Another holiday season is behind us. Literally. Since Thanksgiving, we’ve eaten turkey, tofurkey, ham,
stuffing, more stuffing, gravy, cookies, pies, and hearty breakfasts to boost
our energy for another round of meals.
We’ve put on another few pounds, and now look forward to our New Year’s
resolutions to lose weight, exercise, eat better, blah, blah, blah.
Americans have a bizarre relationship to food. We’ve got a lot of it, but we don’t
treat it right. Food that’s good
for us costs a lot of money, which means poor people (that’s almost all of us
in this new world order) can afford only what clogs arteries, triggers
diabetes, and generally makes us fat.
Since we work so much, we have no time to exercise, and less time to
prepare decent meals. (Woe betide
those of us with food-related health problems, since we likely can’t afford to
see a doctor or afford the cholesterol medication we’d be prescribed if we
managed an appointment.) So, yeah,
we’re a bit schizophrenic when it comes to food.
But take another look. Food, so necessary to our survival, is actually weaved into
our cultural and personal identity in fascinating ways. We’re so used to viewing food as
somehow separate from who we are, what we believe — it’s an other in several important senses —
that we don’t stop to realize just how much it shapes and reflects our
lives. We feel disconnected from
food partly because of how easy it is for us to obtain it, partly because there
is so much variety that we don’t understand what it means outside of its
cultural or geographical context, and partly because we are, quite literally,
removed from it. For example, no
meat or poultry packaging helps us understand the source of the item or how it
came to be displayed in the refrigerated section of the market. I’m sure few city-dwellers or suburban
Americans have viewed a slaughter firsthand, let alone ever killed their own
food.
We should, however, stop and consider just how intimate is
our relationship with the materials that keep us alive and (hopefully)
healthy. Food has functions and
symbolic significance in religious traditions and rituals. Food reflects cultural changes as one
becomes assimilated into another – both the assimilated culture and the dominant
culture’s cuisine are affected. It
is a symbol of economic and social status, as are the restaurants and brands
that cater to the various economic classes; we also associate food with certain
gender stereotypes. Food can serve
as political and moral statements, too.
Even our emotions and sense of home, well being, and safety are often
represented by food. Food is even
sexy. (a scene from the 1986 Mickey Rouke and Kim Basinger film, “Nine and a
Half Weeks” springs to mind…) So,
it makes sense not just to say, as the old cliché goes, ‘You are what you eat.’ It also is appropriate to say, ‘You eat
what you are.’
It was the 18th century French queen, Marie
Antoinette, who allegedly said of starving people, “Let them eat cake.” Given the political context in which
this statement was allegedly uttered, along with the fact that Marie was a
foreigner and (gasp!) a woman, the cruel frivolity of the statement solidified
Marie Antoinette’s place in history.
People can survive on bugs, and many to this day gain essential
nutrients from eating mud, but long before Marie came onto the scene, preparing
food had become an art form. It
wasn’t enough just to eat to survive, food should taste good, too, if you could
afford such a luxury.
The material conditions in which one finds oneself
determines much about the way one lives.
Whether home was in the jungles or up in the mountains; by the sea or in
the desert, where you found yourself dictated what you ate and how you
lived. Marx took this rather
obvious fact and made it part of the foundation of his philosophy. Given our modern means of storage,
preservation, and transport, it’s easy for us to forget that, as recently as
hundreds of years ago, people ate what they found or could make out of their
environment. If you lived along
the water, for example, you subsisted largely on fish. Out of such conditions come the
regional cuisine for which a culture becomes known.
Our cultural identity, interestingly enough, is often
inextricably connected with food.
Soul food in the American South, Chinese (Cantonese, Mandarin, and so
on), Italian (red sauce or white?), Thai, Greek — you get the idea. Part of how groups of people think
seems to be represented by the foods they eat — the very foods with which
people outside that culture associate the group. An academic conference entitled “We Are What We Eat:
Archaeology, Food and Identity”, whose agenda was posted online included paper
titles such as “Fields and Tales of Sheba: Food, Identity and Politics in
Ancient Southern Arabia”, Human Excrement from a Prehistoric Saltmine as a
Mirror of Daily Life?”, and “Luxury Foods and Social Distinction: The
Contrasting Nature and Meaning of Luxury Foods in Iron age and Roman Britain”. Social scientists of all types have
been looking more closely at food as playing an important role in how a culture
lives and thinks.
Food has significance in religious traditions, as
well. Catholics represent the
blood and body of Christ with red wine and wafers. (I once read a story about a child in New Jersey whose
Communion was invalidated because the wafer she ate was rice instead of
wheat. Though she has an allergy
to wheat products, church doctrine mandates that the wafers be wheat.) The importance of food is one of
several ideas highlighted in the Muslim practice of fasting during
Ramadan. In fact, fasting is one
of the Five Pillars of Islam.
