Beyond the Superficial: Making Sense of Food in a Globalized World [1 ed.] 9781848884304, 9789004370401

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Beyond the Superficial

Inter-Disciplinary Press Publishing Advisory Board Ana Maria Borlescu Peter Bray Ann-Marie Cook Robert Fisher Lisa Howard Peter Mario Kreuter Stephen Morris John Parry Karl Spracklen Peter Twohig Inter-Disciplinary Press is a part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net A Global Network for Dynamic Research and Publishing

2016

Beyond the Superficial: Making Sense of Food in a Globalized World

Edited by

Swetha Antony and Elizabeth M. Schmidt

Inter-Disciplinary Press Oxford, United Kingdom

© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2016 http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing

The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and encourage the kind of work which is collaborative, innovative, imaginative, and which provides an exemplar for inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary publishing.

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ISBN: 978-1-84888-430-4 First published in the United Kingdom in eBook format in 2016. First Edition.

Table of Contents Introduction Swetha Antony and Elizabeth M. Schmidt Coping with Loss: Living without Tea in Ireland during World War II John Porter

1

The Most American Daily Bread: The Rise and Fall of Wonder Bread Keiko Tanaka

9

Deepening Cultural Knowledge: Semiotic Study on Finnish Chocolate Packages Heidi Uppa and Tania Rodriguez-Kaarto

21

Cannibals and Vegetarians in Ancient Greek Theories of the Natural State John Dayton

37

Questions of Culinary Commonplacing: The Social Significance of Personal Recipe Collections in the Late Nineteenth Century Elizabeth M. Schmidt

45

‘São João, São João, acende a fogueira do meu coração’: An Examination of Food, Culture and Identity in the Brazilian Festas Juninas Bianca Arantes dos Santos

55

‘Mamakization’: Food and Social Cohesion in Multiethnic Malaysia Eric Olmedo and Shamsul AB

65

Agriculture and Sexual Minorities: Historical Precedents and Contemporary Evolutions Andrea Bosio

75

Our Land of Milk and Honey: Spirituality in the Transformation of Ecological and Heritage Production Hart N. Feuer

97

Conventual Sweets: A Culinary Journey to Innovation Maria José Pires, Cláudia Viegas and Nelson Félix

111

Introduction Swetha Antony and Elizabeth M. Schmidt Food is so integral a part of our life that more often than not it is taken for granted. The common understanding of food is that it is one of the basic necessities of life and is essential in terms of nourishment, ensuring survival. However, beyond this basic premise, the ways in which ‘food’ has been defined over time, in the context of nationality, ethnicity, culture, religion or gender has never ceased to evolve. So, when we embark upon the act of making sense of food, the major concern is to probe the boundaries of this tangible reality. The academic engagement undertaken here is an inter- and multi-disciplinary approach, that makes room for an all-encompassing framework aimed at initialising discussions about the nature of food and the ways in which people interact with it on a day-today basis. The conference that ultimately produced this volume, Making Sense of Food, opened up myriad gastronomic routes by taking these aspects into consideration. Here, authors engage with food in its numerous roles since time immemorial, not only as an indelible ingredient of our everyday existence but also as a powerful metaphor. Food is a commonality that impacts everyone's life, though in varying degrees. For instance, it can serve as a marker of social distinction, irrespective of the roles involved, as those who prepare it, those who consume it, those who write about it and those who use it in many other ways are all equally significant participants within the discourse on food. This volume, in effect, intends to explore these and more. Even when engaging with food on multifarious levels, an allencompassing definition of ‘food’ is not reached. What has been triggered instead is an endless and ongoing dialogue on the intricacies and complexities of its presence in a layman’s life. This is the basic premise on which this volume operates. So, what exactly does making sense of food imply? In the contemporary scene, our understanding of food centres more on a proclivity towards misunderstanding or a lack of acknowledgement of its importance. The essays collected in this volume question this practice by effectively employing unique research methodologies and critical approaches. Clearly, 21st century discussions on food have moved way beyond the polemics surrounding the superficial – food as a means of survival. Food has come to play a role in the larger economic, social, political, cultural and ideological realms. This is a fact that is engaged with at length in the various chapters collected here and forms the broad framework within which they are contextualised. It has to be reckoned here that the present debates on food involve transactions within a broader spectrum, which is, in itself, a considerable challenge. Hence, taking a practical approach, the focus is on a few themes which can be dovetailed into the larger concerns. The ultimate aim of the volume is to destabilize the common notion of food as essentially sustenance and to engage with it from many levels of

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__________________________________________________________________ consciousness by bringing in a historical understanding. This is achieved by acknowledging the ways in which food has been used to confront questions of tradition, culture and identity. Gastronomically speaking, what we have compiled here for you is a delectable salad, which stands out in both taste and appeal by virtue of the unique ingredients that enhance the dish. To put it broadly, each paper maintains a subtle sense of novelty by exploring themes belonging to an exclusive category, even employing strikingly different methodologies, eventually enriching the volume as a whole. Ultimately, these 10 exclusive papers open up probable points for debates which augment the all-inclusive discourse on food that already exists. To offer some direction for readers, the concerns and debates opened up by the essays included in this volume can be broadly, albeit apprehensively, categorised under three major strains of thought. The first two are common threads that run across most of the papers: culture and identity. Many of the essays collected here confront these themes, discussing how they connect with, shape and are shaped by conversations around food. The final thread, the creation of taste parameters, is an emerging trend associated with various food studies. A crucial aspect here is the presence of manifold spaces in which culture and identity interact, inevitably leading to concerns about taste. The delineation of these categories will, in a way, help the newly initiated readers to engage with their everyday culinary reality. However, assigning these broad categories does not in any way limit the scope for further research. Moreover, this volume also considers the question of historical context, not only in the ways in which food perception, ritual and ideologies have changed over time, but also the ways in which food studies have evolved. For instance, as we approach the question of identity, there are many issues that crop up from the core to the fringes. While probing the impact of food on identity, a crucial aspect is that of nationality. Current debates on such a topic are opened up by an incomparable influence of globalisation, the evolved avatar of colonialism; both of these issues are explored in this volume. For instance, John Porter's article ‘Coping with Loss: Living without Tea in Ireland during World War II’ has an interesting take on the role of tea in establishing the Irish identity. He poignantly captures how scarcity of the product led to its transformation as an item of luxury, thereby influencing the understanding of even the most common aspects of everyday reality. On a similar note is Keiko Tenaka's article ‘Most American Daily Bread: The Rise and Fall of Wonder Bread’, where she explores the ways in which trends in the evolution of the reception of a commercial product such as Wonder Bread has played a key role in determining the evolution of American identity, marking the shift from the hegemony of white Americanism to an all-encompassing multicultural existence. Heidi Uppa and Tania Rodriguez-Kaarto's engaging analysis in the article ‘Cultural Translations: Visual Semiotics on Finnish Food Packaging’, also touches upon one such thread. In the case of Fazer, a Finnish chocolate brand, the symbolism that

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__________________________________________________________________ comes into play in the packaging of food products can be intimately connected with a particular national nostalgia, used both to establish and promote national identities on a global scale and also to initiate the process of social cohesion and integration among the non-natives, in this case, in Finland. Situating the whole debate within a historical context makes one also consider identity on a micro level, which is highlighted by John Dayton’s article with discussions of vegetarianism and carnivorism in antiquity. Instead of discussing how food contributes to a shared group identity, Dayton looks at ways in which food has been intimately connected with individual morality and the ‘natural state’. Elizabeth Schmidt's article ‘Questions of Culinary Commonplacing: The Social Significance of Personal Recipe Collections in the Late Nineteenth Century’, marries micro- and macro-level analysis, linking culinary commonplacing to explorations of identity on a personal level and within society as a whole. Mrs. E. A. Foord's ‘Receipt Book’ transforms from a mere book holding together everyday recipes and snippets of domestic know-how to a document which opens our eyes to the identity of its keeper, and the world she occupied, even to the extent of foregrounding the taste trends prevalent then. The impact of colonialism in the evolution of taste parameters and the question of originality and authenticity when recipes – initially a part of an exclusive oral tradition – get written down, are among the issues that the paper draws our attention to. If one is to engage with such a thread, then the question of ethnic cuisine, and the related debates around tradition and authenticity, are brought to the fore. It is nothing short of a paradox, when on the one hand this burgeoning category represents a sense of identification and belonging rooted on a micro level, in the realm of locality, while on a macro level, the use of food, foodways or food culture contributes to the gaining of a national or even a cosmopolitan identity. In the contemporary scene, however, another poignant issue connected with ethnic food is its role in popular food culture, leading to large scale demand and resulting in mass production, an apparent throw back to Mcdonaldisation. This is problematic in many ways. Interestingly, one thing that it draws our attention to, is the role of memory and, more specifically, to the idea of nostalgia as ‘fragments of utopias’. The commoditization of ethnic food, such as the case of food in the Brazilian Festas Juninas as explored by Bianca Arantes dos Santos in ‘“São João, São João, acende a fogueira do meu coração”: An Examination of Food, Culture and Identity in the Brazilian Festas Juninas’, questions notions of authenticity and tradition. Food here evokes memory leading to the creation of self or communities, both real and imagined, while serving as an indicator for the ways in which traditions evolve over time. In other words, food simultaneously acts as a marker of legacy, heritage and tradition, and as a beacon of change or modernisation. Along the same lines we can see consumption of food as the consumption of culture. It becomes a site of social transaction evoking emotional connections in differing degrees. A case in point is a practice in local food joints in Malaysia,

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__________________________________________________________________ colloquially referred to as ‘Mamak stalls’, as evoked by Eric Olmedo and Shamshul Amri Baharuddin in the article ‘“Mamakisation”: Food and Social cohesion in Multi-ethnic Malaysia’. They have attempted to make sense of the connection between food and social cohesion, understanding how the preparation, packaging and presentation of food is customised to the needs and desires of customers who may or may not be ethnically Malay, at times reinstating the old or developing new cultural norms surrounding this foodway. Here, there is another level of transaction between the producer and the consumer, where the chef or producer is aware of and accommodates the tastes of each customer, both the immediate sensory interaction of taste and the later psychological understanding of the physical experience. In such cases and more, irrespective of being representative of a particular ethnicity or culture, food and the act of consuming it are transformed into a tangible heritage, much more immediate than an imagined one. Clearly, food can also add to the performance involved in the creation of identity; in other words, one uses food in an act of display associated with a particular identity. The flipside to this is the very real phenomenon of creating discourses centred on imagined national cuisines to propagate an imagined national identity. This is an instance where such culinary identities based on memory are mediated. Moreover, what do we make of instances where ethnic food is often served and consumed along with non-ethnic foods, thereby taking it out of context, a phenomenon that has become common in many areas of the world. Indeed, a paradox. It is precisely at this point that the whole polemics of taste takes centre stage. Apparent parameters of taste play a role in evoking a sense of identity. For instance, the act of eating out and the choice of the place powerfully reiterates the question of social stratification. The choice of space also gains relevance when local and ethnic food joints are transported from an open space to a controlled space within walls, bringing up concerns about the public and private, and semiprivate, acts of eating. Questions in its wake are many. What constitutes good taste? Has it to do with factors such as authenticity, tradition and localisation or is to do more with modernisation and appropriateness? Where is the line that separates good taste and bad? Can an adoption of any of the two kinds of taste gain one access to a more acceptable social, economic or political position? What are the possible links between the discourses of taste and power and ideology? Can taste be taught or understood from a pedagogic point of view? Is taste an individual choice or do extra sensory factors mediate its understanding? Does one's taste preference decide one's identity? Does it play a major role in affirming the culture to which one belongs? Clearly, when looking into the many vistas opened by identity and culture one thing that runs across both is the question of space. For instance, debates regarding identity and culture can involve many different spaces – urban space, rural space,

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__________________________________________________________________ virtual space, a borderless imagined space, even cinematic and cultural space. Even further, specific spaces are often the centre of food discourse, as highlighted by Andrea Bosio’s essay on ‘Agriculture and Sexual Minorities’. In this case, urban vs. rural spaces are used to represent how sexual minorities have combatted societal stereotypes over time in the context of food consumption and production. How do we make sense of food when this space is mediated, when it is used as a means of resistance or when it is incorporated into other discourses? Space also comes into play in Hart N. Feuer’s ‘Our Land of Milk and Honey: Spirituality in the Transformation of Ecological and Heritage Production’. Here he discusses the connections between land and spirituality, mapping the ways in which agriculture, local foodways and food policy are often shaped by both the religious identity and the geographical realities of a particular nation. What about food that can or cannot travel? How do we resolve the possibility of a transcendence of space when there are aspects such as Protected Geographical Indications that are making a cry to be heard, apparently preserving and limiting food within a space? How does the dominant ideology come into play here? For instance, the whole question of secular and religious foods. Given these issues, what exactly is food doing – is it trying to connect people by moving beyond time, space and class or is it, by an apparent transcendence, reinstating all these boundaries? These issues are explored by Maria José Pires, Cláudia Viegas, and Nelson Félix in the essay ‘Conventual Sweets: A Culinary Journey to Innovation’, where they explore the roots of local delicacies and the possibility of moving beyond the idea of locality by taking advantage of outside innovations and technologies that have revolutionised culinary arts. The poignant question that this article highlights is whether it is possible for one to balance tradition, technology, health and pleasure. All these and more become the focus of this volume which brings together the latest work from research carried out across the globe. The group of essays collected in this volume stands out precisely by virtue of the large scale navigation that is undertaken in this thought provoking, in-depth and engaging topic. Even the various empirical, theoretical and archival methodological approaches with which the notion of food is approached here does not in any way shift the focus from the exploration of this ever expanding arena of food. On the other hand, the unique blend of themes and methodologies characterised by the essays will enable a reader to see and approach their everyday culinary experiences from different and more meaningful perspectives. More than an academic engagement, the interdisciplinary nature of this publication facilitates an engagement beyond certain confines or boundaries, say for instance, of a specific academic discipline. The kind of vibrancy achieved here is the best possible way to make sense of an equally elusive category like food, which refuses to be tied down by an overarching parameter. The semblance of commonality lies within the idea of food as a means of sustenance, which is

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__________________________________________________________________ basically destabilised in this volume by utilizing multiple avenues, perspectives and disciplines to understand this entity. One thing that this volume establishes with a small degree of certainty is that it is not possible to bring in an objective or, for that matter, a subjective definition of food; the only alternative is to contextualise the reality in which food gains meaning and relevance.

Coping with Loss: Living without Tea in Ireland during World War II John Porter Abstract This chapter proposes to consider the effect upon society of the sudden absence, or relative unavailability of a food product considered vital for reasons of health, sociability and identity. To do so, it will analyse how Irish society reacted to the absence of tea during the Second World War. One of the greatest shocks to the general population during the War was the vast reduction in the availability of tea introduced by the system of government rationing. Considering the various issues around the provisioning and consumption of tea, thus, provides a very useful lens with which to analyse Irish society. One among them - the expansion of state involvement in the regulation of food consumption, becomes a major focus here, by highlighting the tremendous efforts of the state to provide an adequate tea supply, and demonstrate the relative failures of substitute products, such as, Coffee Éire. In contrast to Britain, the Irish population seem not to have accepted deprivation as a necessary sacrifice, as government intervention was often inept and poorly communicated, leading to the creation of inequality among individuals and groups. It was easy to obtain extra rations on the black-market, provided you had the money, which eventually emphasised class divisions. Adjusting to the reduced rations and lower quality of tea was perhaps even more difficult for pregnant women who were advised to drink as much tea as possible, and by the end of the war several groups, such as, the Irish Housewives Association, exerted pressure on the government to ensure cheap and adequate supplies. Associated with tradition, sociability and good health, tea held considerable symbolic importance for Irish citizens and, thus, presents an illuminating pathway to study how societies react to the unforeseen absence of a necessity. Key Words: History, consumption, tea, Ireland, World War Two, deprivation, rationing, luxury, necessity. ***** 1. A Necessity becomes a Luxury ‘Tea was not at all in the nature of a luxury but was an absolute necessity’; the words of a Major in the Irish army in 1941.1The dichotomy created between luxury and necessity is ever present in discussions on food; often as a point of departure, to lambast the perceived decadent indulgence of modernity. When supply is limited, however, the sudden importance of defining and justifying a necessity as against a luxury becomes paramount. As this chapter will demonstrate, Irish society on the verge of the Second World War, viewed tea as an absolute necessity. In the century that preceded the war tea had become central to the Irish

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__________________________________________________________________ diet, symbolising social exchange and inter-personal relationships. The vast reduction in the availability of tea combined with its gradual decline in quality over the course of the war represented a traumatic event for Irish society. Studying how Ireland reacted to the virtual disappearance of tea provides a useful means to consider how societies react to the virtual absence of a necessity. This chapter will argue that tea came to dominate the ways in which Irish citizens reacted to the war, and how it helped to shape the society and state's understanding of consumer rights and responsibilities. Even though, evidence for the regular consumption of tea in Irish cities is present from seventeenth century onwards, it was in the second half of the 19th century that tea really gained popularity. What had previously been the preserve of an elite, often seen as a colonial elite, now became the drink for all sections of society, consumed widely across all regions of the country. Tea became ubiquitous. It was consumed every day, with every meal, and often as an event in itself. This meant tea was drunk in vast quantities. It is estimated from the allowance provided to the Dublin Rotunda maternity hospital in 1883 that as many as 10 cups of tea would have been consumed by each woman in the hospital every day.2 By 1904 in rural Ireland tea and sugar accounted for almost 20% of total food expenditure amongst the farming and labouring classes.3 For the poorest groups in society tea became a meal in itself often eaten alongside a slice of bread, or to produce a quite unappetising broth by soaking stale bread in it, as in some remote Western areas. Gradually, tea not only became essential to the Irish diet, but also became a central symbol in social exchange and personal relationships. Even today, the idea of not being offered a cup of tea upon entering a relative or friend’s house is almost unthinkable. Tea structured the language and ordering of the Irish diet. Still, in many rural areas the evening meal is called tea. On the verge of war, Ireland had the second highest per-capita consumption of tea in the world (second only to the United Kingdom).4 Restrictions did not follow immediately upon the announcement of war and it was not until March 1941 when the British government, following the edict of Churchill himself, decided to restrict exports to Ireland, believing the nation was receiving a free ride on the back of the Atlantic convoys without contributing to the war effort.5 From April 1941 onwards personal tea rations were introduced at ¾ ounce (21 grams) per week, and would fluctuate between ½ ounce (14 grams) and 1 ounce (28 grams) for the course of the war.6 To put this into perspective the tea ration per person in Britain was 2 ounces for the majority of duration of the war. The Irish government’s announcement of tea rationing was met with immediate anxiety. Newspapers carried articles advising consumers how they could eke out supplies, supplement them with other commodities, or almost unimaginably try to survive without tea. The Irish Press claimed:

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__________________________________________________________________ The Subject most talked about at present by all creeds, classes and both sexes is tea – how to replace it and fool oneself, how to eke out one’s rapidly vanishing ration, or more simply, how to learn to do without it.7 Similar anxiety is also visible in the pages of Dublin Opinion, a monthly satirical magazine, which had been in publication since 1922. From March 1941 onwards almost every addition carried a cartoon on tea, and very often two or three per edition. 2. The Power of Tea To a significant extent, tea or the lack thereof, came to obsess Irish citizens and society, and, I would suggest, it was one of the principal ways in which they related to the war. Ireland of course, maintained a position of neutrality during the war, but isolation from military conflict did not free Irish citizens from suffering. In 1942, cases of tuberculosis, a disease associated with poverty and malnutrition, vastly increased.8 Typhus, effectively eradicated in Western Europe, threatened to reach epidemic proportions in the same year.9 Infant mortality rates more than doubled during the war, causing James Meeny, the newly appointed Chief Medical Officer in 1944 to describe infant deaths as Ireland’s ‘holocaust’.10 The quality and quantity of rations available were barely sufficient for the ordinary citizen. In particular, the quality of bread vastly deteriorated as 100% wheat extraction became necessary due to restricted imports. In contrast to Britain, where, during the Second World War the nutrient intake of the working class and poorest sections actually increased, the quality of the Irish diet rapidly deteriorated. Given these harsh realities tea was certainly not the only concern for Irish people. Tea, in a sense, became a stand in for the horrors imposed by war; its absence represented allegorically all other hardships which afflicted Irish society. In 1941, a British servicewoman wrote to her mother whilst on a Dublin shopping trip saying: Tea is the only thing that people are really desperate about, and you can exchange it for practically anything, so we have taken as much of it as we could get a hold of.11 In the same year the Army’s Quartermaster General Liam Egan engaged in a lengthy correspondence with the Ministry of Defence wrangling for any extra tea he could attain. In these pages the idea that tea would be able to compensate for all other suffering is tangibly present. In April 1941 he wrote to the Minister for Defence stating:

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__________________________________________________________________ It is no exaggeration to say that the soldier would cheerfully sacrifice any other portion of his ration rather than tea. . . No hardship or privation is too severe for him provided an occasional mug of tea is forthcoming.12 The government were acutely aware of the symbolic importance of tea. After the announcement that normal tea imports from Britain would be cut the administration engaged in frantic efforts to secure an independent supply through Calcutta, which proved elusive as the war in Asia intensified. A quick glance at the list of files in the Department of Supplies will demonstrate that more governmental time was dedicated to this one commodity, than any other. Fianna Fáil, the political party in office throughout the war, was also clearly aware of the practical political benefits tea could bring. For example, at various stages during the war the tea ration was increased for small periods and then reduced again, such as, in the period before Christmas 1942, which also happened to coincide with the run up to the 1943 General Election. 3. The State Intervenes This was an era of increasing state involvement in the minutia of daily life, often generating much frustration and anger amongst sections of the population. Compulsory Tillage Orders, for example, compelling farmers to set aside a certain amount of land for growing wheat were highly unpopular.13 In terms of food provisioning, particularly tea provisioning, anger is certainly evident at perceived inequalities and ineptitudes. Smuggling across the northern border was rife, often with tea being exchanged for eggs, which were in greater supply in the south.14 Substitute products, for example, Coffee Éire, intended to compensate for the lack of actual tea proved incredibly unpopular, and were often negatively associated with the state.15 In contrast to Britain, where, as Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska has demonstrated, rationing was accepted as a necessary sacrifice, this was never the case in Ireland, as the government undermined itself with ineffective communication and an increasing raft of unpopular orders and officials.16 Many relationships to the Irish State, began to revolve primarily around access to tea. Charities, which for decades had provided free tea to the destitute and very poor, were required to send individual requests to the Ministry of Supplies asking permission for increased rations. Saint Vincent de Paul societies located in all parts of the country sent in dozens of such applications supplicating for increased tea on the grounds that it was the only pleasure the most disadvantaged in society had to enjoy.17 Tea was certainly something of a contested battleground, through which institutions and groups attempted to challenge the authority of central governance. For example, initially the Army secretly continued to provide double the ration of tea to its soldiers and was only brought into line after extensive wrangling between the Ministry of Supplies and Ministry of Defence.18 Other groups were able to

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__________________________________________________________________ claim and hold special privileges. Turf workers were vital in supplying fuel in the face of restricted coal imports. Workers on a turf bog, near Spiddal in County Galway, went on strike in August 1941 demanding extra tea supplies, and similar such strikes took place across the country, eventually forcing the Minister of Supplies to grant an extra ration to the turf workers nationally.19 The fact that extra tea was the primary demand of the strike should not delude us into thinking that the turf workers had little to complain about. Almost all outside observers described the conditions on the bogs as unsatisfactory, and some compared them to the internment camps, where IRA suspects were detained throughout the Emergency.20 Their demands for increased tea again highlight the significance and symbolism attached to this product. It was seen as a panacea. Not everyone within Irish society had to go without tea. Access to tea was carefully mediated according to income and class status. It was available on the black market but only to those who could afford to purchase it. Thus, an everyday commodity considered a necessity became a luxury, only obtained by those with money or influence. Dublin Opinion played upon this idea frequently in their cartoons. In one such cartoon we witness a father chastising his butler for only providing champagne on the day of his daughter’s wedding, ‘tut, tut’ he reprimands him, claiming ‘tea alone is fitting in such a circumstance’.21 During the war, whilst there was evidently some disruption in supply it was possible for the wealthy of Irish society to maintain relatively lavish lifestyles. British and American servicemen and women stationed in Northern Ireland, moreover, looked to Ireland as something of a haven from the worst shortages of the war. Ironically for them, Ireland, a land on the verge of a typhus epidemic, was a holiday destination, filled with steak, cream, and cakes, which often proved difficult to obtain in Britain. Many on the outside portrayed Ireland as a land of plenty, and even as fiddling or partying while Europe burned. The reality was somewhat different, however; and captured by the English writer Cyril Connolly in 1941 – ‘The shops are full of good things to eat, the streets of people who cannot afford to buy them’.22 For the majority of the population the war brought a sharp decline in their standard of living. The fact that tea was available in society, but only to those who had money or influence, undoubtedly generated resentment amongst the average citizen confined to a ration they considered inadequate. From our vantage point it is difficult to understand how a food product, such as tea, largely devoid of nutritional or caloric benefits, could obsess a society. Ireland, during the Second World War, was, however, obsessed by tea. The hot soothing beverage conjured images of halcyon pre-war and pre-ration days, evoking feelings of home and family in a time of immense uncertainty. Sidney Mintz has described sugar as having an ‘unusually symbolic carrying power’, and, I think the same must be said of tea.23 During the war, the absence of tea was a metaphor which represented the other hardships Irish society were suffering, it came to dominate the interactions between the state and other institutions, and highlighted the class

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__________________________________________________________________ divisions present within the society. And the politics of tea would continue to have a significant influence on the state beyond the war. Price controls and subsidies introduced after the end of conflict ensured that tea, and other commodities, such as sugar and bread, remained affordable to all sections of society. Indeed, the government would continue to subsidise the price of tea until 1957. As the normal supply level returned post-war, tea became enshrined as a right for all citizens, regardless of income or status. The experience of absence during war, thus, helped to formulate a new politics of consumption based on the ideals of fair shares, consumer rights and state responsibilities.

Notes 1

Major John Lillis, ‘Memorandum on Tea Supplies’, The Department of Industry and Commerce Files, EMR/3/2, 10 February 1941. 2 L. A. Clarkson and E. Margaret Crawford, Feast and Famine: A History of Food and Nutrition in Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 103. 3 Ibid., 104. 4 Clair Wills, That Neutral Island: Ireland during the Emergency (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), 239. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 ‘To Tea or Not to Tea’, The Irish Press, 21 March 1941, 7. 8 Clair Wills, That Neutral Island, 258. 9 Ibid., 257. 10 James Deeny, quoted in Clair Wills, That Neutral Island, 258. 11 Unknown British Servicewoman, quoted in Clair Wills, That Neutral Island, 240. 12 Liam Egan, ‘Letter to Minister of Defence’, Department of Industry and Commerce Files, EMR/3/2, 29 April 1941. 13 ‘Those Government Forms’, Dublin Opinion, September, 1940, 295. 14 ‘The Smugglers’, Dublin Opinion, April, 1941, 34. 15 ‘Home-Made Tea’, Dublin Opinion, May, 1941, 53. 16 Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls, and Consumption, 1939-1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 256. 17 ‘Charitable Organisations’, The Department of Industry and Commerce Files, EMR/3/4. 18 ‘Meeting between the Minister of Defence, Colonel McCabe and Commandant Hannon’ The Department of Industry and Commerce Files, EMR/3/2, 18, July 1941. 19 ‘Turf Cutters go on Strike for Tea’, The Connacht Tribune, 23 August 1941, 4. 20 ‘Migrant Labour for Camp Scheme’, The Department of the Taoiseach Files, TAOIS/3/S12820, 1 June 1942.

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‘Tut, Tut! Jeeves’, Dublin Opinion, March, 1941, 5. Cyril Connolly, quoted in Clair Wills, That Neutral Island, 245. 23 Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (London: Penguin Books, 1986), 207. 22

Bibliography Primary Sources ‘Charitable Organisations’. The Department of Industry and Commerce Files EMR/3/4. 1941. Egan, Liam. ‘Letter to Minister of Defence’. Department of Industry and Commerce Files EMR/3/2. 29 April 1941. ‘Home-Made Tea’. Dublin Opinion. May, 1941. Lillis, Major John. ‘Memorandum on Tea Supplies’. The Department of Industry and Commerce Files, EMR/3/2. 10 February 1941. ‘Meeting between the Minister of Defence, Colonel McCabe and Commandant Hannon’. The Department of Industry and Commerce Files EMR/3/2. 18 July 1941. ‘Migrant Labour for Camp Scheme’. The Department of the Taoiseach Files, TAOIS/3/S12820. 1 June 1942. ‘The Smugglers’, Dublin Opinion. April, 1941 ‘Those Government Forms’. Dublin Opinion. September, 1940. ‘To Tea or Not to Tea’. The Irish Press. 21 March 1941. ‘Turf Cutters go on Strike for Tea’. The Connacht Tribune. 23 August 1941. ‘Tut, Tut! Jeeves’. Dublin Opinion. March, 1941. Secondary Sources Clarkson, L. A. and E. Margaret Crawford. Feast and Famine: A History of Food and Nutrition in Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

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__________________________________________________________________ Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. London: Penguin Books, 1986. Wills, Clair. That Neutral Island: Ireland during the Emergency. London: Faber and Faber, 2007. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Ina. Austerity in Britain: rationing, controls, and consumption, 1939-1955. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. John Porter is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History, Trinity College Dublin. His research focusses on the history of consumption in Ireland in the early to mid-twentieth century. His work is funded by the Irish Research Council.

