food and culture
The classic book that helped to defi ne and legitimize the fi eld of food and culture studies is now available, with major revisions, in an affordable e-book version (978-0- 203-07975-1).
The third edition includes forty original essays and reprints of previously published classics under fi ve Sections: Foundations; Hegemony and Difference; Consumption and Embodiment; Food and Globalization ; and Challenging, Contesting, and Transforming the Food System.
Seventeen of the forty chapters included are either new to this edition, rewritten by their original authors, or edited by Counihan and Van Esterik.
A bank of test items applicable to each article in the book is available to instructors interested in selecting this edition for course use. Simply send an email to the pub- lisher at textbooksonline@taylorandfrancis.com.
Carole Counihan is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Millersville University in Pennsylvania and editor-in-chief of Food and Foodways . Her earlier books include Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family, and Gender in Twentieth-Century Florence , Food in the USA , and The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power .
Penny Van Esterik is Professor of Anthropology at York University in Toronto, Canada, where she teaches nutritional anthropology, in addition to doing research on food and globalization in Southeast Asia. She is a founding member of WABA (World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action) and writes on infant and young child feeding, including her earlier book, Beyond the Breast-Bottle Controversy .
food and culture
a reader
third edition
edited by
carole counihan and
penny van esterik
First published 2013 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Food and culture : a reader / edited by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. – 3rd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Food–Social aspects. 2. Food habits. I. Counihan, Carole, 1948- II. Van Esterik, Penny.
GT2850.F64 2012
394.1'2–dc23 2012021989 ISBN: 978-0-415-52103-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-52104-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-07975-1 (ebk) Typeset in Minion
by Cenveo Publisher Services, Bangalore
Foreword from The Gastronomical Me , M.F.K. Fisher xi
Preface to the Third Edition xii
Acknowledgments xiii
Why Food? Why Culture? Why Now? Introduction to the Third Edition 1 Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik
Foundations
1. Why Do We Overeat? 19 Margaret Mead
This piece questions attitudes towards food and eating in a world where food is overabundant and we face the ambiguity of overindulgence and guilt.
2. Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption 23 Roland Barthes
Barthes explains how food acts as a system of communication and provides a body of images that mark eating situations.
3. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste 31 Pierre Bourdieu (tr. Richard Nice)
Bourdieu addresses differences between taste of luxury and taste of necessity through his theory of class distinction.
4. The Culinary Triangle 40
Claude Lévi-Strauss
This classic structuralist statement, often critiqued, shows how food preparation can be analyzed as a triangular semantic fi eld, much like language.
5. The Abominations of Leviticus 48
Mary Douglas
Douglas applies structural analysis to the establishment of Jewish dietary rules as a means to develop self-control, distinction, and a sense of belonging based on the construction of holiness.
vi Contents
6. The Abominable Pig 59
Marvin Harris
Materialists like Harris reject symbolic and structuralist explanations and explain food prohibitions based on economic and ecological utility.
7. Industrial Food: Towards the Development of a World Cuisine 72 Jack Goody
The early industrialization of food processing was made possible by advancements in preservation, mechanization, marketing, and
transport of food items. These advances also separated urban and rural societies from food manufacturing.
8. Time, Sugar, and Sweetness 91 Sidney W. Mintz
Colonialism made high-status sugar produced in the Caribbean into a working class staple.
Hegemony and Difference: Race, Class, and Gender
9. More than Just the “Big Piece of Chicken”: The Power of Race,
Class, and Food in American Consciousness 107 Psyche Williams-Forson
Ethnographic, historical, and literary research reveals not only controlling and damaging stereotypes about African Americans and chicken but also the ways Black women have used chicken as a form of resistance and community survival.
10. The Overcooked and Underdone: Masculinities in
Japanese Food Programming 119 T.J.M. Holden
Cooking shows featuring male chefs predominate on Japanese television and propagate one-dimensional defi nitions of masculinity based on power, authority, and ownership of consumer commodities.
11. Domestic Divo? Televised Treatments of Masculinity, Femininity,
and Food 137 Rebecca Swenson
The programs of The Food Network manifest gender stereotypes while also providing an avenue for challenging ideas of male and female roles regarding food.
12. Japanese Mothers and Obento-s: The Lunch-Box as Ideological
State Apparatus 154 Anne Allison
Japanese mothers, in preparing elaborate lunch-boxes for their preschool children, reproduce state ideologies of power.
13. Mexicanas’ Food Voice and Differential Consciousness
in the San Luis Valley of Colorado 173 Carole Counihan
Food-centered life histories portray the voices and perspectives of traditionally muted Hispanic women of rural southern Colorado whose food stories reveal differential behaviors and consciousness which promote empowerment.
14. Feeding Lesbigay Families 187 Christopher Carrington
Because feeding work is complex, laborious, and highly gendered, it is problematic in lesbigay families because a full accounting of it would destroy illusions of equality and call into question masculinity of gay men who do it and femininity of lesbians who do not.
15. Thinking Race Through Corporeal Feminist Theory: Divisions and
Intimacies at the Minneapolis Farmers’ Market 211 Rachel Slocum
By applying feminist materialist theory, Slocum analyses the embodiment of race and its manifestations through food practices and behavior displayed at the farmers’ market.
16. The Raw and the Rotten: Punk Cuisine 231 Dylan Clark
Punk cuisine — based on scavenged, rotten, and/or stolen food — challenges the hierarchy, commodifi cation, toxicity, and environmental destruction of the capitalist food system.
Consumption and Embodiment
17. Fast, Feast, and Flesh: The Religious Signifi cance of Food to
Medieval Women 245 Caroline Walker Bynum
Medieval women used food for personal religious expression, including giving food away, exuding foods from their bodies, and undertaking fasts to gain religious and cultural power.
18. Not Just “a White Girl’s Thing”: The Changing Face of Food and
Body Image Problems 265 Susan Bordo
Bordo argues that eating disorders and body image issues are created through social and media pressures that target all women regardless of race or class.