Judaism follows prohibition against eating certain types of animals,
animals raised in a certain way, and all shellfish. These are just a few of many examples of how food figures
prominently in religious traditions.
Imagine if food rituals and practices were taken out of these belief
systems, and suddenly the systems become foreign and confusing. The equation of food with certain
fundamental aspects of religious practice identifies food as that practice
itself.
Related to religious practices, food can represent moral
and political positions. The
famous lunch counter sit-ins of the 1960s in the South were profoundly
significant elements of the civil rights movement. The act of black and white patrons sitting side-by-side was
just as complex and morally adamant as any speech on equality. The idea of sitting down with another
person and ‘breaking bread’ with him is historically a sign of friendship,
trust, and recognition of another as an equal.
More recently, the massive coffee company, Starbucks
experienced widespread pressure to engage in the Fair Trade cooperatives with
coffee growers in South American countries by both brewing Fair Trade coffee
and selling Fair Trade whole beans.
Patrons learned that coffee growers became increasingly impoverished as
the companies that bought their beans, including Starbucks, increased their
wealth by astounding amounts. The
Fair Trade organization works to ensure that coffee growers (along with a
number of other farmers, craft producers, and workers) are not exploited. Once the problem was publicized,
drinking Starbucks coffee became something of a social taboo.
Even American politicians have used food as a political
device. Remember “Freedom Fries”? That moniker was the result of
Representative Bob Ney’s (R-Ohio) order to rename French Fries “Freedom Fries”
in the House cafeteria. It seemed
a silly thing to do, but betrays just how closely identified cultures (and
nationalities) are with their food.
If you are a vegetarian or vegan, you likely have a strong
moral conviction that eating non-human animals or their products is wrong. An entire culture and consumer market
built up around vegetarianism, which finally gained mainstream acceptance in
the 1990s. Today, many people are
fighting against industrial farms — the very machine-like production of meat
and poultry that makes these items pretty affordable — because of the harrowing
conditions in which chicken, pigs, cows, and other non-human animals are forced
to live before slaughter.
It’s not just the living conditions, either, but also the
food these animals are fed, food that is arguably good neither for them nor for
the people who eventually eat them.
Then, of course, there is the slaughtering itself, which is almost
invariably a gruesome process to behold, and likely a terrifying process for a
non-rational animal (or any animal, for that matter) to endure. Some scientists have begun arguing that
animals killed under stressful conditions are less tasty because of the
hormones released prior to death.
A fascinating scientist, Temple Grandin, created a “squeeze machine”
designed to calm cattle at the abattoir.
Grandin, an autistic and Ph.D. in Animal Science, engineered the device
based on memories of wrapping herself in a blanket as a child — a safe house of
sorts.
So mainstream is food culture, that cable networks such as
The Food Network are thriving and producing culinary stars such as Emeril
Lagasse (“Bam!”), Bobbie Flay, Mario Batali . Most of these chefs are now household names, largely because
of their popular cooking shows. Of
course, the all-time, original cooking show star was the late Julia Child. On her long-running PBS show, Ms. Child
single-handedly taught generations of Americans how to cook.
Though she is known for other skills (and legal
indiscretions) besides cooking, Martha Stewart also made the idea of cooking
well seem as easy as going to a McDonald’s drive-thru. And speaking of McDonald’s, the
fast-food restaurant chain’s recent healthy menu makeover reveals our most
commonly talked about relation to food.
A scene from the 1996 film, “Big Night” offers another
moral dimension to our relationship with food. In this scene, two stereotypically crass Americans walk into
an Italian bistro run by two Italian brothers (played by the great Stanley
Tucci and the equally great Tony Shalhoub) trying to “make it” in the
restaurant business in the 1950s.
The woman complains about having to wait so long for her food. She is used to restaurants (and likely
the burgeoning frozen food market) that produce food quickly, but with little
care or taste. When her Seafood
Risotto finally comes out, she is annoyed that she can’t see the seafood. In a moment of culinary blasphemy, she
orders a side of pasta and meatballs to go with her dish. When the chef, refuses to fill her
request, the brothers fall into an argument about the morality of art versus
commerce.
Food, it turns out, is at the heart of life — and not just
in the biological sense. Yes, we
need food to live, and anyone who’s ever gone hungry can appreciate just how
profound that need is. But food
also says something important about what sort of life we want to have, what
sort of life we’re willing to live, and what sort of life we have to live. Indeed, these issues are issues about
the human condition itself. So,
before you buy your next can of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup, your next head
of Romaine lettuce, or your next carton of eggs, take at least a moment to ask
yourself why.
Eat well!