Edible Secrets: A Food Tour of Classified US History [review]

In The Curious Case of the Communist Jell-o Box: The Execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, authors Michael Hoerger and Mia Partlow succeeded in offering a fresh take on a decades-old political trial. With Edible Secrets: A Food Tour of Classified US History (Microcosm, 2010), Hoerger and Partlow return to Jello‘s format to tackle American capitalism’s myriad manipulations.

And there is no shortage of ugliness revealed in Edible Secrets. How state and industry collude for mutual benefit — industry to uphold capitalist values, state to ensure such values can be used to not simply convey a lifestyle but destabilize countries embracing alternatives — are laid bare. Coca Cola in particular gets a thorough investigation that digs far deeper than the Colombian controversies that have dogged the company in recent years. Utilizing reams of declassified documents and other research, Hoerger and Partlow put forward a history lesson that would make Howard Zinn proud.

Through Congressional action and extralegal means, corporations maintained profits and control through what the authors term “capitalism as foreign policy.” Efforts by the Central Intelligence Agency, acting under the auspices of strengthening democratic ideals globally, supported what were in many instances brutal tactics aimed at suppressing dissent overseas and ensuring unions, legislation and political organizers did not affect or impacted with as little damage as possible the bottom lines of multi-national corporations.

Edible Secrets conveys some of the story originally told in Communist Jell-o Box, and its entertaining cut-and-paste style is replicated in full, through book form, this go-around. The CIA’s scores of failed assassination attempts against Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro make for some of the meatiest and more interesting art presentations. Coke gets a particularly hard hitting world map worth reading again and again. And finally, some of the classified documents which are used as source material are reprinted in full, pages and all.

The design in Edible Secrets is far from dull, even if for some the topic may seem like ancient history. Tragically corporations’ maneuvering, as many people see in the Citizens United case and other issues, is alive, well and menacing the democracies from which they flowered. Hoerger and Partlow make their topic enlightening, and the reasons to act even more necessary.

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