Celebrity Chef, Luxury & Ethical Eating
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Celebrity Chef, Luxury & Ethical Eating. Virginia Catena Student ID: 60951 Supervisor: Linda Lapina Bachelor Project Autumn/Winter Semester 2018 1 Abstract This project explores through Critical Discourse Analysis the subjects of ethical eating and luxury, within the context of Dan Barber’s book “The Third Plate: Fieldnotes on the future of Food”(2014). The analysis section is structured in three main sections: Narrating produce, the chef and ethical consumption and lastly it explores Barbers ideas on food choices and taste. The analysis section is supported by Bourdieu’s notion of Cultural Capital, Habitus, The taste of Luxury and Necessity. Furthermore, Johnston & Baumann’s “Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape”(2010) plays a central role in unpacking the discousess regarding the politics of eating that Barber reproduces in his book referred to as “Win, win” Logic. Virginia Catena Roskilde University 2018 2 Table of Contents Motivation 3 Introduction 4 Dan Barber 5 “The Third Plate”, a short summary. 5 Problem Area 8 Methodology 9 Theory 11 Foodscape & The Foodie 12 Eating Ethically & Celebrity Chefs, a brief overview. 13 Bourdieu: The use of Cultural Capital & The taste of necessity and Luxury 14 Analysis 17 Part 1: Produce 17 Part 2: The Chef 24 Part 3 29 Concluding Discussion. 32 Bibliography 35 Virginia Catena Roskilde University 2018 3 Motivation The trajectory to my current project is peculiar. This project started with the idea of studying Urban Gardens in Copenhagen, aiming to do participant observation in a specific one. I was fascinated by this rooftop space were people volunteer every week to pick vegetables, that they will later eat in their little farm-to-table restaurant. I emailed the garden, to ask them if I could participate in their volunteer days, to perform a series of observations. While I waited for their reply, I began to look at who had written about the farm-to-table movement. So within the possibilities I saw Dan Barber's name. I remembered Dan Barber as what was probably what I would qualify as the most boring episode on the otherwise brilliant show “Chef’s Table”. Barber, was not half as charismatic as Massimo Bottura talking about his epiphany during an Art Biennale in Milan or Alex Atala exploring the Amazon. He was this skinny New Yorker chefs, calmed, talking from his farm Blue Hill. I gave Barber’s book a chance, despite my lack of interest in his character or his food. What I found wrapped me in; stories of producers all over the world that do things differently and a chef that is concerned with how we eat. The side story to my project became the story, and in some way, I was fortunate that the garden took a while to reply. Virginia Catena Roskilde University 2018 4 Introduction This project will explore the book “The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food” by Dan Barber. The project will use Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA) as a tool to explore Barber’s narratives concerning chefs, eating ethically and luxury. The first section of the project will be dedicated to briefly introducing the reader to who is Dan Barber and to Barber’s book, how it is structured and what are its main themes. A method section will follow, explaining why CDA(Fairclough, 1992) is the adequate methodological approach in the context of the analysis. Furthermore, the theory section will expand on the main theoretical tools that will be used in said analysis. Firstly, a review of the “foodscape” today and the role of the foodie(Johnston & Baumann, 2010), that is whom Barber is addressing in his book. Moreover, will briefly review how the figure of the celebrity chef emerged(Lee, 2014). Later, I will review the concepts of Cultural Capital (Bourdieu, 1984) by Bourdieu as well as some of the notions he presents in “Distinction” regarding taste production and Luxury(Bourdieu, 1986). After reviewing all these key theoretical components, follows the analysis section. This will be divided into three sections. The first one will engage with produce or goods and how these are narrated within the scope of Barber’s worldview. The second one is the chefs' place in ethical consumption. This section develops on Barber’s broader ideas on what are the chef’s responsibilities and how do they relate to food choices. Dan Barber Dan Barber is an American chef. He became famous first for his work in Blue Hill restaurant that opened its doors in the year 2000 in New York City. Later, in 2004, he radicalised his farm-to-table approach by partnering with The Stone Barns Centre Virginia Catena Roskilde University 2018 5 for Food and Agriculture in Upstate New York and opened a branch