A Relational Approach to Food, Taste, and the Senses Daniela C. Bentia
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Training Tastes A Relational Approach to Food, Taste, and the Senses Daniela C. Bentia B.A. German Studies, M.A. Anthropology Heidelberg University Submitted for doctoral degree in Sociology September 2010 Department of Sociology Lancaster University Abstract This thesis explores the ways in which taste is mobilized as a sensory, cultural, and political force in contemporary Western societies. My explorations derive from a context in which there is a growing dissatisfaction with the quality of food and this is seen as severely impacting upon social and cultural structures and institutions and as altering people’s health, habits and ways of life. This thesis investigates in what way taste and people’s sensuous engagement with food offers insight into the nature of relations between people, food, and environs. It further examines how such relations tackle the transmogrification of food and the systems supporting it, how these surpass dichotomous views of fast and slow food, and how these redefine essential dimensions of what it is that constitutes food and eating. I show that taste, rather than being a static attribute which determines people’s choices and status, is an active process of exploring, learning, and knowing. The analysis of relations between people, food and the senses is grounded in ethnographic research pursued with the Slow Food Movement in Britain. This international organization, originating in Italy, advocates that the education of taste is imperative and people need to develop and deepen their knowledge about food by eating produce which is produced, sourced, sold and prepared in sustainable and equitable ways. The thesis discusses discursive and embodied ways of engaging with food and proposes approaching the formation and training of taste in terms of patterns of perceptual experience. In highlighting food tasting as a sensory practice, I introduce the notion of sensory pageantry and evaluate several tensions and contestations around speedier and slower modalities of experiencing taste. Thus, I demonstrate that training techniques of remembering, repeating, rebalancing and fine-tuning hone taste into a skill and mode of knowing. This thesis argues that taste is relational and multi-sensuous. Methodologically, this thesis takes an interdisciplinary perspective and draws on arguments, concepts and theories from anthropology and sociology, cultural geography and ecological psychology. Furthermore, this thesis introduces storytelling as a way of ‘capturing’ the evanescent and fleeting character of taste. Acknowledgments I declare that this thesis is my own work and has not been submitted in substantially the same form for the award of a higher degree elsewhere Special thanks to my supervisors John Urry and Anne Cronin for believing in my work, and for seeing me through the writing process with patience, perseverance, and good humour. I admire and respect their work and their integrity. To Yoke-Sum Wong and Rebecca Ellis for their inspiring suggestions and heartfelt encouragements. To Katja Neves-Graca for bringing me on this path, for honing my senses for the visible and the invisible, for always making me more aware of the bigger picture and for reminding me that everything is interconnected. I owe many thanks to all the participants in the Slow Food Movement who have shared their knowledge, enthusiasm, and time with me. Special thanks to Annette Gibbons, David Natt, Sylvia Davidson, David Harding, Bruce Scholten, Laura Mason, Liz Merrywater, and Phil Keenan. To my colleagues and friends in our incredibly supportive, inspiring and fun writing group: Sergio Fava, Silvia Ferreira, Allison Hui, Misela Mavric, Sung- Yueh Perng, Tom Roberts, and James Tomasson. To each one of my devoted friends for accompanying me from close and afar on this journey and putting up with my long periods of absence. Special thanks to Viv Cuthill. To my parents for their love, trust and immense generosity. To ORSAS for funding parts of my PhD and the Sociology Department for the generous support. Contents Abstract Acknowledgments Preface 3 Chapter 1 Introduction 6 Chapter 2 To Eat or Not to Eat: Popular Discourses of Food in the West 43 Introduction 43 Sketching the field of food advocacy 45 Radical breaks and gastro-anomy 50 Historical roots of food advice 55 Sensory expertise 56 Chapter 3 Slow Food 68 Introduction 68 The beginnings of Slow Food 75 Structure and projects of Slow Food 82 Relational concepts and their openness 90 Chapter 4 Taste Formations: Displaced and Emplaced Tastes 98 Introduction 98 Historicized palates: The case of MSG/Umami 103 Hyperpalatability and speed: Food, fuel, and fetish 106 Emplacing taste: The case of terroir 114 Sensory pageantry