Carnal Appetites

FoodSexIdentities

Elspeth Probyn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134595525
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Scienze della comunicazione

In Carnal Appetites, Elspeth Probyn charts the explosion of interest in food - from the cults that spring up around celebrity chefs, to our love/hate relationship with fast food, our fetishization of food and sex, and the impact of our modes of consumption on our identities. 'You are what you eat' the saying goes, but is the tenet truer than ever? As the range of food options proliferates in the West, our food choices become inextricably linked with our lives and lifestyles. Probyn also tackles issues that trouble society, asking questions about the nature of appetite, desire, greed and pleasure, and shedding light on subjects including: fast food, vegetarianism, food sex, cannibalism, forced feeding, and fat politics.

1
BODIES THAT EAT

Do we eat what we are, or are we what we eat? Do we eat or are we eaten? In less cryptic terms, in eating, do we confirm our identities, or are our identities reforged, and refracted by what and how we eat? In posing these questions, I want to shift slightly the terms of current debates about identity and subjectivity, and suggest that the question of what we are is a constantly morphing one that mixes up bodies, appetites, classes, genders and ethnicities.

It must be said that the question of identity and subjectivity has been so well trodden in the last few decades that the possibility of any virgin territory is slim. Bombarded by critiques of identity politics, any cultural critic still interested in why and how individuals fabricate themselves must either cringe before accusations of sociological dogooding (and defend the importance of the categories of race, class, sex, gender and so forth), or face the endless clichés that seemingly support the investigation of identity. The momentum of my investigation is carried by a weak wager, by which I mean that the areas and examples I study cannot be overdetermined by a sole axis of investigation. My point of departure is basic: what if we were to think about identities in another dimension, through the optic of eating and its associated qualities: hunger, greed, shame, disgust, pleasure, etc.?

While the connections suggested by eating are diverse and illuminating, interrogating identity through this angle brings its own load of assumptions and preconceptions. One of the more onerous aspects of ‘writing about eating’ is the weight of previous studies. The field of food is a well-traversed one, staked out by influential authors concerned with proper anthropological, historical and sociological questions. They are, by and large, attracted to food for its role in securing social categories and classifications. They have left a legacy of truisms, such as Lévi-Strauss’s oft-stated maxim that food is good to think with¹ (Lévi-Strauss, 1966), or Brillat-Savarin’s aphorism, ‘tell mewhat you eat: I will tell you what you are’ (Brillat-Savarin, 1825/1970: 13). In turn, scientific idioms meet up with the buzzing clichés that hover about food. These can be grouped primarily around the notion that food is fundamental, that we all eat, and so on. Indeed, buffeted by the winds of postmodernism that have permeated public debates, it seems that there is a popular acceptance of the fact that identities are henceforth difficult, fragmented, temporary, unhinged by massive changes to modes of employment and the economy, re-formations of family, and the changes in the gender and sexual order. As we all live with and through these changes on a daily basis, it is no wonder that food and eating has been popularly reclaimed as a ‘fundamental’ issue, as the last bastion of authenticity in our lives.

