The Limits of Nostalgia in Food Films

Most food documentaries draw on an expository Talking-Heads approach and a rhetorical form that argues through a nostalgic vision of the pre-industrial farming period. The environmental nostalgia evoked by We Feed the World and King Corn, for example, may be limited, however, because the past evoked by a nostalgic view is not only unobtainable, but also cast in an unrealistic innocence. The reality of the past is lost in its present-day nostalgic translation, even when, as in King Corn, emotional appeals draw on both personal and universal ecological historical memories. 

Nostalgia has been critiqued, reified, and recovered in the past few decades, with a resurgence of research in memory studies complicating negative views of nostalgia built on postmodern views. Postmodern responses to nostalgia critique its move toward essentialism. In her 1988 article, “Nostalgia: A Polemic,” Kathleen Stewart engages postmodern cultural critics’ views that see nostalgia as a social disease. According to Stewart, “Nostalgia, like the economy it runs with, is everywhere. But it is a cultural practice, not a given content; its forms, meanings, and effects shift with the context—it depends on where the speaker stands in the landscape of the present” (227). Drawing on the work of Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Jonathan Culler, Donna Haraway, Fredric Jameson, and Raymond Williams, Stewart elucidates why nostalgia is such a powerful rhetorical tool, as well: Stewart argues that “on one ‘level’ there is no longer any place for anyone to stand and nostalgia takes on the generalized function to provide some kind (any kind) of cultural form” (227, emphasis Stewart’s). 

According to Stewart, nostalgia serves as a powerful rhetorical tool that placates and paralyzes the disenfranchised: “Nostalgia is an essential, narrative, function of language that orders events temporally and dramatizes them in the mode of ‘that’s what happened,’ that ‘could happen,’ that ‘threaten to erupt at any moment’” (227). Stewart sees the seductive nature of nostalgia in a postmodern culture not only as culturally situated but also as reductively negative, resulting in what she calls mirages—either a “grand hotel” of affluence or a “country cottage” of romantic simplicity. For Stewart, then, nostalgia is a negative consequence of attempting to replace postmodern relativism with an essential past based in recovery of an essential “self.” 

More recent work, especially in anthropology and cultural studies complicates visions of nostalgia as inherently and inescapably bad. Ethel Pinheiro and Cristiane Rose Duarte, for example, argue that nostalgia may itself prove not only a way to learn from the past but to recuperate real community in the Largo da Carioca. And Sean Scanlan, in his Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies introduction asserts, “postmodernism’s negative critique only partially illuminates its various links to memory, history, affect, media and the marketplace, only partially accounts for nostalgia’s continuing power.” Yet other cultural critics in the journal condemn the use of nostalgia as a rhetorical strategy because it “abused individual and collective memory and … problematized the relations between producers and consumers.” Although King Corn most effectively invokes nostalgia by drawing on both the personal memories Cheney and Ellis recover on the family farm and the collective memories of the ubiquitous family farm and farmer, King Corn, Food, Inc., and We Feed the World essentialize a pastoral past as a solution to factory farming, a solution doomed to failure because it rests on the limits of environmental nostalgia.