19. De-medicalizing Anorexia: Opening a New Dialogue 276 Richard A. O’Connor
This paper offers a biocultural approach to anorexia that stresses how young people obsess not over beauty but over an ascetic search for self-control.
viii Contents
20. Feeding Hard Bodies: Food and Masculinities in Men’s Fitness
Magazines 284 Fabio Parasecoli
Men’s fi tness magazines defi ne masculinity through discussions of food and body, increasingly involving men in concerns about constructing corporeal perfection and regulating consumption to build muscle and strength.
21. Cooking Skills, the Senses, and Memory: The Fate of
Practical Knowledge 299 David Sutton
Practical knowledge of food preparation is an embodied skill that uses all the senses. Standardization of modern food practices affects the social dimensions of this type of experiential learning.
22. Not “From Scratch”: Thai Food Systems and “Public Eating” 320 Gisèle Yasmeen
The urban phenomenon of public eating in Thailand is a refl ection of changes in gender, labor, and household dynamics in a
(post)industrial food system.
23. Rooting Out the Causes of Disease: Why Diabetes is So
Common Among Desert Dwellers 330 Gary Paul Nabhan
Skyrocketing type two diabetes among desert dwelling Seri Indians of Northern Mexico suggests that changes in diet have caused this major health problem and that traditional desert foods — especially legumes, cacti, and acorns — are protective.
24. Between Obesity and Hunger: The Capitalist Food Industry 342 Robert Albritton
Political economists identify how the industrial food system manipulates the price of commodity goods in order to shape the diet of Americans. This global capitalist food system with its cheap and addictive foods promotes both hunger and obesity.
Food and Globalization
25. “As Mother Made It”: The Cosmopolitan Indian Family,
“Authentic” Food, and the Construction of Cultural Utopia 355 Tulasi Srinivas
This chapter examines the growing consumption of packaged foods by middle-class South-Asian Indians in Bangalore and Boston and focuses on the relationship between authenticity, meanings of motherhood, and defi nitions of the family.
26. “Real Belizean Food”: Building Local Identity in the Transnational
Caribbean 376 Richard Wilk
Transformations in Belizean food from colonial times to the present demonstrate transnational political, economic, and culinary infl uences that have affected the ways Belizean people defi ne themselves and their nation.
27. Let’s Cook Thai: Recipes for Colonialism 394 Lisa Heldke
Cultural food colonialism is reproduced by food adventurers who seek out ethnic foods to satisfy their taste for the exotic other.
28. Slow Food and the Politics of “Virtuous Globalization” 409 Alison Leitch
This chapter provides a brief history of the Slow Food movement’s politics and controversies.
29. Taco Bell, Maseca, and Slow Food: A Postmodern Apocalypse
for Mexico’s Peasant Cuisine? 426 Jeffrey M. Pilcher
The case of Mexico highlights challenges to the program of Italy’s Slow Food Movement which offers strategies for the maintenance of traditional, local, and sustainable Mexican food but which does not address problems of class and food access.
30. Food Workers as Individual Agents of Culinary Globalization:
Pizza and Pizzaioli in Japan 437 Rossella Ceccarini
This chapter examines globalization of food through a case study of pizza in Japan through the transnational experiences of Japanese and Italian pizza chefs.
31. Of Hamburger and Social Space: Consuming McDonald’s in Beijing 449 Yungxiang Yan
In Beijing, Chinese consumers localize fast food by linking it to being American and being modern. They enjoy the standardization of meals, the hospitable service, the democratic environment, and the cleanliness, which create a desirable space to socialize and linger.
32. On the Move for Food: Three Women Behind the Tomato’s Journey 472 Deborah Barndt
The neoliberal model of production has contributed to the feminization of labor and poverty as told through the stories of two Mexican and one Canadian worker forced to adapt to the fl exibility of labor in the global food system.
Challenging, Contesting, and Transforming the Food System
33. The Chain Never Stops 485 Eric Schlosser
The mistreatment of meatpacking workers in the United States is linked to the high rates of trauma in this dangerous industry and reveals general problems of corporate food production.
x Contents
34. Fast Food/Organic Food: Refl exive Tastes and the Making of
“Yuppie Chow” 496 Julie Guthman
This chapter examines salad greens to study the development of modern organic food production, its roots in the counter culture movement of the 1960s, and its transformation into a gentrifi ed commodity reserved for a privileged niche market.
35. The Politics of Breastfeeding: An Advocacy Update 510 Penny Van Esterik
The commodifi cation of baby food has had severe consequences, but advocacy groups actively resist the promotional tactics of transnational food and pharmaceutical companies.
36. The Political Economy of Food Aid in an Era of Agricultural
Biotechnology 531 Jennifer Clapp
The advent of genetically modifi ed organisms (GMOs) has seriously affected food aid, even in the context of famine and extreme hunger.
37. The Political Economy of Obesity: The Fat Pay All 546 Alice Julier
The culture-wide denigration of the “obesity epidemic” is due not only to its health consequences, but also to the political and economic benefi ts to the food corporations, the diet industry, and the health professions.
38. Want Amid Plenty: From Hunger to Inequality 563 Janet Poppendieck
Because of great need, many US volunteers feed the hungry, but charity not only fails to solve the underlying causes of hunger — poverty and inequality — but contributes to it by offering token rather than structural solutions and taking the government off the hook.
39. Community Food Security “For Us, By Us”: The Nation of
Islam and the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church 572 Priscilla McCutcheon
McCutcheon looks at Black Nationalist religious organizations that aim to achieve racial self-reliance through community food movements.
40. Learning Democracy Through Food Justice Movements 587 Charles Z. Levkoe
The modern detachment of people from their food sources has fostered a surge of community involvement in the food movement. Through engagement in food justice organizations the public is relearning democratic citizenship and empathy for activism.
Contributors 602
Credit Lines 609
Index 614
People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do?
They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft.
The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it . . . and warmth and richness and fi ne reality of hunger satisfi ed . . . and it is all one.
I tell about myself, and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits, and it happens without my willing it that I am telling too about the people with me then, and their other deeper needs for love and happiness.
There is food in the bowl, and more often than not, because of what honesty I have, there is nourishment in the heart, to feed the wilder, more insistent hungers. We must eat. If, in the face of that dread fact, we can fi nd other nourishment, and tolerance and compassion for it, we’ll be no less full of human dignity.