of Blue Hill in the same year. The Stone Barns Centre started as an initiative of the Rockefeller Foundation in 2001 to educate young farmers. Barber’s family farm, Blue Hill, (that served as inspiration for his first restaurant’s name) was the adjacent farm to the new Stone Barns Centre. Barber’s involvement in the centre was a pivotal point. His involvement gave the Stone Barns Centre a clear purpose, and he became instrumental in developing close relations with farmers around the world. Barber purpose became to communicate the intricate relation between agriculture and a plate of food. Barber was also, appointed during the Obama administration, to serve as counsel in matters of Nutrition. “The Third Plate”, a short summary. “In the future delicious food is in the hands of farmers who grow nature and abide by its instructions, we ought to become more literate about what that means. (..) The Farmers in this book farm one level down. They don’t think in terms of cultivating one thing. If your worldview is that everything is connected to something else, why would you? Instead, they grow nature by orchestrating a whole system of farming. And they produce a lot of things -delicious food, to be sure, but also things we can’t easily measure or see” -Dan Barber, The Third Plate, 2004. “The Third Plate: Field notes on the Future of Food” came out in 2014. The book is a collection of stories Dan Barber compiled during ten years of interacting with other Chefs and Farmers; coincidentally, this was around the time that Blue Hill became part of the Stone Barns Centre. The book's structure is simple, its divided into four main sections Soil, Land, Sea and Seed. Each chapter begins with an opinion piece of the state of industrial practices on that particular environment and moves on to take an example of a specific producer or/and chef, that will guide the message Barber hopes to convey. Virginia Catena Roskilde University 2018 6 The first chapter, Soil, addresses the changes that wheat, as a crop, has undergone in the context of American Agriculture. The section is a simple overview of American Agriculture, a story about abundance. How has the American landscape changed with the development of industrial farming techniques? Barber argues that because of the how vast and fertile American soil was, producers, stop worrying about feeding their land. American Farmers began concentrating on the yields of their harvest to the detriment of the land. Pesticides and fertilisers came into the equation later on and finally, genetical engineering changed wheat so drastically, that instead of relying on the richness of the soil, the crop became dependant on the heavy use of fertilisers to reach its optimal form. Barber’s example for “Soil” is Klaas Martens and his wife Mary-Howell, a couple of now renowned organic farmers from Penn Yan, New York. Klass tale is set on a farm that his family had own for three generations. He grew up in the rise of pesticides and genetically engineered crops that his father and grandfather revered since the yields were growing each year. In 1994, Klass got sick after spraying pesticides on his farm. Mary-Howell and Klass decide to go organic after that year, and they began the long process recovering the health of their farm. In the twenty years between their start as organic farmers and the publishing of “The Third Plate”, the couple became the pioneers of organic farming in the Penn Yan area. Perhaps the most interesting fact is that the community who was in disbelief in 1994 of their neighbour's new practices, is now a predominantly organic community. Klass and Mary-Howell might seem like two characters from the book far from the theme of this project, but they are key players in Barber’s worldview. Firstly in the idea of interconnectedness between the chef and the farmer, that I will develop on my analysis. “Rotation Risotto” one of Barber’s most famous dishes were he uses as a base for the Risotto whatever crop is rotating in the farm during that season is a gesture towards the couple as mentioned earlier, and will be another subject delved into in the analysis section. Part two of the book is called “Land” and will be one of the main analytical focuses of this project. The main story Barber puts forward to convey his message is Eduardo Sousa’s “gavage” free foie gras. In this chapter, Barber discusses foie gras and its problematic production. Foie gras is fattened ducks or geese liver that in most of the Virginia Catena Roskilde University 2018 7 cases has been produced by a force-feeding technique called ‘gavage’. Gavage consists of inserting a tube powered by a pneumatic or hydraulic pump into the animal's throat and force-feeding it corn in the 12-15 days before the slaughter (Rochlitz & Broom, 2017).