Consuming Geographies

We Are Where We Eat

David Bell, Gill Valentine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135103231
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze fisiche
• Subtopic: Geografia

Food occupies a seemingly mundane position in all our lives, yet the ways we think about shopping, cooking and eating are actually intensely reflexive. The daily pick and mix of our eating habits is one way we experience spatial scale. From the relationship of our food intake to our body-shape, to the impact of our tastes upon global food-production regimes, we all read food consumption as a practice which impacts on our sense of place.
Drawing on anthropological, sociological and cultural readings of food consumption, as well as empirical material on shopping, cooking, food technology and the food media, this book demonstrates the importance of space and place in identity formation. We all think place (and) identity through food - we are where we eat!

1
INTRODUCTION
•

Two men, Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega, are driving through Hollywood in a 1974 white Chevy Nova. As they drive, Vincent tells Jules about his trip to Europe. After discussing Amsterdam's hash bars, the conversation moves on …

Vincent: But you know what the funniest thing about Europe is?

Jules: What?

Vincent: It's the little differences. I mean, they got the same shit over there that we got here, but it's just, just, there it's a little different.

Jules: Example.

Vincent: Well, you can walk into a movie theater and buy a beer. And I don't mean just, like, in no paper cup. I'm talking about a glass of beer. And in Paris, you can buy a beer at McDonald's. And, you know what they call a Quarter-Pounder with Cheese in Paris?

Jules: They don't call it a Quarter-Pounder with Cheese?

Vincent: No, man, they got the metric system there, they wouldn't know what the fuck a Quarter-Pounder is.

Jules: What'd they call it?

Vincent: They call it a Royale with Cheese.

Jules: Royale with Cheese.

Vincent: Yeah, that's right.

Jules: What'd they call a Big Mac?

Vincent: Well, Big Mac's a Big Mac, but they call it Le Big Mac.

Jules: Le Big Mac. What do they call a Whopper?

Vincent: I dunno, I didn't go into a Burger King. But you know what they put on French fries in Holland instead of ketchup?

Jules: What?

Vincent: Mayonnaise.

Jules: Goddamn!

Vincent: I seen ’em do it, man. They fuckin' drown ’em in that shit.

Jules: Yuck.

This dialogue comes from the screenplay of Quentin Tarantino's movie Pulp Fiction (1994: 14–16). Jules and Vincent are two hitmen on their way to a job, idly chatting as they go. But this part of their conversation contains some very resonant discussions of food, place and identity — topics which are at the heart of this book. An American in Paris, eating at McDonald's, is someone (whether self-consciously or not) who is connecting with ‘home’ while also experiencing the ‘little differences’ at play within an increasingly globalised culture of cuisine. And being able to get a beer in a French cinema or fast-food eatery immediately signals very different legal and cultural attitudes towards alcohol, while Jules' and Vincent's shared revulsion at the idea of mayonnaise on French fries (Vincent calls it ‘that shit’, Jules' only comment is ‘Yuck’) shows how food practices code and demarcate cultural boundaries, even in the most mundane of ways. So, in a scene which lasts no more than a couple of minutes, Tarantino captures a whole set of ideas embodied in Uma Narayan's discussion, in a more scholarly context, of what has been characterised as ‘thinking about (or through, or with) food’:

Thinking about food has much to reveal about how we understand our personal and collective identities. Seemingly simple acts of eating are flavoured with complicated and sometimes contradictory cultural meanings. Thinking about food can help reveal the rich and messy textures of our attempts at self-understanding, as well as our interesting and problematic understandings of our relationship to social Others.

Narayan 1995: 64

THINKING THROUGH FOOD

For most inhabitants of (post)modern Western societies, food has long ceased to be merely about sustenance and nutrition. It is packed with social, cultural and symbolic meanings. Every mouthful, every meal, can tell us something about our selves, and about our place in the world. As Arjun Appadurai (1981: 494) says, food is both ‘a highly condensed social fact’ and a ‘marvelously plastic kind of collective representation’ with the ‘capacity to mobilize strong emotions’. And in a world in which self-identity and place-identity are woven through webs of consumption, what we eat (and where, and why) signals, as the aphorism says, who we are (for critical discussion of theories of the relationship between self-identity and consumption, see Warde 1994).

By focusing on a set of commonplace consumption practices — food shopping, cooking, eating and drinking — we can begin to think about a whole set of contemporary social and cultural issues, from health to nationalism, from ethics to aesthetics, from local politics to the role of transnational corporations in global regimes of accumulation. It might seem that looking at an apple, or a microwave, or a cookbook, or a supermarket is no more than epistemological or methodological slackness, but in fact, if we look at a powerful and compelling parallel work, which unpacks a similarly mundane consumption practice — smoking — then we can begin to see how this kind of pop-cultural criticism opens up rich theoretical insights; and if we then look at the ways in which food has been used in academic inquiry by historians, sociologists, philosophers and others, we can start to appreciate just how telling thinking about (or through) food can be.