The Most American Daily Bread: The Rise and Fall of Wonder Bread Keiko Tanaka Abstract The Wonder Bread factory of Interstate Bakery at Biddleford, Maine was the biggest producer of bread in the world in the 20th century. Wonder Bread was the staple food of the American people in Mid-20th century, even to the extent of it becoming the impetus for the phrase, “the greatest thing since sliced bread”. Due, in part to its powerful marketing strategy, sliced white bread was the symbol of white American. It became prominent marker of the eating habits of America, even stretching beyond race, unifying the eating habits of a wide range of emigrants and helping in the integration of American multiracial society. Moreover, increased attention to greater nutrition was encouraged with the increased supply of Wonder Bread during wartime America. Since the 1960s, however, with the enhancement of health consciousness, the middle-class American returned to homemade bread and bread made from whole wheat flour. With the increase in the number of ethnic groups, there was a similar expansion and variegation in the cuisine of Americans. Fewer Americans came to have sliced bread for breakfast and lunch, and the sales of Wonder Bread decreased. Thus, in the rise and fall of Wonder Bread, we can see a reflection of the rise and decline of Anglo-American hegemony in mainstream culture. Key Words: White bread, Anglo-American, advertisement, commercialism, ethnicity, immigrant. ***** 1. Anglo Heritage of American Food Culture American breakfast followed the British food culture and toast became a common feature at breakfast. When we examine the history of toast, it goes as far back as early Egyptian culture where the discovery of yeast-bacteria fermentation was supposedly used first when the Egyptians scorched lumps of dough over fire.1 They were perhaps the first to do what the British practiced most extensively centuries later. Elizabeth David asserts the reason for toast’s popularity across the socio-economic classes of England -- the attachment of fireplaces in the home and the range of the charcoal available, making cooking more frequent in more homes. Toast, she describes, with spread butter is a delicacy originally peculiar to England.2 ‘Bread and butter’ has become inseparable and is a set phrase. The practice of spreading butter on toast was said to be English invention ‘because the houses were so cold and the butter so hard that it was only on toast that it was

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_______________________________________________________ spreadable.’3 By the 17th century it had become usual in Britain and butter on toast became an essential feature at breakfast and teatime. However, the popularity of sliced bread can be traced back to sandwich, a staple lunch food, whose origin is British and is related to the Earl of Sandwich. Sliced white bread is used to make a sandwich which is an easy-to-make meal in itself. A sandwich is very handy and simple, but can be elaborate with fillings according to the maker’s ingenuity. Thus, as an ingredient, sliced white bread changed American eating habits from just filling their stomachs to satisfying their appetite quickly. Sandwiches have been a common handmade lunch meal for students. Still, a probability of getting tired of them cannot be denied. A girl in a teen novel of the 1950s, made do with a small budget of allowance to save money for her adornment, but she became sick and tired of eating sandwiches every day. The things that broke her budget were having to buy her lunch all those days when there was nothing in the house for sandwiches, except chicken which she was tired of, or bologna which she couldn’t eat, or cheese which she had taken two days in a row, or peanut butter, which was fattening. She had had to spend sixty cents a day for good lunch, and that took a lot of her week’s allowance.4 Peanut butter was promoted by the vegetarian John H. Kellogg in the 1890s. At first it was the luxury item but with the industrialization of food processing the price decreased and since the Great Depression, when fresh meat as a source of protein became expensive, peanut butter became popular as sandwich spread for children and workers across all classes. 5 Thereafter peanut butter and jelly became essential to American child’s diet in place of butter. Soft white sliced bread and peanut butter, or bread and Spam, became basic sandwiches during the Depression.6 Both peanut butter and jelly were listed on U.S. military rationing in World War II. The average American student consumed fifteen hundred peanut butter and jelly sandwiches before high school graduation in 1986.7 Peanut butter is one of things American as is evident from the fact that National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day is celebrated annually. 2. Changing the Role of a Lady (or Loaf Kneader) Most European immigrants had the custom of using communal ovens in their homeland, because they could not afford space and fuel for baking bread at home. So, they did not have any option but to buy baker’s bread in a new world.8 Whiter and softer bread was expensive but gained popularity because whole grain bread was thought as being coarse and commonplace and white bread symbolized purity and refinement. From ancient times, the whitest flour was the result of the finest ground wheat grain produced. After 1900, due to the evolution of technology,

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_______________________________________________________ American wheat flour was processed to appear white by bleaching and the removal of the wheat germ and bran. By the end of the 19th century, when fewer cooks baked their own bread at home, the consumption of homemade bread was onequarter of what it once was and continued to decrease.9 At the turn of the 19th century, diseases deriving from food spread and people began to pay more attention to food hygiene. Shocked by the publication of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, which denounced the bad hygiene conditions of a meat processing factory, President Theodore Roosevelt signed a new Federal food law in 1906. The law ensured consumer confidence in the food and drugs people purchased, which benefited these businesses. Factories making bread were regarded as germ-free, cleaner than the local bakery and the trust in the safety of factory-made bread began to grow.10 Though, in the early 1800s, Mother’s bread was celebrated as the symbol of goodness, by 1930s commercial bread was a godsend for the households which could not afford a servant.11 So, the role of the mother or cook as goddess of the hearth was passed onto bakers and then bakery companies. In this way the custom of buying bread began to prevail among ordinary households in urban areas in America. In fact, commercial bread was common during the First World War. America exported large amounts of flour to the military and Allies in Europe, so Mondays and Wednesdays were declared as ‘Save Wheat’ days. Flour was hard to obtain at retail stores but bakers continued to be supplied with it. 12 3. Wonder Bread: A Cultural Icon of America The marketing strategy of the company intended to change the custom of immigrant housewives from baking bread with recipes from their home country to buying Wonder Bread by promoting white bread as a status symbol of a proper American middle-class home. In 1925, Continental Baking Company acquired Taggart and made an epoch in American bread history as this company made use of new medium for promoting its product and changed housewives from bread makers to expert consumers. The target of advertisements was nationwide. Wonder Bread was a very American bread in that it seemed to cross the barriers between races and social classes. Moreover, there were few regulations governing exaggerated advertisements and many of the visitors to Expo naively accepted the extravagant nutritious claims made by Wonder Bread. Into the 1950s, greater and more persuasive advertisements continued to reinforce and embellish the nutrients of Wonder Bread. It was Ted Bates’ Advertising Agency which the Continental Baking Company adopted, and their slogan, ‘Wonder Bread Builds Strong Bodies 8 Ways’ was based on USP (Unique Selling Proposition) theory.13 The slogan of making one's body strong reflected the disquieting tension of the international situation and the social anxiety of McCarthyism. By the 1960s, four more elements were added leading to ‘12 ways to Build Strong Bodies.’ After the

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_______________________________________________________ Second World War, wartime trend continued and enriched food was encouraged for the military in the interest of national defence. Under President Johnson the government came out with a positive stance by establishing Children Nutrition Act as a part of policy for the ‘Great Society’, targeting the malnourished poverty stricken children.14 4. Mothers’ Hand-made Lunch The preciousness of store-bought bread for Southern rural people was beyond the bounds of imagination for city-bred people. School children’s lunch meals reflected the gap between the rich and the poor. Rich kids would swap their sandwiches made of store bought with those of homemade bread with the country kids. David Campbell, a retired engineer recounts his hard days of farm life in Oklahoma to his grandchildren: This was during the Great Depression, and we were so poor that my mother would send us to the Porter School with biscuits and pork sausage for lunch. There was a “rich kid” that sat next to me in the lunchroom. His sandwiches were usually ham and cheese on white store-bought bread. Sliced light bread was a treat at our home. This dumb rich kid actually liked pork sausage and biscuits, so sometimes he would trade his sandwich for mine. To this day I enjoyed a ham and cheese sandwich and don’t care for biscuits and pork sausage.15 He was not interested in the lunch which his mother made for him, but ironically enough, the rich child liked it. For the poor farm boy, ham and cheese sandwiches made with store-bought bread had become comfort food. Thus, we can see how children’s identity can be shaped by what they eat. In the case of schoolchildren, their very cultural identity could be shaped by what was put in their lunch box, because the contents of lunch boxes represent the culture of its maker and their family. As for Campbell, the ham and cheese sandwich with white storebought bread was the symbol of wealth, and a longing for it. 5. Wonder Bread as a Part of the American-Immigrant Experience Immigrant children tend to be strongly concerned about what others eat. How were they conscious of their own daily food, which their parents had brought with them? Jewish Immigrants from Eastern Europe mostly settled in New York by 1920s. There were large Jewish communities in Lower East side in Manhattan and the Jewish residents consumed mostly bagels from delicatessen shops. Marlene Adler Marks, a Jewish columnist (1948-2002) who lived in a Jewish ghetto in Brooklyn,

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_______________________________________________________ New York, remembers her school trip to the Wonder Bread factory. As a girl she ate Wonder Bread in order to fit in with her white, middle-class American classmates. She says: And, of course, there was Wonder Bread – in every particular (sic), from its spongy white center to its grainless, seedless crust, a rejection of European rye. Wonder Bread was not only everything that it took to be an American – why else must a bread build strong bodies twelve ways? – but everything that a would-be American was expected to give up: taste, specific culture, grit. The Wonder Bread factory was right across the river and every New York City school child visited there as a school trip, peering into the vats filled with yeasty dough, bringing home gifts of tiny spongy loaves wrapped in red-yellow-andblue-ballooned bags. How could we not feel safe in this breadbasket America? Because what, really, was the alternative? Those who today shake their heads at the immigrant generation’s rush to cut off their roots have forgotten one crucial fact: Life in the old country was hell.16 Regardless of race, Wonder Bread was an American national staple. Secondgeneration emigrants abandoned their taste of their motherland. By eating Wonder Bread, all of them not only became stronger but, perhaps more importantly in their eyes, became American citizens transcending race and class. I think Wonder Bread seems to be one symbol of the realization of the concept of Anglo conformity. As the latecomers, newer immigrants were supposed to accept AngloAmerican customs, abandoning the traditional culture of their homeland. The American melting-pot society was reinforced by Wonder Bread and its advertising. Even in the 1980’s, for a new Asian-immigrant girl, Wonder Bread was the object of admiration. Bich Minh Nguyen arrived in America, along with her family, after fleeing Vietnam in 1975, when Saigon fell to the Communists. The Nguyen family settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and growing up as a young girl Nguyen tried to adapt to American life style. After moving to public school, she worries about the fact that the food she brings for lunch is different from that of the other students. Not long after third grade started I ditched my banged-up Scooby-Doo lunch box, which smelled faintly of deli meat no matter how much I washed it, for the brown paper bags that everyone else was using. Luckily, they were inexpensive, so my

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_______________________________________________________ stepmother didn’t object to buying them. The bags provided little protection for my sandwiches, which always got smushed (sic) before lunch hour. Rosa bought whatever white bread was cheapest – sadly, never the Wonder Bread my friends ate, which I was certain had a fluffier, more luxurious bite – and peanut butter and jelly, olive loaf, or thin packets of pastrami and corned beef made by a company called Buddig.17 She longed to eat what everyone else was eating and to have the same items as her peers. To avoid being seen as an outsider in her classroom she felt it necessary to have the fashionable and commonly held things. We see how the young immigrant girl is affected not only by peer pressure but by American commercialism. She wanted to become “more American” by eating American food. 6. Children’s Wonder Bread Play Susan Seligson, a Jewish journalist wrote the book titled Going with the Grain, professing herself to be a bread lover. She selected a Wonder Bread factory for one of her destinations, as it was the taste of nostalgia for the baby boomers of her generation. When Seligson visited Interstate Bakery at Biddleford, the manufacturers told her that their best customers were children. Wonder Bread was soft, smooth and pleasant, and easily torn. Children could play with the crusts. Louise De Salvo tells the memory of a store-bought bread of Wonder Bread type. 18

Amusingly, she adds that you can also eat this. ‘But it sticks to the roof of your mouth.’ Children also had fun making small balls out of crumps and a square to be used as a ‘hoop’ from the crusts so that they could play basketball with Wonder Bread. Seligson added the article of ‘Wonder Bread basketball set’ in the end of the chapter on her Wonder Bread factory visit. 7. The Collapse of the Empire The heyday of sliced white bread consumption is a thing of the past now. The food industry saw a 30 percent decrease in sales in the 15 years from 1967 to 1982. In 1975, Wonder Bread shamefully made it into ‘What Not to Eat: 10 Foods to Avoid’ published by Center for Science in the Public Interest. The McGovern report (1977) emphasized the importance of eating less meat and fat, and more cereal products and whole grains. These new dietary guidelines were embraced across the country and especially urban elites of upper-middle-class came to have interest in health care and healthy eating.19 Wonder Bread was the symbol of technological advancement in 1935 but became the image of large corporate manufacturing, the very essence of American culture – its food – for profit and slick advertising. As the air in balloon withered, now Wonder Bread is disappearing from the shelves at the supermarket. The

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_______________________________________________________ 1970’s saw ethnic consciousness rising as the core of ethnic groups became the third generation. The phenomenon of ethnic revival became prominent and the movement spread across aspects of food, clothing and housing. People came to show interest not only in their own ethnicities but also in others. As for food, bread and bakery businesses started by new immigrants were of interest. The value of the handmade bread of the motherland was rediscovered. According to Interstate Bakery’s market research, most of Wonder Bread’s consumers are blue-collared, low-income families; approximately 40 percent earning less than $15,000 annually. 20 Men and teenagers are the leading consumers. Approximately half the sales are to people older than fifty, who have nostalgic attachment to Wonder Bread. 21 Once the image of American affluence, it has now degenerated to being the food of the lower classes. 22 Now that the consumers’ sense of value supporting Wonder Bread has been lost, its buyers are the people who have little care for what they eat, or poor people with a low standard of living who can buy only cheap bread. The Wonder bread factory in Memphis, Tennessee was as old as the brand of Wonder Bread itself and the existence was called a symbol of the town for the vast outward appearance and the baking fragrance. However, within its walls racial policy prevailed. Indeed, Martin Luther King Jr. called for a boycott of Wonder Bread as well as Coca Cola and Sealtest milk in his speech on the night before his assassination in 1968, at Mason Temple in Memphis.23 African Americans were allowed to do labour such as floor cleaning, loading and unloading trucks, and machine repair but handling bread dough was never permitted at Wonder Bread factories in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. Margaret H. Mason published a picture book, These Hands based on this and won Golden Kite Honours for it in 2012.24 In 2000, a Californian court awarded over 112 million dollars reparations to 20 plaintiffs against the manufacturers of Wonder Bread. In this suit – the second highest compensation of a suit concerning racism in America at the time, the Interstate Bakery declared its bankruptcy in 2004. When Interstate Bakeries Corporation emerged from the 2004 bankruptcy, the name was changed to Hostess Brands, Inc. The height of Wonder Bread’s popularity is now truly destroyed. Hostess went out of business in January 2012 again, after another legal suit in 2009. In 2012, Flowers acquired Hostess and the brand of Wonder Bread is coming back to stores.25 Yet, entrenched fans of Wonder Bread do still exist. 8. Conclusion Wonder Bread, once the symbol of white, healthy, middle-class America, is now considered junk food by intellectuals of America. Once the model nutritious food for white mid-class Americans and for immigrants wanting to assimilate into mainstream American society, Wonder Bread is now commonly considered dull with standardized flavor, taste and artificial nutritive value. As people regained

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_______________________________________________________ their taste for baker’s bread, ethnic breads and community bakeries have been revived. As for the child consumer who was once so attracted by vigorous advertising and marketing ploys, sweet cereals and enticing snacks are now more appealing. Now, the trademark gives us an impression that the magic of the air balloons once envisioned by the founders, has lost its effect on the American palate. The gloss of exaggerated advertising has been removed. Wonder Bread, once a leader in the food production industry and a ubiquitous all-American brand now struggles to keep the logo and name on the product from Flower Bakery. The fall of Wonder Bread can be seen coincidently with the decline of the hegemony of Anglo Americanism.

Notes 1

H. E. Jacob, Six Thousand Years of Bread: Its Holy and Unholy History, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Skyhorse Publishing Inc., 2007), 26-28. 2 Elizabeth David, English Bread and Yeast Cookery (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 540-1. 3 Colin Spencer, British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History (London: Grub Street, 2002), 212. See also Andrew Webb, Food Britannia (London: Random House 2012), citing March 1748 dairy entry of Peter Kalm, Finnish explorer. 4 Ann Emery, First Love, True Love. (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1956), 35. 5 Smith, Vol.2, 246-247. 6 The Great Depression: Food 1929-1941, Historic Events for Students: The Great Depression. Editor: Richard C Hanes & Sharon M Hanes. Volume 1. Detroit: Gale,2002.(http://www.omnilogos.com/2015/02/great-depression-food-19291941.html) 7 PB&J is A-OK. Prepared Foods, October 2002, viewed on date is missing, https://www.highbeam.com/publications/prepared-foods-p132758/october-2002. 8 Katherine Leonard Turner, ‘Tool and Spaces: Working-Class Neighborhoods, 1880-1930,’ Food Chains: From Farmyard to Shopping Cart (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 230. 9 Smith, Vol.1, 121. 10 Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012) 37-47. 11 Bobrow-Strain, 30. 12 Smith, Vol.1, 121. 13 Twitchell, 134-135. 14 Bobrow-Strain, 117-131.

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_______________________________________________________ 15

David Campell, Take me back to Tipton (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse Inc, 2001), 12. 16 Marlene Adler Marks, ‘Macaroni and Cheese,’ Nice Jewish Girls: Growing up in America, ed. Marlene Adler Marks (New York: Plume. 1996), 281. 17 Bich Minh Nguyen, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 76. 18 Loise DeSalvo, ‘Cutting the Bread’, Ed. By Louise DeSalvo and Edvige Giunita, The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture (New York: The Feminist Press, CUNY, 2002), 324. 19 Emily Bryson York, “Grains make gains: Wheat surpasses white in sliced bread sales,” Chicago Tribune, August 1, 2010, not properly capitalized, viewed on date is missing, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-08-01/business/ct-biz-0801-breadsqueezed--20100801_1_bread-sales-white-bread-wheat-bread. 20 Twitchell, Ibid., 138, Notes 9. 21 Whet Moser, ‘How Wonder Bread Saved Civilization,’ Chicago magazine / A Chicago Tribune Media Group website, Viewed on 2 May 2016. http://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/March-2014/How-Wonder-Bread-Becamethe-Healthand-then-the-Ill-Healthof-the-State/. 22 Twitchell, 138, Notes 9. 23 Martin Luther King, Jr. ‘I've Been to the Mountaintop’, viewed on date is missing, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkivebeentothemountaintop.htm. 24 Margaret H. Mason, Amazon.com Review: A Note from the Author. Viewed on date is missing, http://www.amazon.com/These-Hands-Golden-Honors-Awards/dp/0547215665. Mason is the picture book writer who made human rights a theme and plainly tells the children of discrimination against blacks. She had heard about the Detroit Wonder Bread factory’s discriminatory policies in the 1950s and ‘60s from an old friend and Bakers Union stalwart whose voice still trembled even after thirty years passed, talking about the humiliation the workers endured at the bakery. 'Look at these hands, Joseph. / Did you know these hands were not allowed to mix the bread dough in the Wonder Bread Factory? / Did you know these hands were not allowed to touch the bread dough in the Wonder Bread factory? / These hands were only allowed to sweep the floors and work the line and load the trucks. / Because the bosses said white people would not want to eat bread touched by these hands. / .... / Now any hands can mix the bread dough, no matter their color. / Now any hands can touch the bread dough, no matter their color. / Yes, they can.' Bookloons, information and the viewed on date is missing, http://www.bookloons.com/cgi-bin/Review.asp?bookid=13691. 25 Colin Schultz, “The Life And Death of Wonder Bread,” Smithsonian,

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_______________________________________________________ November, 16, 2012, blogs, viewed on date is missing, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-life-and-death-of-wonder-bread-129979401/.

Bibliography Bobrow-Strain, Aaron. White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2012. Campell, David. Take me back to Tipton. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse Inc, 2001. David, Elizabeth. English Bread and Yeast Cookery. New York: Penguin, 1988． Davidson, Alan. Oxford Companion to Food. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. DeSalvo, Louise and Edvige Giunita. The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture. New York: The Feminist Press, CUNY 2002. Emery, Ann. First Love, True Love. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1956. Eidenmuller, Michael E. American Rhetoric. Martin Luther King, Jr. ‘I've Been to the Mountaintop’. Viewed 18 December 2015. http://www.americanrhetoric.com/. Gong, Leo. The Wonder Bread Cookbook; An Inventive and Unexpected Recipe Collection. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 2007． Jacob, H. E. Six Thousand Years of Bread: Its Holy and Unholy History. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Skyhorse Publishing Inc., 2007 Marks, Marlene Adler. ‘Macaroni and Cheese’ Nice Jewish Girls: Growing up in America, edited by Marlene Adler Marks, 280-282. New York: Plume, 1996． Mason, Margaret H. Amazon.com Review: A Note from the Author. Viewed on 2 May 2016. http://www.amazon.com/These-Hands-Golden-Honors-Awards/dp/0547215665. Moser, Whet. ‘How Wonder Bread Saved Civilization,’ Chicago magazine / A Chicago Tribune Media Group website, Viewed on 2nd May 2016. http://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/March-2014/How-Wonder-Bread-Becamethe-Healthand-then-the-Ill-Healthof-the-State/.

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_______________________________________________________ Nguyen, Bich Minh. Stealing Budda’s Dinner. New York: Penguin Book, 2008. Smith, Andrew F. ed,. Oxford Encyclopaedia of Food and Drink in America. New York: Oxford UP, 2004． Spencer, Colin. British Food : An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History. London: Grub Street, 2002. Ruth Tobias, ‘Toast’ Smith, Oxford Encyclopaedia of Food and Drink in America Vol.1, 122. Schultz, Colin, ‘The Life And Death of Wonder Bread,’ Smithsonian, November, 16, 2012, blogs, Viewed on 2 May 2016. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/the-life-and-death-of-wonder-bread--129979401/. Turner, Katherine Leonard, ‘Tool and Spaces: Working-Class Neighborhoods, 1880-1930,’ Food Chains: From Farmyard to Shopping Cart University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009 Twitchell, James B. Lead us into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism. New York: Columbia UP.1999． Webb, Andrew. Food Britannia. London: Random House 2012. York, Emily Bryson. ‘ Grains make gains: Wheat surpasses white in sliced bread sales,’ Chicago Tribune, August 01, 2010, blogs, Viewed on 2 May 2016. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-08-01/business/ct-biz-0801-breadsqueezed--20100801_1_bread-sales-white-bread-wheat-bread. Keiko Tanaka is an Associate Professor at Shizuoka Sangyo University, Japan. She is now working on the readership of American Junior Novels in Post-War Japan.

Deepening Cultural Knowledge: Semiotic Study on Finnish Chocolate Packages Heidi Uppa and Tania Rodriguez-Kaarto Abstract Food packages are cultural products. They reflect practices and perspectives and therefore convey culturally coded meanings. In this chapter, we analyse Finnish food culture through chocolate packaging examples. Food products and packages are so intertwined that it is difficult to recognise products without packages. Chocolate packages are studied as cultural symbols, by which meanings are constructed through social interactions and repeated patterns. However, messages and meanings on packages might be ineffective in communicating basic information to non-Finnish speakers. We focus on communication of food packages and the role of visual elements in the process of translating cultural knowledge and meanings. In this paper, Finnish culture is defined based on literature review and cultural dimensions. Semiotics and Yuri Lotman’s concept of the Semiosphere are adapted in the theoretical framing.1 Semiotic analysis is applied as a research method to examine food packages and chocolate packages in particular. Visual elements in Finnish chocolate brands such as text and typography, colours, imagery, layout and structure and the whole package as message are analysed. In addition, semi-structured interviews with design professionals were executed to ensure the depth and quality of the analyses. We also organised a workshop with foreigners living in Finland to record how they understand and read packages. Findings of this study show how the meanings of the packages are translated in the Semiosphere. Visual communication strengthens cultural transformation by reinforcing understanding in a multicultural environment. We identified a need for better visual translators to support nonFinnish speakers to understand and integrate into Finnish (food) culture. Future research will issue recommendations for the use and development of ‘meaning translators’ that boost cultural knowledge. Key Words: Food packaging, culture, identity, semiotics, language, cultural knowledge, chocolate, visual communication, semiotic analysis, semiosphere. ***** 1. Introduction Food cultures are shaped by history, environment, climate and socio-economic factors. They typically have specific characteristics pertaining to local conditions. Food is a cultural symbol and therefore a part of a broader system of meanings. New cultural meanings are constructed based on previous experiences and knowledge in a multifaceted process. For example, a taste for certain food needs to

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__________________________________________________________________ be developed by ‘training and intellectual activity’.2 Eating and tasting experiences are personal and intimate because of the physical nature of such practices. Eating is an embodied activity connected to all senses —to taste and smell in particular— which also include important social features.3 That makes food a powerful social connector. Specific food, as well as language can be considered as a characteristic of certain national or local culture. Both, food and language have important social functions, closely connected to ways of learning, belonging and socialising. Language is learned and shared through dialogical interactions, which is also a physical and sensorial experience.4 Consuming edible goods serves as a gateway for cultural exploration among foreign and immigrant population. Immigrants learn about food and culture through conscious interaction with products and people. Cultural curiosity and knowledge acquisition raises interest to interact with a foreign culture and in turn motivates foreigners to learn the language.5 In modern cultures, many food products are the result of industrialised processes; typically packaged and bought from supermarkets. Food and packaging are intertwined concepts and semiotically they formulate one unit: a food product. Packaging becomes a representation of a food product containing several different messages, codes and semiotic levels. In this paper, we concentrate on food packages as cultural symbols and on the process of meaning construction within the Semiosphere.6 We discuss about the Semiosphere, in relation to Finland as a country and a culture, although Yuri Lotman originally stated that the Semiosphere could be a larger system. We chose chocolate as a representative product for this study because in many American and European countries chocolate is considered as a traditional product due to historical reasons and its long and enduring presence in the market. The first cacao beans came to Europe in the 16th century.7 This new luxury drink slowly began to spread among European courts and higher classes. Chocolate became available for mass consumption after the first European chocolate factories were founded in the 19th century.8 Many famous chocolate brands such as English Cadbury, Belgian Godiva and Neuhaus, Russian Einem, Latvian Laima and Finnish Fazer were established in the 19th century simultaneously as nationalisticromantic ideas were spreading throughout Europe. Chocolate was introduced as a nutritious drink for children and soon after in 1849 the British chocolate company Fry & Son innovated the first eatable and convenient chocolate bars.9 The story of chocolate is intertwined with historical events, practices and social conditions.10 This study approaches food packages through a semiotic analysis by referring to the concept of Semiosphere to explain how meanings are constructed in Finnish chocolate packages. Research questions of this study are: – How meanings on the food packages are translated in the Semiosphere? – What can Finnish chocolate packages reveal or tell about Finnish culture? What makes Fazer Blue chocolate specifically a Finnish product?

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__________________________________________________________________ Methods to answer the questions include a semiotic analysis, a collaborative workshop with foreign participants living in Finland as well as semi-structured interviews with design experts. 2. Background: Chocolate in Finland History of chocolate in Finland is closely connected to the most famous Finnish chocolate brand Fazer. Karl Fazer moved to Finland from Switzerland with his family and was passionate about creating taste sensations. He studied baking in Berlin, Paris and Saint Petersburg before opening his Franco-Russian confectionery in Helsinki in 1891.11 Six years later, in 1897, he opened the first Finnish sweets and chocolate factory.12 Fazer Blue chocolate bar was introduced in 1922, a few years after Finland gained independance from Russia.13 Still today Fazer Blue remains one of the most famous, recognised and loved Finnish brands among Finnish consumers. It is closely connected to the idea of Finnishness and is considered to be one of the national symbols. Since the beginning, the most recognizable elements on the package have been the signature of Karl Fazer to guarantee the quality along with the colour blue.14 In the Fazer Blue’s package, the blue colour is connected not just to Finnish nature —comprised of many lakes and a clear northern sky— but also to the idea of Finnish independence, since it is also one of the colours on the Finnish flag. Today Fazer dominates the Finnish chocolate and candy market with many brands and sub-brands; other Finnish chocolate brands have remained as minor competitors. Fazer chocolate is also exported to other markets although it is not as strongly positioned abroad as it is in Finland. 3. Applying Semiotic Analysis on Food Packages Semiotics, is the study of signs and symbols through a deconstruction of image, texts and objects to understand them in the context of ‘broader systems of meaning’.15 For Semiotics, signs are considered to be the basic unit of language and the main components of our culture. Signs cannot be interpreted alone but only understood in relation to other signs; they are composed of: a) signified which is a concept, and b) the signifier which represents the sound or the image ascribed to the signified; the actual physical object is called the signs’ referent.16 The ‘broader systems of meaning’ are also called codes. A code is an established way to make meaning among a group of people; they are understood as cultural practices when speaking of a whole nation —what, when and where of peoples’ doings and habits.17 Codes reflect the perspectives (values and philosophy) at work in a society. When a sign is encoded it means that it is familiar to a certain group that understands that code. These codes can also be embedded in different ways of representation called modes (image, text, 3D object, writing, music, etc.); one sign can be found in more than one mode, and this is referred to as multimodality.18 In

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__________________________________________________________________ chocolate packages, the analysis decodes all signs —type, colour, graphic elements, illustration, layout, size and material— at play in the product. 3.1 The Semiosphere Yuri Lotman coined the term Semiosphere in 1984 when referring to the space where all systems of signification (messages) are contained. The same way a biosphere contains all interactive living systems, the Semiosphere contains all signification systems in constant interaction; it is the space where nothing is absolute and which engages in constant and simultaneous processes of signification, meaning and sense making.19 According to other theoreticians of the Semiosphere, ‘there is more than one level at which one might identify a Semiosphere -at the level of a single national or linguistic culture [...] or of a larger unity such as ‘the West’ [...]’20. The Semiosphere has boundaries of two types: One which separates the Semiosphere from the non- or extra-semiotic spaces that surround it and through which information passes and is adapted to make new meanings. Outside the boundary, lie all other systems (i.e. flora, fauna, pagan, chaos, etc.). The second boundary is internal, it is the one that separates the centre from its periphery; not fixed and in constant renegotiation with incoming new information according to ‘multiple paradigms moving at different rates and changing’.21 This shifting, accounts for the Semiospheres’ semiotic irregularity. This implies that the mechanism of a Semiosphere unavoidably shifts because of the multiple paradigm changes that give way to different semiotic codes.22 In this chapter, Semiosphere is discussed in the context of Finnish food culture (Image 1). Chocolate packages were chosen to exemplify the meaning making process. 4. Methods of the Study We have revised Semiotic theory and the concept of the Semiosphere and carried out two research activities to exemplify both, cultural meaning and translation process in relation to chocolate packages. Firstly, we organised ten semi-structured interviews with Finnish and Russian design professionals with ample experience and cultural knowledge to discuss chocolate packaging designs and their meanings. Interviews combined with the results of a semiotic analysis carried out by one of the authors provided a deeper, professional level of knowledge on cultural meaning represented on the chocolate packages. We were then able to use those insights to reflect and compare with the results of the second research activity. Our second research activity was a workshop where chocolate packages were discussed with five non-Finnish participants. The participants have lived in Finland (between 3–32 years) and account for different degrees of cultural knowledge and language skills (from beginners to advanced). Chocolate products and their packaging designs are considered as ‘first-hand’ cultural encounters for foreigners

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__________________________________________________________________ in Finland. The purpose of the workshop was to find out what symbols and what kind of cultural information were evident and thus, understandable to foreigners from the Finnish chocolate packages. In this study, we focus on visual elements that may translate cultural information to the foreign population in Finland.

Image 1. Representation of the Semiosphere with a subcategory of cultural products, practices and perspectives, and a schematic representation of exchange of bilingual translatable filters during semiosis. © 2015, Tania Rodriguez-Kaarto and Heidi Uppa. 5. Decoded Meanings of the Finnish Chocolate Packages According to myths, origin of Finnish culture is traced to Siberia, although it is more likely that Finnish ancestors arrived from western and central Europe, Baltic countries, Sweden and Central Russia.23 Finland is a relatively young nation, culturally defined by Zacharias Topelius in 19th century for the first time.24 Finland has been ‘nation-centric’ as a result of public officials’ role as intelligentsia.25 In 1990, Tarasti described Finnish Semiosphere as scanty with its universe of signs; foreign signs were easily interpreted as threats against the consistency of the Finnish Semiosphere. This resistance can still be recognised in remote locations in the countryside, regardless of cultural transformations, globalisation and increased migration. There used to be relatively small amount of signs borrowed from elsewhere.26 However, there has been a shift towards cultural transformation due to increased interaction and communication with other cultures. Finnish culture

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__________________________________________________________________ differs significantly from neighbouring Russian culture (Image 2), since Finnish culture is dominantly individual and with low power distance; with clearly feminine values and slightly higher uncertainty avoidance in comparison to other cultures.27 Finnish culture has a linear understanding of time and is considered a low context culture due to its straightforward, direct and precise communication style.28 These cultural dimensions are values represented in the package designs through visual elements.

Image 2: Dimensions of Finnish culture in comparison with Russia.29 © 2015, Heidi Uppa. 5.1 Packages as Cultural Symbols Fazer Blue (Image 3) is widely considered as a national symbol in Finland. According to Fazer, the blue colour on the packaging refers to patriotism. From the expert interviews we gathered that the blue colour was originally chosen by Karl Fazer who supported the independence of the young Finnish nation in the 1920’s. However, today the blue colour is explained and associated more with nature. For example, blue landscapes have been used in its advertising campaigns. Connotations with nature tend to be more neutral in the context of Finnish culture than official symbols such as the national flag, which can be easily associated with nationalism and the Second World War.30 According to the Finnish design experts, the blue colour communicates calmness, coldness or distance and when combined with golden colour it suggests luxury, preciousness, trustworthiness and even royalty.

