Food and Cultural Studies

Bob Ashley, Joanne Hollows, Steve Jones, Ben Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134490035
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

What and how we eat are two of the most persistent choices we face in everyday life. Whatever we decide on though, and however mundane our decisions may seem, they will be inscribed with information both about ourselves and about our positions in the world around us. Yet, food has only recently become a significant and coherent area of inquiry for cultural studies and the social sciences. Food and Cultural Studies re-examines the interdisciplinary history of food studies from a cultural studies framework, from the semiotics of Barthes and the anthropology of Levi-Strauss to Elias' historical analysis and Bourdieu's work on the relationship between food, consumption and cultural identity. The authors then go on to explore subjects as diverse as food and nation, the gendering of eating in, the phenomenon of TV chefs, the ethics of vegetarianism and food, risk and moral panics.

1 Food-cultural studies – three paradigms

Mike Leigh’s 1991 film Life is Sweet depicts a restaurateur called Aubrey, nervously awaiting the opening of his bistro, the Regret Rien. In an attempt to impress a waitress with his savoir-faire, Aubrey runs through his first night menu, an offal-rich list that includes hors d’oeuvres of tripe soufflé and saveloy on a bed of lychees. The waitress reacts with horror (‘Oh, not brains!’) and Aubrey’s prospective clientele agree: no one shows up for the opening.

Aubrey’s comical menu is, of course, a satire on contemporary food trends. There has indeed been something of an offal boom in recent years, exemplified by London’s St John restaurant which features such delights as bone marrow salad and crispy pigs’ tails (Henderson, 2000). Equally, there has been a vogue for combining ingredients from different parts of the world in new, and not always appetising, ways. If Aubrey’s idea of fusion cooking is a peculiarly distasteful one (‘tongues in a rhubarb hollandaise; liver in lager’), it is also one recognizable in newspaper restaurant reviews. This chapter will also attempt to fuse diverse ingredients, though the result is not, we hope, a tripe soufflé. The stew we propose to produce by the end of the chapter is a brief and provisional history of what we will term ‘food-cultural studies’. To achieve this we focus on a particular moment in the formation of what has come to be known, generally critically, as ‘British’ Cultural Studies (see, for example, Turner, 1990; Clarke, 1991; Schwarz, 1994). At a key point in its development a polarization of ‘culturalist’ and ‘structuralist’ methods was partially and temporarily resolved through the adaptation of Gramscian hegemonic theory. Analysis of this moment allows us to return to ‘the fundamental issue for any kind of cultural study’ (Tudor, 1999: 17), namely the complex relationship between power structures of various kinds and human agency. A hegemonic approach is used to suggest one way in which ‘dominant’ ideologies and the aspirations of subordinate groups might be usefully articulated together. The three sections therefore offer a modest and critical guide to structuralist, culturalist and Gramscian approaches to the study of food culture, and also a history of food’s place in the evolution of cultural studies. In order to ground these theories we will explore three instances of gustatory culture – the pig, the bar and the abattoir. Apologies to the herbivorous, but there is little here, in Aubrey’s words, of the prune quiche.

Pork and difference

It could be said that European civilization . . . [has] been founded on the pig. Easily domesticated, omnivorous household and village scavenger, clearer of scrub and undergrowth, devourer of forest acorns, yet content with a sty – and delightful when cooked or cured, from his snout to his tail. There has been prejudice against him, but those peoples . . . who have disliked the pig and insist he is unclean eating, are rationalizing their own descent and past history.

(Grigson, 1975: 7)

The cookery writer Jane Grigson opens her Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery with a moment of bathos. Despite the heroic tone in which the pig is celebrated, the reader will be well aware that the values of civilization are generally held to exist in opposition to that animal’s uncultivated characteristics. Unlike other edible mammals, the pig exists only as the subject or object of digestion. It eats and is itself eaten: it is a signifier of appetite. The pig’s appetite enters popular wisdom as something uncontrolled (greedy pig!) and unrefined (dirty pig!), while the civilized appetite is upheld as one moderated by social convention and selfdiscipline. The pig wallows in its own filth, eating its own and human faeces, while civilization flushes its waste out of sight, if not out of mind.