and food tastings 118 Chapter 5 Contesting Vision: Cooks and Cooking 133 Introduction 133 Patterns of cuisine in France 137 Further developments and reforms: A fresh aesthetic emphasis 149 Cooks and chefs: From legislators to interpreters 159 Slow food differences: Synergy, synecdoche, and seizure 163 Chapter 6 Training Taste: Slow Food Taste Workshops 176 Introduction 176 1 Tasting wines with David 179 Embodied and emergent tastes 190 The vitality of foods: Producers’ views 198 Socialising taste 202 Chapter 7 Tasting Sociality: Slow Food Dinner Events 211 Introduction 211 Sociality 212 Eating, dwelling, moving 220 Temporalities of taste 234 Sequence 1: Che Vita and Bistro 21 in Durham 235 Sequence 2: Eating and touring in Cumbria 238 Sequence 3: Cooking class and lunch 242 Chapter 8 Conclusion 251 Bibliography 265 2 Preface For a long time now I have been intrigued by how food reveals people’s relationship to eating in terms of distance or proximity to the body, the self, the objects of consumption, other people, and more largely to socio-natural environments. In this way, philosophical writings on the predicament of humans to engage with the world through dual modes of reflection and perception have impinged on my thoughts. Curtin and Heldke’s edited volume on Cooking, Eating, Thinking. Transformative Philosophies of Food (1992) figured as an early trigger of my intellectual quest for approaching and grasping people’s relationships with food. The authors evaluate how deep-seated patterns in the Western tradition of separating between mind and body, subject and object, have installed a range of hierarchies and oppositions that encouraged a view of food and eating as a rather insignificant domain compared to other more noble human intellectual pursuits of constructing meaning in and of the world. But this thesis does not attempt to establish the worthiness of studying food or to bring food back into the mind. Traditional food and taste studies have contributed a lot in this respect. It has been shown that eating is part of the process of civilization (i.e. Mennell 1984) and that it can figure as an utmost symbol of aesthetic refinement (predominant here are elaborate descriptions of French cuisine of the 18th and 19th century) and further that status and hierarchies are kept in place through class-defined modes of eating (for instance Bourdieu 1984). But such accounts in my view are insufficient to account for current challenges posed to food systems in terms of addressing more sustainable ways of eating and living in the world. Discourses, practices, mobilities, and power relations of the most diverse kinds surpass classes and groups and act on scales which do alter the ways people eat and think with foods. 3 The challenge which this thesis engages with is not to overcome binary understandings, but rather to find new ways of addressing them and exploring what they do to people, and how they impinge upon discourses and practices. In this respect, the thesis engages with several relations and relationalities between concepts, categories and practices rather than assuming the rigidity of some such dualisms. This thesis offers a modest attempt to exemplify such a challenge and shows how discursive and material embodied forms of talking about, looking at, and tasting food and drink in more or less public tasting and dining situations complicate or dilute neat boundaries between categories of food and forms of engagement with food. It presents cases and instances which seem to suggest that people’s multiple interests and pleasures with food denote more than simple displays of likes, knowledges, and group belonging. Attention to food initiates novel ways to re-engage bodies and selves with the vitality of food and in this way experience anew and more intensely the care involved in eating and growing food, the sociality of sharing foods, and the often idiosyncratic cycles of socio-natural environments. The start of my PhD research was marked on a more personal level by a variety of encounters with food and people. A dozen of us coming from various corners of the world started the PhD programme in Lancaster a few years ago and we decided to meet every Sunday to share a meal together. Each one of us cooked traditional meals from our country of origins and these meetings provided us with a joy and intensity of living in our new place which in time created very strong bonds and friendships which outlasted all the subsequent years. It also got us more attached to the new place which was to be our home for several years and provided the imaginative and material nourishment for each of our different journeys and quests. 4 In light of the above encounters and the ethnographic research pursued in Britain with groups keen to know foods, tastes and people, this thesis asks the following