The Cultural Politics of Food, Taste, and Identity

A Global Perspective

Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz, Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350162747
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Cultural Politics of Food, Taste, and Identity examines the social, cultural, and political processes that shape the experience of taste. The book positions flavor as involving all the senses, and describes the multiple ways in which taste becomes tied to local, translocal, glocal, and cosmopolitan politics of identity. Global case studies are included from Japan, China, India, Belize, Chile, Guatemala, the United States, France, Italy, Poland and Spain. Chapters examine local responses to industrialized food and the heritage industry, and look at how professional culinary practice has become foundational for local identities. The book also discusses the unfolding construction of "local taste" in the context of sociocultural developments, and addresses how cultural political divides are created between meat consumption and vegetarianism, innovation and tradition, heritage and social class, popular food and authenticity, and street and restaurant food. In addition, contributors discuss how different food products-such as kimchi, quinoa, and Soylent-have entered the international market of industrial and heritage foods, connecting different places and shaping taste and political identities.

Part I

Taste and the Politics of Identity

1

Food, Taste, and Identity in the Global Arena

Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz

The Politics of Food, Taste, and the Senses

Every day we find evidence that food not only is meaningful but also has a close relationship to people’s sense of identity and belonging, and thus, political importance. Despite its apparent banality, we find repeating assertions, often loaded with affective charge, of what a food is or ought to be. These pronouncements are often deployed as defense against perceived attacks on the integrity of an ethnic, regional, or national cuisine. A common global debate I find in social media is whether pineapple belongs in pizza or not. For most of my Italian friends (but not all), it is a disrespect to Italian cuisine and sense of taste. They just don’t go together. Foreigners, in contrast, tend to see pizza as just a type of bread that accommodates whatever one pleases (and that is the way pizza delivery services market it). Something similar happens within academic circles when food specialists join local or national efforts to obtain UNESCO recognition of a food as intangible cultural heritage. This is particularly the case, as for example, when scholars debate whether the Mediterranean Diet has “ancestral” roots or not (Medina 2017). Food is evidently political, especially as it plays an important part strengthening the ties between a cuisine and different modes of identity (ranging from local to cosmopolitan).

It is in this context that we must remind ourselves that food is good to think with. The field of food studies has been rapidly growing during the last three decades. A number of volumes have provided directions to follow within anthropology, cultural studies, and history (e.g., Counihan and van Esterik 2013; Flandrin and Montanari 1999; Klein and Watson 2016; Lebesco and Naccarato 2018; Pilcher 2012). Remarkable monographs which became highly influential in spawning questions and shaping the field of food studies have included Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power (1985) and David Sutton’s Remembrance of Repasts (2001) in anthropology, Harvey Levenstein’s Revolution at the Table (1988), Priscilla P. Ferguson’s Accounting for Taste (2004), and Rebecca Spang’s The Invention of the Restaurant (2003) in history, to mention just a few. It would exceed the purpose of this chapter to review the bibliography pertaining to the entire field but there is no question that during the twenty-first century the literature on food studies has rapidly grown in the social sciences and the humanities (see, e.g., Ayora-Diaz 2015; Mintz and Du Bois 2002; Phillips 2006; Pilcher 2006).

Food and cooking, we agree now, contribute to structure everyday social relations and cultural practices through the inscription of meanings in their modes of production, circulation, and consumption. In addition, food and cooking have political symbolic meanings that both produce and mirror structures of social inequality. Multiple studies have shown how food is tied to different politics of identity in which it mediates the groups’ representations of self and others (Banerjee-Dube 2016; Coleman 2011; Poulain 2017). Taking into account the global context, in this chapter I am concerned with discussing the part played by food and cooking in the structure of power and social inequality, and how they relate to the politics of identity in different societies; that is, how culinary practices are turned into mechanisms productive of difference between members and outsiders of any given group. One very important and generative aspect of taste—its social, cultural, and economic entanglements with social differentiation—has been pursued by scholars inspired by Bourdieu’s Distinction (1984). His analysis privileges the ways in which the consumption of goods (food among them) inscribes and is inscribed by the consumers’ social class. This conceptual position has influenced many authors focusing on the consumption of food and how these practices convey social distinction.