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Image 3: Fazer Blue chocolate package. © 2015, Heidi Uppa, published with permission of Fazer. Visual elements on the packaging are scanty and our Finnish design experts described the style as simple, minimalistic, calm, official, informative, straightforward, distant, traditional and classic. The logotype is based on a signature script that guarantees the quality, sophistication and originality. The product images are realistic and simple; and the layout style is classic. The product —wrapped in aluminium foil and paper— has a traditional packaging technique, which in the present context can be interpreted as a bit outdated. For Russian design experts, Fazer Blue packaging appeared as European, trustworthy, functional and practical since it emphasises the products’ qualities. As interviewed Russian designers summarised, ‘Russian packaging designs include layers’ and ‘wouldn’t ever have so much empty space free from visual elements’.31 The lack of original cultural material and content is visible in the Finnish chocolate packages and they communicate more modestly and calmly when compared to other European or American food packages. As one interviewed Finnish senior-level designer expressed ‘Finnish packages are not so overwhelmingly commercial as American packages’, for example the actual product name ‘Fazer Blue’ is not written on the package. However, he also recognised that Finnish packages typically contain references borrowed from Anglo-Saxon traditions. This is visible, for example, in the use of certain typefaces, styles and trends, in relation to Dammenberg’s chocolate package. 32 Geisha and Panda (Image 5) are examples of other chocolate brands based on exotic signs borrowed from ‘other Semiospheres’. Interviewed Finnish design experts recognized Finnish packages as cold, hard and Scandinavian, even boring when compared to Russian packages; without product images they are difficult to be recognized as chocolate packages. Storytelling in Finnish chocolate packages is functional: product images are realistic and precise.

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__________________________________________________________________ Visual quality of Finnish packages is often a bit unfinished and less ambitious — homespun and ‘good enough’.33 As one of the interviewed design experts summarised, culturally they are closer to Swedish and Scandinavian traditions but Swedish packages typically go further in expressing taste and flavour.

Image 4: Samples of Russian chocolate packages (selected through content analysis due to the large amount of product available in the Russian markets). © 2015, Heidi Uppa, published with permission of Красный Октябрь, Кондитерская фабрика Русский шоколад, Рот Фронт, Бабаевский, Волшебница and Коркунов гoрький шоколад. 5.2 Packages as Cultural Translators Cultural translators or translations can be understood as our interpretation of the depicted signs on cultural products. Fazer Blue is a national icon that has transcended its borders in Europe. The actual 3D object is available in almost every cafeteria, shop, market and kiosk throughout Finland. The majority of Finns are familiar with the product and its connotations of nationality and nature since their childhood. However, the foreign population can have a different reading of the product —as mentioned during the workshop— the colours blue and gold are associated with royalty in other countries—hence the confusion of Karl Fazer being Swedish— or as a luxury product, since the colour blue was very expensive to manufacture. The package displays the text of ‘milk chocolate’ in three different languages, which indicates that the product is directed to audiences outside Finland.

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__________________________________________________________________ Fazer Blue packaging design was updated in 2014. The current design displays an abstract circular shape in white over its iconic blue where the logo is situated and anchored with a flare element. This element can be understood as a light flare or drops on the lake surface by the Finnish consumers, however some foreign workshop participants failed to interpret it due to the abstract representation. In their opinion trustworthiness was reinforced by the style of the design. As for foreign residents in Finland, the photo of the chocolate on the package ‘is what you get’ and is representative of Finnish design style where directness and reticence mean, ‘less is more’. However, most of the interpretations made by foreigners fail to notice the references to nature with the colour blue. The simplicity of the design was the most recognisable feature among the foreign workshop participants as a representative feature of Finnish culture. In comparison, other Finnish chocolate packages were viewed as figurative, simple and depict abstract signs that relate to nature or the ingredients inside. Foreign workshop participants had difficulties in recognising cultural and historical elements in the packages, particularly when compared to Russian packages (Image 4). Russian packages are richer and more detailed with visual elements containing references to folk history and storytelling related to the national culture and pride.34 This reflects the need for higher level of cultural knowledge in order to understand meanings encoded in Russian packages in comparison to the simple style of Finnish packages.

Image 5: Samples of Finnish chocolate packages. © 2015, Heidi Uppa, published with permission of Fazer, Brunberg, Dammenberg, Kultasuklaa and Orkla.

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__________________________________________________________________ 6. Discussion of Findings Immigrants learn about food and culture through conscious interaction with products and people. In our workshop, we noticed that the amount of time spent living in Finland did correlate with the level of cultural knowledge or ability to recognise cultural translators in chocolate packages. Also, all workshop participants mentioned that their level of cultural knowledge is higher than their Finnish language skills, implying that language – albeit, not the only one-- is an important tool for acquiring cultural knowledge and vice versa. Cultural learning requires personal experiences, active interaction and communication between other members of the culture. We noticed that the level of involvement with the culture and native Finns was not equivalent to the duration of stay in Finland. Workshop participants with active personal and professional connections with Finnish culture were able to recognise more cultural meanings than less active participants who had been in Finland for a longer time. They also coincided with the design experts’ interpretations on the chocolate packages. Workshop participants mentioned that ‘Finns don’t communicate much’ or ‘Finns communicate with silence’ which makes decoding messages specially complicated for foreigners. Silence and simplicity can be considered as signs proper to the Finnish Semiosphere, and are often implicit in the designed packages. During the discussion, the workshop participants mentioned that living in another culture than ‘your own’ is a contrasting experience that helps them to recognise cultural signs and patterns. Taste and smell are especially important senses for socialisation because they develop emotions, memories and a sense of belonging.35 Active engagement with the local culture can help immigrants understand the language and cultural meanings related to the products they taste. Cultural knowledge enhances language learning through the exploration of cultural products allowing learners to engage in different ways of learning. Cultural products scaffold all types of learning — increasing vocabulary, broadening concepts, ways of expression and feeling, sensations and flavour descriptions— regardless of the learners’ level of language proficiency. Chocolate, as the cultural product under analysis, represents a ‘door’ for cultural knowledge for foreigners living in Finland. Finnish cultures’ visual style is simplistic and modest. Immigrants’ understanding of Finnish cultural connotations could be strengthened with the inclusion of other resources besides typography, such as storytelling. Some Finnish signs —such as silence— might be challenging to visualise within a design, although it would only lead to more expressive package designs and help foreigners to translate cultural information in the Finnish Semiosphere. 6.1 Conclusion Food packages are cultural symbols and convey meaning in the Semiosphere— in the same way as words and language. Meanings related to the signs are

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__________________________________________________________________ constructed by active interaction with products and amongst ourselves to gain more cultural understanding and in turn, develop language skills. Finnish chocolate packages express simplicity, practicality and calmness typical of Finnish culture. Some typical Finnish signs such as silence and simplicity are difficult to recognise by foreigners and immigrants due to their abstractness and because there might not be such a sign in their ‘own Semiosphere’. To create more meaningful and inclusive food packages we recommend improvement of the process of cultural translation by enhancing aspects of simplicity and storytelling with packaging designs.

Notes Yuri Lotman, ‘On the Semiosphere.’ Sign Systems Studies 33 (1), 2005, 206–229. Adrienne Lehrer, ‘As American as Apple Pie—and Sushi and Bagels: The Semiotics of Food and Drinks.’ Recent Developments in Theory and History. The Semiotic Web 1990, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok (Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1990), 388–401. 3 Martin Lindstrom, Brand Sense. Building Powerful Brands through Touch, Smell, Sight and Sound (New York, United States: Free Press, 2005). 4 Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Transl. Vern W. McGee (Austin, Texas, USA: University of Texas Press, 1986), 94–114. 5 Young-ae Hahn and Tania Rodriguez-Kaarto, ‘Designing for Social Integration: An Ecological Approach to Language Learning.’ (Nordes: Design Ecologies, conference proceedings, 2015), viewed 10 July 2015, http://www.nordes.org/opj/index.php/n13/article/view/406/383. 6 Lotman, ‘On the Semiosphere.’ 206–229. 7 Teresa L. Dillinger; Patricia Barriga; Sylvia Escarcega; Martha Jimenez; Diana Salazar Lowe and Louis E. Grivetti, ‘Food of the Gods: Cure for Humanity? A Cultural History of the Medicinal and Ritual Use of Chocolate.’ The Journal of Nutrition 130 (2000): 2057S–2072S. 8 Bertram M. Gordon, ‘Commerce, Colonies, and Cacao: Chocolate in England from Introduction to Industrialization.’ Chocolate: History, Culture, and Heritage, ed. Louis E. Grivetti and Howard-Yana Shapiro (Hoboken, NJ, United States: John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2009), 583–594. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Fazer. ‘History and Heritage’, viewed 5 July 2015, http://www.fazergroup.com/fi/tietoa-meista/history--heritage/fazerin--historia/. 12 Ibid. 13 Fazer. ‘Fazerin Sininen 1922’, viewed 5 July 2015, https://dream.do/fi/dreams/dream/historia-ja-perintö/posts/11048. 1 2

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__________________________________________________________________ 14

Ibid. Gillian Rose, Visual Methologies. An Introduction to Research with Visual Materials (London: SAGE Publications, 2012). 16 Ibid. 17 Gillian Rose. Visual Methologies; National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project. Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century. (Lawrence, KS: Allen Press, 2006). 18 Rose. Visual Methologies. 19 Lotman, ‘On the Semiosphere’, 206–229. 20 John Hartley, Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture (London: Arnold, 1996). 21 Edna Andrews, ‘Conversations with Lotman: The Implications of Cultural Semiotics in Language, Literature and Cognition.’ Toronto Studies in Semiotics & Communication ed., 47 (Canada: University of Toronto Press Incorporated, 2003), 13–25. 22 Lotman, ‘On the Semiosphere.’ 206–229. 23 Kirsikka Moring, ‘Suomalaiset Eivät Tulleet Mistään’ Helsingin Sanomat, Teema 04/2009, 10–12. 24 Zacharias Topelius, Maamme Kirja (1876), folk edition ed. Vesa Mäkinen (Helsinki, Finland: WSOY, 1985). 25 Tero Halonen and Laura Aho, ed. Suomalaisten Symbolit (Jyväskylä, Finland: Atena Kustannus Oy, 2005). 26 Eero Tarasti, Johdatus Semiotiikkaan. Esseitä Taiteen ja Kulttuurin Merkkijärjestelmistä (Helsinki, Finland: Gaudeamus, 1990). 27 Geert Hofstede, Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind (London: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1991). 28 Sari Kanervo and Tiina Saarinen, Kulttuurit Keskuudessamme (Turun kaupungin kulttuurikeskus, 2004), viewed on 5 July 2015, http://www.turku.fi/public/default.aspx?uielementsize=1&nodeid=11816. 29 Image by Uppa, Heidi. 2015. Information combined from Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture. (New York: Anchor Press Doubleday, 1976); Geert Hofstede, Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. (London: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1991) and Heidi Uppa, Suklaahyllyn Salat – Kansalliset Kulttuuriset Erityispiirteet Suklaalevypakkauksissa Suomessa ja Venäjällä (Graphic design MA thesis. Helsinki: Aalto University, 2010). 30 Erika Finell, ‘National Symbols, National Identification and Attitudes Toward Immigrants’ (PhD diss., Helsinki University, 2012). 31 Heidi Uppa, ‘Suklaahyllyn Salat – Kansalliset Kulttuuriset Erityispiirteet Suklaalevypakkauksissa Suomessa ja Venäjällä’ (Graphic design MA thesis. Helsinki: Aalto University, 2010). 15

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__________________________________________________________________ 32

Ibid. Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Lindstrom. Brand Sense. 33

Bibliography Andrews, Edna. Conversations with Lotman: The Implications of Cultural Semiotics in Language, Literature and Cognition. Toronto Studies in Semiotics & Communication. Toronto, CA: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Translated by Vern W. McGee. Austin, Texas, USA: University of Texas Press, 1986. Boudieu, Pierre. Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, United States: Harvard University Press, 1984. Dillinger, Teresa L.; Barriga, Patricia; Escarcega, Sylvia; Jimenez, Martha; Salazar Lowe, Diana and Grivetti, Louis E. ‘Food of the Gods: Cure for Humanity? A Cultural History of the Medicinal and Ritual Use of Chocolate.’ The Journal of Nutrition 130 (2000): 2057S–2072S. Fazer. ‘History and Heritage.’ Viewed 5 July 2015, http://www.fazergroup.com/fi/tietoa-meista/history--heritage/fazerin--historia/. Fazer. ‘Fazerin Sininen 1922.’ Viewed 5 July 2015, https://dream.do/fi/dreams/dream/historia-ja-perintö/posts/11048. Finell, Erika. ‘National Symbols, National Identification and Attitudes Toward Immigrants.’ PhD Dissertation, Helsinki University, 2012. Gordon, Bertram M. ‘Commerce, Colonies, and Cacao: Chocolate in England from Introduction to Industrialization.’ Chocolate: History, Culture, and Heritage, edited by Louis E. Grivetti and Howard-Yana Shapiro, 583–594. Hoboken, NJ, United States: John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2009. Hall, Edward T. Beyond Culture. New York: Anchor Press Doubleday, 1976.

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__________________________________________________________________ Hahn, Young-ae and Rodriguez-Kaarto, Tania. ‘Designing for Social Integration: An Ecological Approach to Language Learning.’ Nordes: Design Ecologies, conference proceedings, 2015. Viewed 10 July 2015, http://www.nordes.org/opj/index.php/n13/article/view/406/383. Halonen, Tero and Aho, Laura, ed. Suomalaisten Symbolit. Jyväskylä, Finland: Atena Kustannus Oy, 2005. Hartley, John. Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture. London: Arnold, 1996. Hofstede, Geert. Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. London: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1991. Kanervo, Sari and Saarinen, Tiina. 2004. Kulttuurit Keskuudessamme. Turun kaupungin kulttuurikeskus, 2004. Viewed 5 July 2015, http://www.turku.fi/public/default.aspx?uielementsize=1&nodeid=11816. Lehrer, Adrienne. ‘As American as Apple Pie—and Sushi and Bagels: The Semiotics of Food and Drinks.’ Recent Developments in Theory and History. The Semiotic Web 1990, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok, 389–401. Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1991, 388–401. Lindstrom, Martin. Brand Sense. Building Powerful Brands through Touch, Smell, Sight and Sound. New York, United States: Free Press, 2005. Lotman, Yuri. ‘On the Semiosphere.’ Sign Systems Studies 33.1 (2005): 206–229. National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project 2006. Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century. Alexandria, VA: Allen Press, 2006. Moring, Kirsikka. ‘Suomalaiset Eivät Tulleet Mistään.’ Helsingin Sanomat, Teema 04/2009, 10–12. Purhonen, Semi; Grunow, Jukka; Heikkilä, Riie; Kahma, Nina; Rahkonen, Keijo and Toikka, Arho. Suomalainen Maku: Kulttuuripääoma, Kulutus ja Elämäntyylien Sosiaalinen Eriytyminen. Helsinki, Finland: Gaudeamus, 2014. Rose, Gillian. Visual Methologies. An Introduction to Research with Visual Materials. London: SAGE Publications, 2012.

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__________________________________________________________________ Tarasti, Eero. Johdatus Semiotiikkaan. Esseitä Taiteen Merkkijärjestelmistä. Helsinki, Finland: Gaudeamus, 1990.

ja

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Topelius, Zacharias. Maamme Kirja (1876). Folk edition edited by Vesa Mäkinen. Helsinki, Finland: Juva: WSOY, 1985. Uppa, Heidi. ‘Suklaahyllyn salat – Kansalliset Kulttuuriset Erityispiirteet Suklaalevypakkauksissa Suomessa ja Venäjällä.’ MA thesis. Helsinki: Aalto University, 2010. Heidi Uppa (MA, MISTD) is a creative designer interested in food design, eating experiences and cultural differences. In recent years she has been teaching at Aalto University. The topic of her current Doctoral research is the development of future food cultures by utilising design thinking. Tania Rodriguez-Kaarto (MA) is a doctoral candidate interested in language acquisition and development of language learning tools for immigrant population in Finland. Her current PhD research concerns an online learning tool, which is in prototype development phase, about to start a trial period.

Cannibals and Vegetarians in Ancient Greek Theories of the Natural State John Dayton Abstract Greek thinkers and their Roman successors speculated on various scenarios for the rise of human society and techne from the state of nature, in which means of subsistence and diet often are imbued with moral significance. The most widely known conception is of course the mythological reign of Cronus/Saturn, a primitive or pastoral state featuring a vegetarian diet of earth’s freely proffered bounties, that is, the most natural and herbivorous diet possible (though agricultural versions exist also). In such a scheme, farming and especially meateating often figure as a rupture of man’s divine and ethical condition (e.g., Vergil Georgic 2.537-8). A near-complete inversion of the process is also found in what is sometimes called the ‘hard primitivist’ or anthropological model, exemplified in the euhemerizing account of Diodorus 1.14.1. Here the natural dietetic condition is the extreme form of carnivorism, that is, cannibalism. Isis is the primeval discoverer of grain cultivation, whose memory becomes revered as divine by ensuing generations, freed by her benefaction from the gory savagery of their primal state. The point of agreement between these diametrically contrasting conceptions is the negative connotation imparted to meat eating. Indeed a bias against carnivorism lingers in the Classical mind, whether in the proscriptions of Empedocles and Pythagoras or in Plato’s city of superfluous luxuries (Republic 2.372-4), and ordinarily meat consumption was restricted to occasions of communal sacrifice. This antipathy probably has ancient origins in the prehistoric conflict of farmers and herdsmen and the guilt occasioned among the former by their eventual victory (also probably reflected in the story of Cain and Abel). The cultural consequences included an idealization of the vanquished pastoral peoples as a Golden Age generation, a conflicted attitude toward the practice of agriculture, and a partial prohibition on animal consumption, which was approved only when sanctified through sacrificial rites. Key Words: Carnivore, vegetarianism, cannibalism, Golden Age, pastoralism, agriculture, sacrifice. ***** Ancient Greek speculations on the origins of human culture have generally been assigned to opposing factions, one a mythical strain which asserts a deterioration or fall of humankind from the primeval condition, another a protoscientific or anthropological conception in which human progress is the driving force. I feel they do not sort themselves so easily into two categories; in all theories

38 Cannibals and Vegetarians in Ancient Greek Theories of the Natural State __________________________________________________________________ of this kind, mythical and rational tendencies are so entwined and overlapped that it is hard to classify one against another. And as we are about to see, on the matter of human diet and meat consumption they have certain attitudes in common. We will first consider a mythical account. There seems to shimmer at the edge of our psyche a vision of a better world that once existed from whence we have fallen, maybe a hope that our fall is not irrecoverable. Elsewhere this is the Garden of Eden and it has other names; in Greek myth we know it as the Golden Age. The classic account is found in Hesiod’s Work and Days. Mankind, according to him, spanned five ages - the Golden Age, when men and animals coexisted in perfect harmony, the Silver Age, a diminished version of the Golden Age, the Bronze Age, a descent into Brutishness, a brief resurgence in the Heroic Age, and then the fullthrottle depravity of the Iron Age.1 Perhaps you see what I mean here when I state that there is no clear line between myth and science. At least two of his terms, the Bronze and Iron ages, are still in scientific use and are still understood much as he described them; there is some genuine historical memory at work here. And the Golden Age is in part a much softened reflection of a pre-agricultural pastoral age. It is also vegetarian; the Golden race live off the spontaneous bounty of nature, and while they are rich in flocks, these are for wool and perhaps milk. The absence of meat is a logical necessity in the Golden Age. If no creature can do harm, we cannot go about killing and eating one another. Dike or Astraea or Virgo, the goddess of Justice, communicated frequently with men in the Golden Age. In the Silver Age, when men apparently made use of animals without killing them, she still communicated, though less frequently. In the Bronze Age, marked by an extreme proliferation of violence, Hesiod specifies the men ate no bread, which probably implies they ate only meat. The later Greeks understood it in this way; another version of the Cycle of Ages, in Aratus’ Phaenomena makes it explicit that the Bronze Race were the first to eat oxen (line 132), one of their impieties which impelled Justice to abandon them.2 An intriguing idea developed later that humans first resorted to meat during a time of war and famine, when their crops had been destroyed. So animal slaughter is one element in a general frenzy of murderous wrongdoing. Thus, already at the beginnings of Greek literature we find the practice of carnivorism inspiring a distinct unease. There are deeper problems: other myths hint that it introduces an unnatural imbalance of strength in the universe. Hesiod elsewhere tells us of the myth of Prometheus, the divine friend of man.3 In an enigmatic tale touching on the origin of animal sacrifice, Prometheus tricks Zeus and wins the better share of the meat for humans. Zeus then deprived men of fire, denying them at one stroke their power over animals, their means of cooking them, and the basis of technology in general. The absence of fire reduced humans to the level of beasts, who were forced to eat food raw. Prometheus stole the fire and restored it to men, so that they could cook food, putting them back into their position midway between gods and beasts. For this he suffered eternal punishment

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__________________________________________________________________ chained to mountain rocks, where a great eagle would devour his liver each night, a neat reversal of roles, where animals eat the raw flesh of the human or rather the anthropomorphic god, and are thus restored to their rightful power. This collocation of the themes of meat, sacrifice, fire, and divine wrath intimates an anxiety over something profoundly wrong with humans’ domination and consumption of beasts, something which God once intended to set right. Plato’s Laws records a belief - a widespread topos not unique to this passage – in a primordial time when humankind adhered to vegetarian foods as a sacred duty.4 It is curious. Anthropology assures us that no such herbivorous period ever existed, and so its strong imprint on the mythical record seems to have a psychological rather than a historical origin. Or perhaps it is a historical perspective after all, but one viewed through the mythopoeic prism, whereby we transfigure our dim knowledge of prehistoric periods in order to imbue them with moral or narrative purpose. In later literary treatments of these myths the chronology of themes is worked out more explicitly and consistently, e.g., Vergil’s reference to the Age of Saturn, the Golden Age, when life was most righteous, and after that is the introduction both of sacrifice, meat and cooking, and also martial technology; these sinister developments often are conjoined, as in Aratus too.5 Starting in the 5th century BC or somewhat earlier, the onset of rationalism and philosophical thought began to supersede the mythical world view, and thinkers moved toward speculation on human origins without supernatural causation. Indeed primitivism, the natural state of man and his ascent therefrom now came to prominence as favourite objects of philosophical conjecture, a status they enjoyed through the 18th century. However, most of these speculations remain rooted in their mythical origins; thinkers attempted to extract the pragmatic essence of the myths, rather than searching for an empirical alternative, and the results are quite as fanciful as anything from Hesiod. In one example, the later author Diodorus Siculus gives us a recreation of society’s origins set in Egypt, often considered the fountainhead of human institutions.6 In this scenario, the natural state is not idyllic; this story represents what has long been known as hard primitivism, the belief that our natural state is crude and brutal, in contradistinction to the soft primitivism of Golden Age thought. Our original condition is the state of extreme carnivorism, and humans are inveterate cannibals. The culture-hero Isis first discovers edible grain, and Osiris learns to cultivate it, thus introducing a pleasanter way of life and gentler mores to the world. For these benefactions the pair of early humans are thereafter honoured as gods, following the popular euhemerist theory of the origins of divinity. The tale is virtually a reverse mirror image of the usual Golden Age procedure, not a fall but a rise of man. Carnivorism is a remnant of a more brutal past, virtually interchangeable with cannibalism, its displacement by agriculture represents evolutionary progress.

40 Cannibals and Vegetarians in Ancient Greek Theories of the Natural State __________________________________________________________________ Between the mythical vision of human origins next to a rational account such as that in Diodorus, the point of contact is an aversion to meat eating, whether its crudity is a reflection of a primitive past or a degenerate present. This objection is remarkably consistent in serious Greek thought, though we find diverse grounds claimed in \its support. Going as far back as the 7th century we find the Pythagoreans abstaining from flesh in the belief that it was the moral equivalent of cannibalism, since reincarnated souls indwelt in animal bodies. It is found in various other sects such as the Orphics. The pre-Socratic Empedocles has left us some of the most powerful reflections on the doctrine in his remaining fragments. He presents a more consciously philosophical Golden Age wherein Aphrodite, goddess of love, was worshipped alone, and only with bloodless offerings of incense and honey. In another fragment Empedocles equates animal sacrifice with homicide and anthropophagy, and in 137 we have a horrific scene of kindred butchering one another in the guise of animals, preparing them for a gruesome feast. It is easy to interpret this as a broad parable on the spiritual kinship of all sentient life, but Empedocles definitely means something more literal than that; they really are human lives and souls by virtue of transmigration. He is aiming at purification from the physical world, starting from the grossest phenomena of bloodletting and murder. A century later, Plato, when he describes his ideal republic, considers a peaceful community feasible when the inhabitants maintain a wholly vegetarian economy (‘the city of pigs’).7 Once we have animal husbandry and meat, that indeed makes for higher resource costs and we have the growth of luxury, appetite, economic burden and eventually war. Concern with the immediate spiritual effect of animal slaughter is absent here but the result is largely the same; carnivorism encourages licentiousness, indiscipline, and spiritual breakdown. Later still, the imperial neo-Platonist Porphyry gives us the most extensive treatise on vegetarianism from antiquity: On Abstinence from Animal Flesh of the 3rd century AD. He has many arguments against meat; among the more intriguing are that it incites animalistic pleasure and increases physical strength, which are both bad for a philosopher, as they increase our preoccupation with physical deeds and appetites. Mighty men are observed to have mightier appetites for food, wine, sex, and sleep and are thus bound more strictly to the corporeal realm. We now have an overview of the variety and breadth of the repugnance to meat consumption in ancient Greece. The misgivings are not limited to philosophical inquiry. An animal slaughter required a sacrifice and an involved ritual, sometimes with a priest. As for the nature of the sacrifice – meat is the most ritualized type of diet, a fact still attested by the kosher and halal prescriptions. The ritual has an expiatory purpose, most clearly revealed in the curious Athenian festival of the Bouphonia. Porphyry has left us a detailed description of this ceremony, which presents a mimic homicide trial for an animal’s murder.8 The account begins with an aetiological myth. In that remote time when men still lived on vegetable foods, before they had tasted meat, sacrifices to the gods also consisted of grains and

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__________________________________________________________________ fruits. Once when the Athenians were holding a sacrifice, one Diomus was standing beside the altar when an ox approached and began to munch the sacrificial grain. The angered Diomus seized a nearby axe and killed the beast in anger. The people then decided they might as well not waste the ox and they ate it. Diomus himself realized that he had committed a crime in his impassioned haste, and he went into voluntary exile. This was not enough. The land of Attica suffered a terrible drought, and the inhabitants were told by oracle that they must atone for the crime by punishing the murderer and raising a statue of the ox. The logic of the story seems to break down a bit here, but Diomus agreed to return and face trial if he would be made a citizen and the slaughter of an ox would become a communal event. Thus was the origin of the Bouphonia. Each year, on the Athenian Acropolis in midsummer, a group of oxen were led before an altar scattered with grain; the first who began to eat in effect volunteered to be the victim. Women brought water to lubricate the sharpening of the ritual axe and knife. The sharpener handed the weapons to another man who handed them to two appointed slayers, one of whom struck the animal with the axe to stun it, and the other cut the throat; then they dropped their weapons and fled the scene. Bystanders filled the hide of the ox with straw, set it upright and yoked it to a plough, an early form of taxidermy. A murder investigation is initiated, the water bearers accuse the sharpener, who in turn accuses the weapon handler, who then accuses the axe man, who then accuses the knife man, who blames the knife itself. The knife cannot speak in its own defence, so it is condemned and cast into the sea. The people then feast on the slaughtered ox. I barely know where to begin exegesis of this astonishing tale. Obviously this festival aims at propitiation; it is a purification from the miasma of bloodshed which then allows the worshippers to consume the meat without pollution. In a way, it can be considered the founding charter of carnivorism, enacted in countless miniature iterations at all animal slaughter. But one is struck by the desperate and almost comic attempt to dodge responsibility. Even the founding myth presents the first animal sacrifice as a quasi-accident. But while it is easy to understand the spiritual resistance to killing a sentient, feeling creature, the curious thing in the ritual is that the ox has virtually equal legal standing with humans. And that is what I notice in all the ancient meditations on the subject, the beast is fully interchangeable with a human, and so cannibalism and carnivorism, human and animal sacrifice are constantly confounded. I do not believe this phenomenon is explicable just in terms of the spiritual trauma attendant on killing a clearly sentient creature. I will close with a speculation on what I believe to be the secret to all this spiritual torment over meat. Obviously from a scientific viewpoint we cannot concur in the belief that people began eating meat as an aberration at some point; we know we were carnivores and indeed cannibals long before we were humans at all, and there is no point in

42 Cannibals and Vegetarians in Ancient Greek Theories of the Natural State __________________________________________________________________ speaking of an origin for the practice. But the moral complication set in probably at the point of animal domestication. Let us return to Hesiod’s Golden Age of benign shepherds. All the genre of pastoral literature, from Theocritus and Vergil’s Eclogues to Sir Philip Sydney, presents the shepherd as a being who dwells in a hermetic world of innocuous innocence. He also lives without meat in most cases – see the bucolic repast from Vergil’s First Eclogue.9 But it’s a matter of disguised polarity, an effort to abnegate the terrible truth of the herdsman’s birthright. For herdsmen began the mass slaughter and consumption of tame animals; culling the herds is simply a necessity in springtime to maintain them at any manageable population. I believe that an exceptional degree of trauma must have attended the origin of this phenomenon, one which sealed mankind in blood-guilt forever. It is not at all like hunting wild animals, since shepherds naturally foster a tenderly protective stance over their charges. This point is perhaps best understood in New Testament tropology, where Christ is the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep. It is simply profoundly unnatural to reverse this impulse and murder the helpless infants whom they should care for, but that is what they must do. The outcome is an effort to ennoble the animal through divine ritual in the ways we have seen. This practice again reaches its extreme form in Christian symbolism, wherein the spring paschal sacrifice is literally deified as the Lamb of God. The ancient Greeks of course lived much closer to the realities of pastoralism than the modern ages and this residual blood-guilt does much to explain the ambivalence toward meat eating and the complex of protective rituals around it. Further: I notice in the ancient writers a near-complete identification between cannibalism and carnivorism, between animal and human life. I might even speculate that at some far removed time, little difference was felt between the killing of a fellow human or an animal. Many of our writers recognize that animal sacrifice must have emerged as a substitute for human sacrifice. They may be right. The religious basis of human sacrifice is much disputed and it probably does not have the same origins in all cultures, but in many cases it probably began as propitiation for a communal crime or pollution. Then animals came to replace humans through a kind of magical transference. The Old Testament tale of the sacrifice of Isaac is undoubtedly a parable of this process of scapegoating, to use the exact term. The Islamic faith well understands the relief occasioned by this escape from an angry God, as they commemorate Abraham’s sacrifice in the festival of Eid Al Adha, which precipitates a massacre of sacrificial animals and the distribution of meat throughout Muslim lands. Some unease at the scale of the bloodletting usually adulterates the joy, and this fact reflects a relic of guilt over the punishment of animals for the crimes of their keepers. It seems we could never leave our guilt altogether behind. The final element in this interpretation concerns the perennial war between farmer and herdsman which marked the Neolithic transition to agriculture in much

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__________________________________________________________________ of the world. The archaeological record tells of constant battles over land use, which the farmers always win. Among the other rewards of victory there generally took place a feast of plundered livestock. But the victors did not altogether escape retribution. The tale of Cain and Abel is certainly a parable of this long prehistoric war to the death. Cain, the first farmer, is the first murderer, cursed to wander in search of new land forever. The blood guilt which the early farmers apparently felt upon the extermination of fellow tribes may have contributed to that identity of the shepherd as a uniquely righteous and innocent being which we see in the genre of pastoral literature. It has also resulted in a problematical view of agriculture seen in many Greek and especially Roman versions of the Golden Age, where farming accompanies the emergence of land conflict and warfare in the ensuing ages.10 It has also probably contributed to a partial taboo on the eating of the herdsman’s produce and the necessity of expiatory rites before doing so. Thus when animal meat is at issue, a potent complex of anxieties, taking increase from several tributaries, rises to torment the human conscience from the blood-soaked prehistory of the race. We evolved as killers, homicide and zoocide are our bloodline and it is integral to our creative process; killing has inspired much of our distinctly human action and expression.

