The ghosts of taste: food and the cultural politics of authenticity Kaelyn Stiles • O ¨ zlem Altıok • Michael M. Bell Accepted: 16 February 2010 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 Abstract We add a political culture dimension to the debate over the politics of food. Central to food politics is the cultural granting of authenticity, experienced through the conjuring of relational presences of authorship. These presences derive from the faces and the places of rela- tionality, what we term the ghosts of taste, by which food narratives articulate claims of the authorship of food by people and environments, and thus claim of authenticity. In this paper, we trace the often-conflicting presences of authenticating ghosts in food along a prominent axis of current debate: the local versus the global. The three cases outlined here—Greek food, Thousand Island dressing, and wild rice—illustrate the recovery and suppression of the lingering spirits of both local and global faces and places in what we taste, and show the mutually interdependent consequence of culture and economics in food politics. Keywords Place Á Food Á Localism Á Food systems Á Agriculture Á Authenticity Introduction A cheeseburger is more than a bun, a beef patty, and a slice of cheese. A cheeseburger, like any item of food, is a complex set of relations, social and environmental. Such an observation, even of a cheeseburger, has become a hallmark of the local foods movement, which uses phrases such as ‘‘from farm to table’’ to make this point. In the state of Washington, the Cascade Harvest Coalition ‘‘represents the diverse range of Washington interests for healthy food and farm systems, from the farm gate to the dinner plate’’ (Cascade Harvest Coalition 2007). Or, in New York State, the Farm to Table Initiative of Earth Pledge advocates ‘‘good food, close to home’’ (Earth Pledge 2006). Niman Ranch promotes its network of 500 pasture-based family farmers with the The Niman ranch cookbook: From farm to table with America’s finest meat (Niman and Fletcher 2005), emphasizing sustainability, animal welfare, and traceability. But McDonald’s, it appears, agrees, which presents an analytic puzzle for those who see a relational understand- ing of food as a challenge to corporate food ways. At least McDonald’s recently claimed as much in its own ‘‘farm to table’’ campaign (McDonald’s Corporation 2005). Vonetta Flowers, winner of a 2002 Olympic Gold medal in bob sled, presented this glitzy Internet infomercial, explaining that, I want to know that the foods my family enjoys are high quality. And McDonald’s has opened their kitchen doors to share the source of some of their foods. So come with me for a behind the scenes tour and discover how McDonald’s most popular meals make their way from the farm to the table. These contrasting narratives of the relations of ‘‘farm to table’’ open the door to the approach we take in the analysis of food politics. Most previous debate has focused on political economic approaches, such as the conventional- ization thesis in organic agriculture (Best 2008; Guptill 2009; Guthman 2004; Hinrichs 2003; Legun forthcoming; Rosin and Campbell 2009) and the debate over whether local food initiatives represent the promotion of neoliberal subjectivity (Allen and Guthman 2006; Guthman 2007; K. Stiles (&) Á O ¨ . Altıok Á M. M. Bell Department of Community and Environmental Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 350 Agricultural Hall, 1450 Linden Drive, Madison, WI 53706-1393, USA e-mail: kstiles@ssc.wisc.edu 123 Agric Hum Values DOI 10.1007/s10460-010-9265-y