Why is such a richly symbolic language of dislike constructed around this useful animal? One explanation can be given by returning to Grigson’s opening sentence, which harmonizes a perceived opposition between pork and civilization. She notes that rather than being the antitheses of one another, pigs are part of civilization. But in arguing for a redefinition of boundaries, Grigson is pointing precisely to the ways in which meaning is generated through separation: civilization is distinct from animality. This distinction is then closely policed through various taboos and symbolic forms which dramatize the disruption of the opposition between civilization and piggishness as a descent into anxiety and danger.

This separation of a highly valued normative category from a threatening polar opposite is a common, perhaps universal, way in which meaning is imposed on the messy material of our world. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas has noted, ‘ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions . . . impose system on an inherently untidy experience. It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without, above and below . . . with and against, that a semblance of order is created’ (Douglas, 1966: 4). Douglas’s work is generally considered to be ‘structuralist’ and structuralist-derived theories were central to cultural studies’ early attempts to theorize the places of power and difference within culture. For structuralism, meaning is produced through the systematic generation of difference and the separation of self from other. We need to take a short detour into theory to give some sense of how this hypothesis of a system of difference has been used within food-cultural studies.

Structuralism originates with the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916). As the name ‘structuralism’ suggests, Saussure was more interested in the deep structure, or form of language than in its content, and his work is an attempt to develop a universal science of language in which all communication corresponds to unchanging rules. Given the dauntingly monumental nature of this task, Saussure begins modestly by studying the most basic aspect of language – the units, or signs, which make up any system of communication. He proposes that we may divide the sign up into two elements: a signifier (in Saussure’s system, this will typically be a word, whether spoken or written, but we may also use the terms to cover an image, sound, smell or taste) and a signified (the mental concept or meaning). The relationship between the signifier and signified is, for Saussure, usually an arbitrary one: there is no inherent reason why, for example, the three black marks ‘p-i-g’ should signify a non-ruminant omnivorous ungulate (this theory may be less convincing in the case of a livestock picture, or the taste of a pork chop, where the relationship seems more straightforward, though here too the signifier is constructed: see Hall, 1997). Instead, Saussure proposes that ‘p-i-g’ signifies the mental concept ‘pig’ only by virtue of its difference from other signifiers. ‘Pig’ signifies the oinking animal because it is not ‘fig’, ‘pug’, ‘pit’ or any number of other signifiers. Meaning

is wholly a function of difference within a system . . . the ‘units’ which we wish to understand are purely differential and defined not by their positive content but negatively, by their relations with the other terms of the system. Their most precise characteristic is in being what the others are not.

(Morley, 1992: 67)

Such an organized system of difference begins to account for the abominated position of the pig. Although Saussure hypothesizes an endless chain of differences, the social application of such a system of self and other typically involves a key distinction in which the characteristics of one individual, group or thing are held to be in stark opposition to those of another (man/woman, black/white, etc.) It was the peculiar position of the pig in early industrial society to be the familiar beast against which the developing version of civilized humanness could achieve definition. Conversely, the survival of piggishness in everyday life suggested that civilization had not been fully achieved. For Friedrich Engels, writing during the nineteenth-century heyday of British industrialism, the survival of piggishness was indicative of capitalism’s failure to generate a more civilized society:

[In the valley of the Irk] there are large numbers of pigs, some of which are allowed to roam freely in the narrow streets, snuffling among the garbage heaps, while others are kept in little sties in the courts. In . . . most of the working-class districts of Manchester, pig breeders rent the courts and build the sties there . . . The inhabitants of the court throw all their garbage into these sties . . . impregnating the air . . . with the odour of decaying animal and vegetable matter.

(Engels, 1958: 68)

While in this description the industrial landscape, and the pig’s unwholesome place in it, are the products of historical processes (the establishment of the factory system, the movement of rural people into cities, the renting of space for commercial use), Engels later offers a rather different explanation for the pig’s survival as ‘matter out of place’. Rather than the pig being suggestive of the transitional character of urban society and culture in the mid-nineteenth century, it is an index of the uncultivated nature of those responsible for bringing it to the city: the lumpen, preindustrial Irish. For the Irish, he writes: ‘have brought with them the habit of building pigsties immediately adjacent to their houses. If that is not possible, the Irishman allows the pig to share his own sleeping quarters. . . . The Irishman loves his pig as much as the Arab loves his horse’ (ibid.: 106).

