The Psychopolitics of Food

Culinary rites of passage in the neoliberal age

Mihalis Mentinis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138549845
• eBook ISBN: 9781317294788
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Psychopolitics of Food probes into the contemporary 'foodscape', examining culinary practices and food habits and in particular the ways in which they conflate with neoliberal political economy. It suggests that generic alimentary and culinary practices constitute technologies of the self and the body and argues that the contemporary preoccupation with food takes the form of 'rites of passage' that express and mark the transition from a specific stage of neoliberal development to another vis-à-vis a re-configuration of the alimentary and sexual regimes.

Even though these rites of passage are taking place on the borders of cultural bi-polarities, their function, nevertheless, is precisely to define these borders as sites of a neoliberal transitional demand; that is, to produce a cultural bifurcation between 'eating orders' and 'eating dis-orders', by promoting and naturalising certain social logics while simultaneously rendering others as abject and anachronistic.

The book is a worthwhile read for researchers and advanced scholars in the areas of food studies, critical psychology, anthropology and sociology.

1 From unemployment to creative adaptability Romanticised chefs and the psychopolitics of gastroporn

DOI: 10.4324/9781315646367-1

Beyond the sociology of the culinary expert

The contemporary obsession with culinary culture and, more particularly, the prominence of the now ubiquitous figure of the celebrity chef has been the subject of much critical academic attention, primarily from a perspective that focuses on the emergence and promotion of lifestyle television hosts – in our case TV chefs – as ‘experts’ who offer guidance and lifestyle suggestions to members of the public, whilst at the same time examining the particular strategies through which this kind of ‘expertise’ is constructed (e.g. Chaney, 2002; Davies, 2003; Smith, 2010; Tominc, 2014). In a similar fashion, chefs are also of interest as emerging figures of authority which reflect, as Tominc (2014) observes through recourse to Giddens (1990), broader shifts in patterns of authority in Western societies during the transition from modernity to late modernity. Generally speaking, chefs, both as figures of authority and experts, are discussed in terms of their importance for shaping and expressing the tastes, desires and fantasies of the middle classes, alongside acting as gatekeepers to high social status and symbolic ascension through their promotion of the consumption of particular food and food related commodities (e.g. Hollows, 2003; Lang and Heasman, 2004; Ketchum, 2005; De Solier, 2013; Tominc, 2014).

Within a sociological paradigm of work, authority and expertise are invariably understood as central components of what Bourdieu (1984) – a theoretical touchstone in this kind of work – calls ‘cultural intermediaries’: these are key figures in the media consumption process (e.g. therapists, artists, fashion designers, etc.) who mediate between production and consumers and are actively involved in the symbolic production of value and taste as part of a hedonistic lifestyle (see Binkley, 2006). Cultural intermediaries acquire their status of authority and expertise through the accumulation of what Bourdieu (1984) calls ‘cultural capital’ (one's skills, training, education, knowledge, etc.). Celebrity chefs, via their role as a specific form of cultural intermediary, are thus said to be in possession of and invest in a particular type of cultural capital which in food related literature is defined as ‘culinary capital’. It is the possession of this specific form of culinary capital that forms the basis of their legitimacy as arbiters of culinary taste (see Bell, 2002 cited in Ashley et al., 2004; Naccarato and Lebesco, 2012; De Solier, 2013). Through their role as a cultural intermediary, the celebrity chef is seen as performing a number of functions, some of which are even contradictory; these range from shaping the audience's culinary tastes and disseminating a new consumerist culinary culture, to democratising food knowledge and providing people with the opportunity and means through which to acquire culinary capital themselves (Bell, 2002 cited in Ashley et al., 2004; Tominc, 2014).

Inherent to most approaches within cultural and food studies is an interest in the association of the figure of the celebrity chef with the business sector, with scholars probing into the marketing process by which celebrity chefs become or are consciously created as ‘brands’, each with their own distinct image and appeal so as to distinguish him/her from their competitors. These ‘brand’ chefs are subsequently discussed in relation to a variety of industrial concerns, usually related to media interests, the highly competitive restaurant scene and its demand for ‘unique’ culinary styles and ‘signatures’, and in terms of celebrity chefs’ ability to generate profits through selling various kinds of spinoff merchandise (cookbooks, kitchenware, seasonings, etc.) as expressive of lifestyle consumption (e.g. Ashley et al., 2004; Turner, 2004; Brownlie et al., 2005; Tonner, 2008; Smith, 2010).

Even though this sociological ‘paradigm’ does capture important elements of the cultural figure in question, as well as showing sensitivity to the ways in which TV cooking programmes and cookbooks reflect, register and mark certain transitional political demands (e.g. Mennell, 1996, Hollows, 2003; Brownlie et al., 2005; Helstosky, 2010; Tominc, 2014), it nevertheless still fails to adequately capture and account for the psychopolitical specificity of the figure of the celebrity chef. Or, phrased otherwise, by discussing the figure of the chef as a subcategory of the broader categories of celebrity and cultural intermediary, the literature thus remains inattentive to its unique function as a shaman-esque figure performing a rite of passage in accordance with neoliberal psychopolitical transitional demands. To a certain extent, the reason for this neglect is the insufficient attention afforded to both the privileged symbolic function of food itself, and its status as a ‘magical’ element that links the psychological with the social world in a number of linear and hodgepodge ways.