There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk. And that is my answer, when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love?
M. F. K. Fisher The Gastronomical Me, originally published 1943
Preface to the Third Edition
In this third edition of Food and Culture: A Reader , our aim mirrors that of the previ- ous two editions: to provide a comprehensive introduction to the fi eld that contains classic foundational pieces, a range of outstanding articles refl ecting diverse perspec- tives and topics, and cutting edge new work. This task has become more challenging with each edition as the fi eld has exploded over the sixteen years since the fi rst edition appeared in 1997. To include new work and keep the Reader current and lively, we had to omit some pieces that we love, but we hope that the new articles will excite our readers and more than make up for what we dropped.
In this new edition, we have kept almost all of the foundational pieces but cut the article by De Certeau and Giard to include a selection from Pierre Bourdieu. We have modifi ed the section on food consumption and the body by reducing the number of articles on anorexia nervosa, expanding the focus on obesity, and including more diverse approaches to the body. This edition of the Reader maintains a broad geographical and multicultural coverage with articles on Euro-Americans, African Americans, and Latinos as well as on Japanese, Greek, Italian, Thai, South Asian, native American, Mexican, and Chinese food cultures. It continues to explore endur- ing topics of food and gender, consumption and meaning, globalization, and political economy, but introduces new topics with articles on farmers’ markets, community food security, the complexities of the organic food market, democracy and food jus- tice, cooking skill and its meanings, gender in food television, and packaged foods in the South Asian diaspora.
Since the fi rst edition of the book, we have been privileged to participate in the creation of the sumptuous covers. From the multihued noodles and fruit of the fi rst edition, to the sensuous chocolate dessert and colorful spices of the second, we have endeavored to combine foods like fi sh and tomatoes with culturally constructed products like sandwiches. We chose the Thai fruit and vegetable carving for this edi- tion’s cover to underscore the skill and effort involved in transforming foods into edible works of art, and the important place of the visual aspects of food in the anthro- pology of the senses.
We are pleased to publish this third edition not only in standard book format but also as an electronic book. For instructors who adopt the book in courses, we have also prepared test questions which are available on the book’s website. We have tried to pay more attention to temporal context in this edition, giving the original date of publication at the beginning of each article, to draw more attention to the scholarly context in which these papers were written.
We would like to thank many colleagues who provided feedback on the book, both those who chatted with us informally and those who provided formal reviews for Routledge.
Jonathan Maupin, Arizona State University Mary Malainey, Brandon University
Janet Alexanian, California State University, Fullerton Julie Fairbanks, Coe College
Amy Speier, Eckerd College
Thierry Rigogne, Fordham University Ari Ariel, New York University Susan C. Rogers, New York University Susan Cooper, Roosevelt University Claudia Chang, Sweet Briar College
Sharyn Jones, University of Alabama at Birmingham Don Pollock, University of Buffalo
J.D. Baker, University of Hawaii at Manoa Judy Rodriguez, University of North Florida Frayda Cohen, University of Pittsburgh Ann Reed, University of Akron
We thank the Boston University Gastronomy MLA students in Carole’s Food Anthro- pology class in spring semester 2012 who wrote reviews of many articles which helped us narrow our selection for this book: Mayling Chung, Aubee Duplesss, Monet Dyer, Jennifer French, Susie Helm, Brad Jones, Joyce Liao, Emily Olson, Katie Peterson, Erin Powell, Jessica Roat, Allison Schultz, Natalie Shmulik, Penny Skalnik, Shannon Streets, Kaylee Vickers, Rachel Wegman, and Chao-Hui (Amy) Young. We express eternal gratitude to Boston University Gastronomy MLA student Alexandre Galimberti for serving as editorial assistant on the project with effi ciency and equanimity. We would also like to thank our Routledge editor, Steve Rutter, for his good publishing sense and his unbelievable deadlines, Fred Courtright for help with permissions, Tom Hussey for the cover design, and Samantha Barbaro and Leah Babb-Rosenfeld for their editorial assistance.
Carole would like to thank the Millersville University Sociology-Anthropology Department and Faculty Grants Committee for years of support; the Boston Univer- sity MLA Gastronomy program and Rachel Black, its coordinator; the University of
xiv Acknowledgments
Gastronomic Sciences students, faculty and administration for providing the oppor- tunity to teach food anthropology in an international setting for the past eight won- derful years; and the University of Cagliari Visiting Professor program and colleagues Gabriella Da Re, Giovanna Caltagirone, Alessandra Guigoni, and many others. She would also like to thank her patient, smart, supportive husband, Jim Taggart, who has put up with more food anthropology than he ever dreamed of, and her children for their continuing ability to amaze her.
Penny would like to thank Vivian Khouw, Anne Meneley, Paul Antze, and Megan Davies for sharing their resources and experiences teaching about food, and suggest- ing readings that students enjoy, as well as her husband, John, whose hands and eyes greatly facilitated this project. Penny’s efforts on the reader are dedicated to her late mentor, Dr. Michael Latham, founding director of International Nutrition at Cornell, who embodied lasting lessons about how to combine academic integrity with activist social justice around the subject of food and hunger.
Why Food? Why Culture? Why Now?
Introduction to the Third Edition
Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik
In 1997, when we proposed the fi rst Food and Culture Reader , we had to persuade Routledge of the importance of publishing it. In 2012, Routledge had to persuade us to undertake the arduous task of reviewing the incredibly expanded literature to produce a third edition. We hope that the current selection of articles gives a snapshot of how the fi eld has grown and developed from its early foundations. Cultural anthropology remains the central discipline guiding this fi eld. Food and nutritional anthropology in particular, and food studies generally, manage to rise above the dualisms that threaten to segment most fi elds of study. This fi eld resists separating biological from cultural, individual from society, and local from global culture, but rather struggles with their entanglements. Food and culture studies have somehow made interdisciplinarity workable. Sometimes co-opting, more often embracing the history and geography of food as part of the holistic emphasis of anthropology, food studies have become increasingly sophisticated theoretically. We hope these papers reveal the roots of contemporary issues in food studies, and we acknowledge our bias towards particular subjects that most engage our interest.