Notes 1

Hesiod, Works and Days, 109-155. Considerations of space do not allow for presentation of the text here. 2 Aratus, Phaenomena, 130-4. 3 Hesiod, Works and Days 42-105; Theogony, 507-616. 4 Plato, Laws 782 B-C. 5 Vergil, Georgic 2.536-40. 6 Diodorus Siculus, Histories 1.14.1. 7 Plato (428-348 BC), Republic 372 b – 373 e. 8 Porphyry, On Abstinence from Animal Flesh 2.29-30. 9 Vergil, Eclogue 1.80-82. 10 Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.135-44.

Bibliography Burkert, Walter. Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Cole, Thomas. Democritus and the Sources of Greek Anthropology. Cleveland: Western Reserve University Press, 1967.

44 Cannibals and Vegetarians in Ancient Greek Theories of the Natural State __________________________________________________________________ Hyde, Walter Woodburn. ‘The Prosecution of Lifeless Things and Animals in Greek Law, Part I’. American Journal of Philology 38.2 (1917): 152-175. Lovejoy, Arthur O. and George Boas. Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935. John Dayton has a doctorate in Classics from Brown University and is currently Associate Professor in English at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Dubai. He is the author of ‘‘The Athletes of War’: An Evaluation of the Agonistic Elements in Greek Warfare’ (Toronto: Edgar Kent, 2006).

Questions of Culinary Commonplacing: The Social Significance of Personal Recipe Collections in the Late Nineteenth Century Elizabeth M. Schmidt Abstract Commonplace books are used by their makers to organize their thoughts, collect information, and as a way to remember, and later refer to, pieces of knowledge that were important to them. In the late 19th century, Mrs. E. A. Foord began work on what she called a ‘Receipt Book’, but which could also be referred to as a commonplace book; in this case, an act of ‘culinary commonplacing’. Her book was a collection of recipes that were recorded over an extended period of time, and included original contributions as well as recipes copied from published cookery books, cut from newspapers or magazines, or given to Foord by friends and family. Collected over a period that approximates 1862-1948, and with evidence suggesting that it was passed down to at least one younger generation, we can see how tastes changed over time. Although most evidence points toward Foord being from England, the varied nature of the recipes suggests that she, and other contributors, could have lived in any part of the British Empire. The book has a decidedly global influence, with recipes from all over Europe as well as India and North America. This book is not an outlier by any means. In fact, the concept of personal receipt books has stood the test of time; I have my own recipe binder at home that contains magazine clippings and recipes copied out of cookbooks. But there are several questions that these books raise: What makes a recipe ‘authentic?’ How can we define ownership of a recipe? Does the act of writing a recipe down, even if it is copied, make the recipe yours? This project examines a single personal receipt book to discover more about the compiler herself, as well as the nature of the world she inhabited. Key Words: Cookbooks, collaboration, manuscripts, empire, authenticity, ownership, globalization. ***** 1. Introduction When Mrs. E. A. Foord first picked up her newly purchased T. J. & J. Smith journal, I wonder if she already had a plan for what she would fill the pages with. 1 The book itself is small, an octavo about eight inches tall, but was well made and fixed with a metal clasp that would hold the book closed when not in use. It was too big for a lady’s pocket but certainly small enough for everyday handling and easy storage. Whether it was purchased by Foord herself, or was given to her as a gift, it ultimately became a place for her to collect her favourite recipes, both culinary and medicinal.2 The title found on the first page in carefully written block letters, ‘Receipt Book. Mrs. E. A. Foord’, definitely encompasses the contents;

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__________________________________________________________________ Mrs. Foord used the journal as a place to record everyday receipts used in her household, new recipes that she wanted to try, and information about household management. Mrs. Foord called it a ‘Receipt Book’, but I would argue that it is also a form of commonplace book, an evolution of the tradition that began early in the sixteenth century. Furthermore, the book contains valuable information about the life and experiences of the Foord family, even if it is nearly impossible to pinpoint the exact identity of its author. This chapter is separated into two sections: the first will argue for the placing of Foord’s receipt book into a category of commonplace books; the second section will discuss what we can glean about Mrs. Foord herself and the world she lived in. 2. Culinary Commonplacing At their conception, traditional commonplace books were used by intellectuals to collect quotes, facts, and observations in order to assist with memory and future writing. As the practice gained traction, organisation of the commonplace book was a topic of discussion amongst many great thinkers. Through the use of indexes and marginalia, pieces of information were recorded and then organised alphabetically under specific subject headings set up by the compiler. John Locke’s A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books, circulated starting in 1706, was one of the most popular methods, and used subject based organisation with topics listed alphabetically using the first consonant and vowel of the subject. Many others built on and modified Locke’s method, publishing instructions for specific fields of study or for alternative methods that were believed to be more user friendly. There can be no doubt that the tradition of commonplace books evolved over time to fit new standards of writing, reading, and publishing. Even as late as 1841 academics were still teasing out the best way to organise commonplace books, such as William Augustus Gray who wrote about organising collections of medical theories, practices, and observations.3 His method, a self-proclaimed improvement on Locke’s version, was only applicable to commonplace books of science and not necessarily useful for literature, history, or theology. Neither Gray nor Locke would consider Foord’s receipt book a commonplace book, since there is no index or obvious attempt at organisation. However, it is representative of the basic idea of commonplacing, as a means of creating artificial memory. Many others in the late nineteenth century were producing evolutions of commonplace books that moved away from the original tradition of meticulous organisation. Jillian Hess in 2012 argued that books produced by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the nineteenth century, commonly described as notebooks, were really commonplace books that embraced a ‘diary-like’ form in his later years, containing just as many original thoughts as collected ones. Hess describes Coleridge’s later commonplace books as areas for ‘containing and generating knowledge’, which did not require such strict methods of organisation.4 Foord’s receipt book is reminiscent of this, as her collection is filled with recipes collected from friends,

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__________________________________________________________________ family, and published cookery books, in addition to what might be considered original recipes.5 Of course, the idea of originality in culinary culture is debatable on its own, but there is no doubt that the act of tweaking a recipe was commonly considered enough to make it one’s own, even from the beginning of cookery manuscript circulation. Within the cookbook genre, authorship was more often defined by the act of compiling and collecting rather than a sense of originality as we know it now. Although the modern cookbooks we see today have explicit lists of ingredients, specific measurements, and detailed instructions for carrying out the recipe to completion, early manuscript and printed cookbooks could more closely be considered as aids to memory. They operated under the assumption that the reader would be competent enough, and have a high enough level of culinary literacy, that only the most basic instructions were needed. Foord’s book is the same, and hearkens back to the Renaissance tradition of commonplace books that served as ‘memory prompts’.6 Although cooking was first and foremost an oral tradition, recited through the very act of preparing food, manuscript and printed collections of recipes were eventually produced as a way to collect the oral tradition, and were seen as ‘a natural progression of culinary culture’.7 Personal receipt books like Foord’s are the literal representation of both a culinary reading experience and the continual existence of the oral culture of food. Foord collected recipes from manuscripts and published works as well as compiled recipes handed down to her by family and friends. She was collecting extracts that were representative of the culinary culture that she participated in. Sure, Foord did not use an index, or a complex way of organising according to proscribed culinary categories, but there are clear attempts at some kind of organisation within the book. We can often find similar recipes bunched together, evidence of a concerted effort to keep similar items in the same place. Starting on page nineteen, Foord listed ‘German Cakes’, ‘Plain Cake’, ‘Ginger Cakes’, and ‘Tea Cakes’ together, although each was transcribed with a different attribution. Although they came from different places, they were strategically placed together. Similarly, Foord listed thirteen different Indian dishes together starting on page eighty-six, a section that includes two different recipes for a curry powder, six different chutney recipes, and various other dishes labelled as ‘Indian’ by Foord. We see eight of these recipes with attributions, telling us that they all came from different places, but were still consciously placed together as evidence of an attempt at organisation. In addition to her efforts at keeping similar food recipes together, Foord also put the more than thirty household receipts together at the back of the book. Between a recipe for ‘Apple Omelette’ and instructions for making a ‘Paste for Polishing Steel’, there are eighteen blank pages. This suggests that Foord was writing down recipes starting from the back and front simultaneously, keeping household and medicinal receipts at the back for easy access when needed. Mrs. Foord definitely did not intend for her receipt book to become available to the public. The recipes are often written in a kind of culinary shorthand, with gaps

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__________________________________________________________________ in the process that she most likely considered too ‘common knowledge’ to waste ink and paper on. The average housewife would have been educated to a basic level of culinary literacy early on in her life to prepare her for managing a family, able to fill in the blanks on a specific recipe they might already be familiar with. For example, a recipe for ‘Stone Creams’ found on page 53 of Foord’s book is as follows: ‘Half fill some custard cups with preserved fruit or jam, and pour on it some blancmange’.8 What kind of custard cup should be used, and how does one make blancmange? While there are three different blancmange recipes found elsewhere in Foord’s book, she did not include a reference to where you could find them to make it easy for an outside reader to prepare ‘Stone Creams’. Further evidence of the fact that Foord never intended for anyone other than herself to use the book is found on page 101 in a recipe for ‘Currant Dumpling’. Here we see only a list of ingredients, without any instruction on how to actually prepare the dumpling. For someone who was literate enough in kitchen essentials, the process for making a dumpling might be common sense. In other words, Foord herself did not need to remember the process for a dumpling, merely the ingredients specific to a currant dumpling. As a nineteenth century housewife, Foord’s Sunday dinners were akin to Locke’s great essays, and her personal receipt book served as a sourcebook for those dinners the same way Locke’s commonplace book would have served his writing. Although the book itself was only ever meant to seen by Foord, or perhaps by her daughter or granddaughter, it served as a resource for something that was intended for public consumption. Locke’s own commonplace book would have given him the resources he needed to complete his essays or speeches, but it never would have been meant for eyes other than his own. Nevertheless, he created a system of organising his commonplace book to make it easier to use himself; in the same way, Foord organised her receipt book in a way that made it easier for her to find the recipes she needed for a specific occasion. For those of us who have the pleasure of reading through her receipt book now, we have a window into the world that she lived in, and the people she lived in it with. Foord’s receipt book as an aid to memory fits into the commonplacing category, with or without an index. Similar to the ways in which Classical and Renaissance authors used the metaphor of a bee collecting nectar to describe the purpose of commonplace books, Foord was a culinary bee, collecting contributions to use herself, or to share with close family members.9 She wanted to remember not only her favourite recipes but also the culinary world that they came out of. 3. The Life of Mrs. E. A. Foord But who was this woman who was participating in a tradition of culinary commonplacing? While it has proven difficult so far to determine exactly who Mrs. E. A. Foord was, the receipt book provides us with some hints. She almost certainly lived in England for part of her life, and probably lived abroad in another

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__________________________________________________________________ part of the British Empire at some point. To start with, there are ten different recipes for marmalade, four of which were cut from newspapers. Marmalademaking was not a tradition that took hold in the United States, the only other place Foord’s English language receipt book could possibly have come from. It was, however, a staple of British culture, as marmalade season brought a sweet smell to the Empire with housewives across the world buying up crates of Seville oranges, lemons, grapefruits, and limes to make enough homemade marmalade to last the rest of the year. The perfect marmalade recipe was continuously sought after, with newspapers publishing hundreds of articles on making marmalade every year in the British Empire between the months of January and April. Other evidence of Foord’s residence in England includes an inventory list of personal possessions that lists ‘6 Vols Queens of England’, referring to the series written by Agnes Striklan. A curry recipe starting on page seventy-seven includes a comment that while ‘cocoanut milk is used in India, a little extra gravy or ¼ pint of cream would do in England’, further supporting the conclusion that at some point in her life Foord expected to cook curry in England.10 As mentioned previously, there is also evidence that Foord may have lived in another part of the British Empire at some point in her life, specifically India. Although Indian recipes were not uncommon in contemporary cookery publications, a majority of the thirteen Indian recipes found in Foord’s book have attributions that suggest she received them from friends in India. A recipe for ‘Curry’ is attributed to ‘Abraham Cook, Cuddalore’, while another for a ‘Mango Pickle’ includes a note saying it was from ‘Mrs. Norfor, Cuddalore 1862’.11 Upon further investigation, I found a Colonel E.A. Foord who worked for the East India Company. Tracing the history of Colonel Foord’s promotions puts him and his family in India from about 1837 to at least 1877 when he was listed as the ‘Secretary of the Madras Government’ in the marriage announcement of his daughter12; this would coincide with Mrs. E. A. Foord receiving recipes from friends in India around 1862, when Mrs. Norfor gave her the recipe for the ‘Mango Pickle’. An inventory list is found on page 143 of the book (near the back), for ‘Contents of the box Sent by Hindoostan, July 25th, 1867’. The list contains bottles of mango pickle, curry paste, mint chutney, mango chutney, and curry powder, amongst other non-culinary items. Did these items arrive somewhere else in the Empire, from India, or was Mrs. Foord herself still in India in 1867? It is unfortunately impossible to tell at this point, but I am still leaning toward a permanent late-in-life residence there. The mentions of ‘Cuddalore’, ‘Bangalore’, and ‘Hindoostan’, as opposed to the more vague and general attributions found in contemporary published cookbooks, suggest a deeper familiarity with India, supporting the assumption that Mrs. Foord lived there. Inconsistency in ink type and format tell us that the entries were added gradually, over time. There is also definite evidence of at least two different hands in the book, each contributing during the same time period. The primary author,

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__________________________________________________________________ Mrs. E.A. Foord herself, contributed 121 different recipes which comes out to about 81% of the book. By comparing the handwriting on each page of the book, however, we can see that a secondary author contributed 19 recipes, about 13% of the book, with the other 6% of recipes showing evidence of various other hands. These latter few recipes were written on notecards or other slips of paper, and added to the book either by pasting them onto a journal page or insertion between pages. As for the primary and secondary authors, we can tell that they were contributing at the same time because there are several places where the primary author filled in a page started by the secondary author, and vice versa. On page 54, the primary author started a recipe for ‘Jelly’ and continued it onto page 55. At the bottom of page 55, we see that the secondary author started a recipe for ‘To Pickle Onions’, which was then finished on the next page. This section of recipes by the secondary author ends on page 59 when the author added a recipe for ‘Ginger Beer’. The last line, ‘and strained then bottled’, is found on page 60. Below that line, recipes for ‘Fig Pudding’ and ‘Apple Soufflé’ were added by the primary author. Both authors were most likely living in the same household, which would give them both equal access to the book. However, since the title page of the book tells us that it was clearly started by Mrs. Foord, and thus the ‘primary author’, it makes sense that 80% of the contributions were hers. The secondary author could have been a husband, sister, or daughter, adding in recipes at the request of, or with permission from, Foord. The final question to be asked is, in a book filled with newspaper clippings, recipes copied from printed cookbooks, and recipes with attributions, is there any originality? The traditional commonplace books were also collections of quotes, notes, and illustrations copied from other sources, but they often contained original thoughts and observations as well. It is well understood that originality will never be pinpointed in the world of manuscript and printed recipe collections, especially since these formats came out of an already existing oral culinary culture. But does that mean that there is no creativity, and no originality in recipe collections? From the time I have spent with Mrs. E. A. Foord’s receipt book, I have come to realize that the concepts of authorship and novelty mean different things in the world of cooking. Just because this book was a collection of work done by others does not mean that there is no originality: the mere act of compiling can be an act of creation. In other words, this is ‘Mrs. Foord’s Receipt Book’, an original collection that has never been duplicated. She collected things as she lived her life, from friends or books that inspired her, from newspaper articles that caught her interest. The recipes reflect where she lived, what she liked to eat, what her family liked to eat, and how she ran her household. They tell us that she was constantly searching for the perfect marmalade, and was concerned about keeping her family healthy without wanting to continually visit doctors. The occurrence of medicinal recipes for dogs and horses tell us that she raised animals at some point in her life. We know that black silk was probably really hard to keep clean, because Foord .

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__________________________________________________________________ included three different ways to clean it. We know all of this because, why else would she have written down the receipts? This was not a published cookery book where an author put in everything imaginable to appeal to a wide audience. This was a personal manuscript, something Foord used herself and specifically filled with things that would be useful to her, not to the world. This book is evidence of originality, creation, and invention because it is the concrete evidence of someone’s life; of an individual, living their original life in the big wide world. The lack of concrete information regarding Mrs. Foord makes it difficult to make any kind of conclusions about the life of a woman in the British Empire. What this chapter has done instead is to offer up some insights into the life of one British woman in the nineteenth century. In the future, I hope to compare Mrs. Foord’s book to other contemporary housewives producing personal receipt collections which will allow us to paint a clearer picture of everyday life in the nineteenth century. In addition, personal receipt books like Mrs. Foord’s may help us understand the ways in which women engaged with published cookery books, giving us a better idea of the effectiveness of these publications.

Notes 1

This chapter analyses a personal receipt book found at Texas Women’s University, in the TWU Woman’s Collection, Blagg-Huey Library, Call No. Cookbook TX 717 .C56. Thank you to Bethany Ross, Kimberly Johnson, and Erica Block for their help during my visit there in Spring 2015. 2 The metal clasp that holds the book closed has a manufacturer stamp: T. J. & J. Smith London. This refers to Thomas J. Smith and his son, office supply manufacturers who operated in London in the nineteenth century. Newspaper advertisements tell us that the company probably produced this kind of blank journal between about 1870 and 1905. Most of their products were annual diaries or almanacs with pre-printed dates on the pages, and spaces for notes. However, there is evidence that blank journals, like the one Mrs. Foord was using, were produced between 1870 and 1905. This particular journal was most definitely made before 1909 when ‘T. J. and J. Smith’ became ‘T. J. and J. Smith, Limited;’ the manufacture stamp does not include ‘Ltd’. or ‘Limited’. 3 William August Gray, ‘On the Best Method of Collecting and Arranging Facts, with a Proposed New Plan of Common-Place Book’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London 3.4 (1841): 353-366. 4 Jillian M. Hess, ‘Coleridge’s Fly-Catchers: Adapting Commonplace-Book Form’, Journal of the History of Ideas 73.3 (2012): 464. 5 Foord’s Receipt Book is not the only example of a commonplace book outside the boundaries of intellectual study. See, for example, Anthony Cavender, ‘A Midwife’s Commonplace Book’, Appalachian Journal 32.2 (2005): 182-190,

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__________________________________________________________________ where he discusses other types of household commonplace books, where families recorded any kind of information that they deemed useful for the future. 6 Richard Yeo, ‘Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1728) and the Tradition of Commonplaces’, Journal of the History of Ideas 57.1 (1996): 161. See also: Earle Havens, ‘‘Of Common Places, or Memorial Books’: An Anonymous Manuscript on Commonplace Books and the Art of Memory in Seventeenth-Century England’, The Yale University Library Gazette 76.3/4 (2002): 136-153. For information on the concept of ‘culinary literacy’, see Wendy Wall, ‘Literacy and the Domestic Arts’, Huntington Library Quarterly 73.3 (2010): 383-412. Wall writes that ‘kitchen literacy’ involved a connection between oral and written forms of information, taking in advice that was distributed through the written word as well as information learned through experience or offered via a friend or family member. 7 For more information on oral culture and printed works, see Paul J. Korshin, ‘Reconfiguring the Past: The Eighteenth Century Confronts Oral Culture’, The Yearbook of English Studies 28 (1998): 235-249. 8 Found on page 53 of Foord’s book. 9 Yeo discusses the metaphor of the Bee as used by Ephraim Chambers, Erasmus, and Sister Joan Marie Lechner to describe Commonplace books in ‘Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia’, page 166. 10 Lives of the Queens of England, by Agnes Stricklan, were published between 1840 and 1848 (12 volumes). Reference to the books found in Foord’s book on page 143. Based on information found in birth, death and marriage announcements, there were generations of Foords living in Great Britain, and Australia, with almost none in Canada. 11 ‘Curry’ is found on pages 77-79, and ‘Mango Pickle’ on pages 93-95. 12 The 1837 Calcutta Monthly Journal lists an ‘E. Foord’ arriving from London in Kedgerie on May 30th, 1837. (The Calcutta Monthly Journal and General Register of Occurrences throughout the British Dominions in the East (Calcutta: Samuel Smith and Co., 1838) 77.) He was promoted to 2nd Lieutenant in Madras in 1844 (The Indian Mail, No. 17, (London: Wm. H. Allen and Co., 1844), 531.) and is listed as a Colonel in 1877 in his daughter’s marriage announcement (Pall Mall Gazette, ‘Marriages’, 21 June 1877, page 5.)

Bibliography Blair, Ann. ‘Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: The Commonplace Book’. Journal of the History of Ideas 53.4 (1992): 541-551. Cavender, Anthony. ‘A Midwife’s Commonplace Book’. Appalachian Journal 32.2 (2005): 182-190.

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__________________________________________________________________ Foord, Mrs. E. A. ‘Mrs. Foord’s Receipt Book’. Cookbook TX 717 .C56. TWU Woman’s Collection, Blagg-Huey Library, Texas Women’s University. Gray, William August. ‘On the Best Method of Collecting and Arranging Facts, with a Proposed New Plan of Common-Place Book’. Journal of the Statistical Society of London 3.4 (1841): 353-366. Havens, Earl. ‘‘Of Common Places, or Memorial Books’: An Anonymous Manuscript on Commonplace Books and the Art of Memory in SeventeenthCentury England’. The Yale University Library Gazette 76.3/4 (2002): 136-153. Hess, Jillian M. ‘Coleridge’s Fly-Catchers: Adapting Commonplace-Book Form’. Journal of the History of Ideas 73.3 (2012): 463-483. Korshin, Paul J. ‘Reconfiguring the Past: The Eighteenth Century Confronts Oral Culture’. The Yearbook of English Studies 28 (1998): 235-249. LeFebre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. ‘Marriage’. Pall Mall Gazette. 21 June 1877, 5. The Indian Mail. No. 17. London: Wm. H. Allen and Co., 1844. The Calcutta Monthly Journal and General Register of Occurrences throughout the British Dominions in the East. Calcutta: Samuel Smith and Co., 1838. Wall, Wendy. ‘Literacy and the Domestic Arts’. Huntington Library Quarterly 73.3 (2010): 383-412. Yeo, Richard. ‘Emphraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1728) and the Tradition of Commonplaces’. Journal of the History of Ideas 57.1 (1996): 157-175. Elizabeth M. Schmidt is a food scholar interested in the contributions of women to culinary culture and how food interacts with identity. She recently completed her MA in European History from Texas A&M University. Her thesis discussed how published cookbooks expressed social realities in eighteenth century Great Britain.

‘São João, São João, acende a fogueira do meu coração’: An Examination of Food, Culture and Identity in the Brazilian Festas Juninas Bianca Arantes dos Santos Abstract The purpose of this chapter is to present the Festa Junina (June Festival) as an important tradition of the Brazilian culture, formed from the synthesis of various elements of the cultures and customs of the different nationalities that formed the Brazilian nation throughout history. The Festas Juninas, traditionally made in honor of Santo Antônio (Saint Anthony), São João (Saint John) and São Pedro (St. Peter) during the months of June and July, have a high visibility and importance in several Brazilian states, although they are best known as a typical festival of the Brazilian Northeast. With strong influence of the Portuguese colonisation, these festivals coincide with the period of harvest of corn, a basic cereal in the diet of most Brazilians, and main ingredient of the ethnic foods of the Festa Junina, present in almost every party during this period. This article intends to analyse how the typical food of this festival can represent the local culture, serving as an identifying factor of a society, and how it can help to tell the story of the Brazilian people. Seeking to understand how the ancient traditions of this festival are manifested nowadays, in a context of globalisation, the idea is to see how this relationship occurs within a traditional Festa Junina in a metropolis like São Paulo, which is influenced by various cultures. Thus, the corpus of the research will be based on participant observation of the Festa Junina promoted by the Centro de Tradições Nordestinas (Northeastern Traditions Center), localised in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, considered the ‘Best São João of São Paulo’, which brings to the city typical expressions, such as food, of the great festivals of the Brazilian Northeast, internationally famous for its celebrations in this time of the year. Key Words: Brazil, Festa Junina, typical foods, food studies. ***** 1. Introduction The act of eating is a nutritional and social act, since it can produce attitudes that will be linked to the uses, customs, protocols, social behaviour and the context of the moment.1 All food consumed by a society retains at its core cultural and social manifestations of the setting in which it originated and that in which it is established, reflecting marks and events of geographical and socio-historical contexts of which it is part of.

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__________________________________________________________________ Ariovaldo Franco in his book De caçador a gourmet [From hunter to gourmet] shows that the culture and the culinary habits of a nation,-- the rules and the customs that guide an individual or a group in the preparation and consumption of typical foods of their diets-- , are not only derived from a survival instinct, but that they are actually expressions of the history, geography, climate and social organisation of a society. Besides this, they are also the manifestation of religious beliefs and other cultural aspects of the society in which they operate.2 With more than five centuries of documented history, the Brazilian gastronomy and food habits have already undergone several changes. Since Colonial Brazil we have myriad ingredients that even nowadays, although with less emphasis in some cases, are the basis of the diet of thousands of Brazilians. The Brazilian food custom, with its practices, recipes and ingredients, has become one of the most diversified food cultures in the world over the centuries thanks to the influence of other nations, with special emphasis on the different indigenous peoples that lived here, the Europeans, predominantly the Portuguese, and various African nations. Every Brazilian region has its particularities, its own food culture, which encompasses its multiplicities of histories, development processes, climate, topography, types of soil, vegetation and characteristics of the various populations and ethnicities that inhabit an area. Alongside everyday food, most cultures have special dishes and food customs for festive occasions, that are used to demarcate and celebrate some events, be it individual or collective accomplishments. Nearly all societies will develop a specific behaviour - that might involve what should be dressed, eaten or done by whom and when - for circumstances such as birthdays, marriages, funerals, and other rites of passage of an individual’s life. Events that influence the daily life of a community, such as the harvest of crops, the change of the seasons or a religious commemoration, will also produce specific behaviours that will be used to mark these episodes. In Brazil, even today, some of the most important events of the social calendar are the ones marked by holidays and, most of the time, tracing its origins in the Catholic religion. Brazilians tend to have large celebrations during Christmas, Easter, Carnaval, and the Festas Juninas (June Festivals), which celebrates three Catholic saints. During these occasions, food plays an important part in the festivities, which might even have their own typical food, bringing together families and friends around the table to share a meal after its preparation, which is often done collaboratively. In this chapter, we seek to discuss the importance of the Festa Junina in the Brazilian culture and the way its typical foods can serve as an identifying factor, partly reflecting the geographical and socio-historical context of Brazil.

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__________________________________________________________________ 2. Festa Junina Of European origin, the Festa Junina has become a non-religious popular festivity over the centuries in Brazil.3 Created long before the Christian era, these festivals are inspired by the celebrations that used to be held in the Northern Hemisphere during the Summer Solstice. These festivities would be marked by rituals of fertility, for a good year of harvest and in the agriculture. The festas juninas, or June Cycle, officially starts on 12 June, the eve of Saint Anthony’s Day (13 June) and extends to the 29th of the month (day of St. Peter), with St. John’s day being celebrated on 24 June, However, the contemporary festivities are normally extended to July, so they can be better adjusted to a school calendar. Lúcia Rangel demonstrates in her book Festas juninas, festas de São João: origens, tradições e história [June festivals, St. John’s festivities: origins, traditions and history] that the festas juninas, which are held and celebrated in all Brazilian territories, represent one of the richest Brazilian cultural manifestations.4 During these festivals it is customary for the participants, especially the children, to wear an interpretation of the countryside clothing, although in a mock sense. The women normally use cotton flowery dresses made with strong colours, ruffles, puffy sleeves and a straw hat; the men use plaid shirts, trousers with fake patches, a straw hat and, occasionally, a cowboy scarf. At least one couple will be dressed as bride and groom. Properly dressed, men and women will form couples to take part in the ‘quadrilha’, which may have had months of preparation and rehearsals or be improvised. The quadrilha is a typical dance of the festa junina inspired by the French dance quadrille, where the couples reproduce a wedding ball. Sometimes before or during the dance, the fake wedding will be played, in which case the couples will choose a role to play and a fake priest will perform the ceremony. Other important traditions of the festas juninas are the games that are played during the event. Some of the most classical ones are the pescaria (fishery), which is related to St. Peter since he is considered to be the protector of the fishermen, and the pau-de-sebo (Greasy Pole). The pescaria consists of a fake fishery where the participants must capture with a fishing rod little fishes, normally made of paper or of plastic that can be floating in a small pool or be buried in sand. When the fish is captured, the captor may choose from some prizes that are usually small toys for the kids. The pau-de-sebo is a pole of varnished wood with approximately 5 meters high, greased with wax or animal sebum. The game consists of embracing the pau-de-sebo, trying to climb it and reach the prize. Rangel points out that even through the huge structural changes that have happened in Brazil, especially its fast urbanisation which took a little more than half a century to occur, most of the cultural traditions of the Festa Junina have survived, although they are beginning to fade out of the memory of the new generations. As the author indicated, and confirmed through observation, these

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__________________________________________________________________ new generations still practice the main traditions, such as dancing the ‘quadrilha’, or eating the typical foods of these festivities. However, just a few still know the religious history of the festival and its saints. 3. A ‘Corn Civilization’ Until the 19th century, the culinary tradition of the Brazilian Southeast was mostly influenced by the Portuguese cuisine and the food habits of the various Brazilian indigenous peoples and of the numerous African nations that were forcibly brought here undeslavery. After the arrival of immigrants of many nationalities in large numbers - such as Japanese, Lebanese, Italians, Spaniards and Germans – there was a sudden and considerable increase in Brazilian gastronomic heterogeneity, especially in the city of São Paulo, over a short period of time. This modernization process, induced by the population and geographical growth of the city of São Paulo, led to the persecution of some food habits, such as the commercialization of food in the streets and even to the traditional menu of this type of commerce, which was heavily based on the corn, called ‘iguarias do bugre’.5 This cuisine was strongly influenced by the indigenous culinary culture, offering delicacies such as içás (a type of ant that would be fried and eaten with farofa, cassava flour or corn flour boiled or roasted), roasted pinhão (the seed of the Pinheiro-brasileiro), corn cakes, cuscuz (a type of couscous) and others.6 Studying the São Paulo society of the Colonial period, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda devoted a chapter, ‘Civilização do Milho’, to the role of corn in Brazilian food culture during this period; and another chapter to the ‘iguarias de bugre’, i.e. the use of wild foods such as the içá, in the food and diet of the Paulistas. In his work, Sérgio Buarque explains that the main contribution of corn to the diet of the Paulistas came from its mature grains, from which the corn flour would be made. This flour would be the ‘true bread from the earth’ and would be used in place of the cassava, common in the rest of Brazil. As the month of June is the time of harvest of corn in Brazil the abundance of this ingredient may be the reason that most of the typical foods of the June festivities are made of it. Pamonha, curau, canjica, cuscuz, popcorn, corn cake are just a few examples of the typical food of the festas juninas.

