The New Honor Code by Grant McCracken

Author:Grant McCracken
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tiller Press
Published: 2020-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

Okay, but What about Honor?

When Alice and her brain trust sat around the table at Chez Panisse, they were intent on transforming American life. The obvious target was all that processed, adulterated food, pumped full of sugar, fat, and salt, all the fast food that seemed designed to strip food of its nutrition, all, and especially, the things we fed our children: the breakfast cereal, the snacks, the desserts. Whatever else these were, they were sugar-delivery devices designed to turn children into industry shills. “Please, Mommy, may I have some more?”

Waters’s telos was simple: change the way food is a farmed, harvested, transported, packaged, marketed, and taken to market, and you change family life. The rest of her revolution was less obvious and happened pretty much on its own. Change American food and family life, and a landslide is set in motion. Restaurants, retail, urban planning, marketing, storytelling would eventually follow suit. Did Alice Waters intend this immense act of social engineering? She hasn’t said.

It seems unlikely that honor entered into her calculations. In the counterculture from which she came, the artisanal and mixology cultures she helped birth, honor was never mentioned at all. For the band of activists sitting around Waters’s Chez Panisse table, it must have seemed that these grand acts of transformation must necessarily end in social good. After all, if Americans were eating better, in happier, less pretentious restaurants, in smaller, Jane Jacobs–scale neighborhoods, surely that could only have pleasant social effects. Surely, these Americans would be nicer to one another and better behaved. All of this was obvious and inevitable. In the 1970s, a reference to honor would surely have seemed old-fashioned and retrograde.

But the optimism of this movement is haunted by the ghost of the American historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, a woman with cultural ambitions of her own. Himmelfarb did not believe that the social reform unleashed in the twentieth century would necessarily result in a more moral world. Indeed, Himmelfarb wondered whether this carving away at the traditional order might lead to a demoralization. And it’s hard to say she was wrong. Surely the bad behaviors of the present day do not spring from the artisanal revolution, or from any of the other cultural reforms of the twentieth century, but the social change we needed to accomplish them may have cost us some of our moral clarity.

Still, when we look at the Waters revolution it looks very much as if, intentionally or not, it prepared the way for the return of honor. Her revolution discouraged the fast food outlet, punched out with perfect uniformity across the country. It encouraged the rise of owner-operated places, run by young people who scorned the fast food model, who wanted their places, their food, their ambiance to be as individual and local as possible. The only uniformity sought in regard to coffeehouses was perfectly brewed coffee. (This left Starbucks struggling in the middle ground. It got the coffee mostly right, but would have to exert itself mightily not to look like a chain.

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