Consider the Waffle

Are Waffle Houses or garden cities the future of food?

By Benjamin R. CohenMarch 25, 2026

• Food & Drink

• Economics and Finance

THERE WAS A GLOBAL pandemic in the early 2020s. Many readers will remember. For those working on food reform and, honestly, for anyone going to the grocery store, it was an object lesson in how brittle the industrial food system is. We all learned a lot about supply chain logistics in short order. After he took office, President Joe Biden’s USDA put a Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA) cooperative agreement program into place to help build resilience. According to the Second Harvest Food Bank of Lehigh Valley, my home region of Pennsylvania, the LFPA brought $1.9 million to dozens of farms, keeping jobs in place (farmers, packers, distributors, salespeople), distributing 2.15 million pounds of food, and providing 1.8 million meals. The program wasn’t perfect, as it depended on how well different areas had rebuilt an infrastructure of regional foodways in recent decades, but it was based on humanistic values of care, community, and connection. And it was working. Then, in 2025, it got caught in DOGE’s blades, which killed it off and diverted a billion dollars of taxpayer money to other programs (such as the Department of Homeland Security, tax cuts, and various unpopular projects). The oligarchs had a different idea about the future of food, one that didn’t involve farms or people.

There was a well-publicized debate almost exactly 50 years ago, in November 1977. Readers may be less familiar with that. It took place in North Manchester, Indiana, a small town in the north central part of the state where the local Manchester College (now Manchester University) hosted two luminaries to argue over the future of food. The prompt was “The Crisis in American Agriculture.” If I can abridge a more complex two hours of argument, I’d say it basically boiled down to machines versus humans in the fight to address said crisis. On one side was the technocratic power of capital; on the other was the community-based power of people.

Earl “Rusty” Butz, 68 years old at the time, took the stage first. He’s the quant guy, recently dismissed as Gerald Ford’s secretary of agriculture for a racist joke that finally caught up to him. He’s sort of famous for that in foodie circles, as much as he’s known for his devotion to agribusiness, his love of scale (the bigger the better), and his technocratic worldview. There to represent capital, he had one big point to make: efficiency is king. It lets you make, sell, and buy more stuff. His adversary, Wendell Berry, then a 43-year-old writer, poet, and farmer, took the stage next. He’s the qual guy. People matter. Mutual care, the land, neighbors, community, human thriving—it’s the relationship between those values that counts.

Butz believed in binaries: forward or backward, the future or the past. He used the phrase go back or the word return dozens of times in the 27 long minutes of his opening remarks. Butz’s Law of Economics—he called it that—was “Adapt or Die.” A lifelong agribusiness booster, he thought his corporate friends would take care of you. Berry’s response was to challenge the binaries. “I think what we all want to try is the future,” he said. “It’s just a question of how we try and who gets to make the attempt.” His talk about the decision-making process brought a more democratic ethos. He’d published The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture that year, a book-length takedown of Butz’s pro-capital agricultural worldview. (Butz’s review: “There are a few paragraphs in it with which I agree, not many.”) The quant guys are exploiters, Berry wrote, who are here not for you but for capital. The people trying to maintain an agriculture that holds ecology, community, and culture in mind are nurturers. Policies should consider whole and coherent systems that maintain the fertility and ecological health of the land over generations, not market cycles.

We saw the consequences of the entrenched power of capital during the pandemic, just as we saw it during the 2008 financial crisis, just as we will see it in the near-future AI crash, just as Butz wanted and Berry disputed. Theirs was a contrast between the technocratic and the humanistic. Berry brought an eco-humanist viewpoint to the debate; Butz’s technocratic view sought a more industrial-capitalist future.

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Two new books continue the debate here in 2026. Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg’s Feed the People! Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make It Even Better leans to the technocratic side, while the eco-humanism in Kate Brown’s Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City is more place-based and community-centric. In their respective frames, they reflect divergent ideas about capitalism, community, and political possibility. In so doing, they contribute to a long-standing debate about the future of food that aims either for efficiency and corporate power or for community welfare and mutual aid.

Neither book refers to Butz, though Feed the People! updates his logic for the 2020s with Berry as antagonist (they name-check Berry nearly 50 times). The book departs from Butz in the authors’ disavowal of carnivore-based diets, but they share his view that efficiency, abundance, and convenience should be the alpha and omega of food policy. The “industrial” of their subtitle is a way to grow food that prioritizes the quantity of US agriculture’s cornucopian ideal. The self-provisioning of Brown’s book is a way to envision land-use policies that prioritize belonging and mutually governed lands.