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__________________________________________________________________ Table 1: Some typical foods and beverages encountered at most Festas Juninas. Name in Portuguese

Approximate Translation

Description

Roasted corn

Corn still on the cob roasted at the campfire

Batata-doce assada

Roasted sweet potato

Sweet potato roasted at the campfire

Arroz-Doce

Arroz con Leche

kind of porridge made with rice, milk, sugar, clove and cinnamon

Bolo de fubá

Fubá cake

Cake made with a kind of fine corn flour

Bolo de Milho

Corn cake

Cake made of corn

Canjica or Munguzá

N/A

Porridge made with Canjica corn (white variety of corn), milk, cinnamon and condensed milk

Curau (Southeast and South regions) / Canjica (Northeast)

Corn porridge

Sweet custard-like dessert made from the expressed juice of unripe corn, cooked with milk and sugar.

Cuscuz

Couscous

type of Couscous, it is made with corn flour flakes cooked in a special pot, it resembles crumbs

Pamonha

N/A

Paste made from sweet corn and milk, boiled wrapped in corn husks. Pamonha can be savoury or sweet.

Pé-de-moleque

Boy’s foot

Original recipe: corn flour, molasses and peanuts; Recipe today: peanuts, rapadura or sugar

Pipoca

Popcorn

Can be savoury or sweet

Tapioca / beiju

Cassava flatbread

toasted cassava starch in the skillet, looks like a flatbread, can be stuffed with sweet or savory

Quentão

‘Very hot’ / Hot stuff

drink made of cachaça and spices (sugar, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, lemon)

Vinho Quente

Hot Wine

Red wine along with cinnamon, cloves, ginger, citric fruit chopped. It is served hot or warm and may be alcoholic or nonalcoholic.

Milho verde assado

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__________________________________________________________________ However, with the development and change of food habits, new dishes are being incorporated into the traditions in contemporary times, primarily food encountered at carnivals and other festivities across the globe, such as barbecue. Still, these foods are not widely accepted among all the visitors of festas juninas, sparking discussion about their status in these festivities. Table 2: New typical dishes encountered at most Festas Juninas. Name in portuguese Maçã-doamor Algodãodoce Pastel (brasileiro)

Approximate Translation Candy Apple Candy floss / Cotton candy Brazilian pastel

Description caramelized apple, covered with red syrup, skewered on a stick light and fluffy sugar confectionery which resembles cotton wool Flour-based dough which takes the form of an envelope and then fried by immersion in boiling oil. May be filled with many fillings (sweet or savory), but the most common are mozzarella or ground beef.

4. Festa Junina Nowadays In contemporary times, we can observe a process of spectacularization and touristification of the June festivities in some Brazilian cities, especially in the Brazilian Northeast, which perform festive events of large physical proportions and with strong factor media coverage. With the crescent globalisation and the increase in the interest in gastronomy among Brazilians, new food trends have been emerging in the country, leading to a transformation of ‘normal food’ to ‘gourmet food’, such as paçoca cupcakes. In an article published by Folha de São Paulo, one of the leading Brazilian newspapers, the journalist Patrícia Britto reported in the month of June that in the festa junina of Campina Grande, called the ‘O Maior São João do Mundo’ (world's largest Saint John's Festival), the ‘junines delicacies are exchanged for Japanese, Arabic and Mexican food’.7 In the article, she explains that instead of sweets, such as the canjica, curau, pamonha and corn cake, what the stalls were offering were French crepes, sushi, pizza and even a ‘petit gateu nordestino’, a style of mound lava cake made of rapadura with melted cheese sauce and tapioca ice cream.8 5. Centro de Tradições Nordestinas (Northeastern Traditions Centre) The Northeastern Traditions Center (Centro de Tradições Nordestinas - CTN) was founded in May 1991 in the city of São Paulo, with the aspiration of becoming, more than a meeting place for the northeastern community, a centre for dissemination and preservation of northeastern culture. The public of CTN has at

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__________________________________________________________________ their disposal ten restaurants and nine kiosks serving northeastern typical food and a stage that regularly receives artists from Brazil’s Northeast. On the weekends between 13 June and 28 June the CTN promoted a free Festa Junina, the ‘São João de Nóis Tudim’, considered the best, and most traditional, held at the City of São Paulo, and receiving up to 7000 visitors each day. Inspired by the traditional festivities of Brazil’s Northeast, and seeking to bring to its public, the diversity and richness of those, we could, however, observe that even this has been suffering the influence of the globalization process. During the event promoted this year in celebration of the June Cycle, we identified the presence of some typical junine dishes, such as the corn cake, the curau, the roasted pinhão, the popcorn, the canjica, the cassava cake, the pamonha, the pé-de-moleque and the paçoca, the quentão, the vinho quente. Talking with some of the individuals that were working at the stalls, we confirmed that some of these treats, however, are now purchased by vendors ready for consumption; others, like some cakes, were homemade. Although the promise of the festival is that people would find ten stalls with ‘what’s best in treats, snacks and drinks of St. John’s’, we could detect the appearance of some non-traditional delicacies, such as the ‘paletas mexicanas’, a kind of large popsicles that can be filled with a myriad of ingredients (such as fruits, chocolate, condensed milk, or doce de leite), that have become a popular gastronomic trend in Brazil over the last year. 6. Conclusion Although the culture is always changing and suffering transformations, we noticed that the typical foods of the festas juninas still represent an important part of Brazilian cuisine and of the processes its society has been through since the invention of those delicacies. Corn and peanut based foods are still present in the everyday food of Brazilians throughout the national territory and can be used as an identifying factor among its population, be it by the various names that some dishes receive in different areas of Brazil or by what is considered food by these individuals, especially, what is seen as everyday food and festival food. We also could perceive a slow transformation on what is considered to be the typical foods of the Festas Juninas. While most participants of the festivities do not consider dishes as Paletas Mexicanas to be part of the usual, and even ‘proper’, food of these events, treats such as maçãs-do-amor are more controversial, being normally accepted by the younger generations as an established part of the menu of these festivals, but still being seen as intruders by the older generation. This changing nature of the June food is an indicator of how the Brazilian socio-historical context has influenced, and continues to influence Brazil’s culinary culture. The various dishes, food preparation modes and manners, which have been

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__________________________________________________________________ added to these festivals over time, demonstrate how the Brazilian nation formation process generated a rich and adaptable food culture.

Notes 1

Carlos Roberto Antunes dos Santos, ‘A Alimentação E Seu Lugar Na História: Os Tempos Da Memória Gustativa’, História: Questões & Debates 42 (2005): 12, Viewed on 14 February 2014, http://ojs.c3sl.ufpr.br/ojs/index.php/historia/article/viewFile/4643/3797. 2 Ariovaldo Franco, De caçador a gourmet: uma história da gastronomia (São Paulo: Editora Senac São Paulo, 2004). 3 Luciana Chianca, ‘Devoção e diversão: Expressões contemporâneas de festas e santos católicos’. Revista Anthropológicas 18.2 (2011): 49-74. 4 Lúcia Helena Vitalli Rangel, Festas juninas, festas de São João: origens, tradições e história (São Paulo: Publishing Solutions, 2008). 5 Sérgio Buarque Holanda, Caminhos e Fronteiras (São Paulo: Cia das Letras, 1994). 6 Holanda. Caminhos e Fronteiras. 7 Patrícia Britto, ‘Na PB, quitutes juninos são trocados por comida japonesa, árabe e mexicana’, Folha de São Paulo, 27 June 2015, Cotidiano, Viewed on 27 June 2015, http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/cotidiano/2015/06/1648610-na-pb-quitutes-juninossao-trocados-por-comida-japonesa-arabe-mexicana.shtml. 8 Britto, ‘Na PB, quitutes juninos são trocados por comida japonesa, árabe e mexicana’.

Bibliography Basso, Rafaela. ‘A cultura alimentar paulista: Uma civilização do milho? (16501750)’ [The Paulista Food Culture: A Corn Civilization?]. Master Thesis, Universidade Estadual de Campinas: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciȇncias Humanas, 2012. Britto, Patrícia. ‘Na PB, quitutes juninos são trocados por comida japonesa, árabe e mexicana’. Folha de São Paulo, 27 June 2015, Cotidiano. Viewed on 27 June 2015. http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/cotidiano/2015/06/1648610-na-pb-quitutes-juninossao-trocados-por-comida-japonesa-arabe-mexicana.shtml. Chianca, Luciana. ‘Devoção e diversão: Expressões contemporâneas de festas e santos católicos’. Revista Anthropológicas 18.2 (2011): 49-74.

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__________________________________________________________________ Franco, Ariovaldo. De caçador a gourmet: uma história da gastronomia. São Paulo: Editora Senac São Paulo, 2004. Holanda, Sérgio Buarque. Caminhos e Fronteiras. São Paulo: Cia das Letras, 1994. Rangel, Lúcia Helena Vitalli. Festas juninas, festas de São João: origens, tradições e história. São Paulo: Publishing Solutions, 2008. Santos, Carlos Roberto Antunes dos. ‘A Alimentação E Seu Lugar Na História: Os Tempos Da Memória Gustativa’. História: Questões & Debates 42 (2005): 11-31. Viewed on 14 February 2014. http://ojs.c3sl.ufpr.br/ojs/index.php/historia/article/viewFile/4643/3797. Bianca Arantes dos Santos is an undergraduate student of journalism at Universidade Estadual Paulista. Her academic interests include food journalism and food anthropology.

‘Mamakization’: Food and Social Cohesion in Multiethnic Malaysia Eric Olmedo and Shamsul AB Abstract The concept of McDonaldization is a well-known metaphorical figure of the globalisation paradigm, presenting neo liberalism as a form of cultural imperialism leading to global cultural homogenisation. The ‘Golden Arch Theory (GAT)’, often regarded as an economist offspring of McDonaldization, was much more ambitious: GAT posited itself as a transnational conflict prevention system. In short, countries that were endowed with McDonald’s restaurants on their national soil would not go to war with one another, as their respective middle-classes would have far much to lose, having reached standards of wealth and comfort symbolised by the presence of the Golden Arches in their territory. It is noticeable that the GAT theory was conceived to explain cross-borders or international conflicts, rather than to shed some light on the state of social cohesion in a given country. If we view social cohesion antithetically, as an absence of social conflict, we pave the way for an alternative theory. We therefore propose that this theory-in-the-making should be socially embedded and empirically rooted in order to analyse the level of social cohesion of a specified country. The main purpose of this chapter is to introduce the concept of ‘Mamakization’, which draws from an iconic figure of street food in Malaysia: the ‘Mamak’ stall. In opposition to the ‘global’ McDonaldization, the foundations of the Mamakization paradigm derive from a food alternative network framing, outlined by two main precepts: localisation and divergent modernity. Mamakization looks primarily at the act of patronising a food stall in multiethnic Malaysia as a social transaction that can therefore be analysed and made sense of. The objective of this chapter is to propose and discuss the key concept of Mamakization as a comprehensive analytical tool to investigate social cohesion through a specific social practice: eating out in a Malaysian food stall. Key Words: Mamak stall, Mamakization, McDonaldization, food, multiethnic Malaysia, Alternative Food Network, inalienated social transaction. ***** 1. Introduction The French anthropologist Marcel Mauss is well known for having established bridges between sociology and anthropology. Drawing from fieldwork in Polynesia, Mauss built on Emile Durkheim’s concept of ‘social fact’, and devised the construct of ‘total social fact’ in his classic work ‘the Gift’ (‘Essai sur le don’1). For Mauss, a total social fact involves

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__________________________________________________________________ the totality of society and its institutions … all these phenomena are at the same time juridical, economic, religious, and even aesthetic and morphological, etc. […] They are whole entities, entire social systems … it is by considering the whole entity that we could perceive what is essential.2 The region of South Asia illustrates perfectly how society pervades into the social practice of eating. The American-Indian anthropologist Arjun Appadurai argues that ‘food avoidances, […] can signal caste or sect affiliation, life-cycles stages, gender distinctions, and aspirations toward higher status’.3 Beyond Southeast Asia, the paradigm of globalization has been captured by George Ritzer in his essay on McDonalidzation.4 Ritzer points out four primary components of McDonaldization: efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. Efficiency means aiming at minimisation of time. Calculability emphasises the notion that quantity equals quality, to render the other notion of ‘value for money’ easier to evaluate for McDonald’s customers. Predictability is another word to describe the standardisation of products & services. Control refers to the uniformity of employees themselves, being selected according to transnational tools and techniques, as well as the progressive replacement of human by nonhuman technologies. For the present research, the social object is ‘social cohesion’; the research object is the iconic figure of Malaysian street food: the ‘Mamak Stall’; the empirical field is a peri-urban area in Malaysia; and the theoretical framework shall be designed at the end of this chapter. The theorization parts stems from a critical discussion nurtured by preliminary findings from an exploratory survey. 2. The Heuristic Status of Social Cohesion Social cohesion has been a long-standing torment for social scientists. A review of literature highlights that one of the most significant problems related to social cohesion draws from the term ‘social cohesion’ itself. Its polysemy is regarded as ‘somewhat startling considering how widely used this concept is’.5 In absence of a consensual definition, we have to content ourselves at first with ‘narratives’ of social cohesion. A. The Mamak Stall as a New Narrative of Social Cohesion Not unlike other post-colonial societies such as South Africa and Australia, the narrative of social cohesion in Malaysia follows a sequential pattern. Stages of social cohesion are conceptualised and explained: ‘kesepaduan’ (cohesion), ‘penyatupaduan’ (reconciliation) and ultimately ‘perpaduan’ (unity). As enlightening as they can be, all these narratives remain largely intellectual constructs destined for pedagogy and ideology.

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__________________________________________________________________ The narrative of the ‘Mamak stall’ can be presented at first as a substantiated alternate narrative for Malaysia. Food stalls are places of sociability. Consequently, we wish to posit the Mamak stall as a ‘great good place’6 in the same vein as cafés, coffee shops, bars, pubs, etc. According to Ray Oldenburg, ‘the most important function of a great good place is uniting the neighbourhood’.7 The American sociologist later adds that ‘these places serve community best to the extent that they are inclusive and local’.8 As we may easily postulate that Mamak stalls are local, in order for a food stall to qualify as a ‘Mamak stall’ it must combine two cultural markers: Indian ethnicity and Islamic faith. The label ‘Mamak Stall’ derives in turn from the term ‘Mamak’, a Malaysian colloquial idiom used to describe Indian Muslims who migrated to peninsular Malaysia. The word ‘Mamak’ supposedly borrows from the Tamil expression ‘Maa-ma’ for maternal uncle. The addition of the letter ‘k’ at the end of the word most likely comes from a hypercorrection devised by Malay language speakers, terminal Ks being silent in Malay language. The first ‘Mamaks’ were immigrants from South India who opened shops in Malaysia. Those ‘uncles’ became familiar features of street food business that arose from the industrialisation process in urban areas. B. From New Narrative to Analytical Framework Ray Oldenburg uses the term ‘great good place’ interchangeably with another expression bearing sociological implications: ‘third place’. The third place of social life comes after home first, and workplace second. The fact that this research focuses on the third place locates our analysis in a selected fragment of social reality. This aspect of social reality is potentially more prone to capture a sense of social cohesion due to the character of third places. Third places are ‘neutral grounds upon which people may gather’,9 and act as levelers, ‘which reduce men to an equality’.10 In addition to being third places, Mamak stalls stand as a specific variety of food stalls; we are therefore compelled to summon back the concept of ‘total social fact’ to test the social properties of the said food stall. The concept of total social fact may be considered as a methodological device rather than a specific ontological entity: it serves a minima to legitimate the election of the mamak stall as a magnifying glass to scrutinize social cohesion at work. The substantive form of ‘Mamakization’ reflects the ‘Mamak Stall’ object as a socio-economic construct: a place of sociability as well as an economic unit. 3. Mamakization as a Bi-Paradigmatic Theory An important notion in Mauss' conceptualisation of gift exchange is what Gregory refers to as ‘inalienability’.11 In a commodity economy, there is a strong

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__________________________________________________________________ distinction between objects and persons through the notion of private property. Objects are sold, meaning that the ownership rights are fully transferred to the new owner. The object has thereby become ‘alienated’ from its original owner. In a gift economy, however, the objects that are given are inalienated from the givers; they are loaned rather than sold and ceded. Social objects that are transacted in a Malaysian food stall are meals and beverages that are part of a larger ensemble anthropologically termed ‘cuisine’. The point of contact of a customer with a food stall is made through a codified culinary system, and as such a ‘cultural system’;12 or, in other words, a ‘cuisine’ or, at times, several ‘cuisines’. Subsequently, we choose to segregate the idioms ‘food’ and ‘cuisine’ in our theorisation attempt: ‘food’ will be reserved for the economic axis of our framework, while ‘cuisines’ shall be assigned to the sociological axis (social transaction). A. Problematization As we have seen, Mamak stalls are first ‘third places’, then ‘great good places’. A great good place is an umbrella construct that harbours the two key notions of locality and inclusivity. Shifting to a more analytical ground leads to the articulation of the following question: how do Mamak stalls’ cuisine(s), as alienated social transaction(s), act as symbolic signifiers, thus enabling us to read social cohesion in Malaysian society? To answer this fundamental question, we need to design two levels of analysis: 1. Apprehending Mamak stalls as links in an alternative food network (AFN); 2. Apprehending Mamak stalls as providers of inclusive cuisines, i.e. mediatizing vessels of Malaysian common society’s core values. In the given context of Mamakization, we postulate that the ‘social transaction’ taking place at the Malaysian food stall, between the Giver (the food stall owner and staff), the commodity (culturally conditioned food) and the Receiver (the patron), constitute our acting unit. The dialectical articulation of the above levels of scrutiny actually constitutes our analytical framework. 4. Measuring Social Cohesion in Mamak Stalls: Lessons from the Field In the month of June 2015, we conducted an exploratory fieldwork in three Mamak stalls, set in three different locations on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, in the state of Selangor, Malaysia.

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__________________________________________________________________ A. Methodology The primary intention was for the fieldwork to help us refine, more than actually test, the following set of hypotheses that derive from the above theoretical framework. First level of analysis: Mamak stalls as links in a food alternative network. This also echoes the notion of locality raised by Oldenburg. • Hypothesis 1: Mamak stalls purchase their fresh food ingredients from local vendors who in turn buy their foodstuff from local farmers, thus forming a short supply chain. • Hypothesis 2: Mamak stalls are ubiquitous. Their geographical coverage grid is tight for the whole Malaysian territory. Second level of analysis: Mamak stalls as providers of inclusive cuisines. The concept of providing goes beyond the action of feeding people: Mamak stalls provide a shelter away from the first and second place, as well as a neutral ground for non-conflictual conversations, and finally act as a leveller where patrons can choose to transcend ethnic and social differences. • Hypothesis 3: Mamak stalls provide cuisines that transcend ethnic boundaries under a religious Muslim canopy; • Hypothesis 4: Mamak stalls are not class exclusive: they cater for a variety of social classes. • Hypothesis 5: social transactions taking place at Mamak stalls tend to be inalienated, thus participating to shape these eateries as loci of social cohesion. The planning of our data collection was three-fold: 1. Fifteen semi-structured interviews of Mamak stalls’ managers and customers; 2. Direct observation of eating patterns; 3. Participant observation: acting as customers, i.e. eating the food and engaging into conversations. Depending on the customers, interviews were conducted interchangeably in English or Malay language.

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__________________________________________________________________ B. Lessons from the Field As far as the first level of analysis is concerned, all Mamak stalls have declared buying fresh and neither frozen nor canned ingredients when it comes to fish, meat, poultry, fruits and vegetables. For these categories of foodstuff, their chain of supply stems from two sources: ‘pasar borong’ and ‘wet market’. In Malaysia, the Pasar Borong acts as a central market at different scales, either at the level of a district or the level of the state. Suppliers working there are generally wholesalers who have bought their merchandise exclusively from local farmers or fisheries. The idiom ‘wet market’ refers to the local neighbourhood market, held every morning. The floor is regularly washed with loads of water to avoid rapid decay of organic matter in a hot tropical climate, hence the term ‘wet’. Vendors are exclusively local farmers, or small local businesses associated with fishermen or cattle breeders. As per the second level of analysis, we have found empirical evidence of inclusivity. We mostly saw Ethnic Indians, Ethnic Chinese and Malays crowding the stalls. We observed that the workers use Tamil language to communicate. Interestingly, they adjust to their customer’s language. We saw a worker attending an Ethnic-Chinese customer, saying ‘You sudah order meh?’ (You have already ordered?). The Chinese patron then replied ‘I sudah order tadi maa’. The usage of meh and maa at the very end of sentence is usually reserved the Chinese ethnic group, while the mix of English (you, order) and Malay (sudah, tadi) shows a consciousness to adjust to the style of communication at the level of common society. This is a striking example of code switching and ethnic alignment leading to social cohesion, motivated by market economy. Looking at social class inclusivity, the class mix depends very much on the location. In the first stall, most of the customers came by car. In the second stall, we witnessed elderly men with families and working men coming on foot. The third stall was filled with many youngsters, coming riding small motorbikes. From all the fifteen persons interviewed, fourteen of them have been patronizing the stall between three times to five times a week. At this point of the survey, we can easily categorise the Mamak stalls’ patrons in three ideal-types: (1) the single, often immigrant, working class man who comes for a nutritious and cheap meal. Most of all, patronising this Mamak stall exempts him from timeconsuming food shopping and preparation, while a fast and good meal ‘at the Mamak’ is definitely cheaper for a bachelor than cooking at home. (2) The second ideal-type concerns students, who look for a cheap alternative to the campus’ cafeteria and who generally patronise in groups, enjoying the relaxing and carefree atmosphere. (3) Families in need of social assistance: grand-parents who end up taking care of the grand-children because the parents are too busy working, or single-parents - usually male divorcees - who do not have the skills to cook, thus bringing their kids to the Mamak stall, while they have them in custody.

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__________________________________________________________________ While the sum of these observations is not representative enough to draw any kind of definitive conclusions, these snapshots of Malaysian social life give us a first insight on the concept of Mamakization at work. 5. Conclusion Wealth and income distribution are components that have been traditionally used to discuss the notion of social cohesion. The Mamakization model articulates an economic dimension (the AFN) to a sociological dimension (the in-alienated social transaction). Mamakization thus connects together two degrees of the social observation scale: a macrosocial level (economic supply chain) and a microsocial level (individual representations of inalienation). These macro-micro dialectics enable Mamakization not to restrict itself to studying moments of social cohesion; instead it confers spatial and temporal depth to this analytical framework. Unlike McDonaldization, which produces sporadic attempts to adjust their products to national markets (i.e., the yearly release of the Chinese New Year ‘Prosperity Burger’), Mamak stalls display ethnic plasticity when it comes to range of cuisines as well as customisation of service, according to their perception of market segments at the micro level of the neighbourhood. Consequently, the construct of ‘Mamakization’ can be viewed as an avatar of divergent modernity in opposition to the convergence embodied by the Golden Arch Theory: in practice we oppose plasticity, tolerance to uncertainty, and social cohesion to standardisation, predictability and social fragmentation. The meshing performed by all stalls connected through a short supply chain stands as an open framework on which a sculpture is moulded. The clay used for the moulding symbolises each and everyone’s own representations of social cohesion. Each Mamak stall acts as rotating coil in machinery: mobile but integrated. The above-mentioned open framework embodies the interdependence of a local economic chain of prosperity and the inclusiveness at work in the Mamak stall as a third place. Sociologically speaking, a third place should not be investigated independently, but rather studied in conjunction with social life in the first and second place. However, the open framework of Mamakization offers the necessary pre-requisite for social cohesion: a socio-economic armature.

Acknowledgements The authors wish to express their sincere gratitude to Noor Ashikin Said and Zaharul Abdullah for their valuable contribution in the phase of the exploratory survey.

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Notes 1

Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Cohen & West, 1966). 2 Mauss, Gift, 81. 3 Appadurai Arjun, ‘Gastro-Politics in Hindu South Asia’, American Ethnologist 8.3, Symbolisms and Cognition (August 1981): 494. 4 George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (Los Angeles: Pine Forge Press, 2008). 5 Mehta, D. Michael, ‘Introduction: The Impact of Innovations in Biotechnology on Social Cohesion’, in Biotechnology Unglued: Science, Society, and Social Cohesion ed. by Michael. D. Mehta (Vancouver: UBC Press 2005), 2. 6 Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place (Cambridge MA: DA CAPO Press, 1997). 7 Oldenburg, Great Good Place, xvii. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 22. 10 Ibid., 23. 11 Christopher A. Gregory, Gifts and Commodities (London: Academic Press, 1982). 12 Claude Fischler, L’Homnivore (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1991).

Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun. ‘Gastro-Politics in Hindu South Asia’. American Ethnologist 8.3, Symbolisms and Cognition (1981): 419-511. Ben-Rafael, Eliezer and Yitzhak Sternberg, eds. Comparing Modernities: Pluralism versus Homogeneity. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Durkheim, Emile. Les règles de la méthode sociologique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967. Draper, Alizon. Street Foods in Developing Countries: The Potential for Micronutrient Fortification. U.S. Agency for International Development Publications, 1996. Fischler, Claude. L’Homnivore. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1991. Gregory, Christopher A. Gifts and Commodities. London: Academic Press, 1982.

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__________________________________________________________________ Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Cohen & West, 1966. Maye, Damian and James Kirwan. Alternative Food Networks: A Review of Research, edited by Geoffrey Pleyers, 147-168. Paris, Desclée De Brouwer, 2011. Mehta, Michael D. ‘Introduction: The Impact of Innovations in Biotechnology on Social Cohesion’. Biotechnology Unglued: Science, Society, and Social Cohesion, edited by Michael D. Mehta, 1-12. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005. Muntaner, Carles and John Lynch. ‘Income Inequality, Social Cohesion, and Class Relations: A Critique of Wilkinson’s Neo-Durkheimian Research Program’. International Journal of Health Services 29.1 (1999): 59–82. Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place. Cambridge MA: DA CAPO Press, 1997. Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. Los Angeles: Pine Forge Press, 2008. Shamsul, Amri Baharuddin. ‘Debating about Identity in Malaysia: A Discourse Analysis’. Southeast Asian Studies 34.3 (1996): 476-499. Shamsul, Amri Baharuddin and Anis Yusal Yusoff. Unity, Cohesion and Reconciliation. Kuala Lumpur: ITBM & KITA Publishing, 2014. Eric Olmedo is the Principal Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnic Studies (KITA), of the National University of Malaysia (University Kebangsaan Malaysia). He holds a PhD in Sociology from University of Toulouse. His research interests revolve around sociology of work, anthropology of food, and anthropotechnology. Shamsul Amri Baharuddin is the founding director of the Institute of Ethnic Studies (KITA), of the National University of Malaysia. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from Monash University. His research interests focus on intra- and inter-ethnic relations in Malaysia, as well as social cohesion.

Agriculture and Sexual Minorities: Historical Precedents and Contemporary Evolutions Andrea Bosio Abstract The chapter investigates the relationship between agriculture and sexual minorities in the western world. The twentieth-century socio-cultural shift from Fordism to Post-Fordism allowed the emergence of landscapes characterised by new, and often ambiguous, relationships between city and countryside. Consequently, the emergence of new figures inhabiting those hybridized landscapes represent a historical precedent. Thus, this shift is argued to foster a restructuring of traditionally rooted sexuality-based dynamics, which relegate for instance homosexuals into urban consumption, and associate agricultural practices to the notion of the heterosexual family. The changes happening within urban environments in terms of visibility and freedom of expression of sexual minorities are starting to influence also the rural realm, with, for instance, associations of gay farmers timidly advocating their existence. In these terms, different cases are analysed within two sections. The first section, starting from the observation of the over-exposure of homosexuals within the realm of food consumption in media like television programs, commercials and newspapers, analyses the historical connection between urbanity, food consumption, and sexual diversity. The second section, conversely, begins with an exploration, in the existing literature, of the relationship between rurality and sexual diversity, observing the conception of the notion of rurality being close to consumptive activities and disjointed from the realm of agriculture. Upon this, the chapter argues the difficulty to observe this relationship without a direct reference to urban practices, and considers the case of the 2015 Milan Expo as an example of agricultural practices entering the urban realm, in order to observe which role and which space the LGBTI community has within. Through those cases, the chapter attempts to delineate the contemporary relationship between agriculture and sexual minorities, evidencing the difficult relationship between sexual diversity and the realm of food production. Key Words: Agriculture, gender studies, homosexuality, city, countryside, food, production, consumption. ***** 1. Introduction The chapter begins by observing the visibility gays and lesbians have in contemporary society through media, especially when pertaining to activities relating to food consumption, food preparation and food presentation. The presence of gay chefs and contestants in cooking programs, gay food bloggers, gay

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__________________________________________________________________ characters in food television advertisements, and the utilisation of gay activism for food product placement, is noticeably contrasted by the absence of almost any reference in magazines, news or advertisements to sexual diversity within agricultural socio-cultural environments and the sphere of food production. 1 Timidly, the movie and book industry have started to include gay and lesbian characters populating rural contexts and being involved in agricultural activities, with the most striking and most popular example being Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain.2 Gay activists have supported initiatives of environmental and natural impact, as for example the construction of New York’s High Line.3 Occasionally, newspapers or magazines report the story of gay people transitioning from urban life toward agricultural activities.4 Yet, there seems to be still a large visibility gap of gays and lesbians between those engaged in food consumptive activities, and those engaged in food productive ones. Upon these observations, the chapter attempts to analyse how and in which terms the relationship between agriculture and sexual diversity can exist, through two distinct sections, respectively focusing on food consumption and food production. In the first section, by assuming the historical nineteenth century emergence of the western city as the space primarily dedicated to food consumption, the chapter highlights the contemporary twentieth century construction of the stereotypical gay urban figure as a super-consumer.5 It stresses that, due to a western urban parochialism considering the spatial and functional supremacy of the city over the countryside, queer theories have been relegated into urban realms and in homonormative realities proper of gay neighbourhoods and communities.6 In the second section, the chapter observes that the notion of rurality emerges, within the surveyed literature, to be attached more to the recreational fruition of the landscape than to the productive use of it through agriculture. Consequently, in light of rurality being conceived as opposed to urbanity, the chapter observes an interest in researching the seeking of a gay and lesbian rural identity but little interest in the maintenance of such through established rural practices.7 Under this perspective, the chapter argues the impossibility to establish and observe a relationship between agriculture and sexual diversity outside of urban dynamics. In considering then the Milan 2015 World Exposition as an urban event of global consumption which focuses, in the specific 2015 edition, on food production, the section observes the contrasting positions playing within this event and how these intertwine with LGBTI activism. 2. Contemporary Gayfication of Food Consumption and the Historical Rise of the Gay Urban Super-Consumer This first section begins with highlighting the intrinsic and rooted relationship between market logics of consumption connected to freedom of choice, and the instrumental use marketing agencies and companies are making of social issues involving their customers.8 It also highlights a double side of the strategy of the

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__________________________________________________________________ phenomenon of pink-washing. 9 In spite of this strategy being applied by corporations mainly for attracting more consumers, the increasing recent trend of gay-friendly advertisements has determined a change in the public opinion even in hostile environments, as Gianmarco Capogna stresses referring to Italy as ‘a country which has not yet been able to give a political and juridical response to the homotransphobia directed to couples and homosexual families.’10 Moving from this, the section considers the close relationship between food advertisement and the physical place of food sale and consumption. David Bell stresses that sexual citizenship is to some extent constituted through consumption, following a late-capitalist economy, and therefore it tends to recognise the most visible part of the community, the shoppers, as the largest part of the gay and lesbian community. 11 Within this context, the survey literature on consumption, urbanity, and sexuality, is observed considering the space of the city to be the historical quintessential queer space. Julie Abraham makes a clear and direct association between homosexuality and urban consumption, and advances being gay and cruising to be an extension of the flâneur’s very essence. 12 Abraham’s reference to the figure of the flâneur, which emerged in the nineteenth century French city and interpreted as the inhabitant of the Paris covered shopping arcades, allows her to make considerations of historical nature over the relationship between urban consumption and the visibility of sexual minorities, and over the rise of such a relationship. The historical inhabitant of what are considered the archetypes of contemporary shopping centres - first by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project - appears to represent the nature of the consumer, which is however disenfranchised, through the act of strolling through the city and window shopping, from consumption logics which give shoppers the impulse to buy anything they see.13 In light of this last aspect, the flâneur is seen by Carol Harrison as a key figure of the nineteenth century construction of the bourgeois identity, and therefore is argued by the chapter to be a figure through which urban taste became prominent in its social and gendered distinctions. 14 Historically, however, the ability to freely stroll through the city was given only to men, with women being relegated into small shops first, and then large department stores. 15 The intertwined spatial male and female behaviours acted out by the French male flâneur allow authors such as Abraham, Wolff, and Munt to question his assumed heterosexuality, and to advance the rise of the conception of the city being more tolerant to sexual diversity when entering the sphere of consumption.16 This is even more evident when pertaining to food consumption. As Barry Smart explains, ‘the restaurant and the café are portrayed by Baudelaire as popular haunts of the flâneur, as providing acceptable and appropriate sites for non-ambulatory forms of flânerie,’ 17 conducted by a man rather than a woman. The flâneur is here then argued to give rise to the contemporary consumer, disenfranchised from moral and social codes, but largely subjected to the type and the style of the consumption space.