Richard Klein's Cigarettes Are Sublime (1993) uses techniques of literary criticism and (popular) cultural analysis to reflect, with some verve and panache, on smoking. Where many texts on the subject offer dry polemic on the evils of the global tobacco industry, or on health issues, Klein takes his readers on a smoke-spiral journey through the history of cultural representations of cigarette smoking — or what he calls ‘cigaretticism’. Early on in the book, Klein sets out his stall by declaring cigarettes ‘America's gift to the world’, praising their ‘remarkable gift to modernity’ (14). Later, tracking the history of tobacco, he suggests that Columbus brought tobacco from the New World as an antidote to the anxieties which his discoveries of ‘a great unknown world’ provoked in the ‘Eurocentred consciousness of Western culture’ (27), while in a survey of literary allusions to smoking he notes that poets often use cigarettes as ‘powerful instruments for appropriating the world symbolically’ (52). And given that something like a third of all adults have, for the past century, smoked cigarettes daily, their cultural significance is indeed remarkable.

As with cigarettes, so it is with food, with cooking, with eating and drinking. Even more universal and commonplace, seemingly even more mundane, food in fact occupies an unrivalled centrality in all our lives; although it might not dominate our consciousness, it nevertheless serves to structure our lives, from the daily rhythm of meals to the rites of consuming passage (our first sip of alcohol, the first time we cook a meal, right up to our ‘last supper’). Arjun Appadurai (1993) has theorised these links, attempting to ‘resituate consumption in time’ (11), beginning with consumption's role in punctuating or periodising all our lives through repetitive ‘techniques of the body’. Consumption — and here an explicit focus on eating is called into play — ‘calls for habituation, even in the more upscale environments where food has become largely dominated by ideas of bodily beauty and comportment, rather than by ideas of energy and sufficiency’ (12). These daily rhythms impact on other, longer-duration periodisations of consumption:

In any socially regulated set of consumption practices, those that center around the body, and especially around the feeding of the body, take on the function of structuring temporal rhythm, of setting the minimum temporal measure (by analogy to musical activity) on which much more complex, and ‘chaotic’ patterns can be built. Pushing the analogy a step further, the small habits of consumption, typically daily food habits, can perform a percussive role in organizing large-scale consumption patterns, which may be contrived of much more complex orders of repetition and improvisation.

Appadurai 1993: 13

Seasonality and rites of passage are thus also marked by consumption practices — or, rather, are built from them, as, at all scales, ‘consumption creates time’ (15) rather than merely responding to it; hence ‘natural’ periodisations — including ‘seasons’ and punctuations in the life course — can better be seen as naturalised ‘consumption seasonalities’ (16). Later in the essay, Appadurai builds on Thompson's (1967) classic account of the rise of time discipline which occurred with industrialisation. Comments on the resultant commodification of time (and especially the demarcation of ‘work time’ and ‘leisure time’) build to an account of the increasing of time discipline in consumption (what Gofton (1990) calls ‘time famines’), such that consumption itself becomes work, with everyone

laboring daily to practice the disciplines of purchase, in a landscape whose temporal structures have become radically polyrhythmic. Learning these multiple rhythms (of bodies, products, fashions, interest rates, gifts, and styles) and how to interdigitate them is not just work, it is the hardest sort of work, the work of the imagination.

Appadurai 1993: 31

Contemporary consumption, Appadurai concludes, is governed by ephemerality, scopophilia and body manipulation linked in a systematic and generalised way into ‘a set of practices that involve a radically new relationship between wanting, remembering, being and buying’ (33). Drawing on Emily Martin's (1992) combining of theories of corporeality and flexibility, he suggests that bodies, consumption, fashion and time come together in the following logic: ‘ephemerality becomes the civilizing counterpart of flexible accumulation and the work of the imagination is to link the ephemerality of goods with the pleasures of the senses’ (33).

In a broadly similar way, Leslie Gofton (1990) mobilises Thompson's work on time discipline and the typology pre-industrial/industrial/post-industrial in a discussion of food's changing role in our experience of time. For Gofton, food technologies have radically altered our relationship to eating:

Food itself is considered less ‘significant’, and carries less symbolic weight than in the past. It doesn't signify the season, or the time of day, or the day of the week in quite the way it did, nor does it mark out the roles and relations between adults and children within formal meals.

Gofton 1990: 92

The household is now flexible and self-reliant (at part under current state-defined notions such as ‘active citizenship’), time-budgeting has become domesticated, and so on. We have, he concludes, ‘[i]nformal, open-ended, anomic food choice’ (87), with our total reliance on outside production giving us ever greater anxiety about food safety and acceptability.