Waffle House is the use case for Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg. They love the waffles there. They love that “Waffle Houses turn out on average 145 waffles every minute of every day” with inexpensive, unending consistency. In a chapter on labor, they walk the picket line with Waffle House workers fighting for better wages and protections against the fistfights that plague late-night shifts, explaining that the strikers also love the diner’s menu and want an improved, not defunct, workplace.

Dutkiewicz is a political scientist; Rosenberg is a historian and gender studies scholar. They’ve written together for years, with a significant profile in public writing about food, agriculture, and politics. As they pour syrup into the gridded pockets of their breakfast fare, their argument is that a food system should focus on “food that tastes good, is available to as many people as possible, and causes as little harm as possible.” Pleasurable, affordable, harmless. They call that “democratic hedonism,” a “political project aimed at building a yummier society, one that can accommodate food pleasures as diverse as our society.” Their analysis says that the food system is not broken (so stop saying that) and that progress begins where we are so, contra Butz, don’t talk about “start[ing] from scratch or go[ing] back in time.” Policy reform and regulation will get us the change we need.

Although their work shares a technocratic bent, there is that one point of departure from Butz: meat. Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg appeal to more plant-based diets, while their critique of the ecological and labor damages of meatpacking follows in the footsteps of Francis Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet (published in 1971, as Butz was taking over the USDA). They, too, recognize that there are few things less efficient than, as Lappé showed, feeding 20 grams of protein to an animal to produce one gram of protein as processed meat.

In their Meatless Butz paradigm, Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg position themselves against the local food movement’s flaws. Their posture stems from a reading of the “New Food Writing” since the 1990s, which they claim “usually dismiss[es] industrial, ‘fast’ food as worthless garbage corrosive to both America’s teeth and its soul.” The four horse-people of the foodie apocalypse—Berry, Alice Waters, Mark Bittman, and Michael Pollan—are wrong because their nostalgic goals are not pleasure or accessibility. You can’t get meatloaf, Taco Bell bean burritos, strawberry Pop-Tarts, or Doritos (“delicious”) in Waters’s kitchen or from Bittman’s recipes. Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg rebuke pretentious foodies, with their haute cuisine and expensive artisanal diets, after scoring a reservation at the posh Manhattan restaurant Eleven Madison Park: “Berry’s attitude is snobbish and self-defeating.”

Kate Brown’s Tiny Gardens Everywhere takes the argument about the future of food to the streets and cities of North America and Europe, a kind of updated urban Berry. Her book is kaleidoscopic and humanistic; it is part memoir, part history, and part manifesto, grounded in place and featuring the diffracted view of many examples. She moves from England in the 1700s to Berlin in the late 1800s to Jim Crow Washington, DC, in the 1900s. She goes to post-Soviet Estonia and 21st-century Amsterdam and Ohio. Along the way, Brown recovers stories of “the most fertile agriculture in recorded human history,” small garden beds. “With no tax breaks, regulatory structure, or founding manifestos,” she writes, “urban growers quietly produced local, diverse, organic fruits and vegetables on marginal land with short market chains in a production cycle that resulted in affordable, fresh, and nutritious food.”

Brown is an environmental historian at MIT. She, too, has a well-honed public writing profile, with past books that include a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for nonfiction. She composed Tiny Gardens Everywhere, we learn, while appreciating that urban gardens are neither helpless nor hopeless but productive and joyful—pleasurable—offering the chance for collective action and calling to mind the unabashed gratitude and joy the poet Ross Gay writes about with regard to community orchards, gardens, and farms. It isn’t the singular garden that interests Brown; it’s gardens, plural.

In 21 quick, dynamic chapters, Tiny Gardens Everywhere examines ways of growing food that are also ways of building community. Commoners in 17th-century England devised landscapes to produce food, fuel, and shelter with a minimum of labor by drawing on a network of alliances. In 1900 in Berlin, 50,000 families had garden allotments. They were called “arbor colonies.” By 1920, 14,000 acres of urban gardens covered seven percent of the city. Washington, DC, was full of neighborly mutual aid organizations in the 1930s that helped foster cooperative movements across the country. The famous Victory Gardens of World War II—which, at first, I mistakenly thought this book would be about—produced 40 percent of all fruits and vegetables in the United States in 1944. Small Soviet family gardens provided enough fruits and berries to feed a family of four for a year in the 1950s.