Food's ‘anomalousness’, its transitory nature which allows it to move between opposing poles, from ‘raw’ to ‘cooked’, from ‘nature’ to ‘civilisation’ (Strauss, 1983) – or even its character as an intermediary/transitory object (Winnicott, 1953; Farrell, 2000; Sibbett, 2005) – affords it a privileged function within culinary metaphorics. By both working with food and on food, the figure of the chef appears to negotiate a number of culturally opposing dualistic-archetypes, such as masculinity and femininity, tradition and modernity, repetition and innovation, stability and flexibility, cosmopolitanism and provincialism and so on, vis-à-vis the making and re-making of the self, whilst taking into account culturally embedded neoliberal transitional demands. In fact, the figure of the chef itself is an anomalous figure also: he (as a primarily masculine subject position) appears to stand betwixt and between two distinct worlds (albeit with a special affinity towards one of the two sides), channelling their spirits and negotiating solutions. Just like other anomalous figures residing on the borders of distinct worlds – e.g. the angels (between heaven and earth) or the vampires (between the dead and the living) (see Elyada, n.d.) – the figure of the chef speaks to our very ‘souls’, promising us access to a ‘higher’ level of existence as long as we commit to following his instructions and perform the requisite rite of passage.

For the remaining duration of this chapter I will attempt to produce a critical psychological account of the figure of the celebrity chef, paying particular attention to the way it deals with neoliberal demands, that is, its psychopolitical function. I will set out the terms of my argument by discussing first what can be called the romanticisation of the figure of the chef, and exploring, through recourse to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, the function of the signifier ‘chef’ in the neoliberal symbolic order. I then proceed by probing further into the metaphorics of cooking, in particular the conjunction between cooking and the production of the self, before concluding by delineating the aesthetic politics of gastroporn as a form of governmentality. In contradistinction to a commonly observed tendency in food related literature to focus on the relation between food culture and the middle classes, my aim here is to construct an account of the way today's cooking culture registers, marks and promotes forms of creative adaptability to the constantly shifting neoliberal landscape.

The romanticisation of the figure of the chef

The relation between romanticism, food and chefs is neither recent nor a simple one. The Romantic late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the invention of the restaurant, the sophistication of gastronomy and the emergence of culinary public figures, i.e. the first celebrity chefs (Gigante, 2007). In order to gain prestige and be seen as important personages and artists in their own right, famed culinarians of that period would style themselves as great men of letters, as Romantic geniuses, a pretension that would often make them the butt of satire (Garval, 2007). Even though a detailed account of Romantic ideas is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is important to outline their basic philosophy regarding taste and food, which was developed against Kant's theses. In his Critique of Judgment Kant (1987), following in a long philosophical tradition that prioritised seeing and hearing over taste and smell, rejects food and drink as objects of contemplative critical appreciation. Kant's argument holds that taste cannot offer a reflective aesthetic experience; that is to say, no object of gustatory experience can be beautiful due to its hedonic immediacy (as opposed to a disinterested attitude required for the appreciation of the beautiful), the reflexive agreeable or disagreeable sensory response (as opposed to the contemplative activity of one's imaginative engagement with the object) and the subjective relativity of taste (as opposed to the universal assent for something to be beautiful).

Given the subordinate status assigned to taste and appetite by Kantian aesthetic theory, then, Romantics’ revision of taste as gusto was an attempt to tear down the eminence of sight at the top of the hierarchy of the senses (Gigante, 2007), and writers of food and eating merged gastronomy and philosophy in an attempt to elevate cookery to the level of the fine arts, explicitly referring to the ‘art of cookery’. Even though such an endeavour found no reciprocation in conventional philosophy (Korsmeyer, 2007), we can nevertheless trace in it the beginning of the introduction of a complex aesthetics in the configuration of the alimentary regime; an aesthetic dimension which is now indispensable to the alimentary regime and the workings of what I call here culinary metaphorics. ¹ Shifts which took place in the culinary culture in the late 1960s and 1970s, particularly within the nouvelle cuisine in France, constitute another nodal point in both the development of aesthetics in relation to food and the consolidation of an image of the chef as a culinary artist with his own style and ‘signature’. This time, however, aside from his culinary artistic virtuosity, the figure of the chef emerges also as an owner of his own restaurant(s), or at least as one who desires to escape the condition of working for others, aspiring to become an entrepreneur himself (Gillespie, 1994; Mennell, 1996; Parkhurst Ferguson and Zukin, 1998).

