Tim Plowman — 1 February 2005
Singles
This morning as I stumbled out of bed and into the kitchen, I began to mentally tick-off an inventory of possible food items that I might put into our two year old daughter’s lunch for the day. Being a devoted working parent, I like to try to give her a variety of healthy foods for her to reject while I am not looking. At the end of the day when I dump the considerable contents of her small Tupperware containers into the trash, I know I have succeeded, at least in giving her variety.
I opened the fridge and squinted into a blinding interior – way too much light for 5 watts. I began pulling out various items – all organic – to put in her doggie motif lunch bag: yogurt, avocado, beans, and a handful of raspberries. I reached into the cheese drawer looking for the standard organic cheese stick and was a little perturbed to find American singles -- you know, cheese food product that is not actually cheese. I was about to call out to my wife and ask her why she bought plastic masquerading as food when I realized that the label said “organic.” Upon closer inspection, it seemed that Horizon Organic Dairy had succeeded in melding two vastly different world ethoi.
American singles are essentially a military food, an artifact of American imperial cuisine. In many ways American Singles are the crystallization of a set of beliefs pertaining to Fordist mass production, the need to keep workers cheaply fed, and the more general need to have food available in a variety of productive circumstances. American Singles are food designed for the reproduction of capital.
The fact that they are now organic (if still not actually cheese) is brilliant – they are a classic bridge product, bringing two disparate experiences together in a vaguely orange square that doesn’t really melt too well. They bring together mass production with the idea of small hippie farms – tracts of earth lovingly worked by people in dirty overalls and in need of a haircut. Forget the fact that organic agriculture is being co-opted by corporate agribusiness and that predictably pinheaded attempts of the current administration to dilute the term “organic” are unrelenting. Should they succeed in altering the definition, upstanding corporate citizens like Archer Daniels Midland will be able to enter upon new vistas of price fixing.
At any rate, while the notion of an organic artificial food can be a little unsettling for a Berkeley Bowl regular, our little monster seems to revel less in the flavor than in the fact that she gets to unwrap every Single before carefully folding it into a series of small squares and gulping it down in one triumphal act. And I get to witness the delicate ritual all without the guilt of transfats and artificial coloring.
© 2008 Cheskin Added Value