem in need of remedy, Preston appears to think it is a cause for regret that this innocence has been lost. Just as film critics are perpetually accused of having lost the ability to see movies through the eyes of ordinary cinemagoers, so modern caterers are “a little too knowing, too sophisticated” to recreate the food of the past.

So if there is such a loss involved in ‘enlightening’ people, why bother? If people enjoyed POTC, why should Kermode be so churlish as to rob them of this pleasure? One possibility is that he sees his task as combatting something like ‘false consciousness’. On this view, to enjoy bad films is to be under a misapprehension which harms your deep interests. It is to hold a false belief which makes your life worse.

This sort of account is most plausible where there is an uncontroversial human interest at stake, for example health. So Anthony Bourdain’s culinary elitism is more defensible because its target is defensible because its target – excessively fatty, fried Southern food – is genuinely injurious to those who develop a taste for it.

But what is it that Kermode is trying to protect us from? How is he making our lives better by making certain films less enjoyable?