This conjunction in the figure of the chef of two distinct figures, that of the artist and the entrepreneur, has now been consolidated, and constitutes the kernel of the psychopolitical function of the chef. On the one hand, contemporary celebrity chefs have managed to achieve, to an unprecedented extent thus far, a status as culinary artists discursively structured around the Romantic notion of the ‘creative genius’ and its many iterations (‘culinary revolutionary’, ‘culinary visionary’, etc.). Indissolubly connected with this romanticisation is the contemporary aestheticisation of food and the tendency of food scholars with an explicit interest in romanticism to reclaim taste's place among the ‘higher’ senses, in turn, allowing for food to be the object of gustatory aesthetic appreciation (e.g. Monroe, 2007; Sweeney, 2007, 2012; Brady, 2012; Korsmeyer, 2012). If the German Romantic philosophers and writers of the end of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century came to replace the priest with the genius artist in their mythology, and the aesthetic experience condensed in the original work of art became a mystical experience and form of knowledge of the world (Kearney, 2005; Peroulis, 2012), then we could say that our epoch has chosen to replace the artist with the chef, or more precisely the culinary artist, and the aesthetic experience condensed in food becomes the experience of the neoliberal order of things. If, as Rauning et al. (2001) argue, in the tradition of the aesthetics of the genius and charismatic imagination the truly creative social actors, the designated elect who generate innovations, are marked apart for symbolic ascension, then the figure of the chef, situated within the same tradition and largely described with terms borrowed from German romanticism, also comes to perform pivotal symbolic functions. It is now the chef above all, as a culinary artist, who can capture with his creative imagination the spirit of our neoliberal world, and convey it to the people through food (culinary art). Furthermore, the signifier ‘chef’ itself also performs a symbolic function which imposes certain alimentary laws, as well as performing the imaginary function of constituting an ideal image of the self to be desired.

At the same time, chefs are also romanticised qua their ‘subversive’ entrepreneurial activity and success: “what Steve Jobs, Richard Branson and Jamie Oliver have in common [is that] they're all genius innovators, doing things differently, looking beyond how things have always been, to find new ways forward”, writes the global director of a coaching agency, before she goes on to provide the exact coordinates of entrepreneurial genius: “come out of the traditional box”, work with “intuitive senses” and allow ideas to “stream in from the air around us” (Green, 2014, n.p.). What is romanticised here is a ‘psychology’ (of the entrepreneurial subject) which promotes adaptability to changing conditions and constant change as its modus operandi: “the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity” as Dardot and Naval put it (2013, p. 119). ² Unlike other entrepreneurial figures, however, the chef does not simply run a successful business (restaurants, food brands, etc.) nor merely engages in creative thinking and the releasing of innovations. In addition to all of this, he is the absolute expert in the actual main product he is involved with, that is food, and he is actively involved (at least in the initial stages) in the actual process of its production as a manual worker. Thus, whilst Steve Jobs cannot produce an ‘i’-product by himself, Jamie Oliver can design all of his own dishes by hand – using his own branded ingredients, before serving the final product in the restaurants he owns. The figure of the chef merges and blends entrepreneurial spirit, artistic virtuosity and manual work in the single process of producing one's own distinct product; a product bearing one's unique signature. What the romanticisation of the figure of the chef thus serves to demonstrate, is that capitalism in its most advanced (creative/entrepreneurial) forms does not alienate the worker but, in fact, unites him/her organically with his/her product of work; the self and his/her work become one.

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) assert that within a machinic assemblage “what regulates the obligatory, necessary, or permitted intermingling of bodies is above all an alimentary regime and a sexual regime” (p. 90). This is an important point for our argument concerning the centrality of the figure of the chef within the neoliberal symbolic order. Given that the intermingling of bodies is indissolubly connected to the intermingling of selves, it goes without saying that the chef, as the key figure within the contemporary alimentary regime, has a pivotal psychopolitical function to play. This becomes even more apparent if one considers how Foucault's (1986) claim, that the classical world's preoccupation with controlling diet had given way to a modern obsession with sex, now no longer appears to be valid. Indeed, it appears today that food, and thus the alimentary regime, claims a privileged status as a site of moral restrictions, scientific inquiry and individuating reflexivity (see Probyn, 1999; Taylor, 2010), and therefore plays an even greater role than before in the configuration of the neoliberal assemblage. In other words, what we eat, how and how much we eat, whom we eat with and where we eat are now more important coordinates (or at least equal to) of who we are than our sexual activity.

My wager in this chapter is that we should approach the function of the figure of the chef as operating analogously to Lacan's (1993) ‘Name-of-the-Father’. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Epigraph
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Ian Parker
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: culinary rites of passage in the neoliberal age
• 1 From unemployment to creative adaptability: romanticised chefs and the psychopolitics of gastroporn
• 2 From the semiotic to the symbolic: placentophagy and the name-of-the-chef
• 3 From colonialism to neoliberal multiculturalism: a Mapuche spice in the Chilean national cuisine
• 4 From East to West: economic crisis and the cooking of the new Greeks
• 5 From eating to starving: gastrosexual men and anorectic women
• Conclusion: towards a theory of anorectic cannibalism
• Bibliography
• Index