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__________________________________________________________________ Upon the rise of the urban consumer in the shape of the flâneur, the chapter argues the historical conditions from which the contemporary city and its attitude toward consumption emerged led to a gendered social coding in which consumption allows a larger freedom of expression, thanks to the social rules bending over the larger possibilities the urban market offers. For Rob Shield, however, consumption becomes a means of identification with fantastic role models, and gives the illusion of freeing the consuming individual of social conviction. 18 Consequently, in spite of the city being characterised by the multiplicity of real or imaginary networks of social activities, Elizabeth Grosz argues the urban attitude toward the division of space and function within individuals and groups allows the creation of the isolation and segregation of social marginality and diversity, as in the case of gay neighbourhoods or villages.19 In this sense, the production of power created through categorisation of urban functions and groups is here masked by the illusory freedom given by the possibility to consume, which is absent, or at least reduced, in a rural context in which production is the main, or the sole, activity. The relationship between production and sexuality can be found in Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, although it never specifically refers to homosexuality. 20 The problem of heterosexuality universally being recognised as needed for the production of human labour can be traced in the history of Western queer theory. In particular, it can be found in the Marxist thoughts of the Italian writer and gay activist Mario Mieli, who talks of ‘educastration’ as a process of imposition of heterosexuality as the norm for the socialisation of the production and the formal submission of labour to the Marxist notion of capital. 21 In light of this, the chapter argues production, rather than urban consumption, being the locus of power, and advances the need to investigate the rural context in search of a correlation between food production and sexuality. 3. Rural Gays and Food Production: Analysis of an Antithesis In light of the last section’s final argument, this second section attempts to understand the relationship between sexual diversity and the countryside, this latter assumed by the chapter to historically be the place antithetical to the city in light of its specificity in food production. Close to the functional and spatial notion of countryside, and in opposition to urbanity, resides the concept of rurality, which is observed through the survey literature to be often understood through consumptive dynamics proper of urbanity rather than through the realm of production. Practically, the chapter conceives city and countryside in oppositional terms, in respect to food consumption and production. The chapter then argues the influence of this oppositional model of urban and rural also on the inhabitants of the countryside, and investigates rural gay and lesbian populations within a literature survey. However, it argues that the contemporary reality is often characterised by an urbanity or rurality not necessarily attached to a consumptive city or productive

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__________________________________________________________________ countryside. In this sense, urbanity can exist within the countryside in form of settlements, and rurality can be present in the city in forms of urban agriculture or urban parks. Thus, the chapter assumes to find a reflection of such realities within the surveyed literature. Noticeably, the surveyed literature comes from an English, and mainly American, scholarly context. Chris Wienke and Gretchel Hill, through the analysis of the American fishing village of Provincetown in Massachusetts, which is considered the gayest town in America in light of the annual Mardi Gras and the established gay tourism, argue rurality is often perceived by gay people as a recreational space. 22 In Darren Smith and Louise Holt’s analysis of Lesbian households in Yorkshire, rurality appears to be perceived as an idyllic retreat, distant from the chaotic urban environment. In Sine Anahita’s study of the Landdyke movement in the United States and the creation of an ecofeminist movement, rurality is conceived in terms of a natural setting, through the ecological protection of achieving personal and communal liberation from a manoriented and patriarchal society.23 In Kenneth Kirkey and Ann Forsyth’s study, a reason for gay men to populate rural fringes of cities appears to relate to the emergence of the nature movement during the 70s, in which gay communes were founded upon the belief that harvesting organic food in a supposedly more salubrious environment would have made them freer from societal norms. 24 Within this literature, the chapter observes a general criticism, which argues rural gays and lesbians to have been generally left out of the academic research, on the basis that, due to assumed environmental and social aspects of rural areas such as the extreme isolation, the very poor accessibility to media and the limited way of social connection, they tend to move to urban areas whenever possible, creating enclave and homonormative realities. 25 Upon this, the chapter considers Gavin Brown’s criticism, which suggests homonormativity needs to go outside of the boundaries created by neoliberalism, which generated a notion of gay and lesbian space of action shaped by commodity and subjected to for-profit businesses serving the desires of gay consumers.26 The chapter, furthermore, considers this criticism under a spatial and functional perspective. In spite of evidences in the literature of positive cases of gay and lesbian individuals and communities living in rural areas, all these examples highlight the difficult relationship between the visibilities of sexual diversity and the sphere of food production. They evidence, in fact, a notion of rurality contextually detached from the idea of countryside as a place dedicated to agriculture. Consequently, this notion of rurality functionally overlooks the inclusion of agricultural and food production practices aside of consumption and leisure activities, which are present also in rural contexts, although are historically proper of urbanity. The chapter then highlights the issue, within the surveyed literature, of studying the relationship between food production and sexual diversity without defining the rural environment as opposed to the urban one on

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__________________________________________________________________ functional terms, including the sphere of agriculture within the notion of rural life as complementary to leisure and consumption practices. The section therefore aims to illustrate, and attempts to possibly resolve, this last argument through a practical case, by observing how rural issues are considered within urban contexts. It considers the world exhibition, a major urban event which historically represents a shop window for the world and a celebration of mass consumption, as an opportunity to test where the LGBTI community sits within such a circumstance. 27 In particular it considers the 2015 Milan Expo, which, in light of its theme ‘feeding the world,’ focuses on agricultural practices, strategies and policies, and therefore also includes the realm of food production. Also, outside of the scope of the present chapter, the Expo brings up controversies surrounding the presence of large food corporations and industries ‘feeding’ the ‘developed world’ within an event aiming to consider the global world represent a starting point of the discussion. In particular, the quarrel between McDonald’s and Slow Food offers the ground to reflect on the space gays and lesbians occupy in the event. While the large capitalist food distributer defends its presence at Expo claiming to believe in ‘the customers’ freedom and ability to choose,’28 the Slow Food association - whose advocacies fight for socio-economic rights of the agricultural sector and the protection of bio and cultural diversity - criticises the domination of aesthetics and large corporations, including McDonald’s, over cultural contents at Expo. 29 Curiously, Eataly, which promotes a gay-friendly image of its supermarket-boutique-restaurants, stands in the middle of this quarrel, promoting the same vision of Slow Food in relation to food culture and agriculture, but agreeing with McDonald’s in including free market logics within Expo.30 In this scenario, Expo 2015 represents an ambiguous ground. First, it poses ethic-economic issues at a food level by being a commercial event sponsored by large groups like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola - whose advertising strategies often can be described as pink-washing. It also poses ethic-political issues of human rights nature by locating on the same ground pavilions representing countries like the United States or France, which legally protect and recognise sexual minorities, and pavilions of nations where gays and lesbians have no rights, or, far worse, are criminalised, such as Iran and Uganda. 31 More importantly, this ambiguity evidences how the indirect influence on society of a pink-washing strategy acted by food corporations through marketing contrasts here with the lack of interest in issues relating to sexual minorities from associations like Slow Food or Coldiretti, when advocating on issues related to the sphere of food production and agriculture. 32 Rather, gay associations are left outside of the broader discussion, forced to take a political stance by either including the gay pride organised by the pavilion of the United States - which sits in front to the Iranian one - as the opening party of the traditional gay week annually held in June; 33 or by independently organising a counter-pride, the ‘no-expo pride,’ advocating against the instrumental use of gay rights within Expo and against issues curiously also criticised by Slow

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__________________________________________________________________ Food, including labour exploitation and the domination of large food corporations.34 This scenario highlights pink-washing strategies as the sole actions including gays and lesbians within discourses on food. Subjects fostering discussion on food production or administrating agricultural realities appear less inclined to support diversity, simply because they overlook the presence of sexual diversity within the population engaged in food productive activities. An interpretative reason for this could consider the historical urban connotation of corporatism and unionism, even of those of an agricultural nature; and the anthropocentric attitude of conceiving the city as the locus of the human action. The first aspect would therefore consider associations like Slow Food to focus their activism toward agricultural practices and their socio-economic aspects when engaging in intellectual – and nonproductive – activities, and in the case of Slow Food within the urban bourgeois context of Milan. 35 Criticisms toward Slow Food stress the elitist and bourgeois character of the association, and advance the argument of Slow Food reiterating the socio-economic discrepancies of the current capitalistic food and agricultural system by producing an alternative version in which distinctions are on cultural bases rather than economic ones.36 A second interpretation considers Grosz’s reflections over the relationship between the body and the city, which lies within the fundamental opposition between nature and culture. In her argument, while a western anthropocentric view of the world leads to conceive the city as a ‘product or projection of the body,’37 its gendered male-centric perspective also leads to conceive nature through the opposition between the dominant productive male and reproductive female.38 In the context of the chapter’s argument, it means that while the city is more malleable to diversity and to creative and consumptive dynamics because it is conceived outside of and against nature, the countryside is inextricably linked to the duality between male and female, even during events like Expo 2015 in which agriculture enters the environment of the city.39 Conversely, the case of the Italian initiative organised in 2012 by Legambiente, a major environmentalist Italian association, in partnership with Famiglie arcobaleno (Rainbow Families), shows the opening to diversity in conjunction with a ludic conception of nature, involving kids' laboratories in the parks of a number of Italian cities to promote bio-and-social diversity. 40 In this sense, nature can be conceived as a medium to foster diversity only in the city. 4. Conclusion In conclusion, the chapter attempted to analyse the relationship between gays and lesbians and food production, starting from the observation of their overexposure in contemporary media when engaged in food consumption or presentation. By advancing the current impossibility of observing how gays and lesbians interact with food production without the medium of urbanity, it observed the ambiguous inclusion on the LGBTI community within an urban event themed

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__________________________________________________________________ on agriculture. The chapter ultimately argued the need for the integration of capitalistic logics associated with the consumption market and non-capitalistic ideologies advanced by agricultural associations. This would foster the elision of a dualistic system composed by a productive countryside and a consumptive city, and consequently, the distinction between sexual liberation through urban consumption and the persistence of gendered roles proper of the fictional androcentric perception of the countryside.

Notes 1

Among the numerous examples, see: the food blog Gnambox, sponsored by the Italian fashion magazine Grazia, and run by a young gay couple of designers; Gastrogay, a food blog run by an Irish gay couple; and Ben&Jerry’s advertisement of a special ice-cream made in support of gay marriage in 2009 and 2013. Gnambox, accessed 24 June 2015, http://gnambox.com; Gastrogay, accessed 24 June 2015, http://gastrogays.com; Alexandra Churchill, ‘Gay and Lesbian Foodies: The Best Blogs for the Culinary Minded’, The Huffington Post, October 5, 2013, accessed 24 June 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/05/gay-lesbian-foodiesblogs_n_4046409.html; Matthew Moore, ‘Ben & Jerry’s Renames Ice Cream Hubby Hubby in Celebration of Gay Marriage’, The Telegraph, September 2, 2009, accessed 24 June 2015, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/6125277/Ben-andJerrys-renames-ice-cream-Hubby-Hubby-in-celebration-of-gay-marriage.html; Cec Busby, ‘Ben & Jerry’s Say I Dough for Marriage Equality’, Gay News Network, August 22, 2013, accessed 24 June 2015, http://gaynewsnetwork.com.au/news/benjerry-s-say-i-dough-for-marriage-equality-11749.html. 2 Brokeback Mountain, dir. Ang Lee, US, Canada: Focus Features, 2005, DVD. 3 The urban reclamation of an old disused New York elevated commercial railway, and its consequent transformation in a linear urban park, was initiated in 1999 by two gay men living in Manhattan. The project, opened in 2009, runs through historically established gay neighbourhoods such as the Greenwich Village, and has since fostered a general gentrification of the meatpacking district and other former industrial areas. The gay image of the High Line and the areas through which it runs has also been fostered by the endorsement of gay advocates and public figures, which continues with ongoing projects run for and by the LGBTI community. Joshua David and Robert Hammond, High Line: The Inside Story of New York City’s Park in the Sky (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011); Curtis M. Wong, ‘High Line’s Gay History: New York’s Urban Reclamation Project has LGBT Community Ties’, The Huffington Post, February 2, 2012,

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__________________________________________________________________ accessed 22 June 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/07/high-line-gayhistory-new-york_n_1259884.html; ‘Local Sounds: the Lesbian & Gay Big Apple Corps’, Friends of the High Line, accessed 22 June 2015, http://www.thehighline.org/activities/local-sounds-the-lesbian-gay-big-applecorps; David Hershkovits, ‘High Line Co-Founder Robert Hammond on the Park’s Gayness and His Nostalgia for a Gritter NYC’, Paper, November 15, 2011, accessed 22 June 2015, http://www.papermag.com/2011/11/in_the_few_short_years.php. 4 An example is the American Hudson Seed Library, a farm run by Ken Greene and his partner Doug Muller, selling produce as well as organizing programs to foster biodiversity and sustainable agricultural practices. They hold the distinction of being the only openly Gay owned farming company in America that LGBT gardeners can support. Ann Monroe, ‘How to Know What You Sow Will Grow’, Edible Manhattan 23 (May-June 2012): 17-18; Kerry Trueman, ‘Tis the Season for Seeds’, The Huffington Post, December 8, 2010, accessed 22 June 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kerry-trueman/tis-the-season-forseeds_b_794193.html; MrBrownThumb, ‘Shopping for Identity in Seed Catalogs’, Chicago Now, January 28, 2011, accessed 22June 2015, http://www.chicagonow.com/chicago-garden/2011/01/shopping-for-identity-inseed-catalogs/, blog. Another example is the newspaper story of a gay couple running a horse and cattle farm in rural northern New South Wales, Australia, which is narrated with evident reference to Ang Lee’s movie. James May, ‘Gay Cowboys: Kicking Back in the Northern Rivers’, Gay News Network, July 20, 2014, accessed 22 June 2015, http://gaynewsnetwork.com.au/feature/gay-cowboyskicking-back-in-the-northern-rivers-14520.html. 5 In ‘Sex and Caring among Men’ (1992), Adam sees the post-stonewall period – referring to the 1969 riot in New York - as giving the impetus for the creation of a gay commercial ethos, due also to the climate of greater security for small business investment. The urban gay figure of this period was ‘non-apologetic about his sexuality, self-assertive, highly consumerist and not at all revolutionary, though prepared to demonstrate for gay rights’. Barry D. Adam, ‘Sex and Caring among Men: Impacts of AIDS on Gay People’, in Modern Homosexualities: Fragment of Lesbians and Gay Experience, ed. Ken Plummer (London: Routledge, 1992), 176. 6 Jon Binnie, ‘Relational Comparison, Queer Urbanism and Worlding Cities’, Geography Compass 8/8 (2014): 591-595; Gavin Brown, ‘Homonormativity: A Metropolitan Concept that Denigrates “Ordinary” Gay Lives’, Journal of Homosexuality 59:7 (2012): 1067. Focusing on western queer theory, the paper assumes Edsall’s historical geographical periodisation of history of homosexuality, stressing that ‘it is generally agreed that the subsequent development of male homosexuals and, later, lesbian subcultures similar to those of the late twentieth

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__________________________________________________________________ century was centred in only half a dozen countries, the major nations of northwestern Europe […] and the United States, the social and cultural descendent of the others’. Nicholas C. Edsall, ‘Preface’ to Toward Stonewall: Homosexuality and Society in the Modern Western World (Charlottesville VA: University of Virginia Press, 2003), x. 7 Linda McCarthy, ‘Poppies in a Wheat Field’, Journal of Homosexuality 39.1 (2000): 77. 8 As an example the paper refers to a controversy related to an anti-gay statement pronounced by the chairman of the Barilla Company in 2013 and the consequences it sparked. In September 2013 Guido Barilla, during a program on a national Italian radio, stated that the company would never make any advertisement showing gay couples, as it believes in the traditional family, and encouraged gay customers who don’t like the company’s marketing to move to different brands. Soon after, direct and indirect competitors of Barilla such as Buitoni, Garofalo, Pastificio Campi, Ikea, and Eataly took the opportunity of the sparked controversy to redirect consumers towards their products through gay-friendly advertisements openly referring to the opinion of the Barilla chairman. ‘Guido Barilla: “mai spot con una famiglia gay, sono per famiglia tradizionale”‘, La Zanzara Radio 24, accessed 16 June 2015, http://www.radio24.ilsole24ore.com/notizie/guido-barilla-spot-famiglia-122352gSLAIqYzV. Antonio Castaldo, ‘Barilla e i gay, si catena la guerra della pasta’, Corriere della Sera, September 28, 2013, accessed 24 June 2015, http://www.corriere.it/cronache/13_settembre_28/pasta-gay-barilla-concorrentigarofalo-buitoni-misura_e6efa860-2840-11e3-a563-c8f4c40a4aa3.shtml; Laura Heller, ‘The Barilla Boycott, a Lesson in Respect’, Forbes, September 30, 2013, accessed 24 June 2015, http://www.forbes.com/sites/lauraheller/2013/09/30/the-barilla-boycott-a-lessonin-respect/; Giulia Belardelli, ‘Barilla e gli omosessuali: “No ai gay nei nostri spot, siamo per famiglia tradizionale.” La protesta su Twitter’, The Huffington Post, September 26, 2013, accessed 16 June 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.it/2013/09/26/barilla-no-spot-conomosessuali_n_3993977.html. 9 The term is used in this context to describe promotional and marketing strategies acted by corporations and institutions through a gay-friendly image or message. It gained popularity after an editorial description of Israeli state’s violation of Palestinians’ human rights, which was justified in the name of a notion of Israeli modernity exemplified by Israel’s active gay life. It was originally borrowed from a criticism toward the use of activism against breast cancer by corporations while engaging in practices that might increase the disease; and from the parallel phenomenon of green-washing - the engagement in the same type of strategies this

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__________________________________________________________________ time targeted on the environment. Jason Ritchie, ‘Pinkwashing, Homonationalism, and Israel-Palestine: The Conceits of Queer Theory and Politics of the Ordinary’, Antipode 47.3 (2015): 616-634; Amy Lubitow and Mia Davis, ‘Pastel Injustice: The Corporate Use of Pinkwashing for Profit’, Environmental Justice 4.2 (2011): 139-144. 10 Gianmarco Capogna, ‘Anche il Marketing Italiano avanza verso il Rainbow’, LGTB News Italia, accessed 16 June 2015, http://www.lgbtnewsitalia.com/ancheil-marketing-italiano-avanza-verso-il-rainbow. For further discussion on the effect of gay-friendly advertisements on gay and lesbian consumers, see: Gillian Oakenfull, ‘Effects of Gay Identity, Gender, and Explicitness on Gay Responses to Advertising’, Journal of Homosexuality 53.4 (2007): 49-69. Soon after the controversy, Barilla opened special programs aiming to ‘expanding health benefits for transgender workers and their family, contributing money to gay right causes, and featuring a lesbian couple on a promotional Web site’, and achieved then a mention within the Human Right Campaign’s annual Corporate Equality Index. Sandhya Somashekhar, ‘Human Rights Campaign Says Barilla Has Turned around Its Policies on LGBT’, The Washington Post, November 19, 2014, accessed 24 June 2015, http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/human-rights-campaign-saysbarilla-has-turned-around-its-policies-on-lgbt/2014/11/18/9866efde-6e92-11e48808-afaa1e3a33ef_story.html. 11 David Bell, ‘Pleasure and Danger: The Paradoxical Spaces of Sexual Citizenship’, Political Geography 14.2 (1995): 141. 12 Julie Abraham, ‘The Homosexuality of Cities’, in The New Blackwell Companion to the City, eds. Gary Bridge, and Sophie Watson (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2011), 586. 13 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. and ed. Rolf Tiedermann (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). Orig. published as Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, Das Passagen-Werk (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1972); Robert Fulford, ‘Walter Benjamin, the Flâneur, and the Confetti of History’, Queen’s Quarterly 120.1 (2013): 30, 34. For a discussion on passages as archetypes of contemporary shopping centres, see: Valeria Giordano, Immagini e figure delle metropoli (Milan: Mimesis Edizioni, 2013), 71; Sze Tsung Leong, ‘And Then There Was Shopping’, in Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping: Project on the City 2, eds. Chung et al. (Cambridge MA: Taschen, 2001), 132. 14 Carol E. Harrison, The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth Century France: Gender, Sociability, and the Use of Emulation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3, 4, 5, 8. 15 Alexander Cuthbert, Understanding Cities: Method in Urban Design (New York: Routledge, 2011), 150, 151.

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Abraham, ‘The Homosexuality of Cities’; Janet Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse. Women and the Literature of Modernity’, Theory, Culture & Society 2.37 (1985): 586-595; Sally Munt, ‘The Lesbian Flâneur’, in Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities, eds. David Bell and Gill Valentine (New York, Routledge, 1995), 125. 17 Barry Smart, ‘Digesting the Modern Diet: Gastro-Porn, Fast Food, and Panic Eating’, in The Flâneur, ed. Keith Tester (London: Routledge, 1994), 166. 18 Rob Shields, ‘Spaces for the Subject of Consumption’, in Lifestyle Shopping: The Subject of Consumption, ed. Rob Shield (London: Routledge, 1992), 11-12. 19 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Bodies-Cities’, in Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatrix Colomina (New York: Princeton Papers on Architecture, 1992), 244. 20 Foucault repositions the relationship between power and sexuality within the advent of capitalism, arguing its transformation from relationship based on repression to a one based on production, ‘an integral part of the bourgeois order’. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978, originally published in French in 1976), 5. 21 Mario Mieli, Elementi di critica omosessuale (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2002, first published in 1977), 13-16. 22 Chris Wienke and Gretchel J. Hill, ‘Does Place of Residence Matter? RuralUrban Differences and the Wellbeing of Gay Men and Lesbians’, Journal of Homosexuality 60.9 (2013): 1260. 23 Darren Smith and Louise Holt, ‘Lesbian Migrants in the Gentrified Valley and “Other” Geographies of Rural Gentrification’, Journal of Rural Studies 21 (2005): 317, 318. Sine Anahita, ‘Nestled into Niches: Prefigurative Communities on Lesbian Land’, Journal of Homosexuality 56.6 (2009): 719, 720. 24 Kenneth Kirkey, and Ann Forsyth, ‘Men in the Valley: Gay Male Life on the Suburban-Rural Fringe’, Journal of Rural Studies 17 (2001): 428, 429. 25 McCarthy, ‘Poppies in a Wheat Field’, 80, 81. 26 Brown conceives homonormativity as an assemblage of social changes happening in the last two decades and regarding the liberalization of social, political, and economical attitude toward homosexuality producing a normalization of homosexual practices. In this sense, Herring speaks of a metronormativity characterizing the American gay urban population. Gavin Brown, ‘Homonormativity: A Metropolitan Concept that Denigrates “Ordinary” Gay Lives’, Journal of Homosexuality 59.7 (2012): 1070; Herring, Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism, 32. 27 Since its inception with the 1851 London expo, the urban nature of the world exhibition has been represented by the fair-like character of the expo park, historically being constituted by temporary pavilions; and by its historical relationship with the architecture of the city, with the expo site representing

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__________________________________________________________________ fundamentally an opportunity to redevelop run-down parts of the host city, the World Exhibition can be defined as an urban event. Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universalles, the Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851-1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). 28 ‘Milano Expo, McDonald’s risponde all’attacco di Petrini – Slow Food: “La sua? Retorica terzomondista”‘, Corriere della sera, May 15, 2015, accessed 23 June 2015, http://milano.corriere.it/notizie/cronaca/15_maggio_20/milano-expomcdonald-s-risponde-petrini-la-sua-retorica-terzomondista-55a35728-fed9-11e4ab35-8ecb73a305fb.shtml. 29 Oriana Liso, ‘Expo, Petrini (Slow Food) all’attacco: “È un circo Barnum, hanno dimenticato I contenuti”‘, La Repubblica, May 19, 2015, accessed 23 June 2015, http://milano.repubblica.it/expo2015/il-dibattito/2015/05/19/news/petrini114753878/. 30 ‘Eataly come Ikea sui Gay’, Il Post, April 30, 2011, accessed 26 June 2015, http://www.ilpost.it/2011/04/30/eataly-come-ikea-sui-gay/, blog; ‘L’Expo Renziano –se Verdini é il primo alleato del PD, Coca Cola e McDonald’s non possono che essere sponsor ufficiali dell’Expo 2015, sul cibo sano e sostenibile! – Farinetti: “Chi é contrario, é stupido”‘, Dagospia, March 9, 2015, accessed 26 June 2015, http://www.dagospia.com/rubrica-4/business/exporenziano-se-verdini-primo-alleato-pd-coca-cola-96062.htm, blog. For more information on Eataly and its connection with Slow Food, see: ‘Let Them Eat Truffles’, The Economist, November 30, 2013, accessed 26 June 2015, http://www.economist.com/news/business/21590913-italian-food-discerningandloaded-let-them-eat-truffles. 31 McDonald’s already produced a very controversial gay-themed advertisement for the French market in 2010. Alice Gomstyn, ‘Gay Group: Don’t Trust McDonald’s Commercial’, ABC News, June 22, 2010, accessed 26 June 2015, http://abcnews.go.com/Business/mcdonalds-commercial-france-prompts-chargeshypocrisy-us-gay/story?id=10975302. 32 While McDonald’s is accused to stand for minorities only when such stances would not mine economic profits, Slow Food, within all the literature produced by and on the association, never explicitly mentions issues relating to sexual minorities within agricultural contexts. Steve Williams, ‘McDonald’s Is Only Gay Friendly When It Doesn’t Risk Hurting Sales?’, Care2, June 16, 2010, accessed 27 June 2015, http://www.care2.com/causes/mcdonalds-is-gay-friendly-only-when-itdoesnt-harm-sales.html. Coldiretti instead, as the main Italian union of the agricultural sector, advocates for workers’ rights and sustainable agricultural practices, and actively engaging in the protection of the Italian gastronomic diversity and tradition. Coldiretti is present at Expo 2015 with its own pavilion. Coldiretti a Expo, accessed 26 June 2015, http://expo.coldiretti.it.

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__________________________________________________________________ For more historical information on Coldiretti, see: Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy. Society and Politics 1943-1988 (London: Penguin, 1990), 171-73. 33 Andrea Montanari, ‘Gay Pride a Milano, gli USA anticipano la festa a Expo. E la regione litiga sul patrocinio’, La Repubblica, May 17, 2015, accessed 23 June 2015, http://milano.repubblica.it/cronaca/2015/05/17/news/gay-114527073/; USA Pavilion 2015, ‘Milano Pride Kick Off Party at Expo Milano 2015’, accessed 23 June 2015, http://www.usapavilion2015.net/schedule/milan-pride-kick-offparty-at-expo-milano-2015. 34 ‘Documento politico per il Noexpo pride del 20 giugno 2015’, Noexpo Pride, accessed 23 June 2015, http://noexpopride.noblogs.org/?p=142; ‘Milano Pride, a Expo è la giornata dei diritti: cori, bandiere arcobaleno e cupcakes’, La Repubblica, June 20, 2015, accessed 23 June 2015, http://milano.repubblica.it/expo2015/2015/06/20/news/expo_e_la_giornata_dei_dir itti_gay-117289844/. 35 Slow Food was founded in 1986 by Carlo Petrini, within the Milanese gastronomic cultural club of Arcigola. For publication edited and published by Slow Food itself, see: Carlo Petrini in conversation with Gigi Padovani, Slow Food Revolution: da Arcigola a Terra Madre: Una nuova cultura del cibo e della vita (Milan: Rizzoli, 2005); Carlo Petrini, William McCuaig, and Alice Waters, Slow Food: The Case for Taste (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Carlo Petrini, Cibo e Libertà. Slow Food: Storie di gastronomia per la liberazione (Milan: Giunti, 2013). 36 Alessandro Trocino, Popstar della cultura (Roma: Fazieditore, 2011); Justin Myers, ‘The Logic of the Gift: The Possibilities and Limitations of Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food Alternative’, Agricultural and Human Values 30.3 (2013): 405. 37 Grosz, ‘Bodies-Cities’, 245. 38 Ibid., 246. 39 The duality between a reproductive female nature and a dominant human male is distinctively restated in the entry pavilion of the Expo, and is also promoted by a campaign organised by Expo itself over the role of women within agricultural and food practices. ‘Padiglione zero’, Expo 2015, accessed 10 September 2015, http://www.expo2015.org/it/esplora/aree-tematiche/padiglione-zero; ‘WE-Women for Expo’, Expo 2015, accessed 10 September 2015, http://www.expo2015.org/it/progetti/we-women-for-expo. 40 ‘“Tutti uguali, tutti diversi”: Genitori omosessuali e Legambiente insieme per scoprire il valore della diversità’, Savona News, May 10, 2012, accessed 27 June 2015, http://www.savonanews.it/2012/05/10/leggi-notizia/argomenti/interc…oriomosessuali-e-legambiente-insieme-per-scoprire-il-valore.html.