The connotations of piggishness are therefore transferable onto other significant others who likewise provide defining differences from the self. For Engels, the piggish Irish provide a negative standard against which the more disciplined English working class are able to define themselves. This movement of connotations across groups and things is suggestive of a second major structuralist inheritance within food-cultural studies, found within Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1972). In this work, Barthes draws a distinction between denotation – scientific, value-free description – and connotation, in which social, cultural and political beliefs and values become attached to a phenomenon. Barthesian structuralism performs the valuable function of demonstrating how apparently natural or commonsense meanings attach themselves to objects and practices. An example of this is provided by his discussion of the relationship between food, national identity and imperialism in the mythology ‘Steak and Chips’.

Barthes begins by reducing steak to its denotative level. Steak, he argues, is a lump of meat in which blood is visible. It ‘is the heart of meat, it is meat in its pure state’, defined by its ‘quasi-rawness . . . blood is visible, natural, dense’ (Barthes, 1972: 62). This denotative bloodiness constrains the terms of steak cookery so that they are only expressions of bloodiness – saignant (rare) or bleu (almost raw) – or euphemisms which obscure cooking’s role in the transformation of meat into steak, such as à point. Yet as well as limiting meaning, the denotative level also generates meaning in the form of what Barthes calls ‘a morality’:

[rare steak] is supposed to benefit all the temperaments, the sanguine because it is identical, the nervous and lymphatic because it is complementary to them. [For intellectuals, steak is] a redeeming food, thanks to which they bring their intellectualism to the level of prose and exorcize, through blood and soft pulp, the sterile dryness of which they are constantly accused.

(ibid.: 62)

The first series of connotations, then, are around rawness, which offers a symbolic separation of the self from the presumed sterility of modern living. Barthes notes that the craze for steak tartare, a combination of raw eggs and ground beef, represents a particularly dense range of meanings about the healthiness of the natural and traditional, as opposed to the ‘sickliness’ of the modern. This connotation generates further layers of meaning. Despite the invasion of ‘American steaks’, the steak is a deeply nationalized foodstuff, ‘a basic element’ in the cuisine of France. It is an edible metaphor for the national family, offering a symbol of consensus across the social classes, figuring ‘in all the surroundings of alimentary life: flat, edged with yellow, like the sole of a shoe, in cheap restaurants; thick and juicy in bistros; cubic, with the core all moist throughout beneath a lightly charred crust, in haute cuisine’ (ibid.). Further, this national family is one immersed in a history of military endeavour: ‘Being part of the nation, it follows the index of patriotic values: it helps them to rise in wartime, it is the very flesh of the French soldier, the inalienable property which cannot go over to the enemy except by treason’ (ibid.). In the conclusion to the essay, these connotations combine to offer a magical resolution to the crisis in French post-war history. At a moment of humiliating withdrawal from its empire, steak and chips are offered as a symbol of the deep horizontal comradeship and natural values hidden beneath the apparent defeat of the 1950s.

From the Saussurean position that signification is produced through difference, Barthes therefore moves to a structuralism in which signification is produced by the transference and combination of meaning. Throughout his work, Barthes is conscious of the centrality of food to other forms of social behaviour, arguing that a ‘veritable grammar of food’ (Barthes, 1997: 22) is needed to illuminate the range of modern social activities. In a discussion of the business lunch, he observes that:

To eat is a behavior that develops beyond its own ends, replacing, summing up, and signalizing other behaviors. . . . What are these other behaviors? Today we might say all of them: activity, works, sports, effort, leisure, celebration – every one of these situations is expressed through food. We might almost say that this ‘polysemia’ of food characterizes modernity.

(ibid.: 25)

Rather than meaning being produced purely through difference, therefore, a more nuanced structuralism sees it as being formed through both differentiation and association. This in turn should make us suspicious of the completeness of meaning. Meaning is present as a trace in other signifiers (Frenchness in steak) but it can never be entirely present. Frenchness, or steak, or the business lunch are never fully meaningful in themselves – only through their association with other signs. And further, the ‘other’ that has been exluded from the self during the process of signification can never be entirely externalised. Within ‘Steak and Chips’ there are insidious allusions to collaboration, colonial defeat and the American steak. In each sign may be read traces of the signs that have been excluded in order to produce it, or evidence of the strains required to police the boundaries of self and other.