To put it another way, and in the terms that guide this book, theoretically and in terms of popular understandings, eating is seen as immediate—it is something we all have to do; and it is a powerful mode of mediation—it joins us with others. What, how and where we eat has emerged as a site of considerable social concern: from the fact that most do not eat en famille, that we increasingly eat out and through drive-in fast food outlets (in the USA, 50 per cent of the food budget is spent on eating outside the home), to the worries about genetically altered food and horror food—mad cows, sick chickens, square tomatoes. From family worries to environmental concern, eating continually performs different connections and disconnections. Increasingly the attention to what we eat is seen as immediately connecting us, our bodies, to large social questions. At a broad level, this can be as diffuse as the winds that spread genetically modified seed stock from one region to another. Or it can be individually experienced in terms of the guilty knowledge that others are starving as we eat. From the image that has long haunted children told to ‘eat up everything on your plate because little children are starving in Africa’, to more evolved forms of vegetarianism and other ethical forms of eating, food reminds us of others. From the pictures of starving children staring from magazine pages, we now progress to the spectre of hunger that is broadcast by the Internet, exemplified in the Hunger Site, where ‘users are met by a map of the world and every 3.6 seconds, a country flashes black signifying a death due to hunger’ (www.thehungersite.com, accessed 28 September 1999). Here eating is the subject of a double articulation: the recognition of hunger is presumed to be a fundamental capacity of individuals, and our feelings are then galvanised into painless action. Each time a user clicks on the ‘hunger’ button, one of the sponsors donates a cup and a half of food. As the site explains, ‘Our sponsors pay for the donations as a form of advertising and public relations.’ Here, the logic is that hunger is visceral, that it is a basic human feeling, which is to say that it is understood as immediate, and that it connects us in an elemental way to other humans. That advertising companies know that appeals to hunger can also be a profitable form of mediation, transforming ‘humans’ into consumers, is but one example of how eating connects us in complex ways to other people, to products, to new formulations of identity, and in this case altruism (the site has been called ‘the altruistic mouse’).² Eating continually interweaves individual needs, desires and aspirations within global economies of identities.

Of course the interlocking of the global and the local has been the subject of much debate over the last decade. For instance, in his recent book on globalisation, John Tomlinson uses ‘global food and local identity’ as a site through which to problematise these terms. It is clear that changes in food-processing and transportation technologies have altered our sense of connection to the near and the far, allowing us to routinely find, in our supermarkets, products that previously would have been the foodstuff of the élite. These institutional and technological changes rework the connections that individuals have to their ‘local’, to the regions and nations in which they live. As Tomlinson argues, ‘globalization, from its early impact, does clearly undermine a close material relationship between the provenance of food and locality’ (Tomlinson, 1999:123). As he further states, the effects have been good (availability and variety), and bad (disrupting ‘the subtle connection between climate, season, locality and cultural practice’). In terms of what we can now eat, Tomlinson points out that ‘the very cultural stereotypes that identify food with, say, national culture become weakened’ (Ibid., 1999:124).

Dispersing the whiff of moralism that accompanies so much writing about globalisation and food, Tomlinson argues that these changes to how we eat are not

typically experienced as simply cultural loss or estrangement but as a complex and ambiguous blend: of familiarity and difference, expansion of cultural horizons and increased perceptions of vulnerability, access to the ‘world out there’ accompanied by penetration of our own private worlds, new opportunities and new risks.

(Ibid., 1999:128)

In terms of my own argument, his attention to the increased sense of vulnerability is particularly important. Indeed, to put it more strongly, I’d argue that eating is of interest because of the ways in which it can be a mundane exposition of the visceral nature of our connectedness and distance from each other, from ourselves, and from our social environment: it throws into relief the heartfelt, the painful, playful or pleasurable articulations of identity. In this vein, I want to use eating and its associations in order to think about how this most ordinary of activities can be used to help us reflect on how we are connected to others, and to large and small social issues. This is to attend to the immediacy of eating, and the ways in which that immediacy is communicated, mediated and can be put to use in thinking about culture. For instance, in the interviews that underpin this project, some of the terms that have emerged to name alimentary subjectivities are: food wanker, food tosser, food het, food wozzies (white Australians with ‘wog’ tastes). Comments such as ‘I eat it before it eats me’, ‘a guy thing stopped me from becoming a vego’, or the feeling of being schizophrenic when it comes to food politics, are all, I think, common expressions of individuals’ profound relations to eating.

