Food in Memory and Imagination: Space, Place and, Taste 9781350096165, 9781350096189, 9781350096172

Citation preview

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FOOD IN MEMORY AND IMAGINATION

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Also Available from Bloomsbury: The Bloomsbury Handbook of Food and Popular Culture, edited by Kathleen LeBesco and Peter Naccarato A Philosophy of Recipes, edited by Andrea Borghini and Patrik Engisch Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory, David E. Sutton

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FOOD IN MEMORY AND IMAGINATION

SPACE, PLACE, AND TASTE Edited by Beth M. Forrest and Greg de St. Maurice

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Beth M. Forrest, Greg de St. Maurice and contributors, 2022 Beth M. Forrest and Greg de St. Maurice have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xiv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Terry Woodley Cover image: Albert Einstein (1879–1955) in Tokyo in December 1922 with his second wife Elsa to his right. © Leo Baeck Institute. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Control Number: 2021949396 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-9616-5 ePDF: 978-1-3500-9617-2 eBook: 978-1-3500-9619-6 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India

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CONTENTS

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F igures  

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C ontributors  

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A cknowledgments   Introduction Beth M. Forrest and Greg de St. Maurice 

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Part One  The Body and Individual 1 A Private Snack of Crackers and Butter Lisa Heldke 

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2 Fermentation and Delicious/Disgusting Narratives Maya Hey 

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3 How Does Memory Impact Food Choice and Preference? The Role of Implicit and Imperfect Processes in Research on Food Attitudes Leighann R. Chaffee 

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4 Food Memoirs and Coming-of-Age Stories: Memory and Maternal Kitchens in Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones & Butter Julieta Flores Jurado 

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5 What Role Does Memory Play in Our Enjoyment of Meals? Charles Spence 

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Part Two Family and Community 6 Brittle Memories: Sharing Culinary Expertise in an Italian Family Fabio Parasecoli 

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7 Menus of the Zodiac Club of New York, 1868–1915 Paul Freedman, Graham Harding, and Henry Voigt 

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8 Food Memory and Food Imagination at Auschwitz Lisa Pine 

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9 The Knife without a Hand: Ethnographic Memoir through a Goat Not Eaten, Samburu, Northern Kenya Jon Holtzman 

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CONTENTS

Part Three Cities 10 The Legend of Les Mères Lyonnaises: Narrative, Meaning, and Gender in the Kitchen Rachel E. Black 

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11 Memories, Meals, and Shame in Florence, Italy Carole Counihan 

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Part Four Regional 12 Whose Arancino/a? The Multiple Making of Place through an Iconic Sicilian Food Amanda Hilton 

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13 Apples as “Objects of Memory” in the Midwestern American Imagination Lucy M. Long 

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14 Reverse-Engineered Terroir: Reimagining Taste and Identity Thomas Parker 

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Part Five National 15 The Local and the National in Japan’s Documentary Food Show Kuishinbō! Banzai Greg de St. Maurice 

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16 Food, Rituals, and the Selective Remembrance of (an Idealized) Home in Diaspora: Iranians of New Zealand Amir Sayadabdi 

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17 “The Taste of Earth and Homeland”: Remembering Palestine in “Little Ramallah” Jennifer Shutek 

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18 Everyday Militarisms in the Kitchen: Baking Strange with Anzac Biscuits Lindsay Kelley 

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Part Six Cross-Regional 19 The Next Apicius Andrew Donnelly 

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20 Remembering and Promoting Grandma’s Cooking through the Mediterranean Diet, Apulia, Southern Italy Elisa Ascione, Vincenza Gianfredi, and Daniele Nucci 

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21 The Pharmacological Table: Environmental Memory in New Nordic Cuisine C. Parker Krieg 

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22 Remembering Food Waste and Recovery: Imagining Food and/as Citizenship Leda Cooks 

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Part Seven Beyond National and Regional Boundaries 23 Sweet Disturbances: Candy as Speculative Imagination for a Socially Grounded Memory Iñaki Martínez de Albeniz 

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24 Eating in the Time of the Dead: Farming, Foraging, and Food Insecurity in Zombie Cinema Taylor Reid and Maureen Costura 

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25 Cooked in Milk and Full of Froyo: Food and Eating in Hell in the American Imagination Beth M. Forrest 

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I ndex 

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FIGURES

2.1 Nordic Food Lab insect garums made from bee larvae and grasshopper 

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3.1 Diagram of human memory processes 

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6.1 Fabio Parasecoli’s family recipes in his grandmother’s handwriting 

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7.1 Chart compiled by the authors using data from Records of the Zodiac as They Appear in the Minute Books (volumes one and two) 

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10.1 Mural at Auberge du Pont de Collonge featuring la mère Brazier and la mère Fillioux 

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12.1 A protestor’s pro-immigration, anti-far right sign at the Port of Catania in August 2018 

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14.1 Wolfe, Button, Santarelli, and Dutton sample the fungi and bacteria of 137 kinds of cheese 

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17.1 Chocolate-covered Oreos arranged to make a Palestinian flag at a women’s brunch at the Palestinian-American Community Center, in Clifton, New Jersey 

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23.1 Gominola de vaca, Mugaritz Restaurant 

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23.2 Kiss my Kiss 

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23.3 Kiss my Kiss. The Kiss 

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23.4 Cloud of clouds (Muxua da mezua) 

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23.5 Sugarberg (Muxua da mezua) 

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CONTRIBUTORS

Elisa Ascione is a cultural anthropologist. She has taught courses on sustainability, history, and anthropology of food. She has conducted research and published on heritagization processes of foods in Central Italy, and on migration, work, and gender relations in Italy. She currently works at the John Felice Rome Center, Loyola University, Chicago. Rachel E. Black teaches in the Anthropology Department at Connecticut College and has been developing a food studies curriculum. She is the author of Porta Palazzo: The Anthropology of an Italian Market (2012), Cheffe de Cuisine: Women and Work in the French Professional Kitchen (forthcoming 2021), and co-editor of Wine and Culture: From Vineyard to Glass (2013). Leighann R. Chaffee is an Associate Teaching Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington, Tacoma. Her academic training in neuroscience informs both her research and teaching. She mentors student-hypothesis driven research on food choice and implicit preferences. She also enjoys hiking, eating, and traveling with her family. Leda Cooks is professor in the Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her teaching and research address the ways people and food communicate identity, morality, power, relationships, community, culture, and citizenship. Carole Counihan is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Millersville University. She is author of Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia (2019), A Tortilla Is Like Life (2009), Around the Tuscan Table (2004), and The Anthropology of Food and Body (1999). She is editor-in-chief of the scholarly journal Food and Foodways. Maureen Costura has a PhD in anthropology and an interest in public perceptions of societal collapse. Her work has focused on the archaeology of Caribbean colonial societies, with an emphasis on communities formed through ethnogenesis and creolization. Her particular interest is French colonial societies and the anthropology of daily life. Greg de St. Maurice is tenured assistant professor at Keio University. His research has appeared in the journals Gastronomica, Food, Culture, & Society, and edited volumes. Current projects look at local food and branding in Japan, study the transcultural transmission of culinary skills and knowledge, and examine cuisine as craft. Andrew Donnelly is Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University-Commerce. He is the co-editor of Sauces and Identity in the Western World, forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Julieta Flores Jurado earned a BA in English and an MA in Comparative Literature from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where she is a PhD candidate. Her

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research focuses on the body in literature, food, and gender, and poetry by women in Ireland and Great Britain. Beth M. Forrest is Professor of Liberal Arts and Applied Food Studies at the Culinary Institute of America and the current president of the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS). She has published in Food & Foodways, Gastronomica, Global Food History, and Food, Culture & Society, among others. Paul Freedman teaches history at Yale. His research focuses on the Middle Ages and the history of cuisine. Freedman edited Food: The History of Taste (2007), translated into ten languages. He is the author of Ten Restaurants that Changed America (2016), American Cuisine and How It Got This Way (2019), and Why Food Matters (2021). Vincenza Gianfredi a medical doctor in Public Health, is currently a researcher in Hygiene and Public-Health at the University of Perugia. She has published about a hundred articles in international journals on epidemiology, public-health, and nutrition. She won the Young Academy of Public-Health, the Gioacchino Cartabellotta scholarship and the gold medal of Eleonora Cantamessa prize. Graham Harding is an Oxford-based wine historian. His latest book Champagne in Britain, 1800–1914: How the British Transformed a French Luxury will be published in 2021. He has also published widely on connoisseurship, the formation of taste, the power of fashion, and the Victorian dinner party. Lisa Heldke is Professor of Philosophy and director of the Nobel Conference at Gustavus Adolphus College. Works on philosophy of food include Exotic Appetites; Cooking, Eating, Thinking (edited with Deane Curtin) and Philosophers at Table (with Raymond Boisvert). She’s working on a book with the tentative title Stuck on You: Thinking Parasitically. Maya Hey graduated from Concordia University (PhD, Communication Studies) in 2021, where she served as a Public Scholar of the School of Graduate Studies and a Fellow of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She is a former Vanier scholar with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSRC, Government of Canada). Amanda Hilton is a research scientist in the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology at the University of Arizona, where she received her PhD in sociocultural anthropology in 2020. She studies human-environment interaction through the lenses of food and critical heritage studies. Jon Holtzman is a cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on northern Kenya, Japan, and elsewhere, emphasizing food, memory, and violence. He is the author of the books Uncertain Tastes (2009) and Killing Your Neighbors (2016), as well as many journal articles. He is Professor of Anthropology at Western Michigan University. Lindsay Kelley is a senior lecturer at UNSW Sydney in the Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture, School of Art & Design, as well as honorary research fellow, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, the School of Philosophical and Historical Enquiry, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, in association with Sydney Environment Institute, the University of Sydney.

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CONTRIBUTORS

C. Parker Krieg teaches in the Global Studies program at the University of NebraskaLincoln’s School of Global Integrative Studies. He previously held a postdoctoral research fellowship in environmental humanities at the University of Helsinki, affiliated with the Faculty of Arts and the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science. Lucy M. Long, PhD directs the Center for Food and Culture (www.foodandculture. org) and teaches American studies, folklore, and food studies at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. She has published extensively on culinary tourism, regional and ethnic American food cultures, food as ritual, comfort food, and folkloristic perspectives for understanding food. Iñaki Martínez de Albeniz is head of the Sociology and Social Work Department at the University of the Basque Country. Head researcher of the INNokLab (Laboratory of Cultural Innovation) research group, he also collaborates with the Basque Culinary Center, the first Faculty of Gastronomic Sciences in Spain, among others. Daniele Nucci is a dietitian-nutritionist. He is currently a researcher in Human Nutrition. He is the author of about fifty scientific publications in international journals on epidemiology, diet, nutrition, and prevention. He is a culinary expert acting as food and nutrition literacy promoter through culinary courses addressed to patients and the general population. Thomas Parker is an associate professor at Vassar College. He specializes in food studies in the French and francophone world. His latest book is entitled Tasting French Terroir: The History of an Idea, and his newest work, provisionally entitled Paranature and Culinary Culture, explores ways of reconceptualizing nature through food. Fabio Parasecoli is Professor of Food Studies in the Nutrition and Food Studies Department at New York University. His research explores the intersection of food and cultural politics, media, and design. Recent books include Food (2019) and Global Brooklyn: Designing Food Experiences in World Cities, co-edited with Mateusz Halawa (2021). Lisa Pine is a historian and Fellow of the National Historical Society. She is author of Nazi Family Policy, 1933–1945 (1997), Hitler’s “National Community” (2007, 2017), Education in Nazi Germany (2010) and Debating Genocide (2018). She is currently working on the edited volume Dictatorship and Daily Life in Twentieth-Century Europe. Taylor Reid is Assistant Professor of Food Studies at the Culinary Institute of America. His research interests include the pandemic experience of chefs and culinary students’ attitudes about climate change. When not watching zombie movies he can be found foraging for wild food near his home in New Paltz, New York. Amir Sayadabdi is a lecturer in Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand. His research interests include anthropology of food, studies of gender and sexuality, migration and diaspora studies, and cultural history of food. Jennifer Shutek is a PhD candidate in Food Studies at New York University, where she researches the relationships between urbanism, migration, nation-building, and foodways in Palestine/Israel. Her previous research focused on cookbooks as literature and she has a decade of teaching experience and a background in journalistic writing.

CONTRIBUTORS

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Charles Spence established the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at the Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University in 1997. He has published over a thousand academic articles sixteen books including the Prose prize-winning The Perfect Meal (2014), the international bestseller Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating (2017), and Sensehacking (2021). Henry Voigt collects menus and ephemera related to American history and culture, particularly the social and food customs of eating outside the home. He maintains a blog at www.TheAmericanMenu.com. He is a member of the Grolier Club and serves on the board of the Ephemera Society of America.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are grateful to all of the contributors to this book, many of whom wrote their chapters as they were undergoing life events and finished their edits during Covid-19. We also appreciate Lily McMahon at Bloomsbury, who supported us along the way. We both would like to thank our families, those who are still with us (Betty, Jim, Peg, Chuck) and those who are still with us in memory (Loute, Arthur). We imagine a time when we are all again enjoying a meal around the table. In particular, our gratitude to Scott and Junji is endless, for keeping us nourished in all ways, throughout the writing of this book.

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Introduction BETH M. FORREST AND GREG DE ST. MAURICE

In bringing together food studies scholars to address the interrelated processes of memory and imagination in this volume, we found ourselves thinking about the axes of time and space. At the simplest level, most people think of memory in relation to a past event, while imagination is what one supposes might happen at some unspecified future date. And, of course, in both cases, the active thinking occurs at a third moment in time: the present. Yet, more recently scholars have argued that these are cognitively intertwined much more intimately: memories can be imperfect or downright incorrect, rooted in imagination, while imagination can correspond with reality and be influenced by past experiences. Philosopher Tzofit Ofengenden captures the complicated and often messy interrelationship between memory and imagination thusly: According to common perceptions, memory is a source of knowledge, a reliable reference to our past. We believe that memories are in general trustworthy, that a remembered event probably took place … When memory exhibits forgetfulness, errors, or inaccuracy, it is perceived as dysfunction, deficiency, and failure. Imagination, on the other hand, is associated with the unreal and fantastic. We are not obligated to verify its realness or truthfulness and therefore there is no reason to doubt its epistemological status. Not only does imagination not refer to a real past, it need not necessarily refer to anything that really exists. Imagination can represent anything, at any time. However, the opposition between memory and imagination disregards the complexity of cognition. It is true that imagination contains states that do not represent anything in factual reality. Yet, imagination is not constrained to be fictional; it has various manifestations. For, example, imaginings can also be actual and compatible with factual reality as they can also coincide with representations of past occurrences. Alternatively, imagination can deceive us into believing that its representations are true memories rather than products of the imagination. Memories, on the other hand, can be inaccurate, or false, or they can stem from imagination. We often mistakenly designate memories as products of the imagination and vice versa. False memories, which are actually imaginative re-presentations characterized by belief, are the most convincing evidence of the close relationship between imagination and recollection. (Ofengenden 2016 [abstract]) Because we often understand memory and imagination as cognitive processes, we tend to consider them as occurring at the level of the individual, as illustrated in a memoir (the etymology of which stems from the Latin memor meaning mindful or remembering). One of the most referenced literary moments demonstrating the powerful way in which the

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physical, individual, and sensorial process of eating intersects with cultural, social, and the intellectual takes place when the narrator of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past nibbles on a small, sweet, shell-shaped cake dipped in warm tea. Sitting at the table, he is mentally transported not just across time, back to his childhood, but also across place, back to Combray. This passage in Proust’s novel captures the complex way that food can stimulate memory and imagination. The narrative that follows is not just about the madeleine, but about his relationship with his aunt Léonie, his identity, and then so much more. Proust’s account of the madeleine, of course, is perhaps one of the most iconic in food literature, but it is far from singular. Chefs and food writers have used food in memoirs to reflect upon their professional identity and, in many of these resulting narratives, crossing geographic boundaries also plays an important role in the professional and personal journeys being recounted. Madhur Jaffrey, in her memoir, Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India, mentally returns to Delhi by reminiscing about food via the written word after moving to London and New York. She closes with the epilogue “Mingling the Flavors of the Past and the Future,” which includes a passage that highlights the intermingled relationship between memory and imagination of place, and its impact on the self in the present moment. Jaffrey confides in the reader as she recalls setting sail on a P&O ocean liner, leaving her family and life in India to move to London: I found myself … all alone but all ready for a new life I was breathless to taste. I … found myself writing home to my mother, begging her to teach me [how to cook] … I hardly knew that my old and new worlds would start to mingle as soon as they touched, and that so much of my past would always remain my present. The innocent Indian honey of my infancy was now mixed with the pungencies of Indian spices, the sour and bitter, the nutty, and the tingling aromatic. Births, deaths, illnesses, caste, and creed had woven their way through the flavors like tenacious creepers, and yet, somewhere in my depths, each bite, each taste of all I had eaten, lay catalogued in some pristine file, ready to be drawn up when the moment was ripe. (2006: 242–3) Julia Child, A. J. Leibling, and Marcus Samuelsson are but a few others who have famously added to the genre. Without a doubt, the use of food, memories from the past, and imaginings of the future—in all of their complexity and tangledness—extend far beyond the individual and commentary about one’s profession. In personal narratives, for example, individuals use food as an identity marker indexing ethnicity and nationalism, often through the context of immigrant experiences. In Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love and the Search for Home, Kim Sunee shows the relevance of these deep connections very early in her life, from being abandoned by her mother on a bench in South Korea with nothing but a handful of food (where she sat for three days before a policeman noticed her), to being adopted by an American couple and being raised in a New Orleans community as only one of two Asian Americans, and ultimately marrying a French man and living as an expatriate in France. She remarks, “Although memories are distorted, there are true sensations one doesn’t forget, like fear and hunger, deep rumblings echoing in a cavernous heart and belly” (Sunee 2008: 2). Details, inconsequential or not, that she cannot recall in the writing of her book, she expressly imagines for herself and her reader, as she explores and searches for her identity through the themes of food and travel. Sunee, like all of us, does not simply have one simple immutable identity, but rather experiences identity as multidimensional with intersectionalities related to gender, race, class, religion, ethnicity, and disability.

Introduction

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Collective memories surrounding food are also a powerful tool when it comes to thinking about, creating, or reaffirming group identity. Scholars including Mary Douglas and Jon Holtzman have demonstrated this for groups like the Lele, Samburu, and Jews. Benedict Anderson’s work on “imagined communities” has influenced scholarship about how food and cuisines have helped shape national, ethnic, and class identities, notably Arjun Appadurai’s seminal work on the role of the middle class and cookbooks in India. For example, we also see collective identity imagined through the use of food in a banquet thrown by Queen Taytu of Ethiopia in 1887. For the spectacle, she had rivers of honey wine or mead created, spices collected from across the empire, and presented newly invented dishes that combined tastes and aesthetics. The latter represented various stakeholders in the new Ethiopian political entity: the Orthodox church, the aristocracy, various ethnic and regional representatives, men and women, the state (as represented by Queen Taytu and her husband Menilek, who would become emperor two years later), and even the city of Addis Ababa, proclaimed the capital only a year prior (McCann 2009: 65–77). Roughly fifty years later, Mussolini employed similar strategies in his propaganda campaigns that included national cookbooks, festivals incorporating tableaus of young men in togas, and grape harvest parades with floats referencing the past, as a way to inspire Italians to imagine the restoration of the Roman Empire as potential for his regime (Helstosky 2004). Such practices are also used as weapons, to separate, delegitimize, and dehumanize. Groups’ collective memory and imagination also occur in ways that are both decentralized and more quotidian. For example, Italian immigrants have used food and foodways to navigate the process of maintaining the “Italianness” of their past while imagining it in new contexts (Trecchia 2012; Cinnotto 2013; Ankeny and Cammarano 2017). It can appear through “banal nationalism” (to borrow the phrase from Michael Billings) as in the show The Great British Bake Off, in the marketing of food products and the construction of authenticity, and even through the gifting of food, as David Sutton has illustrated in Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory. Even the memory— and perpetual physical state—of hunger that was pervasive across the European peasantry inspired the imaginary Land of Cockaigne (Camporesi [1978] 1996). Therefore, whether for an individual or for a collective group, constructs of food in memory and imagination reflect and reify identity across different boundaries, and not necessarily geographic ones. Collective memories, however, can be faulty, fabricated, or draw on an imagined past. Eric Hobsbawm illustrated this in the introduction he wrote for the seminal The Invention of Tradition (co-edited with Terrence Ranger), by arguing that the past is understood in terms that are both real and invented, the latter depending strongly on imagination. Andrew Smith’s work on Thanksgiving in the United States shows how this phenomenon occurs for food and rituals, specifically in the myth of a communal meal between Puritans and Native Americans. The revisionist history served to integrate new immigrants, but also as an imagined, palatable past meant to overshadow a nation beset by atrocities perpetrated by white, mainstream (European-) American culture at the expense of Africans and African Americans (and, indeed, Native Americans) (Smith 2003). (Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863.) Food is ubiquitously used in the process of identity formation. It is universal—everyone eats—but it is simultaneously highly individualistic, with the existence of cultural variations and strong personal preferences. Food is also ephemeral, really only physically existing in the present; but because of the mind and shared cultural forms, food can also occupy the past and the future. Food can cross space unlike almost anything else, passing through

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geographic borders—international, state/province, rural/urban, and even across thresholds into a household—and anatomical ones, as it passes between lips, teeth, through the throat and into the stomach where it is digested. It becomes part of the body’s landscape, but it is temporal and ultimately leaves the body crossing still another boundary. Food is thus one of the very few things that regularly occupies all of these time/space continuums, perhaps not from the perspective of quantum physics, but certainly in a sociocultural sense. With these heady thoughts in our minds, we came across the photo of Albert Einstein and his wife drinking tea while in Japan that now appears on this book’s cover. It struck us how our themes were captured in a unique way by Einstein during his six-month international voyage and his diary of these travels. Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1922 after publishing his theory of relativity—or more accurately the theory of special relativity—which links the relationship between time and space through its recognition of the fourth dimension. Einstein’s theory of relativity posits that the faster one moves through space, the slower one moves through time. Newton had argued previously that speeds are never absolute, but always relative, such that conversations regarding time/space should be accompanied by the phrase “with respect to.” And here, we can return to the issue at hand: when thinking about food and identity, time and space matter. In October 1922, Einstein and his wife, Elsa, embarked on a six-month trip where they left Berlin, and embarked on the SS Kitano Maru in Marseilles, France. With stops in Egypt, Ceylon, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Japan, and Palestine/Jerusalem, they concluded their tour in Spain in March of 1923. While on the lecture circuit, Einstein kept a diary “as an aide-mémoire for future reference, or, … for the sake of his stepdaughters back in Berlin” so that they could imagine the places that Albert and Elsa went (Einstein 2018: 76). With few exceptions, and without counting the various times he simply mentioned having tea, supper, or dinner (with next-to-no detail other than the company), the excerpts below summarize the near entirety of the food experiences mentioned by Einstein in his travel diary: 6 October 1922, Marseilles: “Bugs in morning coffee.” 2 November 1922, Singapore: “The meal was hearty and endless. I had to finally get up because I couldn’t even look at food anymore, let alone eat it.” 14 November 1922, Shanghai: “One constantly fishes with sticks from common little bowls set out on the table in great numbers. My innards reacted quite temperamentally …” 24 November 1922, Tokyo: “Meal at a Japanese inn. Sitting on the floor difficult. Roasted lobsters; poor creatures.” 25 November 1922: Tokyo “… dinner at a Japanese restaurant … with a number of geishas. Doll-size fare for humans” [probably the event in the photo]. 16 February 1923: Egypt (on the ocean liner Ormuz) “Bad grub.” (Einstein 2018) Einstein’s accounts of his encounters with other cultures—and their foods and foodways— showed less of an eagerness to recognize and accept cultural relativity and his own ethnocentrism. Einstein’s framing of both the food and the people linked to the “foreign” cuisine reminds us of Said’s insight into imagined geographies. Einstein’s writing gives us evidence not just of an “imperial gaze” but also of an “imperial taste.”

Introduction

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In the essay “Images of the Past, Pure and Impure,” Said argues that the awareness of such boundaries between cultures is problematic as the “divisions and differences that not only allow us to discriminate one culture from another, but also enable us to see the extent to which cultures are humanly made structures of both authority and participation, benevolent in what they include, incorporate, and validate, less benevolent in what they exclude and demote” (1993: 15). For Said, in such situations, memory and imagination are sturdy tools and weapons “with respect to” power. From this perspective, how Einstein framed the foods he encountered on his travels—in his memory and in his diary—was neither a banal afterthought nor without consequence. Such epistemological considerations can guide attitudes, behaviors, and biases toward ourselves and the other (as we have seen with Einstein). The essays in this book attend to such relationships as they investigate the interplay between food, identity, and memory and imagination. To acknowledge how relative these concepts are, we have organized the chapters on memory and imagination that follow using scalar categories, starting with individual bodies and broadening in scope through space to family, cities, regions, nations, and beyond. We have placed essays that focus on the body and the individual in Part One. Here, Lisa Heldke begins by asking if it is possible to know if the saltines and butter she eats now do, indeed, taste verifiably different from the ones she remembers eating fifty years ago. In the process, she considers philosophical insight into the senses, memory, and knowledge about the world. Maya Hey’s chapter looks at the rhetoric of disgust and deliciousness in portrayals of the interaction between microbes, food, and the human body, particularly in relation to fermentation. She considers what such narratives reveal about how we imagine purity, the place of nonhuman species, and even ourselves. In her chapter, Leighann Chaffee addresses the limitations of dietary research on the impact of memory on individual food preferences and behaviors. She then assesses the promise that psychological research on memory may hold when it comes to improving eating habits. Literary scholar Julieta Flores Jurado, meanwhile, seeks to better understand how memories of food are used in memoirs as coming-of-age stories, especially those written by women. The focus of her chapter is Chef Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones & Butter, the memoir in which she revisits personally transformational experiences and memories. Closing Part One, Charles Spence explains what psychologists know about how memory and imagination—and particularly anticipation—contribute to pleasurable restaurant dining. His chapter contains insight into how chefs work to design memorable meals or trigger nostalgia, as well as how one might make a meal more memorable. Part Two scales up to family and community. The insight in Fabio Parasecoli’s chapter comes from reflections on the passing down of culinary knowledge from one generation to the next in his Italian family since the 1920s. He confronts, through personal experience, the complicated relationship between the transmission of recipes and information, technology-based skills, and embodied memories. In their contribution, Paul Freedman, Graham Harding, and Henry Voigt analyze a collection of 269 food and wine menus documenting dinners organized by the Zodiac Club of New York, a small elite club, from 1868 to 1915. Their analysis sheds light on high-end gastronomic aesthetics among elites during a specific period of time as a way to create a collective memory of taste. Lisa Pine’s chapter looks at how food featured in the historical experiences of Jewish survivors’ experiences at Auschwitz—their recollections of how food featured in their interment experiences, how their memories of food showed how the concentration camp changed their relationships with food (and their starvation), and how some survivors used food

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and imagination as survival mechanisms. Jon Holtzman, meanwhile, uses goats (and their absence) to reflect in a Proustian fashion upon his ethnographic fieldwork among Samburu pastoralists in northern Kenya and one particularly memorable interlocutor and friend, Barnabas. In doing so, this chapter probes the complex role of memory, imagination, and relationships over time in fieldwork and ethnography. Cities are the focus of Part Three of the volume. Rachel Black turns to the city of Lyon and les mères lyonnaises, women who became famous for their restaurant cooking in the period following the Second World War. Black argues that in contrast to a national culinary history dominated by men, the legend of les mères lyonnaises is both central to Lyon’s cultural identity and a source of pride and inspiration to women working in restaurant kitchens there today. In the following chapter, Carole Counihan analyzes shame-related food memories from interviews she conducted with Florentines in the 1980s. Counihan finds that the stories her interlocutors shared with her revealed a common concern with the negotiation of relationships between one’s self, one’s body, and others. The three authors contributing to Part Four look at how memory and imagination are used within subnational regions. Amanda Hilton’s chapter uses debates about Sicily’s “little orange”—including whether it is more correct to refer to it as masculine (“arancino”) or feminine (“arancina”)—to reveal geographical, political, and cultural dimensions to how Sicily is positioned vis-a-vis Italy, Europe, Africa, and the Mediterranean. She also asks how Sicilians experience arincino/a in view of both their memory and imagination of being at a cultural crossroads within time and place. Lucy Long considers how apples contribute to identity in the Midwest region of the United States in terms of foodways, rituals, and festivals. Using Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s theory of “objects of memory” and ethnographic fieldwork, she argues that the ubiquitous apple has come to represent heritage and traditional values as a way to create a regional identity. Finally, Thomas Parker examines “reverse-engineered terroir,” based on reimagined notions of place and taste, using cheese and wine as examples. He compares these to more “traditional” conceptions of terroir and considers how these two approaches are philosophically understood in relation to “beauty.” Part Five takes up the volume’s themes in regards to the nation and national diasporas. Greg de St. Maurice’s chapter reveals how over its four and a half decade run, the Japanese TV show “Kuishinbō! Banzai” shifted in its mission of preserving knowledge about “traditional” local foods to a more consumption-oriented vision of supporting local areas. Amir Sayadabdi asks how Iranian expatriates in Aotearoa/New Zealand recreate home by using nostalgia. It is, he argues, selective memories and chosen material goods that allow his interlocutors to create four key feelings that validate a transnational identity: familiarity, community, security, and sense of opportunity and hope. Jennifer Shutek studies the complex ways that memories and post-memories of food combine with new foods for diasporic Palestinian communities in “Little Ramallah,” in Paterson and Clifton, New Jersey. In particular, it is sensory cues related to food and eating—in private and public spaces—that shape these memories from the “homeland” and help build new communities. Lindsay Kelley’s chapter discusses the history of the iconic Anzac biscuit and its role in generating a type of “everyday militarism” in society. Through a series of workshops where participants “bake strange,” she challenges the ways in which Australasian identities are created, contested, and reimagined. Part Six extends beyond the nation to consider larger geographic regions. Andrew Donnelly’s chapter provides a segue between scalar dimensions, as he approaches a contemporary restaurant meal as a way to better understand the past. As a historian

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and archaeologist experiencing “Ancient Rome” at Chicago’s restaurant Next, he contemplates the sensorial phenomenology of a long-lost culture and its cuisine. Elisa Ascione, Vincenza Gianfredi, and Daniele Nucci look at the reimagining of the historical foodways of the Mediterranean Diet. By drawing on interviews with women who were agricultural laborers from the Italian town of San Vito dei Normanni (called the “homeland” of the Mediterranean lifestyle) and restaurateurs who promote related foods to tourists, they reveal that the women’s memories and an imagined preindustrial simplicity are interwoven and complex. C. Parker Krieg uses the concept of the “pharmacological table” to show how two of the most prominent chefs in the New Nordic movement have imagined the relationship between memory and place in their work. By using a Peruvian chef for comparison, Krieg explores how the ways in which one views one’s environment can have transformative potential. Leda Cooks’s research adopts a comparative perspective, shedding light on the discourse of food waste by Americans and Italians. Looking at national and individual narratives about what is not/ eaten—what is remembered as well as forgotten, she considers the relationship of that which is rejected or thrown out to food citizenship, that is the rights and responsibilities of individuals across the food chain. Contributors to Part Seven extend the scope of analysis well beyond national and regional boundaries. Drawing on The Candy Project—an experimental collaboration between Mugaritz restaurant, the University of the Basque Country, the University of Gastronomic Sciences, and Slow Food International, Iñaki Martínez de Albeniz’s chapter considers candy, its materiality, and how it is imagined and demonized. He identifies possibilities for its redemption, from nutritional education to sociability, within our plastic world. In their chapter, Taylor Reid and Maureen Costura find that contemporary insecurities about food and social collapse have resulted in an increase in zombie films and television shows in recent decades. Concerns over techno-scientific risk and climate change have driven the genre, yet (ironically) industrially produced foods by and large remain the basis of food procuration in imagined post-apocalyptic worlds. Closing the volume, Beth Forrest juxtaposes moments in popular culture where Americans have imagined what is consumed in hell. From John A. Chaloner’s early twentieth-century “transcription” of a friend’s message to The Simpsons and The Good Place, she argues that what foods are portrayed reveal cultural attitudes of time and place. We have organized these chapters according to scale, but there are many other possibilities for grouping the chapters together. Disciplinary perspective is one approach, say by starting with history or psychology, as a way of comparing methodological practices and theoretical ideas. Several of the chapters specifically reveal the complications and possibilities inherent in a scholar’s craft, from the philosophical and psychological perspective of asking how to reach reliable information to that of anthropologists and archaeologists working in the field and the role of the scholar in situ. Another way of reading the chapters would be as a comparative study of food as symbols and transmitters of cultures. Six of the chapters hone in on specific foods as sites of memory: Anzac biscuits, apples, arancine/i, candy, goats, and saltines with butter. Several deal with diasporic communities or migration (Sayadabdi, Shutek, Parasecoli). Four others engage with popular media: Reid and Costura with zombie cinema, Forrest with American television comedy, de St. Maurice with Japanese food television, and Flores Jurado with memoirs. Gender also appears in several of the essays as a key theme, including how food features in expectations for Samburu men’s behavior and aesthetics in men’s dinner clubs in the United States, during the Gilded Age, how cooking and related

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knowledge and skills are gendered in Lyon, Italy, New York, and Japan, and how a food itself can be thought about in explicitly gendered terms. Six of the chapters touch upon Italy in some way. Each takes up our core themes in relation to a distinct research question and attempts to answer it from a specific disciplinary perspective, yielding very different insights into food, memory, and imagination in relation to what might be conceived of as Italian foodways in the broadest possible sense. Hence we have Donnelly’s chapter about ancient Rome and how it is understood and cooked up in the present, and also Hilton’s discussion of contemporary debates over the meaning and gender of a specific Sicilian food (the arancina or aracino, depending on your position). In his chapter, Parasecoli also shows the formation of tradition, this time through his own family’s recipes. He demystifies the romanticized notion of “grandma’s recipes,” situating the recipes in politico-historic context and shows how and why recipes change over time. Counihan’s chapter makes it all the more clear that while food and family may generally have positive associations, food is a malleable and complex medium and symbol and is used to negotiate social relations and perform emotions that are assuredly not always pleasant. Cooks’s chapter compares attitudes toward food citizenship and food waste in the United States and Italy. Ascione et al.’s chapter is concerned with the Mediterranean Diet and specifically how southern Italy—in places like San Vito dei Normanni—participates in a discourse that imagines shared regional traditions and a role for tourism based on them. While some of the case studies or topics may seem worlds apart, you will discover unexpected threads and dialogues between chapters. Thomas Glick, writing on the impact of Einstein’s theory of relativity in Spain, argues that it “obliged scientists to confront both themselves and their disciplines” (2014: 70). We believe that bringing imagination and memory together to look at foodways from a multidisciplinary perspective reveals a complexity that spans time and space. Each of the chapters that follows unearths key insights into the volume’s themes. Taken as a whole, we hope they point to new questions and inspire new projects. Incidentally, 1922—the year that Einstein took his voyage—was also the year that Proust’s Swann’s Way was published in English and the year that Proust died.

REFERENCES Ankeny, R., and T. Cammarano. (2017), “Leggo’s not-so-Autentico: Invention and Representation in Twentieth-Century Italo-Australian Foodways,” in P. Naccarato, Z. Nowak, and E. Eckert (eds.) Representing Italy through Food, 219–38, London: Bloomsbury. Camporesi, P. ([1978] 1996), The Land of Hunger, Clare Foley (trans.), Cambridge: Polity Press. Cinnotto, S. (2013), The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City, Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Einstein, A. (2018), The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein: The Far East, Palestine & Spain 1922– 23, Ze’ev Rosenkranz (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press. Glick, T. (2014), Einstein in Spain: Relativity and the Recovery of Science, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Helstosky, C. (2004), Garlic and Oil: Food and Politics in Italy, Oxford: Berg. Jaffrey, M. (2006), Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India, New York: Alfred A. Knopf McCann, J. (2009), Stirring the Pot: A History of African Cuisine, Athens: University of Ohio Press. Ofengenden, T. (2016), Memory and Imagination: Epistemological Perspectives from British Empiricists to Neuroscience, PhD dissertation, Tübingen: Tübingen University.

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Said, E. ([1993] 2012), Culture and Imperialism, New York: Knopf Doubleday. Smith, A. (2003), “The First Thanksgiving,” Gastronomica, 3 (4): 79–85. Sunee, K. (2008), Trail of Crumbs. Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home, New York: Grand Central Publishing. Trecchia, P. (2012), “Identity in the Kitchen: Creation of Taste and Culinary Memories of an Italian-American Identity,” Italian Americana, 30 (1): 44–56.

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PART ONE

The Body and Individual

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CHAPTER ONE

A Private Snack of Crackers and Butter LISA HELDKE

Sunday evening: the time in my week in which melancholy and nostalgia mix with anxiety; when memories of childhood Sunday nights (pancakes, “The Wonderful World of Disney,” bath, bed) infuse the night’s desperate scramble to get ready for the week ahead (grade, read, then grade before reading some more). I interrupt the scramble to make myself a small snack: saltines, which I spackle with butter, thick enough to leave tooth marks. One bite leaves tears standing in my eyes. Melancholy has sent me to memory’s pantry for this snack; saltines and butter were the quintessential “night lunch” of my growing up years, eaten at the kitchen table before tooth brushing and bed. Suddenly, I’m eight. I want my mom and dad. Even as I savor the remarkable luxury of a quarter inch of salty, silken butter, the shattering crispiness of the cracker; even as I settle down to wallow in my middle-aged orphanhood, a niggling realization shatters the spell. These are the wrong saltines. Aren’t they? Let’s step out of that scene to consider the saltine. For such a simple, elemental food, this cracker exhibits remarkable variation in flavor from company to company. I love one major brand, which I’ve eaten since childhood. I cannot abide another equally ubiquitous brand; just one additional ingredient completely changes its flavor.1 (I think.) Back to my Sunday night kitchen. The crackers I’m eating are the “right” brand. But they suddenly taste wrong. Or at least I think they do. But how do I know? How, that is, can I compare the flavor experienced by my current mouth-nose apparatus with the flavor a childhood me experienced, to know whether they are the same?2 Nostalgia evaporates in the heat of frustration. I can think of a dozen “obvious” explanations for the wrongness I (think I) am experiencing, all of which boil down to “the crackers taste wrong because they’re different from what they were in 1968”: The cracker company has changed its formula in the intervening fifty (!) years. Wheat has been reengineered during that time. They’re getting the water (or salt) from someplace else. The batch I’m eating is actually defective, and will be subject to a recall next week. Any one of these explanations might account for why I experience these saltines as “wrong,” but somehow none of them seems adequate to explain what I’m feeling. I’ve been eating this brand all my life and have never experienced this particular sapid

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dissonance (to invent a pretentious name for the feeling) before. Surely I would have been hit by these crackers’ “wrongness” already, if it were a simple matter of the cracker company having changed its product. Wouldn’t I? Maybe I’ve never noticed before because I’m the one who’s wrong; that is, maybe my mouth and nose are misperceiving tonight. Is a cold coming on? Did I burn my tongue? Does a residual flavor of garlic linger from dinner? Maybe the “I” who’s tasting this cracker is a different I whose “equipment” is just a little off. I’m making the flavor of these crackers wrong. Or is the apparent wrongness of these saltines to be explained by the fact that I have, for decades, paid so little attention to the saltines I’ve been eating and allegedly enjoying that I have failed to notice an earlier transformation? Did a moment of melancholy finally lead me to pay attention to the taste in my own mouth; to experience the “wrong” flavor that has been present in them for ages?3 Do they taste “wrong” because I’m trying to recreate a combination of me-plus-saltines that has not existed for fifty years: trying to do so with a “me” that definitely is not its eight-year-old self? (At what age do our faculties of taste and smell begin to diminish? I’m well beyond that magic number.) Or am I making things up whole cloth (er, wholemeal)? Is there a cracker flavor “there” for me to “find?” Any of these explanations of the purported difference is plausible; I could muster evidence for each. And yet each leaves me with a more fundamental question: am I or am I not experiencing a “real” difference between the flavor of these saltines and the saltines of my childhood night lunch? Can the present me even know, reliably, whether the flavor is “right?” And what am I actually asking when I say that? I try to formulate the question, and end up creating syntactic monstrosities in which nested parentheses substitute for clarity: (How) would I know if the flavor I love now is the same as the flavor I loved then? (How) does my memory of those saltines match (whatever it is [I think] I refer to when I talk about) “what they tasted like then?” My understanding of the workings of memory and sensation has been shaped, profoundly, by the fact that, once a year, I teach modern (i.e., eighteenth-century) European philosophy to undergraduate philosophy students. For fourteen weeks, I try to compel them into experiencing the skepticism and puzzlement that gripped hold of Descartes and Hume, Berkeley and Kant—puzzlement about just how our senses “hook up” to the “external world,” and about the relationship between this sense experience I’m having this minute and my memory of the sense impression I (think I) had yesterday. I am at home in that skepticism, a whiff of which can be detected in my cracker questions: just what is the relationship between those crackers and my experience of them? And how do I know? Psychological science, in the centuries since Hume, has made leaps in understanding the operations of memory and sense. Has it, in fact, solved (or dissolved) the very questions I’m asking? If I understand how psychologists now explain the chemical senses of taste and smell, the processes of sense memory, will my cracker questions evaporate? The thought worries me: has philosophical investigation of questions such as these become obsolete, now that psychology has made such advances? If a sensory psychologist sat me down and talked me through things, would my questions evaporate?4 This essay is my attempt to formulate some of the philosophical questions about taste and smell that I believe remain, despite developments in psychology and neuroscience;

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questions that my saltine experience brings to the foreground. I draw upon the work of philosophers William James, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Carolyn Korsmeyer, and Alisa Mandrigin to formulate the questions, which turn on the matter of whether taste and smell refer to anything beyond themselves. Philosophical accounts of the senses often maintain a two-tier system, separating smell and taste from vision and hearing by one or another set of criteria. My exploration begins in one such account.

ACCOUNT #1: SMELL AND TASTE ARE NOT REFERENTIAL I recently heard a painter recount his first memory of being exposed to great art—a story he uses as both an origins story for his identity as an artist and his account of the nature of aesthetic appreciation. The story also illustrates a widely held understanding of the operations of sense and memory that rests on the conviction that hearing and vision are referential—they “gesture” to something beyond themselves—whereas smell and taste do not. The painter recalls the first time he saw a painting. He was four or five, and it was actually only a photograph of a painting, reproduced in a magazine—St. Francis and the animals, he thinks it was. While his recollection of the subject matter of the painting is dim, his memory of his reaction is—he believes—sharp and clear. He remembers being utterly transformed by the moment, a fact he presents as irrefutable evidence for his theory that great art doesn’t need an interpreter, doesn’t require that one be taught to see it. It just grabs you by the throat and pulls you in. Even a child, confronted for the first time with great art, will be compelled by it, as he was. This man became a painter; his recollection of that first encounter with art looms large, whereas any number of the other “firsts” he experienced (that might have been relevant, had he become an accountant or a longshoreman or a teacher) he’s lost. As such, the story he tells is not just a piece of his past; it’s always also a part of his present. He refashions it, remembers it differently, “notices” different features of that original experience, even as he becomes a painter and develops his theory that the power of art is intrinsic and immediate. He describes the memory of that painting as “vivid,” despite being fuzzy about its subject matter. (A man and some animals? Probably. St. Francis? Maybe.) Psychological science will tell us that, ironically, this memory-of-a-feeling that forms so crucial a part of his theory of art and his sense of self, is anything but vivid in the sense he means; indeed, it may bear precious little resemblance to his four-year-old self ’s feeling, because of the frequency with which he recalls it. Current research characterizes memories not as objects we take out, examine, and put back in their boxes, confident that they will be preserved in their original form. Instead, memory researchers describe a phenomenon they call “retroactive interference”: whenever we replay a memory, newer memories get added on to the older ones and become parts of a newly reformulated memory (Fields 2012). I think of artificial Christmas trees; each time we take out the tree (the memory) and set it up, we hang new ornaments on it. The more often we set up the memory, the more ornaments we add, until our tree bears little resemblance to the original, sparsely decorated one. But as the expression “interference” makes clear, it’s not as if the later memories just get hung onto an intact structure. So, each time we “decorate the tree,” we’re actually reconstructing the tree itself, pulling off limbs and reattaching them in different configurations.

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But here’s the thing about visual memories: however much the painter’s memory of that photograph of a painting has grown, developed, been “interfered” with over time (St. Francis? Or just some hunter?), it would nonetheless be possible (in principle) to locate the magazine with the photograph of that painting, and see just exactly what created such an uproar in the life of that long-ago four-year-old. But even if we succeed in doing so, no amount of staring at that photo will give us any real insights into that fouryear-old emotional response; it’s not possible to go back and “find” the exact feeling of transformation that he now reports. Let’s say that again: the thing he doesn’t remember— the image—we can recover and examine. The thing he insists he does remember in emotional technicolor—his very particular feeling upon seeing that image—we cannot. According to this understanding of the senses, sights and sounds represent5 or refer to objects in the world: “vision or touch … really seem to present us with an external world of material objects” (Mandrigin n.d.). Relatedly, our memories of sights and sounds are memories of the experiences of such objects; in many kinds of cases, we have traces of them, in the form of photographs, recordings, and other reproductions. I can check my memory of particular sights and sounds for accuracy against those reproductions. I remember my third grade teacher having a mellifluous voice; I can listen to a recording of it to see how it matches up with my memory. I remember our classroom walls as blue; a look at a photograph of the room can tell me whether I am right.6 On the other hand, while I remember how I felt about that teacher and that classroom, I can’t find a reproduction of that feeling against which to compare it, because (the argument continues) that feeling was only something about me, not something about the world, and certainly not something that could leave a record of itself “outside” of me somehow. (Can it leave a meaningful record inside of me? Hold that question for a moment.) Smells and tastes, on this account of the senses, are like feelings, not sights or sounds, in being “just a modification of our consciousness: something that happens in us rather than being world-directed” (Mandrigin n.d.). Flavors have no referent in the world of material objects; they are not “about” something. (Note that this also renders them subjective, one of the reasons that historically the senses of smell and taste have often been regarded by philosophers as unimportant at best, treacherous at worst. They cannot be sources of reliable knowledge.) What, then, do we say about my memory of those saltines, if flavors and memories alike are just modifications of consciousness? For starters, there can be no “smell/taste recording” to which we can compare our memories. There is no “external, material thing” to which our flavor memory refers, and thus nothing to “record.” Wait; what about the cracker? Nope, the cracker is not a referent in this case, the way that the photograph in the magazine is for the painter’s memory; the flavor I remember refers only to itself. The flavor is not “in” the cracker the way in which the elements of the visual image are in that photograph. It is (on this understanding) a feature of me. If smell and taste don’t refer to anything outside themselves, there is really no point in me trying to locate a fifty-year-old saltine cracker to compare its flavor to the one in my memory. My nagging feeling that the present flavor-of-crackers does or doesn’t line up with memory-of-cracker-flavor is just that—a feeling. It can be nothing more, by its very nature. Smells and tastes refer only to themselves. The fact that they also happen inside our bodies further underscores how deeply particular to us they are. Indeed, some theories of the senses argue that this lack of distance between sense organ and substance contributes to its lack of objectivity; only vision gives us enough distance to be objective.7

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To puzzle over whether a flavor now is the “same” as a fifty-years-ago flavor is to make a mistake of the type that Ludwig Wittgenstein discussed in what is known as his private language argument, discussed in Philosophical Investigations. In that work, Wittgenstein offers an illustration-cum-argument to show that there can be no such thing as a private language; a set of words that can be used correctly but can only be understood by one person. Consider why: In order to know that we are using a word correctly, we need an independent referent; something to which the word is supposed to refer, and to which we can point (at least figuratively): “chair,” or “escape,” or “love.” A “private” word (private in principle) would point to something to which only an individual could ever have access. Wittgenstein uses pain as his candidate for such a private something; only you can point to your pain. Given the understanding of tasting and smelling I’ve been exploring here, in which they are “modifications of our consciousness,” the flavor of those saltines and butter would also be a candidate for such a private something. Wittgenstein then asks a question that reveals the impossibility of there being such a language, or even a single word. If the thing (the pain, the flavor of saltines and butter) is something to which, by its very nature, only one person can point, then how could even that person know whether they are “pointing” to the same pain-or-flavor on a subsequent occasion? To what can I refer, to ascertain that today’s cracker-flavor is the same as yesterday’s or the one from fifty years ago? My own recollection of that previous flavor? What can that tell me? What’s the basis for its legitimacy? It’s hardly an independent referent.8 Wittgenstein’s private language argument illustrates why, if flavors really are simply “modifications of my consciousness” with no independent referents, I cannot know if my memory of the flavor of those saltines is accurate or not—why I can’t even ask a meaningful question about whether the two flavors are the same. If sensations of taste and smell are as private as all that, then it is impossible in principle for me to know anything about flavors then or now.9 As it goes for pains, so it goes for smell and taste when they are understood in this non-referential, radically “interior” way: I don’t know that I’m tasting something, I just taste it. And I cannot know that some flavor accessible only to me is the same as, or different from, some flavor I experienced in the past. If taste and smell are simply features of me, then Wittgenstein leaves us with something happening in our mouths to which we cannot knowledgeably refer in the future, and to which we have no reliable access in the past. But are smell and taste really non-referential? Are they just altered states of our consciousness, “private” in the sense that pains are private? I hope such an idea tastes wrong in the mouth of the reader. It’s time to turn to a more promising alternative; smell and taste do indeed refer to something beyond themselves, beyond me-the-perceiver.

INTERLUDE: BUT THEY ARE In a short blog post about smelling, Alisa Mandrigin writes, “we can give a representational account of olfactory experience”: smells do refer to something other than themselves and/or the human that is experiencing them. Specifically, “what olfactory experiences represent are smells and properties of smells” (Mandrigin n.d.) Wait, how does that get us anywhere? How is a smell something other than my experience of the smell? Simply thus: when I smell something, it’s because there’s a something—a smell—to be smelled. Indeed, when there is no “smell to be smelled,” we call the person’s experience an olfactory hallucination and diagnose a problem with the machinery.

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If smells are “about” something—if they refer beyond themselves—they can be sources of information about the world.10 Granted, “olfaction is different from vision because it provides us with a different kind of information” (Mandrigin n.d.). And let us further grant that we humans are (most of us) lousy at sussing out and using the information that smell and taste can provide us. (You know the guy who can’t pick out his “favorite beer” in a taste lineup—and don’t place any bets on me being able to distinguish tarragon from chervil in a blindfolded smell test.) Nevertheless, as dogs are my witness, smelling “informs us about how things are in the world and thereby puts us in a position to act on and in the world” (Mandrigin n.d.). Carolyn Korsmeyer similarly argues that the chemical senses are referential; she focuses on taste. Challenging the claim that taste is “experienced as a state of the body” (and thus as private as Wittgenstein’s pain), Korsmeyer writes, “Taste also relays information about objects in the world … True, we rarely inquire about the external world by licking the objects [unless we are geologists!], but only because taste is not a convenient means to explore most objects. When we do taste, however, we also learn about the world” (1999: 99). And what we learn is not just “true-for-us,” but true intersubjectively; we can meaningfully agree (and disagree) with each other about what we taste. If you were in my kitchen with me, eating saltines topped with butter, we could talk about what we’re tasting, we could argue over the presence or absence of certain flavor notes. If you were one of my sisters, say, we could discuss whether these saltines tasted “right.” At the same time, there is more to tasting than its representational elements; neither Mandrigin nor Korsmeyer claims that tasting only represents or refers. Both philosophers emphasize that tasting is also self-referential, and that tasting and smelling (especially) may be particularly emotionally laden senses. Taste is, in part, inward-looking. My experience of the flavor of those crackers on that Sunday night included notes of melancholy, nostalgia, anxiety, and probably a little guilt (that much butter? Really??). Neither of my sisters has much of an emotional attachment to this snack; would that make their recollection of cracker-taste more reliable than mine? Or less? Had you been there, your flavor experience would have struck a very different chord; perhaps an undertone of amusement at being served such a childish snack, a bit of surprise at just how delicious it was—and maybe a touch of pleasure that you now feel free to enjoy butter because it has yet again been deemed a good fat. Can we peel away these elements and get at what the crackers really taste like, independent of all those feelings? No; tasting is an interactive activity and we humans cannot set aside our very particular selves with our very specific experiences, in order to get at some taste essence. Can we, nevertheless, know that you and I are experiencing the same flavor, standing at that kitchen counter? Can I, further, ever know that the cracker in my mouth today really does taste wrong—that its flavor is not the same as the flavor of the crackers I ate as a child? The nontrivial (I promise) philosophical answer to that question is “it all depends on what you mean by ‘the same.’ ”

ACCOUNT #2: IT DEPENDS There’s no doubt that, on one reading of what I mean by “wrong,” my original question— “do these crackers taste wrong”—is unanswerable, in a Wittgensteinian sense. I can’t articulate what it would mean to know whether or not that long-ago flavor (comprised

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of smell and taste, yes, but also kitchen and mother and sleepiness and Walt Disney) matches this one (consisting of smell, taste, different kitchen, dead mother, anxiety, and logic homework), because I have no independent access to that long-ago taste. I don’t even have “independent access” to the cracker-eating episode that begins this essay, and that took place just a year ago! The inaccessibility of those taste experiences has (virtually) nothing to do with time elapsed, and everything to do with it being the stuff of memory. And if I insist that the taste is uniquely and privately my own, well, then I guarantee there’s no getting at it, and no determining whether this taste is the same as the fifty-yearold one. I have, as Wittgenstein puts it, no “criterion of correctness.” But (as Wittgenstein himself would insist), we do not in fact treat taste and flavor as such radically private things. We can, and do, argue about them regularly—a practice that counts as evidence that we understand there to be some independent something about which we can argue, to which we can appeal. My sisters and I could get up a good head of steam about those crackers, for instance. To state what seems obvious—but is philosophically momentous—the issue turns on what one means by “the same.” Can we sort out the various ways we can ask the question “do these crackers taste the same?” And can we, in so doing, determine whether the distinctions in meanings amount to differences in the ways those versions function in the world of experience? Enter William James. In “What Pragmatism Means,” the philosopher suggests that many philosophical problems can actually be tidied up if we make clear the consequences of adopting one meaning of a word or another. His folksy example involves a man, a tree, a squirrel, and the question “is the man going round the squirrel as they both go around the tree?” His answer: “it depends on what you mean by ‘go round the squirrel.’ ” We might, James acknowledges, be disappointed in the end by the answer we get to our question; we might still be left in the dark about something we really wish we could know. But in sorting out and eliminating those questions the answers to which yield no experiential differences whatsoever, we will have done ourselves and philosophy an important service. Here is how James describes pragmatism: it is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. … The pragmatic method … is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right. (James [1904] 2013) James’s argument here begins down the same road as Wittgenstein’s private language argument; both philosophers are clearing away the things about which we cannot meaningfully argue (leaving them still fair game for reverie, fantasy, wonder). Both are trying to figure out what it is possible to worry about meaningfully. (Note that, in stipulating that the difference be “practical,” James means simply “in everyday practice,” not that it needs to cure cancer or make a big return on investment.) So, where does that leave me and my saltines? With the need to find a practical difference between saying that the saltines taste the same as they did in 1968, and saying that they do not. This amounts to determining whether there are versions of this question that will produce “practical” (i.e., identifiable in the world of experience) results.

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Answering a question such as “does this saltine taste the same as the one I remember having as a child?” requires establishing criteria for sameness and difference; criteria that I could access through some identifiable practices. In the case of the man and the squirrel, James clears away the problem thus: If you mean passing from the north of [the squirrel] to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb “to go round” in one practical fashion or the other. (James [1904] 2013) Likewise, whether the saltines taste the same or not depends on what I mean to mean by “the same.” Depending on this, the question might be one of empirical fact, it might be a mystical musing, referring to something so private that it cannot be a matter of fact, or it might be some complicated admixture of the two. Let’s return to the answers I so flatly rejected at the beginning of this essay. Contexts exist in which each one of them would account for the cracker’s apparently different taste. At least some of the factors I quickly set aside would produce practically different— and likely measurable or detectable—consequences. Consider one working-out of some relevant factors, resulting in one meaning for the word “same”; factors that point to qualitative differences in the crackers’ ingredients. If flavors do refer, if there is some set of sensory qualities in the cracker to which I can “point” when I make a claim about the saltines, then I can (to the degree technology allows) ascertain whether that set of qualities is the same in 1968 and 2018. We can imagine tests that could identify properties in 1968 wheat and 2018 wheat that would contribute to different flavors, for instance. We could, in principle at least, establish a meaningful and measurable conception of “sameness” based on specified ingredient qualities, that could determine, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the answer to (one version of) the question “do these crackers taste like 1968?” Greg de St. Maurice provided me with an example that illustrates just this sort of comparison. A Japanese television show did a side-by-side comparison of instant ramen from fifty years ago and the same variety from today. The flavors of the two (for someone tasting them at the same time) were easily distinguishable. (Of course, one of the products was also fifty years old, so arguably, it doesn’t taste like itself either.) But of course that answers just one version of the question. Given what we know about flavor—that it does refer, but that’s not all that comprises—the 2018 and 1968 crackers might “taste the same” to some tasters in one sense (the television show sense), while still tasting different to me, standing in my Sunday night kitchen. On a Jamesian account, that is not a problem, but rather evidence that practically different meanings of “tastes the same” are possible (remember the squirrel). Qualities of wheat and water do not even begin to exhaust the relevant contributions to the flavor of those crackers in my mouth. My “tasting apparatus” makes another contribution—one that, like wheat and water, might even be objectively measurable eventually.11 It’s not hard to imagine that

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technology can (or someday could) enable us to ascertain just how my tongue and nose have degraded over fifty years, and how those degradations affect the flavors of my foods. If we could conduct such an evaluation of my tasting apparatus, the evidence it would produce would be just the sort of Jamesian practical consequences that would enable us to say, meaningfully, “these crackers taste different.” At a certain point in our search for practical consequences, we’ll run out of publicly verifiable ways to answer the question “do these crackers taste different?”—but not run out of question. While (in the imaginary technological world I’ve created) we might find ourselves forced to acknowledge that nothing measurable is different between the cracker in our mouth and the cracker in our memory, James’s notion of practical consequences does not reduce to things we can publicly verify. At this point, Wittgenstein’s private language argument forces us to admit that we cannot know that the crackers taste different, no matter how much it might feel like they do. For Wittgenstein, any attempt to talk meaningfully about this difference collapses into nonsense (remember: not falsehood). But that feeling of wrongness I had in the kitchen is not nothing. And not only do I have the evidence of my own feelings, but I also am validated by others’ responses; they’ve had such experiences as well. The fact that taste refers, that tastes are not entirely and only subjective (concerned with the contents of our own mouths) does not nullify the importance of those subjective elements—the features of our experience, our emotions, our history that shape and color what goes on when we taste a food, familiar or unfamiliar. James, in contrast to Wittgenstein, would ask, does the difference I find between the taste of the cracker in my mouth and my (present) memory of that long ago cracker manifest itself practically? (Remember James’s expansive definition of “practical” in your answer.) If so, the difference is as real as it needs to be. Applying James’s standard opens up a space in which to distinguish between my present taste and my present memory-of-past-taste. Note that this distinction can be meaningful even though I cannot know whether my memory-of-past-taste is “accurate.” Indeed, one might even argue that it’s irrelevant. My memory may or may not have much to do with that long-ago experience; it might, in fact, be a much-decorated Christmas tree by now. Nevertheless, the difference I’m experiencing is a difference between two tastes that are present to me in the moment; a cracker-in-mymouth taste and a memory-cracker taste. There is a real difference between the (present) cracker flavor and the (present) memory of cracker flavor. My evidence that they are different is precisely the feeling of loss, longing, lack, and emptiness that I experienced in my kitchen; indeed, those feelings are just what conjured up the memory-taste. This feeling of a difference is of course not the sort of thing one takes into the lab for analysis; the meaning of this difference lies elsewhere, in the realm of emotion. In my everyday world, taste and smell are underutilized as sources of insight and information about the world; I could be far more astute in my use of them, because these senses do refer to things in the world, things we can measure and assess in verifiable ways. Furthermore, I eviscerate taste and smell if I reduce their value for me as sources of understanding to the purely referential; these senses also steep me in robustly personal, even intimate aspects of my being: emotion and memory. That we cannot verify these in a Wittgensteinian public sense does not mean we cannot meaningfully reflect on, and sometimes even talk with each other about, them. And it certainly doesn’t mean that emotion and memory don’t slam me with their significance. Can I know that the crackers taste different, though? On one reading, nope. The squirrel doesn’t go round the tree. But on another reading—one in which I take into account the full range of aspects of tasting and smelling, I can point to a gap between my

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present mouth-experience and my present memory-experience, a gap that is charged with meaning, meaning that infuses my life and my activity in the world. Flavor can be a source of information about the world that we can sometimes exchange with others. It can also be a thing of some mystery, about which melancholy musings or hilarious reminiscences are the right responses.