Scholarship in food studies has expanded remarkably over the past decade. A quick and by no means exhaustive bibliographic search turns up scores of recent food books in fi elds as diverse as philosophy (Heldke 2003 , Kaplan 2012 , Korsmeyer 2002 ), psychology (Conner and Armitage 2002 , Ogden 2010 ), geography (Carney 2001, 2010, Friedberg 2009 , Guthman 2011 , Yasmeen 2006 ), fi lm studies (Bower 2004 , Ferry 2003 , Keller 2006 ) 1 , and architecture (Franck 2003 , Horwitz and Singley 2006 ), not to mention the vast literature in food’s traditional fi elds of nutrition, home economics, and agriculture. Countless new texts abound on food in literature—from the study of eating and being eaten in children’s literature (Daniel 2006 ) to food sym- bols in early modern American fi ction (Appelbaum 2006 ) and classical Arab literature (Van Gelder 2000 ), to post-Freudian analysis of literary orality (Skubal 2002 ).
In its more longstanding disciplinary homes, food continues to fascinate, so we fi nd texts exploring the history of food from the Renaissance banquet (Albala 2007a ) through the broad sweep of time (Clafl in and Scholliers 2012 , Parasecoli and Scholliers 2012 ) to the future of food (Belasco 2006 ); from the United States (Williams-Forson 2006 ) to Italy (Capatti and Montanari 2003 , Montanari 2010 ) and all of Europe (Flandrin and Montanari 1999); to the history of many specifi c foods including tomatoes (Gentilcore 2010 ), beans (Albala 2007b ), turkey (Smith 2006 ),
2 Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik
chocolate (Coe and Coe 2000 ), salt (Kurlansky 2003 ), and spices (Turner 2004 ).
Sociologists have not hesitated to stir the food studies pot (Ray 2004 ), and anthro- pologists have continued to produce work on topics as varied as hunger in Africa (Flynn 2005), children’s eating in China (Jing 2000 ), the global trade in lamb fl aps (Gewertz and Errington 2010 ), food and memory in Greece (Sutton 2001 ), the glo- balization of milk (Wiley 2010 ), Japan’s largest fi sh market (Bestor 2004 ), the culture of restaurants (Beriss and Sutton 2007 ), and the role of cooking in human evolution (Wrangham 2010).
These examples provide some measure of the many texts that have been published in the last decade. Why has the fi eld exploded so? We would like to suggest several reasons for this explosion. Without a doubt, feminism and women’s studies have contributed to the growth of food studies by legitimizing a domain of human behavior so heavily associated with women over time and across cultures. A second reason is the politicization of food and the expansion of social movements linked to food. This has created an increased awareness of the links between consumption and production, beginning with books on food and agriculture (e.g. Guthman 2004 , Magdoff et al. 2000 ) as well as more interdisciplinary work on food politics (Guthman 2011 , Nestle 2003 , Patel 2007 , Williams-Forson and Counihan 2012 ). A third reason is that once food became a legitimate topic of scholarly research, its novelty, richness, and scope provided limitless grist for the scholarly mill, as food links body and soul, self and other, the personal and the political, the material and the symbolic.
Moreover, as food shifts from being local and known, to being global and unknown, it has been transformed into a potential symbol of fear and anxiety (Ferrieres 2005 ), as well as of morality (Pojman 2011 , Singer and Mason 2006 , Telfer 2005 ).
Scholars have found food a powerful lens of analysis and written insightful books about a range of compelling contemporary issues: diaspora and immigration (Gabaccia 1998 , Ray 2004 , Ray and Srinivas 2012 ); nationalism, globalization, and local manifestations (Barndt 1999 , Inglis and Gimlin 2010 , Wilk 2006a , 2006b);
culinary tourism (Long 2003 ); gender and race-ethnic identity (Abarca 2006, Williams-Forson 2006 ); social justice and human rights (Kent 2007 , Wenche Barth and Kracht 2005 ) 2 ; modernization and dietary change (Counihan 2004 , Watson 1997 ); food safety and contamination (Friedberg 2004, 2009, Nestle 2004 , Schwartz 2004 ); and taste perception (Howes 2005 , Korsmeyer 2002 , 2005). Many of these subjects have important material dimensions, which have also been studied by archaeologists, folklorists, and even designers, as food leaves its mark on the human environment.
The explosion of the fi eld of food studies is also refl ected in new and continuing interdisciplinary journals such as Agriculture and Human Valu es, Appetite , Culture and Agriculture , The Digest , Food and Foodways , Food, Culture and Society , Gastronomica , The Anthropology of Food , and Nutritional Anthropology . Hundreds of websites inform food professionals, researchers, and the general public. Ground- breaking documentary fi lms such as Fast Food Nation , The Garden , Supersize Me , The Future of Food , The Real Dirt on Farmer John , King Corn , Farmageddon , and Two Angry Moms have called attention to problems in our food system and efforts to redress them. Food advocacy is refl ected in food movements that promote organic,
local, fairly traded, and slow food, revitalizing vegetarianism and freeganism (Van Esterik 2005 ), and decrying what fast, processed food has done to our bodies and communities. Of particular interest is how food-focused social movements interact with one another, and with academic research (Belasco 2007 ).
The last few years have also seen a dramatic increase in popular books about food, some by talented journalists such as Michael Pollan, and others by food faddists more closely linked to the diet industry, the latter often relying on hearsay rather than research. It is important that students understand that the papers in this reader come from specifi c disciplinary perspectives and are based on sound research. We hope that this Reader helps students acquire the critical skills to distinguish between the different sources of information about food.
Given the vastness of the food studies repast, there is no way this book can offer up a complete meal. Rather we envision it as an appetizer to introduce the fi eld to the reader—a taste of the diverse array of scrumptious intellectual dishes that await further pursuit. We have chosen articles that are high quality and that explore issues of enduring importance written by some of the leading food studies scholars. “Write a book with legs,” our editor urged us in 1997—and we did. But those legs have taken food studies in exciting new directions in the last decade, and this revised Reader refl ects these changes.