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__________________________________________________________________ Capogna, Gianmarco. ‘Anche il Marketing Italiano avanza verso il Rainbow’. LGTB News Italia. Accessed 16 June 2015. http://www.lgbtnewsitalia.com/ancheil-marketing-italiano-avanza-verso-il-rainbow. Castaldo, Antonio. ‘Barilla e i gay, si catena la guerra della pasta’. Corriere della Sera. September 28, 2013. Accessed 24 June 2015. http://www.corriere.it/cronache/13_settembre_28/pasta-gay-barilla-concorrentigarofalo-buitoni-misura_e6efa860-2840-11e3-a563-c8f4c40a4aa3.shtml. Churchill, Alexandra. ‘Gay and Lesbian Foodies: The Best Blogs for the Culinary Minded’. The Huffington Post. October 5, 2013. Accessed 24 June 2015. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/05/gay-lesbian-foodiesblogs_n_4046409.html. Cuthbert, Alexander. Understanding Cities: Method in Urban Design. New York: Routledge, 2011. Dagospia. ‘L’Expo Renziano –se Verdini é il primo alleato del PD, Coca Cola e McDonald’s non possono che essere sponsor ufficiali dell’Expo 2015, sul cibo sano e sostenibile! – Farinetti: “Chi é contrario, é stupido”‘. March 9, 2015. Accessed 26 June 2015. http://www.dagospia.com/rubrica-4/business/exporenziano-se-verdini-primo-alleato-pd-coca-cola-96062.htm. Blog. David, Joshua, and Robert Hammond. High Line: The Inside Story of New York City’s Park in the Sky. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011. ‘Eataly come Ikea sui Gay’. Il Post. April 30, 2011. Accessed 26 June 2015. http://www.ilpost.it/2011/04/30/eataly-come-ikea-sui-gay/. Blog. Edsall, Nicholas C. ‘Preface’ to Toward Stonewall: Homosexuality and Society in the Modern Western World, ix-xii. Charlottesville VA: University of Virginia Press, 2003. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. Translated from the French by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Originally published in French in 1976. Fulford, Robert. “Walter Benjamin, the Flaneur, and the Confetti of History.” Queen’s Quarterly 120.1 (2013): 29-35.

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__________________________________________________________________ Gibson-Graham, J.K. A Post-Capitalist Politics. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Ginsborg, Paul. A History of Contemporary Italy. Society and Politics 1943-1988. London: Penguin, 1990. Giordano, Valeria. Immagini e figure delle metropolis. Milan: Mimesis Edizioni, 2013. Gomstyn, Alice. ‘Gay Group: Don’t Trust McDonald’s Commercial’. ABC News. June 22, 2010. Accessed 26 June 2015. http://abcnews.go.com/Business/mcdonalds-commercial-france-prompts-chargeshypocrisy-us-gay/story?id=10975302. Greenhalgh, Paul. Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universalles, the Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851-1939. Manchester: Manchester University press, 1988. Grosz, Elizabeth. ‘Bodies-Cities’. In Sexuality and Space, edited by Beatrix Colomina, 241-254. New York: Princeton Papers on Architecture, 1992. Harrison, Carol E. The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth Century France: Gender, Sociability, and the Use of Emulation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Heller, Laura. ‘The Barilla Boycott, a Lesson in Respect’. Forbes. September 30, 2013. Accessed 24 June 2015. http://www.forbes.com/sites/lauraheller/2013/09/30/the-barilla-boycott-a-lessonin-respect/. Herring, Scott. Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Hershkovits, David. ‘High Line Co-Founder Robert Hammond on the Park’s Gayness and His Nostalgia for a Gritter NYC’. Paper. November 15, 2011. Accessed 22 June 2015. http://www.papermag.com/2011/11/in_the_few_short_years.php. Kirkey, Kenneth, and Ann Forsyth. ‘Men in the Valley: Gay Male Life on the Suburban-Rural Fringe’. Journal of Rural Studies 17 (2001): 421-441.

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__________________________________________________________________ Leong, Sze Tsung. ‘And Then There Was Shopping’. In Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping: Project on the City 2, edited by Chuihua Judy Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas, and Sze Tsung Leong, 128-155. Cambridge MA: Taschen, 2001. ‘Let Them Eat Truffles’. The Economist. November 30, 2013. Accessed 26 June 2015. http://www.economist.com/news/business/21590913-italian-food-discerningandloaded-let-them-eat-truffles. Liso, Oriana. ‘Expo, Petrini (Slow Food) all’attacco: “È un circo Barnum, hanno dimenticato I contenuti”‘. La Repubblica. May 19, 2015. Accessed 23 June 2015. http://milano.repubblica.it/expo2015/il-dibattito/2015/05/19/news/petrini114753878/. Lubitow, Amy, and Mia Davis, ‘Pastel Injustice: The Corporate Use of Pinkwashing for Profit’. Environmental Justice 4.2 (2011): 139-144. May, James. ‘Gay Cowboys: Kicking Back in the Northern Rivers’. Gay News Network. July 20, 2014. Accessed 22 June 2015. http://gaynewsnetwork.com.au/feature/gay-cowboys-kicking-back-in-the-northernrivers-14520.html. McCarthy, Linda. ‘Poppies in a Wheat Field’. Journal of Homosexuality 39.1 (2000): 75-94. Mieli, Mario. Elementi di critica omosessuale. Milan: Feltrinelli, 2002. First published in 1977. ‘Milano Expo, McDonald’s risponde all’attacco di Petrini – Slow Food: “La sua? Retorica terzomondista”‘. Corriere della sera. May 15, 2015. Accessed 23 June 2015. http://milano.corriere.it/notizie/cronaca/15_maggio_20/milano-ex…toricaterzomondista-55a35728-fed9-11e4-ab35-8ecb73a305fb.shtml. ‘Milano Pride, a Expo è la giornata dei diritti: cori, bandiere arcobaleno e cupcakes’. La Repubblica. June 20, 2015. Accessed 23 June 2015. http://milano.repubblica.it/expo2015/2015/06/20/news/expo_e_la_giornata_dei_dir itti_gay-117289844/.

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__________________________________________________________________ Monroe, Ann. ‘How to Know What You Sow Will Grow’. Edible Manhattan 23 (May-June 2012): 17-18. Montanari, Andrea. ‘Gay Pride a Milano, gli USA anticipano la festa a Expo. E la regione litiga sul patrocinio’. La Repubblica. May 17, 2015. Accessed 23 June 2015. http://milano.repubblica.it/cronaca/2015/05/17/news/gay-114527073/. Moore, Matthew. ‘Ben & Jerry’s Renames Ice Cream Hubby Hubby in Celebration of Gay Marriage’. The Telegraph. September 2, 2009. Accessed 24 June 2015. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/6125277/Ben-andJerrys-renames-ice-cream-Hubby-Hubby-in-celebration-of-gay-marriage.html. MrBrownThumb. ‘Shopping for Identity in Seed Catalogs’. Chicago Now, January 28, 2011. Accessed 22 June 2015. http://www.chicagonow.com/chicago-garden/2011/01/shopping-for-identity-inseed-catalogs/. Blog. Munt, Sally. ‘The Lesbian Flâneur’. In Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities, edited by David Bell and Gill Valentine, 247-262. New York, Routledge, 1995. Myers, Justin. ‘The Logic of the Gift: The Possibilities and Limitations of Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food Alternative’. Agricultural and Human Values 30.3 (2013): 405-415. Oakenfull, Gillian. ‘Effects of Gay Identity, Gender, and Explicitness on Gay Responses to Advertising’. Journal of Homosexuality 53.4 (2007): 49-69. ‘Padiglione zero’, Expo 2015. Accessed 10 September 2015. http://www.expo2015.org/it/esplora/aree-tematiche/padiglione-zero. Petrini, Carlo in conversation with Gigi Padovani. Slow Food Revolution: da Arcigola a Terra Madre: Una nuova cultura del cibo e della vita. Milan: Rizzoli, 2005. Petrini, Carlo, William McCuaig, and Alice Waters. Slow Food: The Case for Taste. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Petrini, Carlo. Cibo e Libertà. Slow Food: Storie di gastronomia per la liberazione. Milan: Giunti, 2013.

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__________________________________________________________________ Ritchie, Jason. ‘Pinkwashing, Homonationalism, and Israel-Palestine: The Conceits of Queer Theory and Politics of the Ordinary’. Antipode 47.3 (2015): 616-634. ‘Ruralitá femminile nel Sannio, convegno alla Coldiretti’. Il Vaglio. May 26, 2015. Accessed 26 June 2015. http://www.ilvaglio.it/appuntamenti/3487/ruralita-femminile-nel-sannio-convegnoalla-coldiretti.html. Shields, Rob. ‘Spaces for the Subject of Consumption’. In Lifestyle Shopping: The Subject of Consumption, edited by Rob Shield, 1-20. London: Routledge, 1992. Smart, Barry. ‘Digesting the Modern Diet: Gastro-Porn, Fast Food, and Panic Eating’. In The Flâneur, edited by Keith Tester, 158-180. London: Routledge, 1994. Smith, Darren, and Louise Holt. ‘Lesbian Migrants in the Gentrified Valley and “Other” Geographies of Rural Gentrification’. Journal of Rural Studies 21 (2005): 313-322. Somashekhar, Sandhya. ‘Human Rights Campaign Says Barilla Has Turned Around Its Policies on LGBT’. The Washington Post. November 19, 2014. Accessed 24 June 2015. http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/human-rightscampaign-says-barilla-has-turned-around-its-policies-onlgbt/2014/11/18/9866efde-6e92-11e4-8808-afaa1e3a33ef_story.html. Trocino, Alessandro. Popstar della cultura. Roma: Fazieditore, 2011. Trueman, Kerry. ‘Tis the Season for Seeds’. The Huffington Post. December 8, 2010. Accessed 22 June 2015. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kerry-trueman/tisthe-season-for-seeds_b_794193.html. ‘“Tutti uguali, tutti diversi”: Genitori omosessuali e Legambiente insieme per scoprire il valore della diversità’. Savona News. May 10, 2012. Accessed 27 June 2015. http://www.savonanews.it/2012/05/10/leggi-notizia/argomenti/interc…oriomosessuali-e-legambiente-insieme-per-scoprire-il-valore.html. ‘WE-Women for Expo’, Expo 2015, accessed 10 September 2015. http://www.expo2015.org/it/progetti/we-women-for-expo.

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__________________________________________________________________ Wienke, Chris, and Gretchel J. Hill. ‘Does Place of Residence Matter? RuralUrban Differences and the Wellbeing of Gay Men and Lesbians’. Journal of Homosexuality 60.9 (2013): 1256-79. Williams, Steve. ‘McDonald’s Is Only Gay Friendly When It Doesn’t Risk Hurting Sales?’. Care2. June 16, 2010. Accessed 27 June 2015. http://www.care2.com/causes/mcdonalds-is-gay-friendly-only-when-it-doesntharm-sales.html. Wolff, Janet. ‘The Invisible Flâneuse. Women and the Literature of Modernity’. Theory, Culture & Society 2.37 (1985): 37-46. Wong, Curtis M. ‘High Line’s Gay History: New York’s Urban Reclamation Project has LGBT Community Ties’. The Huffington Post. February 2, 2012. Accessed 22 June 2015. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/07/high-line-gayhistory-new-york_n_1259884.html. Andrea Bosio completed in 2015 a PhD at Griffith University, Australia. Although his background is in architecture, with both Bachelor and Master conducted at Milano Politecnico, Italy, he conducts researches on media and food, the Slow Food movement, and aspects inherent to food and sexuality.

Our Land of Milk and Honey: Spirituality in the Transformation of Ecological and Heritage Production Hart N. Feuer Abstract Many facets of globalisation are contested on ethical or humanitarian grounds but the defence of local food and agriculture often borders on the spiritual. In particular, the decline or homogenisation of local food and agriculture is often acutely felt because it embodies a spiritual violation of cultural identity and sacredness of the land. The essence of this crisis has been newly characterised in Pope Francis’ latest encyclical Laudato si’, which captures the spiritual relevance of agriculture by characterising the human response to contemporary ecological decline and culinary shifts. In trying to understand how we arrived at our present state, sociologists of faith, such as the late Jacques Ellul have long described how technology comes to dominate over nature in processes such as agricultural development. In his argument, by incrementally drawing humans away from nature and into technological spheres (by engineering tractors, producing agri-chemicals, and genetically modifying plants), alienation from nature is amplified and the scope of ecological crisis broadens. This phenomenon is not new; indeed, most religious texts and creation myths caution against this alienation through parables and commandments. In light of the new public attention being drawn to the spiritual dimension of the ecological crisis, this chapter explores content from Judeo-Christian texts and Cambodian myths that specifically speaks to this phenomenon. The valorisation of the land found, for example, in the book of Exodus referencing Israel as the ‘land flowing with milk and honey’, is typical of religious and pseudo-religious narrative that are integrated with political narratives such as nationalism and cultural patrimony. In this chapter, I address how national metanarratives built on these spiritual-historic characterisations play a role in shaping agriculture and food policy and evaluate the spiritual dimension of a few Cambodian initiatives that attempt to moderate the alienation brought about by industrialisation and globalisation. Key Words: Heritage, national cuisine, spirituality, Pope Francis, globalisation, agriculture, laudato si’. ***** 1. Introduction As a multifaceted phenomenon, globalisation is often contested along numerous practical, ethical and humanitarian grounds; on the issue of food and agriculture, however, the arguments often border on the spiritual. While the various direct responses have ranged from the erection of trade barriers and the

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__________________________________________________________________ establishment of protective subsidies to more violent outbursts of nationalism, the pacification derived from these measures (not to mention their effectiveness) typically erodes over the long-term, leading to real and perceived loss of agricultural and culinary heritage. The loss or homogenisation of food culture and agro-biodiversity is felt acutely because it often comes to represent an existential threat to the uniqueness of cultural identity and to the sacredness of the land. Although innovative mechanisms for safeguarding heritage are constantly being developed (from land zoning, targeted subsidies, and geographic designations to child food education, global slow food and farmer movements), their impact is non-comprehensive, and has often been marginal. The creeping sense of global disillusionment about these losses can now perhaps more usefully be described as a spiritual crisis, one that is fuelled by the middling performance of technological or superficial policy solutions. While some commentators, most notably the late sociologist and theologian Jacques Ellul, diagnosed and predicted the combined technological and spiritual basis of this crisis since the 1960s, the release in June, 2015 of a sweeping encyclical from Pope Francis entitled Laudato si' has recaptured public attention on this issue. This chapter revisits the evolution of the debate about technology, nature and spirituality, outlining its culmination in 2015 with the cross-religious fervour around the release of Laudato si'. As a case study, I then map these historical insights onto the everyday understandings of the culturalspiritual crisis in food and agriculture in Cambodia, a developing country at the onset of agricultural industrialisation. In this, I illuminate how the nascent, everyday processes of asserting food sovereignty and reproducing local food aesthetic are embedded in the broader shift to recognise the spiritual connectedness of humans to their food. In the spirit of many texts in rural sociology, I underline the contradictions that emerge from societal initiatives to reconcile the informal natural ethos around agricultural production with the march of commoditisation and globalisation.1 In particular, I reflect on how spiritual-historic metanarratives, such as those embedded in JudeoChristian agricultural and environmental leitmotifs, align with contemporary national narratives governed by intergenerational naturalistic memory, consolidation of the cultural unit of the nation-state, and nostalgia. Drawing on a few key insights from field research in 2009, 2010 and 2014 in Cambodia, I question how contemporary developing countries might develop their reflexive explorations into the spiritual and naturalistic dimensions of their material heritage into effective counter-measures against the alienation of modernity. 2. ‘Technique’ and the Legacy of Jacques Ellul Over the course of a tremendous life, theologian and sociologist Jacques Ellul (Université Bordeaux IV) fought passionately for explicitly including spiritual and religious dimensions, indeed Christian values, into the ongoing debates about ecological destruction and the alienation of humans from their natural world. With

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__________________________________________________________________ his prescience about the direction of the contemporary debate, and his Christian background, Ellul would have been an ideal adviser to Pope Francis in the development of Laudato si'. Indirectly, Ellul’s theories have likely filtered their way into Laudato si’ as a natural consequence of building upon the foundational theories of Pope Francis’ predecessor, Pope Paul VI. At the 25th anniversary celebration of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, Pope Paul VI remarked: the most extraordinary scientific advances, the most amazing technical abilities, the most astonishing economic growth, unless they are accompanied by authentic social and moral progress, will definitively turn against man.2 This argument, repeated by Pope Francis in Laudato si', that humanity's relationship to nature can readily be usurped by technology (or ‘technique’3 as Ellul calls it) and hollowed of its spiritual core, was laid out in Ellul's 1954 treatise, The Technological Society (La technique ou l'enjeu du siècle). Over a number of later works, Ellul develops his contention that civilisations, and the attendant technology necessary to enable urban density, draws humans away from nature and portends ecological exploitation.4 As synthesised by Dunham in his doctoral dissertation covering Ellul's 1975 book, The Meaning of the City (Sans feu ni lieu: Signification biblique de la Grande Ville), the over-zealous ‘application’ of technique in the development and functioning of the ancient city of Babylon ultimately led to its destruction.5 This is chronicled from a religious standpoint in the books of Jeremiah and Revelation but has more recently gained considerable archaeological and anthropological confirmation through the excavations of Harvey Weiss’ team at Yale University. While many faults are associated with the fall of Babylon, this parable is particularly revealing of the dangers of agricultural industrialisation. Together, religious, historical and archaeological accounts suggest that Mesopotamian civilizations aggressively pursued extensive irrigation schemes and credit-leveraged expansion of agricultural zones. This led to an ecologically unsustainable spike in food production that, while it lasted, fuelled a period of societal excesses, including military aggression,6 which later proved difficult to wind back as climate change and increasing soil salinity eroded the productive bases for cities such as Babylon.7 Speaking to this dilemma, Ellul casts a generally pessimistic picture of the interplay of civilisation and technique, contending that the way they mutually reinforce each other to create a hegemonic ‘technological morality’8 makes the process difficult to interrupt.9 In similar fashion, many contemporary technocratic measures for protecting agricultural heritage (such as geographic indication or ecological food certifications) are themselves constitutive of technique, and therefore predestined to fail or backfire in achieving socially-resilient environmental goals. To better understand the basis

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__________________________________________________________________ upon which Ellul, and later Pope Paul and Pope Francis, argue for spiritual reconsideration of nature, it is important to understand the various hindernisse for ecological and cultural protection that have long been identified in pseudohistorical narratives of various religious texts and creation myths. As an indicative case, I turn to some of the most well-known narratives found in the Hebrew Bible. 3. The Biblical Underpinning of Nature and Agriculture Worldwide, it is common for national pseudo-religious or religious narratives to link the creation (or existence) of a homeland (or the world) with natural fertility and abundance of food. Cambodia and Israel are no exceptions.10 The book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible is particularly useful as a reference point as it is broadly representative of many disparate cultural mythologies found worldwide and has particular utility in connecting the theological work of Jacques Ellul with contemporary understanding of food, nature and agriculture.11 To begin with, it is important to acknowledge that the Hebrew Bible differentiates between natural food harvesting and farming—a distinction often overlooked. Most often based on a degree of mistranslation is the scope of God’s initial commandment to Adam in the Garden of Eden that he should ‘tend the land and keep it’.12 As Pope Francis comments in Laudato si'¸ the two verbs have complementary definitions: one refers to cultivating or ploughing the land while the other connotes care, protection, and preservation. This implies, as Pope Francis writes, ‘a relationship of mutual responsibility between human beings and nature’.13 In the Garden of Eden, this relationship was ostensibly not difficult to maintain, as Adam and Eve were vegetarian gatherers living primarily from the harvest of wild foods (this period of ‘pre-domestication’ is described in Genesis 2:5-6). After the fall from paradise, however, the setting for a more antagonistic relationship between nature and humans was laid by God. This section of the Hebrew Bible is worth quoting at length: Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. The land will bring forth thorns and thistles, and you will have to work to extract the plants of the field.14 Taken out of context, this pronouncement seems to be prophetic regarding the development of not only farming, but of industrial agriculture: the ‘cursed’ ground must be countered with fertilisers; the thorns and thistles (i.e. the weeds) must be combated with pesticides; and the painful toil of work must be relieved through mechanisation. However, looking at the broader context of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, Pope Francis comments that these seemingly harsh conditions after the fall were meant to sediment humanity’s relationship with nature on a more equal basis—one in which the challenge of cultivation becomes an embedded part

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__________________________________________________________________ of human culture, i.e. agri-culture.15 He suggests that, in demythologising nature with this combative stance, nature is rendered vulnerable and thus in need of our responsibility. As Pope Francis writes, ‘A fragile world, entrusted by God to human care, challenges us to devise intelligent ways of directing, developing and limiting our power’16 (stress added). The city of Angkor, the foremost representation of the Khmer civilisation in Cambodia, is symbolic of this narrative. Although ultimately succumbing to a fate similar to that of the ancient city of Babylon, for many modern Cambodians the spirituality, disciplined social organisation and honour that are associated with the agronomic feats of their predecessor Khmer civilisation provide a beacon of hope for future development.17 The apparent contradiction of glorifying a failed civilization in the past is reconciled, however unjustifiably, by the populist view of many Cambodians that the flaws of the past can be remedied with current technology. In the meantime, the ancient Khmers are glorified for their advanced cultivation, physically embodied in the extensive archaeological remains of irrigation canals and waterways interwoven with the city of Angkor, and the bounty of their orchards, embodied in the two towering Palmyra sugar palms that nobly flank the temple of Angkor Wat.18 In the Judeo-Christian tradition, this type of valorisation of the homeland is notably present in the Exodus 33:3 reference to Israel as the ‘land flowing with milk and honey’. Speaking to this populist ideal of agricultural development, Pope Francis cautions that human transformations of the landscape have often failed to respect its inherent ecological functional and aesthetic balance. He writes: ‘Nature is usually seen as a system which can be studied, understood and controlled, whereas creation can only be understood as a gift from the outstretched hand of the Father of all’.19 Echoing warnings made by Ellul in the 1970s and Pope Francis today, the parables about the fall of Babylon and Angkor both speak to the risks of over-reliance on technology in managing human-made environments and the underappreciation of ecological systems. 4. Managing Technique: Symbols of Agriculture and Nature In an article for the Journal of Social and Biological Systems, Ellul argues that technique increasingly contributes to the human relationship with nature being mediated through symbolic attestation, rather than direct interface.20 For example, rains can symbolise nature’s system of fertility and nurturing of plants but the same phenomenon can also be symbolically transmuted into the more instrumentalised concept of ‘filling up the reservoirs’ for irrigation. Ellul posits that the logic and imperatives of technique insert a wedge between humans and their natural environment. In the same article, Ellul points to the obvious, if rather unwieldy, solution: ‘If [man] is only in a direct physical relationship to his natural environment he is completely disarmed’.21 Perhaps ironically, agriculture is a battle with nature but it is also an avenue to nature, and the products of agriculture,

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__________________________________________________________________ encoded through education and consistent exposure, reinforce the spiritually cogent mutual independence that engenders ecological empathy.22 An evolving example of this relationship can be observed in the case of Palmyra palm products. On the one hand, the tree’s productive uses23 and complementarity to rural life24 can be stressed: among other farm uses, the versatile palm sap is transformed into sugar (syrup, paste, cakes and granules), vinegar, wine, beer, liquor, and animal feed. It has different forms for rural consumption (informally ecological), urban marketing (as a natural heritage product), and for export (particularly as a certified organic product). On the other hand, the Palmyra sugar palm is laden with social and spiritual appreciation: it is recognised as a national heritage symbol, associated with civilisation of Angkor, has been written about in poetry,25 protected by royal decree,26 and exemplified as an ecologicallybalancing27 and aesthetic tree.28 In this way, a contemporary nation can complement the technocratic basis of conservation by attaching cultural patrimony and spiritual relevance. But how can these symbols be revered and enjoyed if humankind's relationship with agriculture, and thereby nature, has often been so fraught by hard labour and poverty? In seeking to emancipate itself from the eternal ‘toil’29 over the land, is it surprising that humankind has progressively applied technology, thereby amplifying alienation with nature? Indeed, this process is built into common discourses of agricultural modernisation. The decline in the number of farmers in industrialised countries through specialisation has shifted agricultural experience to migrant labourers, miners of minerals for fertiliser, laboratory technicians producing chemical components for pesticides and herbicides, engineers of farm equipment, prospectors and refiners of fuel for farming machinery, builders and administrators of extensive irrigation networks, geneticists and plant breeders, and of course taxpayers who subsidise farming. By all appearances, technique has usurped humankind's agriculturally-mediated relationship with nature. This view, however, ignores the ebbs and flows of alienation, the reflexive learning in different regions, and the safeguards built into agriculture. This last issue has been debated fervently among rural sociologists who have questioned why, even in the most advanced cases of industrialisation, technique faces natural barriers when it comes to agriculture. Foremost here is the MannDickinson thesis, which suggests that the fundamental rootedness of agriculture in ecological systems hampers its full and inevitable commoditisation and absorption into capitalist relations.30 Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, using the case of highly industrialised Dutch farmers, demonstrates that considerable diversity or heterogeneity of farming styles persists despite the predominantly capitalist agricultural context.31 Furthermore, the expansion of technique in agriculture has always faced backlashes and counter-movements, such as Luddism in 19th Century England, or the alternative food movements gaining ground in the latter part of the 20th Century.

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__________________________________________________________________ And in countries such as Cambodia, which have developed their agricultural development programs later and have had a chance to learn from trends in other countries, active measures are underway to pre-empt some undesirable aspects of industrialisation found in many developed countries.32 While contemporary promotion and conservation programs, such as that for Palmyra products, are themselves constitutive of technique, approaches that amplify the direct physical relationship with nature can also simultaneously mitigate technique. Alternative approaches to measuring, or valuing, agricultural productivity that are systemic and include social and naturalistic components also suggest way of maintaining reflexivity when applying technique. This potential can be demonstrated from the case of a multi-purpose farmer in Cambodia, who related his experience in the following way: Before I let my farm become multi-purpose according to the NGO’s ideas, I felt that I should be the master of my field. I cleaned the weeds and brought water from far away and used selected seeds. One year I fell ill with malaria before transplanting and I watched from my bed as my children tried to farm on their own. When I could go out again, I saw our fields and I thought we were ruined. There was a pond and my seedlings were drowning. My dikes were broken except where the sugar palm tree roots held it in place. Instead of fixing everything, I dug a pond where the water collected and I planted trees on the dikes after I fixed them. I started raising fish and frogs and using seeds that grew big on my field. […] Other people made fun of me because my farm looked messy and complicated but the next year I had the best palm sugar, rice, beans, frogs and fish. Now I watch the nature to see her opinion about how to change my farm.33 Implied here is the process whereby ecological production systems become less constitutive of technique by engendering humility towards nature and natural processes and by valorising the reproduction of the natural order as a sign of respect for nature.34 These 'anti-technique techniques', often embedded in agroecology and permaculture, not only use ecological systems as a model, they also imply a sustained relationship with nature. In other work, I have shown how the technology of modern-day ecological agriculture in Cambodia struggles to escape from the alienation of technique35 but that, in contrast to industrial methods, ecological cultivation approaches are more easily adapted to alternative valuation and direct contact with nature.36 It is in this contested space that experiments in resolving the spiritual crisis of contemporary agricultural sustainability find fertile soil.

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__________________________________________________________________ 5. Conclusion The euphoria for industrial products beginning in the 1950s, which has inspired much of Jacques Ellul’s warnings about the escalation of the technological society, has subsided and a new mental construct of heritage and diversity protection is emerging, particularly in cases dealing with agriculture and food.37 However, without attention to the spiritual dimension of this crisis, societies may simply end up repackaging technique and reproducing the agricultural conditions that the parables of Eden, Babylon and Angkor were meant to guard against. In Laudato si’, Pope Francis acknowledges this challenge: The idea of promoting a different cultural paradigm and employing technology as a mere instrument is nowadays inconceivable. The technological paradigm has become so dominant that it would be difficult to do without its resources and even more difficult to utilize them without being dominated by their internal logic.38 And yet, despite this negative outlook, both Ellul and Pope Francis consider activities and engagement on behalf of human-nature harmony to be noble and worthwhile. The fanfare surrounding Laudato si' and the swing of the pendulum toward ecological agriculture and agro-biodiversity might be construed as a turning point, but Pope Francis is under few illusions about the scale of the intervention required: There needs to be a distinctive way of looking at things, a way of thinking, policies, an educational programme, a lifestyle and a spirituality which together generate resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm.39 These elements, which are being experimented with in Cambodia and around the world, need to be judged on a basis of how close they draw humans to nature.

Notes 1

This follows the work of David Goodman, ‘Agro-Food Studies in the “Age of Ecology”: Nature, Corporeality, Biopolitics’, Sociologia Ruralis 39.1 (1999): 17– 38. 2 Pope Paul VI, ‘Address to the FAO’ (Speech at the 25th Anniversary of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, Rome, 16 November 1970). 3 Technique means ‘the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human

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__________________________________________________________________ activity’. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Knopf, 1954), xxv. 4 See notably: Jacques Ellul, The Meaning of the City, trans. Dennis Pardee (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970); Jacques Ellul, The Politics of God and the Politics of Man, trans. Geoffrey W Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1972); Jacques Ellul, ‘Power of Technique and the Ethics of Non-Power’, The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture, ed. Kathleen Woodward, trans. Mary Lydon (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, 1980), 242–47. 5 Paul L. Dunham III, ‘The Meaning of Technology: A Theology of Technique in Jacques Ellul’ (Ed.D. diss., West Virginia University, 2002). 6 Wes Jackson, Consulting the Genius of the Place: An Ecological Approach to a New Agriculture (Berkeley, California: Counterpoint Press, 2010), 75–77. 7 Harvey Weiss and Marie Agnès Courtney, ‘The Scenario of Environmental Degradation in the Tell Leilan Region, NE Syria, during the Late Third Millennium Abrupt Climate Change’, Third Millenium BC Climate Change and Old World Collapse, ed. H. Nüzhet Dalfes, George Kukla, and Harvey Weiss (Berlin: Springer, 1994), 107–48; Harvey Wilkinson, ‘Environmental Fluctuations, Agricultural Production and Collapse: A View from the Bronze Age Upper Mesopotamia’, Third Millennium BC Climate Change and Old World Collapse, ed. H. Nüzhet Dalfes, George Kukla, and Harvey Weiss (Berlin: Springer, 1994), 67– 106. 8 Ellul, ‘Power of Technique and the Ethics of Non-Power’, 243. 9 Jacques Ellul, ‘The Technological Order’, Technology and Culture 3.4 (1962): 401–405. 10 George Cœdès, Walter F Vella, and Susan Brown Cowing, The Indianised States of Southeast Asia (Honolulu: East West Center Press, 1968), 66; Nusara Thaitawat, The Cuisine of Cambodia (Bangkok: Nusara and Friends, 2000), 17. 11 The Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale University has chronicled the increasing attention paid to ecological world narratives in religions across the world. Furthermore, Pope Francis convened a global meeting of religious leaders on 28 April, 2015 which received unprecedented attention in non-Christian circles See: Mary Evelyn Tucker, ‘Response from Other Religions’ (Paper presented at the conference of Pope Francis and the Environment: Yale Examines Historic Climate Encyclical, New Haven, CT, April 8, 2015). 12 Genesis 2:15 (Author’s translation) 13 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’ (The Vatican: The Holy Sea, 2015), 49. 14 Genesis 3:17-18 (Author) 15 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, 57. 16 Ibid. 17 Hart Nadav Feuer, ‘Pre-Industrial Ecological Modernization in Agro-Food and Medicine: Directing the Commodification of Heritage Culture in Cambodia’ (PhD

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__________________________________________________________________ Diss., University of Bonn, 2013), 73–85; Judy Ledgerwood, ‘History/Myth and the Nation: Research at Angkor Borei, Cambodia’ (Friday Forum Lecture Series, University of Wisconsin-Madison, February 21, 1997); Sen Hun (Prime Minister of Cambodia), ‘Remarks at the Opening of Trapang Thmar Water Storage, Phnom Srok District, Banteay Meanchey Province’, CNV, 2006, viewed on 12 June 2014. http://www.cnv.org.kh/2006_releases/09mar06_banteay_meanchey_water_tropean g_thmar.htm. 18 Bernard Philippe Groslier, ‘La Cité Hydraulique Angkorienne: Exploitation Ou Surexploitation Du Sol?’, Bulletin de l’Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient Paris 66.6 (1979): 161–202. 19 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, 56. 20 Jacques Ellul, ‘Symbolic Function, Technology and Society’, Journal of Social and Biological Systems 1.3 (1978): 208–210. 21 Ibid. 208. 22 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, 155–157. 23 J P Romera, ‘Le Borassus et Le Sucre de Palme Au Cambodge’, L’Agronomie Tropicale 8 (1968): 801–43. 24 Khieu Borin, ‘The Sugar Palm Tree as the Basis of Integrated Farming Systems in Cambodia’, Livestock Feed Resources within Integrated Farming Systems (1996): 83–95. 25 Sothun Sok, ‘Value of the Palm’, trans. Piseth Som, The Pracheachun Magazine 33 (February 2004): 25-26. 26 Royal Government of Cambodia Prakas 481, 5 September 2003 27 Koma Yang Saing, ‘Palm Trees in Cambodia’, Magazine of Environment, Agriculture and Sustainable Development (April-July 2000): 7. 28 Chan Sarun, ‘Animal and Plant Species that Are Symbolic of Cambodia’, trans. Piseth Som, The Pracheachun Magazine 49 (June 2005). 29 Genesis 3:17-18 (Author). 30 Susan A. Mann and James M Dickinson, ‘Obstacles to the Development of a Capitalist Agriculture’, Journal of Peasant Studies 5 (1978): 466–81. 31 Jan van der Ploeg, Labor, Markets, and Agricultural Production (Oxford: Westview Press, 1996). 32 Feuer, ‘Pre-Industrial Ecological Modernization in Agro-Food and Medicine’. 33 Informant was male, age 38, from Takeo province, Cambodia. 34 Ellul, ‘Symbolic Function, Technology and Society’, 208–210. 35 Hart Nadav Feuer, ‘Sustainable Agricultural Techniques and Performance Oriented Empowerment: An Actor-Network Theory Approach to CEDAC Agricultural and Empowerment Programmes in Cambodia’ (MPhil diss., University of Oxford, 2007).

