Food in the Social Order

Mary Douglas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415291125
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317833680
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1984, This work is a cross-cultural study of the moral and social meaning of food. It is a collection of articles by Douglas and her colleagues covering the food system of the Oglala Sioux, the food habits of families in rural North Carolina, meal formats in an Italian-American community near Philadelphia. It also includes a grid/group analysis of food consumption.

1

Standard Social Uses of Food: Introduction

Mary Douglas

The Food Problem

The idea is still widely held that the proper, the most direct, and indeed the only true way to prevent famine and hunger is to increase food production. The emphasis on the physical shortage of food materials has guided economic planning and dominated debates about global population and resources. It will be a difficult notion to correct, sustained as it is by convenient fictions and anchored in shared prejudices. But gradually a reaction is being expressed. Food policy is not merely concerned with production, storage, and conveyance to the kitchens of the people. The worst horrors of famines could be diminished and many famines even be averted if understanding the social, legal, and economic aspects of food problems was given priority. Amartya Sen (1981), in his study of the four great famines in Bangladesh, Bengal, Sahel, and Ethiopia, demonstrates that famines cannot be explained by food shortages: famines are liable to occur even with good harvests and even in prosperity. People die of starvation in front of food-filled shops. The causes are complex shifts in the legal entitlements which determine individuals’ access to food. Administrators, like planners, are blinkered by their conviction that the causes lie in the physical supply of food. Unsuspecting of the extremes to which people will go in order to protect their own stocks when food shortages are rumored, they compound their initial misunderstanding with prolonged mishandling. There is extraordinarily little to guide them about the social uses of food. The dominant paradigm treats the human problem in the same terms as getting fodder into cattle troughs.

This volume seeks to present an expanded and humanist approach to food. Only observe how little is known about access to foods at the domestic level, about the cultural influences training tastes, or about the micro-politics that govern its distribution. Something about those blank places in our knowledge calls for explanation. Why is so little said on these particular scores? International agencies certainly know that unequal access to food is the result of social inequalities. They are discussing programs to improve the living conditions of the poorest segments of the developing countries. But, of course, authority tends to be most precarious in the poorest countries, so the very places where food is most unequally distributed are those in which politics are most sensitive to criticism. Plans for a new economic order meet political obstacles if receiving aid is conditional on interventions that threaten the sovereignty of the developing country (Fishlow et al. 1978). A concern to protect international collaboration may explain a tendency to keep political criticism out of the debates on world food problems.

Perhaps the extraordinary emphasis on production is a response to a need to depoliticize the subject of food. One might expect that this need would promote unpoliticized methods of thinking about food distribution.^* But this is another blank space that needs explaining. The absence of serious research into the cultural and social uses of food is caused by a more fundamental separation between food sciences and social thought. It is the legacy of a process of intellectual compartmentalization corresponding to academic teaching and research divisions. The research reported here is intended to reach a more fundamental level of understanding. It attempts to examine some elementary relations between food sharing and social integration. The method has potential for bridging the gaps separating food sciences, cultural analysis, and sociology. It starts from the assumption that unlike livestock, humans make some choices that are not governed by physiological processes. They choose what to eat, when and how often, in what order, and with whom. The idea of approaching these choices through information theory has been aired before but never worked out, and this is what we here attempt.

Though dismay at the horrors of famine and hunger drives the rich industrial nations to advocate basic political changes, none of them seems to be a convincing solution to the problems. A revolution in favor of the socialist state could theoretically solve problems of production and maldistribution by planned direction of the economy and strict rationing of food. It has often worked for short, intensive periods: through the duration of a war or through the crisis period of an earthquake or flood disaster. But over the long term it is subject to well-known abuses. Moreover, the solution of imposing long-term control on individual choice is repugnant to the Western liberal tradition, even if it was considered to be efficacious. Another version of a radical political solution is reduction of scale: a turning back from the unwanted effects of high technology and the bureaucratic control associated with it. Small government is one thing, but rejection of the achievements of science reads too much like avoiding one kind of famine disaster by returning to the earlier famines and pestilence characteristic of preindustrial Europe. It is difficult to see how to make sense of it. A third political option is the one currently followed in the West: the system of private enterprise and sporadic and ineffectual rescue efforts.