NOTES 1 I will use “flavor” throughout this essay to mean aroma-plus-taste, despite my conviction, informed by the work of Carolyn Korsmeyer, that the experience of the flavor of food is always far more multisensory than this. Potentially, it includes all five senses, plus memory plus imagination. 2 “What about the butter?” you’re thinking. “Mightn’t it be the source of the wrongness? Is that the same brand?” Of course the butter tastes wrong, because it is not Gerland’s butter, the brand my family made for three generations. The butter that no longer exists. But rest assured: I can sort out the wrongness of the butter from the wrongness of these crackers. 3 I recently spent a semester eating foods that I described myself as “not liking”—foods for which I’ve had a longstanding aversion. My realization from that experience? I have no idea what I mean by “things I don’t like.” The category shattered into a million pieces when I started paying attention. Things I was sure I loathed were often reasonably pleasant, or at worst “meh.” (The one exception was the banana, which remained vile.) If I were as … erratic? Capricious? Undependable? In interpreting my visual experiences as I am interpreting flavor experiences, I would definitely be ineligible to drive a car. What’s the eating equivalent of an unreliable narrator? 4 “Yes,” says one cadre of scientists, including Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson. “Philosophy is indeed obsolete,” these folks say; “its questions have all been taken over by proper sciences, which are proceeding to answer them.” This essay does not set out to refute such a claim; it does, however, rest upon the belief that the claim is wrong. 5 This breezy observation ignores real questions about representation raised by modern philosophers—questions that I will ignore, contenting myself to observe that we have no idea what it means to say that an image, for instance, visually represents a material object. 6 Anthropologist David Sutton thinks of memory as itself a sense, where sensing is defined as “a type of communicative and creative channel between self and world” (2011: 371). He introduces the term “polytemporality” to capture the way “the present moment seems to ‘hum’ with memories of past words and past times” (472). While I will not develop that idea further here, I am sympathetic to it; my discussions of memory in this essay could certainly be understood through it. 7 See Korsmeyer (1999: 24–5). 8 Thanks to Peg O’Connor for help with this point. Here’s how Wittgenstein puts the matter: Let us imagine … something like a dictionary … that exists only in our imagination. A dictionary can be used to justify the translation of a word X by a word Y. But are we also to call it a justification if such a [dictionary] is to be looked up only in the imagination?— “Well, yes; then it is a subjective justification.”—But justification consists in appealing to something independent.—“But surely I can appeal from one memory to another. For example, I don’t know if I have remembered the time of departure of a train right and to check it I call to mind how a page of the time-table looked. Isn’t it the same here?”—No; for this process has got to produce a memory which is actually correct. If the mental

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image of the time-table could not itself be tested for correctness, how could it confirm the correctness of the first memory? (As if someone were to buy several copies of the morning paper to assure himself that what it said was true.) Looking up a table in the imagination is no more looking up a table than the image of the result of an imagined experiment is the result of an experiment. (§265) 9 Notice that Wittgenstein does not say “we have knowledge, but it is purely subjective knowledge-for-me.” He cuts much deeper, denying the very possibility of knowledge of any sort in this case. 10 For newcomers to philosophy, the idea that I have to stipulate such a thing might strike you as hallucinatory: “of course smells can give us information about the world!” you’re thinking. “Have you ever smelled that odor they put into propane gas? Ever burned a batch of cookies? Recognized a family member by smell? Those are all instances of smells giving us information about the world.” I agree entirely, but take my word for it that the debate about this matter has a long and venerable history in philosophy. And it ain’t over. 11 Beth Forrest notes that “After the age of 50, the rate at which our taste buds regenerate slows, and the sense of taste declines/dulls” (private correspondence).

REFERENCES Fields, H. (2012), “Fragrant Flashbacks,” Observer, Association for Psychological Science, April. James, W. ([1904] 2013), “What Pragmatism Means,” in Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, Project Gutenberg. Available online: https://www.gutenberg.org/ files/5116/5116-h/5116-h.htm (accessed January 2, 2019). Korsmeyer, C. (1999), Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy, Ithaca: Cornell. Mandrigin, A. (n.d.), “Is Our Sense of Smell More like Vision or More like Pain?” Rethinking the Senses: AHRC Science in Culture. Available online: https://www.thesenses.ac.uk/publicengagement/being-human-festival/the-objectivity-of-smell/ (accessed December 22, 2018). Sutton, D. (2011), “Memory as a Sense: A Gustemological Approach,” Food, Culture and Society, 14 (4): 461–76. Wittgenstein, L. ([1953] 1986), Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell.

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CHAPTER TWO

Fermentation and Delicious/ Disgusting Narratives MAYA HEY

Introduction Although fermentation is currently experiencing renewed interest, humans have historically relied on fermentation and microbial work to transform food ingredients, preserve them, and make new tastes for the future. As early as the fifth century BCE, Romans fermented the intestines of fish like mackerel and tuna into savory sauces that were used as seasonings (Mouritsen et al. 2017; see also Donnelly, this volume). Taking this Roman garum as inspiration, the Nordic Food Lab prototyped a series of insect garums as part of a broader ambition to map the delicious potential of entomophagy in contemporary fine-dining contexts (Evans 2014; Evans et al. 2017; see also Redzepi and Zilbur 2018). Using the mechanics of fermentation, these insect garums take umami (a known source of deliciousness) out of the insect body and present savory flavors in a liquid form, thus converting ingredients associated with disgust in the Western foodscape into a socially acceptable vehicle for deliciousness. Delicious and disgusting are not just evaluations of agreeable or off-putting taste sensations; they can also serve as proxy for how we imagine the work and lives of microbes like bacteria, molds, and yeasts.1 Microbes transform our foods (Steinkraus 2006; Katz 2012) as well as our bodies (David et al. 2014; Enders 2014; Yong 2016), and recent research is updating our ideas on nutrition, microbiomes, and mental wellness as being composite experiences from having engaged with microbial life. Yet, we humans cannot easily see these microbes, and our reactions to this fact can be disturbing, knowing they are both everywhere and invisible at the same time. Due to our limited ability to see microbes, we have had to sense them otherwise—through senses like taste and smell—which have coded memories into our bodies in lasting ways. I argue that delicious/disgusting narratives can serve as a heuristic for how we think about microbial life and, more generally, the relationships that constitute our physical and social beings. Examining how we relate to and work with microbes is important because our mutual thriving is at stake. The unsettling fact that they can live without us—when we cannot live without them—suggests that we urgently need to reconsider the way we conceive difference across species (McFall-Ngai et al. 2013; Margulis 1998; Fishel 2018; Bone 2018). Even on a human scale, we could stand

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FIGURE 2.1  Nordic Food Lab insect garums made from bee larvae and grasshopper. Source: Photograph by the author.

to challenge normative power relations and reimagine difference as an asset instead of a threat. I focus on narratives because I see them as collective memories that can be embodied, enunciated, and acted upon. As units of ideology, the narratives we inherit and code into memory may be reactions to foods but nevertheless feed into the human imaginary of who we are as a people and how we ought to treat each other. This scalar jump from foodstuff to food-fueled ideology is nothing new, for good/bad qualifiers double as grounds for moral superiority and social distinction (Lupton 1996; Johnston and Baumann 2010; Finn 2017). Thus, analyzing the narratives of deliciousness and disgust can reveal how these meanings inform power relations across species (human and microbes) and amidst our own species (human relations). What follows is a weaving of participant observation, lived experience, and textual/ media analysis, putting together experiments and insights from a number of disciplines. Concomitant to a transdisciplinary approach to studying food, I mix epistemologies

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(e.g., empirical, phenomenological) and scalar foci (e.g., individual versus societal agency, as well as microorganism versus macro-level human relations), which may seem contradictory at times. Rather than attempt to resolve such contradictions, this chapter follows Annemarie Mol’s approach to the composite, or an approach that maintains multiplicitous perspectives (what she calls “worlds”) that “hang together” (2016). Mol uses the clafoutis to expand on the notion of composite, explaining that the dessert is made up of an agricultural world (ingredients), informed by a place-based/historico-cultural world (cuisine), that provides elements of nourishment from an organoleptic/nutritional (grams and calories) as well as a sensuous world (pleasure and memory). The result is not a homogeneous understanding of what is (a clafoutis), but a complex understanding of “the fascinatingly heterogeneous worlds” that meet in a food and coexist together (247). Similarly, this chapter observes the biochemical, physiological, and the ideological worlds as they hang together in delicious/disgusting narratives. I rely on a performative framework in order to unpack who or what is acting and how their actions confer agency and meaning. Deliciousness, for instance, is often thought as being inherent to a particular ingredient, maker, or place. These associations may be imagined in high quality contexts, such as caviar, a chef from a Michelin-star restaurant, or champagne from the Champagne appellation. But deliciousness exists well outside of these contexts, often in more subjective, circumstantial, or quotidian terms: in the secret ingredient of a family recipe, the feeling of wholesomeness when sharing a home-cooked meal, or the “specials” of a local eatery. These examples highlight the dynamic interplay between the material ingredient and the meanings of a food, suggesting that deliciousness might be better theorized as being processual instead of fixed. The same could be argued for disgust, in which the material and the semiotic intertwine to produce aversion and rejection. Thought of this way, deliciousness and unpalatability are emergent, not predetermined. Performativity also acknowledges that food emerges from a confluence of (f)actors, including human actors and more-than-human actants.2 Foods like surimi (Mansfield 2003), tomatoes (Heuts and Mol 2013), and scallops (Callon 1999) interface with their social, historical, political, and environmental contexts in ways that produce a tethered object that is always in relation with other objects of a network. For instance, the wildness of “wild salmon” is not merely descriptive; it is enacted and thus defines salmon differently than their farmed counterparts (Lien and Law 2011). While we may not think of foods as capable of “acting” in the sense of volition or sentience, extending the notion of “performance” to foods allows us to see what they do in relation to the human eater. How foods “enact” taste has been theorized by Barbara KirschenblattGimblett (1999), who explains that food performs its organoleptic features to discerning sense organs (e.g., tongue, nose, eyes), which subsequently decode food tastes. In the same way that deliciousness is perceived by the human as an incoming message, it is also performed by the food as an outgoing message for the human to interpret. By seeing foods as performative instead of static, performativity disrupts what is commonly considered an actionable subject. It sees agentic capacities as latent, not absent, that depend on material affordances (e.g., wheat bread bakes differently than rye bread due to physical differences in gluten concentration). Thus, it is important to remember that a solely human focus makes up only part of the narrative: we must also consider matters beyond what we consider capable of acting. Rather than assuming what good taste is (or is not), a performative lens would help us see past the preformulated definitions of deliciousness as articulated by food culture, commercial hype, or other food ideology.

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THE DELICIOUS NARRATIVE: EMBRACING MICROBES FOR TASTE INNOVATION Renewed attention toward fermented food focus on fermentation’s ability to transform foods with less energy (as a sustainability intervention) and with more bioavailable nutrients (as a health intervention). Sauces like the insect garums develop rich flavors using fewer resources than a meat-based stock boiled for hours; vegetable trimmings (like celery butts and pea shells) that are typically discarded can be reclaimed as starting material for kombuchas and vinegars; and the longer fermentation times of sourdough breads and cheeses make compounds like gluten and lactose easier to digest. As a result, tastemakers—including the likes of chefs, food scientists, product designers, and media influencers who shape the public’s opinion—have increasingly added fermentation into their culinary toolkit. Microbes may be seen as an easy resource to utilize because: (1) their microscopic size and shorter lifespans enable quicker turnaround for experimentation, and (2) our historical use of microbial life may serve as a precedent for continuing to use what is familiar, instead of creating an entirely new technique, machine, or chemical for flavor enhancement.3 Consider the Impossible Burger, which is so named because its burger patty tastes “bloody” yet remains meatless. This taste is conferred to the patty due to the work of the yeast species Pichia pastoris that has been genetically engineered to produce leghemoglobin, a compound similar to what is found in mammalian blood. The allure of the Impossible Burger resides in its taste, promising the sensation of meat-eating while circumventing the ethical and environmental cost to consuming animals. The relative success of the Impossible Burger could be attributed to the normalization of yeasts in food production, which stands in stark contrast to attempts at normalizing in vitro meat (IVM) production and mammalian cell culturing that is “too close” for (human) comfort. While IVM also poses as a meatless protein option, Neil Stephens reports that it is often discussed in terms of “zombie meat” or “lab-grown steak” (2010). These terms preclude the potential for IVM to be about taste because their connotations remind the consumer that producing this kind of life-form will necessarily be partial (i.e., “steak” instead of whole animal) in an existence “outside of ” mammalian sentience (i.e., undead like zombies). It is also worth noting that taste-testers of early IVM prototypes were weary of its gelatinous texture (Catts and Zurr 2004/5), fueling the emphasis on bite and mouthfeel in later iterations like “the cultured burger” (O’Riordan, Fotopoulu, and Stephens 2016, see also Wurgaft 2019). Considerable amounts of R&D search for the right tools, ingredients, and species to attain the balance of meat-like taste and texture. In alternative meat discourses, I cannot help but notice the difference in attitudes toward mechanism. Genetically modified yeasts are seen as an expendable tool, which differ from the genetically modified plant base (e.g., soy, corn) because the latter is consumed as an ingredient. As a tool, we may not consume the yeasts directly, just their outputs, and perhaps it is the fact that these yeasts occupy laboratory spaces, not in the field like soybean and corn, that we cannot imagine plants as tools. It seems to me that the expendability of yeasts has been largely accepted (or, arguably, taken for granted) by public consciousness. And, in contrast, the idea of expending (fellow) mammalian cells to technocratically solve carnivorousness seems uncanny (still; this is changing). Thus, it seems that taste, not necessarily the ethics of expendability, is what allows meatless alternatives to flourish in the contemporary foodscape.4

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This prioritization of taste is perhaps most pronounced in the culinary industry, where food-makers use microbes to unlock new tastes, heretofore undiscovered, and leverage these flavors as a marketable edge. Some fine-dining establishments in Scandinavia, for instance, develop robust fermentation programs to produce a wide range of tastes from a limited larder of seasonal ingredients as part of the principles of New Nordic Cuisine.5 Recently, many of these restaurants rely on a microbial food called koji, a Japanese ferment, due to its versatility in food transformations. Koji is produced using the fungal species Aspergillus oryzae, which contains two types of enzymes: proteases that break down proteins and amylases that break down starches. The protease enzymes convert proteins into free amino acids such as glutamate that our tongues subsequently interpret as being savory (note that glutamate is the operative compound that confers umami in MSG, or monosodium glutamate). For instance, koji is the key ingredient for miso and shoyu (i.e., soy sauce). When left to ferment for months or years, the koji breaks down the soy proteins into umami compounds, resulting in a depth of flavor not found in the original legume. Whereas Japanese cuisine tends to inoculate koji onto rice, these Nordic kitchens grow koji on whatever substrate is available locally in order to develop new tastes.6 At the world-renowned restaurant Noma in Denmark, local farmers produce more peas and barley than soybeans and rice; so, Noma substitutes barley for rice, and the resulting barley koji is mixed with other proteins (like peas, hazelnuts, and rye) to produce unique in-house condiments (affectionately called pea-so, hazel-so, and rye-so, respectively).7 By employing the logic of substitutionism, test kitchens and R&D endeavors experiment with microbial food products in search of latent flavors. Philosophically, the pursuit of delicious flavors functions on the complete ontological separation of humans and microbes. The resulting relationship between the two is built on utility, such that microbes are employed as enzymatic workhorses until the target flavor is delivered. The sense of wielding microbes as a tool is most apparent in the language used to describe the potential for microbes-as-laborers, evident in phrases such as “koji was going to be the key to unlocking the ‘fifth taste’ [umami] for us” in order to generate “ways of extracting umami from things native to our part of the world” (Redzepi and Zilbur 2018: 213, emphasis added). In turn, the repetitive performance of humans commandeering microbes sets up a narrational voice that solely features human expertise (i.e., “I made that [ferment]” versus a “we” that acknowledges more-thanhuman relations).8 In other words, the “success” of a ferment is a testament to the skill of the maker, not the work of the microbial life expended. However, the “failure” of a ferment is assigned to microbes as the source of off-flavors that could harm a prospective eater. Thus, deliciousness conflates with human mastery, and both are championed as the result of control over ingredient, control over environment, or, in the context of fermentation, control over microbe. This elision runs the risk of perpetuating the myth of human supremacy, where absolute control over microbial life becomes the assumed power relation for innovative taste-making, craftsmanship, and expertise.

THE DISGUSTING NARRATIVE: THE LAYERED DANGERS IN MICROBIAL FOODS Etymologically, disgust refers to bad (dis-) taste (gust-), often associated with what is unappealing, dangerous, or inappropriate. Although disgust can be based on physiological, psychological, or moral responses, they are not inherently value-negative. Instead, they may serve an evolutionary role of codifying sense memories into cautionary tales (e.g.,

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“avoid this next time”) or defining out-group food practices (e.g., “those are the people who eat that disgusting food”). For instance, many food cultures have developed taboos around meat-eating (e.g., eating beef, horse, or dog) or have defined “pure” diets based on excluding particular foods (e.g., vegan, halal, kosher, Jain diets, see also Curtis 2011). Some instances of disgust are innate, as in the case of genetic predispositions toward disliking bitter tastes (Negri et al. 2011, see also Bee Wilson 2015 on the Algerian mint experiment). But some are constructed, and it is these danger narratives that demonstrate how power operates in layered and surreptitious ways. In Purity and Danger, anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966) explains that cultural context determines what is permitted and what is prohibited, following the binary of the sacred/profane or, in secular terms, clean/unclean. Accordingly, contagion and dirt are not inherently dangerous but it is because they are “out of place” that they signal aberration and connote uncleanliness. What is important to note is that these valuations are assigned; they do not inhere to the object or action being described, and applying Douglas’s insights to microbial life can show that good/bad binaries do not always hold. For example, the location of Lactobacillus delbrueckii can signify probiotic, or healthpromoting, qualities when found in yogurt, but the bacteria can also be considered a contaminant in beer production as well as a causative agent for urinary tract infections when found inside a urethra. Microbes are context dependent. Or, consider the interiority/exteriority of the following bacteria in relation to the human body. Some human orifices are covered in a bacterial species called Staphylococcus aureus, which remain benign; however, when introduced to an open wound, a Staph infection results. Compare this to E. coli, which are naturally occurring species inside human/animal intestines and in fecal matter. These species can be found in the runoff water of farm operations or on the hands of food service employees who may inadvertently participate in the fecal-oral transmission of disease, which can subsequently produce (what we call) food poisoning. The negative outcomes in each of these instances is due to bacteria being “out of place” from where they normally occur: bacteria on the outside of the skin causes trouble when inside the body, or intestinal bacteria outside of the body connote an unhygienic, unclean, and dangerous environment for human food production. Although we may be quick to categorize microbes as being “good” or “bad,” these valuations are limited to a human perspective. Some microbes are along for the ride, some may even help us, but others can kill. To demonstrate the pernicious ways in which negative valuations can be assigned, I analyze a few experiments that feature a microbe “out of place.” Some experiments impose a narrative of disgust on the humans handling them, combining with and magnifying other notions of inferiority that affect human relations. In 2015, artist-researcher Tarsh Bates made bread that was leavened with the yeast species Candida albicans, instead of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (also known as baker’s yeast). C.albicans is the yeast species responsible for candidiasis, a medical condition more commonly known as thrush. Thrush affects both men and women in areas ranging from armpits to groins and genitalia, though it is worth noting that thrush is often synonymized with vaginal infections. In The Unsettling Eros of Contact Zones, Bates prepared Candidaleavened bread alongside a “normal” bread, and presented them to gallery attendees for tasting. Both breads were not consumed, leading Bates to conclude that “the disgust experienced when faced with Candida-leavened bread is tightly woven with ‘sexual’ disgust due to the metonymy of Candida and women’s genitals” (2015: 25). Considering how “feminine hygiene products” and “sanitary pads” are marketed under the pretense

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that the leaky human body must be cleaned back to normal, Bates’s bread exemplifies the perceived impurity of female bodies. That the gallery attendees refuse to consume the “normal” bread adjacent to the Candida bread indicates a “corruption effect” whereby “people are hesitant to consume the bread, even though the yeasts, including C. albicans, are killed during cooking by elevated temperatures and baking duration” (ibid.). It seems disgust toward food and toward people differ on an order of time. The biochemical rationale for disgust (i.e., the “bad” yeasts in bread) is short-lived, because the contagion is eliminated when the bread is baked. Yet, the discursive rationale for disgust (i.e., the “bad” person’s yeasts) is longer lasting due to the engrained, enduring, and imbricated nature of food inedibility and gendered impurities. On November 23, 2015, self-identified feminist blogger Zoe Stavri announced, “I’m making sourdough with my vaginal yeast” on Twitter. The tweet has since been removed by the blogger herself due to the misogynistic outcry and hate speech toward her. Unlike Bates’s gallery exhibition, Stavri conducted her “little home baking project” in a domestic kitchen, a place meant to signify safety and cleanliness. In a recap post on her blog, Stavri explains that her experiment exposed the discrepancies between real and perceived threats: the vaginal yeasts were likely outnumbered by the wild and ambient yeasts in her kitchen, the yeasts were killed off when the loaf was baked, and centuries of breadmaking have witnessed dough that incorporates yeasts that naturally thrive on human skin. Despite these considerations, Stavri recounts: I suspect the vast majority of the utter horror about my sourdough isn’t anything to do with ignorance on food hygiene, but more to do with a general mistrust and horror at vag[ina] . . . It probably doesn’t matter that my sourdough may or may not contain any actual vaginal yeast. The very idea of it seems to horrify people more than enough. (Stavri 2015, para 13, 16, emphasis in original) Similar to Bates’s bread experiment, the perceived threat of a “bad” yeast outweighs the actual threat since the yeasts cannot survive baking temperatures. Unlike Bates, public rejection of Stavri’s experiment targets her as a person, accusing her feminism and womanhood in tweets including “something is seriously wrong with you,” mentions of her “madness on display,” and “this isn’t about empowering women, this is you being a retard trying to prove nothing, its [sic] disgusting.”9 Examining Bates and Stavri side by side indicates that disgust spans across species, food, and person: contamination in the Bates experiment is located in the “bad” yeast and the bread, whereas contamination in the Stavri experiment is embodied. Compare these reactions to a beer inoculated with yeasts isolated from a man’s beard. Rogue Beer, a microbrewery located in Portland, Oregon, debuted its Beard Beer in 2012 using the endogenous yeasts living on the beard of master brewer John Maier. Responses to Beard Beer were positive enough for Rogue to cross-promote Beard Beer as the official beer for No Shave November, an organization promoting cancer awareness (Rogue Beer 2015). The Smithsonian online magazine features Rogue Ale’s experiment as a quest for extreme locality: “Not satisfied with growing his own barley, hops and honey, John Maier of Rogue Ales turned to his facial hair in order to find new flavors” (Nuwer 2012). The local television news (“Beer from a Beard,” April 1, 2013) provides a backstory that the beer was “a bit of a joke,” to which “Maier said there’s no reason to be afraid of beard beer, since yeast is everywhere.” While Maier’s assertion indicates a statement of scientific fact (microbes are everywhere), it is also a testament to his privilege as a cismale, tenured head-brewer of a leading microbrewery. Thus, Maier’s beard beer does not

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render the microbe (yeast) as a food contaminant per se; rather, the social positioning of the microbes’ origins can play into constructions of permissibility. To be sure, one key difference between Stavri’s bread and Rogue’s Beard Beer is from where on the human body the microbes come. One might assume that cooking with ingredients from a man’s genital regions may illicit just as much an ill-response as what Stavri experienced. Here, I turn to the work of Paul “Fotie” Photenhauer who has selfpublished two cookbooks on the potential of using semen for food recipes (2008) and cocktails (2013). Reactions to these cookbooks on Twitter were cheeky, citing recipes that use “man batter” and “leftovers” or using the alliterated hashtag #cookingwithcum. At worst, responses were one of shock or the punchline to sarcastic humor. While both the works of Stavri and Photenhauer could be seen as deeply experimental and pursued for the sake of curiosity, they point to starkly different realities based on how their results were received by a public (albeit digital) audience. Whereas Stavri’s personhood—indeed womanhood—is called into question and accused, Photenhauer’s manhood is celebrated. As seen in the rejection toward the bread experiments of Bates and Stavri, narratives of disgust emerge when the self/other line is erased, collapsing the space between human and microbe. These disgust narratives feed into a broader imaginary of perceiving the body as impermeable and bound. The bounded body is consistent with Elizabeth Grosz’s argument that Western philosophy bases itself in male-oriented understandings of corporeality (1994; see also Shildrick 1997 and Overend 2011). The Candida-leavened bread exemplifies microbes “out of place,” and the gallery reactions indicate that the only acceptable place for C.albicans in the human imaginary is for it to be contained within the female reproductive organs. This is despite the fact that candidiasis affects men as well as other orifices such as the mouth and nose. In each of these cases—breads, beers, and cookbooks—the perceived threat of contamination outweighs the real one in ways that conflate moral judgment and social discrimination. Analyzing these examples suggest that disgust may originate from the possible explanation of a layered yuck-factor, conflating the perceived danger from microbes being “out of place” and the immoral status of others. As William Ian Miller describes in The Anatomy of Disgust (1998), a breadcrumb that is stuck in a man’s beard signifies more than a morsel of food that is “out of place”; the breadcrumb signals the moral failure of the man in upholding the societal imperative to clean and be clean. For Bates and Stavri, the “out of place” yeast signifies a moral transgression of females having created “unclean” breads in “clean” contexts like domestic kitchens and galleries. Meanwhile, Maier’s beard-yeast was not “out of place” because of the gendered association of a male-dominated beer industry. Thus, disgust is rejection toward a threat—both real and imagined—as well as a resentment to memorize for future encounters.

SELECTIVE MEMORIES AND REIMAGINING OUR-SELVES AS COMPOSITE Memory is always partial and, despite our coevolution with microbial life, we humans seem to preferentially recall moments of vanquish and triumph over microbes instead of the tangled moments of everyday existence. Perhaps our obsession with control is erroneously (ironically) fueled by the fact that it remains aspirational and unattainable, never absolute. I argue that, if we are to relinquish control in ways that do not harm our own, then we would be better to imagine our constitution differently.

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To better understand the origins of control imaginaries, I turn to Louis Pasteur, the presumed father of modern microbiology. Pasteur coupled the notions of control and knowledge through two experiments: in one, he identified the microorganism responsible for spreading the anthrax disease and, in the other, he prevented the spoilage of meat extract by maintaining sterile conditions. While these findings provided rationales for why humans and food were thought to inexplicably perish (i.e., the “spontaneous” part of spontaneous germination), Pasteur’s work emerged less out of his research alone and more out of the failures of the then-popular hygienism movement, which was too vague and too general to secure a single source of contagion (Latour 1988: 45). Yet, having isolated the “unknown” microbe in a “known” scientific space, Pasteur “discovered” microbes only in the context of disease and decay, concretizing microbial pathogenicity as scientific fact.10 (Pasteurian hegemony continues into the contemporary moment, with the gold standard for sterilization being pasteurization.) By the time germ theory permeated the American conscience, populist campaigns against adulterated foods enabled scientists to play “an increasingly prominent role in the food industry’s purity campaign” (Friedberg 2004: 44) and “to embrace purity as something that excluded those who did not adopt a particular way of life” (Dupuis 2015: 77). These historical accounts are rehashed in textbooks, in food safety credentialing, and through oral pedagogy, all of which serve to selectively reinforce the memory of exercising control over microbial life in the name of purity. What these accounts tell us is that purity was not only a rally-cry to fix food adulteration and contamination, it was also a way to control other humans and their eating practices because consuming adulterated food was seen as being dangerous to the pure body, whose sanctity, as this logic goes, ends at the edge of skin. By seeing everything outside the body as a potential threat, what goes into “the body” (i.e., consumed) frames individual control and personal purity as markers of ethical success. The problem with purism, as articulated by Alexis Shotwell, is that it “is simultaneously inadequate, impossible, and politically dangerous for shared projects of living on earth … such as energy use, climate change, and eating” (2016: 107). That we are yet unable to see our bodies as being more than human—or as containing multitudes, as Ed Yong would say—requires that we redefine what it means to be human both physiologically and philosophically. Lisa Heldke (2018) borrows the analogy of a donut to describe our bodies (with the alimentary canal being the hole) and uses it to challenge interiority and exteriority so staunchly lodged in philosophical renderings of the body: Look deep inside of us, into the “heart” of us, where our “truest selves” must lodge, and what does each of us find? We find not what our substance ontologies would seem to promise—some solid, essential core—but the rest of the world. But wait; perhaps there’s hope for that essential core after all, because without the world running through us, without this wealth of life forms populating our guts, we individuals would not be, would not survive. We’d starve to death, for one thing, without the casts of thousands helping us digest that slice of bread we just masticated. So, this world-in-our-gut may be external, but that external world is essential to our self, is constitutive of it. (253–4, original emphasis) The outside world is inside of us, twisting the concepts of interiority and exteriority into a Möbius strip. Efforts to demarcate and define the contours of a body bring to mind Mary Douglas’s ideas on hygiene as “a positive effort to organise the environment” (1966: 2). The hygienic, pure body was never “pure” in the sense of tabula rasa, unsullied and immaculate;

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it epitomizes control, reflecting a body that has followed and enforced moral judgments on what is permissible and what should be forbidden. These values inform the acceptable (delicious) and unacceptable (disgusting) ways that food and bodies come into being. Here I gesture to the idea of a composite body that points to the compound, complex manner in which foods, bodies, and places constitute each other. In comparison to the so-called pure body, the composite body “offends against order” (ibid.) and therefore remains messy. Whereas purity is vertical and categorical, composites defy essentialism with their myriad parts. Given that our physical bodies are made up of as many human cells as microbial cells, our sense of self is simultaneously multiplicitous and ambiguous (we just never acquiesced to seeing our-selves in that way). When we eat, for example, who or what are we actually feeding, supporting, and enabling to survive? While there are some murmurings of post-Pasteurian ethics (Paxson 2012, Finlay and Arrieta 2016), what we have come to know about microbes (ontologies) and how we have come to know them (epistemologies) have predetermined and overdetermined the ethics of engaging with microbes and the bodies that handle them. The neologism of “ontoethico-epistemologies” as Karen Barad (2007) articulates, can help us to understand the entwined nature of antagonizing microbial life (microbes are ontologically bad), using it as a justification to further positivist understandings of cause and effect (we know this by science), and the ethical stakes of having lived with a human-centered mindset (man/ technology will prevail, or so we believe). This means that changing the stance on one requires a shift in all three dimensions of metaphysics.

CHANGING THE NARRATIVE: A HOPEFUL CONCLUSION Changing the narrative around foods is important, but we must also change the way we conceive the borders of selfhood and otherness, particularly around how these lines reinscribe existing hierarchies: human over microbe, certain humans over others, or, more broadly, self over other. Flattening these hierarchies is not enough; instead, we must take seriously the relations that constitute our-selves and accept interdependence as the norm. Part of this redefinition entails a deep engagement with the composite body, which seeks to redistribute agency across all beings that compose a body, both materially and discursively. Reconsidering ourselves as composite human bodies and humans situated in more-than-human foodscapes will aid us in practicing ethics on more reflexive terms. It may assist with the shift from thinking ourselves as pure, individual, and exceptional to porous, multiple, and participatory. To summarize, taste innovation requires that human self and microbial other are ontologically separate in order to instrumentalize and employ them. The cost of thinking in these terms means perpetuating a false (and dangerous) narrative of human mastery. The invisibility of microbes perpetuates the assumption that control is (or must be) absolute, deploying science and purity campaigns to mitigate threats and danger. Danger turns to disgust through processes of embodiment, which can be literal or imagined, disproportionately affecting others who embody difference. Analyzing disgust narratives can help us understand how contamination on a microbial level can be short-lived, whereas contamination in the human imaginary lasts longer and withholds agency from those discriminated against. While delicious/disgusting narratives may seem benign as a reaction to food, they enable rhetorics of purity and superiority that could stand to be scrutinized and revised if we are to reimagine more equitable ways of practicing humanity.

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One such way is in (re)imagining the human body as always and already a composite. To be made up of various parts demands an attention to specificity, and I would argue that it is attuning to these differences that we can start to (re)imagine our-selves and the narratives we tell.

NOTES 1 To clarify terminology, I use the words delicious/disgusting as adjectives that describe a taste evaluation (e.g., a delicious cake, a disgusting cheese). These words are experiential. These words differ from attitudes toward a food: although an attitude of disgust is easy to imagine, its counterpart for delicious may be harder to imagine (perhaps an attitude of enthusiasm may be a close approximation, e.g., “She expressed enthusiasm/disgust toward the smelt.”). Lastly, the noun-forms of delicious/disgusting might be deliciousness and unpalatability (or, disgusting-ness, if it was a word). 2 The concept of actants was developed by Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett to mean “something that acts” without assuming its agency to originate from a human actor. While Science and Technology Studies and Actor-Network Theory rely on actants to examine performative assemblages in their complexity, the dangers of relying on networked ontologies is the “flattening” of all actors/actants, dismissing particular histories that may deserve more attention. Accordingly, I use the term more-than-human over nonhuman or posthuman, and evoke the term actant insofar as it gestures to material agencies we often overlook. 3 Patenting new procedures often faces institutional and bureaucratic delays, including federal approval procedures and, if needed, clinical trials. Indeed, Impossible Burger’s leghemoglobin was permissible by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration because it fell under the Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS) provision. 4 Impossible Burger’s competitor, Beyond Meat, distinguishes itself by not using GMO ingredients (i.e., engineered yeasts), relying instead on coconut oil (for juicy texture) and beet juice (for red hue/metallic taste). While both meat analogues may expand the repertoire of vegetarian dining options, they continue to promote schema of burgers and patties, within which “the veggie option” remains secondary to the original version of meat. Not only does this follow Peter Singer’s ideas of animal expendability (1975), it frames “better” consumption choices as the answer. 5 Admittedly, much of the critique against New Nordic Cuisine is that its tenets are no different than any other cuisines that use local, seasonal ingredients. This chapter does not disagree with this critique, but uses New Nordic Cuisine as a productively problematic example that gathers taste innovation techniques from outside of the Nordic context (e.g., Japan, Mexico) to promote itself. Perhaps more interesting are the endeavors of novel misos and comparisons of their micro-terroirs in how taste, place, and speciation interrelate (see Evans 2021). 6 The substrate for koji can also be wheat or beans, depending on regional/climate affordances. For instance, Hokkaido uses black beans to make their koji because the growing season for rice is too short above the 45th parallel. This, too, was once an innovation and points to the adaptive relationship between present and past. 7 These observations were the result of a four-month internship at the Nordic Food Lab and a three-week apprenticeship (as stagier) at a restaurant subsidiary of Noma. 8 Linguistic limitations should be noted here in that English sets up an actionable subject by default of sentence construction. For instance, Japanese language commonly sets up a sentence constructed in the passive voice, indicating that fermentation “is done unto” an

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ingredient (i.e., 発酵された). The differential affordances in language would be interesting to explore in other food cultures that describe differently what “does” the fermenting. 9 The use of these tweets as evidence is not meant to be done in impunity, but considers the insights of Ahmed, Bath, and Demartini (2017) that Twitter is both publically accessible but, if searched, can identify its source (including metadata). This chapter does not analyze data sets or metadata and instead focuses on text as a public utterance. Taking this into account, identifiers have been omitted to avoid singling out individual Twitter accounts. 0 There is something to be said here about epistemic encounters as forms of mastery, which has 1 arguably fueled colonial endeavors of knowing/conquering the Other (see Beausoleil 2016 on the problematic nature, and potential solutions to, epistemic encounters).

REFERENCES Ahmed, W., P. A. Bath, and G. Demartini (2017), “Using Twitter as a Data Source: An Overview of Ethical, Legal, and Methodological Challenges,” in K. Woodfield (ed.), The Ethics of Online Research, (Advances in Research Ethics and Integrity, Vol. 2), 79–107, Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing. Barad, K. (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bates, T. (2015), “We Have Never Been Homo sapiens: CandidaHomo naturecultures,” Journal of Media and Communication, 6 (2): 16–32. Beausoleil, E. (2016), “Responsibility as Responsiveness: Enacting a Dispositional Ethics of Encounter,” Political Theory, 45 (3): 291–318. “Beer from a Beard: Rogue Ales Unveils Latest Creation,” KPTV-FOX12 (2013), April 1. Available online:  https://www.kptv.com/news/beer-from-a-beard-rogue-ales-unveils-latest-creation/ article_95d2a5c2-679c-5cbc-8e52-a8e7d3002680.html (accessed July 10, 2018). Bone, E. (2018), Microbia: A Journey into the Unseen World around You. Pennsylvania: Rodale. Callon, M. (1999), “Some Elements of a Sociology in Transition,” in M. Biaglioi (ed.) The Science Studies Reader, 67–83, London: Routledge. Catts, O., and I. Zurr (2004/5), “Ingestion/Disembodies Cuisine,” Cabinet, 16: 1–3. Curtis, V. (2011), “Why Disgust Matters,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 366 (1583): 3478–90. David, L. A., C. F. Maurice, R. N. Carmody, D. B. Gootenberg, J. E. Button, B. E. Wolfe, A. V. Ling, A. S. Devlin, Y. Varma, M. A. Fischbach, S. B. Biddinger, R. J. Dutton, and P. J. Turnbaugh (2014), “Diet Rapidly and Reproducibly Alters the Human Gut Microbiome,” Nature, 505 (7484): 559. Douglas, M. ([1966] 2005), Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, New York: Routledge. Dupuis, E. M. (2015), Dangerous Digestion: The Politics of American Dietary Advice, Berkeley: University of California Press. Enders, G. (2014), Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ, Vancouver: Greystone Books. Evans, J. D. (2014), “Observations from the Frontier of Deliciousness,” in MAD Dispatches: What Is Cooking? Editor: Nordic Food Lab, 80–91, Copenhagen, DK: MAD. Evans, J. D. (2021), “Novel misos,” Online webinar presented at the Spring Fermentology series, hosted by Department of Applied Ecology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, January 28. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ci-eARCoO_c&l ist=PLsSlVlDbPkFQrvOUmjuhFbo92RkbVzYwh&index=21.

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Evans, J., R. Flore, and M. Bom Frøst (2017), On Eating Insects: Essays, Stories, and Recipes, London: Phaidon Press. Finn, M. S. (2017), Discriminating Taste: How Class Anxiety Created the American Food Revolution, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Finlay, B. and M. -C. Arrietta (2016), Let Them Eat Dirt: Saving Your Child From an Oversanitized World, Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books. Fishel, S. (2018), “Fermenters of the World Unite!” CuiZine: Journal of Canadian Food Cultures, 9 (2). Freidberg, S. (2004), French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grosz, E. (1994), Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heldke, L. M. (2018), “It’s Chomping All the Way Down: Toward an Ontology of the Human Individual,” Monist, 101 (3): 247–60. Heuts, F., and A. Mol (2013), “What is a Good Tomato? A Case of Valuing in Practice,” Valuation Studies, 1 (2): 125–46. Johnston, J., and S. Baumann (2010), Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape, New York: Routledge. Katz, S. E. (2012), The Art of Fermentation: An In-depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World, White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (1999), “Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium,” Performance Research, 4 (1): 1–30. Latour, B. (1988), The Pasteurization of France, trans. J. Law, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Lien, M. E., and J. Law (2011), “‘Emergent Aliens’: On Salmon, Nature, and Their Enactment,” Ethnos, 76 (1): 65–87. Lupton, D. (1996), Food, the Body, and the Self, London: Sage Publications. Mansfield, B. (2003), “Fish, Factory Trawlers, and Imitation Crab: The Nature of Quality in the Seafood Industry,” Journal of Rural Studies, 19 (1): 9–21. Margulis, L. (1998), Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution, New York: Basic Books. McFall-Ngai, M., M. G. Hadfield, T. C. G. Bosch, H. V. Carey, T. Domazet-Lošo, A. E. Douglas, N. Dubilier, G. Eberl, T. Fukami, S. F. Gilbert, U. Hentschel, N. King, S. Kjelleberg, A. Knoll, N. Kremer, S. K. Mazmanian, J. L. Metcalf, K. Nealson, N. E. Pierce, J. F. Rawls, A. Reid, E. G. Ruby, M. Rumpho, J. G. Sanders, D. Tautz, and J. J. Wernegreen (2013), “Animals in a Bacterial World: A New Imperative for the Life Sciences,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110 (9): 3229–36. Miller, W. I. (1998), The Anatomy of Disgust, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mol, A. (2016), “Clafoutis as a Composite: On Hanging Together Felicitously,” in J. Law and E. Rupert (eds.), Modes of Knowing: Resources from the Baroque, 242–65, Manchester, UK: Mattering Press. Mouritsen, O. G., L. Duelund, G. Calleja, and M. Bom Frøst (2017), “Flavour of Fermented Fish, Insect, Game, and Pea Sauces: Garum Revisited,” International Journal of Food Science, 9: 16–28. Negri, R., M. Di Feola, S. Di Domenico, M. G. Scala, G. Artesi, S. Valente, A. Smarrazzo, F. Turco, G. Morini, and L. Greco (2011), “Taste Perception and Food Choices,” Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition, 54 (5): 624–29. Nuwer, R. (2012), “Brewmaster Makes Beer from his Beard Yeast,” Smithsonian.com, October 8. Available online: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/brewmaster-makes-beerfrom-his-beard-yeast-64843043/ (accessed July 10, 2018).

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O’Riordan, K., A. Fotopoulou, and N. Stephens (2016), “The First Bite: Imaginaries, Promotional Publics and the Laboratory Grown Burger,” Public Understanding of Science, 26 (2): 148–63. Overend, A. (2011), “Leaky Bodies and the Gendering of Candida Experiences,” Women’s Health and Urban Life, 10 (2): 94–113. Paxson, H. (2012), The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America, Berkeley: University of California Press. Photenhauer, P. (2008), Natural Harvest: A Collection of Semen-based Recipes, Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace. Photenhauer, P. (2013), Semenology: The Semen Bartender’s Handbook, Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace. Redzepi, R., and D. Zilbur (2018), The Noma Guide to Fermentation, New York: Artisan, a division of Workman Publishing. Rogue Beer. (2015), “Beard Beer, Official Beer of No-Shave November,” Rogue Beer Official Website, September 28. Available online: https://www.rogue.com/stories/beard-beer-officialbeer-of-no-shave-november (accessed August 22, 2018). Shildrick, M. (1997), Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio)ethics, London: Routledge. Singer, P. (1975), Animal Liberation: A New Ethics of Our Treatment of Animals, New York: HarperCollins. Shotwell, A. (2016), Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stavri, Z. (2015), “I’m Making Sourdough with My Vaginal Yeast,” Another Angry Woman, November 24. Available online: https://anotherangrywoman.com/2015/11/24/im-makingsourdough-with-my-vaginal-yeast-2/ (accessed December 3, 2016). Steinkraus, K. H. (2006), “Fermentations in World Food Processing,” Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety, 1: 23–31. Stephens, N. (2010), “In Vitro Meat: Zombies on the Menu?” Scripted: A Journal of Law, Technology & Society, 7 (2): 394–401. Wilson, B. (2015), First Bite: How We Learn to Eat, New York: Basic Books. Wurgaft, B. (2019), Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food, Berkeley: University of California Press. Yong, E. (2016), I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes within Us and a Grander View of Life, New York: HarperCollins.

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CHAPTER THREE

How Does Memory Impact Food Choice and Preference? The Role of Implicit and Imperfect Processes in Research on Food Attitudes LEIGHANN R. CHAFFEE

Describe your most recent meal—what, exactly, did you eat? Do you recall the ingredients and portion size? How did the meal taste? From cost to convenience to contextual cues, a variety of factors influenced your decision of what, when, and where to eat. Sophisticated cognitive processes exerted their guidance as well, perhaps in the decision to pack a wholesome lunch, or to go outside and eat at a park instead of at the desk. But how do we determine if the food will be tasty, satisfying, healthy,1 and/or available? Our memory! Previous experiences—with a specific food or a similar food— shape attitudes toward the food and thus the motivation to consume. The goal of this chapter is to employ concepts from psychology to explore the interaction of memory and food preferences in driving food choices, while illuminating some key limitations in food memories and the circumstances under which memory is unreliable. Yet research in food studies and nutrition relies on memory, resulting in significant limitations in the practical understanding between nutrition and health. The automatic, implicit processes of human memory also influence food preferences and complement the more deliberate processes to drive eating. Memory stores information from lived experiences to influence food preferences and potentially provides avenues to improve research methods and eating habits.

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MEMORY AS A PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESS Psychologists define memory as the persistence of information or learning over time, though this definition differs slightly across theoretical orientations. Eating is directed by a variety of psychological processes, starting with basic functions such as sensation and perception. The taste, smell, and appearance of a food are processed by the brain, allowing perception of the complexities of flavor, whether it be a boring office lunch or a gourmet meal. Perception cooperates with higher cognitive processes, such as decisionmaking and memory, to guide food choice. In this process, taste plays a significant role; after all, we choose meals that are anticipated to taste at least moderately pleasant (Glanz et al. 1998). However, how do humans and animals know if the available food will taste acceptable? The line cook at a favorite restaurant is unlikely to invite patrons back for a taste test, and kids and adults alike cannot avoid trying new foods. Memory of similar foods or experiences in the past guides anticipation and judgment about the food at hand. Memory is essential for survival—the good and bad events of the past guide the present experience. From the appearance of palatable (and revolting) foods to the location of satisfying meals, and the skills like cooking and grocery gathering that yield sufficient nutrition, memory guides behavior. Remembered enjoyment shapes preferences (Rozin and Vollmeck 1986), allowing humans to form their favorite foods. Memory is a cognitive process that depends on sensation and perception: sensory experiences, including the sight, smell, taste, texture, and even sound of good and bad foods, are integrated for perception and interpretation. Food memory is robustly linked with appetite and satiety, as the memory of previous intake outweighs physiological sensations of hunger and fullness to drive eating (for review, see Higgs 2005). These processes represent various aspects of memory: Memory can be explicit or declarative for personally experienced events and knowledge, or implicit or nondeclarative for information stored automatically and outside of conscious awareness (Fazio and Olson 2003). Explicit memories are conscious recollections of past events, important names and dates, and the knowledge we acquire to successfully complete responsibilities at home and work. Implicit memories include conditioned responses (e.g., taste aversion after food poisoning), the incidental encoding—which means the unconscious processing of information into the memory system—of space and frequency (e.g., the realization you already ate four cookies without counting them), and procedural or motor skills (e.g., a talented person tossing a pizza crust high in the air with ease) (Figure 3.1). Food memory complements motivation, guiding goal-directed behavior for survival through behaviors such as eating. Together, memory and motivation influence evaluations of stimuli and attitudes.2 This feature of food memory is illustrated further by the neurological processes at play. The brain area most associated with memory function is the hippocampus, which receives and responds to appetite signals like the hormone leptin. Appetite signals for hunger and satiety exert their effects across multiple brain areas, including the hippocampus. This allows signals for hunger and satiety to modulate food-related memory processing (Kanoski et al. 2001). The role of contextual cues, reward processing, and higher cognitive processes demonstrate the complexity of food choice and influences beyond memory (Figure 3.1). Despite the remarkable capacity of memory, it is prone to errors and omissions, and vulnerable to personal biases. When encoding information into memory, we patch together the limited information we perceive at that moment. The process of accessing information stored in long-term memory is termed recall. During recall memories are

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FIGURE 3.1  Diagram of human memory processes. Source: Author

fragile and vulnerable to change (Loftus 1979). Memory itself is a constructive and “reconstructive” process (Loftus 1996), as information may be integrated when originally encountered or later when the memory is recalled. Memory is more akin to a painting with touches added each time it is observed, rather than a photographic image that is fixed once taken. The malleability of human memory informs analysis of the methods employed in contemporary food research and the subsequent health and nutrition recommendations put forth by this field.

WHAT DID YOU EAT? SELF-REPORT IN CONTEMPORARY NUTRITIONAL RESEARCH A great deal of contemporary research on food choice, health, and nutrition leans heavily on participants’ memory for data that eventually guides nutrition recommendations. What is it like to be a participant in these studies? Consider the experience of using a mobile app or food diary to track eating. This process is similar to memory-based dietary assessment measures commonly employed in nutrition and consumption research. Whether inquiring about food preferences and attitudes, experiences, or actual intake, researchers trust self-report. It is impractical to observe participants in their natural environment; after all, food researchers rarely enter the home or follow their participants from rise to rest to record every interaction with food. Because it is not feasible to directly measure these behaviors, researchers frequently collect data using participant self-report measures such as questionnaires, surveys, and interviews.

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A prime example of a nutritional survey relying on self-report is the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) of the United States. Dietary guidelines are iterated with attention to findings from nutrition surveys administered to a large, crosssectional sample of the population.3 In NHANES, dietary behavior is inquired during an in-home interview, participants complete a twenty-four-hour dietary recall and a foodfrequency questionnaire (FFQ) is mailed to participants to follow up (Block et al. 1986; US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2017). The NHANES is a twenty-fourpage multiple choice type questionnaire, and participants fill in the bubbles to indicate their eating patterns, similar to a standardized test. The FFQ is an additional method of collecting dietary intake in nutrition, health, and epidemiological study. Participants report the consumption of foods and food groups, for example, oranges and orange juice, indicating how often they are consumed from a list of specified frequencies (never, monthly, weekly, two to four times per week, five to six times per week, daily, two to four times per day, more than five times per day). Based on a finite list of foods, with limited preparations, food databases are used to calculate numeric energy (calorie) values from the self-reported foods eaten. Additional methods for dietary assessment include the open-ended twentyfour-hour dietary recall administered by a trained interviewer, self-administered dietary recording, plus other surveys and interview protocols (Shim, Oh, and Kim 2014). Researchers studying eating patterns and preferences use methods to collect data via surveys as described above, or in the laboratory or a field setting. For example, in the “bogus taste test,” participants consume a test meal, typically in a laboratory setting under the guide of evaluating its taste, and researchers measure intake to test a hypothesis such as the influence of certain advertisements (Robinson et al. 2017). In addition to the way the questions are asked, the social and physical research settings are equally important considerations. The practical limitations in directly measuring natural eating habits justify why contemporary food studies and nutrition research commonly rely on memory-based dietary assessment methods such as a twenty-four-hour or seven-day look back on foods eaten. Yet as early as 1987 we knew that a far greater duration of recording was necessary when researchers at the US department of agriculture reported that thirty-one days of food intake recording was required for precise estimate of food energy intake (Basiotis et al. 1987). This study did not rely as heavily on memory; the participants were trained in accurately measuring portion sizes and logging their daily intake in real time. More recently, memory-based dietary assessment methods have received extensive criticism, which is perhaps of no surprise. Given the role of memory-based dietary assessment in the development of dietary guidelines, these criticisms stem from a failure to abate the obesity epidemic despite decades of attention (Roberto et al. 2015). The critical evidence that challenges the soundness of memory-based dietary assessment methods is extensive. Most of this research compares self-reported data with research techniques that more directly measure energy used by a person. For instance, in the technique called total energy expenditure (TEE) intake, a stable isotope of oxygen is used to measure carbon dioxide production, which indicates energy expenditure (Schoeller and van Santen 1982). A comparison of self-reported dietary intake with TEE intake illuminates the conditions under which underreporting is likely to occur, to be explored in this chapter. However, the cost of the chemical analysis required to estimate TEE limits the use of this technique in most research. To further assess the validity of these methods, consider the role of memory for a research participant completing a twenty-four-hour dietary recall or a FFQ, and

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try to list every food you ate and every beverage you drank in the past day, detailing ingredients, portions, condiments, and seasonings. A research participant responding to a questionnaire about food attitudes, answering interview questions about their experience, completing a food log, or interacting in a lab setting relies thus on their memory to navigate the process, as they access information in long-term storage. Though memory is often reliable, it is prone to errors and omissions. Imagine the experience of a participant completing a diet log by entering their foods consumed. Even without any bad intentions, the potential for errors arises at several key points in this process. If they are entering the food simultaneous to intake, for instance completing a food log at home, errors can occur via omissions, if they overlook a food item that is not easy to record, or that perhaps they do not want to disclose (whether deliberate or unintentional; Schacter 1999) as well as through invalid report of portion sizes. Participants may reflect on attitudes about healthy foods and adjust their responses accordingly; after all, it is hard to admit to consuming a large portion of junk food. When participants complete an interview or the questionnaire some time after the food was consumed, the dynamic constructive and reconstructive process influences the accuracy of self-report, because memory is especially fragile upon retrieval (Schacter, Norman, and Koustaal 1998). Memory is malleable in the process of reconstruction and reconsolidation—the re-encoding of memories after recall—which occurs in both twenty-four-hour recall and FFQs. The procedures used in most memory-based dietary assessment methods mimic those used by cognitive scientists to evoke false memories, omissions, and the constructive processes of memory by providing semantically related words, repeated prompts and questioning, and encouragement to imagine or think back to past experiences (Archer, Pavela, and Lavie 2015). Finally, the database itself, used to calculate energy intake and micronutrients, has obvious shortcomings given the breadth of food options available in the modern food environment. Meals consumed outside of the home, especially prepared by others, are particularly problematic as portion size estimates, unknown ingredients, and hyper-palatability undermine accurate reporting (Archer, Hand, and Blair 2013). It is not surprising that these subjective, memory-based assessment methods are faulty, but the degree of their inadequacy is alarming. Comparison of self-reported energy intake and physiological techniques to measure energy expenditure demonstrates the ubiquity of underreporting (for review, see Hill and Davies 2001). Archer, Hand, and Blair (2013) evaluated the four-decade history of NHANES data, from 1971 to 2010, and determined that energy intake for the majority of participants was not physiologically sufficient to sustain life (in 67.3 percent of women and 58.7 percent of men). Paradoxically, while population health has declined due to the consequences of obesity, self-reported consumption of fatty and carbohydrate-rich foods has decreased (Heitmann, Lissner, and Osler 2000). Pooled results from five studies confirm that accuracy of self-report varies— average rates of energy underreporting was 28 percent with FFQ and 15 percent with twenty-four-hour recall, while sodium underreporting is more extreme than potassium underreporting (Freedman et al. 2014, 2015). Other researchers indicate that a sevenday food diary provides superior validity to the FFQ, despite the increased burden on research participants (McKeown et al. 2001). Why are we so prone to energy misreporting? Three key explanations are the malleability of human memory, social desirability, and the complexity of the modern food environment. Social desirability, an individual’s wish to convey an image that aligns with social norms or the tendency to consciously misreport due to perceptions about social

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appropriateness, also plays a key role in studies of dietary intake (Maurer et al. 2006). The social desirability bias is not uniform and may vary by context, the demand characteristics of the study, and individual characteristics such as gender (Hébert et al. 1997). The modern food environment is an obstacle to rational food choice, predisposing reliance on simple heuristics given the volume of food decisions required each day. Abundant temptations for highly palatable foods and sugary beverages influence motivation and activate the reward system, and ultimately what we eat. The present context can influence reporting bias due to social desirability, for instance underreporting of fat consumption increasing into the 1990s with public health campaigns warning of excessive fats (Heitmann, Lissner, and Osler 2000). The selective and variable nature of underreporting demonstrates the contextual influences on reporting bias. Are food memories as vulnerable as episodic memories for false information and misreporting? Absolutely. Loftus and other memory researchers have successfully planted false memories for bad experiences with certain foods, such as getting sick from strawberry ice cream or ill from dill pickles, leading to decreased preferences and consumption of those foods (for review, see Bernstein and Loftus 2009). Archer et al.s (2015) recent work, described above, highlights the potential for false reporting on memory-based dietary assessment methods. Accurately assessing dietary intake with limited resources poses a challenge to researchers. Despite the potential for errors reviewed thus far, many researchers stand by the utility of memory-based dietary assessment methods for informing policy (e.g., Hébert et al. 2014; Davy and Estabrooks 2015). They argue that measuring dietary intake at multiple time points provides valuable data, and cite the prohibitive cost of biological sampling for dietary indicators as evidence against alternative measurements. No single research design will perfectly capture dietary intake,4 yet a majority of studies use methods relying on memory and self-report providing only subjective estimates of food intake. The fallibility of memory-based dietary assessment methods has potential consequences for nutrition recommendations, public health campaigns, and the validity of data on dietary intake across the food studies disciplines. Research in psychology interrogates the relationship between deliberate or explicit self-report instruments and automatic, implicit processes. Consider the relative contribution of automatic and deliberate processes in behavior—when in conflict, which one of these drives choices, like what we choose to eat?

WHAT DO YOU LIKE? IMPLICIT ATTITUDES AND PREFERENCES The explicit self-report measures described above, though practical for food and nutrition research, have clear drawbacks. Self-report instruments measure deliberate attitudes and predict behavior when a person has sufficient resources such as self-control and working memory capacity (Friese, Hofmann, and Wänke 2008). An individual might hold an explicit attitude that favors organic food, genuinely believing that it is a better food source. Yet the same person is influenced by advertisements and past experiences and may hold implicit attitudes that strongly favor junk food such as freezer meals or diet soda. In this example, the conscious, deliberate, explicit attitudes do not align with the automatic, unconscious implicit attitudes. How might the automatic processes drive behavior? For instance, despite the wealth of information available on food packaging, nutritional labels, menus, and via internet search, we rely mostly on visual information to make a choice, attending to the name of a food item or its appearance rather than a

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more deliberate selection relying on nutrition facts and knowledge (Schulte-Mecklenbeck et al. 2013). Automatic processes are recorded through indirect measures of predilections and liking that rely on reaction time, for instance, with the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz 1998). These implicit preferences reflect the automatic positive and negative associations in memory that link concepts, and complement the rational, deliberate cognitive system.5 An essential question is the link between implicit processes and behavior, and decades of research on prejudice, health, and consumer behavior confirm that these automatic attitudes, activated outside of conscious awareness, influence actions. The IAT and its variations have been applied to food preferences, consumer behavior, and eating. Implicit attitudes align with brand preferences and serve as an independent predictor of behavior, beyond self-reported attitudes (Maison et al. 2004). When explicit and implicit preferences for food products are incongruent, participants select the implicitly preferred food brand when choices are made under time pressure (Friese, Wänke, and Plessner 2006). The IAT demonstrates the additive role for implicit processes, in addition to conscious explicit attitudes, as a valid predictor for fruit or snack (Richetin et al. 2007). Evidence for the predictive validity of implicit measures related to eating and food is mixed, as implicit biases toward specific foods are predictors of food choice, though other studies find a more complex relationship. For instance, Karpinski and Hilton (2001) found no significant correlation between explicit and implicit preferences for apples and candy bars, yet the IAT did not predict the spontaneous selection of an apple or candy bar at the conclusion of the study. A follow-up study showed the IAT was correlated with snack choice when several options were available (Perugini 2005). A meta-analysis by Greenwald and colleagues (2009) demonstrated that the greater the agreement between explicit and implicit attitudes, the greater their predictive validity for actual behavior. These mixed findings led to more nuanced hypothesizing and exploration of implicit preferences across different groups, such as dieters and restrained eaters, and by body weight category. Additionally, the features of the food cues themselves illuminate the complexity of implicit influences on eating behavior. Both participants who are of normal weight and obese have negative explicit and implicit attitudes toward high-fat foods, but the negative association is stronger in obese individuals (Roefs and Jansen 2002) despite consuming more of these foods (Drewnowski et al. 1992). It is interesting to note that smokers demonstrate similar negative attitudes toward cigarettes (Swanson, Swanson, and Greenwald 2001). Other researchers find different patterns of implicit food attitudes nuance across types of food and by BMI category (Czyzewska and Graham 2008); in a sample of female participants, explicit, selfreported preferences were positive across food groups, but implicit attitudes toward lowcalorie foods like a veggie wrap were negative. Obese participants showed the greatest positive implicit preferences for high-calorie non-sweet foods (pizza) but had negative implicit attitudes toward high-calorie sweet foods (chocolate cake); this pattern was opposite in normal and overweight participants (BMI between 18.5 and 30). Meanwhile, Sartor and colleagues (2011) found that overweight and obese participants had stronger implicit preferences toward sweet foods than their normal weight counterparts; these participants also rated sweet tastes as more pleasant. One explanation for these disparate outcomes is the role of dietary restraint, characterized by periods of food restriction plus periods of disinhibition or indulgence (Herman and Polivy 1980). The characteristic of dietary restraint is common in those who

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are overweight and obese who are in fact watching what they eat despite the unfortunate inefficacy of dieting (Jeffery et al. 2000). Relative to unrestrained eaters, restrained eaters demonstrate stronger positive implicit attitudes toward high calorie foods (Houben, Roefs, and Jansen 2010), which is in conflict with intentions to diet and restrict intake. Follow-up work from Houben and colleagues (2012) demonstrates that restrained eaters have enhanced positive implicit preferences for palatable foods as well, even if they are low- or medium-calorie density. This interaction between dietary restraint and amplified preferences for many foods is an important factor in comprehending the difficulty of weight loss. Self-regulatory resources, like response inhibition and self-control, and sufficient cognitive resources, are important predictors of food intake, especially in the modern food environment with plentiful food cues. As previously stated, self-report instruments predict behavior when resources are sufficient, such as self-control and working memory capacity (Friese, Hofman, and Wänke 2008). However, when resources are depleted or behavior is impulsive, implicit measures demonstrate greater predictive validity for actual behavior like the consumption of fruit or chocolate bar. In an elegantly designed study with a one-year follow-up, response inhibition complemented implicit preferences for snack foods to predict weight gain in a sample of female college students (Nederkoon et al. 2010). Executive functions, like working memory capacity, moderate the relationship between implicit preferences and behavior (Dohle, Diel, and Hofmann 2018). Much of the research reviewed thus far uses palatable foods and food cues, high-calorie items, and sweet foods. To further evaluate the discrepancies in research findings, consider the interaction between our automatic hedonic responses to food (is it tasty?) and our utilitarian reaction (is it healthy?). These food attitudes are dependent on memory—lived experiences with these foods (episodic memory) and the nutrition knowledge (semantic memory) contribute to attitude formation. For some foods, like kale or chocolate cake, the hedonic and utilitarian reactions may be in conflict. This struggle between the cognitive (utilitarian) evaluation of foods and the hedonic reaction demonstrates the unhealthyequals-tasty intuition (Trendel and Werle 2016). Interestingly, the affective or hedonic implicit attitude is a better predictor of actual food choice, especially when cognitive resources are limited. The utilitarian value of a food only predicts taste when cognitive resources are ample but only for participants low in impulsivity (Trendel and Werle 2016). Self-regulatory resources clearly influence the relationship between implicit preferences, actual eating behavior, and health. Given the power of our automatic implicit associations to predict behaviors that explicit measures fail to foresee, perhaps they are an avenue for intervention and change? In the social sciences, the potential to impact behavior through learned associations is widely known, for instance, via marketing. Consider the malleability of implicit attitudes: theoretically, implicit attitudes are formed gradually and are more stable than explicit self-report, though some evidence points to their potential flexibility (Gregg, Seibt, and Banaji 2006). Gregg and colleagues used a series of experiments to demonstrate that implicit attitudes about social groups can be induced through both concrete learning and abstract thinking, but once established, automatic preferences are more difficult to change than self-reported (explicit) preferences. Yet the data are promising. A simple act of rehearsal (a verbal or written strategy of repeating information to improve recall) increases remembered enjoyment and subsequent consumption of specific foods in a laboratory setting (Robinson, Blissett, and Higgs 2011). Some researchers have demonstrated that by planting a false memory of enjoying a food, participants have more positive implicit

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attitudes toward the food (Howe, Anderson, and Dewhurst 2017), though methodological limitations of this study limit causal conclusions. Health interventions commonly employ aversive images to warn of potential consequences (e.g., tobacco). Is it possible to apply this malleability of memory via learned associations to impart positive change? A potential avenue for manipulating implicit processes is with evaluative conditioning, the process of pairing an object with pleasant stimuli to induce liking or with negative stimuli to create disliking. An evaluative conditioning intervention led to more negative implicit attitudes toward unhealthy snacks plus it made participants more likely to select fruit over energy-dense snacks (Hollands, Prestwich, and Marteau 2011). In follow-up work, negative (but not positive) images of health outcomes led to more nutritious snack choices and implicit attitudes, independent of whether these aversive images were paired with healthy or unhealthy foods (Hollands and Marteau 2016). Other researchers were able to induce negative attitudes toward snack foods but failed to change behavior in a virtual supermarket task (Lebens et al. 2011). Culturally held gender stereotypes associating females with healthfulness can be primed via food packaging to target implicit processes and promote healthier food choices (Zhu et al. 2015). Marteau, Hollands, and Fletcher (2012) argue the automatic aspects of thinking and behavior can be harnessed to promote healthier choices without conscious deliberation, for instance, altering environments for ease of use and availability, while targeting automatic processes through priming and creating new positive associations with healthful foods. While marketing researchers are well aware of the power of brand identification, self-referencing can be powerful in generating both implicit and explicit attitude change toward food products (e.g., with organic foods, Richetin, Mattavelli, and Perugini 2016). The power of self-referencing is clear to students: drawing connections to one’s own life improves recall. Similarly, if we align ourselves and our values with particular food practices like buying organic foods, this drives positive implicit evaluations. The potential to target implicit processes to influence health behavior is corroborated by evidence from neuroscience (for review, see Stice et al. 2016); individuals who are overweight and obese demonstrate elevated responsivity to tasty foods in the reward system. Thus, computerized training programs have been developed to alter the associations between high-calorie foods and positive attitudes. These interventions are promising, curbing both intake and weight, some with long-lasting effects (Stice et al. 2016). While additional research is needed in this area, these approaches are relatively cost effective compared to typical weight loss interventions, and their accessibility provides potential to reduce health disparity. To conclude, food memory complements motivation and influences both explicit and implicit preferences, also known as attitudes, for certain foods. These memories and attitudes drive food choice and eating habits. The theoretical and empirical work evidences the value of considering both conscious, deliberate processes and automatic, implicit attitudes in food and nutrition research. A clear grasp of both the merits and limitations of memory-based dietary assessments can facilitate appropriate use of these measures. While reliance on memory alone is a weakness of this area of research, better understanding of memory processes can offer a solution. By considering the complementary deliberate, conscious influences on intake and the automatic, implicit processes, researchers can form a more holistic view on the psychological forces that regulate eating. Application of automatic processing via learned associations and memories illuminates strategies to identify existing food attitudes and forms associations to improve eating habits.