FOOD AS POPULAR CULTURE

One way of thinking about food is as part of contemporary popular culture — especially given the fact that commentators increasingly see consumption as the dominant contemporary cultural force. Steve Redhead (1995) argues that a global popular culture industry has developed, incorporating many previously disparate areas of leisure and pleasure — together with the cultural commentaries that accompany them. Food has become very much a part of this industry, woven into the construction of ‘lifestyles’ (Tomlinson 1990) and used as a marker of social position (Bourdieu 1984). The food media have been instrumental in this, and recent years have seen a proliferation of food professionals, mediatisers and celebrities. Professional and amateur chefs are household names (British TV shows like Ready Steady Cook, Masterchef and Food and Drink bring haute cuisine into our living-rooms as well as our kitchens), their restaurants given the status of temples of consumption in countless guides and features; food writers, critics and broadcasters meanwhile show us not only how to cook, but tell us what, when, where, how — and even why — to eat and drink. We might even go so far as to argue that the food media make stars of the foodstuffs themselves, investing in them such cultural capital that they take on meanings far away from mere ingredients, recipes and dishes. Food magazines contain luscious centre-folds (referred to quite accurately by Barry Smart (1994) as ‘gastro-porn’ — seductive but unobtainable and artificially, stereotypically perfect), adverts in print and on TV offer us all manner of temptation, tying food in with all the old favourites: with health, with status, with sex, with existential happiness, or jouissance. Everyone is catered for, in cookbooks from Zen Cookery to White Trash Recipes; we can learn to ‘cook for pleasure’ (for friends and family, or just for ourselves — remember Delia Smith's One Is Fun!) or to ‘cook in a hurry’ (Microwave Meals in Minutes); we can create a macrobiotic diet, learn about food combining, or find ‘a thousand ways with mince’.

One recurring theme in the food media — which we will be paying close attention to later — is the sampling of other cultures through their food. A British Sunday paper thus offers us insights into the ‘global kitchen’, and we can buy countless books like Around the World in 80 Dishes, offering ‘authentic’ recipes, menus and techniques, from TexMex to Thai. Vendors and advertisers increasingly appeal to what the food industry calls ‘geographical product descriptors’ (Hodgson and Bruhn 1993) in an effort to cash in on this phenomenon, while the potential offered by the Internet for ‘kitchen table tourism’ has been readily seized — there is an incredible listing of food interest groups on the information superhighway, with every specialism from insect recipes to championship chillies and ‘Mimi's Cyber Kitchen’; the University of Guadalajara offers access via soundcard to an audio version of an encyclopedic Spanish cookbook which it recently translated into English. Commercial interests have also been quick to respond to the opportunities afforded by the Net, with British supermarket chain Sainsbury's offering virtual shopping, a tour round a typical store, and a home-delivery wine-ordering service.

Added to this is the deployment of food metaphorically in a whole host of cultural products. The dialogue from Pulp Fiction used at the start of this chapter is one current example, but food has long served as a useful symbol for conveying social, cultural and moral messages. Maggie Lane's Jane Austen and Food (1995), for example, tracks one novelist's culinary codes, while Cindy Dorfman (1992) shows how the kitchen has been used as the setting in recent US movies for passions more usually located in the bedroom. And as Beardsworth and Keil (1990) note, analyses of food consumption offer the opportunity to illustrate a whole host of social processes. Thus George Ritzer (1993) uses the notion of ‘McDonaldisation’ to describe changes in contemporary society; and Diane Barthel (1989), following the lead of Barthes' classic readings of ‘everyday objects’ in Mythologies (1973), takes a long look at chocolates, chocaholics and chocolate boxes in a discussion of modern design and the modernist political programme. Kirsten Ross (1995) also considers modernity, this time through domestic technology such as the refrigerator. A central part of this book's project is to use food to think about space and identity, as will become clear later.

Academic interest in food consumption has, of course, been incredibly wide-ranging and prolific. Setting aside all the technical literatures, whether from health, nutrition and food science or from catering and the food business, we still have an enormous range of material — too enormous to do justice to. All we can do is provide a token reference or two in each area, which could serve as the starting point for further inquiry. In history, then, we have both general surveys (e.g. Levenstein 1988 on America; Mennell 1985 on England and France), work on specific histories (e.g. Schwartz 1986 on diets and food fads or Elias 1978 on manners) and studies of particular foodstuffs (e.g. Mintz 1985 on sugar; Visser 1986 on the components of ‘dinner’). In sociology, Mennell, Murcott and van Otterloo (1992) have provided a very useful literature review which highlights the richness of sociological study into food and eating, while in neighbouring anthropology we have pioneering works by Lévi-Strauss (1964) and Mary Douglas (e.g. 1984), and many studies of particular food habits and traditions (e.g. Appadurai 1981 on Hindu South Asia). Archaeologists have also tracked foodways through time, often in league with anthropologists (e.g. R. Willis 1990). Psychologists have sought to understand the mental processes involved in our relationships with food, and have given particular attention to so-called ‘eating disorders’ (e.g. Brumberg 1988), which have also been approached — from sometimes very different angles — by medical sociology (e.g. Turner 1992) and women's studies (e.g. Bordo 1993; Charles and Kerr 1988). Other departures include international relations (e.g. Enloe 1990), cultural studies (e.g. S. Willis 1991), economics (e.g. Fine, Heasman and Wright 1996), communication and media studies (e.g. Fine and Leopold 1993 on food advertising; Sanjur 1982 on mass media's influence on dietary patterns), philosophy (e.g. Cu...