Lacking political solutions to that part of the world food problem which is inherently political, professional food theorists understandably turn to low-level solutions based on improved administration and further research. Food policy and planning deal with production, storage, and distribution as management problems. Researchers directed by administrative priorities study the food sciences, human biology, agriculture, and stock raising; and improved official standards of nutrition, health education, welfare support services, and marketing. But this major effort of research hardly touches on consumer behavior. Instead of solving problems, the research reveals mysteries about human behavior. There is the mystery of why nutrition education fails. After much expenditure of time and work the nutritionists are left believing in consumer irrationality, berating the public for wrong choice of foods, or bewailing its conservatism in food preferences. The consumer in modern industrial societies is painted to be just as stubbornly conservative and blind to his own advantage as the fabled peasant in the third world or in our own historic past. Where food is concerned, the consumer is far from being seen as the optimizing rational agent of economic theory. Considering that we are in the midst of a notoriously swift-changing market in food—where pizza has swept its manufacturers into a multi-million-dollar market, where kiwi fruit from the Antipodes has become a fashionable accompaniment for fish, and where frozen yogurt competes with ice cream—the real mystery is the sturdiness of the belief in consumer conservatism.

There is another more fundamental mystery about tastes. Just at the point at which the technology of the chemical senses has become capable of producing any taste or smell or texture or combination of these on demand, the food technologists are smitten by frustration; they do not know what flavors to copy and what textures to reproduce in easily manufactured cheaper substitutes for existing known food stuffs. There is also the mystery of waste: careless waste, conspicuous waste, careful but ignorant waste. The private consumer is arraigned again and again as a person totally unfitted to be left in charge of his own food preferences, an awkward approach for liberal philosophy.

And then there is the mystery of exclusion, even more galling for the philosophers who would defend our civilization. In societies based on primitive technologies, so Marshall Sahlins (1972) would argue, hunger is shared, whereas in modern industrial societies food flows in divergent streams: a trickle of less nourishing stuffs to the poor and unprivileged and huge quantities of highly nourishing stuffs to the rich. The scandal that hits home most squarely is that of undernourished children living in the next street to overfed ones. If we knew the springs of our behavior, we would be in a better position to understand that part of the starvation which follows on lack of social contact and lack of social concern. It is often argued that the sheer urgency of the great food problem directs attention to immediate short-term solutions rather than fundamental rethinking, but there is yet another reason why our worries about the food of the world only turn up scandals and mysteries.

In the sense that the whole of society has been secularized by the withdrawal of specialized activities from a religious framework, so food has also been taken out of any common metaphysical scheme. Moral and social symbols seem to have been drained from its use, at least in the opinion of professional food theorists. However, this theoretical bias may be due less to the secularization of food habits among ordinary folk in the Western Hemisphere than to the secularization of social theory. On the one hand, the official theory of food is exclusively concerned with physical nourishment, it being assumed that consecrated food taking is either a thing of the past or one of minority religions. On the other hand, the ordinary consuming public in modern industrial society works hard to invest its food with moral, social, and aesthetic meanings. The actual current meaningfulness of food is being overlooked by professional food theorists because their thought is doubly restricted, partly by antique metaphysical assumptions about the separation of spirit and flesh and partly by an intellectual tradition which has desocialized the individual.

Theories about human needs, if their assumptions were to be made explicit, would show disapproval of social expenditures (Douglas 1978). The assumptions seem to rest on a postulated good human nature, with physical and spiritual components which should deploy physical resources only to reach some modest level of comfort. At some time past spiritual resources would have supplied an all-encompassing religious system, and defined appropriate physical comfort within coherent theories of life, death, and destiny. In default, the central assumption now seems to be that corrupt society always tempts the individual to misuse material things either for greed or to serve envy and pride by rivalrous display. The assumption still carries forward the religious distinction between godliness and worldliness. It allows that in a secular world without religion the physical needs for survival, work, and leisure are still the same. Furthermore, though the spiritual and intellectual supports of religion have gone, its accouterments remain: music, poetry, and visual and plastic arts count as spiritual activities because they are enjoyed for their own sake, unlike food and shelter needed for base physical reasons.

This division of human needs into instrumental material things and self-justified spiritual things leaves a gap. The goods which are used for extended social intercourse are without justification. Festivities are then treated as illegitimate demands on the world’s productive system, the source of social inequalities and ultimately responsible for the maldistribution of food. Although this has the ring of ultimate truth, it is too simple to treat all the demands of society as unacceptable. Unless we still subscribe to the religious denomination which teaches this particular doctrine of incompatibility between salvation and society, it should have no place in our inquiry and indeed may have nothing to say to us about the great food problem. Worse, the doctrinally derived judgment distracts our vision by insinuating that what is needed is a change of heart: conversion of minds to an anti-institutional attitude instead of correction of institutions to the mind’s purposes.

Our contemporary view of the problem is fogged by another intellectual legacy, the model of the desocialized individual which now dominates our social thought. As Dumont (1977) has skillfully shown, the individual had once been seen as a partially autonomous subunit, gaining full significance from his part in a hierarchical whole. In contemporary philosophizing he has become a separate, self-justified unit, locked in individual exchanges with other such self-seeking, rational beings. The switch to thinking about humans in this way changes the attitude of the investigator to the range of communications available between individuals. Whereas food, like other material things, may be used to communicate, all the possible messages are now treated as originating between private individuals, direct commands or instructions or guileful signals about self-identity, intended to further the sender’s private objectives.