The third edition retains the classic papers refl ecting the foundations of food studies, and provides an interdisciplinary collection of cutting-edge articles in the social sciences that combine theory with ethnographic and historical data. We hope our readers will fi nd this third edition engages even more deeply with both past and present scholarship on food and culture.
From the fi rst reader, we retain the wise words of M.F.K. Fisher, and reaffi rm that food touches everything and is the foundation of every economy, marking social differences, boundaries, bonds, and contradictions—an endlessly evolving enactment of gender, family, and community relationships. 3
Foundations
In rethinking and updating the “Foundations” section, we recognize the signifi cant contributions these authors have made to food studies by introducing basic defi nitions and conceptual tools used by later scholars. The papers we have retained in this edition are considered classics and are fundamental for demonstrating the history of food studies. While we continue to value the pioneering work by Bruch (1979, 2001) and de Certeau (2011) which we included in earlier editions, we have omitted them in this Reader to make room for other approaches and because new editions have made their work easily accessible. Our selection demonstrates the centrality of cultural anthropology to the development of the fi eld. 4 We begin with Margaret Mead’s 1971 Redbook article on “Why Do We Overeat?”, in which she explores the very contemporary problem of the relation between overindulgence and guilt. This piece illustrates Mead’s commitment to making the insights of anthropologists available to the public and we open with it as a tribute to Mead’s
4 Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik
pioneering work as one of the earliest anthropologists to articulate the centrality of foodways to human culture and thus to social science. 5 Her article draws attention to the double role of many anthropologists who write about food as both academics and advocates, a topic explored further in the last section of the Reader .
The classic articles by Barthes, Bourdieu, and Lévi-Strauss present different approaches to food’s ability to convey meaning. Barthes’s ruminations on “The Psy- chosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption” provide an idiosyncratic account of the semiotic and symbolic power of foodways—an account that is not always tightly linked to ethnographic evidence, but is highly provocative and anticipates much later writing on food as communication. In contrast, Bourdieu provides mammoth amounts of ethnographic detail on food in French families in his book, Distinction . This challenging author opens up a new world of scholarship to students, particularly around the concept of class. We were concerned that Bourdieu’s infl uence in food studies was not being fully recognized because of the diffi culty students and teachers have in accessing and understanding the ethnographic context from which his concepts of life style and habitus emerged.
This small excerpt on food and meals gives readers a sample of Bourdieu’s contribution.
While many have critiqued the specifi cs of Lévi-Strauss’s “Culinary Triangle,” and he himself later revised his formulations in his 1978 book, The Origin of Table Manners , this piece remains a classic structuralist statement about food preparation as language. Mary Douglas builds on the work of Barthes and Lévi-Strauss to explain Jewish dietary law, a much debated topic in the fi eld of food and culture and an excellent case study for examining food prohibitions and symbolism. In this edi- tion we have included Douglas’s chapter on “The Abominations of Leviticus” from her path-breaking book Purity and Danger (1966). Although Douglas later revised her argument in “Deciphering a Meal” (1999) to address subsequent scholarship, we feel that her original formulation has value for its simplicity and elegance. While Douglas explains Jewish food prohibitions on the basis of the religious conception of holiness based on wholeness, Marvin Harris rejects semiotic interpretations of the abomina- tion of pigs and offers a cultural materialist explanation based on economic and eco- logical utility. The mystery of food taboos—even when the prohibited foods are available, nutritious, and “edible”—is a test case for exploring the gustatory selectivity of all human groups, and a wonderful example of how the same cultural phenomenon can be explained from different theoretical viewpoints.
We have returned to Jack Goody’s wonderful article on “Industrial Food” from the fi rst edition, since no other anthropologist frames the historical context of the indus- trialization of food processing as well. His study of the changes in the British food system that made colonial expeditions possible sets up Mintz’s memorable paper on
“Time, Sugar and Sweetness” in the Caribbean, an appropriate tribute to his infl uence on the fi eld. Mintz shows how the rich controlled access to desirable high status sugar, until it was produced in suffi cient quantity to become a working class staple rather than a luxury consumed only by the elite; this transformation—and the processes of slavery, global trade, and worker exploitation on which it depended—changed the course of human history.
Categories of Difference: Race, Class, and Gender
Our second section considers the expression of race, class, nation, and personhood through food production and consumption. It recognizes the productive cross- fertilization between food studies, gender studies, and race-ethnic studies marked by a plethora of publications, including Inness’s four volumes (2001a, 2001b, 2001c, 2005); Abarca’s ( 2006 ) study of culinary chats among Mexican and Mexican- American working class women; Witt’s ( 1999 ), Williams-Forson’s (2006), Bower’s (2008), and Opie’s ( 2008 ) books on African-American foodways; and Avakian and Haber’s ( 2005 ) interdisciplinary edited collection on feminist approaches to food studies.
We open this section with Williams-Forson’s paper about food stereotypes which uncovers both the harmful effects of controlling images on African Americans, and also the ways in which Black women have resisted oppression and fostered cultural survival by reversing the stereotypes surrounding chicken and using it as a source of income and community bonding. While the food studies literature is replete with work on the female gender and food, there has still been little research on how food and masculinity construct each other beyond Julier and Lindenfeld’s (2005b) edited special issue of Food and Foodways on “Masculinities and Food.” We have included two papers from that issue—in the next section is Parasecoli’s on how fi tness magazines construct male bodies and food, and in this section is Holden’s on how Japanese food television transmits images of ideal masculinity based on power, authority, and consumerism. Holden’s article reveals how television can provide exciting new opportunities for foodways research; Swenson’s article demonstrates how programs on the American Food Network both challenge and uphold gender binaries that are increasingly problematic in North American culture.