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NOTES 1 “Health” and “healthy” have specific definitions through the lens of psychology. Health relates to well-being, physical and psychological, as holistic approaches to health promotion integrate the mind and the body (CDC 2018). Physical well-being is associated with longevity, self-perceived health or absence of illness, social connectedness, and productivity while the overlapping construct of psychological well-being encompasses positive emotion (happiness), engagement, relationships, meaning and purpose, plus accomplishment (Seligman 2013). Unfortunately, the term healthy is applied far too broadly in the modern world, and the indiscriminate use of this term has stripped its meaning. 2 In psychology, an attitude is a specific construct encompassing feelings and evaluations for something like a food (or a thing, person or group). For instance, a person might have an attitude that organic food is healthier than conventional foods. 3 Note this process of employing food intake surveys to guide nutrition recommendations is not unique to the United States, see Archer, Pavela, and Lavie (2015) for review of global epidemiological studies. 4 For suggestions to improve the current methods of self-reported dietary data, see Subar et al. (2015). 5 The IAT is a computerized reaction-time task, in which participants sort images into positive or negative categories. These categories are traditionally defined by pleasant and unpleasant words (Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz 1998) and variations include the Personalized IAT employing categorization of stimuli by “I like” and “I don’t like” (Olson and Fazio 2004). Participants are instructed to categorize the stimuli, such as faces or foods, as fast as they can by pressing a key on the keyboard designated for each category while the response latencies and categorization accuracy are recorded with the assumption that categorization of congruent stimuli and target words is faster and easier. Conceptually, the IAT and its variations measure automatic, or implicit, associations between attributes and categories in memory.

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Dohle, S., K. Diel, and W. Hofmann (2018), “Executive Functions and the Self-Regulation of Eating Behavior: A Review,” Appetite, 124: 4–9. Drewnowski, A., C. Kurth, J. Holden-Wiltse, and J. Saari (1992), “Food Preferences in Human Obesity: Carbohydrates versus Fats,” Appetite, 18: 207–21. Fazio, R. H. and M. A. Olson (2003), “Implicit Measures in Social Cognition Research: Their Meaning and Use,” Annual Reviews of Psychology, 54: 297–327. Freedman, L. S., J. M. Commins, J. E. Moler, L. Arab, D. J. Baer, V. Kipnis, D. Midthune, A. J. Moshfegh, M. L. Neuhouser, R. L. Prentice, A. Scatzkin, D. Spiegelman, A. F. Subar, L. F. Tinker, and W. Willett (2014), “Pooled Results from 5 Validation Studies of Dietary SelfReport Instruments Using Recovery Biomarkers for Energy and Protein Intake,” American Journal of Epidemiology, 180 (2): 172–88. Freedman, L. S., J. M. Commins, J. E. Moler, W. Willett, L. F. Tinker, A. F. Subar, D. Spiegelman, D. Rhodes, N. Potischman, M. L. Neuhouser, A. J. Moshfegh, V. Kipnis, L. Arab, and R. L. Prentice (2015), “Pooled Results from 5 Validation Studies of Dietary Self-Report Instruments Using Recovery Biomarkers for Potassium and Sodium Intake,” American Journal of Epidemiology, 181 (7): 473–87. Friese, M., W. Hofman, and M. Wänke (2008), “When Impulses Take Over: Moderated Predictive Validity of explicit and Implicit Attitude Measures in Predicting Food Choice and Consumption Behaviour,” British Journal of Social Psychology, 47: 397–419. Friese, M., M. Wänke, and H. Plessner (2006), “Implicit Consumer Preferences and Their Influence on Product Choice,” Psychology & Marketing, 23 (9): 727–40. Glanz, K., M. Basil, E. Maibach, J. Goldberg, and D. Snyder (1996), “Why Americans Eat What They Do: Taste, Nutrition, Cost, Convenience, and Weight Control Concerns as Influences on Food Consumption,” Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 98 (10): 1118–26. Greenwald, A. G., D. McGhee, and J. L. K. Schwartz (1998), “Measuring Individual Differences in Implicit Cognition: The Implicit Association Test,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 6: 1464–80. Greenwald, A. G., T. A. Poehlman, E. L. Uhlmann, and M. R. Banaji (2009), “Understanding and Using the Implicit Association Test: III. Meta-Analysis of Predictive Validity,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97 (1): 17–41. Gregg, A. P., B. Seibt, and M. R. Banaji (2006), “Easier Done than Undone: Asymmetry in the Malleability of Implicit Preferences,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90: 1–20. Hébert, J. R., T. G. Hurley, S. E. Steck, D. R. Miller, F. K. Tabung, K. E. Peterson, L. H. Kushi, and E. A. Frongillo (2014), “Considering the Value of Dietary Assessment Data in Informing Nutrition-Related Health Policy,” Advances in Nutrition, 5: 447–55. Hébert, J. R., Y. L. Ma, L. Clernow, I. S. Ockene, G. Saperia, E. J. Stanek, 3rd, P. A. Merriam, and J. K. Ockene (1997), “Gender Differences in Social Desirability and Social Approval Bias in Dietary Self Report,” American Journal of Epidemiology, 146 (12): 1046–55. Heitmann, B. L., L. Lissner, and M. Osler (2000), “Do We Eat Less Fat, Or Just Report So?” International Journal of Obesity, 24: 435–42. Herman, C. P., and J. Polivy (1980), “Restrained Eating,” in A. J. Stunkard (ed.), Obesity, 208– 25, Philadelphia: Saunders. Higgs, S. (2005), “Memory and its Role in Appetite Regulation,” Physiology & Behavior, 85: 67–72. Hill, R. J., and P. S. W. Davies (2001), “The Validity of Self-Reported Energy Intake as Determined Using Doubly Labeled Water Technique,” British Journal of Nutrition, 85: 415–30.

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Hollands, G. J., and T. M. Marteau (2016), “Pairing Images of Unhealthy and Healthy Foods with Images of Negative and Positive Health Consequences: Impact of Attitudes on Food Choice,” Health Psychology, 35 (8): 847–51. Hollands, G. J., A. Prestwich, and T. M. Marteau (2011), “Using Aversive Images to Enhance Healthy Food Choices and Implicit Attitudes: An Experimental Task of Evaluative Conditioning,” Health Psychology, 30 (2): 195–203. Houben, K., A. Roefs, and A. Jansen (2010), “Guilty Pleasures: Implicit Preferences for High Calorie Food in Restrained Eating,” Appetite, 55: 18–24. Houben, K., A. Roefs, and A. Jansen (2012), “Guilty Pleasures II: Implicit Preferences for High Calorie Food in Restrained Eating,” Eating Behaviors, 13: 275–7. Howe, D., R. J. Anderson, and S. A. Dewhurst (2017), “False Memories, but Not False Beliefs, Affect Implicit Attitudes for Food Preference,” Acta Psychologica, 179: 14–22. Jeffery, R. W., L. H. Epstein, G. T. Wilson, A. Drewnowski, A. J. Stunkard, and R. R. Wing (2000), “Long-Term Maintenance of Weight Loss: Current Status,” Health Psychology, 19: 5–16. Kanoski, S. E., M. R. Hayes, H. S. Greenwald, S. M. Fortin, C. A. Giannessi, J. R. Gilbert, and H. J. Grill (2011), “Hippocampal Leptin Signaling Reduces Food Intake and Modulates FoodRelated Memory Processing,” Neuropsychopharmacology, 36: 1859–70. Karpinski, A., and J. L. Hilton (2001), “Attitudes and the Implicit Association Test,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81 (5): 774–88. Lebens, H., A. Roefs, C. Martijn, K. Houben, C. Nederkoon, and A. Jansen (2011), “Making Implicit Measures of Associations with Snack Foods More Negative Through Evaluative Conditioning,” Eating Behaviors, 12 (4): 249–53. Loftus, E. F. (1979), “The Malleability of Human Memory,” American Scientist, 67 (3): 312–20. Loftus, E. F. (1996), “Memory Distortion and False Memory Creation,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, 24 (3): 281–95. Maison, D., A. G. Greenwald, R. H. Bruin (2004), “Predictive Validity of the Implicit Association Test in Studies of Brands, Consumer Attitudes, and Behavior,” Journal of Consumer Psychology, 14 (4): 405–15. Marteau, T. M., G. J. Hollands, and P. C. Fletcher (2012), “Changing Human Behavior to Prevent Disease: The Importance of Targeting Automatic Processes,” Science, 337: 1492–5. Maurer, J., D. L. Taren, P. J. Teixeira, C. A. Thomson, T. G. Lohman, S. B. Going, and L. B. Houtkooper (2006), “The Psychosocial and Behavioral Characteristics Related to Energy Misreporting,” Nutrition Reviews, 64: 53–66. McKeown, N. M., N. E. Day, A. A. Welch, S. A. Runswick, R. N. Luben, A. A. Mulligan, A. McTaggart, and S. A. Bingham (2001), “Use of Biological Markers to Validate SelfReported Dietary Intake in a Random Sample of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer United Kingdom Norfolk Cohort,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 74: 188–96. Nederkoon, C., K. Houben, W. Hofmann, A. Roefs, and A. Jansen (2010), “Control Yourself or Just Eat What You Like? Weight Gain over a Year Is Predicted by an Interactive Effect of Response Inhibition and Implicit Preferences for Snack Foods,” Health Psychology, 29 (4): 389–93. Olson, M. A., and R. H. Fazio (2004), “Reducing the Influence of Extrapersonal Associations on the Implicit Association Test: Personalizing the IAT,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86 (5): 653. Perugini, M. (2005), “Predictive Models of Implicit and Explicit Attitudes,” British Journal of Social Psychology, 44: 29–45.

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Richetin, J., S. Mattavelli, and M. Perugini (2016), “Increasing Implicit and Explicit Attitudes toward an Organic Food Brand by Referencing to Oneself,” Journal of Economic Psychology, 55: 96–108. Richetin, J., M. Perugini, A. Prestwich, and R. O’Gorman (2007), “The IAT as a Predictor of Food Choice. The Case of Fruits versus Snacks,” International Journal of Psychology, 42: 166–73. Roberto, C. A., B. Swinburn, C. Hawkes, T. T-K. Huang, S. A. Costa, M. Ashe, L. Zwicker, J. H. Cawley, and K. D. Brownell (2015), “Patchy Progress on Obesity Prevention: Emerging Examples, Entrenched Barriers, and New Thinking,” Lancet, 385 (9985): 2400–9. Robinson, E., J. Blissett, and S. Higgs (2011), “Changing Memory of Food Enjoyment to Increase Food Liking, Choice, and Intake,” British Journal of Nutrition, 108: 1505–10. Robinson, E., A. Haynes, C. A. Hardman, E. Kemps, S. Higgs, and A. Jones (2017), “The Bogus Taste Test: Validity of a Laboratory Measure of Food Intake,” Appetite, 116: 223–31. Roefs, A., and A. Jansen (2002), “Implicit and Explicit Attitudes toward High-Fat Food in Obesity,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 111 (3): 517–21. Rozin, P., and T. A. Vollmecke (1986), “Food Likes and Dislikes,” Annual Review of Nutrition, 6: 433–56. Sartor, F., L. F. Donaldson, D. A. Markland, H. Loveday, M. J. Jackson, and H.-P. Kubis (2011), “Taste Perception and Implicit Attitude toward Sweet Related to Body Mass Index and Soft Drink Supplementation,” Appetite, 57: 237–46. Schacter, D. L. (1999), “The Seven Sins of Memory: Insights from Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience,” American Psychologist, 54 (3): 182–203. Schacter, D. L., K. A. Norman, and W. Koustaal (1998), “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Constructive Memory,” Annual Review of Psychology, 49: 289–318. Schoeller, D. A., and E. van Santen (1982), “Measurement of Energy Expenditure in Humans by Doubly Labeled Water,” Journal of Applied Physiology, 53: 955–9. Schulte-Mecklenbeck, M., M. Sohn, E. de Bellis, N. Martin, and R. Hertwig (2013), “A Lack of Appetite for Information and Computation: Simple Heuristics for Food Choice,” Appetite, 71: 242–51. Seligman, M. E. P. (2013), Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being, New York: Free Press. Shim, J.-S., K. Oh, and H. C. Kim (2014), “Dietary Assessment Methods in Epidemiological Studies,” Epidemiology and Health, 36: 1–8. Stice, E., N. S. Lawrence, E. Kemps, and H. Veling (2016), “Training Motor Responses to food: A Novel Treatment for Obesity Targeting Implicit Processes,” Clinical Psychology Review, 49: 16–27. Subar, A. F., L. S. Freedman, J. A. Tooze, S. I. Kirkpatrick, C. Bousey, M. L. Neuhouser, F. E. Thompson, N. Potischman, P. M. Guenther, V. Tarasuk, J. Reedy, and S. Krebs-Smith (2015), “Addressing Current Criticism Regarding the Value of Self-Report Dietary Data,” Journal of Nutrition, 145: 2639–45. Swanson, J. E., E. Swanson, and A. G. Greenwald (2001), “Using the Implicit Association Test to Investigate Attitude–Behavior Consistency for Stigmatized Behaviour,” Cognition & Emotion, 15: 207–30. Trendel, O., and C. O. C. Werle (2016), “Distinguishing the Affective and Cognitive Basis of Implicit Attitudes to Improve Prediction of Food Choices,” Appetite, 104: 33–43. US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2017), “About the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.” Available online: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhanes/about_nhanes.htm (accessed September 18, 2021).

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United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2018), “Well-Being Concepts,” Available online: https://www.cdc.gov/hrqol/wellbeing.htm (accessed December 22, 2018). United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (reviewed 2021). “National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.” Available online: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhanes/index. htm (accessed December 22, 2018). Zhu, L., V. L. Brescoll, G. E. Newman, and E. L. Uhlmann (2015), “Macho Nachos: The Implicit Effects of Gendered Food Packaging on Preferences for Healthy and Unhealthy Foods,” Social Psychology, 46 (4): 182–96.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Food Memoirs and Comingof-Age Stories: Memory and Maternal Kitchens in Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones & Butter JULIETA FLORES JURADO

Memory, according to autobiography scholars Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (1998: 39), is “the project for the millennium,” an object of academic inquiry that has brought together neuroscientists, artists, philosophers, psychologists, historians, and cultural critics. In the emerging field of literary food studies, a survey of those autobiographical writings in which food plays a central role reveals the presence of many diverse voices: among the authors of food memoirs we find cooks, restaurant critics, farmers, poets, bloggers, and novelists alike. How can the choice of the food memoir as a mode of expression for so many different subjects be accounted for? A possible explanation suggests that “the popularity of the food memoir has to do with food’s elemental power to stimulate our olfactory system and in turn the limbic system of the human brain, that system of interconnected structures below the cerebral cortex where memories are stored and emotions regulated. Food memoirists intuitively grasp these important links among smells, tastes, strong emotions, and keen memories” (Waxman 2008: 363). These links between the senses and memory suggest that we respond to representations of food in a similar manner as we would to a real dish; that is, the affective powers of food depend on imagination, metaphor, and symbolization. Food and taste are ephemeral by nature, and the need to preserve a fleeting sensory experience would seem to justify the existence of a growing collection of texts that attempt to capture the very elusive and private issue of tasting while striving to make collective what happens in an individual body. This idea frames Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson’s discussion of the origins of gastronomic literature: “Language allows sharing what is at once the most assertively individual and yet, arguably, the most dramatically social of our acts: eating” (2004: 19). Nevertheless, Ferguson warns about the inherent

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instability of food: the same meal can never be tasted twice, it can be carefully remade or reenacted, but there is a distance between a dish and its re-presentations that points to the issue of absence, and with it, memory. This acceptance of the elusiveness of representing food is shared by Arlene Avakian: “Food memories are no more reliable than any other memory, even though because of its materiality we tend to assume that a recollection of a particular dish might be ‘true’ ” (2014: 282). As we shall see, this opposition between the material and the abstract has had important consequences for the representation of food as an aesthetic object in literary texts; moreover, Avakian’s comment begins to address the imaginative features of nonfiction genres such as autobiography and memoir. First, my aim is to take a long view on the place of autobiography, specifically food memoirs, in the literary and gastronomical fields. I will give a brief account of the ideological frameworks that underline the more traditional forms of autobiography, and address the marginal position of subjects who are closely linked to food and the body in these schemes. Next, I will link autobiography to coming-of-age stories; the second section of the chapter discusses the adjustments and negotiations required by women (both as authors and characters) who aim to tell a story of growth and self-awareness in their own terms, through food memories. Having established this background, I illustrate how memories of maternal kitchens can become the basis of a chef ’s creative project. Blood, Bones & Butter (2011), a memoir by Gabrielle Hamilton, chef/owner of Prune restaurant in New York City, is an apt example of the intersection between autobiographical writing, coming-of-age stories, and the relevance of gender and female mentors in how a chef narrates her life. Both male and female chefs have written about formative experiences associated with their mothers’ cooking, and about the role these memories have in their present lives, as they locate a heritage they intend to preserve or build upon. Still, the relevance of the domestic kitchen in shaping gendered expectations tends to have a more profound impact in the lives of girls and young women; it is only recently that male home cooks have become more normalized. Instead of easing their entrance into the world of professional cooking, for women interested in this field the connection between women and the domestic kitchen might even work against them. Considering this, my focus will be on the connection between maternal kitchens and the story of a woman whose path toward becoming a chef is clearly defined by maternal figures. In Gabrielle Hamilton’s memoir, this engagement with the past is not, however, uncomplicated. In the narrator’s journey to restore a sense of security and unity, food is much more than an object of nostalgia: it is a magnet for conflicting emotions such as sorrow and delight, grief and hope, conviviality and solitude. I interpret food memoirs as textual practices that chronicle acts of cooking, eating, and remembering, and invest them with meaning in a narrative of development.

THE GASTRONOMICAL ME: FOOD WRITING AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SUBJECTS Autobiography as a literary genre, in its classic form, is closely linked to the emergence of the modern subject during the Age of Enlightenment. This classic form refers to a retrospective first-person narrative, based on memory and focused on personal development. Although generally read as nonfiction, autobiographies always imply varying degrees of characterization and narrativization, even if the autobiographical pact (a concept coined by Philippe Lejeune, which describes a mode in which the author, the narrator, and the protagonist of the work are assumed to be the same person)

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makes a claim to truth. In the entry on Autobiography in The Living Handbook of Narratology, Helga Schwalm (2014) adds that autobiography “is inevitably constructive, or imaginative, in nature and as a form of textual ‘self-fashioning’ ultimately resists a clear distinction from its fictional relatives (autofiction, autobiographical novel), leaving the generic borderlines blurred.” In the early twentieth century, the master narrative that presented the self as complete, unified, and coherent began to be regarded with skepticism, and life writing became increasingly more fragmentary and less conclusive, displaying an awareness of its own artifice, playing with devices such as telling one’s life in the third person and challenging stable divisions between reality and fiction. Recent critical approaches to autobiography insist on the collective dimension of this seemingly individualistic genre: a personal experience may be representative of a larger community, or the voice of a first-person narrator might be embedded in a polyphonic text. This shift mirrors the theoretical debates of recent decades: beginning in the mid-twentieth century, the notion of the modern subject has undergone an intense critique that argues that the sense of subjectivity is inevitably dependent on ideology, and on the models or “scripts” that are available in a cultural framework in a given historical moment. A simple example of how subjects engage with these preexisting models is advertising, which addresses a consumer by telling her “you are this kind of person, and someone like you should own this product.” By recognizing herself in the advert’s image, she “fits” into a position predetermined by ideology and cultural norms; however, subjects can also respond to these calls selectively, or ironically. “Experience” is another concept that has been revised by historians such as Joan Wallach Scott (1991): from naming the immediacy of “real life,” as opposed to abstract knowledge or biased representations, experience has been redefined not as authoritative and self-evident, but instead as produced and interpreted within certain social and cultural conditions. To sum up, these findings have made it difficult to uncritically accept values such as agency, self-determination, and empiricism, which are prominent in classic autobiographical writing. To understand the place of food memoirs in this textual and critical landscape, we must keep in mind the importance that autobiography—in the classic form that I have been referring to—ascribed to reason and the mind, of which the body and emotions are the opposites. Food, appetite, and the sense of taste are assigned to the realm of the body, a site that has been long dismissed as inconsequential and inferior to the higher realm of thought and abstraction, and even as burdensome, sinful, and unruly (see Korsmeyer 1999). It is to be expected, then, that autobiography’s focus on intellectual development would exclude the instinctive, trivial, or frivolous pleasures of tasting and eating, and would preclude those writers who were represented as closer to the realm of the body. When gastronomy emerged as a field of intellectual inquiry in the early nineteenth century, one of its central ambitions was to challenge this view of food and taste as discredited subjects. Through first-person writings, early gastronomes established their authority and expertise on the culinary arts. But as they sought to legitimize food as a subject for intellectual inquiry and to defend cooking as a form of art, they did so by distancing themselves from the domestic space—where cooking was done mostly by women—and by celebrating other genres (aphorisms, essays, restaurant reviews) instead of the recipes exchanged by home cooks. Overall, the dominance of a male, Western, middle- and upper-class perspective in autobiographical writings was not yet called into question. Many social, cultural, and aesthetic transformations would need to take place before women could narrate their relationship to food and cooking in ways that foreground creativity, pleasure, and resistance instead of duty and care work. Along with

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other creative women, female gastronomes who tell their life stories bring change to the models that dictate who can speak publicly about intellectual curiosity and desire: “by incorporating hitherto unspoken female experience in telling their own stories, women revised the content and purposes of autobiography and insisted on alternative stories” (Smith and Watson 1998: 5–6). Life narratives centered on domesticity, mother-daughter bonds, and female hunger are all part of this process of revision. Besides gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality are now understood as intermingled realities that shape a writer’s relation with dominant narratives. Class is another defining factor in locating the kind of narratives that are privileged in the gastronomical and literary culture. Early gastronomes were lawyers, politicians, or journalists, which suggests that they did not make a living from cooking; as Ferguson contends, gastronomy “represented the public pursuit of sensory pleasures, not the private satisfaction of physiological needs” (2004: 93). The work of chefs was not represented as glamorous until very recently. Only a few decades ago, it would have seemed surprising to think of the life of a chef as a “heroic,” exciting life—that is, the kind of life that is told in an autobiography. Krishnendu Ray illustrates this point by telling how, while studying data from the United States census, he found the occupation “chef ” did not appear until the 1980s, and cooks were subsumed under the category “servants” until 1910 (“Episode 233: Ethnic Restaurateurs” 2016). This is a good example of how “at certain historical moments and in specific milieux, certain stories become intelligible and normative. Yet such stories stretch and change, gain cultural prominence or lose their hold over time” (Smith and Watson 2001: 91). The contemporary image of chefs as artists, celebrities, or influential tastemakers is the result of linking their work to values such as originality, authority, ownership, and autonomy. Biographical and autobiographical writings have played a significant role in creating this persona of the chef as the hero of a story. Food memoirs, in sum, have both echoed and contributed to the legitimization of chefs as artists and authors. Let us now look at what distinguishes food memoirs as a subgenre of autobiographical writing.1 For Barbara Frey Waxman (2008: 364), the prototypical food memoir is a narrative that “chronicles the growth and development of the memoirist through the lens of food memories, in narratives that either begin with childhood or that interpose frequent flashbacks to earlier formative experiences.” Recipes may or may not be present. Avakian (2014: 278–9) clarifies that “like Brillat-Savarin and [M. F. K.] Fisher’s work, contemporary food memoirs put food at the center of their narratives, but they are more systematically autobiographical, chronicling the authors’ lives through cooking and eating rather than narratives about food that include personal anecdotes.” Contemporary examples of food memoirs authored by women are too numerous to list here; therefore, in the next section I will concentrate on the subcategory that Gilbert refers to as “the food memoir as coming-of-age story” (Gilbert 2014: 144).

PORTRAITS OF THE GASTRONOME AS A YOUNG WOMAN A closely related term to the genre known as “coming-of-age stories” is Bildungsroman. The Bildungsroman, or novel of development, can be grouped with autobiography under the broader category of “life writing”—when focused on the growth of an artist, it is called Künstlerroman. These categories are relevant for my analysis because Blood, Bones & Butter narrates the education of a chef who is also a writer. Smith and Watson (2001: 70) explain that a prototypical Bildungsroman

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unfolds as a narrative of education through encounters with mentors, apprenticeship, renunciation of youthful folly, and eventual integration into society. The conversion narrative develops through a linear pattern—descent into darkness, struggle, moment of crisis, conversion to new beliefs and worldview, and consolidation of a new communal identity. In the quest or adventure narrative, a hero/heroine alienated from family or home or birthright sets forth on a mission to achieve elsewhere an integration of self that is impossible within the constraints (political, sexual, emotional, economic) imposed in a repressive world and to return triumphant. Recent approaches to Bildungsromane and coming-of-age stories acknowledge that this narrative model is gendered, raced, and classed: the hero’s journey is almost inevitably the story of a boy becoming a man and settling down. In response to the problems of posing a single story of growing up as the only story, “the Bildungsroman has been taken up more recently by women and other disenfranchised persons to consolidate a sense of emerging identity and an increased place in public life … in much women’s writing, its plot of development culminates not in integration but in an awakening to genderbased limitations” (Smith and Watson 2001: 189–90). Laura Pressman (2013), in her entry in The Bildungsroman Project, uses the term Frauenroman to refer to narratives of development and coming-of-age stories that focus on the experiences of young women. Unlike the classic models of autobiography and Bildungsroman, contemporary feminist food memoirs tend not to present conclusive stories of triumph and unity. Subjectivity is instead presented as ever changing, as a puzzle of contradictory elements. In their rejection of the master narratives of the autonomous self, feminist autobiographies also challenge those stereotypes that “provide women with models for ‘growing down’ instead of ‘growing up’ ” (Lazzaro-Weis 1990: 17). Although “to grow down” can refer to the roots of a plant moving deeper into the ground, Lazzaro-Weis’s use of the term alludes to “the suppression and defeat of female autonomy, creativity, and maturity by patriarchal gender norms” (1990: 17). In this analysis, my focus is on the kitchen as a space that evokes childhood memories and on the role of the narrator’s mother in her gustatory education. Hamilton’s memoir begins in a domestic kitchen, and although she will eventually lead her own professional kitchen, the latter is modeled on the space she knew when she was younger. Motherdaughter relationships are another of those subjects that tend to be excluded from the master narrative of artistic success in conventional Künstlerromane, given that the protagonist is supposed to achieve artistic maturity once he or she severs this connection to childhood and surpasses his or her predecessors. But this is not the case here. Blood, Bones & Butter is Gabrielle Hamilton’s first book. Its subtitle, The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, is indicative of the shifts in the model narrative of a chef ’s coming-of-age story: Hamilton did not attend a prestigious cooking school; she did not stage in famed restaurants, as she became financially independent at age sixteen and could not afford to do unpaid work. Instead, she entered the world of professional cooking as a waitress and dishwasher in a restaurant in her hometown, and followed by working for New York City’s luxury catering companies and for a children’s summer camp. Her mentors are not famous chefs or writers, but rather three maternal figures, around whom the memoir revolves: Madeleine, Hamilton’s biological mother; Misty, a former boss in the culinary field; and finally Alda, the chef ’s Italian mother-in-law. Hamilton’s creative work as a chef can be interpreted as an autobiography given a concrete, edible form: Prune, the name of her restaurant, is the childhood nickname that

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she was given by her mother. Radishes with sweet butter and sea salt are one of Prune’s most iconic dishes: they have been on the menu for over seventeen years. The emotional significance of this simple dish can be seen in an essay published in the New York Times Magazine, where Hamilton (2017) wrote: “If I ever took it off the menu, and found myself in the walk-in with an empty spot on that shelf where the [radish] container had always been, I would feel like a widow.” In Blood, Bones & Butter, this dish appears in a key moment in the story: it symbolizes the moment when the narrator, still a young girl, witnesses a tense moment between her parents and abruptly realizes that their marriage is falling apart. Prune: The Cookbook, published in 2015, features recipes for other dishes that have an equally memorable presence in the autobiography, such as a Youth Hostel Breakfast—Prune’s version is a plate with sausages, slices of red onion and tomato, a hard-boiled egg, pâté, cheese, olives, butter and orange marmalade, and some bread and crackers. To further emphasize the importance of memory in the chef ’s creative project and public persona, when Hamilton was featured in the fourth season of The Mind of a Chef, a whole episode was devoted to the issue of the past. In this episode, Hamilton visits her childhood home (a house in a repurposed mill in rural Pennsylvania) and her mother’s kitchen for the first time in thirty-nine years. According to Alex Beggs (2015), who reviewed the season shortly before it premiered, “[Hamilton] wrote every episode, insisting on showing the truth.” Before proceeding to the analysis of memory and maternal kitchens in Blood, Bones & Butter, I must clarify an issue that will help me distinguish between the narrating voice and the character who takes part in the events. Schwalm (2014) explains that “at the heart of [autobiography’s] narrative logic lies the duality of the autobiographical person, divided into ‘narrating I’ and ‘narrated I’, marking the distance between the experiencing and the narrating subject.” For this reason I will refer to the narrator (the “narrating I”) as “Hamilton,” and to the protagonist (“the narrated I”) as “Gabrielle.”

THE THREE MATERNAL KITCHENS IN BLOOD, BONES & BUTTER It is a fortunate coincidence that Gabrielle Hamilton’s mother, Madeleine, shares a name with the most famous literary symbol of the evocative and affective powers of food. Many food memoirs award a central place to the autobiographer’s mother. However, scholars like Arlene Avakian (2015) have been critical of the idealized, conflict-free representation of mother-daughter bonds that these narratives often reproduce: Many of the books I read … presented an idealized relationship, with mothers who were amazing cooks imparting their knowledge of cooking and life to their appreciative daughters. It is possible that these were accurate representations of [the authors’] experience with their mothers, but I questioned the uncomplicated acceptance of their mother’s wisdom. Was there no rebellion? It becomes necessary, thus, to question notions of women (mothers, in particular) as naturally nurturing. As Avakian explains in an earlier article (2014: 281), “who is doing the cooking for whom, and under what conditions?” is a question that should always be asked of food memoirs when reading these narratives through a feminist lens. In Blood, Bones & Butter, the question of “who cooks and how” does not have a straightforward answer. This is Madeleine’s first extensive description:

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I loved that our mother was French and that she had given me that heritage in my very name. I loved telling people that she had been a ballet dancer at the Met in New York City when she met my father. I loved being able to spell her long French name, M-AD-E-L-E-I-N-E, which had exactly as many letters as my own. My mother wore the sexy black cat-eye eyeliner of the era, like Audrey Hepburn and Sophia Loren, and I remember the smell of the sulphur every morning as she lit a match to warm the tip of her black wax pencil. She pinned her dark hair back into a tight, neat twist every morning and then spent the day in a good skirt, high heels, and an apron I have never seen her without in forty years. She lived in our kitchen, ruled the house with an oily wooden spoon in her hand, and forced us all to eat dark, briny, wrinkled olives, small birds we would have liked as pets, and cheeses that looked like they might bear Legionnaire’s Disease [sic]. Her kitchen, over thirty years ago, long before it was common, had a two-bin stainless steel restaurant sink and a six-burner Garland stove. Her burnt orange Le Creuset pots and casseroles, scuffed and blackened, were constantly at work on the back three burners cooking things with tails, claws, and marrow-filled bones—whatever was budgeted from our dad’s sporadic and mercurial artist’s income—that she was stewing and braising and simmering to feed our family of seven. (Hamilton 2012: 7) Madeleine and her kitchen are inseparable in Hamilton’s account. The wooden spoon that seems to never leave her hand is an extension of her body, and the narrative does not question this particular association between motherhood and cooking. Gabrielle’s father, Jim, a stage designer, was also a skilled cook, known for a famous lamb roast that attracted dozens of guests every summer. Even so, the representation of the family’s routines confirms a traditional division of labor, in which Jim is always shown to be cooking outdoors, while Madeleine remains in the indoor kitchen. There is a gendered divide between festive, glamorous cooking and everyday meals focused on economy and reducing waste. From Gabrielle’s point of view, who is between eight and eleven years old at this moment of the story, her family is perfectly happy. However, the memoir does not include Madeleine’s account of this period, and does not consider the consequences that leaving behind her career as a ballerina to become a full-time mother and caregiver must have had for her. Even if her food was delicious, it is unclear if Madeleine found satisfaction in the kitchen. Carole Counihan and Stephen K. Kaplan (1998: 4) note that even if the presence of a woman ruling over the kitchen could suggest authority and power, the relation between women and food provisioning is in fact “a mixed bag, one that is a potential source of influence on husbands and children through the ability to give them a valued substance— food—but one that also is linked with female subordination through women’s need to serve, satisfy, and defer to others.” Cooking and eating together clearly creates affective bonds between Madeleine and her family and, conversely, rejecting food can be a sign of mistrust and hostility. In particular, “men can exert power over women by refusing to provide food or disparaging the food they have cooked” (Counihan and Kaplan 1998: 7–8). In the scene that finally makes clear the tensions that would lead to the narrator’s parents’ divorce, Madeleine is preparing an elaborate recipe, her mise en place laid out on the kitchen table. For no apparent reason, her husband “swept his arm across the entire table and sent every item on it clattering and shattering onto the terracotta tile floor” (Hamilton 2012: 22). They divorce shortly after. The older siblings go to college or to live with friends, Madeleine moves to Vermont, and Gabrielle spends a summer virtually living alone in the mill house, since her father

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has gone to New York City to work for most of the season. She first feeds herself with leftovers, but eventually she has to teach herself to cook, thinking of what she saw her mother doing with each ingredient—the book does not specify if Gabrielle had cooked with her mother before she left, but being the youngest daughter, she would always go on errands with her, buying milk from a nearby farm and foraging mushrooms and herbs. At age thirteen, the narrator finds her first job in a restaurant “called, ironically, Mother’s” (Hamilton 2012: 38). If her education as a chef begins right at the moment she has become estranged from her mother, this would seem to suggest that independence from the previous generation is a necessary condition for artistic growth. Blood, Bones & Butter, however, emphasizes the opposite: continuity and honoring a maternal legacy as the foundation of the chef ’s creative project. To see how this works out, I skip to a much later episode, where an adult Gabrielle has enrolled in a master’s program in creative writing, and supports herself by working in a kitchen led by a woman. After years of cooking for New York City’s luxury catering companies, enduring eighteen-hour shifts and accustomed to work with tweezers, torches, and all sorts of food served in shot glasses, Gabrielle is not initially impressed by her new boss, Misty, the chef of a smaller catering business in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In their first encounter, Misty “was grilling boneless chicken breasts … wearing a stained, faded V-neck T-shirt and a dirty apron. I didn’t see anything in her but the tired, slightly beaten chef of a perfectly decent catering company in downtown Ann Arbor. She was, I thought, simply the source of my future paychecks and nothing more” (Hamilton 2012: 94–5). Gabrielle, in contrast, prides herself on her professionalism and wears chef jackets to work. Despite this initial indifference, Misty’s presence will prove transformative for Gabrielle. Even if studying creative writing was originally part of Gabrielle’s desire for a career change, she soon finds herself out of place in graduate school and longs to go back to the kitchen. After some time working for Misty, Gabrielle receives an invitation to her home. Misty and her husband live in a large house with an impressive organic garden. She owns hundreds of cookbooks, her kitchen is full of clay pots and jars of homemade preserves, and the place could not be more dramatically different from the warehouse kitchens where Gabrielle had worked so far. There is a remarkable similarity between Misty’s kitchen and Madeleine’s, as the following passage, where Gabrielle reaches into her memory, shows: I began to feel the stirrings of a remote past, a someone I had been a thousand lifetimes and fluorescent-lit kitchens ago, and suddenly I found myself digging deep … to find the language to keep up with [Misty]. I had to remember the exhale of Bandol rosé while my mother talked to my father after dinner, not the edible gold leaf in champagne flutes. When Misty put clafoutis on the table for dessert, I had to remember that I knew the taste of the almost muddy, sweet, ripe black fruit of that mulberry bush by the mailbox of my childhood home. (Hamilton 2012: 103) Influenced by the dinners at Misty’s home, Gabrielle distances herself from the style of cooking that she had mastered at the luxury catering companies. Recognizing the taste of the mulberries, and returning to the kitchen of her childhood are, paradoxically, the ways in which the chef finds her own voice and reaches creative maturity. Gabrielle earns her degree from the creative writing program, but by then she has decided to make a living as a professional chef. Back in New York after graduation, Gabrielle receives an offer to rent the space that will become her restaurant. The chapter focused on this period of her life is the one that most clearly characterizes Blood, Bones & Butter as a Künstlerroman. In the

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months leading to the opening, Gabrielle often returns to the memories of the hunger and the hospitality that she experienced during a frugal backpacking trip to Europe. Yet, Madeleine’s cooking style and her clean, well-organized kitchen are the central influence on the chef, who at the end of the chapter decides to name her restaurant “Prune.” Gabrielle pictures her future clients: “I might serve walnuts from the Perigord and a small perfect tangerine so that the restaurant patrons could also sit at their table after the meal and squeeze the citrus peel into the candle flame to make fragrant blue and yellow sparks as I had done on my mother’s lap as a child” (Hamilton 2012: 116; emphasis added). This suggests that diners at Prune are, indirectly, inhabiting this space of maternal presence and influence, not just through the taste of food, but through all of the senses. The third and final mother figure in Blood, Bones & Butter is Alda, Gabrielle’s Italian mother-in-law. Gabrielle meets her husband, Michele, when he becomes a regular customer at Prune. Although Gabrielle and Michele bond over food and have two children together, the main reason behind their marriage was obtaining a green card for him. Unlike the more conventional structure of the Frauenroman, in which a (usually heterosexual) love story is an almost omnipresent element in the protagonist’s growth, the strongest affective bond in Gabrielle’s adulthood is her love for Alda. Even if Alda does not speak English and Gabrielle speaks broken Italian, the two women are able to communicate because cooking is their shared language: “We just hug and cook a lot” (173); “I could understand everything she was doing and she could understand me, too. And for all of the years since, we have cooked together instead of talking” (233). Gabrielle’s integration into a community of women who cook, produce food, and manage kitchens on a daily basis without being recognized as professionals also serves to undermine a rigid division between home cooks and chefs. “Butter,” the last section of the book, is centered on Hamilton’s desire to be fully accepted into her adoptive family. This desire is symbolized by her plans to stage a great feast outdoors, recreating her father’s celebrated lamb roast and restoring the family that she lost so many years before. Alda’s children oppose this idea, as they believe that it would be too exhausting for Alda. After spending several summers in Italy, Gabrielle is distressed at seeing her mother-inlaw’s health deteriorating. She compares her marriage to Michele to a dish of oversalted ravioli that he made when their relationship was just beginning: beautiful on the outside, but inedible (Hamilton 2012: 253). In the final chapters of the book, starving becomes a dominant motif: Gabrielle’s hunger for belonging, her emotional undernourishment, cannot be easily satiated, not even by sharing a table full of delicious and abundant food with her adoptive family. The last chapters are enigmatic: Gabrielle visits Alda at her summer residence next to the seashore, in Puglia. Her divorce from Michele is imminent, and she fears that this will be the last time she sees Alda. The trees that surround the house at Puglia have been left intact for years, and now their branches block the view of the sea from the terrace. When Alda states that she wishes to see the sea, Gabrielle takes off her shoes and climbs the trees with a pair of shears, scandalizing Michele and his siblings. This action reads like a kind of return to childhood and visually echoes the pruned branches of apple trees that the Hamilton children used to gather for the famous lamb roast, three decades before. Blood, Bones & Butter begins and ends with mutilated trees, a symbol of the disintegration of a family. Memory, linked to the senses and the body, appears once more in this passage: It is exhilarating to be so high up, at the very tops of the trees, and to be able to look out at the sea and back at the house completely unobstructed. To have my bare feet

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wedged into the crotches of tree branches—like they haven’t been for thirty years— makes me feel instantly, kinesthetically, very young again, as if the soles of my feet had memories of their own. (Hamilton 2012: 289–90) Minutes later, in this same scene, Michele calls for his mother Alda: “Mamma?” Surprisingly, both Alda and Gabrielle answer him: “Si?” (291). This open ending could suggest that Gabrielle and Alda have exchanged roles: now the daughter must take care of the mother. Another possible interpretation would suggest that Gabrielle is, reluctantly, reacting to a form of interpellation, addressed by the maternal stereotype that female chefs are often reduced to. The book concludes with an epilogue: Gabrielle travels once more to Italy, but this time she visits the family not as Michele’s wife, but as Alda’s friend. This trip takes place in November, and the narrator encounters a completely changed landscape: the trees in Alda’s orchard in Rome are now bearing fruit. In contrast with the summer vacations, this autumnal visit speaks of Hamilton’s maturity, and the fruits she is now harvesting after her intense desire for building a new family. When she makes a joke that Alda dislikes, she is angrily scolded (Hamilton 2012: 305): “Sharply, she said my name curt and loud—‘Gabrielle!’—as if she were scolding me, as if I were her child, as she had never spoken to me before. And I could not have been happier.” Prune, the cookbook written by Hamilton in 2015, has an entire chapter devoted to Alda’s recipes, an acknowledgment of how Prune’s signature dishes are rooted in maternal kitchens.

CONCLUSIONS Given that women have occupied a marginal position both in regard to the classic autobiographical form and to the hedonistic ethos of gastronomical writings, food memoirs by women demand specific negotiations where the representation of appetite and the body is concerned. Similarly, when a young woman is the protagonist of a story of growth and development, women writers’ focus on gender and creativity, along with the centrality of mother-daughter bonds, contribute to reshape the “possible stories” told in our culture. The act of telling one’s life through food also involves questions of individuality and community; belonging and displacement; emotions and sensorial experiences; and the language needed for articulating them. In the words of Arlene Avakian (2014: 136), “who we are both as individuals and socially is linked, then, to our psychic/bodily experiences of and discourses about food. Food memories can evoke both powerful emotions and a sense of a whole—reconstructed—cultural context.” Memory and the reconstruction of the past are key components of Hamilton’s creative project; even if these memories are sometimes painful, they can become a source of artistic expression. Hamilton’s engagement with the past, as I have shown, is a central part both of her recipes and her nonfiction writing. A bittersweet episode in Blood, Bones & Butter features a visit to the older, reclusive Madeleine: even if her cooking is still delicious, the narrator’s mature perspective emphasizes the discordance between the idealized kitchen of her childhood home and the imperfect, more honest image of her mother that she now has to confront. Gabrielle chooses the former. Loss and grieving may seem like an inevitable part of these encounters with the past, but so are imagination and recontextualization. What this view suggests is that food memoirs do not aim to preserve a fixed version of the people, events, scents, and tastes of the past; instead, as in any narrative act, imagination is an important element of the story of the self that is told

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in a specific instance, a self that is constantly changing, readapting, and reforming, and that will speak differently to every reader.

POSTSCRIPT, MAY 2020 While working on the final revisions of this chapter, I learned that Gabrielle Hamilton had recently published an essay in the New York Times Magazine (Hamilton, 2020), looking back at twenty years of operating her restaurant from the same premises. Prune closed in March 2020, and its future reopening remains uncertain. The essay contemplates the current landscape of the restaurant industry and considers whether a bistro that relied so heavily on family meals around small, crowded tables, that resisted online reservations and food delivery apps, can stay relevant amid the current crisis and in its aftermath. I have never visited Prune, but somehow I “remember” being there, having read Hamilton’s books many times. Although the restaurant’s menu first existed in the chef ’s memories and musings, I wish these dishes had not become immaterial once more. At the end of the essay, the chef compares the restaurant to Sleeping Beauty. I can only hope that this story has a hopeful ending, like Blood. Bones & Butter does.

NOTE 1 Melissa Brackney Stoeger (2013: 3) states that the difference between autobiography and memoir is that the latter is narrower in scope; memoirs represent “a slice of life … recounting an experience usually focused on a specific period of time in the writer’s life,” while autobiographies offer a detailed account of the narrator’s entire life. However, Stoeger acknowledges that readers often use both terms interchangeably, and refers to this subgenre of food writing as “food memoirs and autobiographies.”

REFERENCES Avakian, A. (2014), “Cooking Up Lives: Feminist Food Memoirs,” Feminist Studies, 40 (2): 277–303. Available online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.15767/feministstudies.40.2.277 (accessed May 14, 2020). Avakian, A. (2015), “The Maternal Kitchen? Representations of Mothers in Four Feminist Food Memoirs,” paper presented at Falk School of Sustainability, Chatham University, Pittsburgh, PA, June 26, 2015. Beggs, Alex (2015), “Literary and Culinary Sensation Gabrielle Hamilton Gets Real in The Mind of a Chef,” Vanity Fair, September 3. Available online: https://www.vanityfair.com/ culture/2015/09/mind-of-a-chef-gabrielle-hamilton-interview (accessed May 14, 2020). Counihan, C. M., and S. L. Kaplan (1998), “Introduction—Food and Gender: Identity and Power,” in C. M. Counihan and S. L. Kaplan (eds.), Food and Gender: Identity and Power, 1–10, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. “Episode 233: Ethnic Restauranteurs” (2016), narrated by Linda Pelaccio. A Taste of the Past. Heritage Radio Network, April 7. Available online: https://a-taste-of-the-past.simplecast.com/ episodes/018270b4-018270b4 (accessed September 3, 2021). Ferguson, P. P. (2004), Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gilbert, S. M. (2014), The Culinary Imagination: From Myth to Modernity, New York: W. W. Norton.

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Hamilton, G. ([2011] 2012), Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, New York: Random House. Hamilton, G. (2014), Prune: A Cookbook, New York: Random House. Hamilton, G. (2017), “The Wonder of Three Ingredients,” New York Times Magazine, March 23. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/magazine/the-wonder-of-threeingredients.html (accessed May 14, 2020). Hamilton, G. (2020), “My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore?,” New York Times Magazine, April 23. Available online: https://www.nytimes. com/2020/04/23/magazine/closing-prune-restaurant-covid.html (accessed May 14, 2020). Korsmeyer, C. (1999), Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lazzaro-Weiss, C. (1990), “The Female Bildungsroman: Calling It into Question,” NWSA Journal 2 (1): 16–34. Available online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4315991 (accessed May 14, 2020). Pressman, L. (2013), “The Frauenroman: A Female Perspective in Coming-of-Age Stories,” The Bildungsroman Project, n.d. Available online: http://bildungsromanproject.com/femalebildungsroman (accessed December 20, 2018). Schwalm, H. (2014), “Autobiography,” The Living Handbook of Narratology, April 11. Available online: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/autobiography (accessed May 14, 2020). Scott, J. W. (1991), “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17 (4): 773–97. Available online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343743 (accessed December 2, 2020). Smith, S., and J. Watson (1998), “Introduction: Situating Subjectivity in Women’s Autobiographical Practices,” in S. Smith and J. Watson (eds.), Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, 3–52, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Smith, S., and J. Watson (2001), Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stoeger, M. B. (2013), Food Lit: A Reader’s Guide to Epicurean Nonfiction, Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. The Mind of a Chef, Season 4 (2015), [TV program] PBS, October 3. Waxman, B. F. (2008), “Food Memoirs: What They Are, Why They Are Popular, and Why They Belong in the Literature Classroom,” College English, 70 (4): 363–83. Available online: https:// www.jstor.org/stable/25472276 (accessed May 14, 2020).

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CHAPTER FIVE

What Role Does Memory Play in Our Enjoyment of Meals? CHARLES SPENCE

Introduction While the focus of much of the sensory science research on food design and flavor perception is on enhancing the diner’s perception of the meal at the time that it is being consumed (see Spence 2015, 2017c, for reviews), it is really the anticipation of the meals to come and the memory of the great restaurant meals savored in the past that are key, I believe, to the pleasure we get from eating (see Spence 2012c). The anticipation of a great meal builds from the booking in advance. It comes from reading the reviews of the restaurant critics who have already dined at the establishment in question. Perhaps it even comes from waiting in the queue outside the door once we have decided where we want to eat (think only of those restaurants that take no booking like the long-running Le Relais de Venice/L’Entrecôte chain; not to mention an increasing number of trendy capital city eateries over the past decade or so).1 In recent years, a growing number of us are also being influenced by what we see posted online on our social networks/Twitter feeds (e.g., Ensor 2013; see Spence et al. 2016, for a review), and/or the images we see on websites such as Instagram’s The Art of Plating (https://www.instagram.com/_artofplating_/; though see also Robinson, 2014). The ever-expanding number of food shows on television and the internet likely also play their part: Who knows, they may also be helping to fuel the growth in gastrotourism, which again involves people experiencing delight in the anticipation of exotic, or perhaps Michelin-starred, meals to come (see Amey 2015; Long 2012; Spence and PiquerasFiszman 2014; Williams, Williams, and Omar 2013), and their recollection of those meals thereafter (Jochnowitz 2004; Muñoz et al. 2018). The memory of the meal (or at least a good one) lasts much longer than the experience of the meal itself, which is likely to be over in a matter of hours (see Spence 2012a). I would argue that it is the memory of the meal wherein the majority of the pleasure resides. While this might seem obvious, it is worth noting that there are some commentators out there who have argued for the opposite position, though it has to be said, without any supporting evidence.2 Just take Yuval Harari, best-selling author of books such as Sapiens: A Brief

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History of Humankind (2014) and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), who argues that the enjoyment of the meal at the time that one is consuming is everything. The memory of the meal, or so he suggests, counts for nothing. Hence, he controversially argues, we would be none the worse for if we couldn’t remember any of the meals that we have had.3 But would one’s life really be as fulfilled, I wonder, if one couldn’t remember that one really special meal, the perfect meal that M. F. K. Fisher (2005: 325) describes so memorably when she writes: “Once at least in the life of every human, whether he be brute or trembling daffodil, comes a moment of complete gastronomic satisfaction. It is, I am sure, as much a matter of spirit as of body. Everything is right; nothing jars. There is a kind of harmony, with every sensation and emotion melted into one chord of well-being.” Somehow, I don’t think so. Certainly, it is hard not to feel sorry for those patients with amnesia or dementia who can no longer remember their last meal, never mind their best one (see Higgs et al. 2008; Rozin et al. 1998).4 See also Seitz, Blaisdell, and Tomiyama (2021) for the recent suggestion that the memory of eating may be evolutionarily special. The famous French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin was in no doubt about the importance that he saw food memories as having to the aging individual in his classic volume, The Physiology of Taste, first published in 1825, when he writes: “The pleasures of the table, belong to all times and all ages, to every country and to every day; they go hand in hand with all our other pleasures, outlast them, and remain to console us for their loss.” (Brillat-Savarin 1835: 14). A growing number of restaurateurs/chefs, who depend on repeat custom to ensure the success of their business ventures (e.g., Reichheld and Sasser 1990; Spence 2017c), are increasingly coming to realize the importance of understanding, and then engineering (see Fulton 2011), memorable meal experiences (often under the rubric of the business school notion of “Sticktion”; see Carbone 2004; LaTour and Carbone 2014).5 However, here it is important to stress that diners are not simply passive consumers of the food experiences that are provided to them. Oftentimes, diners want to remember a special meal, perhaps using it as a means of connecting with others who may no longer (or for not much longer) be with them (Smith 2018). Special occasion meals (e.g., Thanksgiving for those in North America) and comfort foods for so many of us also offer the means for us to connect to the past, and to autobiographical memories, through the food so mindfully prepared/ consumed (Locher et al. 2005; Sutton 2001; see also Spence 2017a). As David Sutton puts it: “Eating can serve as a medium for the act of remembering” (2001: 121). The following quote from Proust, picked up by Sutton, is also worth quoting at length here: But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. (Proust [1922] 1960: 50–1)

ON THE FUNDAMENTAL ROLE OF MEMORY IN FLAVOR PERCEPTION AND HEDONICS At the outset, it is worth stressing that all we are born liking, more or less, is the taste of sweet and umami (both of which are, as it happens, prominent tastes in human breast

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milk). By contrast, we are all born avoiding sour, bitter, and spicy-tasting foods, our response to the taste of salt coming online some months after birth (see Spence, 2012b, for a review). According to researchers, our responses to odors (and that includes food aromas) are almost all learnt (and thus involve memory),6 though some of that learning starts remarkably early. While it is commonly suggested that the majority of our flavor preferences are established by means of the experiences that we have after birth, some of our flavor preferences are actually acquired while we are still in the womb (i.e., during the later stages of pregnancy; e.g., Schaal and Durant 2012; Schaal, Marlier, and Soussignan 2000). Given that pretty much all of the foods/flavors that we come to love (or hate) are learned as a result of prior exposure, they can be said to involve memory (see also Allen 2012; Mojet and Köster 2016). Many of our food likes result from conditioning, as we learn that tastes/flavors are associated with the delivery of alcohol, caffeine, sugar, fat, and so forth (Rozin and Zellner 1985; Zellner et al. 1983). That said, certain foods (e.g., comfort foods) may also come to be liked, or liked more, not solely because of what they contain, chemically speaking, but as a result of the more emotional associations they have with remembrance/celebration meals/occasions. Ultimately, then, memory is key to explaining pretty much every aspect of our food behaviors and why it is that we enjoy what we do, as well as explaining part of why it is we don’t like other foods (such as those that once made us ill, or at least that our brain associates with illness; e.g., Pelchat and Rozin 1982; see also Piqueras-Fiszman and Jaeger 2016). Genetics, of course, has some role to play too (think taster status, the individual difference in people’s response to cilantro, and various anosmias; see Reed and Knaapila 2010), but learned taste preferences tend to soften out many of these individual differences (see Spence 2017c). Researchers working in the field distinguish between many different kinds of memories, short- versus long-term, episodic versus procedural, implicit versus explicit, and so on (see Roediger, Dudai, and Fitzpatrick 2007). However, for the purposes of the remainder of this chapter, the meal memories that I will be covering are mostly those that reside in long-term, episodic (autobiographical) memory.

MAKING MEALS MEMORABLE But what, exactly, makes a meal memorable? This question has intrigued writers including both food critics (Rayner 2016) and food scientists alike (Piqueras-Fiszman and Jaeger 2015a, 2015b). Restaurateurs/chefs, of course, may have different reasons for wanting to make the meals they serve more memorable (in a positive way) than the diners whom they serve. Furthermore, as we will see later, these two groups tend to use somewhat different strategies in order to help make their meals more memorable. However, no matter which group one falls into, the key point to remember is that our memory plays tricks on us. These biases and cognitive shortcuts in what we remember have been studied for decades in the psychology lab, often using meaningless lists of words. In recent years, there has been something of an explosion of interest in investigating whether similar biases also color our recall of important life experiences, be they of the unpleasant/painful kind (think invasive medical procedures), or more relevant to our concerns here, pleasant experiences (like a delightful meal or your favorite team winning the play-offs).

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Memory Distortions It is important to note that our memories of meals show systematic distortions from what happened and what may have been perceived (and seemed salient) at the time. That is, our memories of meals are not just weaker versions of the original experience, “devoid of the pungency and tang” (as William James, the famous psychologist from the end of the nineteenth century, might have said)7 that was associated with the actual experience of the dishes that were consumed. Instead, certain elements of the experience tend to be remembered better than others, while other aspects of an experience (and that includes dining experiences) will be forgotten almost as soon as they occurred. A large body of memory research has highlighted the existence of seemingly ubiquitous primacy, recency, and peak experience biases in memory (Fredrickson 2000; Weinstein and Roediger 2010). That is, we tend to remember the first part of an experience, the last part, and the high point better than other parts. If we were to consider the analogy with pain research, then prolonging a painful procedure by adding a less painful element at the end has been shown to help reduce remembered pain. This is because the experience ends on a less painful note (see Ariely 2008, for a first-person account of what a good idea this is). Or consider the sporting final where your team is losing all the way through, only to come from behind and score the winning goal/points in the closing seconds of the match. For the majority of the game you may not have been enjoying yourself, but in hindsight you will remember the game as being more enjoyable than it mostly was because of the way in which it ended. The key question here is whether our meal memories are similarly biased by the way in which they begin, the way in which they end (cf. Gopnik 2011), and/or the peak experience. The (admittedly limited) evidence that has been published to date from the world of food suggests that while our memory for meals is in many ways similar to our memory for other types of events, it also exhibits some important differences too (see Garbinsky, Morewdge, and Shiv 2014; Koster 2006; Robinson, Blissett, and Higgs 2011, 2012; Rode, Rozin, and Durlach 2007; Robinson and Higgs 2011; Zandstra, Hauer, and Weegels 2008).8 So, for instance, Rode et al. reported evidence for duration neglect (namely ignoring the mid-part of experiences that don’t change much over time) but minimal peak, end (recency) or primacy effects (see Spence 2017c, for further examples of the way in which meal memories differ from other kinds of memories). Of course, designing memorable food experiences/meals is somewhat different from other kinds of entertainment (meals, notably, are not just “entertainment”), in that we can only consume a finite amount of food in any one sitting, and there are certain foods that (physiologically) might work better at the end of the meal as the diner is approaching the limit of what they can manage to eat. Hyde and Witherly (1993), put forward their icecream hypothesis to deal with the intriguing question of why ice-cream is so often found at the end of a meal. One suggestion being the dynamic change of ice-cream as it melts or perhaps the deliciously stimulating cold temperature that helps provide some desirable stimulation even though we may technically, be sated.

Meals the Restaurateur/Chef Want Us to Remember Business-minded chefs and restaurateurs are all trying to figure out ways in which to make their guests’ meals more memorable. I am not aware of many chefs explicitly trying to design/engineer in memorable moments into the experience as yet (though see Spence, 2017c, for something of an exception in the innovative work/practice of London-based

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modernist chef Jozef Youssef of Kitchen Theory; https://gastrophysics.co.uk/), but intuitively, by trial and error, they would appear to be been homing in on a number of dining trends that the laboratory research shows enhance memory. Here, one might only wonder whether the fact that so many restaurants seem to excel on their starters suggests that they have realized that what matters most in terms of meal memory is the first impression that they deliver, gustatorily speaking. LaTour and Carbone (2014) report on some intriguing research that they conducted on behalf of one high-street pizza chain in the UK. They found that it was the warmth of the initial greeting on entering the restaurant that really stuck in diners’ minds when they were probed several weeks later about what they remembered of their dining experience. That said, I suppose one might wonder whether this result really argues that there is anything especially memorable about the initial greeting, or whether instead it can be framed simply as an example of the primacy effect in memory (i.e., we retain an enhanced memory of whatever happens first in a particular event/encounter).9 In terms of tried-and-tested techniques that are likely to stick in memory when we dine out, the use of surprise ranks pretty high up the list. This can be something as simple as offering the diner an amuse bouche (sometimes called an amuse gruel), the surprise food bite, that will likely stand out due to its very unexpectedness (Clark 2006; Grimes 1998). As one journalist writing in the New York Times put it: “As it often is in restaurants, the amuse-bouche can be one of the most memorable moments of the meal” (Clark 2006). Indeed, I know of a number of people who still remember the surprise associated with being able to dip their bread into the edible candle wax at London’s Restaurant Story (MacLeod 2013), even though they ate there more than five years ago. Theatrical elements in the meal would also appear to stick in mind (see Spence 2017c). However, whether this is the theatrical elements per se (as when the waitress sprays an aromatic mist over the food at Kitchen Theory’s Chef ’s Table), or just that theater tableside tends to be unusual (and hence more memorable) is currently unclear. One has to presume, I think, that if every meal was theatrical then theatricality would no longer stand out as being quite so memorable. And here it is worth noting that evidence collected by chef Jozef Youssef and his team at Kitchen Theory suggests that while the theatrical elements are indeed memorable, the identity of the food itself may soon be forgotten. Though whether one sometimes remembers the theatrical elements at the cost of the flavors experienced on the palate remains to be determined. Then we have the rise of the tasting menu, which again makes sense if one believes that we tend to pay attention to, and hence remember, the first mouthfuls and possibly the last, while the stuff in the middle tends to fade from memory. The official name for the latter memory bias is “duration neglect” (Anderson and Norman 1964; Fredrickson and Kahneman 1993).10 That said, the forty-nine-course tasting menu that was offered when Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli restaurant finally closed its doors may have been taking things a little too far (see Edwards 2011)! The rise in sharing plates can also be framed in a similar way, as it too likely increases the number of different flavor experiences that the diner is exposed to (Muston 2013; though see Lynes 2016), thus potentially offering numerous flavor experiences with “sticktion.” One danger here though is the lack of structure of the dishes/meal organization, which can all too often mean that there is little for the diner’s memory to hold on to afterwards when trying to remember what was eaten (see Spence, Wang, and Youssef 2017). It is here that the use of storytelling in high-end restaurants with multicourse tasting menus starts to make a lot more sense, as by recalling the story at a later date, it may be easier for the diner to reconstruct their meal (Spence 2017c,

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2018). Handing out a printed menu and/or something sweet to savor at a later date can also help here. The large body of memory research (typically not involving food) can be summarized in terms of having revealed a number of memory biases. Several of these have been validated by those working with food/meals. We often tend to remember the first moment and the last more than what goes on in the middle. We also tend to remember the high points of the experience while at the same time exhibiting duration neglect. That said, these biases may show up differently in different kinds of eating experience—some have people imagine eating a meal, others have compared people’s memory of the cookie that they consumed first or second (to compare primacy/recency effects), others have assessed people’s memories for meals at a chain pizza restaurant. Few researchers, in other words, have had the opportunity to assess people’s memories for “special” meals that have actually been consumed by those whose memory is being tested.