In this quest to think through eating and culture, the adjective ‘visceral’ returns again and again: ‘of the viscera’, the inner organs. Could something as common as eating contain the seeds of an extraordinary reflection, a visceral reaction to who and what we are becoming? In mining eating and its qualities, might we glimpse gut reactions to the histories and present of the cultures within which we live? As Emily Jenkins asks, what if we were to go ‘into things tongue first. To see how they taste?’ (Jenkins, 1999:5). In this sense, I want to plunder the visceral, the gut levels revealed by that most boring and fascinating of topics: food and eating. In turn, I want to think about what bodies are and do when they eat. To take up the terms with which I started, eating both confirms what and who we are, to ourselves and to others, and can reveal new ways of thinking about those relations. To take the most basic of facts: food goes in, and then, broken down, it comes out of the body, and every time this happens our bodies are affected. While in the usual course of things we may not dwell upon this process, that basic ingestion forces us to think of our bodies as complex assemblages connected to a wide range of other assemblages. In eating, the diverse nature of where and how different parts of our selves attach to different aspects of the social comes to the fore and becomes the stuff of reflection.

Of course we eat according to social rules, in fact we ingest them. ‘Feed the man meat’, the ads proclaim, following the line of masculinity inwards; while others draw a line outwards from biology and femininity into ‘Eat lean beef’.³ Most often, the body that eats has been theorised in ways that seek to draw out the sociological equations about who we are in terms of class and gender. But rather than taking the body as known, as already and always ordered in advance by what and how it eats, we can turn such hypotheses on their heads. In the act of ingestion, strict divisions get blurred. The most basic fact of eating reveals some of the strangeness of the body’s workings. Consequently, it becomes harder to capture the body within categories, to order stable identities. This then forcefully reminds us that we still do not know what a body is capable of —to take up a refrain that has a long heritage (from Spinoza to Deleuze to feminist investigations of the body). As Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd argue in terms of this idea:

Each body exists in relations of interdependence with other bodies and these relations form a ‘world’ in which individuals of all kinds exchange their constitutive parts—leading to the enrichment of some and the demise of others (e.g. eating involves the destruction of one body at the same time as it involves the enhancement of the other).

(Gatens and Lloyd, 1999:101)

I am particularly interested in how individuals replay equations between eating and identity. But that already sounds impossibly abstracted from the minute instances I have in mind. From the lofty heights of theoretical argument, I follow the injunction to lead, as it were, with the stomach. In this vein, I begin to note petty details, like the fact of recently discovering breakfast. From a diet of coffee (now with a milk called ‘Life’) and cigarettes, I dutifully munch on fortified cereal that provides large amounts of folate should I be pregnant. Spurred on by articles sprinkled with dire warnings about what happens to women in Western societies, I search out soy, linseed and other ingredients that will help me mimic the high phyto-oestrogen diet of Japanese women. Eating cereal, I am told, will stave off depression, especially with the addition of bananas. Washed down with yoghurt ‘enhanced’ with acidophilus and bifidus to give me ‘friendly’ bacteria that will fight against nasty Heliobacter pylori, I am assured that I will even lose weight by eating breakfast. It’s all a bit much first thing in the morning when the promise of a long life seems like a threat.

The myriad of printed promises of the intricate world of alimentary programming serve as an interesting counterpoint to the straightforward statements on cigarette packages—‘Smoking kills’ versus the weak promises that eating so much of such and such a cereal ‘is a good source of soy phytoestrogens (isoflavones) that are believed to be very beneficial’. Apart from the unpronounceable ingredients (do you really want to eat something that you can’t say?), the terms of the contract between me and the cereal makers are thin: that such and such is ‘believed to be beneficial’. There is, of course, a long history to the web of nutritional messages that now surrounds us. In her potted teleology of food messages, Sue Thompson, a consultant dietitian, writes that in the 1960s, the slogan was ‘you are what you eat’. Then in the 1970s and 1980s, the idea was that food was bad for you. In her words, ‘It became a time of “Don’t eat” and “bad foods”.’ Now, happily, ‘we are moving into a time of appreciating the health benefits of food’ (Thompson, 1997). A more acerbic take on this lampoons the notion ‘that by eating tasteless gruel and exercising like maniacs, [we] might just live forever’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 20 September 1999). As the new battleground for extended enhanced life, eating takes on fortified meaning. Awed by the enthusiasm, I am also somewhat shocked by the intimacy of detail. I can handle descriptions of sex, but the idea of discussing the ways in which you ‘are reducing the bacterial toxins produced from small bowel overgrowth’ (Thompson, 1997) is just too much. Gut-level intimacy indeed.