This less stable notion of the sign complexifies our earlier observation that the notion of the civilized self was formed, during the early modern period, in opposition to the pig. We may equally observe that any attempt to exclude piggishness from culture is doomed to demonstrate precisely the proximity of human and pig. This overlap of apparently exclusive categories has been extensively reviewed by Stallybrass and White (1986), who apply to the human–pig relationship a structuralism heavily influenced by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, arguing that the binary oppositions beloved of ‘classical’ structuralism can generally be reconceived as ‘a heterodox merging of elements’ (Stallybrass and White 1986: 46; for more on Bakhtin see Chapter 3). They argue that the pig is an ambivalent creature, a threshold animal that transgresses major oppositions between human and animal (the pink pigmentation of the pig disturbingly resembling the flesh of European babies) and between outside and inside (pigs were usually kept in close proximity to – and sometimes within – the house). Food meanings here seem much less stable than in the Saussurean model.

We have argued then that cultural studies found a number of increasingly complex resources within structuralist-derived theories. What the various structuralisms share is a valuable sense that meaning is not a wholly private experience, being instead the product of shared systems of signification. Yet the extent to which these structures are shared often gives structuralist analysis a pessimistic edge: structures exist prior to their human subjects, profoundly shaping their consciousness of the world and limiting their freedom of action within it. In the most austere versions of structuralism, this amounted to a ‘dominant ideology’, occupying people’s minds and actions and prohibiting alternatives.

This account of culture is unsatisfactory because people’s behaviour is manifestly not entirely determined by existing structures. Indeed, some forms of structuralism acknowledge this. As we have seen, Barthes acknowledges that each class eats a steak that condenses that class’s sense of itself. A more clearly ‘culturalist’ turn within a structuralist framework can be detected in Alison James’ study of children’s sweeteating in the North East of England (James, 1982). James observes that the dialect word ‘ket’ has different meanings for adults and children. For the former it is a noun or adjective meaning ‘rubbish’. For the latter it is a generic term for brightly-coloured sweets with splendid names such as Syco discs and Supersonic Flyers. To comprehend the significance of these sweets for children, James argues that we need to understand both the structure of the adult meal and the systematic inversion of adult structures within the world of the child. The structured rituals of adult eating include the use of crockery and cutlery, the acceptance of a temporal order of mealtimes and swallowing rather than regurgitation. In all cases kets represent a disruption of the accepted order. Kets are largely unpackaged, passed from hand to mouth with dirty fingers, stuck to the undersides of tables, brought out of the mouth to be shown to others and eaten between meal times. James notes that:

This ability to consume metaphoric rubbish is an integral part of the child’s culture. Children . . . have sought out an alternative system of meanings through which they can establish their own integrity. Adult order is manipulated so that what adults esteem is made to appear ridiculous; what adults despise is invested with prestige.

(1982: 305)

The children’s food culture therefore exists both within and in opposition to a dominant familial food structure.¹ James finds within this systematic transgression resources of friendship, humour, self-definition and a resistance to regimentation which all offer alternatives to the current exercise of power. Nonetheless this creativity does not represent a permanent challenge either to the authority of the meal structure or to authority in its wider sense. The childish absorption in kets may be reconceived in structuralist fashion as precisely the illegitimate other against which the legitimate meal is established. Once the child has accepted, and been accepted into, the symbolic adult order he or she will understand the error of a pre-socialized otherness. Yet the question of how people make their own food cultures within dominant structures lingers as a problem. In considering this, we will move some way, socially, from the pigsty and the sweetshop.

Drinks and culturalism

Raymond Williams’s ‘Culture is Ordinary’ (first published in 1958) is an early attempt to redefine ‘culture’ as something lived and commonplace rather than a collection of timeless works of art. The essay primarily defines culture as a set of expressive practices – print, cinema and television – but there are moments at which the term is used to cover the range of material forms available in post-war Britain, the new world of ‘plumbing, baby Austins, aspirin, contraceptives, canned food’ (Williams, 1993: 11).

The choice of canned food is uncoincidental. Williams was writing both within and against a tradition associated with the journal Scrutiny, concerned with the ways in which the study of literature might offset the assumed decline of intellectual and moral standards caused by industrialization and ‘mass’ culture. Williams’s brief thoughts on the new material culture engage with a key Scrutiny-inspired text, F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson’s Culture and Environment (1933). Although the book’s main target is the ‘standardization and levelling-down [that occurs] outside the realm of material goods’ (ibid.: 3) at one point it compares the diet of an ‘organic’ Mexican peasant community with that of the encroaching modern world. While the villagers dine on maize, beans, fruits and vegetables, milk, honey, eggs, meat, rice, chocolate, brandy, pulque and beer, mass production is represented only by a shabby shelf of ‘canned foods . . . that looked old and unappetizing’ (ibid.:...