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Hart Nadav Feuer, ‘Negotiating Technical and Ideological Standards for Agroecological Rice Production in Emerging Markets: The Case of Cambodia’, East Asian Science, Technology and Society 5.4 (2011): 441–59. 37 Barbara Burlingame, ed., Sustainable Diets and Biodiversity - Directions and Solutions for Policy Research and Action Proceedings of the International Scientific Symposium Biodiversity and Sustainable Diets United against Hunger (Rome: FAO, 2012); David Goodman, ‘Rethinking Food ProductionConsumption: Integrative Perspectives’, Sociologia Ruralis 42.4 (2002): 271–77. 38 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, 80. 39 Ibid. 84.

Bibliography Borin, Khieu. ‘The Sugar Palm Tree as the Basis of Integrated Farming Systems in Cambodia’. Livestock Feed Resources within Integrated Farming Systems (1996): 83-95. Burlingame, Barbara, ed. Sustainable Diets and Biodiversity - Directions and Solutions for Policy Research and Action Proceedings of the International Scientific Symposium Biodiversity and Sustainable Diets United against Hunger. Rome: FAO, 2012. Cœdès, George, Walter F Vella and Susan Brown Cowing. The Indianised States of Southeast Asia. Honolulu: East West Center Press, 1968. Dunham, Paul L. III. ‘The Meaning of Technology: A Theology of Technique in Jacques Ellul’. Ed.D. Dissertation, West Virginia University, 2002. Ellul, Jacques. ‘Power of Technique and the Ethics of Non-Power’. Translated by Mary Lydon. The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture, edited by Kathleen Woodward, 242–47. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, 1980. Ellul, Jacques. ‘Symbolic Function, Technology and Society’. Journal of Social and Biological Systems 1.3 (1978): 207-18. Ellul, Jacques. The Meaning of the City. Translated by Dennis Pardee. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970. Ellul, Jacques. The Politics of God and the Politics of Man. Translated by Geoffrey W Bromiley. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1972.

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__________________________________________________________________ Ellul, Jacques. ‘The Technological Order’. Technology and Culture 3.4 (1962): 394-421. Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. Translated by John Wilkinson. New York: Knopf, 1954. Feuer, Hart Nadav. ‘Negotiating Technical and Ideological Standards for Agroecological Rice Production in Emerging Markets: The Case of Cambodia’. East Asian Science, Technology and Society 5.4 (2011): 441-59. Feuer, Hart Nadav. ‘Pre-Industrial Ecological Modernization in Agro-Food and Medicine: Directing the Commodification of Heritage Culture in Cambodia’. PhD Dissertation, University of Bonn, 2013. Feuer, Hart Nadav. ‘Sustainable Agricultural Techniques and Performance Oriented Empowerment: An Actor-Network Theory Approach to CEDAC Agricultural and Empowerment Programmes in Cambodia’. MPhil Dissertation, University of Oxford, 2007. Goodman, David. ‘Agro-Food Studies in the “Age of Ecology”: Nature, Corporeality, Biopolitics’. Sociologia Ruralis 39.1 (1999): 17-38. Goodman, David. ‘Rethinking Food Production-Consumption: Perspectives’. Sociologia Ruralis 42.4 (2002): 271-77.

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Groslier, Bernard Philippe. ‘La Cité Hydraulique Angkorienne: Exploitation Ou Surexploitation Du Sol?’ Bulletin de l’Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient Paris 66.6 (1979): 161-202. Hun, Sen. ‘Remarks at the Opening of Trapang Thmar Water Storage, Phnom Srok District, Banteay Meanchey Province’. CNV. 2006. Viewed on 12 June 2014. http://www.cnv.org.kh/2006_releases/09mar06_banteay_meanchey_water_tropean g_thmar.htm. Jackson, Wes. Consulting the Genius of the Place: An Ecological Approach to a New Agriculture. Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2010. Ledgerwood, Judy. ‘History/Myth and the Nation: Research at Angkor Borei, Cambodia’. Paper Presented at the Friday Forum Lecture Series, University of Wisconsin-Madison, February 21, 1997.

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__________________________________________________________________ Mann, Susan A, and James M Dickinson. ‘Obstacles to the Development of a Capitalist Agriculture’. Journal of Peasant Studies 5 (1978): 466–81. Pope Francis. Laudato Si’. The Vatican: The Holy Sea, 2015. Pope Paul VI. ‘Address to the FAO’. Speech at the 25th Anniversary of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, Rome, November 16, 1970. Romera, J P. ‘Le Borassus et Le Sucre de Palme Au Cambodge’. L’Agronomie Tropicale 8 (1968): 801-43. Sarun, Chan. ‘Animal and Plant Species that Are Symbolic of Cambodia’. Translated by Piseth Som. The Pracheachun Magazine 49 (June 2005). Sok, Sothun. ‘Value of the Palm’. Translated by Piseth Som. The Pracheachun Magazine 33 (February 2004): 25-26. Thaitawat, Nusara. The Cuisine of Cambodia. Bangkok: Nusara and Friends, 2000. Tucker, Mary Evelyn. ‘Response from Other Religions’. Paper Presented at the Meeting on Pope Francis and the Environment: Yale Examines Historic Climate Encyclical. New Haven, CT, April 8, 2015. Van der Ploeg, Jan Douwe. Labor, Markets, and Agricultural Production. Oxford: Westview Press, 1996. Weiss, Harvey, and Marie Agnès Courtney. ‘The Scenario of Environmental Degradation in the Tell Leilan Region, NE Syria, during the Late Third Millennium Abrupt Climate Change’. Third Millennium BC Climate Change and Old World Collapse, edited by H. Nüzhet Dalfes, George Kukla, and Harvey Weiss, 107-48. Berlin: Springer, 1994. Wilkinson, Harvey. ‘Environmental Fluctuations, Agricultural Production and Collapse: A View from the Bronze Age Upper Mesopotamia’. Third Millennium BC Climate Change and Old World Collapse, edited by H. Nüzhet Dalfes, George Kukla, and Harvey Weiss, 67-106. Berlin: Springer, 1994. Yang Saing, Koma. ‘Palm Trees in Cambodia’. Magazine of Environment, Agriculture and Sustainable Development (April-July 2000): 7.

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Our Land of Milk and Honey

__________________________________________________________________ Hart Nadav Feuer is an assistant professor in the Division of Natural Resource Economics, Graduate School of Agriculture, Kyoto University, where he teaches and researches on the subjects of food, rural development, and area studies of East Asia.

Conventual Sweets: A Culinary Journey to Innovation Maria José Pires, Cláudia Viegas and Nelson Félix Abstract Although sugar and egg yolk based sweets have long been associated with an Arabic influence, it was the process of colonisation that definitely replaced the use of honey in convents for heavily sugared creations in what concerns a gastronomic tradition. Unparalleled by its variety and refinement of flavours, these sweets entail the precepts of cultural heritage, from their rituality of conception to their relevance as an act of socialisation and culture. Distinguished by their regional quality, some conventual sweets were the first confectionery products to receive one of the three European Union schemes of geographical indications and traditional specialties, the protected geographical indication (PGI). Accordingly, the ‘local’ is valued for its intrinsic high-quality, facilitating the discovery of centennial secrets. Although these products have been looked upon as symbolic markers of identity since the fifteenth century, we may consider ways of better understanding the inbuilt food practices in relation to the development of nutritionally balanced and innovative products. The case study will be a project on conventual sweets and ice-cream, the art of balancing science/techniques, simultaneously reflecting history and traditions. The apparently simple concept of the conventual sweets is then translated into layers of flavours and texture that raise the issue of authenticity in historic and social terms – even if we also recognise the importance of economic and industrial issues concerning the impact of this project. Accordingly, the multifaceted knowledge of such a food phenomenon proves to be based on the need for interdisciplinary approaches from the humanities, the social and health sciences, reaching an intersection of knowledge. Key Words: Conventual Sweets, identity, authenticity, Culinary Innovation, Nutrition. ***** 1. Introduction Interdisciplinarity is known for relating academic disciplines and accordingly this research project tries to portray the intricate process of crossing boundaries, with the aim of thinking across some traditional boundaries; i.e. such a study seeks to highlight the implicit process of bridge-building, restructuring, understanding an eventual overlap1 of coordination, essential cooperation and communication.2 Because interdisciplinary programs in general are frequently considered unrealistic, we have relied on the knowledge and intellectual maturity of our students from the Master degree on Innovation in Culinary Arts (MICAs) offered by the Estoril Higher Institute for Tourism and Hotel Studies, in Portugal.3 This

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__________________________________________________________________ was food for thought on the interdisciplinary needs of food studies and, therefore, the Coordinating and Executive Committee of this MA opted for choosing conventual sweets to illustrate how the multifaceted knowledge of such a food phenomenon proves to be based on the need for interdisciplinary approaches from the humanities, the social (Maria José Pires) and health sciences (Cláudia Viegas), reaching an intersection of knowledge which cannot be considered without the needs of the industry and the consumers in a context of innovation (Nelson Félix). 2. Tradition and Innovation The Masters Degree in Innovation in Culinary Arts draws together a strong hands-on approach with a multidisciplinary component, as it hinges on working methods that privilege both creativity and autonomy. In view of that, the objective of this MA is not only to explore advanced culinary techniques, but also to integrate and apply concepts of technology, food design, nutrition and food safety. This results in the development of new products, concepts and environments applied to the culinary field, simultaneously stimulating food professionals to maintain technical and scientific rigour in their activities/performances. 4 Accordingly, the diversity of subjects and interests has brought the need for a wide and strong bet on creativity, which, nonetheless, does not forget the role of tradition, adding to the process of innovation of a product. Concerning the specific skills, we are trying not only to master food techniques and technologies, in cooking, pastry and bakery, but also to use advanced and innovative techniques in culinary arts that respond to new food trends (food technology; packaging; molecular cooking; vacuum cooking; cook chill; techniques used in producing ice-cream/sorbets, chocolates and new textures, among others) – i.e., the aim is to create and develop culinary products from/in different contexts. All these interdisciplinary experiences lead us to choose as the first main bibliographic reference the works of Manuel Ribeiro (1884-1972) and the anthropologist, historian and epicure Alfredo Saramago (1938-2008); not only because of the number of recipes, but for the seriousness and rigor with which their research was done. They went to the source: cookbooks and expenses of the convents, recipe books, personal notes, notary of some extinct convents, official and private archives, and privately owned revenue collections – an honest work, according to José Quitério.5 Although Sramago did not acknowledge himself as such, we believe this book to be the landmark for any research on conventual sweets. As for the former, Ribeiro, it becomes interesting to read a work from someone who was academically an architect, and simultaneously a poet, ethnographer, archeologist, professor, art critic, historian and collector. His reflection on art that there are craftsmen who are artists in their art, and artists who are craftsmen in their technique, is quite significant. He had an unusual will to preserve memories. That could be the start of an innovative project on strong

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__________________________________________________________________ neurophysiologic responses, just as Marcel Proust’s episode of the madeleines –– in terms of eventual strong neuropysiological responses. A second essential notion within this research is the concept of risk society. Ulrich Beck’s risk society theory is often mentioned in studies focusing on the relationship between food and technology.6 Beck witnesses a significant change in the nature of modern society in the post-war era in its transformation from an industrial society to that of late modernity. It creates an accumulation of risks and hazards that are not restricted in time, space or class and which are created by human actions inside the systems of scientific progress and industrialised production. These risks, as he sees it, have succeeded in escaping our control; hence the progress of society will inevitably lead to self-destruction. This increase in risks becomes characteristic of the society as a whole in which risks become a systematic element of life, which are often debated. This fight for symbolic hazards creates a discontinuation in the belief of progress, science and politics. Also crucial to Beck’s theory is the idea of individualisation. He observes a distancing from historically grown social forms, which means people lose traditional securities in ideas, culture and norms. This required re-embedding, entailing new forms of social appropriation and commitment. Freedom and destandardisation entail a force of choice, which results in shopping around for expertise throughout different media.7 The similarities with the mentioned evolutions are apparent. The theories and research specific to the field of food studies show how the perception of food and technological properties used in the food chain are affected by the development of a risk society. 3. Conventual Sweets Sugar and egg yolk based sweets have long been associated with Arabic influence, but it was the process of colonisation that without doubt replaced the use of honey in convents for heavily sugared creations while engaging with a gastronomic tradition. Unparalleled by its variety and refinement of flavours, these sweets entail the precepts of cultural heritage, from their rituality of conception to their relevance as an act of socialization and culture. It started with sugar. Of course, it is minor when compared to eggs and flour, which has been there from the beginning of times, and before its appearance things were already sweetened with honey. However, without the intense dissemination of sugar in monastic kitchens there would be no other Portuguese epic, far more lyrical, than the conventual sweets. If the Arabs had already introduced the cultivation of sugar cane of which there were traces in the Algarve, the decisive diffusion of sugar in modern times is due to the Portuguese, who democratised its use. Prince Henry is often credited with the initiative of having sent for the canes to Sicily and ordered around 1452 their plantation in the island of Madeira. Alfredo Saramago, in Doçaria Conventual do Alentejo, guides us through the sugar saga, its imaginary and representations, and by the different medical

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__________________________________________________________________ discourse it implies, by the theological debate it originated. Fortunately for us, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Portuguese doctors did not consider sugar to be harmful to one’s health, and the Catholic Church itself, always repressing pleasures, proved to be generous in this case and, even if it did not bless them, at least it pardoned the sins of sugar. But without this position of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, of course convents would not have been set up as major centres of production and distribution of sweets. The history of the origin, growth and enrichment of these monastic houses are clearly explained by Saramago. As such, there was an economic power as a result of the donations and the constant support by the crown and the nobles, combined with the social origin of those who joined the conventual life and that carried into the cloisters their status and even luxury, reflected immediately in food practices. Moreover, we cannot forget the easy leisurely monastic life, which fostered the conditions for the monasteries to become the privileged stage for the creation of the Portuguese conventual sweets.8 They have dainty and graceful names as literally blowing (assopros), clouds (nuvens), dreams (sonhos), forgotten (esquecidos), love cakes (bolos de amor), sighs (suspiros), supplications (suplicas), and tenderness (ternuras); some resemble nunnery features, sometimes exciting, like belly-of-nun (barriga-defreira), dreams-of-nun (sonhos-de-freira), kisses-of-nun (beijos-de-freira), neck-ofnun (pescoço-de-freira), treats-of-nun (mimos-de-freira), and triumphs-of-nun (triunfos-de-freira); others suggest heavenly consolations, like (also literally) ambrosia from heaven (ambrosia do céu), bacon-from-heaven (toucinho-do-céu), cake from heaven (bolo-do-céu), cheeses from heaven (queijinhos-do-céu), divine delicacies (manjar-divino), heavenly (celestes), pieces of paradise (talhadas do paraíso), sweet angels (doce dos anjos), Virgin hair (cabelos da Virgem), and wafer cheeses (queijinhos de hóstia); others even work as a tribute to earthly patrons (in descending scale), like royal turf (torrão real), royal cheeses (queijinhos reais), royal delicacy (manjar real), pieces of prince (talhadas de príncipe), princesses cake (bolo das infantas), dukes bacon (toucinho dos duques), marquees (marquesinhos), count slices (fatias de conde), gentlemen (fidalgos), majorat (morgados). There are 472 recipes coming from 119 convents which are collected in Saramago’s book.9 All the same, the definition of ‘conventual sweets’ deserves some reflection: are these all the sweets cooked in convents? Will the confectionery spaces be sufficient for the use of that designation? Or should it just highlight the creations, inventions, of sweets that were born there? The definition should cover both criteria excluding the popular tradition of sweets produced in convents but from an earlier tradition.10 We chose one of the most famous one: ovos moles, the first Portuguese confectionery to be awarded the protected geographical indication (PGI) by the European Union. This qualification ensures the traditional sweet from Aveiro to preserve its maximum quality, through the full use of the original recipe, both with regard to the quality of ingredients used and the

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__________________________________________________________________ technique, maintaining the heritage of the ancient perpetuated knowledge throughout generations of confectioners. Accordingly, the ‘local’ is valued for its intrinsic high-quality, facilitating the discovery of centennial secrets. This is rather interesting as a topic to be studied, because of their recognition in the tourism sector where they are publicized in national and international terms. As for the way they are commonly presented in Aveiro, a small amount is manually placed in a wafer mold and then topped with another similar mold. The seven traditional shapes chosen are mostly related to the water – like fish, shells – similarly to the motives painted on locally handmade wooden barrels from seven different sizes. In addition, an association was created as the brotherhood of ovos moles – Confraria dos Ovos Moles – whose mission is the promotion, dissemination and cultural and culinary defense of this conventual sweet as a certified traditional product of orgin. Thus, they seek to contribute by perpetuating these sweets in Aveiro, in Portugal and abroad, claiming to be those which guarantee the authenticity of Portugal, perhaps as opposed to a failed attempt resulting in a kind of cultural standardisation.11 4. Bringing Healthy Choices into the Equation Eating has a major function-- to provide nutrients to our body. But we all know that is not the only reason why we eat; and when considering sweets and desserts we thrive on them because they talk to all of our senses, they provide pleasure while eating and savouring, awakening innumerous feelings and sensations. In fact, we wait for them until the end of the meal, as a final touch, the cherry on the top of the cake. Thus, we do not eat them for satiety or to relieve hunger and we definitely do not eat them for their nutritional value. It is just pure pleasure. Still, we must not forget the relationship between food and health. Health is indeed a major concern and it is becoming more and more important. Nevertheless, sweets and desserts, always imply an excessive intake of calories, sugar, and usually fat too (and one of the worst kinds of fat – saturated fat), which poses a problem while taking health into account. Simultaneously, we cannot tell people to stop eating sweets and desserts, because, as mentioned above, they talk to our senses. Companies are searching for new products and technologies to comply with the public demands and concerns about food and health. The most traditional path it to replace sugar and fat for non sugar, non fat options, which may bring issues related to the safety of the substitutes – however, not the immediate concern of the paper. Usually these products loose their traditional flavour and are not a match to the original ones and tradition is very important, because part of the sensory experience is how it brings up memories and past experiences when tasting a specific product. We all remember our grandmother’s cakes, just as Proust remembered his childhood madeleines. Accordingly, this case study focus on how we took a more modern product – ice-cream – and we put it together with a tradition dessert, combining texture and flavours. In doing so, we took a very high

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__________________________________________________________________ sugar and fat, and sometimes sickening, dessert and we allowed people to taste it in a much more balanced way, connecting both tradition, technology, and taking health and pleasure into consideration. 5. Innovating through Ice-Cream Although products like ovos moles have been looked upon as symbolic markers of identity since the fifteenth century, we may consider ways of better understanding the inbuilt food practices in relation to the development of nutritionally balanced and innovative products. How can one innovate ice-creams, through the art of balancing science/techniques, and simultaneously reflecting history and traditions? The apparently simple concept of the conventual sweets is then translated into layers of flavours and texture that raise the issue of authenticity in historic and social terms. Economic and industrial issues with reference to the impact of this project must be addressed as well. Ice cream can be defined as a mixture of milk, dairy derivatives and other food products which are then subjected to mixing, pasteurization, homogenisation, maturation, beating and freezing. However, this has not always been the definition of ice cream. In earlier times, before the Christian era, the people of China and of other regions would have drinks refreshed with snow. In the same way that they would cool their sweet desserts with crushed ice. It is said that Marco Polo, in the thirteenth century, when returning from his trip to China, launched the trend of consuming fruit juices with ice and snow in Venice – the Iced Drinks as we know them today. These drinks became very popular, spreading beyond Venice into Germany, Spain, England, among other countries. It seems that the main innovation that Marco Polo brought to China in what concerns the preparation of ‘Frozen Drinks’ was the incorporation of salt and ice, which prolonged the validity of the products. There are, however, many other stories related to ice-cream before Marco Polo, in the Bible and in the Old Testament, in Egypt, during the epoch of the Pharaohs and of the Emperor Nero, who would have as dessert, wine and fruit juices refreshed with snow brought from the mountains. Bearing this in mind, we can therefore understand that the sorbets, iced drinks and fresh candies were the first forms of ice cream that came to being. Etymologically, when the Arabs invaded Europe they introduced the sorbet, which derives from the Arabic word ‘scherget’ meaning fresh snow. It is alleged that a disciple of Mahomed would freeze juice in a container by shaking it with crushed ice, and so this technique was used to make ice cream, which has almost lasted until today. Thus, the Muslim culture can be credited with the introduction of ice cream and sorbets to the world. Also, in Sicily, with the arrival of the Arabs, the iced sorbet became very popular as it was rather easy to obtain all the necessary raw materials (fruit juice and snow from Etna), this trend spreading throughout Italy and then to the rest of Europe. However, throughout the Middle Ages due to plagues, illness and wars, the consumption of

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__________________________________________________________________ frozen drinks reduced significantly. In the fifteenth century, ice-cream was re-born through the hands of Bernardo Buontalentic, in Florence, when he offered ice creams in the form of sorbets with cream, fruit, jam, aromas, eggs and snow, at a banquet where there were members from the Spanish aristocracy. This type of ice cream spread throughout Italy and the rest of Europe, having been welcomed both in Mediterranean countries (Spain, Portugal, and Greece) as in Germany, England, among others. It was actually in Spain, and still in the fifteenth century, the ice-cream industry was already showing a great expansion. The snow was kept buried in pits for its consumption in warmer times and the ice was pressed, cut in blocks and transported through the night to selling stations. The presence of milk, cream or any other dairy product to make ice cream was introduced in Europe towards the end of the seventeenth century. At this point in time Sicilian born Procoio de Coltelli introduced new processes which came to improve the quality of the sorbets and cold drinks, such as the incorporation of sugar, making the consumption of cold drinks and sorbets more attractive for the consumer, as well as the addition of salt to ice, which was used to cool the product, increasing the duration of the ice. Afterwards, ice cream is taken from Europe to the United States, where it was easily accepted, becoming world’s number one in terms of the production and consumption of ice cream, as the factories producing ice cream started to emerge in that country. What did we manage to achieve in terms of nutrition? Using milk, cream, skimmed powdered milk, dextrose, inverted sugar, and egg yolk – with the nutritional value of 3.8 proteins, 6.6. lipds, and 20.3 glicids per scoop of 70g – after slowly incorporating the ovos moles, keeping a temperature shock of -25ºc for 10min, and the ice cream preserved at -18ºC. Nutritionally, just the egg based ice cream would have 160kcal, whereas with this recipe the final result would be 215Kcal, whereas there would be a reduction of 170kcal in the case of 70g of ovos moles (385kcal). All this is as a result of research, knowledge and experience, well portrayed and illustrated in Nelson Félix’s book A Arte dos Gelados (The Art of Ice Cream). 6. Conclusion We can say that the Arabs invented the ice cream, the Europeans developed it and the Americans perfected it. Similar is the case of the conventual sweets: from the Arab tradition to a Portuguese creative use and soon to an international market that may savour these delicacies not only through the ice cream recipe but also through other studies. A good example in this case is a study by researchers at the University of Aveiro, which has confirmed in 2012 that ovos moles can be frozen without losing their properties at -40ºc, still keeping the original flavour and will be edible for about four months.

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__________________________________________________________________ This shows how the boundaries between academic disciplines or schools of thought need to be reconsidered, as new needs emerge. Still, as pointed out by George Stigler, there are those who believe the main insight learned from interdisciplinary studies is the return to specialisation. Although, we find this idea somehow questionable, we cannot forget that the most common complaint in terms of interdisciplinary programs, by both supporters and those who react against them, is the lack of synthesis; i.e., students are provided with multiple disciplinary perspectives, as is the case of our MA in Innovation in Culinary Arts, but are not effectively guided to succeed in finding a coherent view of the project. This is an essential issue to be addressed and by choosing a yearly-rotated theme for a transversal project, we believe to have gone beyond such a problem. We are aware of the importance of involving a level of interdisciplinarity among researchers, students, and teachers with the aim of connecting and integrating several academic schools of thought and technologies. All in all, just as Jürgen Schülert and Andrea Frank stated twenty-five years ago, interdisciplinarity accentuates the effort to reestablish communicative connections between disciplinary discourses which seem to have grown apart, ‘to create a single common discourse’.12

Notes 1

Goran Hermeren, ‘Interdisciplinarity Revisited - Promises and Problems’, Interdisciplinarity Revisited, edited by L. Levin and I. Lind (Linköping Universiiy: OECD/CERI Swedish National Board of Universities and Colleges, 1985). 2 Jürgen Schülert and Andrea Frank, ‘Interdisciplinary Studies as Change of Perspective’, Issues in Integrative Studies 12 (1994): 77, trans. Maria GalffeyMeasel, Wayne State University University of Bielefeld. 3 The Portuguese name is Mestrado em Inovação em Artes Culinárias (MIAC) offered by Escola Superior de Hotelaria e Turismo do Estoril – ESHTE / Estoril Higher Institute for Hotel and Tourism Studies. 4 This information is presented in ESHTE website, ‘Masters in Innovation in Culinary Arts’, ESHTE, accessed 6 November 2015, http://www2.eshte.pt/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2352&Itemi d=1308. 5 José Quitério, Comer Bem & Curiosidades (Lisboa: Documenta, 2015), 479. 6 Armando Salvatore and Roberta Sassatelli, ‘Trust in Food. A Theoretical Discussion’, Consumer Trust in Food – A European Study of the Social and Institutional Conditions for the Production of Trust (Working Paper, Bologna: University of Bologna, 2004), 4-36. 7 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992), 1260; Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences (London:

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__________________________________________________________________ Sage, 2002), 1-222; Anthony Elliot, ‘Beck's Sociology of Risk: A Critical Assessment’, Sociology 36.2 (2002): 293-315. 8 Quitério, Bem Comer, 479. 9 Ibid., 478. 10 Virgílio Nogueiro Gomes, ‘Doces conventuais, ou não’, VirgilioGomes, 2015, Accessed 25th September 2015 http://www.virgiliogomes.com/index.php/cronicas/595-docaria-conventual-ou-nao. 11 Among the information on the website of the brotherhood, we would like to emphasise the historical perspective, for example: from the portion of sugar that was with the crown, some was given as a gift to various institutions such as the hospital of All Saints in Lisbon (1506), welfare Misericórdias do Funchal (1512) and Ponta Delgada (1515), and to the convents of Guadalupe (1485), Évora (1497), Beja (1500), Aveiro (1502), Coimbra (1510), and Vila do Conde (1519). History of this association is well attested by documents that avow that the Convent of Jesus in Aveiro – founded in 1458 by D. Brites Leitoa, a noble lady – received sugar from Madeira. Although the first use of sugar in the Monastery of Jesus was in the pharmacy, it soon became very useful in the kitchen, mainly because of the quantities of eggs entering the convent, either because the founders of the convent also owned Quinta de Ouca, which produced large quantities of food products such as cereals, wine and eggs, or because of the payments made with wheat, chickens and eggs. The Association focus concisely on these matters and on the way the nuns were made to be then cooks confectioners, as they experimented with sugar gaining mastery over it at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Check Confraria dos Ovos Moles, Accessed 12 September 2015, http://www.confrariadosovosmolesdeaveiro.pt/. 12 Schülert and Frank, ‘Interdisciplinary Studies as Change of Perspective’, 77.

Bibliography Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage, 1992. Beck, Ulrich and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim. Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences. London: Sage, 2002. Confraria dos Ovos Moles. Accessed 12 September 2015. http://www.confrariadosovosmolesdeaveiro.pt/. Elliot, Anthony. ‘Beck's Sociology of Risk: A Critical Assessment’. Sociology 36.2 (2002): 293-315. Félix, Nelson. A Arte dos Gelados. Lisboa: FipStudio, 2012.

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__________________________________________________________________ Hermeren, Goran. ‘Interdisciplinarity Revisited - Promises and Problems’. Interdisciplinarity Revisited, edited by L. Levin and I. Lind, 77-92. Linköping Universiiy: OECD/CERI Swedish National Board of Universities and Colleges, 1985. Quitério, José. Bem Comer & Curiosidades. Lisboa: Documenta, 2015. Salvatore, Armando and Roberta Sassatelli. ‘Trust in Food. A Theoretical Discussion’. Consumer Trust in Food – A European Study of the Social and Institutional Conditions for the Production of Trust, 4-36. Working Paper, Bologna: University of Bologna, 2004. Schülert, Jürgen and Andrea Frank. ‘Interdisciplinary Studies as Change of Perspective’. Issues in Integrative Studies 12 (1994): 77-92. Translated by Maria Galffey-Measel. Wayne State University, University of Bielefeld. Gomes, Virgílio Nogueiro. ‘Doces conventuais, ou não’. VirgilioGomes, 2015 Accessed 25th September 2015. http://www.virgiliogomes.com/index.php/cronicas/595-docaria-conventual-ou-nao. Maria José Pires currently teaches at Estoril Higher Institute for Hotel and Tourism Studies, coordinating the MA in Innovation in Culinary Arts. She has been a researcher at ULICES (University of Lisbon) and her main interests are Literature, Culture and Food Studies. Cláudia Viegas teaches food physiology, nutrition and dietetics at Estoril Higher Institute for Tourism and Hotels Studies in the Food Production Undergraduate Program, and is a member of the executive commission of the MA in Innovation in Culinary Arts. After her MA in health promotion, she earned her PhD in public health. Nelson Félix is a chef who teaches at Estoril Higher Institute for Tourism and Hotels Studies in the Food Production Undergraduate Program and is a member of the executive commission of the MA in Innovation in Culinary Arts. He is also a consultant and as a researcher he holds vast experience and knowledge in the arts of sweets.