Restaurateurs/Chefs Triggering Nostalgia at Mealtimes A growing number of chefs nowadays would appear to be deliberately trying to elicit nostalgia, triggering memories that are hopefully positive in the minds of their diners (Hirsch 1992; Leonor, Lake, and Guerra 2018). Two representative examples are the Autumn Leaves dish from Grant Achatz (of restaurant Alinea fame) (whereby dried oak leaves are burnt, the scent meant to evoke happy childhood memories of jumping in leaf piles and the smell of burning piles of leaves), and The Sweetshop from Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck restaurant (the latter involving an elaborate model trolley). Cocktail maker extraordinaire, Tony Conigliaro, does something similar with his The Rose cocktail (see Spence 2017b). It is interesting to note how in all three of the cases just mentioned, it is scent/aroma that is used to trigger memories (nostalgia), of autumnal childhood days by the use of scent with Achatz’s dish, the smell of the sweetshop from our childhoods at The Fat Duck, and the smell of an English Rose Garden with Tony Conigiaro’s cocktail served at 69 Colbrooke Row in London. Scent is an obvious go-to here given the oft-claimed enhanced ability of scents to trigger autobiographical memories (Chu and Downes 2000, 2002; Herz and Schooler 2002; Schab 1990), as in the oft-mentioned Proust Effect (see Proust [1922] 1960). But it is worth remembering that much of the same nostalgia can also be triggered by playing the sounds of the sea (seagulls and the sounds of the waves crashing gently on the beach) that serve as the auditory accompaniment to Blumenthal’s signature Sound of the Sea seafood dish (Blumenthal 2007, 2008; Spence, Shankar, and Blumenthal 2011). Part of the idea is to trigger hopefully happy memories of childhood seaside holidays (though the fact that a few diners have been brought to tears by the dish might suggest otherwise). One open question though here is whether the sensory triggers (scents and sounds) that are so redolent for world-famous chefs such as Achatz and Blumenthal necessarily tap into similar memories in the guests they serve.

Meals that We Want to Remember There have been numerous reports of the increase in the proportion of diners who choose to take a photo of their food before they eat it (Ensor 2013; Spence et al. 2016). While part of the reason for this is undoubtedly to share what a great time one is having with one’s social network, one might also consider it as an effective means of laying down an external memory that will help one to recall the delights one experienced later (cf. O’Regan 1992). Indeed, the research shows that taking a picture of a meal before you

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eat it enhances one’s subsequent recall even if you never look at the picture again (Coary and Poor 2016; Spence 2017d). That said, too much use of one’s media at the table is likely to have an overall detrimental impact on the (memory of the) experience (Tamir et al. 2018). Similarly, eating with the TV on has been shown to impair memory, and so leads to increased consumption at the time, and hence likely increased consumption at the next mealtime too (Robinson et al. 2013; Spence 2017c). In fact, the evidence suggests that anything that distracts our attention from the food that we are eating is likely to be bad for our consumption behavior, with people eating up to a third more with the TV on (see Spence et al. 2016; Spence, Mancini, and Huisman, 2019; see also Higgs and McVittie 2012). Meanwhile, anything that we can do to enhance the number of foodrelated sensations that we are aware of is likely a good thing in terms of meaning that we will be satisfied with less, and perhaps also remember more.11 Sutton (2001: 121) also comments on the lack of memories that are associated with snacking.

Manipulating the Memory of Meals Before closing, there are a couple of reasons for potentially wanting to manipulate people’s memory of the foods/meals that they have had. On the one hand, there is an intriguing body of research looking at the possibility of enhancing children’s enjoyment of vegetables by implanting false memories of enjoyable encounters with the food that hadn’t really occurred at some point in the dim and distant past (Bernstein et al. 2005a, 2005b; Bernstein and Loftus 2009; Laney et al. 2008). I am the first to admit that implanting such false meal memories does, however, raise thorny ethical questions. Separately, it turns out that encouraging people to remember the last meal that they ate provides an effective strategy for reducing the amount that they end up consuming the next time they eat (Higgs 2002), especially when people are led to remember eating more than was actually the case (Thompson 2017).

CONCLUSIONS Memory is key to the majority of our food likes and dislikes, which are built on a lifetime of previous meal experiences, no matter whether we remember them or not (and the research suggests that mostly we do not). While special meals may remain in memory, that is, long-term autobiographical memory, the research suggests that we are more likely to remember the social/theatrical elements of the meal (oh and any elements of surprise) more than the specific flavors/foods/dishes that we consumed. The funny thing is that while we remember the occasion, chances are we have forgotten what we ate, and if we think we remember, then the evidence suggests that we may well be incorrect (see Spence 2017c). Perhaps ultimately, therefore, it is the more social aspects of the encounter (e.g., the emotions that we felt) that stay in memory more than the flavors of the food itself. Such an observation certainly fits with the notion of the meal as a primarily social/ commensal encounter (Sobal 2000; see also Spence 2016, 2017c). At the outset, I stressed how much of the pleasure of great meals lies both in the anticipation (or imagination) and in memory. However, the majority of this brief review has focused on the memory of the meal. This is, in part, merely a reflection of the state of the literature but, at the same time, this implicitly recognizes where I believe the majority of the pleasure likely resides. That said, it is perhaps worth noting, in closing, that there is little that gets the brain more excited than the sight (and possibly smell) of our favorite

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food when we are hungry (Wang et al. 2004; see also Small et al. 2008). Hence, perhaps the most appropriate conclusion to end with here is that while the most intense foodrelated neural activity is seen in the anticipation of food, it is the longer-lasting memories of special meals that give us so much pleasure over the longer term. This final sentiment then concurs with Brillat-Savarin (1835: 14) line we came across earlier, and which merits repeating: “The pleasures of the table, belong to all times and all ages, to every country and to every day; they go hand in hand with all our other pleasures, outlast them, and remain to console us for their loss.”

NOTES 1 Though, of course, not everyone finds the queuing itself to be an altogether pleasurable activity (see Anon. 2013). 2 David Sutton (2001) starts his book Remembrance of Repasts as follows: “ ‘Food and memory? Why would anyone want to remember anything they had eaten?’ This sardonic comment, made by an Oxford don ….” As an Oxford don myself, I can certainly see where this comment might have come from (having been to a few too many poor college dinners), but hope that this piece in some way makes up. 3 Though, of course, anyone who subtitles their 600+ page books A Brief History of … perhaps shouldn’t be trusted anyway! 4 One noteworthy intervention at the interface of food and memory comes from those pop-up restaurants (in Tokyo in 2017 and at The Restaurant That Makes Mistakes in Bristol, UK, in 2018) where patients with (early-stage) dementia serve the guests in the restaurant (to help highlight problems with this debilitating condition; see Joseph 2019). 5 While the technical definition of Sticktion refers to “the static friction that needs to be overcome to enable relative motion of stationary objects in contact,” when used by Carbone it is used to refer to those things that stick in memory, and hence are not easily forgotten. 6 The exception being an innate aversion to trigeminal nasal irritants, such as carbon dioxide (e.g., when sniffing a just opened can of fizzy drink). 7 He actually used this phrase to describe how mental imagery differs from perception (see James 1890). 8 Here it is perhaps worth noting that the meal is typically much more of a self-paced activity than many of the other situations that have been studied in memory research to date (such as watching a movie, attending a sporting event, or undergoing a painful surgical procedure). 9 That, or perhaps the pizzas themselves can’t be up to much in this particular chain restaurant. 10 Though, I suppose, one might legitimately ask here whether the relevant unit is the dish, an entire meal, etc.). 11 Though please don’t take this as an endorsement of mindful raisin eating (see Hong, Lishner, and Han 2014). Though even that sounds better than eating with spoons filled with nails, the alternative approach to mindful dining proposed by one Amsterdam supper club (see Gander 2016)

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Family and Community

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CHAPTER SIX

Brittle Memories: Sharing Culinary Expertise in an Italian Family FABIO PARASECOLI

A bundle of yellowish brittle pages, penned in a time-worn, careful handwriting, which I have seen floating around my mother’s kitchen for years, has made its way to me. They carry the recipes for specialties I have been eating as long as I can remember, especially around the holidays. Those recipes constitute a big portion of my maternal family’s culinary memories: my mother has often cooked them for us, at times with our (her children’s) participation. They have contributed to the development of my own foodrelated recollections, as well as those of previous generations in the family. My sister’s children have also grown up eating those same dishes and desserts, which have become a central component in their own sensory experiences and in their culinary memory. As I started experimenting with the family dishes, I quickly became aware that, although I perfectly knew what those dishes were supposed to taste and look like, I was not able to reproduce them. This realization prompted me to try and cook some of those mainstays on a wooden stove while gathering information about how those recipes had been handed down. My epicurean self could once again work in unison with my academic curiosity. I strongly believe that cooking, as many other manual activities, is a legitimate form of knowledge that has been kept to the margins of Western European cultures, which instead favored intellectual and theoretical endeavors and left practices and manual skills to the messy and ordinary world of caregiving and emotional labor (Curtin and Heldke 1992). Through a reflection about my family’s culinary world, in this essay I will explore three modalities in which memories were created and experienced and knowledge handed down in my family: the acquisition and transmission of information through recipes; the role of tools and technology; and the teaching of manual skills through shared practice. Developed around a set of written memories, the first modality is discursive, based both on personal involvement and shared ideas, values, and attitudes that are embedded in larger cultural and institutional frameworks: gender, intergenerational relations, social class, school, and the nation. Discursive memories, however, are not generated in a physical void. In fact, memories are not only maintained but also shaped by the material environment in which individuals and communities interact with food: from cooking tools to appliances,

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FIGURE 6.1  Fabio Parasecoli’s family recipes in his grandmother’s handwriting. Photography by the author.

furniture, and the design of homes and other spaces connected with preparation and consumption. Choosing to use one kind of knife over another impacts the transmission of manual skills, the recipes that can be prepared, the space that is needed for its use. Objects act and interact with humans, contributing to the creation of memories within the historically determined and constantly shifting socio-technological arrangements in which food activities take place (Callon 1999; Law 2000). Last but not least, memories are also the result of sensory stimulations in shared practices such as preparing, cooking, and eating food. These actions are inevitably accompanied by emotions, ranging from the comfort of doing something with loved ones to the distress caused by tensions among them. Such embodied and affective memories cannot emerge outside of the cultural categories shaped by their discursive aspects and their physical surroundings (Sutton 2006). Methodologically, I conducted an auto-ethnography of my own interactions with the cooking members of my family and also an ethnography of my extended family through informal interviews and participant observation. I conversed with relatives during meals and spent several afternoons cooking with my mother, my aunt, my sisters, and my nephew and niece over two Christmas breaks in Rome. I talked with them while cooking in the free-flowing style that Meredith Abarca describes as charla culinaria or culinary chat (Abarca 2007). I also took notes and recorded some conversations, although I soon realized that the presence of a recording device somehow made all the banter more formal. I must admit that my culinary skills have noticeably improved as a result of this research project.

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I also provide a textual analysis of the recipes, trying to locate them within the larger framework of Italian political and culinary history. Those pages have survived the Second Word War and the migration to the big city of Rome with the same hard-headed tenacity that many attribute to the people from the Abruzzo mountains in Italy, where my mother’s side of the family is originally from. Inevitably I will move back and forth between deeply personal observations and forms of reflections that fall under the traditional modes of knowledge in academia. The loose fragments of paper that my mother handed down to me are a reminder of the larger cultural, social, and political history of the generations of women who shaped my taste of home. Their lives are worthy of attention, respect, and admiration.

DISCURSIVE MEMORIES: THE TRANSMISSION OF WRITTEN RECIPES The oldest handwritten recipes in the family collection date to the 1920s, when the National Fascist Party began to gain prominence. From the stories my mother heard from her mother and her aunts, most of the recipes originated from my great-grandmother Marietta. I remember her as a tiny and quiet woman, always dressed in black, vaguely mysterious and a bit scary. We were removed in terms of generations, gender, and upbringing. I recollect her speaking her native dialect from Tossicia, a tiny village on the Gran Sasso Mountain in the Apennines of the Abruzzo region. As she was barely literate and paper was hard to come by, she taught her teenage daughters how to cook through practice in the kitchen. Only later did her daughters (my grandmother Vittoria and her sisters Rosa and Agnese) feel the need to jot down directions for the recipes they probably cooked less frequently, as they were desserts and more elaborate dishes for the holidays (several of them containing precious meat). The texts include ingredients and quantities, at times expressed in pounds (libbre) and ounces (once), still common in the Italian countryside despite the adoption of the metric system by the national government. In their recipes, the different phases in the preparation are barely mentioned, and not described in detail. Very short, at times just two or three lines, the recipes were clearly mnemonic devices written for women who were already familiar with the techniques and methods required to make those dishes. For instance, the recipe for the Pizza di Pasqua (a savory sponge cake served during Easter) only says: 8 eggs, one kilo and 600 grams of flour, 100 grams of brewer’s yeast, a box of milk. Flavorings as you like. Commercial ingredients such as brewer’s yeast and milk in boxes already appear, showing how during Fascism the burgeoning food industry was able to reach small villages, especially after the introduction of electricity and regular buses to the nearby towns (two momentous events that my grandmother remembered quite well). Some recipes were more complex and required more directions. The recipe for marzipan—which I translated trying to render grammar mistakes and misspellings—reads: One pound of peeled almonds, the which you will pound so thinly that is becomes an oindment, it is advised that you don’t let oil come out of them, to this one adds ten ounces of well refined sugar. To make them into a dough one will beat seven egg whites in a container so that they become a quite hard foam. After doing this mix all in

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a recipient and under them so that they don’t stick to the pan you will put a thin wafer [the same one used for the Communion host in church, my note] or a compact, little piece of egg with a little sugar. As a rule, to make marzipan good one will put a dose of cinnamon and a little citron. Looking at the handwriting, different authors emerge, suggesting that knowledge was shared and traded among women. Besides my grandmother and two of her sisters, at least another woman (one Tecla) seems to have contributed. Men did not get involved in the kitchen. However, they participated in hunting and foraging for vegetables and mushrooms. My mother’s cousin, Domenico, remembers their grandfather, also Domenico, taking him on work trips and teaching him about the edible plants they found on the road, even getting him used to eating slightly toxic mushrooms in order “to make him stronger.” The handwritten recipes point to a world more layered and intricate than one could imagine for a 500-soul village carved into the Appennini mountains. The careful penmanship was an achievement for women who only had access to a few years of elementary-level education, if that. The shaky use of the Italian language, imposed through schooling and difficult to master, rather than the local dialect they grew up speaking, showed that those recipes were special and not meant to appear on the everyday table. Some texts, with words from different dialects, reveal influences from various regional traditions, while others echo the then nascent “Italian” cuisine, a by-product of the recent unification of the country and a mainstay ensuring the Fascist regime, which was also turning its citizens into consumers of Italian products (Parasecoli 2014). Although the new Kingdom of Italy had been officially established in 1861, when my grandmother and her sisters were learning how to cook in the early 1920s Italy was far from being culturally and socially unified. From the culinary point of view, each region maintained its traditions and customs, supported by a productive system that was mostly local, due to the lack of a developed transportation network in the country. Pellegrino Artusi’s La scienza in Cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene (The Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well), published in 1891, was the first cookbook referring to Italy as a culinary space and making regional recipes accessible and understandable to readers from around the country (Artusi 1996). At the time, readership for cookbooks was quite small, as literacy was limited to the upper classes. As the Fascist regime was increasingly co-opting cuisine as an expression of Italian creativity and cultural identity, cookbooks and food magazines became more ordinary and accessible, supported by a growing readership and by the regime’s educational policies that drastically increased literacy (Helstosky 2004). The notebooks on which the family recipes were written, now completely broken down and impossible to put back together, had royal decrees and Aesop’s fables on their covers. On one side of a back cover, we see a beautiful pencil drawing of a vase with flowers, while on the other we can read the announcement of the victory of the First World War in November 1918. The language of these dispatches from the government already had the patriotic and bombastic tones that would become common during Fascism, enamored with military spirit and martial manners. Referring to the occupation of Trentino, previously belonging to the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, the proclaim states: “The remnants of what was once among the most powerful armies in the world, in disarray, are climbing up the valleys that they defended with proud assurance.” Another recipe is written on the back of a void administrative form, showing that although more common, paper was not wasted.

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The handwritten recipes were saved together with clips from newspapers and magazines, a testimony to the curiosity of these women who probably had limited access to travel. On the back of the clippings, ads for slimming products and breast enhancement point to an intricate and quite modern feminine world. On the other side of a recipe for stuffed eggplants (an exotic vegetable in the village at the time) we see advertisements for iodized salts from the Montecatini spa village, to cure obesity; for pilules orientales (in French) to make breasts bigger and harder; and for a doctor who cures “nervous disturbances of sexual functions.” Next to a recipe for “small steaks of minced meat” (hamburgers) we see the advertisements for a product against “the tragedy of ugly skin” (illustrated by a crying woman hiding her face) and for a book by Petronilla, one of the most famous female recipe writers during Fascism. In one advertisement for weaning cookies we read that “Gino Pozzoli, seven and a half months, weighs 10.3 kg. Grateful to Mellin” (the brand), a statement followed by the town in which said Gino is supposed to live: Cantù, near Como. However, in-between the food recipes one also finds a note about how to make soap. It is hard to tell if the note is from before the arrival of industrial products to the village or a consequence of the embargo imposed on Italy after it invaded Ethiopia in 1935, when many house products became hard to come by. Those recipes followed my grandmother and her sisters in their migration to Rome, right before the Second World War. Although living in Rome, the family’s food habits fluctuated between ingredients and recipes from Abruzzo, and those from our new city, where my mother Carmela was born and raised and learned how to cook. My parents started dating while my mother finished college (she became a high school teacher) and received her culinary education. My mother’s sister, Amalia, who also learned how to cook from the previous generation, reports the frustration with the impossibly high standards imposed on them as young girls, which made the experience unpleasant. Although participating in the preparation of meals, both for daily consumption and special occasions, my mother and her sister’s first duty had been to succeed academically (a big change for women in the family history). In the same heap of papers that contained the old recipes from Tossicia, I also found my mother’s university notebooks, which on one side carried notes about Italian literature and, on the other side, recipes that she was trying to collect, in preparation for her duties as a soon-to-be bride in the early 1960s. At the time, it was unthinkable that young brides would not know their way in the kitchen. In practice, they started cooking in earnest when they got married and became responsible for their husbands, who did not know how to make anything edible—a common occurrence in that period. My mother received a copy of the Talismano della Felicità—a huge and very popular cookbook—as a wedding gift (Boni 1999). As a newlywed my mother also cooked under the guidance of her mother-in-law, Rina, who taught her recipes both from Rome and the northern Marche and Romagna areas, where her husband’s family was from. Over the years, she started mixing it up, trying new recipes and getting ideas from magazines and newspapers, which she clipped and still keeps. She wrote down significantly fewer recipes than the previous generation, as printed culinary advice was becoming available and cheap. When she learned how to use a computer, she transcribed all the handwritten recipes from her elders, as the pages were increasingly more brittle. She also numbered all the cutouts she had been gathering and created a searchable index, mostly limited to the recipes’ names rather than, say, ingredients, difficulty, time of preparation, or occasion. Those clips are now stored together with printouts from the internet, which my mother accesses regularly and that following generations turn to as a favorite source

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of culinary knowledge. It is in the form of a collection that the recipes were handed all the way down to me and my sisters, Silvia and Cristina. The conversation across generations continues, employing new material supports for the memories that my mother was creating for herself and for the transmission of household knowledge.

TECHNOLOGICAL MEMORIES: LEARNING FROM THINGS While discursive elements such as recipes, family stories, and culinary knowledge are undoubtedly central in creating shared memories with cultural and social relevance, material objects—kitchen tools, appliances, technology, interior design, and built environments—also contribute to the transmission of memory, both individually and communally. All of these elements generate sensory, affective, and discursive engagements that color food experiences and facilitate—or at times hinder—their transmission. We often continue to use instruments that—whether they are handed down from previous generations or are recently purchased—shape our practices. I have always loved my mother’s spaghetti alla chitarra, another specialty from Abruzzo, her parents’ native region. This kind of spaghetti is made by pressing a long strip of thin pasta dough with a rolling pin over a frame on which metal strings have been pulled tight (hence the name of chitarra, or guitar). The strings cut the pasta, which takes the shape of relatively thick spaghetti with a square section and a slightly rough surface, perfect to catch sauce. My favorite is tomato sauce with tiny, fingertip-sized meatballs. I remember spending hours making those with my grandmother, who would scold my sisters and me if we made them too big. My mother owns a chitarra and still uses it, as it gives pasta a unique texture. However, when she does not have the time or energy, she uses a steel pasta machine with adjustable rollers and different heads to make various cuts of fresh pasta. It clamps to the kitchen table and the hand crank makes it easy to operate. Although I may be able to make pasta with the chitarra, I never did. That’s mom’s pasta. Those are her skills. Using that tool would somehow encroach on her territory. So I have embraced the more recent piece of equipment to make similar pasta, even if the results definitely cannot compare. At the same time, the transmission of that knowledge and those skills can only take place if my sisters and myself—and maybe the next generation—learn how to use it by using the tool with our mother. The tool becomes an invitation to interact with the person with the ability to teach and create technological memories, inevitably charged with affect, embodied experience, and discourse. Unless we decide to hang it on the wall as a quaint decorative object, which would generate and maintain a whole different kind of memory, the very presence of a chitarra in the kitchen encourages us to use it. Objects do things: besides acting and modifying reality (the chitarra makes pasta), they also either prompt and guide others to do things, or prevent them from doing them (the chitarra is an invitation for us to learn, but also an obstacle unless we learn). We may not reflect enough about the role of technology when it comes to culinary traditions. Contemporary culture—as reproduced through media and teaching institutions—tends to contemplate traditions in an almost mythical dimension shaped by nostalgia, never affected by time and all that comes with it: modernity, automation, globalization. This approach is particularly evident when we turn our attention to rural or peasant ethnic groups that we may both admire for their attachment to customs and pity for their backwardness. The idea of technology instead brings to mind computers,

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contemporary machinery, and sleek screens, even when it comes to cooking. We risk forgetting that even a spoon is a piece of technology, and an evolving one at that. Those technologies shape our embodied experience, both as individuals and as communities. The adoption of the fork became part of a larger transformation of table manners, transmitted through specialized texts that involved the way people sit around the table, consume food, and interact with each other. Tools and technology participate in the formation of what Marcel Mauss defined as the techniques of the body, which are at the same time embodied and social (Mauss [1935] 1973). The presence of a grill in a backyard or on a terrace probably makes grilling a more frequent activity that is likely to generate personal and shared memories. Building an outdoors oven similarly stimulates specific practices—and the memories connected with them—that could not take place in an indoor kitchen. In the absence of person-toperson transmission, these days we can learn how to grill or bake from YouTube videos, forums and blogs, sponsored websites, and TV shows. But what happens when these venues are not available? How do we create the memory necessary to use an object when there is nobody to teach us, or the object is so old or so unusual that it is difficult to find tutorials? In the summer of 2016 I tried to make some of the family handwritten recipes with my friend Saverio on his 1940s wood stove, known as cucina economica. Such an appliance would have been quite an advancement compared to what my great-grandmother and her daughters used: even my mother clearly remembers that cooking took place in the hearth, with a metal arm and a big pot hanging from it, which could be moved back and forth, and fornacelle, a built-in contraption made of bricks that was located in a wide recess in the wall next to the hearth and had three spaces to put wood and coal and, on top, three holes. Heat was regulated mostly by the quantity of fuel, as the holes had neither a cover on which one can move a pot to expose it to more or less heat nor concentric metal rings that could be taken out to allow more or less direct flames to get in contact with containers. This was the case for the more advanced cucina economica, which also had an oven next to the space in which fuel was burned, at times with a thermometer which would help to determine how much fuel one wanted to burn in order to achieve a specific temperature. My great-grandmother and her daughters did not have one of those fancy stoves, so if they needed to bake or roast something, they would bring their pans and tins to the closest professional oven, where bread was baked for a fee and other dishes could be cooked on hot ambers when the temperatures were already diminishing after the bread baking. Saverio and I chose a meat dish and a cookie recipe, taralli. Toltonné is a version of vitello tonnato, a recipe originally from Piedmont, in Northwestern Italy, but with the tuna stuffed in the meat, rather than in the sauce. Interestingly, the recipe echoes vitel tonné, a French-inflected name that reflects the influence of French cuisine on the traditions of Piedmont and post-unity bourgeois cuisine. Vitello tonnato appeared in Pellegrino Artusi’s 1891 The Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well. By the 1920s or 1930s, a specialty from Piedmont had found its way to the mountains of central Italy, showing how a national culinary tradition was slowly developing by connecting very distinctive techniques, ingredients, as well as cultural values and habits. Maybe adding such a dish to their repertoire increased my female ancestors’ sense of being part of a world that extended beyond their village. Contrastingly, taralli are instead local baked cookies in the form of a ring, relatively common in central and southern Italy both in their savory and sweet forms.

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We immediately realized we did not really know what we were doing. We lacked both the skills and the technological memories necessary to ensure the dishes we were preparing came out well. Our hands and bodies were being asked to perform actions and interpret information that were completely new and lacked any solid frame of reference. The recipes, as the texts below show, did not help us much. Toltonné You take a piece of lean meat, such as a loin, then you stuff it with anchovies and tuna fish. After you stuffed it well, pass it in flour. Then you start cooking it in a pan with water, oil, and white wine. When the meat is cooked, after boiling slowly, you add a sliced lemon. After boiling for a while, you need to strain that sauce. Then you take capers, nicely desalted, and you add them to the sauce, making it simmer all together. Then you cut the meat in slices and put some of the sauce on every slice. What kind of pan or pot did we need? And how were we supposed to place it on the stove? In the center of the surface? On the sides? The recipe told us to add lemon after the meat was cooked, but would it become overcooked? How long was the sauce supposed to simmer? Did we have to move the pan to another part of the surface, as the sauce may need a different level of heat than the meat? The cookies, which we were supposed to bake in the oven, were even more difficult. Taralli Three pounds of flour, one pound of sugar, a glass of wine, one of oil, one of rum. That was it. We were totally befuddled and frankly quite frustrated. It was clear that the writer assumed that anybody reading that recipe would know how to proceed, what the texture of the dough was supposed to feel like, and how to bake the cookies. That was not the case with us, despite our supposed culinary abilities. It became immediately clear that we needed some guidance, or at least some cultural facilitation. We ended up calling my mother, who as a young girl had cooked at the wood stove and had learned those recipes from her mother. She immediately knew what we were getting ready to make, and helped us interpret the somewhat cryptic texts while giving us some practical directions. She was able to answer our practical questions because she had not only maintained the written memories, but had clear, embodied recollections about cooking with women from previous generations. From the start, we had to work out what kinds of wood pieces to use at specific times, depending on what kind of flame we needed. That required buying wood and carrying it, which we easily did in an elevator but which in the past obviously required a great amount of logistical planning and physical labor. We were also being challenged to materially relate to food preparation in a different way. Heat could be controlled by moving the pot closer to or further from the center of the stove, and by removing metal rings that allowed more direct contact with the flame. The manipulation of the air draft also made the wood burn faster or slower. The oven turned out to be the most difficult aspect to manage, as the heat could only be regulated by the quantity and type of wood burned. In fact, the temperature indicator had only three positions: desserts, roasts, and bread, just giving us the vaguest indication that we were on the right track. While the toltonné came out gloriously, the arguably simpler taralli were a disaster. The first batch came out with a scorched surface but a soft interior, while the second never really cooked, as we may have waited too long for the oven to cool off. We developed an all-new kind of admiration and respect for the abilities of women whose

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talents were not given enough credit, discounted as ordinary techniques simply acquired by wives and daughters. A vast amount of embodied knowledge (and physical endurance) got little recognition, hidden in daily chores or special occasion cooking. Furthermore, considerable technological skills, of which only my mother had memory, were necessary to pull off cooking on a daily basis.

EMBODIED MEMORIES: COOKING TOGETHER My mother still cooks, often with her sister and the three of us, her children. Sunday meals are a multicourse affair, every week. At times my sister’s children, Flavio and Grazia, help in the kitchen, which to this day is the busiest room in my mother’s apartment. Although domestic cooking is still widely perceived as a woman’s job, norms related to gender and cooking are changing in Italy, with growing numbers of men feeling comfortable at the stove, especially among the younger generations. I cook too, and eat. A lot. My repertoire is more eclectic and international, as I have lived and worked in several countries. Nevertheless, the dishes from my maternal family occupy a special place in my memories, full of emotions and comfort. My sisters and I started doing small kitchen chores as children: beating egg whites to a foam, peeling almonds, and such. I remember I felt very proud the first time I was asked to make the battuto for the Sunday tomato sauce, by using a sharp knife to turn a piece of cured pork fat, rosemary, garlic, and pepper, into a soft paste. As we became more independent, my sisters and I learned how to cook more and more, often under the remote guidance of my mother. At the same time, some family recipes were increasingly shared with friends and acquaintances. Despite being familiar as an eater, from the gustatory pleasure point of view, with most of the handwritten family recipes, making them turned out to be far from easy. For example, I always loved spumantini, a baked rectangular cookie made of ground almonds, sugar, and white eggs, with a light meringue on top, but when I tried to make them they were either too hard or did not maintain the expected shape. Although I was fully conversant with the dishes, both in terms of their cultural significance and their appreciation in my social circle, I was not actually able to make many of them. I realized what I was missing was the embodied knowledge that was necessary to successfully produce those dishes. I did not have the practical memories that are created in working together with others who have a longer experience and which can provide guidance. Only by cooking with my mother have I acquired the necessary manual skills and embodied knowledge to have some dishes come out the way she, myself, the whole family, and our friends expect them to be. It is not just about verbal guidance. It is rather the need for an immersion in the sensory environment of the kitchen, made of material objects and tools, the way they feel in your hand and need to be used; the smells and sounds; the visual cues; the affective involvement in making sure that you are doing a good job, that you are the next link in a long chain of knowledge transmission, that you are securing the recipes for the future, and that you are providing nourishment, care, and pleasure to others. Memories—including their discursive aspects—present themselves as fundamentally nonrepresentational. As I have argued elsewhere (Parasecoli 2007), we should not consider the senses and the mind as faculties that limit themselves to mirroring nature, with their contents assessed as more or less precise reflections from an external reality. Mnemonic materials cannot be studied as being composed of discrete, recognizable, circumscribed, interchangeable, reproducible components that can also be disposed of. They are rather the result of ongoing interactions between the different properties of the brain and the

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stimuli deriving from the senses. They are not fixed once and for all, ready to be accessed when needed like the files in a computer, which we expect to find exactly as we stored them. Memory is rather a creative and dynamic faculty that allows human beings to relive the past each time in different ways. In fact, the body and the emotions connected with it (e.g., pleasure, pain, fear) influence the way memories are stored and eventually retrieved. When I was growing up, I detested having to beat egg whites until stiff, or peeling almonds right out of boiling water to make the spumantini cookies I adored. Yet, when I remember that experience from the past, it is wrapped in a sort of pleasant nostalgia for my childhood, rather than the annoyance around those specific actions. The affect connected with that memory may also have changed because, as I was growing up, we got an electric egg beater and peeled almonds became easier to find. As much as one can learn from recipes in the media (videos, podcasts, written texts) and as much as visual support may be useful in achieving a good result, these tools cannot provide the physical experience that is necessary to fully master a dish. What is the right consistency of cookie dough? What does it have to feel like to the fingers so that it can bake properly? What is the smell that signals that the cookie is just right, not undercooked or slightly charred? What are the sounds that a tomato sauce makes, allowing us to know when it has reached the desired texture? Can we hear when the sauce has simmered too long, without waiting for the smell of burned food? The emotional aspect of embodied memories is inevitably social as well, entangled in networks of relationships and, as a consequence, power. In fact, learning how to cook from family member can constitute a more or less pleasant (or anxiety-ridden) form of interaction, through which one can assess, accept, or refuse various means of control and authority that otherwise could be taken for granted. Culinary memories are profoundly embodied, as they relate to the sensory environment in which food preparation and consumption takes place. At the same time, the way individuals experience their bodies and the sensory memories produced in the engagement with culinary practices is not purely a “natural” occurrence, exclusively based on the human biological setup, but is also a social experience, as the way we filter and understand what we do depends on cultural and social frameworks. David Sutton points out the relevance of “socio-cognitive aspects of the senses and synesthesia in cuing, storing, or creating memory” (Sutton 2001). For me, growing up learning how to cook was fraught with on the one hand the pleasure of being in the kitchen with my mother and my sisters, the smells, and the tactile experience, and on the other hand the resentment I felt because my father, Giorgio, was not required to help or contribute to shopping or cooking. I now realize that my mother was caught between her attempts to manage the prevailing gender roles of the time and her desire to raise me, her male son, in a different way. But embodied memories, affect, and skill learning were definitely tainted by that unexpressed tension.

CONCLUSION: MAKING MEMORIES, PASSING DOWN KNOWLEDGE Engaging with the handwritten family recipes based on my great-grandmother’s culinary repertoire, handed down all the way to my generation and the following one, has allowed me to reflect more closely on the formation and transmission of shared memories in the form of knowledge, technology-based skills, and embodied practice. These memories are not without problems, because they are filtered through time, different cultural and social environments, quickly changing technologies, as well as vastly diverging affects

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and embodies experiences. They are inevitably tainted with nostalgia, and they are constantly negotiated between myself and the other family members. First of all, I had to analyze linguistically and interpret historically a set of written information and how-to instructions, to understand how the individual trajectories of the recipe authors intersected with important events and their daily surroundings, which provided meaning and context. I had also to deal with my lack of the manual skills that the authors took for granted and were also part and parcel of a specific historical period, with its material culture, its know-how, and its equipment. This forced me to reflect on how discursive memories are inevitably interwoven with technology-based memories, which in turn relate to the body and its connection with the environment world through embodied, physical memories. The reflections I developed also question pedagogical methodologies in culinary teaching and training, which are often very focused on information and skills. How do culinary students acquire the embodied memories that allow them to be autonomous and creative? How reflective are they about their relationship with technology beyond the obvious need to learn about new techniques and the material and machinery that come with them (siphons, sous-vide, liquid nitrogen, alginates, and such)? I hope the musings and the research generated by my family’s handwritten recipes, which are inevitably colored by my personal involvement, will also stimulate others to reconnect with their culinary past in a practical and applied way, which is also always deeply and inevitably emotional. I can now bake my beloved spumantini cookies, proficiently helping my mother around the Christmas holidays and possibly enjoying them if I so felt inclined. I not only can cook better as a result, but I think overall I also have enjoyed reconnecting with parts of my family history that otherwise would have been soon forgotten.

REFERENCES Abarca, M. (2007), “Charlas Culinarias: Mexican Women Speak from Their Public Kitchens,” Food & Foodways, 15 (3–4): 183–212. Artusi, P. (1996), The Art of Eating Well, trans. K. N. Phillips III, New York: Random House. Boni, A. (1999), Il Talismano della Felicità, Roma: Colombo. Callon, M. (1999), “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of Saint Brieuc Bay,” in M. Biagioli (ed.), The Science Studies Reader, 67–83, New York: Routledge. Curtin, D., and L. Heldke (1992), Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Helstosky, C. (2004), Garlic and Oil: Food and Politics in Italy, Oxford: Berg. Law, J. (2000), “On the Subject of the Object: Narrative, Technology and Interpellation,” Configurations, 8 (1): 1–29. Mauss, M. ([1935] 1973), “Techniques of the Body,” Economy and Society, 2 (1): 70–85. Parasecoli, F. (2007), “Hungry Engrams: Food and Non-Representational Memory,” in F. Allhoff and D. Monroe (eds.), Food and Philosophy, 102–14, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Parasecoli, F. (2014), Al Dente: A History of Food in Italy, London: Reaktion Books. Sutton, D. (2001), Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory, New York: Berg. Sutton, D. (2006), “Cooking Skills, the Senses, and Memory: The Fate of Practical Knowledge,” in E. Edward, C. Gosden, and R. B. Phillips (eds.), Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture, 87–120, Oxford: Berg.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Menus of the Zodiac Club of New York, 1868–1915 PAUL FREEDMAN, GRAHAM HARDING, AND HENRY VOIGT

In 1868, twelve members of the New York Club on lower Fifth Avenue formed a private dining society, an exclusive circle within an already exclusive club. Each took a sign of the zodiac as his identifying symbol and so their number was permanently fixed at twelve. The Zodiac Club members dined on the last Saturday of the month six times a year, November through April. No guests were allowed. Each “Sign” contributed $5.00 (about $100 today) whether or not he attended, and those present divided any expense over that amount. Although they took their first meals at the New York Club, the Zodiac soon tried other locations, eventually favoring the Knickerbocker Club, the Union Club, and the Metropolitan Club. The Records of the Zodiac, privately printed in 1916, transcribe the society’s “minute books” from 1868 to 1915, consisting of menus and items of business such as reports of deaths and new elections (Records of the Zodiac 1916). A second volume covering the years 1916–28 is chattier than volume 1, replete with slurs against racial and ethnic minorities, particularly Jews (Records of the Zodiac 1928). The group still exists but is considerably more secretive than during the period that interests us (Oteri 2013). For meetings between 1868 and 1915, the first volume presents 269 menus (three other dinners are mentioned but what was eaten is not recorded). These provide a close look at the tastes in wine and food of an elite group whose conservative preferences show, nevertheless, a lagging recognition of change. Even more than with restaurants, which had to cater to a variety of preferences, the food ordered by this small group exemplifies high-end dining in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Prohibition, implemented in 1920, would effectively ruin this first era of gourmandise and it took forty years for fine dining to be even haltingly restored. Of that total of 269 dinners for which menus survive, 195 were at private clubs, 68 at restaurants and 6 at the home of one of the Signs. The Zodiac members, wealthy men near or at the top of the New York social hierarchy, returned repeatedly to the same dishes at meals that were more ostentatious than adventurous. While such men could have commanded all manner of exotica, they adhered to a conventional if prestigious routine. This contrasts with the radical experimentation of today’s gourmands as represented by the famed ranking of “The World’s 50 Best Restaurants,” almost all of which feature original creations, preparations never seen before. Noma in Copenhagen, Mirazur on the French Riviera, or Osteria Francescana in Modena, offer transformative

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food, often with trompe l’oeil elements and alchemical metamorphosis of textures, flavors, and ingredients. It is no secret that what one eats effectively symbolizes social position. Certain foods confer prestige. In some cases, this association endured for centuries as exotic spices flavored banquets from the Roman Empire until the seventeenth century. Chaucer’s cook in The Canterbury Tales is familiar with galangal, but almost no European recipe since 1700 has included it. In other cases, such as game, certain varieties confer high status: grouse in Britain (August 12, the opening of hunting season, is known as the “Glorious Twelfth”), venison in continental Europe, while others are associated with lower-class, backwoods denizens—raccoon, opossum, or squirrel in Appalachia. More often, certain foods enjoy a season of high regard but later what was once de rigueur is laughable. Peter Meehan begins an article about Sheila Lukins’s Silver Palate Cookbook, a late-twentieth-century classic: “Sheila Lukins is why there is still raspberry vinaigrette pooling on salad plates all over America, and why you know what Chicken Marabella is” (Meehan 2017: 9). In what follows, we look at the Zodiac, an elite group whose tastes demonstrate prestige dining in the period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the First World War. Their preferences in food and wine show not only an attachment to saddle of mutton and Château Lafite, but create a culinary identity based on a piously observed (if invented) tradition. In particular, the menus eschew experimentation in favor of a dossier of dishes conferring a social distinction resistant to change. Nothing lasts forever—one would like to know when this society last enjoyed terrapin at one of its dinners—but after all, in a cosmopolitan environment, memory and resistance to change distinguish cuisines from ephemeral food fashions.

CONSTITUENTS OF CULINARY PRESTIGE For wealthy diners there has always been a creative tension between the distinction attached to profligate variety on the one hand, and, on the other, a small number of dishes whose symbolic prominence is so obvious that their presence automatically designates a meal as distinguished. Although the highest levels of society have been able to command an almost comically diverse array of dishes, the cachet conferred by lavish multiplicity is offset by the identification of a few whose presence on the menu proves that the meal meets exalted social requirements. No cuisine uses as many ingredients or has invented more dishes than that of China, yet today bird’s nest soup, shark’s fin soup, or sea cucumber are almost mandatory to indicate a high level of distinction. In the Middle Ages, banquets inevitably included lamprey, game, birds cooked and re-dressed in their feathers, or boar’s head breathing fire. During the twentieth century, caviar and foie gras were mainstays of French-inspired international gourmandise. Given all the dishes available to the well-heeled, the range of offerings proving the seriousness of the host’s hospitality is quite restricted. Two dinners depicted in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, set in the New York of the 1870s, show the social significance of terrapin and canvas-back wild ducks, both from the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. At one festive meal, the Lovell Mingotts serve canvas-backs, terrapin, and vintage wines, while at the Newland Archers’ first dinner as a married couple, the mere sight of gilt-edged menus at each place assures the guests that either terrapin or canvas-backs will be presented (Wharton 1920: 25, 266). In 1880, a writer for the Washington Post said that any dinner “laying claim to being a pretentious affair” had to include terrapin (Beahrs 2010: 150).

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An almost obsessive reiteration is a feature of the dossier of Zodiac repasts. Unlike the dinners described by Edith Wharton, however, the Zodiac members were not seeking to impress anyone outside their group. The club had no charitable, intellectual, or sporting purpose so that its menus reflect the Signs’ collective tastes unaffected by outside distractions. This purity of gastronomic purpose as well as the number and detail of the menus makes the records of their dinners uniquely significant for understanding high-end American taste and its relationship to both French and English models. In general terms, the dinners of the Zodiac follow the à la Russe structure of service that became fashionable in the 1850s and 1860s in Britain (Broomfield 2007: 122–47). Oysters came first, then soup followed by a fish dish and succeeded by entrées (in this era meaning meat cut up or sliced and served with sauces, as distinct from large roasted or baked meat pieces). After the relevés (or “removes”), typically whole joints of meat, came “roasts,” a course rubric somewhat misleadingly featuring fowls and game such as partridge or hare. The last courses were some combination of cheese, ices, sweet pastries, and fresh and crystallized fruit. This was never an entirely rigid structure. Both the architecture and complexity of individual meals varied over time, typically becoming simpler from the beginning of the twentieth century. At each stage, however, the number of dishes symbolized the level of extravagance in the menu. The wines were numerous if predictable. Sherry (or other fortified wines such as Madeira) accompanied the soup. Sometimes sherry was also served with the fish course but often this was supplemented or replaced by a German white wine or, occasionally, a French white Burgundy. With the entrées came Champagne, and from the 1860s onwards Champagne and/or Burgundy was served with the roasts. Dessert claret accompanied sweet dishes, though port sometimes appeared at this stage of the meal.1 After the first two Zodiac occasions at the New York Club, the members tried something different for their third meal on April 25, 1868, meeting at the American Jockey Club in Jerome Park, but a note in the minutes says the cost of the dinner was “excessively extortionate.” The secretary did not specify what was charged, but the expense for other meals was carefully noted, between $4.00 and $6.00 per person (about $100 in current money) for food and a similar amount for wine. For the remaining years of the 1860s and almost all the 1870s, the club favored Delmonico’s and another grand restaurant Pinard’s, but by 1880 they had settled on club venues. From 1879 until 1915, seventy-five dinners were held at the Knickerbocker Club, sixty-nine at the Union and twenty-six at the Metropolitan, all of which are still in existence. The meals are rather bewildering, involving as they do ten or more courses, a level of elaboration that continued throughout the nineteenth century.

FOOD In the second part of this essay, we will give a detailed description of the dishes and wines served at three meals, from 1870, 1893, and 1915. Beforehand let us look more closely at this question of variety versus repetition. The normal order of service is detailed in an article about the Club from the New York Sun in 1893 reprinted in the 1916 Records of the Zodiac (Records of the Zodiac Club 1916: 337–42). The author claims that the members eschewed the vulgar, convention of a “dreary multiplicity of dishes,” content with meals that unfolded as oysters, soup, fish, roast, entrée, salad, and cheese. The Signs boasted that they never repeated the same menu. The claim to refinement is justified for

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in comparison to other menus of Gilded Age dinners these are almost restrained, offering usually only one entrée and one sweet course item whereas, to take a random example, an 1882 dinner at Delmonico’s for the New England Society in the City of New York, provided three entrées, proceeded with two relevés of roasted meats, and finally five sweets plus edible sugar-spun sculptures (pièces montées) (Veit 2017: 202). Most of our information on dinners for this period is in relation to banquets at which dozens or hundreds of guests were served, and so another advantage of the Zodiac menus and a reason for paying attention to them is that they represent a personal selection by the rotating member (“caterer”) in charge of each dinner, reflecting the tastes of an elite but not particularly innovative group. Restrained menus perhaps, but even within the context of the era’s ostentatious habits, the Zodiac meals were hardly simple. There might be an hors d’oeuvre, there was almost always a game course of wildfowl after the entrée as well, and a rather complicated sequence at the end involving desserts, ices, cheese, and fruit. A certain amount of variation in timing was involved, so that terrapin could substitute for fish, salad might be served with capon, if that was the roast, or appear with the game, or accompany the cheese. The 1893 article accurately reflects what the group considered to be their standard procedure since it possessed the Zodiac members’ seal of approval. The Zodiac’s vaunted gastronomic diversity was borne out only by the entrées. The word has had a variety of gastronomic meanings, beginning (as the name indicates) as an initial dish and in recent times describing simply the main course, but in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the entrée came in the middle of the meal and was distinct because it included a great variety of ingredients, complex sauces, and employed moist cooking methods such as sautés and fricassées. Roast leg of lamb or squab were not entrées, but breaded lamb cutlets with tomato sauce or salmi of squab were. The 1868–1915 menus list 129 different entrées. More than one might be presented at a single meal or in a few cases the course was absent altogether. As the 1893 Sun article indicates, terrapin could function as a de facto entrée or a glorified hors d’oeuvre. Terrapin was, in fact, the most frequent entrée, occurring twenty-four times simply as “terrapin,” seventeen as “terrapin à la Maryland,” and five instances of “terrapin à la Union Club.” Pâté de foie gras was served eleven times plain and ten times en croûte. For courses other than the entrée, it was customary to repeat familiar dishes. Some of this was simply convention. In this era, almost all fancy American meals started with oysters, and because those from New York harbor were particularly sought-after, it is not surprising that they begin 237 Zodiac meals. Clams were served at the others. Caviar makes an initial appearance at the Knickerbocker Club in 1877, but only toward the end of the series of menus, around 1906, does it become common. Caviar supplemented oysters but did not displace them. As was customary in Britain and the United States, the fish course followed the oysters and soup but was served before the roast and entrée. There were nineteen kinds of fish and crab prepared in about a hundred different ways. The number of fish dishes is hard to calculate exactly because there are small differences—planked shad versus planked shad with roe; grilled shad versus shad grillé moutard. The most commonly served was bass (unspecified, sea bass or black bass), sixty-one times, followed by shad, forty-six times. The single most popular dish was chicken halibut with Hollandaise sauce, which appears twenty-two times. Although not as expensive and difficult to come by as terrapin or canvas-back ducks, shad was another East Coast delicacy. A migratory fish, it appears first in Southern rivers

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so there are references to Savannah River or North Carolina shad in February or even late January. When its origin was specified, shad was usually from the “North River,” that is, the Hudson. Saddle of lamb or mutton dominated the roast course as no less than 153 of the meals included one or the other, presented usually with currant jelly. On thirty-nine other occasions a different kind of lamb or mutton dish appeared. Terrapin (served 113 times) and canvas-back ducks (40) were the next in frequency. The order of courses toward the end of the meal, as already indicated, was more flexible than was the case for any other stage. Salad could be served with the game course, constitute a service of its own, or appear alongside the cheese. The positioning of salad, cheese, and dessert shifted constantly. This is further confused by the habit of separating out fruit and nuts and sometime ices from puddings and pastry, a reflection but not a literal imitation of the English pattern of what was called a “sweet” (pastry or pudding) followed by “dessert,” which in Britain meant nuts, fruit, and other small items as opposed to elaborate confections such as Nesselrode or plum pudding. Cheese might come after the (American) dessert, or the order might be salad, cheese, dessert; or salad, dessert, cheese; or the cheese might accompany the fruit and nuts. Almost every permutation was tried, including salad with no cheese, cheese with no salad, dessert with no cheese. When specified, the cheeses themselves were limited to Roquefort, Brie, Stilton, American, Gorgonzola, and Camembert.

WINES Taking a long-term view of the wines chosen by the Zodiac Club, one can see distinct shifts in popularity and taste over time. Figure 7.1 shows how often different types of

The drinks of the Zodiacs, 1868–1915 Liqueurs Whisky Brandy Rum Port Madeira Sherry Sparkling Sweet white Dry white Burgundy Bordeaux 0

50 1868–75

100 1876–85

150 1886–95

200 1896–1905

250

300

1906–15

FIGURE 7.1  Chart compiled by the authors using data from Records of the Zodiac as They Appear in the Minute Books (volumes one and two)

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alcoholic drinks featured in the Zodiac meals. It reflects neither the unknowable total number of bottles consumed nor the number of different examples of specific wine types offered at a given dinner. Dinner 174 in February 1897 included two bottles of Latour 1875, a bottle of Mouton-Rothschild 1869, and a bottle of Mouton Rothschild 1875. For the purposes of Figure 7.1 this dinner counts as one example only of the over two hundred instances when red Bordeaux was served. From this it can be seen that sparkling wine was the most commonly consumed wine, present at nearly every dinner from the start of the menu listings. The second most common is sherry, though this dropped out of favor in the final decade of the pre-First World War dinners of the Club. Every dinner featured red wine from either Bordeaux or Burgundy but, as the figure shows, Burgundy became steadily more popular with the Signs. In the period 1868–95, red Bordeaux featured around four times more often than red Burgundy. From 1896 to 1915, the frequency was approximately equal. Dry white wine, always associated with the early stages of the meal, appeared at slightly more than half the dinners and sweet white wine at just under half. Note that consumption of both these types of wines dropped away sharply in the last decade before 1915. Madeira was a consistent presence at the Club’s dinners. Port was never as popular, although it was somewhat more visible in the dinners between 1876 and 1895. The decade 1906–15 saw a major shift in the Signs’ alcohol consumption. The number of types of wine offered dropped away and the wine listings are dominated by sparkling wine, red wine from Burgundy and Bordeaux and, at the liqueur stage, by brandy and Cognac, which entirely displaced rum, the favorite spirit of the Club’s early years. The Sun article appendix to the Records suggests that “comparative confidence” in provenance is largely confined to Champagne and that “has forced that garrulous beverage from its once lowly position on the menu up to higher stations”—as the menu for the 1915 dinner analyzed later well indicates (Records of the Zodiac Club 1916: 340). The Zodiacs’ preferences for specific estates or brands changed slightly over the years. Overall, Lafite was probably the favored Bordeaux property, although Latour was a frequent choice and Haut Brion featured more prominently after 1896, particularly in the last decade of the menus. There was little change in the popularity of the different red Burgundies with Romanée, Chambertin, Musigny, and Clos Vougeot all featuring regularly. The most popular of all the many Champagne brands was Roederer’s Grand Vin Sec, followed by Pommery. Roederer, a slightly sweeter style of Champagne, was an almost consistent presence though it was overshadowed by Pommery in 1876–85 (probably the years of highest renown of that brand) and by Krug in the decade 1906–15. Four of the “champagnes” appear to have been American; two identified as “Champagne Nap. Cab.” or “Cab. Sec” in 1875 and 1876 and two champagnes, one also bearing the Krug name, from “Bass Rock Farm” in 1910–11. Overall, the Signs’ practice was strongly influenced by the taste dictates of Victorian Britain, with the sole exception of their preference for Madeira over port.2 Their repertoire of wines was limited, the quality increasingly high and correspondingly costly.

EXEMPLARY DINNERS Three menus separated by twenty or so years give a sense of how the courses fit together and the slow evolution of the taste preferences of the Signs.

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March 26, 1870 The first menu is for the fourteenth meeting of the Zodiac Club, an example of the Signs’ tastes during the Club’s earliest years: Oysters Bisque Boiled shad, butter sauce Saddle mutton—Currant jelly Potato croquettes—String beans Salmi, Redheads—French peas Pea-hen, roasted bread sauce Salad of lettuce—Cheese Nesselrode pudding Fruits and Dessert Coffee The minutes listed the following wines. Text in brackets [] has been added by the current authors. Sauternes, Johnston [a long-established Bordeaux shipper] Hay Sherry Liebfraumilch Dry Sillery [sparkling wine from the Sillery region of Champagne] Lafite 1865 Roman punch [a lemon water ice fortified with brandy or champagne]3 Bloomfield Sherry Madeira Mentor Madeira, Black Cork, City Hotel Old Port—C. Livingston Madeira Juno Old Peach Brandy, 90 years old Livingston Rum Even by the Zodiacs’ standards this appears to have been a bibulous dinner. Thirteen different alcoholic drinks are listed for the delectation of the nine members present; six of whom had donated bottles to the dinner. The only unusual element in this menu is the game course of pea-hen, which is a female peacock. Recipes for peacock are common in medieval cookbooks. The Llibre de Sent Soví (2014: 182–3), a Catalan cookbook of the fourteenth century, begins with a recipe for a sauce meant to accompany peacock. Saint Augustine claimed to have verified an ancient legend that peacock meat doesn’t spoil. He kept some of what he had been served at a banquet and after thirty days it was unchanged; after a year it had dried out but not otherwise deteriorated (Augustine 2010: 345). Peacock was never widely consumed, even in the ostentatious Gilded Age, although in his authoritative cookbook The Epicurean,

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published in 1893, chef Charles Ranhofer (1893: 777) of Delmonico’s presents a recipe for roasted peacock (male) with bread stuffing and “adorned with its plumage.” Oysters, as usual, start the meal followed by a soup minimally described as “bisque.” The fish course is shad, whose migration schedule fluctuated each year, but by late March, they had usually arrived in the Hudson River. This is the only mention of “boiled shad in butter sauce”: the most common version generally, and in Zodiac menus as well, is “shad à la maître d’hôtel,” which is broiled and served with butter sauce. Planked shad was offered on four occasions, a method calling for the shad to be nailed to an oaken plank and cooked over a fire, being turned and basted constantly with butter. Though we cannot be entirely certain which wines were served at what stages in the dinner, the list given in the minutes suggest that the Zodiacs were following standard nineteenth-century practices. With the oysters the Signs would have drunk Sauternes. Common then, this pairing of salty oysters with sweet wine is still recommended by sommeliers such as Griselda Rehe of Juvia restaurant in Miami since the “acid [in the wine] balances the sweetness and richness, making the wine more accommodating than you might think” (D’Agata 2015). With (or possibly after) the soup, which was probably thickened with cream or flour, was sherry. Sometimes the Zodiac minutes specify the type of sherry; more often we have only the bare name. Until the late 1880s every Zodiac wine listing included sherry as the second wine in the order and only from 1911 did it drop out of favor. The Liebfraumilch, then a highly regarded German white, would probably have been off-dry, but the high acidity of the Riesling grape would ensure it paired well with the fish. Except for oysters, saddle of mutton was the dish most often repeated in the collection of Zodiac menus. Ranhofer in The Epicurean gives half a dozen recipes for this tour de force, cooked on a spit or roasted. The saddle is from the loin end and the bones would have been removed and the meat rolled up into what then becomes a large but compact boneless roast. The mutton would have been accompanied by Dry Sillery from Champagne. The word “Dry” does not definitely indicate its style or level of sweetness but “brut” or “very dry” Champagne was the standard match for roast joints of meat by that time in both England and America—and remained so at least until the end of the nineteenth century. The next course, the entrée, is somewhat unusual in that it involves a game bird that would more often be served later in the meal. A salmi, however, essentially a ragout made from pieces of already cooked meat or fowl, is a typical entrée (i.e., cut up meat with sauce), whereas the redheads would be roasted if they were served for the game course. The pea-hens were donated by William Holly Hudson (Pisces), which explains how this unusual dish came to be included. It was customary for Signs to donate wines, especially ancient Madeiras as well as curious bottles of rum from their cellars, but providing special food was unusual. Bread sauce means breadcrumbs sautéed with butter and onions to which a small amount of cream is added at the end. What “roasted” denotes in this context is unclear—perhaps the breadcrumbs were separately browned in advance, or the word is supposed to refer to the pea-hen and the comma is misplaced. Though some gourmets would have continued the Champagne with the roasts, the ordering of the wines here suggests that the Château Lafite 1865 may have accompanied the salmi and/or the pea-hens. The use of Champagne would suggest that at this stage, and for many years later, the Zodiacs were following English preference for dry Champagne with roast meat (or, indeed, throughout the meal), rather than Continental European custom, which opted for sweet Champagne to be served with ices.4

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Lafite was a preferred claret of the Zodiac members and 1865 was a highly regarded and highly priced vintage—one of the finest of the nineteenth century in the judgment of Michael Broadbent, the premier authority on such matters (Broadbent 2002: 14–16). First growth Bordeaux wines were often drunk as “dessert claret” in the nineteenth century but the listing of “Roman punch” suggests this followed the fowls (and possibly the salad as well) as a palate cleanser before the cheese and Nesselrode pudding (a cold chestnut confection named after the Russian foreign minister Karl von Nesselrode).5 However, some of the wine listings are patently out of order, for example, brandy precedes a French white wine in the listing for the December 1906 dinner and we cannot, therefore, be entirely sure of the serving progression. The next course, “Nuts and Dessert,” reflects the English custom of following an ample sweet course with a small dessert. The cornucopia of Madeiras and old sherries was probably broached during the fruit and dessert stage of the meal with the spirits drunk with or after coffee. It is, however, possible that the old American custom of the “Madeira party” may have led the Signs to drink them on their own, using fruit such as peaches purely to cleanse the palate between glasses (Mitchell 1922).

DECEMBER 30, 1893 The 144th meeting was held at the Knickerbocker Club which, along with the Union Club, would become the most frequent sites of the Zodiac dinners. The menu Cape Cod oysters Bisque of crawfish—Croûte au pot Hors-d’œuvre Terrapin à la Maryland Saddle of Southdown mutton Brussels sprouts—Potatoes, Hollandaise Aspic de foie gras Canvas-back ducks Celery and chicory salad Bombes—Petits-fours Fruit—Cheese—Coffee The wines Montrachet, 1870 Rauenthaler Auslese, 1862 Roederer Grand Vin Sec Irroy Brut, 1887 Richebourg, 1870 Chambertin, 1870 Very old fine White Port

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Very old fine Port, 1815 Very old Withers fine Champagne Cognac The meal is described in a mixture of English and French. Menus for high-end dining vacillated between French, the international standard, and English. Britain experienced the same indecision, although there was a stronger and longer-term commitment to using French (Freedman 2010: 129–36). Some Oxford and Cambridge colleges to this day present their hall dinners in French. This dinner accords with the aesthetic of the 1870 example. Cape Cod oysters, taken with a fine white Burgundy from Montrachet, are followed by a crawfish bisque, which would have been accompanied (or, more likely, followed) by Rauenthaler Auslese of 1862, a sweet German Riesling that was a favorite of the Zodiac diners. English practice— following the à la Russe style of service—was to offer both a consommé and a thick soup (e.g., creams or purées), but this particular extravagance was unusual in the United States where it was usually one or the other. After the unspecified hors d’oeuvre, came terrapin à la Maryland. Terrapin, as we have noted, was among the most prestigious dishes of the era and often featured in the Zodiac entertainments. The 1893 Sun article describes the manner of preparing terrapin as a problem for the members of the Zodiac Club, second in seriousness only to questions concerning wine (Records of the Zodiac Club 1916: 341). The dispute was between Baltimore and Philadelphia. The Baltimore orthodoxy was to simmer the cut-up terrapin meat in its broth and fat and add sherry or Madeira. Philadelphia put in butter and cream, sometimes turtle eggs, producing something looking like New England clam chowder (McCallister 2007: 101). The exact nature of the canonical terrapin à la Maryland is also unstable. While the Zodiac members regarded “Maryland” as the equivalent of the understated Baltimore style, contrasting it with Philadelphia (cream) and New York (brown stock), Ranhofer considers it similar to Philadelphia, keeping Baltimore as the austere basic version.6 In 1859, Oliver Wendell Holmes proclaimed Baltimore “the gastronomical metropolis of the Union” (Stieff 1932:70) Colonel John W. Forney contradicted this opinion, writing in the journal the Epicure in 1879 that while Baltimore, Washington, and New York take pleasure in terrapin, only in Philadelphia is it a crime not to have a passionate attachment to the turtles (Williams 2006: 119–20; Beahrs 2010: 161). Terrapin was brought to the table in a chafing dish to keep it warm. Most of the Zodiac menus simply list “Terrapin” without elaboration. This 1893 menu is one of seventeen specifying Maryland style, only three are à la Philadelphia. The unsurprising roast course, saddle of mutton (and side dishes of Brussels sprouts and potatoes), would have been accompanied by Champagne, probably the Irroy Brut rather than the Roederer. The presence of several different brands of Champagne at elite dinners had been common in Britain since the 1870s—as testified by a dinner given for the Duke of Edinburgh in Leeds in 1875, which featured six named brands of Champagne among the eighteen listed wines.7 For such dinners the sweeter wines from producers such as Roederer and Veuve Clicquot tended to accompany entrées and it is probable that the Roederer Grand Vin Sec—a long-term favorite of the Zodiacs—was served with the foie gras rather than the mutton. Foie gras with mature Champagne is a classic pairing since the acidity of the wine cuts the fattiness of the dish while the slightly sweeter style of Roederer’s nineteenth-century Grand Vin would neatly complement the richness of the pâté. To late-nineteenth-century tastes, dry Champagne and roast meat was a natural fit. The house of Irroy had come to prominence in the 1860s as a new entrant specializing

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in drier styles of wine, and “brut” signifies that it would have had only a small amount of added sugar, probably no more than 2–4 grams per liter. Irroy was one of the Zodiacs’ favorite Champagne houses; their wine was served some thirty times between 1881 and 1914. The 1887 was a good vintage, though not up to the standard of the renowned 1884, which appeared at a number of Zodiac dinners in the 1890s and early 1900s Following the Champagne, the Zodiacs drank two red Burgundies—Richebourg and the Chambertin—to accompany the canvas-back ducks. Like the Montrachet, both Burgundies were from 1870, a very good vintage consistently popular with the Signs. Though there was only a small harvest that year, the quality was excellent for both red and white wines. The year 1870 also saw the start of the Franco-Prussian war but the Burgundian vineyards, unlike those of Champagne, were little affected. Of the two, Richebourg, from the same terroir as the fabled Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, is usually the more opulent, but Chambertin is equally if not more prestigious. Several wines have Chambertin in the name but the original Champ de Bertin (Bertin’s Field) was planted in the twelfth century and has retained its reputation as the “wine of kings.” It was supposedly the sole wine that Emperor Napoleon drank (Hazlitt 1852: 18). The dinner ends with ice puddings (“bombes”), petits-fours, fruit, and cheese. Unusually for the Zodiacs, the list of wines does not include any Madeiras. Although there was a period in the 1880s when these fortified and highly prestigious wines were largely absent, around 75 percent of the dinners up to 1900 listed one or more Madeiras. The April 1890 and March 1896 dinners both listed five separate such wines, many of them donated by the banker George S. Bowdoin (Sagittarius). The frequency of dinners with Madeiras on the wine lists dropped noticeably after Bowdoin’s death in 1913, though John Pierpont Morgan (father and son) donated bottles in their turn in the years before the First World War. The final alcoholic drink listed was Charlatan Rum. Other menus suggest this was a Grenada Rum dated to 1844 of which Henry S. Fearing (Virgo) clearly had a substantial stock since he donated six bottles between 1878 and 1885.