We follow with Allison’s fascinating article on how women reproduce Japanese defi nitions of subservient femininity through their construction of children’s lunch boxes, or obentos . Counihan uses food-centered life histories to document the voices of traditionally muted Hispanic women of rural southern Colorado who challenge notions that Mexican American women are compliant housewives complacently accepting subservient feeding roles. They reveal differential behaviors and attitudes towards food work that promote empowerment. To avoid limiting understandings of food and gender to heterosexual populations, we have included Carrington’s paper on food, gender identity, and power in gay and lesbian households, one of very few published studies of non-heteronormative populations. Carrington fi nds that food work is associated with femininity and subservience. While the cooks in both sets of families often enact deference by catering to partners’ preferences, lesbigay couples implicitly acknowledge the subordinating dimensions of that practice by denying the extent of the feeders’ work and the inequality it implies. 6
Rachel Slocum’s article moves the focus on race and gender outside the home to the farmers’ market where she looks at intimate interactions between diverse people and food. She uses corporeal feminist theory to suggest how gender and race are con- structed in food purchases. Dylan Clark looks at identity constructions in self-defi ned punks through their food practices and ideologies enacted in a grubby Seattle restau- rant called the Black Cat Café. He uses insights from Lévi-Strauss and Marx to
6 Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik
examine punk cuisine as a challenge to the capitalist food system and its entrenched inequalities, environmental destruction, and wastefulness. Punks offer an alternative ethic and practice of consumption to demonstrate how eating is an ideological as well as a physical act.
Consumption and Embodiment
In our third section, we include articles that consider eating and the body from variety of disciplinary and topical perspectives. A key issue in Western women’s relationship to food and body for hundreds of years has been their unremitting fasting. We have retained Caroline Bynum’s striking discussion of how medieval women used food to gain religious and cultural power. By giving food to the poor, exuding milk from their bodies, and relentlessly fasting, they were able to subvert the economic control of husbands and the religious authority of male priests to commune directly with God. 7 Bynum’s article sets the historical stage for the following two very different articles on contemporary eating disorders. Philosopher Susan Bordo challenges the notion that troubled eating is restricted to white women, and describes its permeation through- out United States communities of color and around the globe. 8 Anthropologist Richard O’Connor uses interviews with recovered North American anorexics to ques- tion the medicalization of anorexia nervosa which is enacted through an enduring mind body dualism, and to show how young anorexics obsess not over beauty but over self-control, an important value in today’s society.
While much work has looked at women’s diffi cult relationship to food and body, men do not escape cultural manipulation through ideologies of food and body, as Parasecoli’s article demonstrates. He fi nds that men’s fi tness magazines alienate men from cooking except in pursuit of sex, reduce eating to a form of body-building, and propose a nearly unattainable ideal of fi tness. David Sutton looks at the body in a very different and more positive way by focusing on corporeal cooking skill as an enactment of practical knowledge, sensory awareness, and memory. Combining ethnographic research in Greece and the United States with an analysis of anthro- pological literature on the senses, he explores how cooking tools and sense organs are repositories of tradition that face challenges from the values and practices of moder- nity. Gisèle Yasmeen’s article (a different one from that used in the second edition) also broadens the notion of consumption and embodiment by considering the per- formance of gender through public eating in Thai food stalls. In addition to revealing the changing notions of Thai food, she shows how public eating relates to female labor force participation.
Ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan examines the important health aspect of consumption and embodiment in his study of the desert dwelling Seri Indians of Northern Mexico and their rapidly increasing rates of type-two diabetes. Listening to elders who asserted that diabetes was non-existent two generations earlier, and thus rejecting simple genetic explanations for the disease, Nabhan suggests that dietary changes towards high-sugar, low fi ber, rapidly digested foods have caused this major health problem and that traditional “slow release” desert foods are protective against diabetes. This research provides support from a nutritional and health perspective for
global efforts to promote local foods and traditional agriculture, a goal also endorsed by Robert Albritton. He engages with concerns over food, body, and health with his interrogation of the paradoxical contemporary situation where rates of hunger and obesity increase simultaneously. He shows how an analysis of the political economy of capitalism can explain this paradox, and can provide a path to reforming the food system to promote healthy bodies and well-nourished consumers while sustaining the earth that feeds us all.
Food and Globalization
Globalization is not new; it is not a one way exchange of items and ideas, and certainly not an expansion of values from Euro-America to peripheries lacking their own culi- nary identities. But it is probably also true that at no time in history has the pace of change been so rapid and so tied up with new technologies. Neoliberal practices such as deregulation and just-in-time production make our global food system even more vulnerable to abuse. It is a challenge for international and national regulatory agencies to keep up with, let alone solve problems caused by this new economic environment.
Food globalization draws our attention to diasporic identities, authenticity, food nostalgia, and power. Srinivas weaves these themes together through her examination of packaged food consumption in Bangalore, India, and Boston, USA. Transnational instant foods, such as chutneys and spice powders, play interesting roles in the con- struction of female Indian identity among middle class families in the two locations.
The loss of home-cooking also occurs in Belize, where families defi ne themselves and their nation through food consumption. Wilk examines historical transformations in Belizean food resulting from colonialism and globalization. Reversing the lens, Heldke examines how food adventurers at home reproduce “cultural food colonialism” by seeking and cooking ethnic foods to satisfy their taste for the exotic other without actually encountering “real” others on their own terms. She raises important ques- tions about the meaning of “authenticity” in food studies. While there have been many critiques leveled against claims about authentic traditional foods, she brings attention to recipe authorship and ownership, challenging scholars and cookbook writers to think about their responsibility to the native cooks whose recipes they appropriate.
Both Leitch and Pilcher examine the ideology and practices of the Slow Food Move- ment, and its efforts to foster local, sustainable, and just food production. Leitch looks at Slow Food’s work in its country of origin, Italy, through a fascinating case study of pork fat— lardo di Colonnata —in the Carrara region famous for its marble on which the lard is cured in humid underground cellars. Achievement of protected status for this traditional product raises questions of national autonomy and identity in the context of the European Union’s efforts to impose universal food safety standards.
Pilcher investigates the relevance of the Slow Food Movement to Mexico’s culinary traditions and sees similar issues to those confronted in Italy, as Mexican peasant producers strive for living wages to produce traditional varieties of maize and hand- made tortillas, in competition with industrially processed versions from global chains like Taco Bell.
8 Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik
Pizza is both authentically local and universal; Thai pizza, German pizza, and Japanese pizza exist as hybrid foods in globalized settings. Rossella Ceccarini draws attention not only to hybrid foods, but also to the transnational experiences of the food workers who create these products in Japan. Much like pizza in Japan, hamburgers in China are modern standardized foods. Yan stresses that the attraction of consuming American fast foods has more to do with their social context and meaning than with their taste in his intriguing ethnographic study of McDonald’s in Beijing.