Focusing on the political dimension of food and cooking, Arjun Appadurai (1981) examined the ways in which food is used to shape power inequalities between men and women and among social and religious groups in Hindu India. He proposed that food plays an important part in social and religious conflicts in different arenas of social and political competition (1981: 495). Similarly, while advocating a more sensual ethnography (and an anthropology of the senses), Stoller and Olkes (1989) illustrated how a woman among the Songhay was able to defy, albeit momentarily, the gender and social unequal structure by intentionally cooking a defective sauce that, through its sour/bitter flavor, symbolically critiqued the prevalent gender dynamics of the group. The association between gender and food constitutes a privileged site in which unequal power structures are displayed and deserve close anthropological and historical attention (Counihan 1999; Counihan and Kaplan 1998; Pite 2013). Different meanings of food are, in the context of modern capitalism and postcolonial conditions, continuously deployed in strategies seeking to reposition different groups within society at large. Significant contributions have focused on the politics of identity to examine the relationship between food and cooking practices and ethnic, local, regional, and national identities (e.g., Farquhar 2002; Holtzman 2009; Ichijo, Johannes, and Ranta 2019; Ichijo and Ranta 2016; Roy 2010). Nonetheless, in these studies the taste of food is either downplayed in importance or not taken into account. Here I argue that it is important to recognize the contributions of the anthropology, history, and other sociocultural studies on the senses and being to bring the perception of flavor to prominence in scholarly work on food.

The Politics of Food and the Senses

An important challenge in the analysis of the politics of taste is the question of how to take into account the different ways in which the senses act jointly to produce, explain, and give meaning to our taste for food and the taste of food. In anthropology, David E. Sutton (2010) has argued for the development of a gustemological approach to recognize the synergic interaction of all the senses involved in cooking and eating and the part played by memory in the construction of our sociocultural and political perception of taste (see below). In consequence, we must recognize that a first dimension (and prejudice) of our shared understanding of the politics of the senses is their historically given position within a hierarchy. This positioning began with the writings of philosophers in ancient Greece, particularly Aristotle and Plato. It was later revisited by Roman and Christian thinkers and theologians. This hierarchy privileged the “distant” senses of sight and hearing, while taste, touch and smell, considered “proximal” senses, were undervalued. Scholars favored the distant senses because they provided an objective appraisal of the material world, while they considered the others subjective and, thus, unreliable (Agamben 2017; Gronow 1997; Howes and Classen 2014; Korsmeyer 1999). However, most authors usually recognize that this hierarchy is marred with ambiguities and ambivalence, and while continuously reproduced, it has also been questioned in different quarters. This hegemonic representation of the senses has led, among other things, to restricting the significance of “taste” to the description and marking of social distinctions, in Bourdieu’s meaning of the term.

Calls for an anthropology, for historical, literary, social, and cultural studies of the senses, have progressively received a favorable response. However, with some exceptions (Ackerman 1990; Le Breton 2017; Jütte 2005), as a nascent interest, most studies have focused on the analysis of the social and cultural significance of each sense separate from the others. In fact, some monographs, such as those of Ackerman and Le Breton, even when discussing the five hegemonic senses, they examine them separately. Similarly, the different contributors in Howes’ Empire of the Senses (2005b) call for taking the study of the senses seriously, and while the chapters in this volume claim for the recognition of this field of studies, their authors did not propose clear analytical strategies to integrate them. An exception to this limitation is Howes’ own chapter on hyperesthesia, where he discusses how the production of commodities during late capitalism seeks to stimulate in the consumer as many senses as possible to make commodities desirable (Howes 2005a). Consequently, his approach privileges the material object and its capacity to invoke and stimulate all the senses, rather than analyzing how the senses act in common to know the world.

Many studies have been dedicated to the social, cultural, historical, and political aspects related to sound (Feld 2012; Samuels et al. 2010), touch (Classen 2012; Paterson 2007), smell (Classen 1993), taste (Korsmeyer 1999), and sight (Korsmeyer and Sutton 2011). The remaining question is how to approach the multisensorial perception of the world, and within it, of food. Fiona Macpherson (2011), from a philosophical angle, recognizes that even though for analytical purposes we have separated the senses, they act together. In the first place, she challenges the notion that we have five senses. She suggests that other senses are not properly recognized (such as proprioception and the sense of balance) and are usually excluded from discussion. Also, she points out, each sense is complex, as different modalities exist for each of them. For example, touch modalities include the perception of temperature, pressure, and pain, and a given experience of touch, as those who cook know, may involve all of these different modalities. Also, she argues, all senses act in common. We hear what people say, but some sounds are alike, and it is often the case that because we can see the other person’s mouth, we can recognize the sound. Hence, we also need to take into account that we use different senses in our relation to the world and there are multi- and cross-modal sensory perceptions. This is similar to what anthropologist David Sutton has been calling synesthesia.

In his influential review, Sutton (2010) proposes that we adopt a gustemological approach. These, Sutton suggests, are “approaches that organize our understanding of a wide spectrum of cultural issues around taste and other sensory aspects of food” (p. 215). In this sense, he argues that the taste of food plays an important part in the construction of place. He suggests that we must also look at the synesthetic elements articulated by food. As he defines it, “synesthesia is not a faculty, but a rather cultivated skill, developed in particular practices and linguistic devices. Food is often a vehicle for such synesthetic practices” (p. 218). I would suggest that all chapters in this volume, ...