Feasts, Fasts, Famine

Food for Thought

Pat Caplan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000323078
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

This study deals with three domains of food which raise complex epistemological, political and moral issues. Through an examination of a wide range of material drawn from anthropology, history, literature and political economy, the author discusses the relationship between food and entitlement, gender, notions of the body and development. Food is shown to be a powerful metaphor for our sense of self, our social and political relations, our cosmology and our global system.

Feasts, Fasts, Famine: Food for Thought

Why Food?

In this lecture, I shall seek to do two things. One is to show how an anthropological approach can give us particular kinds of understanding about people’s food choices. Or to put it the other way round, to show how the topic of food is a good way of gaining an understanding of what anthropology is about. Secondly, I want to suggest some gaps in the existing anthropological work on food, and some possible lines of future work. I do not pretend to be saying anything particularly new tonight, nonetheless, I hope that by juxtaposing a number of issues, some new slants may emerge and new questions arise.

Some have defined the business of anthropology as being that of making the exotic and different comprehensible i.e. ‘understanding other societies’. But in turning this round to include ourselves, whoever we are, we have also to make the familiar exotic, to question our taken-for-granted assumptions which are nowhere more deeply held than in regard to our eating habits. I propose to bear in mind throughout this lecture two questions: “Why do people eat what they do?” and “Whose responsibility is it that they do?”

Looking at food, then, involves looking at the everyday as well as the exotic, the special as well as the mundane. It involves us in varying levels of analysis, from the individual, through the household, to the community (however defined) right up to the world economic system. For an anthropologist, it involves us in the study of culture, including our own, as well as political economy. Food can be viewed as a language, a way of communicating with our fellow human beings or even our deities. It is of course, a basic necessity, but it is also much more. To convey some of its qualities, I begin with an extract from one of the most famous passages in 20th century European literature:

And suddenly, the memory came back to me. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine cake which one Sunday morning at Combray... when 1 had gone to her room to say good morning to her, my aunt Leonie had offered to me after dipping it in her lime-flower tea. The sight of the petite madeleine cake had not reminded me of this before I had tasted it... But when, out of a former past, nothing any longer remains, after the death of humans, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more alive, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and the taste still remain for a long time, like souls, to be recalled, to wait, to hope, on the ruin of everything else, to carry without yielding, on this almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory (Proust 1987:46, my translation).

In this extract, Proust captures the exceptionally powerful way in which taste can represent so much: the past, memories of childhood, a sense of place and time and one’s own self within it. Rupert Brooke’s lines, penned on the battlefield of the First World War, also memorably capture something of the same qualities, an evocation of a world in which everything is in its proper place:

Stands the church clock at ten to three?

And is there honey still for tea?

Food, then, can evoke taste, memory, feelings and emotions; for an anthropologist it is also about social relations, identity and selfhood: “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.”

The format of my lecture will be in three parts, following my title, although I propose to take the liberty of broadening the conventional definitions of its three parts. But before beginning with my first topic, feasting, I want to say a little bit about the anthropology of food.

Anthropological Approaches to Food

Apart from the publication of Richards’ much praised but little emulated study of food among the Bemba, a people of central Africa, in 1939, food did not really become a fashionable topic in British anthropology until the rise of structuralism in the 1960s, particularly following the work of the French anthropologist Lévi-Strauss. He and his followers sought to understand food as a cultural system, an approach which clearly recognises that ‘taste’ is culturally shaped and socially controlled.

Lévi-Strauss, as my anthropological colleagues will not need reminding, was influenced by theories of structural linguistics. In the first volume of his Structural Anthropology (1968), he considers the differences between English and French cooking and introduces the word ‘gusteme’: “the constituent elements of the cuisine of a society” as analogous in the field of taste to the phonemes of language. Lévi-Strauss maintains that deciphering the codes underlying such matters as food enables the anthropologist to reach “a significant knowledge of the unconscious attitudes of the society or societies under consideration” (ibid: 87).

In The Raw and the Cooked (1970), the first volume of his study of Amerindian mythology, Lévi-Strauss considers the basic operations of cookery, such as boiling, roasting and smoking. For him, cooking our food is one way in which we are different from animals, and so the distinction between cooked and raw food is linked to another crucial distinction in human thought, that between culture and nature. His famous ‘culinary triangle’ sets out diagrammatically the way in which the cooked is a cultural transformation of the raw, while the rotten is a natural transformation of either the raw or the cooked (ibid: 335 et seq.; 1965).

Some have criticised Lévi-Strauss’ work on food, even going so far as to dismiss it as ‘nonsense’ (Leach 1970, Lehrer 1972, Goody 1982, Mennell 1985), but there is no doubt that it has been influential, especially his contention that food is not only ‘good to eat’ but also ‘good to think with’ (bonnes á penser).

Roland Barthes, a French semiologist, also utilises a linguistic analogy in the understanding of food, searching for a code or ‘grammar’. His basic argument in this context, as in others, is that where there is meaning, there is system. Barthes sees food as a sign as well as a need and indeed the need itself is highly structured: “Substances, techniques of preparation, habits, all become part of a system of differences in signification; and as soon as this happens, we have communication by way of food” (1975:51). Indeed, he suggests that an entire “world” (social environment) is present in and signified by food.

The British anthropologist Mary Douglas, although not accepting their work uncritically, has been influenced by both Lévi-Strauss and Barthes. In one of her earliest works, Purity and Danger (1966), she considers the food prohibitions laid down in the book of Leviticus in the Old Testament, which form the basis of Jewish dietary law. Drawing upon anthropological work on classification, Douglas seeks to show that animals such as pigs were forbidden to the Hebrews because they were creatures considered to be anomalous under a given system of classification based upon chewing the cud and cloven-footedness, and therefore impure or polluting.

In some of her later work she focusses on British food and on the constitution of a meal (1975). She argues that one will discover the social boundaries which food meanings encode according to their position in a series such as in a single day (breakfast through to nightcap), a week encompassing the Sunday dinner, an annual series which includes holidays and fast days, and a life cycle series, from christening to funeral.

What, she asks, is a meal? Meals are solid food accompanied by liquids. They are usually hot, and require a mouth-entering utensil, a table, a seating order, restrictions on movement and no alternative occupation. They incorporate contrasts such as hot/cold, bland/spiced, liquid/semiliquid. They are ordered in scale or importance and grandeur through the week and the year. But the smallest, meanest meal metonymically figures the structure of the grandest.

A main meal always consists of a serving of potato, a ‘centrepiece’ (which on Sundays is always meat), trimmings (one or two green vegetables) and a liquid dressing (gravy). A special meal (Sunday or Christmas Day) inc...