March 26, 1915 Beginning in February 1912 and continuing through the end of this series of Zodiac dinners, the Club met at Sherry’s, one of the most famous New York restaurants. Its reputation by this time surpassed that of Delmonico’s which was troubled by family quarrels and mismanagement. In conformity with its regular menus, Sherry’s described the 271st dinner in French, or at least mostly in French. The menu: Huîtres Green turtle soup Pompano meunière Selle d’agneau Pommes Bermuda Celery à la Molle Suprêmes de poussin Salade de saison Jambon Pascal

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Asperges, sauce mousseline Mousse aux fraises Café Fruit The wines: Krug 1900 Lafite 1878 Musigny 1878 Brandy, Café Anglais This is an elaborate meal in keeping with precedent, but unusual in context. A more typical example of the Club’s dinners at Sherry’s was the second one held there on March 30, 1912, which involved only oysters, soup, fish (unspecified), a timbale (unspecified), asparagus, chicken, salad, cheese, and fruit. Here for the 271st we have the reliable saddle of lamb, poussin as the entrée, and ham instead of a game course. The presence of both celery and asparagus is unusual. The celery certainly seems to be a course of its own because if it had been attached to the lamb, it would have appeared indented on the menu layout, as with the Bermuda potatoes. Asparagus was often served as a separate dish, here presented with sauce Mousseline, which is Hollandaise with whipped cream mixed in. A simple strawberry mousse was served for dessert followed by fruits and coffee. The wines, by contrast, are representative of the reduced number, the relative age of the listed vintages and the high quality that characterize the last dinners before the First World War. All were donated by J. Pierpont Morgan Jr. “whose cellar,” commented the Minutes, “like the Widow Cruse’s oil, never fails.”8 By this time the tradition of Sauternes with the oysters had been abandoned. Such a match was last made in March 1901 but, well before that, white Burgundy had also been presented at this stage of the dinner. Champagne probably dominated the wines taken with the meal. In Champagne, the 1900 vintage was decent but not outstanding (unlike 1899) and though “attractive when young,” it lacked acidity and did not keep well (Simon 1934: 131). The persistence of Champagne by this point suggests a rather old-fashioned approach to wine pairing. It is unclear whether the Musigny 1881 was served with the lamb or the poussins. There is no obvious match for the asparagus—a notoriously tricky dish to accommodate—in the listed wines; the same may be said of the mousse aux fraises. What is remarkable about the wines served in 1915 (including this dinner) is the venerable nature of the vintages. Counting all the 1914–15 dinners, the average age of the red wines is around thirty-five years; for 1900 the figure is around twenty. In 1885 it was fifteen years; in 1870 most wines are not vintage dated but for those that are the average age is around eight. This steady shift to older wines is paralleled by the preferences of J. Pierpont Morgan Sr. As Simon said of Morgan’s remarkable cellar, “he had no patience whatever with youngsters and he loved his old cronies.” The clarets, in particular, were of “superlative quality” according to Simon, distinguished by legendary pre-phylloxera vintages such as 1865 Margaux and 1865 Chambertin (Simon 1944: 2, 3, 11, 31). Increasing wealth may account for some of this shift; the success of the French wine industry in creating the “illusion of scarcity” through the promotion of vintagedated wines may also have played a role but it is hard to escape the conclusion that as the

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Zodiacs aged, so too did their tastes move toward what Simon called the “venerable.” Equally, they maintained the nineteenth-century tradition of taking no alcohol before dinner and appear to have largely though not entirely resisted the early-twentieth-century trend toward having cocktails before the meal.

CONCLUSION The Signs were not innovative diners and that is, in fact, the point of investigating their numerous menus that reflect elite tastes with a degree of what would now be called transparency. They had no ulterior motive to impress anyone outside their circle. Their gastronomic inclinations contrast with high-end restaurant practice, which favored several different macaroni preparations, oyster “patties” (in puff pastry shells) with or without Béchamel sauce, escalloped oysters, braised beef (“à la mode”), pork and beans, and apple fritters (Freedman 2011). At one time or other fine restaurants had on their menus everything that the Zodiac members favored, just not so frequently. The Zodiac preferences were close to those of regular members of the Union Club, where they often dined. The number of Union Club steward’s reports surpasses that of the Zodiac records, but it gives information about dinners given by various hosts for various guests and not, as with the Zodiac, the predilections of a stable group. Looking at 328 Union Club menus for the five-year period September 5, 1884, to September 2, 1889, it is evident that the same sorts of items are more or less required. Oysters to start (213 times), although Littleneck clams sometimes substituted (81 mentions) and in the later years caviar (68). Clear turtle soup appears 169 times. The most common fish course is shad (here always broiled). By far the most frequent main course was saddle of mutton or lamb (mutton 85 times; lamb 83). Roasted canvas-back ducks showed up 48 times, served with fried or boiled hominy and celery salad or celery mayonnaise.9 We might compare the Zodiac pattern with a Union Club meal ordered by the financier and politician August Belmont on April 5, 1884. Instead of beginning with oysters, this meal started with Little Neck clams followed by two soups—clear green turtle soup (which was almost mandatory at the Union Club) and a French pea soup, then trout for the fish course and saddle of mutton for the meat course. Here we have two fowl courses toward the end of the meal, neither of them game birds—suprême of chicken à la Regence and stuffed roast capon. Asparagus appeared just before the desserts. From our vantage point the Zodiac menus are not unrecognizable, but not exactly familiar either. Although dishes are presented with French tags (à la Richelieu, à la Soubise), most are not actually French even if vaguely French-inspired. Most of what we think of as classic French cuisine is absent—no veal Orloff, or pheasant Souvaroff let alone what are now considered typical French items such as duck à l’orange, coq au vin, or cassoulet. The strongest influence on American high-end dining came not from France but from England. What was most prized in nineteenth-century America was essentially Victorian food. It’s no accident that a book about dining in Victorian England is entitled Mutton and Oysters (Freeman 1989). Even if Americans ate clams, unknown in Britain, or canvasback and red-head ducks instead of Scottish grouse, the major culinary ideas were derived from London. Serving game or saddle of mutton with mint or currant jelly; fish with anchovy sauce; eels with tartar sauce, all these were English. Even French dishes, or originally French dishes, were Anglicized—things like chicken fricassee or chevaliere, or steak with Béarnaise sauce. It may seem counterintuitive to trace fashionable food to England, whose culinary mediocrity has been, until recently, even more notorious than

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that of the United States. Just as the tone of elite American dining was much higher in the first period of the Zodiac Club than it would be in the fifty years after Prohibition, the opulence of British dining in the Victorian and Edwardian era was more brilliant than what the words “mutton” and “oysters” might imply. Elegant American food of the nineteenth century, a peculiar combination of regional, national, French, and English, comes to an end beginning with the 1890s, which saw several changes that would transform American dining. The popularity of so-called “ethnic” restaurants began with Chinese and Italian food. As early as the 1890s, newspaper and magazine articles as well as guidebooks boasted that New York rivaled Paris for dining not because of the excellence of one distinguished cuisine but rather in the incredible international variety of choices offered (Freedman 2019: 263). But this form of globalization of taste was not followed by clubs even if the Union Club menus in the late 1880s do occasionally mention spaghetti à l’Italienne, spaghetti à la Manhattan, and even “spaghetti à la Union Club.”10 The Zodiac Signs did not admit any foreign influence other than French or English. The so-called Chop Suey Craze that swept the nation at the turn of the century had no effect on the Zodiac. Neither did its members acknowledge such fads as lobster, Angel food cake, Waldorf salad, croquettes, fritters, or turkey Tetrazzini. Their preferences should be understood not simply as retrograde but as reflecting long-lasting and cosmopolitan American gastronomy. The late Roger Scruton, an exemplary philosopher, suggested that “the qualities that interest us in wine reflect the social world of which we are a part (Scruton 2004). In that light, the Zodiacs’ increasing preoccupation with recollected, even outmoded food and wine, evoked by Pierpont Morgan’s “venerables,” suggests a fascination with the fading but still remembered tastes of greatness. In wines, this would be those from before the phylloxera plague destroyed almost all the old vines, vintages such as Lafite 1865, and for food, the antiquated cult of terrapin and saddle of mutton. There is, however, a deeper nostalgia reflected in their enduring predilection for the food and wine of the nineteenth century. Were they perhaps reviving memories of (even the wish for) the certainties of a glorious past rather than the hustle and Progressive (anti-monopolistic “trust-busting”) ethos of the early twentieth century, entranced as it was by the new?

NOTES 1 Our thanks to Mr. Lawrence Morris who provided us with information about the recent past of the Zodiac Club. There are relatively few menus surviving in the public record that give wine pairings. See, however, “Fin-Bec” (1878: 95–8) for English practice and a number of American menus in the Henry Voigt Collection of American Menus, Wilmington, Delaware: from the Manhattan Club, March 15, 1889; from the Corsairs, yet another dining society organized by Pierrepont Morgan, May 23, 1889, and February 21, 1891; a menu from the New York restaurant Pinard’s, December 29, 1881 (a birthday party for Cornelius Jeremiah Vanderbilt). 2 The Madeira tradition in America is “far older than in England or anywhere else” (Simon 1906: 26). For a broader perspective on the Madeira trade and the American market, see Hancock (2009). 3 For an early recipe see, Cobbett (1851: 345). 4 For a fictional champagne-only dinner, see Galsworthy (1970: 24). Galsworthy, the son of a wine merchant, was writing in 1908 about a dinner in the 1880s.

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5 For the use of “Roman Punch” (or Punch à la Romaine) in epicurean dining, see “Fin-Bec” (1878: 95–6). 6 Records of the Zodiac Club (1916: 341); Ranhofer (1893: 423–4), recipes 1083 Terrapin à la Baltimore; 1085, Terrapin à la Maryland or Philadelphia. On p. 424, recipe 1088 is for Terrapin à la Maryland Club, a Baltimore institution. This closely resembles Terrapin à la Baltimore except that it dispenses with the thickening agent such as cornstarch or arrowroot. 7 Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, May 14, 1875, p. 6. 8 A reference to I Kgs 17:10-16, but in fact it is not a widow named “Cruse,” whose oil miraculously does not run out, but an unnamed widow who finds that her small pitcher (a “cruse”) always has oil. Records of the Zodiac Club (1916: 333). 9 New York, Union Club Archive, menu books for 1884–90. We are grateful to Ellen Bates, Librarian of the Union Club, for her help with this material. 10 Union Club, menu books, 1884–90.

REFERENCES D’Agata, I. (2015), “Matching Sauternes and Barsac with Food,” Decanter, August 7. Available online:  https://www.decanter.com/learn/advice/matching-sauternes-and-barsac-withfood-269516/ (accessed September 9, 2020). Augustine (2010), The City of God, Books XVII-XXII, G. G. Walsh and D. J. Honan (trans.), Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press Beahrs, A. (2010), Twain’s Feast: Searching for America’s Lost Food in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens, New York: Penguin Random House. Broadbent, M. (2002), Vintage Wine, London: Little Brown. Broomfield, A. (2007), Food and Cooking in Victorian England: A History, Westport, CT: Praeger. Cobbett, A. (1851), The English Housekeeper: Or Manual of Domestic Management, London: Geo. Pierce. “Fin-Bec” (J. Blanchard) (1878), The Dinner Bell: A Gastronomic Manual, London: Wm Mullan & Sons. Freedman, P. (2010), “The Rhetoric of American Restaurant Menus and the Use of French,” in R. Hosking (ed.), Food and Language: Proceedings of the Oxford Food Symposium on Food and Cookery 2009, 129–36, Totnes: Prospect Books. Freedman, P. (2011), “American Cuisine and Restaurants in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” New England Quarterly, 84: 5–59. Freedman, P. (2019), American Cuisine and How It Got This Way, New York: Liveright. Freeman, S. (1989), Mutton and Oysters: The Victorians and Their Food, London: Victor Gollancz. Galsworthy, J. (1970), The Man of Property, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hancock, D. (2009), Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste, New Haven: Yale University Press. Hazlitt, W. (1852), The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (Revised by his Son), vol. 1, London: Illustrated London Library. Llibre de Sent Soví (2014), J. Santanach (ed.), Barcelona: Barcino. McCallister, W. (2007), “Success in Entertaining,” in M. O’Neill (ed.), American Food Writing: An Anthology with Classic Recipes, 99–103, New York: Library of America. Meehan, P. (2017), “Sheila Lukins,” Lucky Peach, 23: 49. Mitchell, S. W. (1922), A Madeira Party, New York: Marchbanks Press.

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Oteri, D. (2013), “Inside the Zodiac Club, NYC’s 145 Year Old Secret Dinner Society,” Gothamist, May 16. Available online: https://gothamist.com/food/inside-the-zodiac-clubnycs-145-yearold-secret-dinner-society (accessed July 23, 2020). Ranhofer, C. (1893), The Epicurean, New York: Privately printed. Records of the Zodiac as They Appear in the Minute Books, 1868–1915 (1916), New York: Privately printed. Records of the Zodiac as They Appear in the Minutes Books: A Second Volume (1928), New York: Privately printed. Scruton, R. (2004), “Philosophy and the Intoxicating Properties of Wine.” Available online: Wineanorak, http://www.winanorak.com/philosophy_of_wine.htm (accessed January 18, 2021). Simon, A. L. (1934), Champagne, London: Constable. Simon, A. L. (1944), Notes on the Late J. Pierpont Morgan’s Cellar Book 1906, London: Curwen Press Stieff, F. P. (1932), Eat, Drink and Be Merry in Maryland, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Veit, H. Z. (2017), Food in the American Gilded Age, East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Wharton, E. (1920), The Age of Innocence, New York: D. Appleton. Williams, S. (2006), Food in the United States, ca. 1820–1890, Westport, CT: Greenwood.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Food Memory and Food Imagination at Auschwitz LISA PINE

Introduction Human memories of food oftentimes are associated with abundance or dearth, feast or famine. They can be evoked through simple or quotidian experiences or associated with extraordinary circumstances. This chapter examines this theme at a specific place and time, presenting an analysis of experiences and memories at the Nazi camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was a unique setting and, as Sybille Steinbacher rightly contends, “the testimony of the victims is indispensable for any engagement with the subject of Auschwitz (2005: 2). Certainly, at Auschwitz, as Italian survivor, Primo Levi (1919– 1987) noted, “the terms eating, food and hunger, had meanings totally different from their usual ones” (1987: 93). When we are not hungry or have not known hunger or starvation, it can be easy to think of food as something about which we have options. We choose when and what to eat, or even take food and drink for granted. To be sure, the opposite was the case in the extreme circumstances at Auschwitz. Choice there was about what to swap in order to obtain food, or about what to exchange food for. For example, Levi recalls an occasion when a fellow prisoner named Grigo asked him to write a letter to his fiancée in exchange for half a ration of his bread (ibid: 69). Liana Millu (1914–2005), an Italian survivor, describes Lili, another prisoner, who saved “two cabbage leaves” in order to exchange for having her cards read by a fellow prisoner who was a fortune teller (1997: 29). These are just two of numerable instances of survivors recalling the exchange of food. Alternatively, at Auschwitz, choice was about sharing or not sharing; or about stealing or not stealing. Hungarian survivor, Olga Lengyel (1908– 2001), candidly recounts another prisoner quite bluntly telling her: “If you do not want to die of hunger, there is only one thing to do: steal” (1995: 109). Polish survivor, Kitty Hart (born in 1926), also frankly admits to stealing: “It was hateful to think that we, too, had to stoop so low as to steal from other prisoners, something we had not done in all these years. But it was necessary in order to survive” (1962: 117). Henry Wermuth (1923–2020), German Holocaust survivor, states that “having one’s bread ration stolen was another thing to be aware of. Stealing bread meant stealing someone’s life” (1993: 158). He recalls very clearly the anguish caused when someone had stolen his father’s bread and yet, he acknowledges, prisoners were driven by self-preservation and so stealing was not uncommon.

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This chapter examines food in memory and imagination in the context of the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz, the most well-known of the six extermination camps established by the Nazis in Poland during 1941 and 1942. The topic of food and the Holocaust has been the subject of a relatively small amount of research and scholarly writing to date. The originality of this chapter lies in its analysis of a range of Holocaust narratives of Jewish survivors of various nationalities, in order to reveal the role of food memory and food imagination in the Holocaust experience on three levels—first, how postwar narratives remember food and hunger at Auschwitz; second, how they recount their recollections at Auschwitz of food in former times; and third, how food imagination at Auschwitz was indicative of a desire to survive and a commitment to the future. The chapter begins with a brief survey of the conditions at Auschwitz—especially in regard to food and hunger— which contextualizes the subject of the main part of this essay. Following that, an analysis of testimonies that describe sharing food and a consideration of food memories about previous times (before transportation to the camp) allows us to gain an insight into how prisoners’ relationship with food changed and to examine the impact of starvation during their imprisonment at Auschwitz. In addition, a discussion of food imagination that gave the inmates a small reprieve from their terrible ordeal forms an important part of the analysis, adding another perspective to our comprehension of life and death at Auschwitz. Food imagination was a coping and survival mechanism, as well as an indicator of a commitment to a future life after liberation.

FOOD AND HUNGER AT AUSCHWITZ Choice at Auschwitz was about whether to eat the meager rations in one go or to try to save them in order to make them last. But then associated with the latter option was the fear that any saved food might be taken. Prisoners constantly feared that others would steal their food. For instance, Millu relates an incident of a female prisoner “hunched up in a corner, voraciously eating a salad of a sort, made from the little herbs that grew at the edge of the camp … She looked up and instinctively clutched her bowl to her chest as if my appearance threatened violence or theft” (1997: 64). Even after liberation, “some survivors would not stop hiding bread under their pillows” (Steinbacher 2005: 131). Survivor accounts also mentioned the difficult subject of the exchange of food for sexual favors. In Millu’s book, which comprises six different narratives, one woman stated: “I can’t demean myself like those women who sell themselves for a slice of bread” (1997: 190). Lengyel too refers to food as “the coin that paid for sexual privileges” (1995: 196). This evokes the term “grey zones” that Primo Levi used in his final book to demarcate the ambivalent and complex choices that prisoners had to make in order to survive. The common preoccupation was about how to obtain a little more food in order to survive a little longer. Wermuth, for instance, notes at one point, when talking to a fellow inmate, who had been in his class at school, “I asked the vital and inevitable question about some additional food” (1993: 147). He had a stroke of good fortune when it turned out that another of his former classmates was in charge of the soup distribution. He recalls that he filled his bowl “from the bottom of the container—not watery but lots of solid stuff, even two tiny pieces of meat” (ibid.). Hence, the capacity to survive, as many survivors have noted, depended on luck or circumstance. The existing historical research into the subject of food and the Holocaust so far has centered mainly upon a gendered approach to Holocaust studies, in which scholars have

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brought to the fore women’s experiences and have shown that kitchen and food memories reminded Jewish women of their former position in their families and communities and reaffirmed their own sense of value. Food preparation was part of the ritual of living in family, social, and community life—as well as Jewish religious festivals—and it defined the former status of many women. The sharing of recipes and cooking tips was also significant for women psychologically because it indicated a commitment to the future (Goldenberg 1998: 335). They fantasized about the future, a time when the war would be over, as a coping strategy. These types of themes are common in female survivor testimonies and narratives. Furthermore, by describing the food they once cooked to another inmate, “they shared a familiar experience and connected to another person” (Goldenberg 2003: 171). Myrna Goldenberg argues that food talk at Auschwitz was “salutary because it fostered social relationships, reinforced religious values and rituals, and strengthened women’s sense of purpose” (ibid.: 163). While food talk among women at Auschwitz has been more widely acknowledged, Viktor Frankl (1905–1997), an Austrian Holocaust survivor, also recounts men engaging in food talk. He states that the majority of prisoners, when they were working near each other and not closely watched by guards “would immediately start discussing food,” asking each other about their favorite dishes and planning what they would eat after this ordeal was over (2004: 41). Moreover, the conscious act of planning for the future in this way was a coping mechanism and a survival strategy for Jewish inmates in Nazi concentration and death camps. It was indicative of a will to survive and was representative of an act of resistance against their captors. Food memory and food imagination are significant themes in Holocaust survivor testimonies. Goldenberg has asserted: “Food—or, more precisely, hunger—dominates Holocaust narratives” (2003: 162). Certainly, we can see significant examples of this, particularly although not exclusively, in female narratives. Even before their arrival at Auschwitz, Holocaust survivors remember the horrors of their journeys. Elie Wiesel (1928–2016), a Romanian survivor, relates as follows: “Saturday, the day of rest, was the day chosen for our expulsion. The night before, we had sat down to the traditional Friday night meal. We had said the customary blessings over the bread and wine and swallowed the food in silence. We sensed that we were gathered around the familial table for the last time” (2006: 21–2). In his description of the journey, he states that after two days of travel, “thirst became intolerable.” He recalls that there was still some food left, but that “we never ate enough to satisfy our hunger. Our principle was to economize, to save for tomorrow. Tomorrow could be worse yet” (ibid.: 23). Many accounts outline the constant struggle between trying to satisfy hunger and saving food for later consumption. Millu recollects the evening bread distributions: Each evening became an endurance test as I wrestled with the most ferocious temptation. I would start out full of resolve, hiding the bread inside my dress for a quarter of an hour or so, then take it out to gaze lovingly and sniff with passion, until the struggle between desire and the wisdom of deferred gratification culminated in my ripping into the bread like a starving beast, destroying in no time what was the object of endless inner conflict. (1997: 31) Frankl too describes “endless debates on the sense or nonsense of certain methods of dealing with the small bread ration … There were two schools of thought. One was in favor of eating up the ration immediately … The second group … used different arguments” (2004: 43). Wermuth also recollects about those who ate their rations straightaway and

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those who tried to save them (1993: 144). The bread ration was so crucial to survival that memories about it were significant. The terrible circumstances and conditions of internment at Auschwitz included thirst and hunger, extremes of temperature, arduous physical labor, overcrowding, inadequate food and foul water, lengthy roll calls, exhaustion, illness, injury, and a constant fear of selection for the gas chambers. Steinbacher summarizes the lack of nutrition and its consequences, describing the watery soup distributed at lunch time, with no meat, but with parsnips, potatoes, or millet, and at dinner time the bread ration (2005: 35). Unsurprisingly, this malnourishment led to exhaustion, illness, and eventual starvation. Prisoners had to resort to extremely desperate measures, such as eating potato peels, rotten root vegetables, and leftover scraps. At Monowitz, a satellite camp of Auschwitz, whose prisoners provided labor for the industrial chemical company I. G. Farben, the living conditions were also pitiful, with minimal calorific intake for prisoners. The life expectancy for Monowitz inmates averaged approximately three months, but was often even shorter than this (ibid.: 56). To be sure, the extremely low calorific value, poor quality, and nutritional insufficiency and imbalance rapidly led to emaciation, characterized by striking weight loss and muscular atrophy in a very short space of time. Symptoms of starvation presented themselves in two stages. The first stage was indicated by great weight loss, muscular weakness, and progressive decline in kinetic energy, as well as slowness of movement and debility. The second stage was signified by further loss of weight, change in facial expression, hollowness of the eyeballs, skin turning grey, and susceptibility to all kinds of infections. In addition, the cheekbones and eye sockets stood out, swellings formed, and diarrhea presented. Furthermore, indifference to and detachment from the environment and eventually a very low body temperature and a bent posture ensued (Langbein 2004: 91–2). The term Muselmänner, a distorted form of the Polish word denoting a “Muslim” (muzułman), was used in camp jargon to describe prisoners in the terminal stages of physical and mental exhaustion, due to starvation. Survivor, Gisella Perl (1907–1988), in her testimony recalls: “We waited for the food with the same burning impatience, the same excited imagination with which a young girl waits for her lover. Dinner was the most important moment of the day, the only moment worth living for.” The food imagination here was very important—especially in comparison to the reality, of course. She describes how awful it was when it came—“a horrible concoction”—and yet, “We didn’t care. It was warm and it was food, even if there were pieces of wood, potato peeling and unrecognizable substances swimming in it.” She describes how it was over very quickly “and before we had swallowed the last mouthful, we already began to wait for tomorrow” (Rittner and Roth 1993: 106–7). Wiesel remembers how on the day after their arrival at Auschwitz, they were brought some soup: “I was terribly hungry, yet I refused to touch it. I was still the spoiled child of long ago. My father swallowed my ration” (2006: 42). He describes how quickly this changed, and how, by the third day he was “eagerly eating any kind of soup” (ibid.: 43). He recollects the good advice given to him by Stein, a relative from Antwerp, who told him: “Eat! Anything, any time. Eat all you can. The weak don’t last very long around here” (ibid.: 45). Hart recalls a scene at noon at Auschwitz, which underlines this point: It was nearly midday, and from the distance we could see big drums being carried out from the kitchens. I had seen these before in the prisons and knew that soup was coming. From nearby blocks girls rushed up. Some soup had been spilled, and the girls

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lay on the ground licking it off the mud. Others were raiding the dustbins in the hope of finding potato peel. (1962: 44) Many survivors describe the soup, which apart from bread, formed the prisoners’ diet. A Czech survivor, Felix Weinberg, relates that “the soup tasted chiefly of hot water. The other constituents were largely root vegetables and dried vegetables such as strips of cabbage leaves, collectively known as Stacheldraht (barbed wire)” (2014: 76). Hart also recalls the first time she ate the soup: “It was horrible tasteless stuff. It had a few bits of potato peel and some swedes floating on top. I tried it, and felt sick but I was much too hungry to leave it” (1962: 44). Wiesel describes how “all that mattered to me was my daily bowl of soup, my crust of stale bread. The bread, the soup—those were my entire life. I was nothing but a body. Perhaps even less: a famished stomach” (2006: 52). Willy Berler, a Romanian survivor, recollects: “Hunger gnaws at me day and night, like at all of my companions, as does thirst, because the water here is revolting” (2004: 50). He adds that “the beverage we get in the mornings is not enough to quench our thirst, nor is the midday soup, although it is too liquid to alleviate our hunger” (ibid.: 54). Later, he adds: “My insides are sapped by hunger, as there is never enough bread” (ibid.: 68). Wermuth too states: “Our stomachs got into the dangerous habit of accepting the feeling of permanent hunger. Our bodies began the process of losing weight. Our determination, however, if anything increased” (1993: 145). Hart describes food exchanges that took place between inmates, for example, prisoners buying cooked food from others who had stolen from the kitchens. She recollects: “Another favourite was potato sandwiches. Potatoes were cut and placed on dry bread as though they were the greatest delicacies” (1962: 59). Hence, it is possible to see how the prisoners’ relationship with food had changed so markedly from that in normal circumstances. The description of potatoes in dried bread as a delicacy is very revealing of just how difficult these times and circumstances were. To be sure, in usual times, such food would be far from being conceptualized as a luxury or delicacy.

SHARING FOOD Female narratives often describe how inmates shared food with each other. For example, Millu describes how Lili shared a “precious gift” of “some cabbage leaves” with two of her fellow prisoners: “This was an incredible treat, especially as our palates were practically deadened by overcooked turnips. We couldn’t stop marveling at the forgotten taste of fresh raw greens” (1997: 29). Rena Gelissen, a Polish survivor, describes clandestinely sharing a packet of macaroni, procured from a nearby factory, between a few women in the laundry room: “Dividing the noodles evenly into their waiting bowls, I figure, accurately, that there are five tablespoons for each girl, then pour the hot water on top, making sure everyone gets some. Danka and I are served last. The rest wait until we are all served; then in silent unison we begin to eat the warm, nourishing macaroni” (1996: 207). On another occasion, she describes sharing another rare provision: sugar. Rena and Danka agreed to share a bag of sugar they procured with “twenty of our closest girlfriends … after everyone is asleep.” Gelissen carefully levelled off each spoon, “making sure that everyone gets an equal amount” (ibid.: 213). These examples underline normative female behavior, with its expectations about sisterhood and caring for one another. Female prisoners often offered each other support, comfort, and solidarity. As Joan Ringelheim has shown, women were able to “transform their habits of raising children or their experience of nurturing into the care of the nonbiological family” (1985: 747).

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While women’s narratives were usually much concerned with food and kitchen memories, men’s narratives oftentimes described other aspects of life, including work and prayer as particularly recurrent themes, although references to food can also be found among them. Weinberg recalls, for example, the importance of ersatz coffee to his survival. Along with three other teenagers, he had the task of carrying the barrels and distributing the “coffee.” It had clearly never seen a single coffee bean but it did contain sugar. If one did not stir it too assiduously (and the ladle was not long enough to reach the base until most of the liquid had been dispensed), there would be left at the bottom of the container a mess of ersatz coffee consisting of chicory grounds and sugar, which we spooned out and shared among us carriers. The taste was revolting but it was full of calories— probably more in a day’s helping than in a week’s supply of the camp food. I doubt I would have survived without it. (2014: 76) Here the relationship of the prisoner to the substitute coffee as a matter of his very survival is extremely significant. In addition, for inmates who were trying to survive on such limited calories each day—while doing hard labor—each gram of sugar was indeed a matter of life and death. Levi recalls an encounter with Tischler, a Polish Jew at Auschwitz: It was his birthday: twenty-five years old. Now, by sheer chance I was twenty-five that day too; we were twins. Tischler said it was a date that called for a celebration since it was most unlikely that we would celebrate our next birthday. He took half an apple out of his pocket, cut off a slice, and made me a present of it, and that was the only time in a year of imprisonment that I tasted fruit. We chewed in silence, as attentive to the precious acidulous flavor as we would have been to a symphony. (1987: 39) Millu too describes the sharing of food among camp friends: “If one of us had the thrill of discovering a bit of potato or carrot in the soup, we always divided it companionably in three parts. They were my true friends!” (1997: 57). Frankl writes: “I remember how one day a foreman secretly gave me a piece of bread which I knew he must have saved from his breakfast ration” (2004: 93). Levi also describes the help he received from an Italian civilian worker, Lorenzo, who brought him “a piece of his bread and the remainder of his ration every day for six months” (2000: 148). He maintains that without Lorenzo’s help, he would not have been able to survive. In Moments of Reprieve, Levi describes the “weird soup” provided to him every day by Lorenzo, which he shared with his friend Alberto: In it we found plum pits, salami peels, once even the wing of a sparrow with all its feathers; another time a scrap of Italian newspaper. I became acquainted with the origin of these ingredients later on when I again met Lorenzo in Italy: he had told his comrades that among the Jews of Auschwitz were two Italians, and every evening he made the round of his dormitory to collect their leftovers. (1987: 154) This kind of sharing, as we have seen, was much more commonly talked about among women and remembered by women, falling into line with expected gendered norms. But here we see it among the Italian male prisoner community too, suggesting that this was not exclusive to female prisoners. Levi describes the extraordinary arrival of a package at Christmas 1944. The parcel contained ersatz chocolate, cookies, and powdered milk. He describes the value, reaction, and impact it had upon him and his friend Alberto:

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There were delicious things to eat for days and days. But there were also serious practical problems to resolve immediately: we found ourselves in the situation of a passerby who is handed a gold ingot in full view of everyone. Where to put the food? How to keep it? How to protect it from other people’s greediness? How to invest it wisely? Our year-old hunger kept pushing us toward the worst possible solution: to eat everything right then and there. But we had to resist that temptation. Our weakened stomachs could not have coped with the abuse; within an hour it would have ended in indigestion or worse. (Levi 1987: 93) Yet, they noted that people were looking at them “with different eyes.” As a result, they decided “to speed up the consumption: something eaten cannot be stolen” (ibid.: 95). Certainly, food was a resource for their imagination, hopes, and dreams, but there were also very strict limitations on what was realistically possible.

FOOD MEMORIES AND FOOD IMAGINATION Not only does memory of food appear frequently in memoirs of Auschwitz, but also food imagination and food memory were significant in the dire circumstances faced by Holocaust victims while at Auschwitz. Both male and female Holocaust survivors talked of severe hunger, unsurprisingly. But food was conspicuous as the subject of fantasy or memory, “stimulated by extreme hunger,” as Goldenberg notes (2003: 165). Sharing their memories of delicious meals eaten in better times was a diversion for both women and men. For men, food memories were about recalling meals once enjoyed in a state of freedom. This may have been related to normative male gendered roles of independence and power. Men’s narratives do not refer much to the exchange of recipes. In women’s narratives, however, food talk and food memories are rooted and situated in the kitchen and remembered through their socialization, which oftentimes had created more concrete memories than for men. For women, there was significance in both swapping recipes and explaining to another woman how to cook or bake. Passing on a skill or a tradition gave hope for the future and a sense that there would be a future after this. Explaining a recipe to another inmate then, was “an act of affirmation” among women hoping to survive (Goldenberg 2003: 174). In addition, engaging in this kind of activity could be representative of an act of defiance against their captors. At Auschwitz, women in particular used a variety of strategies to cope with their situation, such as the formation of ersatz families and “camp sister” relationships, the sharing of recipes, cooking methods, and memories of Sabbath and festival meals. Traditionally, women’s duties were associated with nurturing, caring, and the preparation of food. Gelissen recalls her memories of home while in the camp at Auschwitz: Suddenly I am transported back through time. How wonderful our house used to smell the night before Sabbath—the goose, the kugel, the potato cakes. I long for real homecooked food and actual meals that take place at a table with white linens and silverware, meals that last for hours because there is so much food … I long to see Mama with her white silk scarf draped over her head, lighting the candelabra on the dining room table for Sabbath. (1996: 214) Gelissen’s memory encompasses even the smell of the food, as well as the whole association of the Friday night Sabbath ritual. Memories and recollections from home, childhood, and better times helped victims endure their circumstances at Auschwitz. Since

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food traditions form an essential part of our identity, as De Silva notes, “to recall them in desperate circumstances is to reinforce a sense of self ” (1996: xxvi). Millu writes of Gustine, a prisoner at Auschwitz from Holland, who talked about her home, “for hours on end,” as a coping strategy: “The fire sparkling in the big blue tiled stove and her mother preparing the snacks for tea, the smell of fresh bread, the most comforting smell in the world, and the butter, the ruby-hued currant marmalade, the gaily colored curtains on the windows. Oh, beloved home, the most cherished place on earth!” (1997: 155). Gelissen recalls the Sunday morning picnics with cheese Danish pastries that she used to have with her sister Danka: “Around noon we open Mama’s Danishes, still warm from the oven, or maybe the sun kept them warm, and eat them while languishing in the sun … How I miss … eating Mama’s homemade sweets” (1996: 225). Lengyel too talks of reminiscing and reciting poetry as coping strategies, “to escape the frightful present” (1995: 72). Furthermore, Perl recollects: “Later, as we came to know one another better, we invented games and recited poetry to keep our minds off the sordid present.” Other evenings, they played another game, which spread from block to block until every woman in Auschwitz played it enthusiastically. We called the game “I am a lady” … I am a lady—I said one night—a lady doctor in Hungary. It is morning, a beautiful sunny morning and I feel too lazy to work. I ring for my assistant and tell her to send the patients away, for I am not going to my office today … What should I do with myself? Go shopping? Go to the hairdresser? Meet my friends at the café? Maybe I’ll do some shopping. (Ritter and Roth 1993: 109) The references in this game are clearly specific to the women’s previous experiences and gendered social construction. Imagination is at the fore here as a distraction from the situation in which these female prisoners found themselves. We can see this in many ways: an idea of opting not to work, a description of an elevated professional status that had been removed, the capacity to order what one wanted, and to enjoy food and drink in a leisurely manner. Even the repeated emphasis on “lady” is significant in a context in which the incarceration of female prisoners in these circumstances caused changes to their bodies, including the reduction in the size of their breasts and the ceasing of menstruation over time. Food imagination could have a salutary effect on individual prisoners. Levi recalls the words of a Polish inmate, Rappoport, who told of the experiences he had previously had when visiting Italy: While I could I drank, I ate … I learned, travelled and looked at things. I kept my eyes wide open; I didn’t waste a crumb … Things went well for me; I accumulated a large quantity of good things, and all that good has not disappeared. It’s inside me, safe and sound. I don’t let it fade; I’ve held onto it. Nobody can take it from me. (1987: 23) He could draw on these, he said, in his difficult circumstances. This was significant as a survival tool. Frankl describes prisoners dreaming of food—particularly of bread and cakes—as well as cigarettes: “The lack of having these simple desires satisfied led him to seek wish-fulfilment in dreams” (2004: 40). He adds that thoughts about food and favorite dishes were unavoidable as they “forced themselves into the consciousness of the prisoner, whenever he had a moment to spare” (ibid.: 43). Food imagination exemplified the ability of the human spirit to transcend the immediate surroundings and to defy dehumanization. Marceline Loridan-Ivens, a French survivor, writes of an occasion when she was beaten so hard that she fainted. Addressing her father, she relates:

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When I came to, you were gone, but I found a tomato and an onion in my hand that you’d secretly slipped to me—your lunch, I’m sure—and I hid them right away. How was it possible? A tomato and an onion. Those two vegetables hidden beside me made everything possible once more, I was a child you were my father again, my protector, the one who kept me fed, the head of a business that manufactured sweaters in his factory in Nancy, the slightly crazed man who bought us a little château in the south, in Bollène, and took me there in a horse-drawn carriage. (2017: 9–10) This recollection epitomizes both imagination and food memory during this time of adversity. It indicates both an altered relationship with food, in which just two vegetables made such a difference to the possibility of survival, and the importance of the imagination and memory evoked by them. Weinberg too relates how memories of his happy childhood furnished his mind “with a cocoon of security and contentment” into which it could withdraw in times of hardship (2014: 1). For example, he recalls his summer weekends at small resorts in Bohemia: “Each café specialized in some particular kind of dessert. Our family, friends and relatives would settle down to coffee and the local specialty cakes” (ibid.: 9–10). He remembers eating samples of salami and cheeses offered by shopkeepers, as well as tasting cakes when he accompanied his mother on her outings with her friends to exclusive coffeehouses. He recollects that “marzipan ‘potatoes’ in particular left a lasting impression” (ibid.: 13). He relates a visit to Belgium with his father thus, interestingly placing his memory in his stomach: “My stomach has always had a long memory and the delicacies I encountered in Belgium, such as tomatoes stuffed with crevettes and home-made mayonnaise or crevette vol-au-vents, became something I tried particularly hard to avoid remembering during the subsequent hungry war years” (ibid.: 28–9). Crevettes (shrimps or prawns) were a luxury seafood item and therefore represented a particular kind of (privileged) childhood memory. Its significance is that the circumstance has been lost and replaced by one so drastic, but the memory evoked remained and perhaps even acted as a survival tool. Giuliana Tedeschi, an Italian survivor, recalls that at Auschwitz-Birkenau, “prompted by starvation, a mania was going around the camp, an obsession with recipes and imaginary meals; it had become pathological” (1992: 208). This recollection suggests the relationship between starvation and food imagination very clearly. Prisoners journeyed in their imagination to times when food was freely available. They could think about the normal world before Auschwitz and dream too of an existence afterwards. Furthermore, as John Allen notes, while emotion and smell certainly contribute to the power of certain food memories, the hippocampus also has more direct links to the digestive system (2012: 152–5). Many of the hormones that regulate appetite, digestion, and eating behavior also have receptors in the hippocampus. Access to food and drink is so crucial to survival that the hippocampus forms memories about food. The hippocampus is especially important for forming long-term, declarative memories. And so, perhaps these food memories did indeed play a role in the physical, as well as the cultural, survival of individuals.

FOOD AND RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS Specific ritual meals among some of the Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz evoked previous roles and perhaps additionally signifiers of resistance through a determination to attempt to carry out religious ceremonies. Czechoslovakian survivor, Livia Bitton-Jackson (born

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in 1931), recalls smuggling potatoes and how her mother saved hers in order to use them in place of candles on Friday night: One evening while shoveling snow in the yard, we discover mounds in which potatoes are stored for the winter. We quickly dig them up and, hiding them under our dresses, smuggle enough potatoes into the camp to allow each inmate at least one potato. We wash them in the toilet and eagerly await our bedtime … Noiselessly, with utmost care, so as not to attract the attention of the guard on patrol we bite into the hard, delightful skin of the raw potato. But Mummy saves her potato. “For Sabbath lights” she says. Friday at sunset Mummy kindles her Sabbath lights in the carved-out potato halves using oil smuggled from the factory and threads from our blankets for wicks. (1999: 153) This example illustrates not only her resourcefulness, but also the determination of BittonJackson’s mother to try to continue her tradition of lighting candles for the Sabbath. She was caught but not punished on this occasion. Bitton-Jackson goes on to relate how they subsequently saved “potatoes for a Hanukkah celebration with lights.” With care and secrecy, they lit “Hanukkah oil lamps in carved-out potato halves” and succeeded in kindling the lights for eight nights without being caught (ibid.: 154). Millu writes of maintaining rituals and the celebration of Hanukkah as well. These attempts by women to uphold religious traditions were valuable coping strategies, which both maintained their identities and defied their captors. Bitton-Jackson recalls a particular day at noon, when she was working in the cleaning commando, that they were “given scraps from the meals of the German soldiers.” It happened to be a Jewish fast day, Tisha B’Av, and she describes how she was fasting: “With tears of regret, this is my destiny. Two thousand years ago, the Romans picked the day when I was to taste real food to destroy the Temple in Jerusalem” (Ritter and Roth 1993: 83). Levi describes a memory of the eve of Yom Kippur at Auschwitz, when a Lithuanian inmate called Ezra stood in line for soup, but asked the barrack chief to save his portion until the next evening, even if it was cold, in order that he could observe his fast for the Day of Atonement. The next evening, incredibly enough, the barrack chief had indeed kept it for him (1987: 78–82). Loridan-Ivens recalls: “For the first time in my life, I fasted on Yom Kippur, to feel more Jewish, to remain dignified in the face of the SS” (2017: 63). Wiesel’s memory in regard to Yom Kippur at Auschwitz was quite different. He relates his story thus: The Day of Atonement. Should we fast? The question was hotly debated. To fast could mean a more certain, more rapid death. In this place we were always fasting. It was Yom Kippur year-round. But there were those who said we should fast, precisely because it was dangerous to do so … I did not fast. First of all, to please my father who had forbidden me to do so. And then, there was no longer any reason for me to fast. I no longer accepted God’s silence. As I swallowed my ration of soup, I turned that act into a symbol of rebellion, of protest against Him. And I nibbled on my crust of bread. Deep inside me, I felt a great void opening. (2006: 69) Even in circumstances as materially dire as these, the symbolic power of food—and in this case, also religion—could be immense. Here the two were linked, because Yom Kippur, the most important day in the Jewish calendar, a fast day and a day of repentance, reflection, and prayer, held a special significance, but how that was to be accommodated in these extreme circumstances plagued the minds of the prisoners. They were—as in so many aspects of their lives here—placed into the position of making a “choiceless choice” (Langer 1980: 54).

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THE DEATH MARCHES FROM AUSCHWITZ Survivors have also recalled the extreme and horrific experiences of the death marches from Auschwitz after the Nazis emptied out the camp. Once they left, they were starving, frozen, and exhausted. The circumstances they faced after leaving the camp drove many Holocaust victims to increasingly desperate behavior in their struggle to survive. Wiesel writes of attempts at basic survival in the freezing conditions: “We were given bread, the usual ration. We threw ourselves on it. Someone had the idea of quenching thirst by eating snow. Soon, we were all imitating him. As we were not permitted to bend down, we took out our spoons and ate the snow off our neighbours’ backs. A mouthful of bread and a spoonful of snow” (2006: 96). In the subsequent days, he recollects that the marching prisoners received no food and how they simply lived on snow. Wiesel describes what happened when a passer-by threw some bread onto a train convoy in which he was travelling after his previous ordeals, through Germany on the way to Buchenwald concentration camp: “In the wagon where the bread had landed, a battle had ensued. Men were hurling themselves against each other, trampling, tearing at and mauling each other. Beasts of prey unleashed, animal hate in their eyes” (ibid.: 101). He describes that the emaciated prisoners were prepared to kill for a crust of bread. Hans Winterfeld, a German survivor, similarly recalls the death march from Auschwitz: Normally, one could talk to the other prisoners, but when food was distributed, they began to look and act like lunatics: their eyes stared rigidly at the ladle or at the arm that distributed the bread. When they received their ration, they constantly watched other prisoners to check that nobody had been given more. It was completely irrelevant what kind of person it was: uneducated and primitive, or educated and intellectually superior. I often wondered how cultivated human beings could behave like animals. (Kolinsky 2004: 27) Berler recollects his arrival at Buchenwald after the death march from Poland: I eat the most delicious soup, the most nourishing, the most divine soup I have ever received in my life. It is even better; it is the best meal of my whole existence. I know that until my last day on earth I will never forget that first soup in Buchenwald, even if I never suffer from hunger again. Suddenly, it dawns on me; there is life. It sinks in with the heat of the soup and the taste of the lard, vegetables and potatoes. (2004: 141) This memory is particularly poignant and evocative. It is a clear recollection of the extreme conditions, the moment of change to better circumstances and the impact of this upon the prisoner. On arrival at Buchenwald, Wiesel describes his desperate attempt to procure a hot drink for his dying father. It was a black substitute coffee drink: I fought my way to the coffee cauldron like a wild beast. And I succeeded in bringing back the cup. I took one gulp. The rest was for him. I shall never forget the gratitude that shone in his eyes when he swallowed this beverage … With these few mouthfuls of hot water, I had probably given him more satisfaction than during my entire childhood. (2006: 106–7) This was a painful reckoning. After his father’s death, he describes remaining in Buchenwald until April 11, 1945: “I spent my days in total idleness. With only one desire: to eat. I no longer thought of my father, or my mother. From time to time, I would dream but only about soup, an extra ration of soup” (ibid.: 113). By the last days of his imprisonment,

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before liberation, Wiesel tells of his extreme hunger once again: “Hunger was tormenting us; we had not eaten for nearly six days except for a few stalks of grass and some potato peels found on the grounds of the kitchens” (ibid.: 114–15). Upon liberation, he describes how the inmates’ first action was to obtain food: “That’s all we thought about. No thought of revenge, or of parents. Only of bread” (ibid.: 115). Wermuth too recalls his liberation in May 1945, the sudden availability of food and his excitement at the prospect of his “first proper meal.” He states: “What I did not know then was the very sad fact that thousands of released prisoners were to die—from eating. Their digestive systems were no longer used to proper food and they did not know how to control their understandable greed for food” (1993: 200). Indeed, taking in food too quickly after severe malnutrition caused new health complications, including diarrhea. This brings us back to the pathology of starvation. While memory had sustained the prisoners before—individually, collectively, mentally, and physically (because of the hippocampus), that their stomach had lost its memory—caused many to die in the aftermath of liberation.

CONCLUSION This chapter has analyzed a range of Holocaust narratives of Jewish survivors of different genders and nationalities, in order to reveal the role of food memory and food imagination in the Holocaust experience on three levels—first, how postwar narratives recalled food and hunger at Auschwitz; second, how they recounted their recollections at Auschwitz of food in earlier times; and third, how food imagination at Auschwitz was indicative of a desire to survive and a commitment to the future. An analysis of memories of food at Auschwitz, published in Holocaust survivor testimonies in the postwar period, adds an important perspective to our understanding of both experiences at Auschwitz and Holocaust memory. Food imagination was a coping and survival mechanism, as well as an act of defiance and a commitment to a future life after their liberation. The testimonies have furnished a rich set of sources for analysis. Food imagination in such circumstances as these attests to the strength of the human spirit. Extreme hunger was a permanent feature of life, and yet prisoners talked of previous times—and especially of food memories—in spite of this. In regard to women, in particular, recollections about food were highly significant, as food traditions signified women’s status and definitions of themselves. Kitchen memories reminded women of their former position in their families and communities and reaffirmed their own sense of value and identity. Women used conversation as a distraction from their circumstances and talked about their old lives (Millu 1997: 26–7). This reminded them of their strengths as nurturers, homemakers, and cooks in their normative gendered roles. It is clear that the memory of food was used as a mental survival mechanism. For the prisoners at Auschwitz everything they knew was turned upside down and their existence and desire to survive hour by hour and day by day to come out at the other end of their horrific ordeal meant using whatever physical and mental strength they could muster. Food talk among women at Auschwitz was much more prevalent than among men, but the latter also engaged in food talk, as we have seen. Moreover, the conscious act of planning for the future in this way was an expression of defiance. Food memory is particularly poignant in this extreme setting. Food memory in two different aspects has been examined in this chapter—both as postwar recollections of experiences at Auschwitz and as reminiscences of former times while there. Food memories could be extremely evocative, bringing back memories not only of eating food, but also of place and setting. Food (or lack of food) was an effective trigger of deeper memories of feelings and

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emotions, impacting both the body and the mind. Food imagination too was used as a coping and survival strategy by many prisoners, providing emotional and spiritual escape, as well as a distraction from their dire and desperate situation and sometimes additionally as a way of staking a commitment to a future after their release.

NOTE *I would like to thank Bryce Evans for his careful reading of this chapter and for his helpful comments.

REFERENCES Allen, J. (2012), The Omnivorous Mind: Our Evolving Relationship with Food, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Berler, W. (2004), Journey through Darkness: Monowitz, Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald, London: Vallentine Mitchell. Bitton-Jackson, L. (1999), I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing up in the Holocaust, London: Simon and Schuster. De Silva, C. (ed.) (1996), In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezín, Northvale, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield. Frankl, V. (2004), Man’s Search for Meaning, London: Simon and Schuster. Gelissen, R. (1996), Rena’s Promise: A Story of Two Sisters in Auschwitz, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Goldenberg, M. (1998), “Memoirs of Auschwitz Survivors: The Burden of Gender,” in D. Ofer and L. Weitzman (eds.), Women in the Holocaust, 327–39, New Haven: Yale University Press. Goldenberg, M. (2003), “Food Talk: Gendered Responses to Hunger in the Concentration Camps,” in E. Baer and M. Goldenberg (eds.), Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust, 161–79, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Hart, K. (1962), I am Alive, London: Corgi. Kolinsky, E. (2004), After the Holocaust: Jewish Survivors in Germany after 1945, London: Pimlico. Langbein, H. (2004), People in Auschwitz, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Langer, L. (1980), “The Dilemma of Choice in the Death Camps,” Centerpoint: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 4 (1): 53–9. Lengyel, O. (1995), Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz, Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers. Levi, P. (1987), Moments of Reprieve, London: Penguin. Levi, P. (2000), If This Is a Man, London: Penguin. Loridan-Ivens, M. (2017), But You Did Not Come Back, London: Faber and Faber. Millu, L. (1997), Smoke over Birkenau, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Ringelheim, J. (1985), “Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 10 (4): 741–61. Rittner, C., and Roth, J. (eds.) (1993), Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust New York: Paragon House. Steinbacher, S. (2005), Auschwitz: A History, London: Penguin. Tedeschi, G. (1992), There Is a Place on Earth: A Woman in Birkenau, New York: Pantheon Books. Weinberg, F. (2014), Boy 30529: A Memoir, London: Verso. Wermuth, H. (1993), Breathe Deeply My Son, London: Vallentine Mitchell. Wiesel, E. (2006), Night, London: Penguin.

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CHAPTER NINE

The Knife without a Hand: Ethnographic Memoir through a Goat Not Eaten, Samburu, Northern Kenya JON HOLTZMAN

So it was with Albertine, as with her friends. On certain days, slim, with grey cheeks, a sullen air, a violet transparency falling obliquely from her such as we notice sometimes on the sea, she seemed to be feeling the sorrows of exile. On other days her face, more sleek, caught and glued my desires to its varnished surface and prevented them from going any farther … or it might happen that the tint of her cheeks had deepened to the violet shade of the red cyclamen, and, at times, even, when she was flushed or feverish, with a suggestion of un-healthiness which lowered my desire to something more sensual and made her glance expressive of something more perverse and unwholesome … and each of these Albertines was different, as in every fresh appearance of the dancer whose colours, form, character, are transmuted according to the innumerably varied play of a projected limelight. It was perhaps because they were so different, the persons whom I used to contemplate in her at this period, that later on I became myself a different person, corresponding to the particular Albertine to whom my thoughts had turned; a jealous, an indifferent, a voluptuous, a melancholy, a frenzied person, created anew not merely by the accident of what memory had risen to the surface, but in proportion also to the strength of the belief that was lent to the support of one and the same memory by the varying manner in which I appreciated it … To be quite accurate I ought to give a different name to each of the “me’s” who were to think about Albertine in time to come; I ought still more to give a different name to each of the Albertines who appeared before me. —Proust ([1923] 2020: 770–3)

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Goats hold a special place in the social gastronomy of Samburu pastoralists of northern Kenya. Until recently one of the wealthiest groups of livestock keepers on record (Spencer 1965), the Samburu diet was composed almost exclusively of livestock products, wealth was measured wholly through livestock holdings, and social relationships were predominantly both formed through and mostly concerning livestock exchange. Developments over recent decades have eroded Samburu herds, which, coupled with human population increase, has forced Samburu to rely heavily on purchased agricultural products. Livestock remain economically central while maintaining their social and symbolic roles. Given this diffuse importance it is perhaps unsurprising that livestock are a central medium for Samburu remembrance. Songs composed and sung by murran (bachelor warriors) recounting their exploits in cattle raids and similar activities commonly include reference to the particularities of the livestock consumed on these occasions, along with the places where they were eaten. It is also commonplace for recollections of loikar—meat feasts in the forest, with one’s peers—to take as central elements defining characteristics of the livestock they ate there, such as size, color, and origin (e.g., if it came as a gift from a particular person or from a raid, etc.), and the skulls of the animals are often placed in trees as memorials to the occasion (Holtzman 2009). Most often these recollections focus on cattle (unless a goat eaten was unusually large or otherwise fantastic). Despite their importance within the pastoral economy, anthropological studies have tended to largely disregard goats because they possess little or none of the social and symbolic weight of cows. For Samburu in particular, Spencer (1965) characterized them as “small change” since they play no role in the most crucial forms of exchange (e.g., bridewealth) and have little weight in assessing a family’s wealth. Wealthy elders in particular sometimes belittle goats even further, deeming goat milk suitable only for use in tea or perhaps drunk by children, as only the milk of a big animal—a cow—is fitting for the consumption of a big man. Yet, because of the great significance afforded cows they are relatively illiquid. Gifts of cattle are quite rare apart from those that are ritually prescribed (e.g., in marriage) or forced as a device to mend a serious and socially recognized conflict. And although food sharing is perhaps the most central medium for everyday sociality—Samburu maintain that “friendship is through the stomach”—one’s own cows are virtually never eaten except when they are slaughtered in a ritual context, or just happen to die. No one would ever feast with a friend or visitor with a cow. On the other hand, giving a friend nonmeat food (no matter the quantity) does not carry much meaning, though it certainly would still be relished and appreciated and would perhaps represent some rudimentary commensality. Whether milk, or in the contemporary context tea or purchased agricultural products, nonmeat foods are explicitly constructed as having little gravity. When Samburu employ the aphorism “food gets finished” they contrast its ephemeral nature to the core, lasting importance of human relationships, and the importance of not putting the nutritional requirements or the desires of your appetite above things of social importance. This notion is directly inculcated in murran through the proscription against eating anything unless they are in the company of another murran. Samburu note the renewable nature of milk in particular; if you give a friend or a visitor milk there is nothing you have really given up because you will have more the next day or at the next milking; the worst thing that could happen is that you might go a bit hungry, which is regarded as nothing. In contrast, a goat is truly “a something.” Even if a goat is not an especially consequential form of wealth it is still wealth and will not simply replace itself the next day. When one

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gives a friend or visitor a goat to eat one truly is giving of oneself. Moreover, given the love of meat (which is eaten only irregularly), it is invariably appreciated and remembered. Being given a goat to eat, and eating a goat together, is deeply endowed with sentiment. Such a goat, then, stands in a rather unique position, intermediate between the cow— which has enormous value socially, ritually, and materially—and forms of food that might be shared but mean essentially nothing. As such, it forms the quintessential form of quotidian social relations, commensality, and friendship. Slaughtering a goat for a guest, moreover, signals a highly masculinized form of generosity and sociability; while women have rights in all livestock, it is only men who are empowered with the decision to slaughter. Thus, when a wealthy man slaughters a goat for a friend or guest he signals that which is already apparent regarding his high status, while a poor man doing the same (perhaps inadvisable in economic terms) is often a forthright expression that though he is poor he is still a man. In this chapter I use the idiom “goat of remembrance” to engage with a somewhat different question than one internal to Samburu social relations and meanings: the construction of relations between the ethnographer (myself) and Samburu interlocutors who have been central to my life and work in Samburu. In this sense I engage in a kind of Proustian anthropology quite different from that which typically begins and ends with little madeleines (perhaps in part because the voluminous Proust is, understandably, much more cited than read). Rather, I draw on Proust directly through his subtle and meticulous attention to how people—both ourselves and others—are constantly created through interaction and memory. This is an especially important insight for anthropologists because “what we learn” in anthropological fieldwork—a process that is for good reasons or otherwise often obfuscated—is in fact inseparable from the specific encounters with our friends, interlocutors and research subjects in the course of fieldwork, which are absolutely contingent even as we strive to portray our findings as in some sense representative, even gaining insights into some essential truth. Yet rarely do we hear much about these encounters with our interlocutors except in the cases where a particular informant is the focus of a whole ethnography (e.g., Ogotemeli (Griaule 1948), Nisa (Shostak 1981)), or in essays devoted to the discussion of informants, or noted only in formalized words of gratitude in acknowledgments. While our work should be anchored by various reasonably systematic forms of data collection, any written ethnography is nonetheless simply one of an infinite number of possible ethnographies that would be constructed by different anthropologists in the same place, or in a modestly different place, whether by oneself or by some other hypothetical ethnographer who had encounters with different sets of people. Some have suggested that in In Search of Lost Time Proust disguises a novel as a memoir; here I suggest that ethnographies might be seen as memoirs disguised as social science, or at least transmuted into it with most of the steps in this alchemy abandoned to unwritten pages. I do hold that there are essential qualities to the groups we study, and that ethnographers can, at least imperfectly, unpack these to some degree. But the “essential” is encountered only through contingent relationships and events, in which as anthropologists we are not only authors and editors of experiences, but also characters—characters based on a real person, a selectively remembered and written version of our past self, interacting with similarly constructed interlocutors. We thus might liken our written ethnographies to a gamelan performance, imperfect reliefs of imaginary beings, inclusive of the ethnographer who projects them. Here I take a somewhat experimental approach to pull back some aspects of that curtain. Specifically, I recollect aspects of my research and field experiences with Samburu

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pastoralists in northern Kenya through individuals who have been important to that research and to me, from whom I learned much and experienced much, and who in some ways evoked in me different aspects of an essential reality, which I have aimed to capture and then to translate in my broader work. Though I aim to do this with honesty and detail it is, needless to say, imperfect. Proust notes that “remembering a person consists in forgetting them” ([1923] 2020: 727), the richness of experience giving way to stereotyped forms of memory. The idiom I employ here, as described above, is that of goats. While this idiom is, as I have described, particularly apropos for the Samburu context, I would hasten to emphasize that the goat’s tale I conjure here may differ from the form if conjured by a Samburu, even if that genre exists among Samburu in varying forms. And though in the larger project of which this is a part I explore several relationships in which I describe a goat-centered event as a key moment, space here limits me to one such fractured memoir.