Barndt’s article introduces us to three women from her long-term project on the tomato food chain (Barndt 2007 ). Through their stories, we see how agri-businesses, fast food giants, and supermarket chains increasingly rely on “fl exible,” part-time, low-wage female labor, which enables them to generate huge profi ts at the expense of women workers who lack health and other benefi ts, cannot earn a living wage, and must constantly juggle their lives to accommodate their ever-changing work sched- ules. Food globalization sets up complex problems in households, communities, NGOs, and UN agencies. But as these papers demonstrate, ethnographers are well prepared to shift directions and pick up on subtle changes that reveal the intricacies of global food practices.
Challenging, Contesting, and Transforming the Food System
If the section on Food and Globalization sets readers up for encountering a food system out of the hands of consumers, this last section renews optimism about how individuals and groups are challenging and contesting globalized food systems. Those activists working to transform the food system, however, are working within a new economic context. This section provides examples of some of the recent food activism undertaken since the publication of the second edition of the Food and Culture Reader . It is a reminder that all published work needs to be situated in the decade or even year of its writing (as we have done with the papers in this new edition), and that complex issues underlying food activism remain important long after attention has shifted from boycott Nestle to eat local or slow food . Just as every mouthful has a history, every cause has a past, present, and hopefully, a future.
Food activism has been around longer than food studies. What has changed is that only recently have the activities of activists been observed, analyzed, and refl ected upon as subjects/objects of research. Most research remains grounded in the political economy of food, but refl ects the ever more sophisticated work done in the last decade on how contemporary food systems are changing. The articles demonstrate that food commodifi cation is deeply implicated in perpetuating and concealing gender, race, and class inequalities while transforming cultures.
Case studies on meat (Schlosser), baby foods (Van Esterik) and “yuppie chow”
(Guthman) exemplify some of the social implications of the industrial processing of basic foods. Schlosser carries forward the work he did in his renowned Fast Food Nation ( 2002 ) to examine the many health dangers suffered by meat-packing work- ers—including broken bones, muscle strain, burns, and severed limbs—resulting from exhausting and monotonous labor for low wages, few benefi ts, and high
turnover. Worker exploitation results from the concentration of the meatpacking industry, its reliance on immigrant labor, its concerted resistance to unionizing efforts, and its political power.
Guthman’s insight into organic farming in California is revealed in her ground- breaking research on the subject (2004, 2011). In her study of the salad mixes known by organic farmers as “yuppie chow,” she critiques the dualistic thinking that contrasts alternative farming with industrial farming, fast with slow food, and even good with bad eaters. Her work draws attention to the need for increasing class and gender analysis in food studies, which Van Esterik undertakes in her study of how the commodifi cation of infant food through the international marketing of infant formula has had severe economic and health consequences. Activists have constantly challenged the actions of transnational pharmaceutical and food companies promot- ing industrially processed baby foods. The addendum shows how current advocacy work must adapt to the new economic climate where confl icts of interest and public–
private partnerships with food companies are the new normal.
Even food aid has been affected by the concentration of power in the hands of global food industries. Clapp shows how different African societies exercise their rights to limit the import of genetically modifi ed foods even in the face of famine and extreme hunger. The lens of political economy provides fascinating insights into the current obsession with obesity, as Julier shows. Taking a critical functionalist approach, she shows who benefi ts from blaming the obese for their weight: the gov- ernment, the diet food and supplement industries, bariatric medical practitioners, and exercise businesses. Blaming individuals for being obese draws attention away from the broader social and economic causes of obesity, including poverty, inadequate food distribution systems, and the excess of unhealthy food available to the poor.
Following the recession of 2008, hunger and food handouts have played an increas- ingly important role in North American communities. Poppendieck looks at the role of charity in combating food insecurity in the United States. While charity plays a critical role in temporarily abating hunger, it fails to address the poverty and struc- tural inequality that are its real underlying causes (Berg 2008 , Fitchen 1988 , Lappé and Collins 1986 , Patel 2007 , Poppendieck 1998 , Winne 2008 ). Priscilla McCutcheon provides another approach to hunger in examining community empowerment through food in her study of two black nationalist religious organizations—one Christian and the other, the Nation of Islam. Her research brings out the complex entanglements of food and racial identity in the American south where self-reliance in food production offered a means to address both hunger and black identity. Charles Levkoe’s prize-winning student essay on “Learning Food Democracy through Food Justice Movements” concludes the section and the Reader with more examples of successful community organization around food issues. As a form of adult education that promotes engagement with democratic values, the food justice movement in Canada brings together a wide range of food activists who act not simply as food consumers, but as citizens who advocate for changes in food policy.
Food is a particularly powerful lens on capital, labor, health, and the environment.
Taken together, these papers force us to re-examine the interconnections between the availability of cheap food in North America and the conditions of its production in
10 Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik
other parts of the world. Food advocacy is a growing arena for political activism, as the success of Italy’s Slow Food Movement shows. Food unites all humans; its lack strikes a painful chord among haves and have-nots alike. Progress towards social justice can only come through a concerted effort on the part of social activists everywhere to end world hunger and bring about universal access to nutritious and adequate food.
Cross-Cutting Themes
Throughout the fi ve sections of the reader, several themes emerge that can structure how readers approach the book. Theory and method constitute one important theme. While all of the articles are embedded in theory, some explicitly identify theo- retical positions: semiotic (Barthes), structuralist (Lévi-Strauss), symbolic (Douglas), materialist (Harris), Marxist (Clark), critical functionalist (Julier), and liberal, advo- cacy, corporeal, and Third-World feminist (Bordo, Counihan, Slocum, Van Esterik, Williams-Forson).
