FOOD the Key Concepts
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FOOD The Key Concepts ISSN 1747-6550 The series aims to cover the core disciplines and the key cross-disciplinary ideas across the Humanities and Social Sciences. Each book isolates the key concepts to map out the theoretical terrain across a specific subject or idea. Designed specifically for student readers, each book in the series includes boxed case material, summary chapter bullet points, annotated guides to further reading and questions for essays and class discussion Film: The Key Concepts Nitzan Ben-Shaul Globalization: The Key Concepts Thomas Hylland Eriksen Food: The Key Concepts Warren Belasco Technoculture: The Key Concepts Debra Benita Shaw The Body: The Key Concepts Lisa Blackman New Media: The Key Concepts Nicholas Gane and David Beer FOOD The Key Concepts Warren Belasco Oxford • New York English edition First published in 2008 by Berg Editorial offices: First Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford OX4 1AW, UK 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA © Warren Belasco 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg. Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Belasco, Warren James. Food : the key concepts / Warren Belasco. p. cm.—(The key concepts, ISSN 1747-6550) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-672-7 (cloth) ISBN-10: 1-84520-672-X (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-673-4 (paper) ISBN-10: 1-84520-673-8 (paper) 1. Food. 2. Food—Social aspects. 3. Food habits. I. Title. TX353.B445 2008 641.3—dc22 2008024617 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978 1 84520 672 7 (Cloth) 978 1 84520 673 4 (Paper) Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn www.bergpublishers.com This book is dedicated to my students at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and to my colleagues at the Association for the Study of Food and Society. This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Overview ix 1 Why Study Food? 1 Chapter Summary 13 2 Identity: Are We What We Eat? 15 Cuisine 15 Madeleines: Food and Memory 25 Chapter Summary 34 3 The Drama of Food: Divided Identities 35 Food and Sexuality 35 Food and Gender 41 Embattled Food 52 Chapter Summary 53 4 Convenience: The Global Food Chain 55 Inside Gigantic 67 The Eight Fs 70 Chapter Summary 78 5 Responsibility: Who Pays for Dinner? 79 Health Costs: Food-borne Illness 84 Health Costs: Fatness 88 Confronting the Externalities 96 Chapter Summary 103 viii c o n t e n t s 6 The Future of Food 105 Scenarios 113 The Technological Fix: Business as Usual 114 The Anthropological Fix: Back to the Future 118 Chapter Summary 123 Questions for Essays and Class Discussion 125 Notes 129 Bibliography 135 Index 151 OVERVIEW There is nothing more basic than food. Food is the first of the essentials of life, our biggest industry, our most frequently indulged pleasure, and perhaps the greatest cause of disease and death. Despite its importance, food is often taken for granted, especially by academics, who have long considered food matters to be too coarse for scholarly attention. But the field of food studies has expanded tremendously in recent years, and many colleges and universities are now offering food-related courses designed for undergraduates in liberal arts programs. This book offers an interdisciplinary introduction to the study of food. It opens with a brief analysis of why food has been ignored by scholars for so long. Then it offers a graphic way of understanding and thinking about how people decide what to eat. Food choices are the result of a complex negotiation among three competing considerations: the consumer’s identity (social and personal), matters of convenience (price, skill, availability), and a sense of responsibility (an awareness of the conse- quences of what we eat). In separate chapters we look at each of these considerations. For identity we examine the psychological, cultural, and demographic determin- ants of what and how we eat. Since many people have very conflicted feelings about food, we devote space to how our divided identities may be represented in popular music, literature, and film. Then we look at convenience, which is provided, for profit, by the global food industry, the world’s largest industry. Next, in the hopes of being responsible consumers, we examine some of the medical, political, and environmental costs of our modern feast. Finally, mindful of growing world population and diminishing resources, we examine two very different scenarios for feeding the future, the technological fix, which pins its hope on continued scientific breakthroughs, and the anthropological fix, which hopes to change human expectations and behaviors. This page intentionally left blank 1 WHY STUDY FOOD? Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755–1826) What is food to one man may be fierce poison to others. Lucretius (99–55 BCE) History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of the King’s bastards, but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. That is the way of human folly. Jean Henry Fabre (1825–1915) Welcome to food studies! Food is the first of the essentials of life, the world’s largest industry, our most frequently indulged pleasure, the core of our most intimate social relationships. It’s very hard to imagine a positive social experience that does not involve the sharing of food – whether a simple cup of tea with an acquaintance, a lunchtime “bite” with colleagues, or a sumptuous lobster dinner with a lover. On a broader level, civilization itself is impossible without food: with the invention of agriculture some ten thousand years ago came city states and empires, art, music, and organized warfare. Agriculture remade the world, both physically and culturally, transforming landscapes and geography, subsidizing soldiers and poets, politicians and priests (Diamond 1999: 236). For French epicure Brillat-Savarin, we are what we eat – and for Lucretius, we are what we won’t eat. Our tastes are as telling as our distastes. To be a member of the Parakana people of the Amazon rain forest is to relish roasted tapir and to despise monkey meat, while the neighboring Arara feel quite the reverse (Rensberger 1991: A3). Food identifies who we are, where we came from, and what we want to be. “Food reveals our souls,” sociologist Gary Alan Fine writes. “Like Marcel Proust reminiscing about a madeleine or Calvin Trillin astonished at a plate of ribs, we are entangled in our meals” (1996:1). Food is “a highly condensed social fact,” anthropologist Arjun Appadurai observes, “and a marvelously plastic kind of collective representation” (1981: 494). 2 food: the key concepts Food is also the object of major anxiety, for what and how we eat may be the single most important cause of disease and death. We can’t live without food, but food also kills us. As psychologist Paul Rozin puts it, “Food is fundamental, fun, frightening, and far-reaching” (1999: 9–30). And probably nothing is more frightening or far- reaching than the prospect of running out of food. “A hungry stomach will not allow its owner to forget it, whatever his cares and sorrows,” Homer wrote almost 3,000 years ago. Even in good times, we are not allowed to forget our deeply rooted heritage of food insecurity. “When thou hast enough,” Ecclesiasticus warned, c.180 BCE, “remember the time of hunger.” As if to take advantage of the brief break from habitual scarcity, our bodies store up fat for the next famine – hence the current obesity crisis – while our prophets warn us against complacency. For much of history the search for sufficient food drove the conquest and colonization of continents – and the enslavement or eradication of entire populations. Food matters. It has weight, and it weighs us down. And yet, until recently scholars were amazingly reluctant to study food, especially the aspect closest to our hearts (and arteries): food consumption. To be sure, food production has received considerable attention in established disciplines such as econ- omics, chemistry, agronomy, engineering, marketing, and labor relations. Scientists have long explored the negative pathologies of malnutrition, hunger, and adul- teration. But when it comes to analyzing the more positive and intimate features of what, how, and why we eat, academics have been considerably more reticent. Even now, with the rising interest in food studies, a serious analysis of family dinner rituals, cookbooks, or the appeal of fast food may still evoke surprise and even scorn. “Do professors really study that?” your friends and family ask. “If you’re going to go around telling your colleagues you are a philosopher of food,” philosopher Lisa Heldke writes, “you better be prepared to develop a thick skin – and start a wisecrack collection” (2006: 202). Why this reluctance to address the wider meaning of our food behaviors? Why is food taken for granted, at least in academia? For one thing, intellectuals are heirs to a classical dualism that prizes mind over body. In Cooking, Eating, Thinking, Heldke and her colleague Deane Curtin write, “Our tradition has tended to privilege questions about the rational, the unchanging, and the eternal, and the abstract and the mental; and to denigrate questions about embodied, concrete, practical experience” (Curtin 1992: xiv). Philosopher Carolyn Korsmeyer agrees that “Taste and eating [are] tied to the necessities of existence and are thus classified as lower functions .