BARNABAS The Lanyasunya brothers were five: two outrageously good, one more soft-spokenly so, one a little bad but nondescript, and the last—conventionally—bad. I met the most good-of-the-good days after arriving in Maralal to begin my doctoral research in 1992. I had been advised to go to Gabriel Longoboini, the headmaster of Maralal Boys High School, to get recommendations regarding possible research assistants, and he agreed that we would meet in town in a couple of days with three candidates. On Saturday morning we met outside of the Buffalo Hotel where I stayed upon my arrival, and he presented a young man with a thin mustache and a safari hat. This was his former school captain who had graduated the previous year, but was waiting for the university (closed on strike) to reopen, and he could use work in the meantime. He had the best marks, was hardworking and extremely organized. I thought he seemed nice, but a little stiff. I asked about the other candidates. No, Gabriel insisted. He had realized there could be no others. “Adamson is the one!” he proclaimed, and thus made it so. Adamson was extremely organized—perhaps a little too organized for my tastes. Every day he would ask about our itinerary, and if I didn’t have one in mind, he presented one in full. I joked (which in the end was not so far from the truth) that if there was such a thing as “President of Samburu District” he was going to become it one day. My initial program was mainly to gain familiarity and identify field sites, so an energetic and organized person fit well with this. I was aiming to look at the effect of migratory wage labor on the (purportedly) “gerontocratic structure” of Samburu society (Spencer 1965), and whether independent sources of wealth by young men who went off to do work, such as to become watchmen in Nairobi, had effects on intergenerational power. Because highland and lowland Samburu were significantly different, due mainly to social change, I wanted to find two sites I could compare, but each should still be focused mainly on subsistence pastoralism. Over the next two or so months we visited a LOT of places, at first as day trips out of Maralal and later on longer forays. At some point during that span, Adamson suggested that I might learn more by staying at one Samburu settlement for a longer time than making many short visits. Certainly this was true, though the point of these many short visits was more reconnaissance than data collection. Also, by “one settlement” he was suggesting his own home, in the highest part of the highlands west of Maralal. Perhaps he wanted me to visit there, or perhaps he

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really saw the value of it from a research standpoint. I think he also had some business to attend to. I was happy to visit there, though I knew that there was no chance that it would be suitable as a core field site. It was simply a very unusual—or we might say “very nonrepresentative”—place. It was at a very high altitude, nearly 8,000 feet above sea level, which meant it was quite cool and got a lot of rainfall. While Samburu traditionally did not farm, and it remained rare in most places to make more than an occasional attempt at it, agriculture was perhaps more important than herding in that area. The area was so good for farming that an Italian former race car driver had rented a large swath of land for commercial wheat production. Perhaps more important, though, it was one of the sole Samburu hotbeds of Protestant Christianity. Because of the pleasant climate, protestant missionaries had started their first mission nearby in the 1930s, along with their first school. While there were many nominal Samburu Christians elsewhere, they were mostly Catholics in Name Only, visiting church occasionally for the medical service or relief food they provided. Those Catholic missionaries expected little of their “converts” beyond coming to church sometimes, and bringing their children who would in the next generation bring their children (the Catholic Church having a long-term plan). Despite the fact that the British Protestant missionaries were long since gone, the area had heavily converted to a denomination that equated conversion with Westernization, and believed that one could not maintain (at least many aspects) of one’s culture while being a Christian. It was not very much what I had in mind when I set off to study a pastoralist society, and in any case it was a very unusual place within Samburu. At Adamson’s home I met most of the members of his family. His father, in his sixties at least, seemed largely unaffected by the anomalous aspects of the area; he cut the figure of a typical Samburu elder of his age that you might find anywhere, and avidly played ntotoi (the Samburu version of the widespread African game of mbao, played by moving stones between holes on a wooden board in order to capture your opponent’s stones) and, despite the Born Again leanings of the area, was also an avid drinker. Adamson’s mother was quite different. As a newly married wife in the early 1950s she had actually been painted by Joy Adamson, who (before she met the Samburu game warden, George, and became a world famous lion conservationist) was employed by the colonial government in the Disappearing Kenya Project, to paint in vivid water colors the traditional attire of native peoples before they were all gone. In the 1990s, in many areas, Samburu still dressed in a manner very similar to the 1950s portrait, but not Adamson’s mother. She liked sweaters, and had founded several local churches. Adamson’s oldest brother, Andrew—the other of the very good Lanyasunya’s—was not present. He had gotten an MA in sociology from the University of Nairobi and was now a director, farther north, for the NGO, CARE. As life went on, he and Adamson would compete for who could become the richest and more prominent Lanyasunya. The middle brother, Pat, was soft spoken and was studying to be a veterinarian. The youngest was still in high school. And then there was Barnabas. Barnabas was a year or two younger than Adamson but had attended school first. Following graduation from high school, he had found fairly good employment. He had worked as a teacher, but it did not last, perhaps due to his temperament or because, among all the brothers, he was the only one who drank, and did so with diligence. He also found work as an Administrative Policeman (the branch of the police that served chiefs directly) but it did not last, presumably for similar reasons. So, now he had returned home, a young elder, not yet married, working on the family’s farm of maize and sometimes cutting timber for cash (which could be converted into drink). In every way, he cut an

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entirely different figure from the others. Where they were clean cut, well-bathed, and in fresh clothes, Barnabas was less well bathed, and his clothes were often a bit ragged. The soles of his sneakers flopped like those in the caricature of a hobo. The little facial hair he had was scruffy, unlike the others who were either completely clean shaven or whose minimal mustaches were carefully groomed. His teeth were prominent, but went in directions completely their own. Despite this, or perhaps even because of the contrast with his family (who by and large were rather more clean cut than people I would normally seek out), I quite liked Barnabas from the start. On days when Adamson was attending to other business—the communal land on which they lived was being subdivided, and he was knee deep in local politics to ensure he got a lion’s share of it—he would leave me in the company of Barnabas and some neighbors. Having finished high school, and living in an area where people prided themselves on education, Barnabas’s English was reasonably good, and that was the language in which he wished to converse. We would hang around homes, as well as take walks to whatever were construed as the must-see spots in the area. I don’t think we spoke about anything of particular importance—general stories from Barnabas, and the usual questions about America and such. When we met up with Adamson at the end of the first day, Barnabas said something to Adamson in Samburu (which at that point I understood very little) and they chuckled. It turned out that while I had understood Barnabas quite well, he told Adamson he did not understand a single word of my English. Henceforth I learned the value of making sure to enunciate English (probably American English especially) me-ti-cu-lous-ly with non-native speakers … During my doctoral research, I only saw Barnabas from time to time, on occasional visits to Adamson’s home during the (somewhat intermittent) times Adamson worked as my research assistant. Adamson was almost always good-natured and hardworking but not ideal. His attempts to enforce organization was something I felt compelled to battle against in the sense that it is somewhat contradictory to the “just hanging out” aspects of fieldwork. Moreover, because he was no more integrated into mainstream traditional Samburu culture than was strategically useful, he was also not ideal in terms of productive “just hanging out.” The fact that sometimes he felt he had a better way of doing research than me also didn’t help, since as my language skills improved I realized that he was changing my questions to ones that he thought were better. (Sometimes they might have been, but it didn’t work well for me if he was asking questions different than what I intended or believed at first he was asking.) His brother Andrew was also one of the key founders of the trade in mporo—antique Venetian glass beads that had become Samburu’s most prized heirlooms and essential components of women’s ceremonial adornment (Straight 2002). Andrew and Adamson, as well as a few others, were buying them up as fast as they could at throwaway prices and selling them on the secondary market, where they had become an international fashion trend. Adamson was able to earn far more in that trade than working as my research assistant, but he would return to work from time to time (particularly as the supply of mporo became depleted and the trade less lucrative) and so I would also sometimes see Barnabas. I always enjoyed Barnabas’s ironic humor, which I felt was captured vividly in a picture he asked me to take of him before returning to the United States, and which eventually made its way into my book on food and memory (Holtzman 2009). Barnabas was very far from being a traditional murran. He dressed in Western clothing, did not sing with his age mates and their girlfriends, did not follow (or followed very loosely) the eating prohibitions of murran, did not go to feast on livestock in the forest or steal them from neighboring ethnic groups. Perhaps still, something about this held some appeal to him,

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or at least he enjoyed making a joke of it. So, he collected every weapon and otherwise dangerous object at his disposal—a spear, a club, a bow and arrow, an ax, and his dog to top things off—and struck the stereotypical pose murran frequently employed when having their pictures taken, standing legs crossed, leaning back on their spear. When my doctoral research concluded in 1994, I did not see Barnabas again for seven years, until I returned for a year to do research on food and gender in Samburu. Though as a doctoral student I had only nominal interest in the Lanyasunya’s home area, in this project I saw that the widespread emphasis on farming in this area provided a useful comparison with my main highland location and a more remote lowland location. I had talked this over with Adamson, who was living in the main town of Maralal, but his family was unaware of this plan when I arrived after 10 p.m. one evening. The family was surprised and gleeful, none more so than Barnabas. He crowded next to me on the thin wooden bench in the entry way to the homestead, as about a dozen of us visitors and family members huddled in and exchanged greetings. “Is it too late to slaughter?” Barnabas exclaimed, suggesting we turn my late night return into a celebratory feast. No one paid the least attention to him, and went on with their own chatter. Probably it was, in fact, “too late to slaughter” though on other similar occasions Samburu friends wealthy in livestock have excitedly dispensed with sensible behavior—such as waiting for the next morning—and feted me or others guests even at an unconventional hour. Barnabas was dead poor and thus had no power to offer a goat unless a better-off family member offered one up for him, which they did not. I had come to their home with one research assistant, Sammy, and Barnabas (along with another neighbor) was to serve as the local guide, as we were to do a baseline survey of all the families in the neighborhood. Though Barnabas was in his own way personable, he was not very good with strangers, or with neighbors who he already disliked or had some other prejudice against. In that area there were many lkunono—blacksmiths, or their descendants, who formed a distinct clan considered unclean by other Samburu—and Ndorobo, foragers who had assimilated into Samburu society. It is impolite to mention that background, but Barnabas was insistent—in front of the people surveyed—that we should simply be recording their “true” clan affiliation, a discussion that was rather impolite and to which they did not take kindly. Wandering through the local settlements (either for work or relaxation) we would occasionally run into their father drinking chang’aa, a liquor distilled locally by Samburu women and sold out of their homes as a means to gain some cash income (Holtzman 2001, 2009). Barnabas would join in, taking a cup or two of the sharp, clear drink before we continued on our work. “I have to drink,” Barnabas joked, “because otherwise our father would be lonely in Hell without any of his sons,” since all the other brothers were Born Again teetotalers who saw drinking as a mortal sin. Later Barnabas came to join us at the house in Loltutlelei, our main base in a lower region of the Leroghi plateau, where he would work on transcribing and translating interviews, along with several research assistants. Though he did not have the social qualities (and perhaps the disposition) to work directly with people in data collection, he was quite good with bookwork. And, perhaps, like many who are on the fringes of their own society, he had keen insights into its fractures and little idiosyncrasies, which he dispensed with the same sort of ironic wit as the comment about his father’s drinking. Many of these insights, stories, and witticisms entered, in whole cloth, into both of my Samburu books. Barnabas had married somewhere in the interim, though he was not very adept at keeping his wife at home. This was not that surprising in a society where young wives

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often don’t wish to stay, and more so with a husband who was poor and who, when he came upon money—through working for anthropologists or felling trees—tended to drink it fairly quickly. He insisted to me that it had been his desire to have a traditional Samburu wedding, but since he lacked the resources to wed he had to rely on his brothers, who equated Samburu customs with heathenism, and said that if he were to wed they would only sponsor a Christian wedding. He joked, though, that the most important aspect of the promotion from murran to elder had actually been performed at the wedding (perhaps unbeknownst to anyone but himself). In order to transform from a bachelorwarrior, who must never eat food seen by women, to an elder who can eat in his wife’s house, they must “kill the lminong (prohibitions).” Normally this is done by the new wife and an age-mate feeding the new elder fatty meat and beer. When Barnabas showed off his wedding album to me—him in a clean Western-style suit, his bride in a white wedding dress—he asserted that despite it appearing in every way to be absolutely unlike a traditional Samburu wedding, he had, in fact, respected the most important aspect of transitioning into Samburu elderhood. Specifically, since at the ceremony the bride and groom fed each other wedding cake, which included among its ingredients at least some livestock products, this was in fact his killing of the lminong. This interpretation was idiosyncratic to Barnabas, and it was not clear how serious he was. Perhaps, not much at all given his penchant for ironic humor, but even if it was kind of a joke it was still a joke with enough gravity to him that he returned to repeatedly from time to time. When we left, and at the end of subsequent summers, I would leave Barnabas notebooks to complete. While doing this work, Barnabas would stay in Maralal. Adamson preferred that Barnabas stay in Maralal as much as possible, to try to control his drinking. He did the same with their father, though in the latter case Adamson could also take responsibility to ensure that their aging father was cared for well, which is not always the case for Samburu elders in their seventies and eighties. Adamson, competing with Andrew for who could become the wealthiest, built a large house, even by American standards; Andrew, and then Adamson each, bought a private primary school. Adamson bought a mostly abandoned safari lodge. Adamson watched over Barnabas and we agreed (mostly with Barnabas’s consent) that Adamson would hold his salary until the work was completed, ensuring that he did not go off drinking too much before the work was done. Eventually there was simply no more work for Barnabas. I had embarked on a different project that did not need that much of the book work he was good at. Barnabas retired to the family settlement, farming and felling trees to sell. He left home one day on a drinking safari that was typical for him. If he got money somewhere he might circulate among settlements, near or far, drinking chan’gaa until the money was finished. It was a few days before anyone thought anything of his absence. When someone decided it had been rather long, they went looking for him and found him in a ravine not far from home. He had fallen on his return home, days earlier, and was alive but too injured to move. They brought him home, but injured and suffering from exposure, hunger, and with terrible stomach problems, he died soon thereafter.

CONCLUSION The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time;

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remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years. (Proust [1922] 1992: 579–80) In the concluding pages of Swann’s Way, the narrator takes a November stroll through the bois of Paris, at an undefined time years after the events of the novel. Emerging from the acacias and firs and great oaks, the author longs to capture the beauty of the past, yet the old carriages have been replaced by motor cars, charming, little low crowned hats worn by women of the past time had been replaced by enormous ones “covered with fruits and flowers and all manners of birds,” while men failed to wear any hats at all. Contrasting this present with his passions of the past, he concludes as beauties stroll before him, “They were just women, in whose elegance I had no belief, and whose clothes seemed to me unimportant.” Though to the reader these changes in fashions may appear superficial, to the author they signified the loss of something essential, the loss of an elegance, even, he concludes, “the death of gods.” As anthropologists, we too see our lives and our work within the construct of “something essential” though perhaps we are reticent to mourn its loss (lest we appear to seek to confine our subjects to a timeless, even colonialist fantasy of our liking). Time may challenge us as the things that in one year or many we took to be essential may at another point seem to longer be important, or even seem to no longer be things at all. On my most recent (2019) visit to Kenya I made a joke to an old acquaintance, but a new friend, a joke I had shared innumerable times with a Samburu friend I had been very close to, a putative age-mate but who died before his time. “When we were warriors …,” we would always say, evoking a fictive time, before we met, when we communally feasted on the meat of livestock slaughtered in the bush, and go on to only half-jokingly note the loss of strength and respect that had been the consequence of Samburu’s current reliance on purchased agricultural products, derisively termed “gray foods.” Yet as I subtly demurred to eat the ugali (maize meal mush) that accompanied some meat we shared, my old refrain of “when we were warriors …” was met by my new friend with the manly boast: “We used to go to the river in the bush and eat so many kilos [of this maize meal]!” for I had not realized that this friend of approximately my own biological age was socially of a different Samburu generation, and eating maize meal could to him be a point of pride if done with gusto. The ethnography we translate to our audience may rarely withstand too close a gaze, and perhaps even more so the passage of time. This is why some say, rightly or wrongly, that the elegant models found in Leach’s (1954) Political Systems of Highland Burma were only possible to construct because the contradictory details in his rich field notes perished, destroyed by dynamite or lost at sea. Richard Werbner recounts (personal communication) how the giant of symbolic anthropology, Victor Turner, produced a bemused chuckle at the Werbner’s evidently silly question of whether he, Turner, intended to revisit the Ndembu (as if there was something of value to be yet found, for had he not already eloquently analyzed in Ndembu ritual in its perfect and perhaps unchanging form?). One might wonder whether Marjorie Shostak’s depressing last visit to Nisa should ever have been written down, just as Robert Gardner determined that Dead Birds Revisited would never be filmed. Here I have recalled Barnabas, framed lightly through the vehicle of a goat, but neither food nor memory are simple here. Most often in Western and scholarly accounts of food-centered memory, the gustatory or the sensorial aspects of food are at the fore, the memories evoked by a taste of a time or place, the nostalgia of a special family dish,

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the heritage or commensality as people are brought together through food. Perhaps a Samburu version of such remembrance might be an occasion of great camaraderie, deep in the bush feasting with friends and age-mates on a captured ox or perhaps a particularly large or uniquely speckled goat. Yet the goat that screams to me here through the decades is a goat not eaten, for, however great the power of food is in conjuring memory its absence is perhaps all the greater. The moment was fleeting and perhaps quickly forgotten by all but me, yet emblematic of my friend Barnabas and his lot in life, a “knife without a hand,” a gadfly with cutting and sardonic insights on his culture and even those people closest to him, bristling against convention in ways that may be at times admirable or endearing and other times not, but without the ability to choose the form of his own wedding against the will of his wealthy brothers on whom he depended, or to even have his question acknowledged “Is it too late to slaughter [a goat]?” upon the unexpected arrival of a long lost friend, to even be sought out as he lay in a gully dying, suffering the elements for several days. In this portrait, as well as in similar portraits that space does not allow for here, I certainly claim to evoke some essential, if unstable, aspect of Samburu moralities, character, culture, or social dynamics, captured in part through the vehicle of food. There are aspects of these that are stable, true, and I hope worth knowing, but we must further understand that they are, as well, complex and contingent. As Proust asserts, “the human face is indeed, like the face of the God of some Oriental theogony, a whole cluster of faces, crowded together but on different surfaces so that one does not see them all at once” ([1923] 2020: 727). No person can be reduced to some one thing, nor fully exemplify some one thing. And a person on a page is not only the creation of the journalist or poet or anthropologist who put them there, but also in part the creator of the person who writes them. When I remember my friend through a goat not eaten, it is in part because my friend, a guide in a once unfamiliar place, taught me to understand and remember goats in this way.

REFERENCES Griaule, Marcel (1948), Conversations with Ogotemmeli, Paris: Librairie Artheme Fayard. Holtzman, Jon (2001), “The Food of Elders, the ‘Ration’ of Women, American Anthropologist 103 (4): 1041–58. Holtzman, Jon (2009), Uncertain Tastes: Memory, Ambivalence and the Politics of Eating in Samburu, Northern Kenya, Berkeley: University of California Press. Leach, Edmund (1954), Political Systems of Highland Burma, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Proust, Marcel ([1922] 1992), Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, New York: Modern Library. Proust, Marcel ([1923] 2020), In a Budding Grove, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Australia: Planet eBook. Available at: https://www.planetebook.com/within-a-budding-grove/(accessed May 23, 2019). Shostak, Marjorie (1981), Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Spencer, Paul (1965), The Samburu, London: Routledge. Straight, Bilinda (2002), “From Samburu Heirloom to New Age Artifact: The Cross-cultural Consumption of Mporo Marriage Beads,” American Anthropologist, 104 (1): 7–21.

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PART THREE

Cities

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CHAPTER TEN

The Legend of Les Mères Lyonnaises: Narrative, Meaning, and Gender in the Kitchen RACHEL E. BLACK

Introduction Lyon is a town that prides itself on culinary excellence. If you ask the Lyonnais about the heart and soul of the local cuisine, they will likely tell you about la cuisine des mères lyonnaises. You might expect the Lyonnais to drop the name of Paul Bocuse, a recently deceased homegrown culinary superstar, but often they will first wax lyrical about women’s cooking. Monsieur Paul (as Paul Bocuse is affectionately known in Lyon) often claimed that his culinary roots lie entrenched in the cuisine des mères (Bocuse, interview by author, 2013). At Bocuse’s celebrated Michelin-starred restaurant L’Auberge du Pont de Collonges there are a series of murals that depict the history of French cuisine, including a scene devoted to les mères lyonnaises (Figure 10.1). This is a rare occasion when women appear in the otherwise male-dominated pantheon of French culinary history. Lyon is one of the few cities that continues to celebrate its female gastronomic cultural heritage. This chapter explores why the popular memory of the mères lyonnaises is important for the city’s cultural identity and for the women who are currently working in professional kitchens in Lyon. While doing fieldwork with women working in Lyonnais kitchens, I was struck by how many interviews or informal discussions would start with my respondent telling me the story of the mères lyonnaises. These stories were these women’s way of telling me about their own lives in the kitchen: this connection to the past made their current situation coherent and meaningful within a longer genealogy of Lyonnais women cooking in restaurants. The omnipresence of these stories pushed me to think further about the role of such narratives in the professional experience of this underrepresented group. The memory of the cuisine des mères lyonnaises is critical to Lyon’s continued claim to culinary primacy and, perhaps most importantly, to the success, hopes, and dreams of female culinary professionals working today in this gastronomic capital.

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FIGURE 10.1  Mural at Auberge du Pont de Collonge featuring la mère Brazier and la mère Fillioux. The men in the image (Edouard Herriot off the left of the frame and Brazier’s son Gaston in the background) are both secondary figures. Source: Mural painted by Cité de la Création. Photo by the author.

I wanted to know who these groundbreaking chefs were and what had happened to women in professional kitchens after the glory days of the mères lyonnaises in the 1930s. When the archives revealed few clues, I took to present-day kitchens to tap into oral histories and to try to better understand what still existed of female culinary traditions and women in Lyon’s restaurants and culinary training institutions. To start my fieldwork, I attended culinary school to gain a better understanding of the work I would be studying, to build a technical vocabulary in French, and ultimately to gain the skills that would help me fit into professional kitchens where I observed and participated in the everyday lives of men and women working in restaurants. After culinary school and a short apprenticeship, I worked in kitchens and conducted interviews with culinary professionals in Lyon. I interviewed seventeen female and four male culinary professionals, one restaurant critic, and two women whose family members were mères lyonnaises. I tried to choose a diverse group of women, but this proved challenging since the Lyonnais culinary world is dominantly white and male. The women I worked with and interviewed ranged in age from nineteen to seventy-eight. The majority were French and white, although I did interview one American, one Brazilian, one Swede, and a French woman of color. Many of the women were mothers, some were young and had no children, and a few were lesbians. My participants came from different social classes—some had gone to private culinary schools, while others attended state schools. It was necessary to take an intersectional approach to understand the diversity of women’s identities and experiences. The category “women” did not offer much coherence when I started to gather the individual voices, but the statistical reality of

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women’s underrepresentation made gender and bias against women necessary for trying to figure out why women remain a minority. Women’s presence in professional kitchens in France is growing. At least that is what the data say. DARES (Direction de l’animation de la recherché, des etudes et des statistiques) (2016) reports that from 2012 to 2014, 38 percent of all people employed as “cuisiniers” were women. That is up 8 percent from 30 percent in 1982–4. Statistics from the Ministère de l’education nationale et de la jeunesse show that women are entering secondary and postsecondary professional training in the culinary arts at higher rates than men, and they are also more successful in attaining their degrees.1 If there are more women than ever entering the profession, why is it that they are so deeply underrepresented at the top? Of the few women who reach the highest ranks in the kitchen, not many are recognized for their skill and achievements, which has implications for memory and also for the larger public representation and memory of French chefs. The prestigious Meilleur Ouvriers de France (MOF) has only ever been awarded to two women in the cuisine category in its ninety-four-year history. The Guide Michelin in 2020 gave stars to thirty-three femaleled restaurants out of 630 starred restaurants. This included only one female-led threestar restaurant and one two-starred restaurant. With so few women at the top, there are not many female role models for young, aspiring chefs to follow (Harris and Giuffre 2015: 199). Without access to living mentors, what I found was female culinary professionals construct and employ the legend of the mères lyonnaises in order to give meaning to their experiences and legitimacy to their place in a male-dominated profession. Three central themes emerged when participants evoked the legend of the mères lyonnaises. These themes center on women’s roles in the defense of culinary traditions, making motherhood compatible with restaurant work, and finding female role models in a field that men tend to dominate.

WOMEN FINDING MEANING IN THE LEGEND OF THE MÈRES LYONNAISES How is a legend made and what purpose does it serve for the individuals who reproduce it? The definition of what makes a narrative a legend is contested among folklorists. However, it is generally agreed that a legend should be constructed from reality in a believable way: “It makes allusions to verifiable topographic features or historical personages” (Tangherlini 1990: 378). William Bascom defines legends as “prose narratives which, like myths, are regarded as true by the narrator and his audience, but they are set in a period considered less remote, when the world was much as it is today. Legends are more often secular than sacred, and their principal characters are human” (Bascom 1965: 4). I am using the term legend to indicate a narrative that is accepted as true and which is retold in similar ways. The function of this legend is to “memorate,” to reproduce a personal experience, and in the process give meaning and context to personal experiences (Von Sydow in Dégh and Vázsonyi 1974: 225). Although few of the people whom I worked with and interviewed had firsthand experience of working with the mères in the 1930s, they were recounting their own lived realities through this historical narrative. One of the functions of legends is to “reiterate and reinforce belief ” (Tangherlini 1990: 379). This was notable in the way in which the women I worked with used the legend of the mères lyonnaises to legitimate their place in a male-dominated

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profession—the legend reinforced their belief that women have a place in the professional kitchen. The mères lyonnaises live on in Lyonnais kitchens where they are still actively participating in shaping the type of food that is produced and also the people who are cooking it.

WHO WERE THE MÈRES LYONNAISES? The interview started in much the way many others had: seated at a marble-topped table in the back of a cozy little restaurant, Colette2 leaned in towards me as if she was going to tell me some great secret. In her low husky voice, she asked, “Do you know the story of the mères lyonnaises?” I feigned ignorance and encouraged her to tell me more, although I imagined that what I was about to hear was a story I had heard many times before. After the First World War, the economy was very bad. Many of the big bourgeois houses here in Lyon had to let their cooks go. These cooks were women who had come from the countryside around Lyon to find work in the city. These women had no other place to go and cooking was really all they knew how to do, so they started to look for work in restaurants. No one wanted to hire a woman to cook in a restaurant. A lot of these mères opened restaurants with their companions, husbands or Charles.3 These little restaurants gained a reputation for serving honest food. The kind of food that reminded many clients of the food they used to eat at home when they had cooks. They quickly gained a following, and this was the start of the Guide Michelin. The reviewers praised these women as the guardians of Lyonnais culinary traditions. They cooked with local products, such as poulet de Bresse and fish like pike from the Saône River. The most famous of all these women was la mère Brazier. She had two restaurants with three Michelin Stars. She was a sturdy woman who spoke tersely to her kitchen staff but her clients loved her like a mother. She is perhaps the most important woman French culinary history. Here poulet en demi-deuil and her fonds d’artichaut with foie gras were legendary. When Édouard Herriot was the mayor of Lyon, he used to be a regular Chez Brazier. All the politicians and local celebrities ate at Brazier’s restaurants. There were other women too. Colette went on to tell me about other women who were part of this golden age of the cuisine des mères between the two wars. Colette’s story of the mères lyonnaises was similar to accounts that I heard while working in restaurants or while interviewing culinary professionals–these narratives talked about the economic downturn that moved women cooks from the domestic sphere, as a place of work, into professional restaurant kitchens in Lyon. Most of my participants told me about the role of guidebooks and gastronomic literature that were increasingly published at that time, as a contributor to these women’s success. All of the interviewees placed Eugénie Brazier as a prominent figure in this legend—there was not one interview in which her name was not mentioned. She is always portrayed as both a larger-than-life, exceptional figure, and the epitome of the mère lyonnaise character—an excellent cook, stern but also motherly. What struck me was the way in which these elements were nearly always present in the recounting of the story of these women who were clearly a critical part of Lyonnais gastronomic history. Through archival research, secondary sources, and oral histories, I was able to piece together a better picture of these doyennes of cuisine lyonnaise. Long relegated to the

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family hearth, women began to claim their place as culinary professionals in the interwar period. These years were an exceptional moment in French culinary history when women were celebrated as keepers of France’s culinary knowledge not only in the home but also in restaurants. Although there were most certainly women in kitchens in Paris, Dijon, Marseille, and most French cities, a distinct style of women’s cooking came to mark cuisine lyonnaise and played an important role in making this city the gastronomic capital of France. The growth of the middle class that accompanied this economic expansion meant that there were a large number of households in Lyon that required domestic laborers to maintain or attain a bourgeois lifestyle, which often included family meals at home and the entertaining of guests. In addition to work in middle-class homes, women also found jobs cooking in the small dining establishments that fed the growing ranks of single working-class men and women who were drawn to the city for work but who lived in rooming houses that lacked kitchens. The pull of domestic jobs drew female migrants to Lyon at the end of the nineteenth century (Winchester 1986: 64). After the First World War, few bourgeois households could afford their domestic staff; many cooks were let go and had to find work elsewhere (Piketty, Postel-Vinay, and Rosenthal 2004). Some women took jobs in restaurants, others found it difficult to get work in male-dominated kitchens, and there were those who set up shop on their own. Due to the restrictions governing women’s public lives, many of these cooks started businesses with men, husbands, or other male family members to make the administration of the business easier (Schweitzer 2002: 49).4 In most family-run dining establishments in Lyon, the labor was divided along gender lines. Men worked in the front of the house serving customers wine and taking orders, while women cooked in the back of the house, coming out of the kitchen into the dining room to serve food. This type of small restaurant reproduced the gender dynamics of the household, one of the reasons why these female chefs were often called mères and their husbands pères. This model of the family business was typical in many small eateries, ateliers, and artisanal activities. Women who worked in their homes or with their husbands were seen as assistants. This was often the case with wives of artisans, such as bakers and chocolatiers, who ran the boutiques and managed the front of the house activities. In these cases, there was a clear separation of male and female duties and responsibilities. Susan Terrio’s study of artisanal chocolate production shows that this was a métier de bouche (food profession) that had clear gender segregation of labor. Formal training and apprenticeship were all but closed to women until the end of the twentieth century in many crafts and areas of skilled work (Terrio 2001). In other cases, such as bars, cafés, and bistros, the workspaces were far less clearly defined; women could be found in both the back and front of the house in restaurants. In the small Lyonnais restaurants known as bouchons, there was often a reproduction of domestic gender divisions of labor, but with a fluidity of men and women’s use of space.

EUGÉNIE BRAZIER: THE MOTHER OF ALL MOTHERS Eugénie Brazier is the most celebrated of all the mères. Her story is central to the construction of the legend of the mères lyonnaises—when talking about Lyon’s culinary history, most of the participants in my study cited la mère Brazier as one of the most prominent culinary figures of the twentieth century. Brazier’s trajectory from the

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countryside to the city and from bourgeois hearth to professional piano5 is typical of most mères lyonnaises at the start of the twentieth century, but exceptional because of her level of success. While my informants focused on Brazier’s transformation from country bumpkin to Michelin-starred culinary wonder, they also talked about her strong personality. Most accounts were impressionistic and incomplete. I came to see the erasures as indicative of the ways in which each storyteller was appropriating the story of Eugénie Brazier. Eugénie Brazier was born in 1895 in La Tranclière (Ain) near Bourg-en-Bresse, seventy kilometers from Lyon. Her mother died when she was ten years old, and she went to work on a nearby farm. At the age of nineteen, Brazier gave birth to a son. Shunned by the local farming community, she set out for the city where she hoped to start anew. She left her son Gaston with a wet nurse and set out for Lyon in hopes of finding a way to support herself and her son.6 In 1914, at the start of the First World Word, Eugénie Brazier arrived in Lyon. Her first job in the city involved feeding people—in this case, infants. She was employed as a wet nurse working in the home of the Milliat family. Owners of a prosperous pasta factory, this family had made their fortune in the expanding industrial food sector in Lyon. Mme Milliat could see that Eugénie had an interest in cooking, and she encouraged the young woman to learn more. She introduced Eugénie Brazier to la mère Fillioux, who ran a small restaurant in Lyon’s 6th arrondissement. After working for la Mère Fillioux and then a short stint at the Dragon, a restaurant in Lyon, Brazier purchased her own business on Rue Royale in 1921. Given that she was a mère fille,7 this was not a simple matter. Eugénie never married but she had a longtime companion. Although she maintained control of all aspects of her business, it was through her companion that she was able to work around the administrative constraints that women faced. The sharing of work between men and women did not necessarily mean that women took a secondary role when it came to business. The mères Fillioux and Brazier were astute businesswomen. In 1933, Eugénie Brazier was awarded three Michelin stars for her two restaurants (in rue Royale in Lyon and at Col de la Luère in Pollionnay). She remains the only woman in the history of French gastronomy to have three stars for two restaurants at the same time. This recognition from the relatively new but widely respected national Guide Michelin cemented Brazier’s fame and places her squarely at the center of the legend of the mères lyonnaises.

GASTRONOMIC LITERATURE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF CULINARY MEMORIES The burgeoning field of gastronomic literature in the early twentieth century sang the praises of Lyonnais women’s cooking. In 1925, renowned gastronomes Curnonsky and Marcel E. Grancher published Lyon, Capitale de la gastronomie which lauded the achievement of food in Lyon: “Lyonnais cuisine participates in French Art, only that it never has an effect. It does not beg. It does not sacrifice to easy eloquence. Cuisine attains, naturally and without effort, this degree of supreme Art: Simplicity” (Curnonsky and Grancher 1925: 6). In praising Lyonnais cuisine, Curnonsky and Grancher go on to cite the contributions of numerous mères: Brigousse, Guy, Marateur, Garien, Rivier, Fillioux, Bigot, Pompon, Buisson, Rose, Trolliet, and Brazier. Mathieu Varille in La

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Cuisine Lyonnaise (1928) also gives les mères an important place in the hall of fame of Lyonnais cuisine of the day. The advent of the guidebook helped make Lyon a tourist destination for fine dining. These guides originally developed in conjunction with the spread of train lines then the extensive use of the automobile and the improvement of roads in France (Harp 2001). Thanks to the growing market for cars and the consequent development of automobileoriented tourism, the Guide Michelin quickly became one of the most prominent guidebooks.8 According to Lucien Karpik, the Guide Michelin encouraged the French to free themselves of the limits of train travel; it encouraged them to personalize their itineraries and trips (2000: 371–2). Once the names of restaurants were included in these books, they began to name the specialties of specific restaurants. Jean-François Mesplède, former editor of the Guide Michelin, explained that the menus in restaurants like La Mère Fillioux and La Mère Brazier rarely changed because diners would arrive expecting the dishes listed in the guidebooks. Both mères faithfully cooked their signature dish, volaille en demi-deuil, each evening, for fear of otherwise disappointing clients. In this way, tourists and gastronomic guidebooks began to codify regional cuisine: attaching specific dishes to individuals and places. Guidebooks facilitated consumption and the display of cultural capital for their middle-class readers (Barabowski and Furlough 2001: 12). They also helped define la cuisine des mères lyonnaises. Early gastronomic writing played an important part in cementing the fame of the mères lyonnaises in French gastronomic history but it is problematic because it was uniquely men writing about and representing women. Most women in lyonnais kitchens in the 1930s had little time to write and their craft was mainly passed along through oral tradition and apprenticeship. History’s privileging of the written word has so often left out the working classes and people who did not leave a written record (Thompson 1966). In this case, men gave voice to women but it was a specific voice: celebratory of the maternal, comforting, and authentic nature of women’s cooking. In the historical record, the mères lyonnaises never speak for themselves. While it is exceptional that a group of women became central to a culinary history that is entirely male dominated, there is still a need to be critical of how this memory is constructed. The advent of guidebooks, the rise of gastronomic tourism, and Lyon’s growing popularity as a center for culinary excellence helped a handful of women who had made the transition from the bourgeois household to the restaurant kitchen become celebrated culinary figures locally and further afield. The legend of the mères lyonnaises lives on in the food that is still served in many small dining establishments in Lyon but also in the telling of the story of these women. It is no longer only men who tell their story.

DEFENDING TRADITION As I walked into the small neighborhood restaurant in the 7th arrondissement of Lyon, I noted all the signs and symbols that told me that this was a bouchon:9 the table clothes are white and red checked, a blackboard is used for the menu, and there are only a few employees. Janine and Aishah were having a bite to eat after a busy lunch service. They both cook and serve in their restaurant. Aishah went to culinary school and passed her CAP (certificat d’aptitude professionnelle) diploma for cooking. Janine started in the front of the house and learned to cook out of necessity at a number of her restaurant jobs. These two women began our discussion by placing their experiences and their restaurant

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within the context of the cuisine des mères lyonnaises legend. They defined la cuisine des mères as taking place in “little bistros where you have a woman at the stove and she makes food that she would make for her children.” Here the role of women is central, and like the mères before them, Aishah and Janine reproduce the domesticity of food labor through care work. This point is significant because historically women’s domestic labor, the work of feeding in particular, has not been given much value. Harris and Giuffre argue that “once work is defined as feminine, there is the chance it will become devalued … For chefs, this masculine, professional activity is always at risk of comparison to the unpaid, nonprofessional cooking of women in the home” (2015: 8–9). The legend of the mères lyonnaises counters this tendency to devalue women’s culinary labor by placing it in another frame of value. Aishah and Janine told me that they set out to create a restaurant in the spirit of la cuisine des mères because they feared that this tradition was being lost. Throughout the interview these two cooks made reference to the culinary styles of the various mères of Lyon’s culinary history (Vitton, Lea, and Brazier) and to a style of cooking that they defined as “food that nourishes, a generous cuisine with dishes that are often simmered.” “Generous” was an adjective that other women I interviewed often used to define the cuisine des mères. The food is not supposed to be fussy, it is meant to nourish and take care of hungry people. The narrative of cuisine des mères is not entirely liberated from attempts to devalue or exclude women’s traditions from the restaurant. Aisha and Janine noted that cooking “true cuisine des mères” they frequently found themselves at odds with modern standards of hygiene: “In fact, a dish that is simmered a long time should be thrown out after 4–5 hours … so that Knorr can sell its dehydrated stock bases. Homemade sauces, mayo, whipped cream, pies set us apart.” Janine and Aishah’s commitment to uphold the tenets of cuisine des mères places them in opposition with the industry food safety standards that represent modernity. Aishah and Janine see strict food safety standards as an encroachment of industrial food systems on local culinary traditions. Most standards are geared to large-scale industrial outfits, not small-scale artisanal production. In her study on cheesemaking, Heather Paxson notes that the empirical methods that hygiene standards require are “often described as antithetical to women’s customary ways of knowing” (2012: 102). The legend of the mères lyonnaises places Aishah and Janine and their establishment in the framework of a local tradition of women who cook. While their training and backgrounds are radically different from the mères of the 1930s, they tap into the spirit of female entrepreneurs who blur the lines between the domestic and the professional through their food—they cook simple food that nourishes and satisfies a clientele that is increasingly wary of the industrial food that is creeping into local kitchens. They place an emphasis on the connection that food creates between the place, the cook, and the diner. In the space of the bouchon this embeddedness creates value (Granovetter 1985). Recognizing that “tradition” is not a stable category and that “all cooks have their own particular ways of doing things learned from people who also had different ideas about tradition” (Wilk 2006: 122), these two women actively articulate that they are trying to save a way of doing that is becoming increasingly rare in Lyon. Janine and Aishah craft the category of tradition, which is often placed in opposition to modernity, at their restaurant. The bouchon, its ambiance, and food, are seen as an integral part of lyonnais social life and culinary culture—cultural heritage that is deemed important to preserve. This little bouchon is part of the mères lyonnaises story. It is a place where people from the

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neighborhood can get an honest meal at a reasonable price,10 where customers can come and have long conversations while lingering over several pots of wine. These values of honesty and culinary tradition were exactly what made the mères lyonnaises of the 1930s famous. As Ferguson notes, “In contrast to French cuisine that exists above and beyond particular practitioners, women’s cooking is prized for the attachment to the particular. Curnonsky and Marcel Rouff ’s gastronomic tour of the French provinces emphasized the homey virtues, the farmer’s wives who … were ‘artists’ in the kitchen’ ” (2004: 146). Women’s cooking in France has long been seen as central to the preservation of culinary traditions.

MOTHERHOOD Sabrina and Danielle are another culinary duo. They run a small restaurant at the top of the hill in the Croix-Rousse, Lyon’s 4th arrondissement. There are a few tables and chairs set up on the sidewalk out front and inside there are two large communal tables that seat twelve each. There are stacks of cookbooks off to one side of the room. The kitchen is open and it looks like a regular kitchen you might find in a home with domestic appliances and no special restaurant equipment. A long counter divides the kitchen from the bright, airy dining area. Sabrina, Danielle, and another woman who helps with serving preside over this welcoming space. On my first visit, I sat down to interview Sabrina and Danielle after the lunch service. As Sabrina continued to cook and clean up in the kitchen, she interjected periodically. Danielle explained to me that they work very much in the tradition of the mères lyonnaises. “We see ourselves as nurturing mothers. We like to think our door is open to everyone. It may no longer be workers who come to us but it is people from the neighborhood who come here.” From my observations on two separate occasions, it did seem true that this restaurant was a sort of community center and an extension of the home—with children, groups of friends, and business people gathering throughout the afternoon. Danielle and Sabrina told me that they wanted a restaurant that would be like a second home for their children and their customers. Both women are mothers. Danielle has four children and their needs and schedules shape the business and her work life. On a second visit to the restaurant, one of Danielle’s sons came in and sat down at a corner of a big table and began to do his homework. After a while, one of the neighborhood kids came by to see if he could come out to play. After seeking his mother’s permission, he was off down the narrow street and up the steps with his friend. Danielle went on to tell me that she felt their cooking and that of the mères lyonnaises was in the same tradition: “It is an instinctive type of cooking, traditions are passed down through families and through travels. This is a cooking that is passed down instinctively through family rather than knowledge that can be learned in a school or a book.” The dishes that I saw and ate during my visits to this restaurant were often stews and braises. Unlike Aishah and Janine’s bouchon, Danielle and Sabrina’s cooking moved beyond the canons of Lyonnais cuisine and that of the bouchon to include Middle Eastern, Spanish, and Italian influences. Danielle and Sabrina’s collection of cookbooks partly explains these culinary explorations. However, the culinary methods of slow cooking, simple sauces, and generous dishes served family style speak to the tradition of the mères lyonnaises—a type of cooking that is not learned in culinary school. Although the ingredients have variations, there is a base that comes from the cooking these two women learned from their mothers and grandmothers.

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Sabrina explained, “For me, to be a mère lyonnaise that means to welcome people and to share with them.” Like with the previous example, this small restaurant creates value through embeddedness—people come not only to eat, but to feel connected to their neighbors, the cooks, and culinary traditions. Sabrina and Danielle are not only mothers to their children but also for a moment to the diners who come through their doors and sit down together. Like with Aishah and Janine, the mother discourse brings meaning and a connectedness that is tied to the reproduction of the domestic sphere in a special place that is open to the public. Mother and chef are not incompatible identities in this story. The blurring of professional and domestic personas was also the forte of many of the earlier mères lyonnaises. At the same time, what it means to be a mother is multifaceted in both the past and the present. Eugénie Brazier was known as a severe mother and her own troubled relationship with her son was a testament to her hardheaded nature. At the same time, Brazier acted as a nurturing, mother figure to guests whom she served at their tables. This idea of the chef as mother is malleable and the legend is told in such a way that it supports each woman’s unique ideal of motherhood and what it means cook food and to feed others.

ROLE MODELS When asked what it mean to be a mère lyonnaise, most of the men and women I interviewed talked about the need to have mothering qualities, even if you did not have children. Not all the women I interviewed were mothers or saw themselves as mothers. Nonetheless, the legend of the mères lyonnaises was important to their narratives as chefs. Many of the younger women I interviewed had grown up in culinary families. Several women’s fathers were MOF or Michelin-starred chefs, and they clearly had strong male role models. Nonetheless, the legend of the mères lyonnaises shaped the way they understood being a woman in the kitchen. This was the case for Julie, a 23-year-old Lyonnaise and daughter of a well-known chef in Lyon. When I asked Julie about the mères lyonnaises she told me that these women’s stories are very important to her. You have to understand that for those women it was already really hard to make a mark in that period, to have your own business, to be a woman. But they succeeded in making their place, to make their mark, to say I am here, I do this kind of cuisine, I am known for this specific dish, for my quenelles … Today we take them as an example, if they could do it, why can’t we? It’s great. I am an admirer. Julie graduated with a culinary degree from the Institut Paul Bocuse and she has apprenticed in a number of well-respected restaurants in France. For Julie, having strong female role models is inspirational and critical to her goal of pursuing a career in haute cuisine. In professional fields such as engineering, medicine, and law there have been concerted efforts to improve women’s participation. In a number of studies, it has been found that strong female role models and mentors help women to succeed in fields where they are underrepresented (Wiest 2009, Denner et al. 2005, Foor and Walden 2009). With regards to the field of mathematics, Leah McCoy notes that “because female students are not aware of female mathematicians and scientists, they may internalize a belief that mathematics is not appropriate for women” (2001: 125). The situation is much the same in the contemporary French culinary world. Julie explained to me that the only female instructor she encountered at culinary school was

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in her accounting class. Of the young women I interviewed who were pursuing careers in haute cuisine, all mentioned that there were few other women in the kitchen when they were doing their internships and when they started working in restaurants. This partially explains why the legend of the mères lyonnaises is such an empowering narrative for young women in the kitchens of Lyon. In France, the male stereotype of the chef de cuisine is strong. As French journalist Vanessa Postee explains, “The chef is a man, this is a fact that is not disputed. Who other than a man to take charge of a brigade? Eminently masculine, resolutely military, the vocabulary of the kitchen is at the root of the issue” (Postee 2012: 27). The brigade system has historically been male dominated and it reproduces a rigid hierarchy with the chef de cuisine on top. Charlotte Druckman notes that “as relative newcomers to the professional kitchen elite, women often find themselves in subservient positions. And, since their lack of ability or desire to compete is presumed from the start, they are often hazed harder than the boys” (Druckman 2010: 30). Julie explains to me the ways in which she navigated culinary school and the many fine dining restaurants in which she has worked. She describes her tactic as “hard work all of the time, just as much as anyone else in the kitchen, but if someone wants to lift a heavy crate for you, why not.” Julie felt it was important to prove herself through what she could produce and how she could keep up with all the others in the kitchen. She admitted that there were moments when she was treated differently because she was a “fille” (girl) but that she did not pay much attention to it. It was not important. Would this change? Would there be a moment when Julie would progress no further with her career? For the moment, being a woman in the kitchen was not slowing Julie down, she saw herself following in the footsteps of the mères. For many young female chefs, the legend of the mères lyonnaises demonstrates a tradition of female culinary professionals who achieved the highest accolades in the field. The mères lyonnaises show that it is possible for women to have a place at the top. This was echoed in the voices of women like Julie who aspired to reach the heights of their profession.

CONCLUSION As a whole, the mères lyonnaises may be relegated to a footnote in French culinary history, but the legend of these famous cooks is alive and well in Lyon. Women in Lyon activate the local history and legend of the mères lyonnaises in order to claim their place in the kitchen and in order to find ways of working that fit their life objectives. For some women this means raising a family, for others it means producing food that is deeply tied to a long tradition of local cuisine, and for a younger generation of women it is about reaching the top of their profession. Unlike any other place in France, women have a unique status in restaurant kitchens in Lyon. Nearly all the women I worked with during my time in Lyon situated themselves in relationship to the tradition of the cuisine des mères lyonnaises. Telling the story of the mères lyonnaises is a narrative-framing device that legitimates, roots, and empowers women in a profession that has sought to marginalize and delegitimize female labor. Rather than seeing gender as a burden or a limitation, these women used the legend of the mères lyonnaises to give meaning and value to their labor. The participants in my research placed themselves within a powerful female genealogy that helped celebrate

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women’s contributions to the culinary arts in Lyon and France. The memory of the mères lyonnaises is central to women cooking in Lyon.

NOTES 1 In 2017, 41.5 percent of students enrolled in the CAP en cuisine were women, 35.4 percent in the BAC Pro and 61 percent in the BTS. In the BTS, women had a success rate of 85.9 percent, compared to 77.7 percent of men (Ministère de l’éducation nationale 2018). 2 All names have been changed to protect the privacy of the participants in this study. 3 Charles is a familiar way of saying male companion or boyfriend. 4 Until 1965, women could not open their own bank accounts or access many forms of professional training and higher postsecondary schooling. In 1965, the Réforme des régimes matrimonaux de 1804 made it possible for women to manage their own financial affairs and pursue professional careers without consent from their husbands (Terréand and Simler 2013: 36–41). 5 The stove in most French restaurants is referred to as the piano. 6 It was not an uncommon practice for rural and working-class urban women to leave their children with wet nurses in the countryside. The rates were cheaper in rural areas, and they were offset by the city wages that a woman could make working as a laborer or domestic servant in urban areas. 7 An unmarried mother. 8 The Guide Michelin was first published in 1900. 9 A bouchon is a small typical Lyonnais restaurant. Often there are checked tables, the cooking is not fancy, and offal is regularly featured on the menu at these establishments. 10 This idea of honesty comes partly from the government’s recent creation of the “fait maison” certification, which helps to differentiate cooking from scratch versus reheating prepared foods in restaurants. During the period when I conducted this interview, the French press and consumers were discussing the matter of transparency in restaurant cooking and the quality of food (Ministère des Finances et des Comptes Publiques 2015).

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Druckman, Charlotte (2010), “Why Are There No Great Women Chefs?” Gastronomica, 10 (1): 24–31. Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst (2004), Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foor, Cindy E., and Walden Susan E. (2009), “‘Imaginary Engineering’ or ‘Re-Imagined Engineering’: Negotiating Gendered Identities in the Borderland of a College of Engineering,” NWSA Journal, 21 (2): 41–64. Granovetter, Mark (1985), “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness,” American Journal of Sociology, 91 (3): 481–510. Harp, Stephen L. (2001), Marketing Michelin: Advertising and Cultural Identity in TwentiethCentury France, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Harris, Deborah A., and Patti Giuffre (2015), Taking the Heat: Women Chefs and Gender Inequality in the Professional Kitchen, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Karpik, Lucien (2000), “Le guide rouge Michelin,” Sociologie du travail, 42 (3): 369–89. McCoy, Leah (2001), “Remarkable Women in Mathematics and Science,” in W. Secada, J. Jacobs, J. R. Becker, and G. Gilmer (eds.), Changing the Faces of Mathematics: Perspectives on Gender, 125–32, Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Ministère de l’éducation nationale (2018), “Repères et références statistiques: enseignements, formation, recherche.” Available online: http://cache.media.education.gouv.fr/file/ RERS_2018/18/1/depp-2018-RERS-web_1054181.pdf (accessed December 27, 2018). Ministère des Finances et des Comptes Publiques (2015), “Le décret qui simplifie et renforce le dispositif “Fait maison” est publie,” July 5. http://www.economie.gouv.fr/dispositif-faitmaison-est-simplifie (accessed July 5, 2016). Paxson, Heather (2012), The Life of Cheese Crafting Food and Value in America, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Piketty, Thomas, Gilles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal (2004), “Wealth Concentration in a Developing Economy: Paris and France, 1807–1994” (September). CEPR Discussion Paper No. 4631, http://ssrn.com/abstract=621068 (accessed June 16, 2016). Postee, Vanessa (2012), Le gout des femmes à tables, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Schweitzer, Silvie (2002), Les femmes ont toujours travaillé, Paris: Odile Jacob. Tangherlini, Timothy (1990), “ ‘It Happened not too Far from Here …’ a Survey of Legend Theory and Characterization,” Western Folklore, 49 (October 4): 371–90. Terréand, François, and Philippe Simler (2013), Droit civil, Les régimes matrimoniaux, Paris: Dulluz. Terrio, Susan (2000), Crafting the Culture and History of French Chocolate, Berkeley: University of California Press. Thompson, E. (1966), The Making of the English Working Class, New York: Vintage Books. Varille, Mathieu (1928), La cuisine lyonnaise, Lyon: La Librarie de P. Masson. Wiest, Lynda R. (2009), “Female Mathematicians as Role Models for All Students,” Feminist Teacher, 19 (2): 162–7. Wilk, Richard (2006), Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourist, Oxford: Berg. Winchester, Hillary P. M. (1986), “Agricultural Change and Population Movement in France, 1829–1929,” Agricultural History Review, 34 (1): 60–78.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Memories, Meals, and Shame in Florence, Italy CAROLE COUNIHAN

Introduction This chapter examines food memories I collected during ethnographic research in the early 1980s on foodways, family, and gender in Florence, Italy (Counihan 2004). I gathered food-centered life histories from all the living members of one extended family, which generated many food memories. They fell into two categories: general descriptions of things in the past and specific memories of specific events. I focus on the latter here because they were clearly significant to the interviewees and relatively rare; and they were powerful articulations of cultural values. Specific memories were multisensorial and emotionally intense. Usually set at meals, they often focused on especially tasty or terrible foods. I want to show here that their key themes were the negotiation of relationships and efforts to avoid or manage shame. I aim to contribute to the literature by showing the prevalence of shame in food memories and suggesting the restorative power of telling stories about it. Social connection is key to being human. As Marx put it in the sixth thesis on Feuerbach: “The human essence is … the ensemble of the social relations” (Marx and Engels 1970: 122). Thus it is no surprise that in Florentines’ specific memories there was a consistent concern with relationships and with shame, which in his review article, sociologist Thomas Scheff (2000: 96, emphasis in original) defines as “the feeling of a threat to the social bond.” Moreover, shame also includes the attendant feelings of “embarrassment, humiliation, … shyness, … modesty, … feelings of rejection or failure, and heightened self-consciousness of any kind.” Scheff (2000: 98) highlighted the work of psychologist Helen Lewis (1971) who found that in her transcriptions of hundreds of psychotherapy sessions, shame was more common than all other emotions combined, although it was often not recognized or acknowledged. But sharing experiences of shame mitigate them and create empathy (Scheff 2000: 92), perhaps explaining their prevalence in Florentines’ specific food memories.

MEMORY AND FOOD-CENTERED LIFE HISTORY METHODOLOGY While eating or smelling a food can trigger a memory, as Proust’s (1982: 51) famous consumption of the madeleine did, so also can talking about food—the focus here. In

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the early 1980s I recorded and transcribed semi-structured interviews with twentythree related Florentines exploring foodways—beliefs and behaviors surrounding food production, consumption, and distribution. I gathered fifty-six hours of food-centered life histories, which I transcribed into over a thousand pages. Interviews covered past and present diets, recipes, family and ritual meals, dining out, foods for healing and pregnancy, infant and child-feeding, and gender roles (Counihan 2004). My interviewees were born between 1908 and 1972 and were part of a family I came to know very well through a thirteen-year relationship with one of its members. They ranged from working class to upper middle class, and were blue- and white-collar workers, artisans, clerks, retirees, and housewives. All lived comfortably with adequate income and housing, but none belonged to the Florentine elite. Food was central to their lives, family, and culture and they spoke about it with interest and passion (Counihan 2004). Many food memories—both general and specific—emerged in the interviews. Anthropologist David Sutton (2001: 39) suggested that memory is “a culturally structured process of shaping the past”;1 this cultural construction emerged in Florentines’ interviews. Many of their memories were generalized, like the following by fifty-year-old housewife Valeria:2 “In the old days, you made a chicken last for two or three meals and you only ate a little bit each time. We ate rabbits sometimes and we ate so many vegetables. So many potatoes, so much bread.” In contrast, specific memories were specific stories of specific events. They were less common than more general recollections and they often began with a signal such as “I remember (mi ricordo),” “Let me tell you (ti racconto),” or “Listen to this (senti questo).” They were little stories, set apart and highlighted, capsules of meaning. For this chapter I went through the interview transcriptions and pulled out the specific memories. I looked at how they depicted food and evoked the senses. I looked at their settings and characters. I looked at what values and issues emerged. Almost all of them took place at meals. Delicious and deplorable dishes played a central role and were material, symbolic, and psychological expressions of people’s fraught connections to others. Eating or not eating together made or broke social ties and formed a stage for shame or its repudiation. Both Holtzman (2006: 373) and Sutton (2008: 160) pointed out that food’s simultaneously intimate and public nature made it an important catalyst to memory.3 This also made it a powerful vehicle for mediating relationships between self and others. Many of the specific memories displayed multisensoriality, which enhanced their staying power and ability to carry emotions. Sutton (2001: 71) claimed that food is “a powerful source of memory” because of its “synesthetic properties.” Nadia Seremetakis (1993: 4) noted that the redundancy of the senses also contributed to remembering: “The memory of one sense is stored in another: that of tactility in sound, of hearing in taste, of sight in sound. Sensory memory is a form of storage.” The physical and sensory experience of food—involving taste, smell, sight, touch, hearing, ingestion, and digestion— provided hooks to memories, which displayed deep emotions of sorrow, regret, joy, and especially shame. The following is an example of a specific memory, which centered on a repugnant food, its unpleasant taste and texture, and its threat to relationships. Rinaldo, forty-five years old and the owner of a dyeing factory, recalled: Let me tell you this story about one time I went to Paris and had to eat duck in peach sauce. In Paris we work with French importers of our cloth and have a close

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relationship with them for everything … So after years of working together, I went to Paris and the business colleagues took me to one of the best restaurants. One of them started raving about the specialty of the house—duck in peach sauce. He went on and on about how good this was. So I had to order it. Well, you know that French cooking is more sophisticated than ours, right? When the waiter brought it, I saw this duck in this thick peach syrup—this dense, rather sweet sauce. As soon as I tasted it, I was nauseated, truly revolted. However, this man kept saying, “Eh, how is it Rinaldo? How is it?” I absolutely could not tell him that I did not like it. I found myself in the situation where I had to eat that duck in peach sauce even though it was completely disgusting to me. I could not refuse it. He was so content, so satisfied that he had enabled me to try this specialty that I would have eaten two of them so as not to offend him. He would have taken it really badly because he had sung the praises of this dish so much beforehand. And he kept on saying at the table how good it was. Therefore I gave it all my effort. Rinaldo’s evocative memory dealt with the central issues of maintaining social relationships and avoiding shame. Scheff (2000: 95) conceptualized shame as resulting from an episode of “disconnection from the other” whose sting could linger for years. Indeed, stories of long-ago incidents of shame or its refutation were common in food memories, as in Rinaldo’s. The vaunted meal at the “best” restaurant raised the pressure on him to eat and made refusal impossible. He had to force down the sickening duck in peach sauce so as not to offend his business partners, to avoid shaming them and himself, and to preserve their relationship. His strong multisensorial aversion to the sweet, dense sauce crashed against his unwillingness to risk social rupture to cement this restaurant dinner in his memory.

FAMILY MEALS IN MEMORIES Like that of Rinaldo, most of Florentines’ specific food memories were of meals—whether in a restaurant, at work, or at home. In twentieth-century Italy, family meals were socially central, inexorable, often convivial, sometimes tense, and compulsory. People were expected to be present and to eat; rejecting meals was tantamount to refusing connection, nurture, and family. Each meal evoked all the others. As 54-year-old Baldo, said, “Eating is recalling—il mangiare è un richiamo.” The structured regularity of meals called people back again and again to the family table in Florence, as Sutton (2001: 103–9) also noted for Greek Islanders. Their repetition, daily and annual rhythms, internal order, and rich sensory environment made them an anchor for memories. In Florence meals were “the foundation of the family,” as Baldo said (Counihan 2004: ­chapter 7), and eating together, commensality, was a main arena for forging all kinds of social relationships.4 But meals could be dangerous when relationships were ambivalent or threatening, and they were coercive—demanding that people attend and eat; doing so against their will could leave piercing memories as it did for Rinaldo. Three of my female interviewees had fraught memories of their childhood meals. Retired city clerk Marianna, born in 1923, grew up very poor in urban Florence. Her father was disabled and died early in World War II while her mother made a meager living selling newspapers and cleaning houses. In the following memory, which oscillates between general and specific, Marianna described pleasant meals, valued the familiar tastes of the sparse vegetarian diet of her youth, and explicitly refused to be ashamed of her poverty.

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When I was little, I didn’t go hungry. I was already used to the foods that we ate. You know, a few greens and soup every evening, maybe with a little olive oil. I had already gotten my mouth used to all the food we ate. Maybe we had, I don’t know, a great big pan full of artichokes cut in pieces and cooked in sauce. Or maybe we had fried potatoes eaten with a little tomato sauce. Bread, bread, bread. Sometimes we even lacked bread, or it was the only thing that we had to eat … A woman said to me once, “Aren’t you ashamed (non si vergogna) to tell all this?” I replied, “But excuse me, I really didn’t do any harm to anybody, so why should I be ashamed? (perché mi devo vergognare?)” … Today I remember the foods we used to eat then and I eat them willingly. That means that I must have eaten them willingly as a child, because if not, I wouldn’t eat them again happily. We ate, for example, dried fava beans, fresh fava beans. I ate them right after the war. Oh, we made some huge pans of them when I was living with my cousin. Last year I made fava beans in tomato sauce for my husband Renzo. He said, “Make some for me. Go on.” They were good and I ate them feeling satisfied and tranquil. I eat again willingly the foods I ate when I was young. All of it makes my mouth water. Marianna’s memories of past meals described contentment in spite of the meager diet. She said, “My home was very tranquil, even if all we had to eat was soup with a little oil, followed by a few cooked vegetables for a second course … I didn’t have such a great life but here’s what I had—I told you yesterday and I’ll repeat it today—we always had peace in my house.” The social harmony of her home may have insulated her from feeling shame about her poverty. In contrast to Marianna’s memories of pleasant meals even in times of scarcity, 41-yearold housewife Sergia remembered meals as tense and isolating although her parents were quite well-off: When I was little, I had to be quiet at meals, and that was all. Me, quiet, mute, listening. I was an only child. I didn’t like meals at all as a child. I couldn’t leave the table, because my parents’ upbringing was that the child had to stay seated until the parents had finished. And in those days they loved to sit at the table, as they do today. They loved to spend hours at the table. Therefore I had to stay there to wait until they finished and I had to shut up. Mamma mia, what torture! I got this knot in my stomach; I didn’t eat; my stomach closed up. When I started to get older, when I was at that critical age of thirteen or fourteen years old, I went days without eating. So I asked, “Mamma, can I take my plate and go out into the backyard to eat?” So I went into the backyard and then I would eat. When I stayed with them, no, I couldn’t. I was so thin, so thin, look, you could count my ribs. Depleted … Sergia experienced meals as a crucible for tense and broken family relations, which were the foundation of the shame she felt around food discussed below. She emphasized feeling socially disconnected by saying she was an only child, and she revealed her psychological distress with the image of her stomach closing—like she herself felt closed out by her parents. Her words, her thinness, and her depletion, recalled Scheff ’s (2000: 92) claim that “shame feels like weakness and dissolution of the self, even for the wish that the self would disappear.” A third memory of childhood meals came from 64-year-old housewife and former bakery clerk Elena who, like her niece Sergia, described meals as sites of difficult family relations:

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I remember when I was little and I entered my home, I smelled from afar the odor of the broth that was cooking on the stove. And now I don’t smell it any more. And I don’t understand why—either it is me, or it is the broth. My mother put the pot on the fire in the morning, and from afar I smelled the odor of the broth. In spite of the fact that I didn’t eat it. As a young girl I never ate. I would go even a week without eating. You see, I realized as an adult why I didn’t eat—because in my house, I came to know, there was discord between my father and my mother … I felt so much anguish, so much fear, and I have this defect that when something troubles me, my stomach closes, I cannot eat. This is evidently what happened to me then, without my knowing it. I heard my parents arguing and my stomach closed and I could not eat. So my parents were really worried. Not eating today, not eating tomorrow, it was bad. And I remember that my father returned home with something in his pocket and he said to me, “Look, if you eat this evening, this is a little something for you.” “Daddy, let me see, what is it, what is it?” “I’ll give it to you when you have eaten.” So I pushed myself to eat a little. He brought me, I don’t know, a toy, a little thing, a candy, or something like that, to make me eat. Because of the social obligation to eat at meals in Florence, Elena’s not eating as a child was attention-grabbing at the time and memorable later. She began her story with the comforting odor of broth, a symbol of nurture, but then followed with a description of social distress. Elena’s reaction to family discord, just like Sergia’s, was that her “stomach closed,” illustrating Scheff ’s (2000: 95) claim that shame can be a “bodily … response to the threat of disconnection from the other.” Refusing to eat at all like Elena, or to eat with the family, like Sergia, was a clamorous breach of family norms to protest disconnection. Unlike Sergia who left the table to eat alone in the yard, Elena stayed at the table and drew attention to herself and away from her warring parents. She accepted a bit of food, emphasizing the power of commensality to bring people together and the attempts of a child to mend a fractured family.