Where Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg have their eyes on the entire global food system, Brown has hers on the community scale. Her multinational survey of the past and present offers a push for policy reform that takes urban land as an opportunity for growth.

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Humanistic and technocratic versions of those futures differ in the ways they include people and prioritize values. Brown begins with bees humming, mushrooms sprouting, and flowers and vegetables burgeoning. The people in Tiny Gardens Everywhere are sharing and laughing and smiling. It’s not an ideal—those are real people. The democracy Brown finds in urban farms and cooperatives is one of shared governance. Like Berry, she thinks “a sharing economy makes sense in a garden terrain. Plants are generous.” Like Berry, her eye is “on the future, building soil and restoring dead ground to life.” Her vision of variety and diversity isn’t a backyard garden; it’s a model of networking marginalized space for productive land use.

Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg’s Waffle House gives us people enjoying the ease and accessibility of mass-produced meals while their servers—at least the ones legally able to organize—are on strike and fending off fistfights. (Waffle House is a family-owned company whose donor contributions skew to anti-union right-wing candidates.) Like Butz, they celebrate abundance as a virtue, and like him, they think Berry’s approach is nostalgic. Unlike Butz, they offer the vegetarian carve-out, seeking mass-produced plant-based options that taste as good as meat and avoid the environmental and animal welfare horrors of a meatpacking industry. The authors are hopeful that you can get the ease and abundance of capitalist metrics without the harms of that model.

Food writers are either area-specific when calling for reform—for example, changes to farming or labor, or distribution, or markets, or diet—or they are systemic. The systems analysis in Feed the People! is thus bold and broad, taking on all areas. That approach can also make it difficult to engage with the book as a unified document, in which attention to one area can press back on others. The authors point out that industrial milling in the late 1800s removed the healthy germ from grains, and then they celebrate industrialism as a hero for fortifying the grains during World War I it had just defortified. They explain that unprocessed brown rice leads to lower disease rates than milled white rice but also claim that organics aren’t that healthier. Although small farms and gardens won’t bring the authors pleasure, they look back with longing to one of their childhood gardens of bounty. They critique Berry for minimizing settler culture, even while they advocate for an industrial scale that exacerbates a settlement ethos on dispossessed native lands. Berry’s 1990 essay on “the pleasures of eating” includes seven action items, which they call a list of chores. Their conclusion has a list of 10.

There’s the nostalgia thing too. I’m circling around it because it’s particularly confusing for food-future diagnoses. If nostalgia is a response to a perceived absence, a yearning for something lost, then the community gardens and urban farms Brown canvasses become invisible again rather than, as they are, urgent and present, of the moment and for the future. If nostalgia is meant to devalue things that have been around for ages, that’s tricky too. You wouldn’t call it nostalgic to develop walkable cities any more than you’d call it nostalgic to produce renewable energy. That’d be progressive, as in future-oriented. Decrying nostalgia can protect a sense of inevitability that tracks with capitalist imperatives, that the world we have now is irrevocable, that it’s the only one meant to be.

Brown’s work shows that past failures of urban agriculture happened not necessarily because they didn’t work but possibly because concentrated powers didn’t want them to work. In discussing that point in east Washington, DC, she draws from some of Ashanté M. Reese’s innovative work on Black food justice. Networks of urban farms had provided well for neighbors before real estate development, tax policy, and federal housing subsidies undermined their viability. Brown writes that in Berlin, Paris, Tallinn (Estonia), Amsterdam, and Washington, “urban farmers with their organization and labor added value to real estate. Their tenure on the land was provisional and short term, and others were eager to swoop in, capitalizing on their labor and ingenuity.” Farmers asked for land outside real estate markets to cultivate with confidence that their labor and creativity would not be stolen. “Repeatedly,” Brown writes, “the competitive demands of commerce overruled them.” The garden networks were never meant to feed the entire city in any case, but they were intended to build the ability for communities to control land use. Trying to recover work that’s been forcibly undone doesn’t have to be nostalgic; it can be liberating.