In consequence, two things are missing now from our repertoire of explanations of behavior: society as well as religion. An unfavorable judgment on social life follows implicitly from moralizing against material pleasures whenever they are pleasures of social intercourse. The bias is reinforced by a further moralizing judgment against social life, seen as the arena of individual self-seeking. Given this background of implicit assumptions, no wonder advertisers believe that the symbolic meanings of foods in modern society are all comprised in messages about individual role definition and role performance. It is as if the best mother, the best wife, the most caring persons all press food into the social competition by using it relentlessly for grading one another’s role performance. Briefly, the assumptions current about the social uses of food are patronizing, sometimes moralizing, sometimes exploitative, and always incoherent. There is scope for a fresh approach to understanding food habits, especially by way of comparison between different civilizations.

Anthropologists’ Work on Food Habits

Having a privileged position for cross-cultural comparison, anthropologists also have a responsibility to exercise it. Indeed, anthropologists have always been very interested in the subject of food. They have much to say about food as part of the analysis of domestic and local organization. Some have written about its place in public policy. Audrey Richards (1939) pioneered the study of food in its full relation to agriculture and political economy in Africa. Margaret Mead (1943, 1964, 1965) pioneered the study of food habits and social change in the United States during World War II. At that time, immigrants and displaced persons having lost their access to their habitual foods often rejected those offered them. A good theory would have been valuable for directing the appropriate food supplies to threatened regions, for feeding refugees as well as making the best use of existing resources in the homelands. Mead’s theory was based upon a core/periphery model of the components of any culturally distinct food system: the core elements, identified by their greater frequency of use, were held to be less liable to change than the peripheral elements. The snag in this approach is that the frequency count of foods appearing in household menus or shopping lists overlays the actual patterning of the food. When the core selection corresponds to what is most cheaply and easily available, it gives an unjustified impression of assimilation of an immigrant population’s food habits.

Apart from this sustained work on applied problems, the research of anthropologists on food has gone in several directions. There is an impressive development of interest in nutritional anthropology (Jerome et al. 1980) which applies social and cultural frameworks to problems of nutrition. Excellent work in this field is nevertheless limited by lack of a general theoretical structure. Also, there is fascinating work on food semantics, the meanings of food in different civilizations. Generally conducted in places where food is invested with strong religious significance (Vogt 1976), work in this tradition tends to highlight the secularization of food in our own society. Thus, it reinforces the sense that we are uniquely different, so that nothing that may be learned about food habits of earlier generations or of other societies is going to help us to understand the place of food in our own modern industrial society.

The meanings of food need to be studied in small-scale exemplars. Attempts to generalize by using linguistic theoretical assumptions tend to produce explanations of tastes and preferences that seem too trivial or too bizarre (Leach 1960; Lévi-Strauss 1970) to have much bearing on current food problems. Another dilemma confronts anthropologists: if research is designed according to the prevailing socioeconomic categories of our own culture, it is too deeply biased to claim the advantage of cross-cultural perspective; on the other hand, if research is structured according to conceptual categories of the particular culture being studied, it cannot emerge with results that apply elsewhere. It is intrinsically difficult to learn something of general applicability about how tastes are formed from small-scale studies of remote, exotic places. We can get exquisite miniature portrayals of all the specificities of a particular historic case of adjustment between values and resources, without getting a theoretical grip on the forces that brought that case into being.

Anthropology works on a macro-scale with an evolutionary framework of thousands of years. While this very scale would seem to allow opportunities for experimenting with new perspectives, theoretical investigation tends to stay within the paradigms prevailing in the biological and social sciences: the supply/demand model and the income/expenditure model. Marvin Harris’s work (1971) exemplifies this approach, which has potentially powerful insights for interpreting long-term changes. But the method is inevitably weak for observing short-term relations between social factors and perceived needs. Furthermore, it assumes rational economic choice for explaining cultural adaptation, but we have seen that this is precisely the assumption that is challenged in the current thinking about food tastes. The modern consumer has lost credibility as a rational agent in the eyes of food theorists. So this distinctively anthropological approach lacks fine-tuned relevance to the way that the great food problems are posed.

If the modern consumer is not behaving convincingly as a market-minded individual, neither seeking nor using education about food values and food costs, pe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• 1 Standard Social Uses of Food: Introduction
• 2 Metaphysical Aspects of an Oglala Food System
• 3 Sociocultural Dynamics and Food Habits in a Southern Community
• 4 Meal Formats, Meal Cycles, and Menu Negotiation in the Maintenance of an Italian-American Community
• 5 Measurement of Calendrical Information in Food-Taking Behavior
• Index