Articles also employ different methodologies, providing readers with a wealth of information about the different means of investigating the role of food in history and culture. A number of articles use ethnographic approaches; for example, Allison, Carrington, Sutton, and Yan use interviews and participant-observation, and Counihan uses food-centered life histories. 9 Analysis of cultural symbols and mean- ings is employed by Douglas and Bordo, the former from an anthropological and the latter from a philosophical perspective. Nabhan uses methods of ethnobotany, and Yasmeen of geography, while Bynum, McCutcheon, and Williams-Forson employ fi ne-grained historical research, and Srinivas, Sutton, and Williams-Forson examine the material culture of food. Holden, Parasecoli, and Swenson analyze the mass media, while several articles analyze restaurants including fast-food and fancy ones in China (Yan), Taco Bell in Mexico (Pilcher), pizza restaurants in Japan (Ceccarini), and street stalls in Thailand (Yasmeen). Together, these articles provide readers with a rich sampling of diverse theories, approaches, and methods to inspire their own research.
Another cross-cutting theme is food as a means of communication. Because of food’s multi-sensorial properties of taste, touch, sight, sound, and smell, it has the ability to communicate in a variety of registers and constitutes a form of language (Barthes). Defi nitions of acceptable and prohibited foods (Lévi-Strauss, Douglas, Harris), stereotypes associating certain groups with certain foods (Williams-Forson), consumption of foods to express belonging (Clark, Heldke) or attain desired states (Parasecoli, Yan), and use of food narratives to speak about the self (Counihan) are all ways that food communicates.
New forms of communication include information technology and social media.
Papers on social media are quickly outdated, as technology and apps change quickly.
However, future research will no doubt address the incredible opportunity presented by research in cyberspace. What are the implications of people sharing on Facebook every detail about a just-consumed meal, or of dieters using a smart phone app to instantly document the calories and nutritional content of the dish they are about to eat, or of friends living in different parts of the world sharing a meal in cyberspace?
Is this really commensality when eaters watch each other eating the same meal?
Photographs shared quickly on social media can provide instant evidence of food safety violations or advertising that “breaks the rules,” such as inappropriate ads directed to children, false health claims for specifi c foods, or promotions advertising infant formula. These images can be sent to food activists quickly, and possibly be addressed just as quickly both by activists and food corporations.
Food as an index of power relations is another signifi cant theme in several articles.
Hierarchy and oppression are themes in Williams-Forson’s paper on African American women’s contested relationship with chicken, Counihan’s exploration of differential consciousness among rural Mexicanas , and Barndt’s and Schlosser’s examination of the exploitation of workers. Complex global power dynamics are explored in different ways in Mintz’s treatise on the growth of the sugar industry, Van Esterik’s analysis of breast vs. bottle feeding of infants, and Heldke’s examination of fi rst world consumers’ “adventure cooking and eating.” Julier addresses how the excoriation of the obese serves to maintain economic and ideological hegemony of elites, while Clark shows how punks explicitly challenge the power of the agro- industrial food system in their veganism and dumpster diving. Many other articles engage with issues of power in the food economy, ideology, and politics.
Access to food is at the heart of food security and human rights, and its denial is a terrible measure of human powerlessness, an issue addressed in different ways by Nabhan’s examination of Native Americans’ degraded health, Poppendieck’s insight- ful study of food charity, and McCutcheon’s examination of Nation of Islam com- munity feeding programs. With the increasing commodifi cation and globalization of food, power issues are revealed not only in access to food but also in the production of local, culturally meaningful foods whose endurance is key to cultural survival, as Wilk, Nabhan, Leitch, Pilcher, and Clapp demonstrate (see Van Esterik 2006b). Inte- grating the cultural dimensions of food and eating with the legal discourse on human rights is an ongoing challenge of great signifi cance that Ellen Messer’s work addresses (Messer 2004, Messer and Cohen 2008).
Concluding Thoughts
The questions we raised at the end of the second edition are worth asking again, as they still deserve the attention of food researchers. What is it about food that makes it an especially intriguing and insightful lens of analysis? What questions about food- ways still need to be addressed? How have food regimes changed through time? How does the universal need for food bind individuals and groups together? What are the most serious problems in the global food system and what causes them? What politi- cal, economic, social, and ideological structures enhance food sovereignty and social justice, and what structures contribute to inequitable food systems?
Notes
1. Some recent articles on food and fi lm are Baron 2003 , Johnson 2002 , Van Esterik 2006a . 2. Two insightful articles on food and human rights are Bellows 2003 , Van Esterik 1999b.
12 Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik
3. M.F.K. Fisher (1954, 1961, 1983) is one of the most lyrical food writers who has inspired countless others.
4. The development of research interests in food in anthropology is as old as the discipline. Early anthropologists recognized the central role of food in different cultures, most notably Audrey Richards (1932, 1939), but also Raymond Firth (1934), Bronislaw Malinowski ( 1935 ), M. and S.L. Fortes ( 1936 ), and Cora DuBois ( 1941 ).
Anthropology continues to make important contributions—both ethnographic and theoretical—to the fi eld today. Some infl uential books on the anthropology of food are Anderson 1988, 2005, Counihan 1999, 2004, Dettwyler 1994 , Fink 1998 , Goody 1982 , Kahn 1986 , Kulick and Meneley 2005 , Meigs 1984 , Mintz 1985, 1997, Nichter 2000 , Ohnuki-Tierney 1993 , Pollock 1992 , Watson 1997 , Weismantel 1988 , Wilk 2006a , 2006b.
5. See Spang ( 1988 ) on anthropologists’ work on food during World War II.
6. On the complex relationship between gender, cooking, and power, see Avakian 1997 , Avakian and Haber 2005 , Charles and Kerr 1988 , Counihan 2004 , DeVault 1991 , Inness 2001a , 2001b, 2001c, Van Esterik 1996, 1997, 1999a, Williams-Forson 2006 , and Witt 1999 .
7. Some books that examine the religious and ideological dimensions of fasting and dieting are Adams 1990 , Bell 1987, Brumberg 1988, Bynum 1987 , Griffi th 2004 , Sack 2005 , and Vandereycken and Van Deth 1994 . 8. The following are infl uential studies of women’s food restriction: Bruch 1973, 1978, Brumberg 1988 , Nichter
2000 , Thompson 1994 .
9. Often food and eating become critically important parts of ethnographic fi eldwork, even when the research did not originally focus on food (cf. Coleman 2011 ).
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