However, eating is intimate. But, strangely enough, except for the effusive health gurus and the gossip about the eating habits of celebrities, normally in terms of presumed anorexia, we tend not to publicly air the fact that we all operate as ‘mouth machines’—to use Noëlle Châtelet’s term (Châtelet, 1977:34). To be blunt about it, ‘to eat, is to connect…the mouth and the anus’ (Ibid., 1977:34). We would, with good reason, rather not think about this; it is an area of conversation reserved for our intimates. So let us stay for the moment at the level of the mouth machine, and the ways it brings together the physical fact of what goes in, and the symbolic production of what comes out: meanings, statements, ideas. To sanitise it further, I want to think of the mouth machine as a metonym for the operations of a term that has been central to cultural studies: ‘articulation’. Stuart Hall’s now classic definition states that ‘Articulation refers to the complex set of historical practices by which we struggle to produce identity or structural unity out of, on top of, complexity, difference, contradiction’ (in Grossberg, 1986:64). While the term has tended to be used rather indiscriminately—theorists wildly ‘articulate’ this or that—its precise terms are useful. Basically it refers to how individuals relate themselves to their social contexts and histories. While we are all in some sense the repositories of past practices, through our actions we ‘articulate’, bridge and connect ourselves to practices and contexts in ways that are new to us. In other terms, we continually shuttle between practices and meanings that are already constituted and ‘the real conditions’ in which we find ourselves. As Lawrence Grossberg argues, this offers ‘a nonessentialist theory of agency…a fragmented, decentered human agent, an agent who is both “subject-ed” by power and capable of acting against power’ (Ibid., 1986:65). Elsewhere, Grossberg elaborates on the term, arguing that ‘Articulation is the production of identity on top of difference, of unities out of fragments, of structures across practices’ (Ibid., 1992:54). We are then ‘articulated’ subjects, the products of the integration of past practices and structures; we are also always ‘articulating’ subjects: through our enactment of practices we reforge new meanings, new identities for ourselves.

This then reveals a view of the subject as a fluctuating entity, neither totally voluntaristic, nor overdetermined. If these terms of analysis have in some ways been the staple of cultural studies, they come into their own when paired with eating. As individuals, we eat into culture, continually oscillating between primary, natural and necessary acts, as, simultaneously, we consume and ingest our identities. The mouth machine takes in, but it also spits out. While in some cases there is a direct equation between eating and being, in mundane ways we also shift the lines that connect what we eat with who we are. Rather than simply confirming who we are, eating conjoins us in a network of the edible and inedible, the human and non-human, the animate and the inanimate. In these actions, the individual is constantly connecting, disconnecting and reconnecting with different aspects of individual and social life. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, this reveals ‘a precise state of intermingling of bodies in a society, including all the attractions and repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, alterations, amalgamations, penetrations and expansions that affect bodies of all kinds in their relations with one another’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988:90).

Grossberg joins the theory of articulation to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of rhizomes. In real and theoretical ways, a rhizome is a wonderful entity: it is a type of plant, such as a potato plant or an orchid, that, instead of having tap roots, spreads its shoots outwards, where new roots can sprout off old. Used as a figure to map out social relations, the rhizome allows us to think about other types of connection. Beyond the arboreal, tap-root logic of, say, the family tree, which ties me in lineage to my forefathers, the rhizome spreads laterally and horizontally: as Deleuze puts it, the rhizome is anti-genealogical, ‘it always has multiple entryways’ compelling us to think of how we are connected diversely, to obvious and sometimes not so obvious entities (De...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Bodies that eat
• 2 Feeding mcworld, eating ideologies
• 3 Eating sex
• 4 Cannibal hunger, restraint in excess
• 5 Eating in black and white
• 6 Eating disgust, feeding shame
• Postscript eating: the new sensuality?
• Notes
• References