CONNECTION AND DISCONNECTION: FEELING AND REFUTING SHAME Maintaining social relations through difficult times and avoiding shame were key themes in many of the specific memories such as in the following of 61-year-old Marianna about food and extrafamilial relationships: Listen, I’ll tell you this one, it’s a cute story. I used to walk from my house in Careggi to the school … I remember that I left home early to go to the house of my friend Roberta, the confectioner Conelli’s daughter, who had me carry her schoolbag. She said, “If you come and carry my schoolbag, I’ll give you a pastry.” So I left home early in the morning to have this pastry, and I carried her schoolbag. She might also give me a little piece of lard … Everyone [in school] always had a snack, but I almost never did and the teacher put me next to her during snack time, always next to her … Sometimes I had some bread; sometimes I didn’t even have that. So the teacher called me over next to her. She said, “Marianna, come and sit here,” because she knew I didn’t have anything to eat. Then I wanted to go join the “piccole italiane” [the fascist “Italian little girls” group5]—everyone went except me because of my father. So the teacher said, “Would you like to go?”

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“I’d really like to,” I said. She found me a uniform to join the piccole italiane and I liked it. I went home and said, “Daddy, look daddy, I have the uniform to join the piccole italiane.” He said, “Look child, this [uniform]—tomorrow you take it back to the teacher, she can have her brother wear it.” My father was against fascism, he was a socialist, one of the faithful ones. In this memory, relationships led to or substituted for food. Serving a classmate earned a pastry; closeness to the teacher made up for not having a snack. Marianna expressed no shame about carrying her classmate’s school bag in exchange for food nor about lacking snack—perhaps because both built rather than ruptured relationships. But she implied shame in having to take the little girls’ fascist uniform back to the teacher and break the tie with her that joining the piccole italiane would have represented. However, at the same time she strengthened her important bond with her father and his anti-fascist stance, which she remembered fifty years later with pride. Whereas Marianna’s close family ties protected her from social scorn and isolation, Sergia remembered family meals as the foundation of the social alienation at the heart of her feelings of shame. This was compounded by her mother explicitly denigrating her cooking: In my house there was no way to stand at the stove because I would always be criticized. My mother always said, “You don’t know how to do anything.” What could I do—will you tell me? How could I learn? When she had a kidney operation, she stayed a week in the hospital. I made tomato sauce (pomarola6). I had never made it before, and I made pomarola. When I didn’t have her in the house, I managed to make something. But with her, there was no way ever to do anything … Let me tell you about rice fritters. Listen to this. Well, one year for the Feast of St. Joseph, my mother made fritters, and, because it is a custom here in Florence to make rice fritters for St. Joseph, I made them too. So on the day of St. Joseph, my mother invited me to her house. I replied, “Mamma, I can’t come because I too made fritters. This evening Rinaldo will be coming home, and then some friends are coming over.” She retorted, “But you can’t make fritters as well as I can.” The recipe is the same, identical, because I copied it exactly from the one they gave to her! So now, can you believe it? She even made me have a complex about my fritters. Sergia’s food memories revealed shame generated by difficult psycho-emotional struggles with her mother and manifested in her lack of self-confidence around cooking, which she believed was a key constituent of female identity. She said, “Listen, I’m a housewife. If I don’t know how to cook, you tell me, what else is there?” She was selfconscious and embarrassed about her inability to cook well, which was sometimes a source of shame in social contexts far from her mother: Let me tell you this story. One of the first days after my marriage, I invited my brotherin-law to dinner while my sister-in-law was on vacation at the beach. I made him a salad with cucumbers. Cucumbers—I thought you didn’t have to peel them, because they’re like zucchini, and you don’t peel zucchini. So I cut them all in little slices with the skin on them. I saw this man begin to slice all around the outside of the cucumber slices with his knife and fork. The shame (vergogna) I felt! This story revealed that something as minor as not peeling cucumbers could trigger a shame that lasted for years—and that it resulted from giving others the authority to judge

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rather than believing in oneself. Insecurity and shame around food were strong themes in Sergia’s interviews, but sharing those memories also made possible transformation. Sergia had learned to compensate for her lack of cooking mastery. During her engagement she confessed her shame and ineptitude to her husband-to-be Rinaldo, which freed her to err and laugh about it. He bought her the classic cookbook Il Cucchaio d’Argento (The Silver Spoon) to buttress her skill and confidence. She observed her mother cooking and wrote down the steps in a recipe notebook so she could reproduce the dishes in her own home. After a decade of marriage, she and Rinaldo moved to a beautiful restored farmhouse in the countryside twenty minutes from Florence where they often hosted dinner parties for five or six couples. Sergia was able to use food to foster social connection and counteract her shame around cooking by serving easy but genuine Tuscan specialties like grilled farm-raised rabbit and chicken, prosciutto and Tuscan salami from her pigs, and fett’unta—Tuscan bread toasted over wood embers and soaked with the farm’s own delicious fresh-pressed olive oil. Although Sergia entered her marriage with severe insecurity about her cooking, confessing and confronting it enabled her to begin to change, learn, and develop confidence. Sergia’s aunt, 61-year-old Elena had a specific memory that I interpret as a parable about how social connection staved off potential shame. She became pregnant in 1944 during the Second World War when Florence was in the middle of the fighting, with the Germans on the north side of the Arno River and the Allies on the south side. Elena told a story about her pregnancy focusing on le voglie (the desires)—the belief that a mother’s unsatisfied food cravings would mark the baby in utero (Counihan 2004: 141–3): Yes, people were supposed to give a pregnant woman everything she desired, yes, yes. I remember that my grandmother—my old grandmother Lisa—as soon as she found out that I was pregnant, she brought me snails to eat. Yes, because the desire for snails—la voglia delle chiocciole—is very dangerous. If the baby is a girl, this desire is no threat, but if it is a boy, something terrible could happen. The penises don’t develop on boy babies who are born with the desire for snails. In the old days, that’s what they used to say. So, anyway, my grandmother hurried to bring me all these snails to eat. She went out to gather them and she brought them to me already cooked. But years later, I found out that they were not real snails. She had not been able to find real snails, full with the little veil over them. So she made up a delicious filling and she stuffed it into all these snail shells and then she cooked them in the way that we cook snails. I tasted that same flavor, I ate them, they were really good, and I didn’t even think about it. I learned this years and years and years later. She did this for me precisely so that I wouldn’t have the desire for snails, to convince me that I had already eaten them so that I no longer had to worry about the voglia delle chiocciole. She told me years later, “You know, those snails I brought you when you were pregnant? They were absolutely not real; they were false.” She told me this later when there was no longer any danger, because the baby had been born a girl. This memory implied that social connection was important but dangerous and had to be managed to ward off shame. Food wove a connection between the mother and her gestating child but to keep this from causing harm, others—in this case a beloved grandmother—had to feed the mother and satisfy her desires. The detail that the snails were not really snails is surprising and touching even if it strains credulity. What shines through is how much Elena wanted to believe in the snails, wanted to align with her grandmother, and wanted to protect her unborn child from the shameful fate of an undeveloped penis.

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Elena’s memory showed how food forged connection. The following episode revealed how connection shaped food. During the Second World War when official rations were less than one thousand calories per person per day, hunger was rampant (Helstosky 2004: ­chapter 4). The situation in Florence became particularly dire during the German occupation, from September 1943 through August 1944. Marianna recounted: I started work in City Hall in 1944 and we used to eat in the office in those days in a little room they had for us. I remember one time towards the end of the war, one of my colleagues arrived. “I brought a rabbit for us to eat,” she said. “Oh great, let’s go everybody, a little piece for each of us.” After we finished, my colleague asked, “Did you like the rabbit?” Another colleague answered, “Rabbit, no way, it wasn’t rabbit, it was cat. It was cat and give me another piece because it was really good!”” While rabbit was fully integrated into Tuscan cuisine, cat was an anomalous food, whose consumption was potentially shameful and isolating. But in Marianna’s telling, the friendly commensal social context and playfulness transformed shame into solidarity and bad food into good. In the specific memories, tasty food represented psychological contentment and social connection and terrible food stood for psychological distress and social breakdown. Twentyyear-old secretary Piera told me that her favorite food was pasta, which was a centerpiece of almost every meal she ate at home: “Best of all I like to eat pasta. I eat tons of it … I eat pasta at any hour; just let someone give me some and I eat it, no matter what time it is. I like pasta in all ways, even with fish … We eat spaghetti every day, at both lunch and supper.” Piera had a striking memory of a time she had to live without pasta: One time I went to the beach to stay with a friend of mine. I was there two days without eating pasta and I was badly off. I telephoned my father to come and get me because I could not stand it anymore. I could have stayed another couple of months with that girl, because her family was very well off, but I could not stand it anymore. They never cooked pasta. They ate only cold-cuts and sandwiches, sandwiches and cold-cuts. Oh, I suffered from a longing for pasta. When my father arrived, he took me right away to a restaurant to eat it. I was really badly off. I was suffering. I think I was miserable also because they led a life completely different from my family. They slept so much and they didn’t get up until four in the afternoon. They ate a sandwich at four and then they went to the beach. Then they went to bed. In short, it was a really different lifestyle and I wasn’t used to it. Piera’s memory was about grappling with shame—the social disconnection and discomfort she felt at her friend’s house—which was symbolized by their unfamiliar eating habits. She overcame her feelings of distress by connecting with her family through her beloved pasta. Eating the favorite food that represented familiarity and comfort enabled her to transcend her self-consciousness and reintegrate her eating habits, her body, and her well-being.

CONCLUSION This chapter hopes to have shown that food-centered life histories generated rich food memories, both general and specific. General memories provided an overview of past habits and beliefs whereas specific food memories described particular significant

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events. Most took place at meals and featured delectable or dreadful food, they were multisensorial and emotionally dense, and they revealed central cultural concerns. In Florence, specific memories showed a high focus on social relations and in particular on fear of disconnection and shame. The literature suggests that sharing tales of shame has a positive effect and creates bonds between the teller and the listener (Lynd 1958; Lewis 1971; Scheff 2000). This fact may help explain the prevalence of themes of shame in the foodcentered life history interviews. As Scheff put it, “acknowledgement of shame can strengthen bonds, and by implication, lack of acknowledgment can create alienation … Acknowledged shame, it seems, could be the glue that holds relationships and societies together, and unacknowledged shame the force that tears them apart” (Scheff 2000: 98). But he notes that often shame is unrecognized or misrepresented. In fact, in Florentines’ specific memories of social disconnection, they rarely used the word shame (vergogna)—only three times. But they did seize the opportunity offered by the food-centered life history interviews to describe some of their experiences where the “threat to the social bond” was paramount. Those experiences of shame, particularly when anchored by particularly delicious or deplorable foods, remained deeply lodged in memory, providing fodder for the ethnographer as well as the relief of sharing for the narrator. Anthropologist Keith Basso (1996: 5) remarked: “Remembering often provides a basis for imagining.” What futures did Florentines imagine in their memories of threats to the social bond? It seems to me that they imagined convivial relationships, particularly in the family, the bedrock of Florentine society. When they had familial harmony, they had a bulwark to sustain them against social disconnection and humiliation, as Piera and Marianna did. But when the family was discordant as it was for Sergia and Elena, the threat of social fission was omnipresent and people guarded against it by creating new social ties often through food exchanges and commensality. But food could be revolting as well as appealing and commensality discordant or pleasant—representing the complex challenges of negotiating balance between self, body, and others that were so salient in Florentines’ food memories.

NOTES In 2003, I planned to give a paper at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting entitled “ ‘The Odor of Broth’: Food, Memory, and Ethnographic Methodology” at a panel on food and memory organized by Jon Holtzman whose session abstract raised some important questions that he developed further in his review article (Holtzman 2006). A crisis with my teenagers—which memory has mercifully erased—kept me from attending the AAA, but I’ve been thinking about food and memory ever since. I am grateful to Beth Forrest and Greg de St. Maurice for inspiring me to finally write this chapter and to Jim Taggart for feedback on early drafts. 1 On the cultural shaping of food memory, see also Lupton (1994, 668): “The analysis of memories about food serves to reveal the ways in which our memories of everyday life are socially constructed and patterned.” See also Jordan’s (2015, 14) concept of “edible memory, the infusing of food, heirloom and otherwise, with connections to the past in ways both deeply personal and inherently social.” 2 Florentine subjects’ names are pseudonyms and ages refer to 1984. 3 Holtzman (2006, 373) wrote,

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Food intrinsically traverses the public and the intimate. Although eating always has a deeply private component, unlike our other most private activities food is integrally constituted through its open sharing, whether in rituals, feasts, reciprocal exchange, or contexts in which it is bought and sold. One might consider then the significance of this rather unique movement between the most intimate and the most public in fostering food’s symbolic power, in general, and in relation to memory, in particular. Sutton (2008, 160) wrote that “in producing, exchanging and consuming food we are continuously criss-crossing between the ‘public’ and the ‘intimate,’ individual bodies and collective institutions.” 4 Nadia Seremetakis (1993, 14, emphasis in original) noted, “Commensality can be defined as the exchange of sensory memories and emotions, and of substances and objects incarnating remembrance and feeling.” See Counihan (2018) on the significance of commensality in Florence. 5 In 1933 children’s fascist groups started in Italy. Girls between eight and fourteen years old were enrolled in the “piccole italiane.” http://www.archiviodegliiblei.it/index.php?it/201/ bambine-ragazze-e-donne-in-divisa accessed June 18, 2019. 6 Pomarola (from pomodoro = tomato) is a simple tomato sauce for pasta. See Counihan (2004: 218) for description and recipes.

REFERENCES Basso, K. H. (1996), Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Counihan, C. (2004), Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence, New York: Routledge. Counihan, C. (2018), “Commensality and Taste,” International Journal of Food Design, 3 (2): 143–6. Jordan, J. A. (2015), Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and Other Forgotten Foods, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Helstosky, C. F. (2004), Garlic and Oil: Politics and Food in Italy, Oxford: Berg. Holtzman, J. D. (2006), “Food and Memory,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 35: 361–78. Proust, M. (1982), Remembrance of Things Past, Volume 1: Swann’s Way: Within a Budding Grove, trans. C. K. S. Moncrieff and T. Kilmartin, New York: Vintage. Lewis, H. B. (1971), Shame and Guilt in Neurosis, New York: International Universities Press. Lupton, D. (1994), “Food, Memory and Meaning: The Symbolic and Social Nature of Food Events,” Sociological Review, 42 (4): 664–85. Lynd, H. M. (1958), On Shame and the Search for Identity, New York: Harcourt Brace. Marx, K., and F. Engels (1970), The German Ideology, ed. and with an introduction by C. J. Arthur, New York: International Publishers. Scheff, T. J. (2000), “Shame and the Social Bond: A Sociological Theory,” Sociological Theory, 18 (1): 84–99. Seremetakis, C. N. (1993), “The Memory of the Senses: Historical Perception, Commensal Exchange and Modernity,” Visual Anthropology Review, 9 (2): 2–18. Sutton, D. E. (2001), Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory, Oxford: Berg. Sutton, D. E. (2008), “A Tale of Easter Ovens: Food and Collective Memory,” Social Research, 75 (1): 157–80.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

Whose Arancino/a? The Multiple Making of Place through an Iconic Sicilian Food AMANDA HILTON

L’arancin* è insomma un simbolo che si mangia. —Marrone (2012) The arancino/a is, in sum, a symbol that you eat. —Author’s translation

INTRODUCTION A dramatic soundtrack sets the scene with satirical suspense as a young man with dark hair and a black cape raises a sword above his head in a dark forest, a figure kneeling before him. The man with the raised sword cries, “I, Jon Snow Corso Vittorio Emanuele, Lord of the Arancina with an ‘A,’ and protector of the traditions of western Sicily, sentence you to death for having called ‘arancina’ ‘arancino’!,” before screaming in fury and bringing his sword crashing down. Cut to a young woman in a flowing white robe presiding over a bustling square from a balcony. She declares, “I am Daenerys of Burro, born of fryer grease and mother of the arancino with an ‘O’! All those who call it ‘arancina’ are our enemies!” as the crowd below her bellows its approval. In the YouTube satire “The Throne of Arancin*” (Il Trono di Arancin*) made by popular Sicilian comedy troupe I Soldi Spicci, the “House of Meat” and the “House of Butter” stand in for western and eastern Sicily, battling it out Game of Thrones style over the correct case-marking of the deep-fried rice ball: arancino or arancina. In this parody of the very real linguistic polemic over what to call the popular food, Santa Lucia’s Day approaches as the two sides fight ferociously, only to leave aside their differences in the end and devour the Sicilian rice balls together (I Soldi Spicci 2018).

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Arancini/e, in English literally translated as “little oranges,” are stuffed and fried Sicilian rice balls. I argue that the arancino/a is a symbol of Sicily, the place. As such, it is also a symbol of Sicilians, the people, and Sicilianness or Sicilianità, what it means to be Sicilian. As a symbol of Sicilian identity, the arancino/a could be written about like a hard-walled container of Sicilianità, rather than a porous one; the symbol is not onedimensional, it is multidimensional. The place is also multiple, contested from the inside and the outside, and so I write against this tendency to codify its meaning as singular. Instead, I explore multiple layers of place identity in Sicily. The arancino/a is a window into Sicilianness, which is defined vis-à-vis layers—of Italianness, Europeanness, and a global geopolitical positioning as a primary link between Europe and migrants from the South, especially sub-Saharan Africa, and from the East, especially the Middle East. These layers of Sicilianness are therefore disputed and constructed within Sicily, in Italy, and globally. My purpose here is to use the arancino/a to better understand how Sicilians remember and imagine themselves and their island and the multiplicities of identity even within one seemingly homogenous place. In doing so, I also ask, how is this food actually experienced? What does it mean to regular people in their everyday lives? That, too, is multiple, although certain themes weave together some shared ground: commensality, hospitality, and the lived, sensory experience of pleasure and satisfaction.

ORIGIN STORIES An arancino/a is a rice ball with a (typically) savory filling that is breaded and deepfried. There are as many variations in arancini/e recipes as there are cooks who prepare them. I have prepared and talked about arancini/e with Sicilian home cooks who are far from the restaurant industry as well as with authoritative experts on Sicilian cuisine, like Fabrizia Lanza, who runs an internationally known cooking school in central Sicily (Lanza, Winslow, and Ambrosino 2012). Generally speaking, the rice in arancino/a recipes is cooked and then cooled. The cooking method for the rice in arancini/e is similar to that of risotto in that the rice used is shorter-grained, and water is added and absorbed bit by bit rather than steamed or added all at once. This cooking method makes for cooked rice with a good amount of starch outside of the rice grain (think of the creaminess associated with risotto) and helps the rice to form a barrier that keeps the filling inside. The rice for arancini/e is usually seasoned, often with saffron, although this depends on the filling. The classic fillings are al ragù/a’ carne or al burro—that is, meat ragù sauce or béchamel, mozzarella, and sometimes cooked prosciutto. Other fillings abound—in Enna, in central Sicily, you can have an arancino with a saffron and wild mint risotto surrounding a molten center of local piacentinu cheese; in eastern Sicily, a filling inspired by pasta alla Norma is common—fried eggplant, tomato sauce, and salted, hard ricotta cheese. A filling of spinach and cheese is a common vegetarian option, and pistachio-inflected fillings in eastern Sicily, near the pistachio-producing area on Mt. Etna, are also popular. Sicilian cuisine is celebrated for having absorbed the culinary practices of its various conquerors and inhabitants through history, be they Greek, Phoenician, Roman, North African, Norman, the list goes on (Schneider and Schneider 1976: 21–6; Simeti 1989). All foods have their own symbolic histories (Mintz 1985), and the arancino/a is no exception. The arancino/a’s origin myth is frequently linked to the period of Islamic rule in Sicily, from the ninth to the eleventh centuries (Norwich 2015). The Muslim rulers of

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Sicily are credited with bringing much to the island, including advanced irrigation, sugar cane, citrus, dried pasta, rice, and little deep-fried rice balls (Barbera 2007). According to Palermitan intellectual and historian Gaetano Basile, the arancino/a “comes from Arabic cuisine, made with rice scented with saffron and enriched with vegetables, spices, and small pieces of meat. … One day, to make it transportable, the Arabs made a ball similar to an orange, that, breaded and fried, acquired consistency, enough to resist travel” (as quoted in Droga and Lo Bue 2009, author’s translation). Some even claim that Frederick II was so fond of arancini/e, he brought them on hunting trips (“Gli Arancini di Riso” 2016). Arancini/e are also linked to a distant past as a festive ritual food. Legend has it that a ship entered the port of Syracuse full of grain to end a terrible famine on December 13, Santa Lucia’s Day (Amuri 2015, dir. Costa). People were too hungry to grind the wheat and wait for bread to rise, so instead they boiled the wheat directly. For this reason, to celebrate Santa Lucia in Sicily, bread and pasta are avoided, while a boiled wheat porridge known as cuccìa is eaten. In Palermo, Santa Lucia is celebrated by eating arancine, and a lot of them. One estimate has it that 700,000 arancine are prepared in Palermo alone for this day, which is nearly one per inhabitant (Russo 2013). The memory associated with Santa Lucia, December 13, runs deep. Like any iconic food, the arancino/a’s storied past is recounted today with contemporary agendas that seek to claim ownership and authenticity. Consumers today are accustomed to seeing claims of authenticity on all kinds of products, including but not limited to food (see de St. Maurice 2011). Often “authentic” is stamped on foods that come from elsewhere, and an “authentic” foreign food comes directly from that foreign place. Following this logic, authentic brioche comes from France, and authentic tacos come from Mexico. Or do they? Debating the authenticity of any food is a minefield, as it calls up questions of belonging and identity, of who and what belongs where, and of the proper connections between food, people, and place. It matters little that these connections may be largely imagined, and in fact, imagined connections may be the most powerful ones we have. What is at stake is often how particular actors imagine their own cultural inheritance, or cultural heritage, and this is both a deeply personal and an actively political issue.

SICILIANITÀ AND THE ARANCINO/A DEBATE How do Sicilians imagine themselves and remember their own experiences with the beloved arancino/a? And is it arancino or arancina? The case-marking of the word is enough to seriously offend and spark impassioned debates about the origin of the food and the various etymological explanations for its proper name.1 Italian, like most romance languages, uses masculine and feminine case-marking on nouns. Sicilian is the same way.2 A casual search on the topic brings up pieces ranging from personal blogs to public intellectuals to the leading authority on the Italian language (Iannizzotto 2016). The arancino-arancina fight calls up a well-rehearsed East versus West rivalry stemming from eastern and western Sicily’s distinct cultural and linguistic identities (Schneider and Schneider 1976). Generally speaking, the masculine spelling is preferred by eastern Sicilians while the feminine spelling is preferred by western Sicilians and certainly by those hailing from the city of Palermo. And the case-marking of the noun is about much more than a mere linguistic preference.

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Contested Place Identity and the Southern Question Sicily is known for many things, including food. The Sicily of Peter Robb’s 1998 Midnight in Sicily is a place with a long history of harsh poverty and extremely unequal wealth distribution: a place of hunger, of empty stomachs and empty futures. Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s 2013 [1958] The Leopard tells of a Sicily that is essentially still feudal in terms of social and economic organization well into the late nineteenth century. The novel’s main character, the Prince of Salinas, rejects an offer from the newly formed republic to serve as a senator. He explains that the Sicilian character is “conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind,” and links this to “this violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything” (208). The Sicilian “character,” as if it were singular, has long been linked to Sicilian geography, in particular being an island, and climate, especially an infernal heat. This insularity slips easily from describing an island to describing islanders. The literary tradition of constructing the Sicilian character in this vein (see also the work of celebrated Sicilian authors Giovanni Verga and Leonardo Sciascia) may be respected and long-standing, but it also essentializes Sicilian people—they end up seeming as unchanging and long-suffering as the landscape they inhabit (Rosengarten 1998). The relationship between identity and place is often naturalized in this manner, and place is considered to be unchanging and therefore ahistorical (Pred 1984). People may change but place is conceptualized as a backdrop upon which action unfolds. When foodways are added to the mix, food and place may be seen as equivalent, particularly when certain foods are linked to the so-called terroir of the place (Besky 2013; Terrio 1996). What the case of the arancino/a brings to light is that place, like people and food, is hardly such a fixed canvas. The arancino-arancina disagreement relates to Sicily’s geographic, geopolitical, and historical positioning as Mediterranean in Europe and the European Union, and within Italy. Sicily is liminal in many senses and debates about its identity are nearly fractal in scale: it is peripheral to the Italian state as Italy’s southernmost region, and as an island; geographically it is central in the Mediterranean but this brings its Europeanness into question; historically it has been a crossroads of many Mediterranean conquerors and peoples. On the European level, Italians may not be considered “real” Europeans because they are too southern or too Mediterranean, even too African (see Dainotto 2006). The racism inherent in this construction of Europeanness positions Africa, along with a general “Orient,” as Europe’s dialectical “Other” (Said 1994). Italy’s and Italians’ identity as European is therefore in some ways precarious and cannot be taken for granted. Within Italy, a similar logic of embattled identity exists. If Italy is “too southern” in the EU imaginary to be safely European or Western, the further south you go in Italy, the more this is true. Although I focus here on Sicily rather than on southern Italy more broadly, many stereotypes of Sicily connect back to the Southern Question, elaborated most famously by Italian anti-fascist Antonio Gramsci (Gramsci 2005). The Southern Question refers to a set of ideas and narratives meant to explain supposed southern Italian backwardness, economically and otherwise, as contrasted with northern Italian progress (e.g., Lumley and Morris 1997). The South is correlated with negative ideas of danger, corruption, and underdevelopment, but also often with positive ideas about unspoilt natural beauty: alluringly dangerous. Sicily is the southernmost region in Italy, “a triangularish football being punted toward the Maghreb” (Gollner 2016). This image almost suggests a desire on the part of peninsular Italy to “punt” Sicily back toward northern Africa. Within Italy, Sicilians may not be considered “real” Italians for reasons

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similar to those that threaten Italians’ European standing, as claims of non-Europeanness and, again, African-ness, Arab-ness, or non-whiteness are leveled.3 In the current political climate in the EU, migrants’ arrival from sub-Saharan and northern Africa, the Middle East, and East and Southeast Asia (International Organization for Migration 2019) combines with the rise of right-wing populists and neofascists. The question of what it means to be Italian, or European, has taken on an overtly racist and xenophobic bent (Cole 2005; Lucht 2011; Mezzadra 2012). For example, the rallying cry of Matteo Salvini’s party La Lega (The League), in the 2018 elections was “Prima gli Italiani,” or “Italians First,” and Salvini has a long record of scapegoating immigrants, particularly immigrants of color (e.g., Butini 2019). Difference is necessary to have sameness, and what qualifies as different or similar depends on the agenda of the viewer. Identity, along with place, is a contested process. If place and people are constantly becoming through active practices of inclusion and exclusion, then the “politics of belonging” categorize certain people as “in place” and others as most definitely “out of place” (Trudeau 2006). On a smaller geographical scale, within Sicily there are disagreements about which Sicily is the “real” Sicily, illustrated sometimes in all seriousness and sometimes with humor, in the arancina-arancino debate.

The View from the East and West The fight over the case-marking of the word is a fight over which Sicily is better, eastern or western. But what is each of these Sicilies? The tropes about eastern Sicily, ground zero for arancino/i, are as follows: eastern Sicily retains some characteristics from its Greek colonization, when cities like Syracuse (founded circa 730 BCE) were some of the most powerful and prosperous in Magna Grecia (Norwich 2015). Catania, the unofficial capital of eastern Sicily, is known as “the Milan of the South,” drawing on its architecture and some supposed characteristics of its residents, namely that they are industrious and entrepreneurial. Eastern Sicily is considered to be “calmer” than western Sicily, as I was informed by Sicilians hailing from both parts of the island, and the spendy $7,000 New York Times food tours of Sicily were all on this side of the island (they no longer seem to be offered). Mt. Etna, the 3,329-meter active volcano above Catania, is also central to eastern Sicily’s identity. Arancini in eastern Sicily can be a conical shape, or a punta, which is less commonly found in western Sicily, where they are typically round, but one single café may use different shapes to denote different fillings. In the I Soldi Spicci YouTube spoof, another scene has the Queen of Arancino, in a sword fight with the Lord of Arancina, cry “in dialect arancia [orange] is arancio [orange], for this reason we call it arancino [little orange]!” Using Sicilian dialect is a powerful way to appeal to a Sicilian identity— more specific and heartfelt than a generalized Italian identity (see Cavanaugh 2005). Campanilismo describes the phenomenon of Italians identifying more strongly with their hometowns than with the nation-state (Parasecoli 2014). All of these various points of pride are poured into the fight over the case-marking of the arancino/a. If stereotypes about the East are industriousness and comparative orderliness, Palermo in particular and western Sicily more generally are stereotypically considered to be chaotic, gritty, and opulent. A typical description from a Saveur article describes Palermo as “a honking, city-sized souk lined with palm trees, closer to Tunis than Naples” (Gollner 2016). Rather than drawing on ancient Greek history for an ongoing contemporary identity, the larger historical Mediterranean cultural influences in western Sicily are

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Islamic, often referred to as Arab. As early ethnographer of western Sicily Constance Cronin noted, “The Sicilians talk constantly of their Arabic heritage and use this as a reason (or an excuse) for everything they do which is even slightly out of the ordinary. They point out the terraced hillsides, Arab food, and Arab customs as proof of an enduring ‘Saracen’ influence in the island” (Cronin 1970: 34). Western Sicily’s ties to an Islamic heritage are key to their claims of ownership over the arancino/a, also considered to have an Islamic heritage. The case-marking debate over arancino/a in Sicily gives a view into the multiplicities of meaning in place, and any such debate involves how we imagine ourselves in the world, and collective or invented memories of a meaningful past.

SENSE MEMORIES AND ARANCINI/E I lived in Sicily for about twenty-seven months from 2017 to 2020, and did ethnographic fieldwork for fourteen months of that time. Although my research focused on Sicilian olive oil producers’ experiences with a new geographical indication, immersive ethnographic research provides opportunities to practice the “arts of noticing” (Krause and Li 2020; Tsing 2015), or digging into things that seem either out of place or so entrenched in place that they warrant a closer look, and a look around. As part of this research I conducted participant observation and unstructured, semi-structured, and walking interviews. What follows draws on this ethnographic data. Sicilian interlocutors had no shortage of memories and associations with arancini/e. These associations range from the indulgent pleasure of a quick bite to the reassuring feelings of time spent preparing complicated dishes at home to quick references to the Catania-Palermo rivalry. Salvo,4 in his early thirties and from central-eastern Sicily, offered that the root of the arancina-arancino debate is really the rivalry between the two cities’ soccer teams. According to Matteo, from Palermo, the rivalry is silly, but it’s arancina, because it comes from arancia, the orange, not arancio, the orange tree. Giuseppe, in his fifties and from Palermo, offered the same allegiance to arancina, giving me tips on where to find the best ones and which cafés to avoid. We agreed on café Bar RosaNero and discussed another miniscule café near the train station, known for having remarkably crunchy-shelled arancine and an unusual sausage-based filling, where another friend took me. Francesco, from southeastern Sicily, firmly believed that the best arancini were in the province of Ragusa or perhaps in Catania, because in the province of Ragusa arancini al ragù often have a whole hard-boiled egg inside, and this is a “capolavoro della cucina siciliana,” a masterpiece of Sicilian cuisine. He was very sorry to learn I’m allergic to eggs and had not sampled one. For Marco, the case-marking of the word doesn’t much matter. What is important, instead, is that arancini/e are a snack to be eaten, not with frequency but with much gusto, when one simply cannot wait for lunch or dinner or has not had the time to sit down to a proper meal—they should be eaten piping hot, fresh out of the fryer at the rosticceria (a small bakery-café that specializes in savory foods like arancini/e), and thoroughly enjoyed: a bomba, or bomb, consumed standing up and without utensils, wrapped in layers of thin, waxy napkins. For Sebastiano, arancini/e are squarely in the category of a porcata, or junk food/crap, something one craves after a night out or after a bad day, something that can bring comfort due to its predictability (you know exactly what to expect when you order one), and its links to past pleasurable moments. This emphasis on pleasure has been documented as key to how Italian children are socialized around food, expressing taste preferences as part of personality and enjoying food for its

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own sake rather than seeing food as a reward or merely nutrition (Ochs, Pontecorvo, and Fasulo 1996). The immediacy of the satisfaction given by arancini/e and other ready-to-eat foods found in cafés—rosticceria, tavola calda, or gastronomia establishments—was brought up multiple times. In a place where the day is structured around meals—oftentimes (although this is increasingly changing due to work schedules) sit-down affairs that might include a main of either starch (pasta or rice) or protein (meat or fish) as well as a side or two (vegetables or salads), followed by fruit, perhaps a dessert, and coffee, something about addressing your hunger without having to work, in terms of cooking, or wait, in terms of cooking or of waiting for someone else to cook for you, at home or out of the house, feels indulgent. As Marco noted, “It’s good because you take it and you eat it, right away! No waiting, no formality.” The experience of being hungry and devouring something hot out of the fryer, on the street, with your hands, therefore seems to turn some of the pomp and circumstance that can be a part of Sicilian and Italian meals directly on its head, and this indulgence is therefore pleasurable, perhaps even transgressive. Instead of waiting patiently to satisfy one’s hunger, you address it immediately (temporally) and richly (qualitatively). However, for all of the associations with this sort of immediate satisfaction, the arancino/a is still a dish that is not simple and requires time to prepare. One must cook and cool the rice, prepare the filling, assemble the arancini/e, batter them, and fry them—a true labor of love. So, on the flip side of a transgressive pig-out session (porcata coming from the root word porco, or pig/slob), others spoke of memories of family togetherness in the time-consuming act of preparation. Giovanna not only talked with me about arancine (she refers to them in the feminine even though she hails from eastern Sicily), but she also once prepared them for me using a mold known as the “Arancinotto.” It comes in two styles, “Pro” and “Slim,” for business and home. Giovanna spoke of arancini/e as a food which serves as a social glue, binding her family together. She remembered cooking time-consuming dishes with her mother as a young girl, waiting for her father to return from his evening shift at the hospital. In winter, we waited, so what to do? We made focacce, these are the things, I live them with really beautiful memories, because my mother taught me always to do something. Let’s make this, let’s make that, here, the mostata,5 the focacce, let’s prepare the focacce. There’s always something that she taught me, to be together, to work together, to share a little time. She and I were really together, because I’m the only female daughter, and my brothers didn’t help. (interview, September 2017) Giovanna didn’t prepare arancine with her own mother, but she does prepare them with her daughters to spend time together as a family. The labor involved in this food preparation and the bonding it entails is gendered. She notes that when she was a girl, her brothers did not help in food preparation, and now her daughters participate, but her husband does not. Women’s role as keepers of the hearth, and their responsibility for food preparation and domesticity more generally, are hard to overestimate in Italy (see Counihan 2004) and in Sicily. Francesco speaks of arancini as a symbol, not so much of Sicilianità but of the figure of the matriarch in a family and what happens when she is gone and takes with her the family arancini recipe. Francesco is a farmer and truck driver in his midthirties who lives with his father; his mother passed away a number of years ago. For him, mothers are the keepers of recipes, the real databanks of knowledge and culinary

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expertise, and now that his mother is gone, there is no one to prepare arancini for his family, and so they rarely eat them. A neighbor woman, aware of this lacuna, occasionally prepares arancini for him and his father, as a gesture of kindness. Salvo, too, reflects on the fact that at home, mostly the women in his family made them, particularly his grandmother, but he remembers that his grandfather helped, too. He never participated, and so he isn’t exactly sure how they are made—did she put milk in the rice, or not? He can’t remember; he wished he had paid closer attention. When pressed on why he never tried to participate, he looks into the distance. “When I was young I guess it didn’t interest me. But now, every time I try [to cook something], that I ask for clarification, [my mother] gets confused and she tells me that she’ll take care of it” (interview, September 2018). For these Sicilians, arancini/e are a regular and significant part of their culinary landscape, whether they are prepared at home for a special occasion or eaten standing outside a rosticceria. The memories they evoke may be of home and togetherness, of family members who have passed away, especially female family members. Or, arancini/e may bring back less poignant reminders of colpi di fame, hits of hunger, late-night snacks eaten with friends standing on the sidewalk with a beer, or mid-morning hold-me-overs for a later-afternoon pranzo, lunch. Commensality, or coming together to eat and share food, is a hugely significant aspect of Italian foodways (Counihan 2004; Parasecoli 2014), and it has now been deployed in new ways as a symbol of hospitality in the context of immigration politics. In the Italian context, proper meals are “a mark of social existence, which [is] itself a mark of being fully human” (Counihan 2004: 120). An abundant table that is shared generously and with fullness of heart is key to what could be called the Mediterranean hospitality complex, in which the guest must be given the absolute best that the host has to offer (Herzfeld 1987). It is for this reason that the arancino/a has been used by some Sicilians as a political statement. Immigrants arriving in Sicily from Africa and the Middle East were not greeted with a warm welcome when Matteo Salvini was Interior Minister from June 2018 to September 2019 (Horowitz 2018). On one occasion in August 2018, a ship that had over 150 migrants aboard was allowed into the port of Catania, but the migrants were not allowed to disembark for over a week because of Salvini’s “Security Decree,” which aimed to close Italian ports to migrants and to remove their protections once in Italy. The port of Catania became the site of a large protest, and protestors used arancini/e as a symbol to welcome the migrants, holding them in the air and using the hashtag #CataniaAccoglie, Catania Welcomes, with the “A” in Accoglie a triangular arancino (see Figure 12.1). “Arancini represent, let’s say, a symbol of welcoming. For us in Sicily, food has always been the way in which a guest is welcomed,” said one protestor who was interviewed by Italian newspaper La Repubblica (“La Diciotti a Catania” 2018, author’s translation). This move, to symbolically offer a symbol of Sicily to migrants refused entrance by the government, upends discourses that dehumanize migrants and reframes them as guests. This rearrangement of belonging—that migrants should be welcomed rather than excluded—relates back to the Southern Question. In terms of the Southern Question, essentialized southerners who are defined by the characteristics of their land “belong” not only in the geographical South, but in a state of underdevelopedness. Far-right politics try to paint immigrants as “out of place” in an imagined Europe and Italy, and protestors use arancini/e to combat this narrative and instead claim that immigrants are welcome. And for those who engage in the arancini/e case-marking debate, the differences between

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FIGURE 12.1  A protestor’s pro-immigration, anti-far right sign at the Port of Catania in August 2018. “Catania Welcomes,” it reads, with the “A” in the shape of a conical arancino. © Silvio Laviano.

eastern and western Sicily are emphasized over the many similarities—a person who uses arancina is out of place in eastern Sicily, whereas a person using arancino is out of place in western Sicily, and yet, this East-West rivalry dissolves when faced with a larger-scale North-South polemic or even larger global scales, in which Sicilianness, Southernness, or even Italianness as identifiers may become more or less significant.

CONCLUSION The arancino/a is a symbol that you eat (Marrone 2012). The arancino/a is a symbol of Sicily, but Sicily is not singular, it is multiple, just as the arancino/a is not singular—in its shapes, its fillings, its meanings, and its names—it is multiple. What the arancino/a symbolizes to the eater depends on a host of factors, not least the cultural identity of the eater. In this essay I have hoped to convey how a fried ball of rice, an iconic example of Sicilian cuisine, proxy for Sicilian people and places, is imagined and remembered. It can be a symbol of allegiance, to eastern or western Sicily, and to memories that inform personal narratives of the meanings of those places. Because what do iconic foods evoke if not memories, even imagined ones, of what it means to be from, in, and of a place? This process of place-making through food, through imagining and remembering, is inherently multiple, being taken up by multiple actors at the same time. Through claims to the arancino/a, multiple images of Sicily are constructed. These imagined Sicilies are

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painted with the brush of mythical and banal memories of arancini/e. The arancino/a and its multiple forms and meanings illustrate the messy overlaps between past and present, remembering and imagining. Food links us to each other, to our pasts, and to the places we imagine as our own. While the arancini/e debate can be used to differentiate us from them—East from West, North from South—at the end of the day arancini/e are proudly claimed and well-loved as Sicilian. They are an integral part of the Sicilian culinary repertoire, and as such their meanings and associations are constantly being renegotiated, along with what Sicily, as a place, and Sicilians, as people, represent. These representations run the gamut from negative associations with closed-mindedness to positive associations with pleasure and family, and even political assertions that anyone who arrives on Sicily’s shores should be welcomed to the table with hot, filling, delicious food. Buon appetito.

NOTES 1 Due to space constraints, details of the sociolinguistic case-marking debate will be fully explored elsewhere. 2 In living in Sicily since 2017 I have come across little discussion about personal pronoun use and gender identity that would parallel those happening in English, although these discussions are happening at other levels. 3 The racialization of southern Italians should not be used to excuse or diminish Italian colonialism in Africa (see e.g., Carter 1997; Novati 2008). 4 Names have been altered and pseudonyms invented to protect interlocutors’ privacy. 5 Eastern-Sicilian style focacce are made with a very thin pizza-like dough wrapped around delicious fillings and baked. Mostata is a gelatin-like dessert made during the grape harvest with sweet grape juice, oftentimes served with chopped almonds on top.

REFERENCES 2017. Interview with “Giovanna” by author. September 2017. 2018. Interview with “Salvo” by author. September 2018. Amuri: The Sacred Flavors of Sicily (2015), [Film] Dir. Giacomo Costa. Barbera, G. (2007), “Parchi, Frutteti, Giardini e Orti Nella Conca d’oro Di Palermo Araba e Normanna,” Italus Hortus, 14 (4): 14–27. Besky, Sarah (2013), The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Butini, Cecilia (2019), “There’s No End in Sight for Matteo Salvini’s War on Migrants,” Foreign Policy (blog), August 21. Available online: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/21/theresno-end-in-sight-for-matteo-salvinis-war-on-migrants-league-liga-open-arms-rescue-shipsmeditteranean-libya/ (accessed December 31, 2019). Carter, Donald Martin (1997), States of Grace: Senegalese in Italy and the New European Immigration, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cavanaugh, Jillian R. (2005), “Accent Matters: Material Consequences of Sounding Local in Northern Italy,” Language & Communication, 25 (2): 127–48. Cole, Jeffrey (2005), The New Racism in Europe: A Sicilian Ethnography. Cambridge University Press. Counihan, Carole M. (2004), Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family, and Gender in TwentiethCentury Florence, New York: Routledge.

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Cronin, Constance (1970), The Sting of Change: Sicilians in Sicily and Australia, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dainotto, Roberto M. (2006), ‘The European-Ness of Italy: Categories and Norms’, Annali d’Italianistica: Negotiating Italian Identities, 24: 19–39. de St. Maurice, Greg (2011), “Real of the Real: Kyoto’s Heirloom Vegetables and Articulations of Authenticity,” Digest: A Journal of Foodways and Culture, 1. Available online: http://digest. champlain.edu/vol1/article1_5.html (accessed September 12, 2021). Di Lampedusa, Giuseppe (2013), The Leopard: A Novel, New York: Pantheon. Droga, Valerio, and Giusto Lo Bue (2009), “Lo storico Gaetano Basile: ‘Una palla di riso che resiste ai secoli.’ ” Live Sicilia, December 13. Available online: https://livesicilia.it/2009/12/13/ lo-storico-gaetano-basile-una-palla-di-riso-che-resiste-ai-secoli_33648/ (accessed January 14, 2019). “Gli Arancini di Riso” (2016), Siciliabella (blog), March 28. Available online: https://www. siciliabella.eu/street-food-arancini-riso.html (accessed August 29, 2019). Gollner, Adam. (2016), “Eating the Arab Roots of Sicilian Cuisine,” SAVEUR, March 17. Available online: http://www.saveur.com/sicily-italy-arab-cuisine-where-to-eat-restaurants (accessed March 29, 2017). Gramsci, Antonio (2005), The Southern Question, Toronto: Guernica Editions. Herzfeld, Michael (1987), “ ‘As in Your Own House’: Hospitality, Ethnography, and the Stereotype of Mediterranean Society,” in David D. Gilmore (ed.), Honor and Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean, 75–89, Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association. Horowitz, Jason (2018), “Italy’s Populists Turn up the Heat as Anti-Migrant Anger Boils,” New York Times, February 5. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/world/ europe/italy-election-northern-league-populists-migrants.html (accessed January 5, 2020). I Soldi Spicci. (2018), “Il Trono Di Arancin*,” YouTube. Available online: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=upq8Na44DDI (accessed August 25, 2019). Iannizzotto, Stefania. (2016), “Si dice arancino o arancina?,” Accademia della Crusca, January 29. Available online: http://www.accademiadellacrusca.it/it/lingua-italiana/consulenza-linguistica/ domande-risposte/si-dice-arancino-arancina (accessed January 10, 2019). International Organization for Migration, The UN Migration Agency (2019), “Mixed Migration Flows in the Mediterranean: Compilation of Available Data and Information May 2019,” The UN Migration Agency. Available online: https://displacement.iom.int/reports/europe%E2%80%94-mixed-migration-flows-europe-monthly-overview-may-2019 (accessed January 31, 2020). Krause, Elizabeth L., and Ying Li (2020), “Out of Place: Everyday Forms of Marginalization, Racism, and Resistance among Chinese Migrants in Italy,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2020.1801399. “La Diciotti a Catania, in porto centinaia di persone per manifestare solidarietà” (2018), La Repubblica, August 23. Available online: https://palermo.repubblica.it/cronaca/2018/08/23/ news/la_diciotti_a_catania_in_porto_centinaia_di_persone_per_manifestare_ solidarieta_-204719557/ (accessed January 5, 2020). Lanza, Fabrizia, Kate Winslow, and Guy Ambrosino (2012), Coming Home to Sicily: Seasonal Harvests and Cooking from Case Vecchie, New York: Sterling Epicure. Lucht, Hans (2011), Darkness before Daybreak: African Migrants Living on the Margins in Southern Italy Today, Berkeley: University of California Press. Lumley, Robert, and Jonathan Morris (1997), The New History of the Italian South: The Mezzogiorno Revisited, Exeter, Devon: University of Exeter Press.

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Marrone, Gianfranco (2012), “La forma dell’arancino: arte culinaria e investigazione poliziesca,” in Francesca Polacci (ed.), Ai margini del figurativo, 73–96, Siena: Protagon. Mezzadra, Sandro (2012), “The New European Migratory Regime and the Shifting Patterns of Contemporary Racism,” in Cristina Lombardi-Diop and C. Romeo (eds.), Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity, 37–50, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mintz, Sidney (1985), Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, New York: Viking. Norwich, John Julius (2015), Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, First US edition, New York: Random House. Novati, Giampaolo Calchi (2008), “Italy and Africa: How to Forget Colonialism,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 13 (1): 41–57. Ochs, Elinor, Clotilde Pontecorvo, and Alessandra Fasulo (1996), “Socializing Taste,” Ethnos, 61 (1–2): 7–46. Parasecoli, Fabio (2014), Al Dente: A History of Food in Italy, Clerkenwell: Reaktion Books. Pred, Allan (1984), “Place as Historically Contingent Process: Structuration and the TimeGeography of Becoming Places,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 74 (2): 279–97. Rosengarten, Frank (1998), “Homo Siculus: Essentialism in the Writing of Giovanni Verga, Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa, and Leonardo Sciascia,” in Jane Schneider (ed.), Italy’s “Southern Question,” 117–34, Oxford: Berg. Russo, Rosa (2013), “Arancina o arancino? Ecco come si dice,” Cronache di Gusto: Giornale on line di enogastronomia, December 13. Available online: http://www.cronachedigusto.it/ archiviodal-05042011/343-la-curiosita/12274-arancina-o-arancino-ecco-come-si-dice.html (accessed January 15, 2019). Said, Edward W. (1994), Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books. Schneider, Jane, and Peter T. Schneider (1976), Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicily, New York: Academic Press. Simeti, Mary Taylor (1989), Pomp and Sustenance: Twenty-Five Centuries of Sicilian Food, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Terrio, Susan J. (1996), “Crafting Grand Cru Chocolates in Contemporary France,” American Anthropologist, 98 (1): 67–79. Trudeau, Daniel (2006), “Politics of Belonging in the Construction of Landscapes: Place-Making, Boundary-Drawing and Exclusion,” Cultural Geographies, 13 (3): 421–43. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt (2015), The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Apples as “Objects of Memory” in the Midwestern American Imagination LUCY M. LONG

Introduction I grew up eating apples. I have vivid memories of picking them from trees on the old homeplace in the mountains of western North Carolina and at orchards in the Shenandoah Valley. I carried them with me for meals or snacks, and consumed them raw and cooked into sauce, pies, and crisps. My memories of apples carry nostalgic associations with family and evoke emotions of comfort and contentment. They tie me to places of my past and present. Apples tend to be a popular fruit throughout the world, and their place in the daily and celebratory foodways of the United States is ubiquitous.1 I should not have been surprised then to discover when I moved to northwest Ohio that people there felt the same way about this fruit as I did. In response to questions about what might be distinctive or interesting about this region, they frequently pointed to apples. I felt a sense of possessiveness: these were my memories and they were from another time and place. They made apples personally meaningful to me. How could similar memories be found here? This essay explores the processes by which memories become attached to food through an ethnography of apple foodways in the eastern Midwest of the United States (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan).2 Apples appear in this region as food in numerous forms; apple orchards are common in the landscape; and numerous public events celebrate the fruit. Many residents of the region think of the fruit as significant in their culinary and cultural identity, and their use seems to cut across class, gender, ethos, religion, age, and even ethnicity and race. Further exploration of apples in the eastern Midwest can help us understand how memories make a particular food meaningful to individuals and groups. It can also shed light on why food, as Jon Holtzman asks, is “such a powerful and diffuse locus of memory” (2006: 373). Other cultural forms also hold memories, but food seems to be a particularly potent and rich repository and carrier. Is there something unique or

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distinctive to food itself that sets it apart from these other forms? Are food memories different from memories around other types of experiences? A frequent explanation is that food’s physicality ties it to all the senses, making it an embodied connection between individuals and their memories (Holtzman 2006: 373). David Sutton, for example, states that a key aspect of food and memory is the fact that eating crosses over from the sense of taste to include other senses—hearing, smell, touch, and sight (2001). This synesthesia is what allows the consumer to remember through food so powerfully. The memories are not only cognitive ones, but also held within the body itself, so that a memory in one sense can trigger memories in other senses. Holtzman also suggests that food’s symbolic significance is not necessarily tied to the senses but is attached through its various uses, pragmatic as well as ritualistic. By connecting “the minutiae of everyday experience to broader cultural patterns” (2006: 373), food— and memories of food—take on deeper meanings, both for that individual and for the larger group.3 It is the accumulation of those daily experiences that make memories of food powerful. I suggest here three additional frameworks for analyzing these memories. First, the concept of foodways as developed by folklorists reflects the recognition that processes and contexts interact with products in the creation of meaning (Long 2015). As a network of activities and domains involved in food and eating, foodways offers a lens for identifying points at which memories have been attached to a food. It approaches food as a system in which each aspect of the system affects the others, and activities that seem insignificant can take on meaning because of the total product or event. The processes of producing, procuring, preserving, preparing, consuming, and even disposing of or cleaning up a food are interwoven in everyday and festive life as well as throughout other domains of activities. All these provide occasions for memories to be created. Second, the ritualistic and festive character of many activities in the foodways process constructs, affirms, and celebrates memories. While rituals are popularly thought of as religious ceremonies, they can also be recurring events that stand for something beyond the immediate action. Activities normally considered mundane, such as picking fruit from a tree, can become an annual event symbolizing the fall season, family, or place. The action then is significant beyond itself, and both evokes and creates more memories. Festive events then incorporate and celebrate those rituals, providing occasions for both collectively remembering individual pasts and creating new memories. Finally, not all food memories have the same evocative power, nor do particular foods hold the same memories for all individuals who have experienced them. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s work on objects of memory offers a typology that is applicable to understanding the place of apples in individual and collective memories (1989). Her categorization of these objects as material companions, memory objects, souvenirs or mementos, and collectibles recognizes that memories are created in different ways and can have different levels of significance for different individuals or to the same individual at different junctures in life. Similar to Holtzman’s observation that food gathers memories through the accumulation of daily experiences (2006: 373), Kirshenblatt-Gimblett suggests that collections of objects can be gathered into an “ensembles” that serve as a form of life review, a project to make sense of one’s past, identify a trajectory in events that occurred, and recognize the significance of individual moments. The ensemble, in turn, affirms the significance of the individual object.

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APPLES IN THE AMERICAN AND MIDWESTERN IMAGINATION Apples were part of the early colonization of North America.4 Trees were cultivated for hard (alcoholic) cider, which was commonly drunk by all ages and was also used as a tonic. The Temperance Movement of the late nineteenth century destroyed hundreds of orchards, along with unique apple varieties developed in the United States. After Prohibition ended in 1933, apples enjoyed a comeback in sweeter varieties for eating and cooking. The United States is currently the second largest producer of apples in the world.5 They are grown throughout the country, and thirty-two states produce them commercially, including Michigan and Ohio, both of which are in the top ten.6 Apples in the United States now carry positive and “all-American” associations, albeit those images imply an exclusionary definition of the nation as primarily agrarian, white, western European, Protestant Christian. Browning (1998; Futrell 2017; Juniper and Mabberley 2006: Lape 1979: Martin 1976: Pollan 2001; Powell 2012; Sax 1999; Wynne 1975). Folk tradition and popular culture speak of healthy “apple-cheeked” children, suggest giving apples to teachers to show appreciation, and what can be more American than apple pie? Many of us have fond memories of eating apples as snacks, seeing apple pies for holiday meals, picking apples from grandparents’ trees, or visiting apple orchards as a favorite field trip for family or school (Sax 1999). These memories are not unique to the Midwest, but many residents of the region see them as a significant part of their cultural history and identity. This Midwest relationship with apples is partly due to the region’s settlement history. In 1787, the Continental Congress established the Northwest Territory. Now consisting of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and eastern Minnesota, the region was considered the “frontier” where pioneers would fulfill the “manifest destiny” of the young nation. Settlers were expected to be self-sufficient, hardy, and pragmatic. Apple orchards were a necessary part of homesteads, so settlers either brought seeds and saplings with them or purchased them from traveling peddlers. One such salesman, John Chapman, figures prominently in the cultural history and mythology of Ohio and Indiana (Kerrigan 2012; Means 2011; Price 1954). Better known as Johnny Appleseed, Chapman (1774–1845) was originally from Massachusetts and a staunch Swedenborgian, a utopian religion that promoted peaceful coexistence with nature. He planted and sold innumerable apple trees in the eastern Midwest and established orchards on his homesteads in Mansfield, Ohio (north center of the state) and Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he is buried. Chapman turned into a legend, oftentimes assumed to be fictional and frequently portrayed as a cartoonish caricature with a tin pot on his head for a hat and bare feet. The image was popularized partly through the 1948 Walt Disney animated film, The Legend of Johnny Appleseed. The eastern Midwest, however, embraces him as a “hometown” hero, celebrating him at festivals, heritage events, and reenactments. A museum in Urbana, Ohio, is dedicated to him,7 and a 2016 bestselling novel set in northwest Ohio, Tracy Chevalier’s At the Edge of the Orchard, includes him as a major figure. Apples and apple products are today ubiquitous in the local food culture in the Midwest and readily available in supermarkets and restaurants. Memories around apples associate them for many Midwesterners with home, family, their own childhoods, and pioneer heritage as well as the broader generic idealized American images. How those memories have been acquired is the subject of the following ethnography and suggests ways in which food in general becomes meaningful to individuals and groups.