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Fifty-odd years on from North Manchester, the landscape of food has changed substantially; the structure of debates about it, less so. The political paradigm has changed too, of course. Because Western powers have dug a deep deregulatory trough while democratic principles are under stark attack, a technocratic demand for the further entrenchment of an industrial order thus feels out of time.

The industrial model concentrates power in fewer hands. That didn’t work well as the pandemic hit, revealing how unreliable the industrial model could be. And in a country being overrun by oligarchic policies of belligerent destruction, the question is not whether we need more democratic food systems but how they can be grounded in a politics of care and belonging. With these two books in hand, I’m sifting through an inbox with notices of immigration raids on farms and resistance groups on ICE-monitoring duty to protect vulnerable populations. Migrant laborers work at organic farms too, to be sure. The difference is not that organic farms are free of labor issues and industrial sites are not; it’s that organic scales make control and influence possible while industrial ones don’t.

What’s more, the New Food Writing that so riles Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg has evolved well beyond the Pollan of 20 years past. If, say, Raj Patel, or Leah Penniman, or Julie Guthman are your core writers, the dominant questions for a future food system look different and more justice-oriented. For her part, Brown’s Tiny Gardens Everywhere isn’t principally about the call for food justice, but in its attention to the working class and inequitable policies, it draws from that tradition and allows space for the voices of often-marginalized people to create change. There’s a lot of good food writing that does that too. As just one other example, Civil Eats probably represents the better mainstream critical thinking about food systems, often elevating Indigenous leaders and Black farm voices as it helps characterize all facets of food and farming. Eco-humanistic forums like that also avoid technocratic binaries. The solutions coming from food justice work—like Hanna Garth’s Food Justice Undone: Lessons for Building a Better Movement, also new this season—are not massive farms or small ones but place-based and culturally attentive models of cultivation and land use. As Garth shows, the solution might not even be gardens and farms but, rather, innovative models for fair distribution.

The tensions between technocratic and humanistic futures are close-at-hand realities, not vague academic arguments. Neighborhood-based mutual aid projects in the 1900s led to cooperative leagues, and those co-ops—grocers, urban farmers—provided more than produce alone: they also distributed funds for education and relief. Something similar was going on with the LFPA that DOGE killed, providing not just food but also capacity for community well-being.

I’m also thinking of a more technocratic example that ran in parallel. Venture capitalists dumped $700 million of private equity into Bowery Farming, a vertical farming start-up founded in 2015 and premised on Butzian efficiency and industrial logic. The greens could be grown indoors so as to allow control through proprietary technology and industrial-scale operations. Google Ventures, Fidelity Investments, and, for some reason, celebrities like Justin Timberlake and Natalie Portman jumped on board. In late 2024, they quietly closed their doors, shut down, and dissolved. High prices and plant disease sunk them. Hundreds of millions that could have gone for distributed community-based models went instead to the promise of digital precision agriculture that would have brought profits to investors, not farmers. This is the problem with solutions, to quote Julie Guthman, when food is a commodity to be disrupted for privatized profit.

In their gutting of the LFPA, exploiters in Washington tore down a program that was working. It wouldn’t feed the world—it wasn’t meant to—but it built capacity, supported local economies, and provided work and stability for a food system capable of democratic management. It operated at a controllable and governable scale. At Bowery, technocrats sunk about the same amount of money into a tech start-up that was meant to create profit for investors; food was a vehicle for that, a commodity to sell. It couldn’t escape its capitalist imperatives.

Berry and Butz would still be arguing about this. They stood on their Indiana stage and had to admit, by the debate’s end, that they hadn’t even engaged. “We may never meet,” Berry said, “because he is arguing from quantities and I’m arguing from values.” That will happen when you ask different questions. The debate’s framework is stridently persistent because it avoids the issue that rests under it: which questions should we be asking? Without challenging the assumptions of industrial capitalism, hand in glove with the technocrat, the future of food is only the food of the past, but worse. We should be asking about that.

I actually like Waffle House too, like I love peanut M&M’s at Halloween and a Coke Zero now and then. It doesn’t mean I think our food system should be modeled on these examples. I also love my yard’s raised-bed produce and the bounty from my CSA; I’d love a whole city full of them. Critics might say it’s not scalable because our economic structure can’t manage labor costs. But that means reform should focus on that economic structure, not let it tighten its viselike grip on our culture. Without challenging the blinkered power of capital, there won’t be a more humanistic future of food.