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APPLE FOODWAYS IN THE EASTERN MIDWEST: ACCUMULATING MEMORIES The foodways framework provides categories, albeit overlapping and intertwining ones, for describing as well as researching the various activities, contexts, and conceptualizations around apples. This description illuminates the points within the foodways system at which memories get created, attached, and affirmed. Production of apples in the eastern Midwest is both commercial and domestic, by amateurs and experts.8 Orchards are still a common part of the landscape, and suburban and even urban backyards frequently hold one or two apple trees.9 Springtime includes the smell of apple blossoms, while late summer and fall has the smell of overripe apples lying on the ground rotting, oftentimes accompanied with the sound of bees buzzing around them. The ubiquity of orchards—or at least a few trees—in the past meant that procuring apples was frequently a more personalized activity than going to the supermarket. Individuals recall visiting grandparents who still lived in rural areas and helping them pick apples from their trees—and then eating apple desserts made from them. Accounts of orchards at family farms oftentimes evoke warm memories of family gatherings and idyllic childhoods. Stealing apples from a neighbor’s tree or abandoned farms is a favorite theme among many of the men. One middle-aged white male who grew up in an industrial neighborhood outside the city of Toledo recounted as a teenager sneaking into a local farm that had apple trees. Getting chased out was part of the thrill, and the apples were usually used as projectiles as well as snacks (SP 2014). A popular ritual was visiting a local commercial orchard to select varieties not available in the supermarkets or to even pick your own. Families, schools, and other groups frequently made special outings of apple picking. A female respondent described a yearly ritual: My parents used to take the whole family (6 children and whatever neighbors and cousins could pile in) to a local apple-picking farm every fall in Michigan when we were growing up. Only dad was allowed to climb the ladder to get at the higher apples at first, and then as we grew older, it was a sort of “rite of passage” to be old enough to climb the ladder ourselves. We spent the whole afternoon picking apples, sampling different types, chasing each other around the arbors, and resting in the shade of the same trees. What wonderful memories! (SS 2009) These recalled memories suggest that apple trees and orchards make up the foodscape of many Midwesterners and in this way have become “sites of memory,” places in which we construct our perceptions of our histories (Weissberg 1999: 17–18). These sites highlight the rural heritage of the region and also affirm an identity that is tied to images of old-fashioned lifestyles and “pioneer” values of self-reliance, thriftiness, and industriousness (Long 2007). Apples were frequently preserved in the past by being stored in sawdust or newspapers in a cellar, enabling them to be available long past their harvest season. Sneaking into the storeroom for apples is a fond memory recalled by some individuals. Historically, some families also dried them, but more commonly, apples would be preserved by being made into jelly, applesauce, or “butter.”10 These methods were still being used during the time of my ethnography, particularly among individuals living on farms and also among families who had access to large quantities of the fruit. Since apples are now commonly

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available in American supermarkets year round, preservation is less of an issue; however, there were a number of individuals who said they refused to eat store-bought apples out of season, finding them tasteless. Preparation of apples for consumption as a component of foodways is complicated because they are one plant that can be consumed without being “worked,” as Claude Levi-Strauss referred to the transformation of raw ingredients into a cultural product called food (1968). They are frequently eaten raw as a refreshing snack, or used raw as an ingredient in salads and sweet treats. They can also be cooked, most frequently into sauce, preserves, and desserts or processed into juice, cider, or vinegar. Their flexibility as food is part of what makes apples so ubiquitous and offers so many opportunities for memories. According to researchers, raw apples are one of the most popular snacks in the nation, and that seems to hold true in this region as well.11 People I interviewed mentioned spreading peanut butter on apple slices as a habit they continued into adulthood. For a treat, especially at Halloween, apple slices were smothered with caramel sauce. Caramel and chocolate dips, made specifically for apples, are now available in supermarkets and are usually displayed next to the apples, making the snack more widespread, less tied to specific festive events or rituals, and perhaps less memorable. One individual described how “during the winter, I often serve Granny Smith apple slices and individual dishes of melted caramel to friends” (JW 2009). Whole apples were frequently included in lunches packed from home for school, work, or outings. Neatly protected by their skin, they could easily be carried in a bag or pocket with no other packaging needed. They could then be munched on whenever wanted. Some mentioned disadvantages of whole apples—they were messy, hard to bite into, more than the person wanted at the time. Preparation for these raw apples usually involved no more than washing and drying, but some also insisted that their apples be peeled prior to eating. A single apple could easily be peeled with a knife, but a larger amount usually called for an “apple peeler,” a mechanical device that secured the apple on a long rod that would be hand cranked against a sharp edge. One individual recalled: “My Grandfather and dad had several different apple peelers (most of them antiques, I think, because intermittently they would fall apart and require a prompt fix amid ridicule and laughter), and they would have a competition to see who could peel the most apples” (JW 2009). Such peelers tend to be held onto as family heirlooms and are frequently displayed in homes, antique shops, museums, and other sites wanting to demonstrate a connection to regional history. Whole apples were also skewered on a stick and dipped into crystalized sugar, melted cinnamon candies, or caramel. Commercially produced candy or caramel apples are now frequently available on a seasonal basis in tourist shops, heritage sites, and festivals, but are also made at home. These evoke memories—oftentimes of mishaps while trying to eat a whole apple on a stick and either getting covered with the caramel coating or dropping part of the apple to the ground. Variations on caramel apples are now popular. Elaborate additions of nuts, chocolate, and icing to these apples turn them festive as well as into expensive “gourmet” items. A variation that bypasses the potential messiness is a “blossom,” in which the apple is taken off the stick, sliced, and served on a dish. Additional sauces may be poured over the slices, which can then be eaten with toothpicks or utensils. This variation has reduced mishaps and tears—and possibly memories—associated with the more transportable apple on a stick. Apples are also “worked” into other forms. One of the simplest is drying them after they are cored, peeled, and cut into rings. Dried apples tend to be perceived as old-fashioned,

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associated with the Amish or pioneer life. They also are seen as a healthy snack. Similarly, peeled and sliced apples are cooked with added sugar and lemon juice and served as a side dish in many restaurants in the region that feature home-style cooking and more traditional fare. Preparation of apples included processing them into condiments, toppings, or side dishes. Three distinctive products that share similar ingredients and functions are apple butter, apple jelly, and applesauce. The first has an antiquated connotation. It originated in the 1700s in Pennsylvania adapted from plum preserves by Germanic immigrants. The tradition was carried into the eastern Midwest,12 where it was maintained as a family and ethnic tradition. Apple cider is boiled down until thick, then chopped apples and, sometimes sugar, are added and boiled also. The mixture is usually made in large copper or iron kettles that has to be stirred constantly, over an open flame. The process takes several days, and extended family members and neighbors may be called in to help with the “stirring,” turning it into a domestic celebration. In the last few decades, apple butter stirrings have become a feature of many seasonal and heritage festive events (Long 2003). Other families told of making smaller batches of apple butter in a slow cooker or on a pot on the stove. This modern method lacked the smoky flavor of the outdoor variety, but could be achieved easily by one individual at any time of year. Some cooks followed the recipe of boiling down apple cider first, but others simply cooked down applesauce until it was thickened into a spread. Sugar and spices (cinnamon, cloves, allspice) could be added to taste. The same spices were sometimes added to apple jelly, whose culinary form has a pragmatic historical basis. Apples have a high content of pectin that naturally thickens, transforming heated apple juice into a clear spread, making it one of the few jellies that could be produced without the addition of thickeners. Recipes today usually add sugar and lemon juice and sometimes mix in other fruit juices.13 In the eastern Midwest, apple jelly is oftentimes homemade and sold at orchards, farmers markets, history museums, and stores with “old-timey” décor and merchandise. It is then usually consumed on buttered toast or in a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, incorporating the special into the banal.14 Apples are also commonly processed into applesauce, reflecting probably a culinary history from medieval and even Ancient Roman times (Janik 2011). The apples are slowly cooked into a thick consistency, and sugar and lemon juice are usually added. Historically, this sauce frequently accompanied meats, particularly pork, and is said to have helped with digestion (ibid.). Homemade applesauce seems to have been a mainstay of most rural homes in the eastern Midwest. One individual told of picking apples from her family’s orchard specifically for applesauce and only being allowed to eat the apples that had already fallen to the ground. Apparently, the fallen apples would contain worms, bees, and bits of grass, but these could be easily picked out as an individual ate them. Other families seemed to do just the opposite. Apples were also frequently the featured ingredient in desserts—cakes, pies, and pastries. Some of these reflect the ethnic settlement of the region. Apple pie, a household and restaurant standard, is perceived as quintessentially American, an image supported by its commonplace use in colonial foodways (Edge 2004). In the Midwest it is commonly eaten for Thanksgiving dinner, but also as a dessert for any meal and is usually topped with whipped cream (or commercially produced substitutions) or ice cream. Although its British and Dutch roots are not well known, it carries a pioneer association that fits easily into Midwestern identity, . Less common are apple crisps and cobblers, which is perhaps

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not surprising since cobblers are associated more with New England and crisps with the east coast and south.15 The popularity of apple cake (apfel kuchen) and apple crumb (streusel) cake reflects the prevalence of German immigrants settling in the rural Midwest in the mid- and late 1800s. Both desserts have a layer of dough covered with sliced apples. The kuchen has a topping of sugar and butter (and a little bit of flour) that crusts nicely on baking, while crumb cake topping has more flour and is more substantial. Both are closer to cookie bars than cakes, and both appear in families, festive events, and orchards as celebrations of German as well as regional heritage. A dessert with a distinctive image of the past is apple dumpling, a whole peeled and cored apple sprinkled with sugar and spices (cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg), wrapped in dough, and baked. It is then topped with whipped cream, ice cream, or a sauce (caramel or chocolate are the usual choices). Several interviewees remember their grandmothers making these with scraps left over from pie crusts. Thought to have originated in British and Germanic peasant cultures, apple dumplings in the United States are usually associated with the Pennsylvania Dutch, who probably added raisins and butter to the apples. Since many of the farming families in the Midwest came originally from the Mid-Atlantic, it is quite possible that they carried the recipe for apple dumplings with them in the late 1700s and 1800s. Be that as it may, at least one town in northwest Ohio holds a festival celebrating the pastry, and other heritage events frequently offer apple dumplings. Apples are also chopped up and folded into batter for cakes, pancakes, muffins, and other pastries. Doughnuts made with chopped apples, applesauce, or cider are popular attractions offered by orchards and festivals in the fall. These do not seem to be distinctive to the region and seem to hold special memories on an individual basis related only to specific venues. A ubiquitous way of “working” apples is to turn them into drinkable liquids: juice, cider, hard (alcoholic) cider, wine, ale, and beer (Watson 2013). These are made first by squeezing the fruits to get the juice, then, unless for cider, straining out the apple pulp. Apple juice is one of the most popular juices given to infants and children in the United States and is frequently used in other juice drinks. It seems to be so commonplace that it is unmemorable for most of the individuals I talked to. Cider, however, was distinctive in evoking memories of autumn and activities associated with that season, such as Halloween celebrations, visiting pumpkin patches or apple orchards, raking leaves, and so forth. A popular memory among older individuals is visiting cider mills and tasting the freshly pressed cider. Laws requiring cider to be pasteurized have closed down most mills, but cider pressing is frequently included at festivals and demonstrations of pioneer life. Hard cider is making a resurgence in the Midwest and elsewhere, reflecting current trends in home brewing and eating seasonally and sustainably. Its place in American history is also being exploited in marketing, although few individuals I spoke to associated hard cider with the region; most recalled first tasting it on visits to Europe. Other alcoholic drinks made from apples include applejack, apple brandy, and cocktails and other mixed drinks made with apple juice. “Apple pie,” a concoction of moonshine (grain alcohol) and cider, seemed to be a favorite and was frequently mentioned in interviews and informal chats. It apparently can be rather potent, especially for unsuspecting consumers, and memories of unfortunate incidents were recounted with a certain amount of glee. The final components of foodways mentioned in the interviews include presentation and disposal or clean-up. Apples were frequently presented in homes in an informal but artistic display in fruit bowls on a counter or table. This not only makes them easily

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available for healthy snacking but also added a visual image carrying the popular associations of apples as representing home and family. This presentation of apples seemed to be so commonplace that individuals tended to dismiss them as simply part of the décor. In discussions, however, they recognized that the practice evoked memories of their past and could be considered a tradition—it was something their mothers and grandmothers had done. I noticed similar presentations of apples, perhaps for the same reasons, in commercial spaces, local history museums, and festive events. Also, apple forms and images were frequently used to decorate kitchens, apparently to give a “homey” atmosphere. Apples are easily disposed of and can be prepared and consumed with little cleaning up. In the past, peels, cores, and unwanted whole apples were usually fed to farm animals or composted. Today, they can still be tossed into bushes or grass where animals quickly consume them.

RITUALS AND FESTIVE EVENTS AROUND APPLES: AFFIRMING AND INVENTING COLLECTIVE MEMORIES Apples figure in private events, such as school trips to orchards; family outings to pick apples; and friends and neighbors gathering to stir apple butter or press cider. All of these take on a ritualistic character since they tend to recur annually and reference family, friends, or the season. They are more clearly ritual objects when they appear in fall holiday celebrations—bobbing for apples in a bucket of water at Halloween parties;16 candied and caramel apples for harvest festivals and Halloween events; apple pie for the Thanksgiving meal; and apples dipped in honey for the Jewish holiday, Rosh Hashanah. Numerous seasonal public events in this part of the Midwest celebrate apples. Towns and civic organizations hold festivals as fundraisers and to create tourism destinations; orchards host events to bring in customers; and museums and heritage sites offer festivals as education and entertainment. Many focus on apples themselves or on particular apple products, such as apple butter, cider, or apple dumplings.17 There also are festivals specifically celebrating Johnny Appleseed in some of the locales known to have an historical connection to him. These include reenactors of the character along with varieties of apple products.18 Other festivals include apples in their celebration of heritage, place, or the season. Dory Noyes and Roger Abrahams (1999) argues that such festivals are successful because they build upon preexisting memories that are shared with other attendees, giving rise to a sense of collective identity. Similarly, in Liliane Weissburg’s words, public rituals “have turned into theaters that help us both to recall and to construct our own historical identity” (1999: 17–18). These theaters validate the significance of activities from the past. Not all apple picking was ritualistic or celebratory. For many farm families in the past, it was also a chore that had to be done in order to eat or survive economically. Memories of those activities might not even be pleasant. The festivals recast those activities as significant, allowing for new interpretations. An example of how individual memories become collective ones is the Grand Rapids Apple Butter Fest in northwest Ohio. The event was started in 1976 as a fundraiser for the local heritage society and schools. The Kryder family offered their tradition of apple

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butter making as the centerpiece of the event. Part of the local farming community since the mid-1800s, they invited interested individuals to their farm to make apple butter and to demonstrate the stirring at the festival itself. The one-day event quickly became a popular destination and now draws crowds of up to 100,000 every October. It has expanded to include crafts, vendors of all types, music performances, and a “heritage” demonstration area. Many attendees spoke of the memories of their own pasts that are evoked by the smells and tastes of the apple butter there.19 Others said the fest offered their first taste of apple butter and the event created many memories for them. One older woman enthusiastically told of coming every year: “I just love it. I love the smell of the apple butter; I love the music; I love the crafts and all the people. It’s just not fall without it” (Anon. 1999). Even if individuals do not have childhood memories of apples, the festivals offer a space in which to create such memories. The Johnny Appleseed Festival in Fort Wayne, Indiana, for example, is held at a state park surrounding Chapman’s gravesite. The grave is at the top of a hill, set inside a gated, but open, fence and identified by historical markers. Visitors wander around the grave, and children play in the surrounding apple trees. Many local residents at the festival were aware that Johnny Appleseed had lived in Fort Wayne from 1840s until 1845, but others seemed to have no knowledge of him and were just enjoying the festivities. They expressed surprise when they learned he was more than a fictional character and seemed to then look at the event differently, as an historical celebration rather than a strictly seasonal festival. Several attendees said they brought their children to experience some of the activities they had experienced in the past. In this way, they hoped to create memories that could be shared across generations. One father summed it up: “I want them to know about their history. And it’s a fun family event that we do every year” (Anon. 2017). Most of these festivals also offer a variety of events, engaging audiences in different ways—games, music, craft demonstrations, baking competitions, and historical reenactments. Some include flea markets, antique sales, and oftentimes, local orchards sell apples and apple products. Food vendors are ubiquitous, serving a variety of items, along with apple-based foods. The Kendallville (Indiana) Apple Festival, started in 1985, was typical.20 Held in early October, the event offered several stages for music felt to fit the pioneer theme, including lap dulcimers, which were not likely to have been known in the area until the latter 1900s but nationally carry an old-fashioned image. Bluegrass, old-time, folk groups, and clogging teams entertained audiences. Actors portraying Johnny Appleseed and Abraham Lincoln wandered through the festival greeting visitors. A storyteller dressed as Mother Goose entertained children. A variety of contests were held, including one for home baked goods emphasizing apples, with competition categories of apple pie, quick breads, muffins, biscuits, cakes, and cookies. A “Ladies Skillet Throw” and a “Tomahawk Throw” were held in the “primitive area” of the festival where reenactments were being performed. Both contests mandated that competitors “must be in costume.” Children (without costumes) could compete in “Apple Rings,” “Frog Flipping” (with plastic frogs),” and an “Apple Toss.” On Sunday morning, a nondenominational church service was held. Individuals frequently emphasized the ability to personalize the experience by choosing different activities to participate in and different foods to consume. Many also participated with family, friends, church groups, or civic organizations. In this way, the festival could simultaneously celebrate and create collective as well as personal memories.

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APPLE MEMORIES AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF REGION AS IMAGINED COMMUNITY If one takes all of the practices and meanings around apples in the Midwest, we can understand how such memories have turned the fruit into “objects of memory” that play a number of roles in peoples’ lives. In varied contexts and for different people, they can be described by each of the types suggested by Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, increasing their evocative and performative power.21 For many residents, they are perhaps best categorized as material companions and memory objects. The first refers to objects that have been a “continuous and quotidian presence” throughout the life of the owner of those memories (1989: 331). As shown above, apples are steady but often mundane fixtures of Midwestern life, unmemorable many times other than the continuity they represent. Apple foodways furthermore weave them into other aspects of everyday life, so that memories of them are tied to numerous events and activities. Apples are turned into memory objects in several ways. It may be after their value has been recognized, something that may happen when an individual becomes nostalgic; they become memory objects that can evoke memories of their own. Some of these objects then become collectibles, a category of objects made valuable by virtue of that particular past being valued (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1989). Furthermore, public events celebrating apples also add value to them, turning them into memory objects and collectibles, by highlighting heritage. This emphasis draws attention to the continuity (both imagined and actual) with the past represented by apples, demonstrating that individuals in this region were living history on a daily basis. It also draws attention to the memory bearers themselves as valued authorities of the culture. Part of the way that this happens is through popular souvenirs, with apple and apple-motifed objects intentionally made to commemorate and recall an experience. Such objects are then given as gifts, sharing the memories and extending the imagined community. These objects can then be gathered into “ensembles” that draw together a variety of memories and attempt to make sense of the life they represent. A grouping of apples can evoke memories of past orchards, picking apples, biting into them, or preparing them for pies, cakes, and other foods. Similarly, both private and public events featuring apples can act as ensembles by including several components of apple foodways, such as preparation of apples, consumption of a variety of apple products, baking competitions, throwing apple cores as a game, or watching a cooking demonstration. The range of activities offers a variety of sensory experiences around apples as well as a variety of ways by which an individual might be involved. As such, these collections offer a narrative of both personal and collective pasts. Aside from Johnny Appleseed, these memories of apples are not distinctive to the eastern Midwest. They are shared across the nation, but that might actually be a reason why apples are significant to this region. Henry Ward Beecher in 1874 referred to apples as a democratic fruit (Futrell 2017). They, in theory, are available and accessible to everyone living in the nation, not just literally, but also metaphorically. They are not unusual, too expensive, or too fancy. They are practical and pragmatic. They are sturdy and long lasting. They are an uncomplicated fruit to eat (although not to grow). They can be dressed up, made gourmet, but most often are every day, plain, and straightforward. These qualities fit with the image of Midwesterners as “middle America,” not just geographically, but culturally, socially, and ethically. By celebrating apples, this region celebrates the ideals of itself, as self-sufficient and pragmatic with hands-on skills, grounded in traditional values but also embracing modern technologies.

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As objects of memory, apples have firmly become part of the collective imagination of residents of this region. Even individuals who do not have those memories in their own pasts are able to participate in them through public celebrations. As such, apple foodways have created a sense of shared memories that make up an imagined community tied to this geographic place, turning it into a cultural region.

CONCLUSION This analysis of apples as objects of memory in the eastern Midwest contributes to our understanding of food and memory in general. The quality of memory attached to food products and activities and the ways those memories are created can differ and reflect a variety of processes. The concept of foodways reinforces the fact that food is intertwined with all other aspects of everyday and festive life and involves a variety of sensory experiences. This wealth of activities surrounding food offers numerous occasions for memories to be attached—oftentimes without the individual or group realizing until after the fact—and to accumulate into meaningful representations of the past, place, and people. These memories can be personalized and localized for each individual holding them, but public events celebrate the sharing of them, both reflecting and creating collective identities.

NOTES 1 For statistics on global apple production (second, after bananas): https://www.researchgate. net/figure/World-fruit-and-vegetable-production-Source-IBISWorld-Industry-Report-GlobalFruit_fig3_311404498. 2 This essay is based on fieldwork begun in the late 1990s throughout the eastern Midwest, primarily northwest Ohio. Ethnography consisted of informal and formal interviews with apple producers and consumers, observations at events celebrating apples and sites for their production, and soliciting memories from university students and residents of this region informally as well as at public presentations. The length of time of the project makes it difficult to quantify the numbers of interviews conducted and events attended; however, between 2016 and 2019, I conducted interviews at five orchards, three cideries, three museums, and at least twelve festivals in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The majority of the interviewees reflected the demographics of the rural Midwest—white with a variety of western European heritages. Only two orchard owners were non-white—a Mexican whose wife was white and had inherited it from her family, and an African American man in northwest Ohio who had an orchard on his property but did not run it as a commercial venture. The festivals and educational events drew audiences from nearby cities and tended to include people of color, but they were so few that they stood out. Class and religion were not obvious. 3 Deborah Lupton argues that these personal memories “have a social nature” so that “memory is regarded as a cultural construction which operates beyond the individual level” (1994: 668). 4 I borrow here from Benedict Anderson’s concept of a nation as a socially constructed “imagined community” in which individual residents come to think of themselves as citizens (1983). Region similarly is a social-cultural construction built around features of a natural environment utilized and shaped physically and conceptually by humans. 5 In 2018, China was the largest, followed by Poland, Italy, and France. http://usapple.org/ the-industry/apple-industry-at-a-glance/.

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6 http://usapple.org/the-industry/apple-industry-at-a-glance/. 7 The Johnny Appleseed Educational Center and Museum is attached to Urbana University in Urbana, OH, run by the Swedenborgian Church. 8 https://web.extension.illinois.edu/apples/facts.cfm. 9 Public orchards open to the public number just over 100 in Ohio. (http://www.ohioapples. com/Ohio_Apples_Orchards_Counties.php); 1,100 apple “farms” in Michigan in a 1997 survey (https://www.applejournal.com/mi01.htm); and almost 70 in Indiana (https://www. orangepippin.com/orchards/united-states/indiana). 10 Historically, recipes for making these were commonly included in cookbooks. Preserving food was not only necessary to feed one’s family but also represented the characteristics of successful housewives—thriftiness, resourcefulness, and good management skills. For example: Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, first published in 1876 by the women of the Marysville, Ohio First Congregational Church. (Reprint, 1988, by Minnesota Historical Society Press in St. Paul and edited by Estelle Woods Wilcox.) 11 Estimated per capita annual consumption of fresh apples in 2018/2019 was 16.91 lbs, down from a high of 19.15 lbs in 2016/2017. https://www.statista.com/statistics/257167/ per-capita-consumption-of-fresh-apples-in-the-us/. 12 It was also taken into the southern Appalachian Mountain region, but is usually made there by cooking down applesauce rather than apple cider. 13 Crabapples are frequently used for jelly, but this indigenous fruit is not the same species as apples. 14 Beth Forrest pointed this out to me. It could be seen also as a juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane. 15 Apple crisp is frequently presented in marketing as an “old-fashioned” dessert, however, it did not appear until the 1920s when the main ingredient for the topping, rolled oats, became commercially available. 16 The American tradition, in which individuals use just their mouths to catch apples floating in a bucket, probably developed from the Irish in which the apples hang from above by a string. 17 The University of Illinois Extension offers a comprehensive list: https://extension.illinois. edu/apples/festivals.cfm. 18 The largest is in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Others featured on the internet are in Lima, OH; Brunswick, OH; Lisbon, OH; Sheffield, PA; and Crystal Lake, IL. 19 I observed and interviewed numerous participants and visitors to the fest between 1986 and 2003, while I produced a documentary and published an article on the event (Long 2001, 2003). 20 I attended this festival for three years (2017, 2018, and 2019) as a performer of old-time music. While there, I listened to audiences discuss the event and also did informal interviews. 21 I use the concept of performativity in which language can cause social action (Austin 1962; Butler 1990) to point out that objects of memory can also cause actions: an apple triggers memories that then stir an individual to the action of baking a pie based on a family recipe that is part of those memories.

REFERENCES Anderson, B. (1983), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso Books. Anon. (1999), Fieldwork interview by Lucy Long. Informal discussions with audience at festival. Anon. (2017), Fieldwork interview by Lucy Long. Informal discussions with audience at festival.

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Austin, J. (1962), How to Do Things with Words, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Browning, F. (1998), Apples: The Story of the Fruit of Temptation, New York: North Point Press. Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble, New York: Routledge. Edge, J. T. (2004), Apple Pie: An American Story, New York: Putnam. Futrell, S. (2017), Good Apples: Behind Every Bite, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Holtzman, J. D. (2006), “Food and Memory,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 35 (1): 361–78. Janik, E. (2011), Apple: A Global History, London: Reaction Books. Juniper, B., and D. Mabberley (2006), The Story of the Apple, Portland, OR: Timber Press. JW (2009), Fieldwork interview by Lucy Long (written response), Bowling Green, Ohio. Kerrigan, W. (2012), Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard: A Cultural History, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (1989), “Objects of Memory: Material Culture as Life Review,” in E. Oring (ed.), Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: A Reader, 329–38, Logan: Utah State University Press. Lape, F. (1979), Apples & Man, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Levi-Strauss, C. ([1968] 1978), The Origin of Table Manners: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, Vol. 3, trans. J. and D. Weightman, New York: Harper and Row. Long, L. (2001), [video] Stirring Up the Past: The Grand Rapids Apple Butter Fest WBGU-TV. Long, L. (2003), “Apple Butter in Northwest Ohio: Food Festivals and the Construction of Local Meaning,” in C. Sanchez Carretero and J. Santino (eds.), Holidays, Rituals and Festivals: Proceedings from the Conference, 45–66, Alcalá: University of Alcalá, Spain. Long, L. (2007), “Greenbean Casserole and Midwestern Identity: A Regional Foodways Aesthetic and Ethos,” Midwestern Folklore, 33 (1): 29–44. Long, L. (ed.) (2015), Food and Folklore: A Reader, New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Lupton, D. (1994), “Food, Memory and Meaning: The Symbolic and Social Nature of Food Events,” Sociological Review, 42 (4): 664–85. Martin, A. (1976), All about Apples, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Means, H. (2011), Johnny Appleseed: The Man, the Myth, the American Story, New York: Simon and Schuster. Noyes, D., and R. Abrahams (1999), “From Calendar Custom to National Memory: European Commonplaces,” in D. Ben-Amos and L. Weissberg (eds.), Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity, 77–98, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Pollan, M. (2001), A Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World, New York: Random House. Powell, S. (2012), America’s Apple, Hatfield, MA: Brook Hollow Press. Price, R. (1954), Johnny Appleseed: Man & Myth, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sax, B. (1999), “Apples,” in David Scofield Wilson and Angus K. Gillespie (eds.), Rooted in America: Foodlore of Popular Fruits and Vegetables, 1–22, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. SP (2009), Fieldwork interview by Lucy Long (written response), Bowling Green, Ohio. SS (2009), Fieldwork interview by Lucy Long, Ohio, 2009. Sutton, D. (2001), Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory, Oxford: Berg. Watson, B. (2013), Cider, Hard and Sweet: History, Traditions, and Making Your Own, Woodstock, VT: Countryman Press. Weissberg, L. (1999), “Introduction,” in D. Ben-Amos and L. Weissberg (eds.), Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity, 7–26, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Wilcox, E. W. (ed.) ([1876] 1988), Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press. Wynne, P. (1975), Apples History, Folklore, Horticulture, and Gastronomy, New York: Hawthorn.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Reverse-Engineered Terroir: Reimagining Taste and Identity THOMAS PARKER

Leave it to Americans to “reverse engineer” terroir. It didn’t take long to go from first self-consciously employing the term in the 1990s to repurposing it fewer than twenty years later in a way that rethinks agriculture and culinary aesthetics. In some ways, a new riff on terroir is not surprising. Countries all over the world have adapted the notion to apply it in different contexts, and the French themselves, after borrowing the terroir principle from ancient agricultural models and theories of climate determinism, have modified and reappropriated the term several times over the past five hundred years (Parker 2015). Terroir, which is often termed, “a sense of place,” is the notion that the physiographic qualities of a food or wine’s origin leaves a gustatory imprint that is as individualized as the product’s origin. In tasting, one can taste the mark of the place (the physical soil structure, the climate, the altitude, the region’s particular flora, fauna, and even the microbial denizens of the soil) and the diverse relationships that each of these elements entertains with the food or beverage in question. The term commonly includes notions of cultural tradition as well, since the artisanship and way of working the land have a part in determining how a diverse palette of flavors becomes a reflection of a given geographic origin. As such, there is a romantic and nostalgic aspect of terroir. It is as if by tasting a food and mapping it to an area of origin, one were able to embark on a journey through the senses and discover a naturalized history of people and places. Through terroir, we paradoxically use something as transitory and perishable as food to immortalize the memory of those who passed before us and actualize a perception of how they coexisted with the land. Different countries and cultures have made use of the notion of terroir, sometimes expanding its meaning beyond food itself (e.g., to talk about music or poetry). The Americanization of the term, though, has been especially bold. Not only have Americans extended the concept to such foods as Vermont maple syrup, Ossabaw Island hogs, and Floridian Tupelo honey, which were not traditionally (or, at least, not explicitly) considered from a terroir perspective, but they also coined the term “meroir,” the terroir of the sea (Atkinson 2003), and eagerly adopted the notion of “aeroir,” the unique effect of the regional air on the surrounding produce. Over the next few pages, I would like

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to explore a new American way, not only of tasting and conceiving terroir, but of doing it. Below, I will lay out how reverse-engineered terroir (henceforth RET), a term coined by Mateo Kehler of Jasper Hill Creamery in Greensboro, Vermont, and documented by Heather Paxson in a 2010 American Anthropologist article, reimagines place and creates local identity and nuanced conceptions of traditional terroir (henceforth, TT). I will build on Paxson’s work, documenting ways RET has evolved since 2010, especially with respect to new work on microbial terroir, and further shed light on the construct of “doing terroir,” by addressing a revealing question concerning aesthetics, taste, and natural beauty, originally raised by Emmanuel Kant. Most of all, I will ask: To what extent does American RET threaten the existence of French TT?

THE CONTEXT OF TERROIR Terroir is firmly entrenched in France’s agricultural and culinary traditions, with expectations of how certain foods, such as Burgundy wine or Roquefort cheese, should be grown, formed, fashioned, presented, and taste, which go back hundreds of years. The French also possess a formidable administrative component, the Institut National de l’Origine et de la Qualité (known as the INAO), which legitimizes and formalizes terroir in the collective consciousness. In 2016, the INAO website listed 460 different recognized alimentary terroirs with annual sales of 20 billion euros. Terroir, viewed in these terms, is a pillar that upholds French culinary tradition, creating an administrative structure that perennially links certain foods and wines to a place-specific set of agricultural productions, cultural practices, and an articulated set of gustatory qualities. It incites agricultural economic development and, once defined according to specific criteria, serves as a bulwark protecting against change from the outside. America lacks the support and protection that an institution like the INAO provides. On the other hand, with no existing standard to uphold and no potentially stultifying traditions or rules to conform to, producers have the conceptual freedom to reimagine and apply terroir in new ways: not by looking back, but by looking forward and imagining broader parameters for the alimentary product in question. When Andy and Mateo Kehler founded Jasper Hill Creamery in 2003, they saw a chance to rehabilitate the Vermont countryside, formerly occupied by small family farms, and create a terroir-based product that would not have the same constraints as a European production (Paxson 2010: 452). Besides making great cheese and repurposing abandoned agricultural land, the Kehlers set out to create a new way of subsisting in the region. Instead of being the product of terroir, subject to constraints of extant conditions and traditions, the Kehlers built their own terroir and tradition. Instead of being caught up in a causal structure determined by terroir, the Kehlers, through their vision, would determine terroir. As Paxson describes the new American RET tradition, the Kehlers, and other cheesemakers like them, are more interested in the conditions that produce the cheese than the cheese itself. Whereas TT is usually focused on understanding and analyzing the causal factors linked to place to enjoy taste, the Kehlers sought in taste the means by which they could fulfill their ends of imagining and creating a terroir. The reversal of the TT philosophy applied from the macro level of shaping the land (the brothers dynamited the side of a mountainside to make their cheese caves, which they envisioned as a facility serving not only themselves, but also farmers in the region who wanted to make cheese but lacked the resources), to the web of animals and the human community (their website invites visitors contemplating a new career to “join the herd”), to the business structure

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that had to be put in place (there was no pre-established tradition of marketing valueadded “terroir” cheeses in the area), to the sensorial qualities of the product. Jasper Hill set out to take TT one step further, connecting flavor to a series of wider ethical values reflecting not merely the land as it existed, but as they wanted it to exist, repurposing, for example, territory that had fallen into disuse into a rejuvenated agricultural community whose members were bound by close personal ties and a shared ecological vision. Cheese, in this respect, is a particularly promising model. For one, cheese is more adaptable to different climate conditions than wine, and thus terroirs can be reverse engineered more widely. Cheese terroirs can appear in a less select (and therefore less pricey) geographic local than the wine-growing areas in the United States. Most importantly, there has been a cheese revolution occurring in the United States since the early 2000s, in which value-added cheeses have become much more sought after, making America a propitious starting point both for terroir-driven cheese and a RET philosophy. That does not mean there are no challenges. TT in European countries comes with a market that ostensibly understands the product in question. This is not at all the case in the United States where, before a terroir is explained, consumers do not know what to expect and how to appreciate it. Consumers have to be taught the tools of appreciation, and why an excessively fragrant cave-aged cheese, for example, might be considered succulent instead of revolting. Establishing a consumer base is a vital part of RET: no interested eaters, no terroir. In other words, terroir products are costly and labor-intensive. Without an educated (and passionate) eating public willing to seek out and pay for products benefitting from a particular terroir’s qualities, a terroir is doomed to be forgotten, perhaps before it is ever widely recognized. Although both American cheese and wine producers look to Europe for models, riffing off, say, the fungus in Roquefort and the washed rind in Époisses, in one case, or the pinot noir grape of Burgundy and the cabernet sauvignon of Bordeaux in the other to realize their vision, a central function of RET is to create a separate identity. In this sense, European TT models serve as a foil: penicillium roqueforti grown in an American cheese, such as Jasper Hill’s Bayley Hazen Blue, partially derives an identity in how it is different from Roquefort cheese (“more accessible and balanced in its flavor profile,” explains the website). Finally, even if there are elements of nostalgia, RET is more forward looking. American farmers like the Kehlers take pleasure in reimagining land that was once agricultural and reinhabiting the abandoned barns of small dairy farms with a vision toward the future. In this respect as well, RET offers the opportunity to “create” a terroir.

CONTEXTUALIZING RET THROUGH TT MODELS RET reverses TT insofar as the accent is no longer on nature’s power to shape agricultural output, but of course terroir has always been a concept in which humans intervene, perceiving and interacting with agricultural space, crops, and planting conditions to obtain a desired output. Bringing to light the range of conceptions in which TT frames human agency with respect to agriculture helps contextualize what’s different in RET. The first of three important TT iterations harkens back to before “terroir” was linked primarily to culinary aesthetics. In sixteenth-century France, terroir was correlated with medical humors and health, on the one hand, and on farming choices, on the other. In the latter case, it was used to indicate what sort of land was appropriate for a particular crop. Such was the word’s importance in France’s most famous agricultural manual, Le Théâtre d’Agriculture (1600). The book’s author, Olivier de Serres, asserted that peasants

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who managed the land did not understand the terroir, and that France’s upper classes ought to take an interest in farming, applying reason and method to create the perfect estate. De Serres’s vision was not focused on outward terroir for aesthetics, but inward on how the estate owner could understand the land to create an idealized version of his estate. He would do this by possessing a holistic perspective that imagined plants and animals growing in harmony with human agents. The estate owner could then unlock the land’s inherent potential. De Serres’s work had a marked influence on later generations of farmers, and his vision shapes what has remained the primary ethos of contemporary agriculturalists with respect to TT: producers attempt to create a product in harmony with what they consider the terroir’s natural potential, perceiving themselves as merely the conveyance for the natural products they wish to produce. De Serres placed humans not as an overarching agent, but as causal elements within the system who would shape the terroir, but not create, alter, or override it. At the other extreme in TT’s early modern history is the potager du roi, or “the king’s garden,” in Louis XIV’s Versailles. The garden was built, from 1678 to 1683, on swamp land so improbable for agriculture that the king’s lead gardener, Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie, howled about the inappropriateness of the decision. But when the king later boasted that he was able to cultivate fruits, such as oranges, from exotic climates, fooling people of their provenance, it became clear that technology (systems of irrigation, drainage, green houses, and pruning techniques) and investment allowed him to construct an environment that overrode the natural climatic conditions. The control over nature doubled as an outward sign (and warning) of the king’s political and military invincibility. If the king was able to exercise such dominance over the natural world, little question remained of how powerful he would be in the military domain (Mukerji 1997). Louis XIV was not creating a place in order to instill a sense of holism. Nor was he in search of a terroir with specific characteristics. Indeed, La Quintinie states clearly in his agricultural manual that the best terroir is the most neutral (La Quintinie 1692). The object was to override terroir and use it as a blank canvas to grow plants, fruits, and vegetables not necessarily indigenous to Paris and Versailles. Their version of terroir left nothing to the intrinsic power of nature and everything to nature’s dominance by science and technology. The corresponding modern iteration of this view confers a central technical role to the producer, relegating terroir to the secondary role as a “spice,” if allowing it any role at all. Cheesemakers might, for example, use pasteurized milk with a low microbial population to inoculate the cheese with only the bacteria and fungi they themselves put there. Winemakers might inoculate their grapes with cultured yeasts instead of those occurring naturally, allowing humans to control the ultimate flavors that arise from the fermentation. At the extreme, such practices allow winemakers to shape flavors in spite of the terroir. Such is the case with flash détente, a French- and Italian-designed process that heats the grapes to 180 degrees over several seconds and extracts a variety of aromas that many tasters deem less palatable, such as pyrazines, which produce herbaceous vegetal notes in wine. “Flashed” wines display brighter fruit, but the process potentially strips wines of nuanced secondary and tertiary aromas that would develop during their evolution. These techniques are not about shaping the terroir, but rather modifying it or editing it out. A last tradition goes to the extreme in the other way, which includes the natural wine movement that has been in vogue since the 1990s, first in France, and then further afield (Spain, Italy, Slovenia, Georgia, the United States, etc.), as well as organic and biodynamic practices that arose initially through the theories of Rudolf Steiner at the

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beginning of the twentieth century. Biodynamics attempts to comprehend and integrate what have so far been inscrutable natural rhythms, such as the effect of the waxing and waning moon, on agricultural productions. A part of the attraction is the mysticism in the methods (which include burying cow manure in a horn on the farm, letting it age for a year, and then spraying a highly diluted version of the concoction over the entirety of the vineyard). So-called “natural wines” also refrain from adding sulfur dioxide to the wines, which is traditionally used as a stabilizing agent. Finally, indigenous yeasts from the grapes are used without the inoculation of cultured yeasts, which leaves the control of the fermentation much more to chance than the hands of the winemaker. Biodynamics in dairy focuses on maintaining the health of the animals with minimal intervention (e.g., leaving cows with their horns intact) and concentrating on the microbial health of the soil, while following a biodynamic calendar with respect to the position of the moon, sun, planets, and constellations for making practical decisions about composting, milking, harvesting, and so on. RET sits in a curious place with respect to these three ideologies: it assumes a human capacity to create a terroir as Versailles had, but it also seeks to insert itself into the natural cycle and to create a viable ecosystem (à la De Serres). Perhaps most interestingly, it reverse engineers some of the creative, unscripted agency that occurs in biodynamic practices. The relevance of this third category in the cheese world comes into sharp focus in juxtaposition with a sort of microbial reverse engineering of terroir, invented in the past ten years, that threatens the very existence of TT.

REVERSE ENGINEERING MICROBIAL TERROIR Place-specific microbes influence no terroir product more dramatically than cheese. The microbes initially present in milk are determined by the types of animals used (cow, sheep, goat), their breed, as well as macro- and micro-environmental factors (such as animal bedding conditions), and the animal’s forage (whether it be indigenous grasses, wildflowers, silage, or fodder). Where, how, and how long the cheese is aged also determines the microbial communities on the rind and dramatically alters the flavor of the final product. This microbial activity, both of fungi and bacteria, factors into the development of the color, texture, smell, and flavor of the cheese. In some respects, all cheese producers enact a RET process, since the storage conditions (physical location of the aging facility, pH, temperature, and humidity) will play an overriding role in fostering particular microbial environments. Recent science in this area, conducted with much support from Jasper Hill Farm, has both served to reinforce and redefine RET. It also threatens TT as it has traditionally been understood. This turn of events came about with the impetus of microbiologists Rachel Dutton and Ben Wolfe and the Dutton lab at Harvard, funded over five years (2010–15) to study microbial communities on cheese. The Dutton lab set out to understand how microbial communities work, using cheese as a “lab rat” to help understand larger systems (e.g., the human gastrointestinal tract). The cooperation with cheesemakers that was necessary for the lab’s primary work led to a symbiotic effect by which the former could learn about the microbial life of cheese in order to understand, identify, and avoid problems and, mostly, to create microbial populations that would lead to better flavor. In short, the collaboration would help cheesemakers reverse engineer the sorts of microbial terroir that would help transform their cheeses into the flavor profile they envisioned.

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FIGURE 14.1  Above: Wolfe, Button, Santarelli, and Dutton sample the fungi and bacteria of 137 kinds of cheese, Cell 158 (2) 422–33. © Wolfe, Button, Santarelli, and Dutton (2014).

In their most well-known experiment, the Dutton lab obtained 137 samples of cheeses harvested from all over the world. They first identified the bacterial and fungal life of the cheeses, then isolated and cultured the microbes in vitro. Finally, they reintroduced the colonized microbes onto neutral cheese specimens and confirmed through the microbial evolution that they were able to reenact in vitro the natural microbial evolution on different cheeses as they aged, in effect creating terroir in a petri dish. The findings had enormous implications both for RET and TT. On the one hand, the Dutton lab helped to support the case for terroir and place specificity by defining and formalizing through science how flavors are composed, and providing an objectivesounding lexicon of scientific names. The byproducts of microbial growth create smells in cheese by breaking fats, proteins, and sugars into volatile compounds. In Camembert, Penicillium camberti eats casein in the cheese through the use of enzymes and thereby releases peptides, which are what gives the cheese a mushroomy flavor (Dutton 2017). 2-heptanone, the byproduct of fungal growth of Penicillium roqueforti, is the primary flavor in blue cheeses, giving them a spicy, peppery taste. Rachel Dutton has further defined the chemical breakup of the products in the cheese that produce specific smells, including banana smells (2-methyl propanol), cabbage (methanethiol), roasted meat smells (methional), sweat socks (butyric acid), butter (diacetyl) and almonds (benzaldehyde). The combination of the different microbes, what they eat on a cheese surface, and how they interact together, creates the diversity of cheese flavors and smells. For producers, like the Kehlers, wishing to explain terroir to a clientele and initiate them into the world of terroir cheeses, the Dutton lab provided a set of practical tools with which to process flavor perceptions. Terroir’s legitimacy in this regard would be further bolstered by the prestige of the Harvard brand. Besides helping to reverse engineer a market for such cheeses through an authoritative scientific objectification, there was a practical element in terms of production. Cheese must meet standards imposed not only by the FDA but by a capitalist system that relies on stability. Flavors showcased in a RET creation must be consistent enough to meet these expectations. Just as Appellations d’Origine Protégée

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(AOP), awarded by the INAO in France, regulate productions, ensure consistency and typicity, and make sure that agricultural products who use the name of the AOP on the label provide a product in conformity with a set of standards, the Kehlers, and others who have successfully reverse engineered a terroir, attempt to do the same. The Dutton lab helped these cheesemakers define the typicity of their terroir. Yet, the lab also greeted terroir purists with a potentially alarming conclusion by disclosing that cheeses from different parts of the world (e.g., California, France, and Vermont) contained many of the same bacteria and fungi, at least on the genus level. This conclusion made the argument for place-specific flavors harder to uphold, robbing producers of the foregone conclusion that there was something biologically unique about their terroir. Even more alarming for purists was the Dutton lab’s conclusion “if you build it, they will come.” In other words, if you give the microbes similar conditions in terms of the aging environment and food source (type of cheese), no matter where you were in the world, the same genus of microbes appear, suggesting that, indeed, from a microbial terroir point of view, terroir could be “reverse engineered.” Finally, the microbial lives of cheese surfaces would evolve cyclically in the same way over the aging life of the cheese, with microbial populations and fungi proliferating and dying off at the same rate and time. Microbial terroir, it was posited, could be reproduced not only in the laboratory but also, given the right conditions, in the cheese cave. Such findings represented a potentially tectonic change on the philosophical level. The invisible microbial composition of cheese has previously allowed for producers to perceive that their topical actions were allied with deeper natural processes. As Paxson explains, “In calling attention to ecologies of production, producers draw an analogy between their own labor practices and such naturally generative forces as decomposition … this effectively naturalizes craft production methods, making them seem a part of ‘nature,’ not only legitimate but also moral, in the normalizing sense of ‘that’s how food should be made’ ” (Paxon 2010). In other words, the success of the Dutton lab at isolating and reproducing the exact terroir changed the status of purveyors of RET. The idea was liberating, but also threatened the TT model. Terroir’s chief merit is that it inserts human beings within a larger system that decenters their subjectivity—they are a part of the natural process but not wholly in control. They are invited to work with natural forces (à la De Serres), not master them (à la Versailles). “Doing” terroir, at its extreme, implies that the human producer usurps some of the mystical deterministic forces of terroir that many revere. This repositioning of the earth’s agency more squarely into the realm of the human domain derives not only from the use of scientific methods to produce terroir, but also from new methods of taste appreciation. The Dutton tendency to reframe organoleptic language in terms of objectified-sounding constructs moves humans toward a central, controlling status, describing what cheese is (e.g., benzaldehyde) as opposed to what it does (how it tastes and makes us feel). A description of what a cheese does, is exactly what one might find on shelf talkers, such as those in Murray’s Cheese Shop in New York, which describe Jasper Hill’s Winnimere cheese as “soft, squidgy and velvet in the mouth.” When imprecise subjective-sounding metaphors are replaced by a scientific lexicon with the pretension of objectivity, something is altered. The current tendency in Anglo-Saxon tasting practices, for example, is toward more objective-sounding systems and echoes what we saw above in Dutton. In comparison, the poetic corollary with its outrageoussounding metaphors (e.g., a wine with fruit that comes “helicoptering into the mouth” [Smith 2007]) serves as a reminder that humans are not removed objective observers,

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but lie within the web of causality. Such metaphors signal our subjectivity while also leaving something to the power and mystification of nature, since the metaphor points to something that escapes our linguistic grasp and can’t be rendered in literal terms. This shift toward an objective-sounding taxonomy in wine and cheese, on the contrary, implies a sort of control from the outside.

TASTE AND ETHICS: THE AESTHETIC RAMIFICATIONS OF RET Modern perceptions of what it means to escape the web of causal dependency (TT) and “do” terroir (RET) are rooted in certain prejudices concerning nature that go back to Kant’s Critique of Judgement. In what has become a stock philosophical example, Kant describes the hypothetical case of a beautiful bird song coming from within a copse. A passerby enchanted by the “gladsome” whistle conveying the bird’s joy and contentment is drawn closer to the source until, entering the clearing, they realize that what they took to be a natural song was merely the work of a clever boy playing skillfully on a reed. Kant opines that the listener will view the song as deceitful trickery and lose all interest in the performance once it is clear that it issues from artificial, and not a “natural” source (Kant 1790: paragraph 42). Hegel, however, later revisiting Kant’s scenario, chose to view it in a nuanced way: there would be great aesthetic appeal in the fact that a human being should be able to imitate nature so accurately. Delving deeper into the problem, Kant describes the artist who does work through a rational deliberation with the verb “to do” or “to make” (facere) with the intent of creating a work (opus). Nature, in contrast, merely acts (agere) through instinct without the use of reason to arrive at an effect (effectus). Kant gives the example of the honeycombs produced by bees. They are beautiful to look at, but not a work of art (Kant 1790: paragraph 43). Art or artificial work always has as its cause, or a part of its cause, a representation of the effect. The person carving a wooden boat, for example, has a mental representation of the boat before the carving and, in this way, the final effect also functions as part of the cause. The artistic or artificial imitation of nature is inferior for Kant because it is mediated through a secondary interest wherein humans attempt to show themselves equal to nature. Natural beauty for Kant, on the other hand, is immediate and provides a purer enjoyment devoid of human vanity. Stewards of both TT and RET would find themselves somewhere within the extremes of facere and agere were they to think of an artisanal product’s flavor in terms of beauty. Cheese is at once stamped with the producer’s subjectivity, a vision of its production, the creation of the necessary conditions, and the employment of the technical process and specific tools to create the end result. Yet, terroir factors are not wholly controllable, ranging from the soil, vegetation, weather, and dispositions of the animals to the farm’s microbiome. The extent to which the producer intervenes to create or control these factors (RET) determines where on the spectrum the efforts fall between facere and agere. The freedom that proponents of RET enjoy is that they are not trapped by traditions and systems with rules, but rather help determine the rules and enact the causal forces. In TT, in the tradition of De Serres, producers are not stripped of agentic power, but are determined to a larger extent by nature and cultural traditions, which may appear naturalized. An attempt to reverse engineer terroir, taken to its extreme, sets the stage for a debate that pits the disappointment of Kant’s hypothetical listener to the sense of awe derived from those of Hegel’s point of view. In the latter perspective, there is nothing

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inherently disappointing about understanding and being able to reproduce flavors or the terroir-driven forces that create them. Yet, Wolfe acknowledged that there was clear disappointment by some in response to the Dutton lab’s conclusions (Wolfe 2018). Producers of food and wine could no longer argue that their product was unique, and the mysterious indomitable element that gave cheeses their mystical appeal in the form of invisible microbial terroir appeared on its way to being mastered. But would all of this make the product less palatable to the consumer? In her article “Of Foams and Formalisms: Scientific Expertise and Craft Practice in Molecular Gastronomy,” history of science professor, Sophia Roosth, recounts her field work in Hervé This’s lab in Paris. This, a French physical chemist and cofounder of the term “molecular gastronomy,” would clearly come down on Hegel’s side of the bird whistle debate. At one point Roosth describes a bottle of synthetically produced 1985 Château Haut-Brion that sits on This’s desk. Knowing that the ’85 was his favorite wine, a friend who works at Givaudan, the Swiss fragrance and flavor company, used gas chromatography and mass spectroscopy (GC-MS) to isolate its chemical structure. He then reconstituted the principal ingredients to create an artificial 1985 Haut-Brion as a gift. Marveling over the creation, This pondered what “GC-MS might do to French wine producers. If any wine can be dosed with an engineered bouquet of molecules, could the heritage and prestige of French vintners obsolesce?” (Roosth 2013). Reverse engineering smells and flavors through chemistry goes a step further than reverse engineering terroir on a microbial level, but they are shades of the same question. How pleasurable would drinking a synthetic Haut-Brion be? For This, there would be no dilemma: he sees humans as the agentic center, mimicking the natural process (facere), deriving a different sort of pleasure than would the conventional consumer (the kind Kant admonished). By contrast, devotees of TT, would clearly opt to drink the wine version of the real bird song every time. The TT enthusiast is easy to peg but it is harder to know where RET advocates fall on the spectrum. Once again, Kant is useful: not because he embraces food in drink, but precisely because he does not. In fact, Kant goes out of his way to exclude the pleasure of eating and drinking in categories of contemplating natural beauty. Those who contemplate beauty do so with immediacy and take “an intellectual” interest in the natural wonder of nature’s “forms,” whereas the hedonism obtained through the pleasure of the senses belongs to what Kant qualifies as “nature’s charms” (Kant 1790: paragraph 42), which exclude a larger reflection. At first, then, those who create or enjoy artificial flavor or those who reverse engineer terroir for taste appear doubly damned by Kantian standards. They are both enjoying something that has been created by a large dose of human agency and seemingly reveling in sensory charms instead of intellectual beauty. And, yet, it is precisely these deeper and ethical pretensions undergirding sensory pleasure that create the attraction for purveyors of RET. The latter don’t like terroir for the flavors, but rather like the flavors for the terroir. In other words, contrary to the Kantian formulation equating culinary pleasure with superficial hedonism, RET assesses flavors for the larger values they represent: communities of people, animals, and the landscape. The story reveals still more about the RET purveyor. The synthetic 1985 Haut-Brion is a frozen monument of the real Haut-Brion at a specific point in its evolution that fails to account how the latter will continue to evolve. Connoisseurs fortunate enough to obtain several bottles of such a wine do not seek the same sensory experience each time, but relish the surprise each new bottle reveals. Acknowledging the wine’s agency and readapting expectations at each tasting forces tasters to find new descriptors and ways of accounting for the wine (the same is true for cheese and other terroir products

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that contain evolving flavor profiles). Similarly, the person who reverse engineers terroir strikes a middle ground between facere and agere, not just making terroir, but also inserting themselves into a chain of actions and reactions whose results are not entirely predictable and controlled. Doing terroir is like method acting—it is not just making terroir, but becoming terroir oneself, both in the production process (in which Mateo of Jasper Hill Creamery describes a necessary element of “improvisation” [Paxson 2014]) and tasting. Translating the isomorphic, reductionist end-product language (e.g., diacetyl) into a human-terroir description to wax poetically of its attributes (Jasper Hill’s website describes their Willoughby cheese as “succulent and buttery” with “milky, herbal, ripepeach flavors within”) is an act of self-initiated enthrallment. Pleasure is not stating what the flavors are in scientific language, but experiencing how they present in the mouth in human or metaphorical terms—describing not what they are, but what they do. In this respect, RET producers and tasters alike slide a bit from facere toward agere. Judging from Paxson’s (2010) article, there was something else at work in RET cheese making. Even when fully engaged in RET, many producers left a palpable margin for mysticism. They seemed to be “doing terroir,” not through the mastery of Kant’s facere, but by becoming terroir. Anne Topham of Topham Creamery in Wisconsin boarded her goats out to a neighbor and noticed that the milk from the combined herds and the cheese was no longer the same (2010). Upon retaking possession of her animals, Topham claimed that the milk and cheese tasted better and, consequently, believed that having the goats in her close proximity, in contact with her person, and on the terroir of her property was causally related to the quality of the cheese. There was a mystical sense of community, not only between animal and producer, but between animal, producer, consumer, and product. RET producers, at least the ones Paxson sampled, separate themselves from the factory-induced rationalized and prescribed methods to leave room for variation and surprise. Patty Karlin, another cheesemaker, chooses never to use the telephone when in need of advice or assistance, but always to drive into town and see people. This gesture opens the door to serendipity, run-ins with friends and associates, impromptu encounters with strangers, and, one assumes, a connectedness to larger communities that foster new discoveries. Paxson’s published research signals as much. When she writes of certain producers, the descriptions become colorful, leaving behind tightly wrought academic prose for a poetic descriptions colored by details. Patty Karlin showed up from her local coffee shop in Bodega, California, in a Toyota Matrix to meet Paxson on a “rambling” farm stand, with a small cabin, yurts, goats, interspersed fruit and vegetable gardens, and a wood-framed house (2010). Here, the chronicler of reverse-engineered terroir herself becomes an agent of terroir, setting up the mottled components of the description in a way that unleashes them in the reader’s imagination. In the same way that the invisible chaos of microbes plays an important role in the imaginaire of terroir, and helps cheesemakers naturalize the agricultural process they undertake, the colorful randomness in the description helps the process of reverse engineering terroir. One is not given the impression of a RET agentic force ruling over a dominion, but rather of sparks of potential energy ready to galvanize each other in improbable ways.

CONCLUSION In July 2018, Ben Wolfe returned to a biannual cheese conference put on in Somerset by Neil’s Yard Dairy. During his talk, Wolfe announced that his lab had revived the very microbial terroir compromised four years earlier when the Dutton lab had sewn doubt

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about its credibility. In the interim, the Wolfe lab, seeking to go beyond the genus level of microbes, sampled nine samples of cheese from around the world and took from each three of the same species of bacteria (Staphylococcus equorum, Brevibacterium auranticum, Brachybacterium alimentarium) (Wolfe 2018). After testing each, they found that though taxonomically the same, the bacteria were functionally very different and had remarkably different gene makeups. That is, although their species were identical, their strains behaved differently. More specifically, having evolved in specific microenvironments, the bacteria acquired different genomes and a capacity for action that was enormously variable within the same species. What they were, in the end, was less important than what they were genetically programmed to do, and what they have were programmed to do was dependent on their initial terroir. Once reinoculated on cheese mediums, the samples produced results that were compositionally different, evolving in vastly different ways with different colors and completely different smells. These findings represented the agentic microbial elements of terroir as dynamic forces in contradiction to the connotations associated with the static scientific-sounding names used to catalogue them. That “doing,” which could be read and translated in the genetic code, is perhaps the most enlightening feature in microbial RET. In fact, there is evidence that RET (and TT) is as much about “getting done” as doing. Robert Dunn’s 2018 book, Never Home Alone, which analyzes the countless microbial communities living around us in our houses from black mold in basements to bacteria in shower heads, devotes the last chapter to the hands of sourdough bakers. Bakers, Dunn found, begin to resemble the sourdough starters they work with in microbial terms. At the start, bakers influence the food they make with the personalized microbes from their bodies and their working environments (their domestic terroir). In the end, however, Dunn’s team found that the dough was transforming the bakers as well: 60 percent of microbes on their hands were composed of lactobacillus and saccharomyces, a huge discrepancy with respect to the hands of non-bakers. The notion that the physical properties of human hands imprint food with flavor is not new—it goes back to Korean notions of “hand flavor” (son-mat) that individual hands imprint on the flavors of fermented kimchi (Dunn 2018). But the idea that the hand is also being created by the very terroir it helps craft is revelatory. This phenomenon, applied more broadly, might suggest that purveyors of RET are, in unsuspected ways, becoming products of the very terroir they build. Facere and agere would henceforth become one and the same.

REFERENCES Atkinson, G. (2003), “Treasures of the Tidal Flats,” Seattle Times, March 3, 2003. De Serres, O. (2001), Le Théâtre de l’Agriculture, Arles: Actes Sud. Dunn, R. (2018), Never Home Alone, New York: Basic Books. Dutton, R. (2017), “The Wonderful World of Microbial Cheese,” presentation at the Kavli Institution for Theoretical Physics. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=6QzwNSByNAI (accessed January 27, 2019). Kant, I. (1790), The Critique of Judgement. Mukerji, C (1997), Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parker, T. (2015), Tasting French Terroir: The History of an Idea, Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Paxson, H. (2010), “Locating Value in Artisan Cheese: Reverse Engineering Terroir for NewWorld Landscapes,” American Anthropologist, 112 (3): 444–57. Paxson, H. (2014), The Life of Cheese. Berkeley: University of California Press. Quintinie, Jean de la (1692), Instruction pour les jardins. Paris. Roosth, S. (2013), “Of Foams and Formalisms: Scientific Expertise and Craft Practice in Molecular Gastronomy,” American Anthropologist, 115 (1): 4–16. Smith, B. (2007), “The Objectivity of Tastes and Tasting,” in B. Smith (ed.), Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine, 44–71, Oxford: Signal. Wolfe, B., J. Button, M. Santarelli, and R. Dutton R. (2014), “Cheese Rind Communities Provide Tractable Systems For In Situ and In Vitro Studies of Microbial Diversity,” Cell, 158 (2): 422–33. Wolfe, B. (2018), “Diversity & Dynamics of Food Microbiomes,” talk delivered at Neal’s Cheese Yard conference The Science of Artisan Cheese. Available online: http://scienceofartisancheese. com/ (accessed January 25, 2019).

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Local and the National in Japan’s Documentary Food Show Kuishinbō! Banzai GREG DE ST. MAURICE

Introduction This chapter looks at how one of Japan’s longest-running television shows about food, Kuishinbō! Banzai, has variously imagined the role of Japanese citizens and viewers in sustaining local and national foodways over the decades. The show follows a series of “gourmet reporters” who travel to less well-known locales in Japan, interacting with farmers, chefs, fishermen, and homemakers. Each episode is organized around a specific location and ingredient or dish, though the producers and reporters try to highlight the locality and local residents and not only the food. Several things set Kushinbō! Banzai apart from other shows that feature local foods (and most Japanese TV shows do feature food in some way). Episodes last as few as two and a half minutes. For this reason, in Japan the show is known as a “mini TV show” (mini bangumi). Though its episodes have no commercial breaks, since it was first broadcast in 1975 the show has been sponsored by Kikkoman soy sauce, whose commercials precede each episode. Because it aims to show real people and places from all over Japan and not simply food, producers describe it as a “food documentary.” In an interview from 1989, producer Takaaki Nakamura1 explained that the show had come to look like the vision Ryūzaki Katsu, the second person to take on the mantle of gourmet reporter, had articulated for it: as a kind of “empathetic eating tour” (my loose translation). Thus, for example, when the crew was scheduled to shoot a simmered sardine dish in a fishing port early one morning and storms at sea meant there were no sardines, rather than cancel or postpone shooting the episode, they decided to feature flying fish instead (“Kuishinbō! Banzai” 1989: 51). Over the course of its lengthy run, the show has shaped national perceptions about food and eating. One example of its influence is the hashiire katto or “inserted chopsticks cut” (ibid.: 68). This occurs when a gourmet reporter puts his chopsticks into a dish and

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elevates a steaming or glistening mouthful for a camera close up. Originally introduced by Kushinbō! Banzai, this camera technique is now ubiquitous on Japanese television. The show is also said to have ushered in a linguistic change; whereas kuishinbō used to be a rather pejorative term describing someone who would eat just about anything, the term now has more positive connotations (“Kuishinbō! Banzai” 1989: 51). In spite of its production staff ’s insistence that it is not a “gourmet TV show” it is nevertheless viewed as a harbinger of the Japanese TV industry’s “gourmet boom” (ibid.). It is worth paying attention to how Kushinbō! Banzai has participated in imagining local and national foodscapes and the role of viewer-citizens in them. Studying episodes from the show’s more than forty-five-year run2, as well as using magazine interviews with the show’s staff, publications associated with the show, and related social media content, this chapter first examines Kuishinbō! Banzai’s original mission of preserving knowledge about “buried” local foods and its implicit celebration of an imagined national cuisine. It then looks at the program over the past two decades and the emphasis it now places on supporting local producers through consumerism for the good of the nation. In both of these modes Kuishinbō! Banzai calls upon women to safeguard local and national foodways—in the first as homemakers and then as consumers in the second, but it overlooks decidedly political or agentive participation in local and national foodscapes beyond this.

“BURIED” LOCAL FOODS ON KUSHINBŌ! BANZAI Kyōdo ryōri (local cuisine) or kyōdo shoku (local food) lies at the heart of Kushinbō! Banzai. By 2015 the show’s staff is said to have traveled approximately 570,000 km to introduce 25,000 different meals to viewers (“Shin warera no jidai” 2015: 66). Takanori Murano, the seventh gourmet reporter, explains that the crew would often travel to a rural area and film him eating a local dish with the mountains behind him or to the coast where he would eat with fishermen, with the sea in the background, all in order to better portray the locations to viewers. This, he says, was the image the show projected (Yukawa 2003: 8). The show is said to have received letters commenting that they should actually face the beautiful vistas rather than face away from them. Defining “local” food is difficult because the term is vague and undefined and boundaries are far from clear (de St. Maurice 2013). To be truly local, must a food use local ingredients, have a long history in the area, be made by a local citizen? Of course, places are interconnected, and perhaps even more so today than in the past. But there are also problems with talking about regional cuisines of the past. In Japan, the notion of local cuisines that have been passed down through the ages is one that holds a great deal of appeal. There has long been a culture of edible souvenirs and places that became famous for specific foods in Japan, but as historian Eric Rath reminds us, the categories themselves are relatively new (2016). Prior to the modern period, there would have really been no need to talk about “local food,” since people would have been primarily eating food that was produced locally anyway. Rath traces the use of terms referring to local foods, including kyōdo ryōri and kyōdo shoku, to the early twentieth century and the context of increased imports of sugar, wheat, and rice (2018: 146). Kyōdo dates to the eighth century and refers to rural areas specifically and, while deemed to be larger than one’s hometown, developed a connotation of personal attachment in more recent times (ibid.: 150). Early twentiethcentury Japanese folklorists thus characterized “local” foods in contrast to urban foodways,

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portraying them and the people who ate them as backward and uncivilized (ibid.). During the Second World War, government researchers looked to rural foodways precisely to show the virtues of previously derided alternatives to city staples that were then in short demand. Researchers depicted local foods as deviating from urban norms—in particular the national staple of rice—mostly along geographic and climatic lines (ibid.: 152–3). It’s in the postwar period that local cuisines as such took shape through the work of scholars and government researchers in the context of cultural preservation movements. In this period of economic growth and modernization, Japan experienced the rise of nuclear families, women working outside the household, the introduction of microwave ovens, eating out, and the “Westernization” of Japanese foodways (“Shin warera no jidai” 2015: 69–70). The pace of change and the anxieties that accompanied it led to efforts to “rediscover” Japan. Most representative of this is the surge in popularity of travel linked to the notion of disappearing places and traditions, a trend spurred by the longlived “Discover Japan” campaign put together by the advertising firm Dentsū for Japan Railways (see Ivy 1995). Emerging in 1975, Kushinbō! Banzai was very much a product of its time and articles about the show—like the ones referenced in this section—indicate that the show’s production staff consciously created the show and its episodes as a means of addressing social trends and their consequences. The magazine Josei Sebun places the show and its aim of filming people producing local specialties while they were still alive in this mid-1970s feeling of change and uncertainty (“Shin warera no jidai” 2015: 70). As a documentary show about communities and food, Kushinbō! took on an air of pseudo-salvage ethnography, attempting to record dishes, foodways, and lifestyles that were disappearing. The show’s staff traveled to rural areas experiencing depopulation, where elderly producers had difficulty finding people to whom they could pass on traditional tastes. Those cooks and farmers saw the show as a new way to pass on local knowledge (“Kuishinbō!” 1989: 52). Indeed, people who had moved to Tokyo from rural areas are said to have written to the show to say that seeing their area’s local foods featured made them nostalgically recall the taste of their hometown (ibid.). The show’s staff described such dishes as “buried,” in contrast to the types of local cuisines that have become popular and can easily be found in urban areas (ibid.). In his recollections as the first “gourmet reporter,” Fumio Watanabe writes of his initial displeasure when told the show wanted to highlight Kyoto’s food culture. The staff had to reassure him that they had no intention of showcasing well-known or fancy foods made for tourists or special ceremonies, but rather that they wanted to find out about the ordinary dishes people in Kyoto prepared for themselves (Watanabe 1984: 21–2). In its early decades Kuishinbō! portrays a local with associations similar to those Rath tells us were common in the early twentieth century: linked to the past, backwardness, even an unpolishedness. This is what is deemed authentic about the local, a source of edification and possibly enjoyment. This comes through in interviews in which gourmet reporters and production staff recall locals who renovated rooms or put on extraordinary makeup for television even though the camera crew planned to capture people and places as they had found them (“Kuishinbō!” 1989: 53). Many dishes were presented by gourmet reporters in the show’s first decades as nostalgic local relics, less familiar—or even exotic—to Japanese people from other parts of Japan. In a 1995 FLASH magazine retrospective, the show’s staff recalled being served such dishes as bee larvae with rice, a seaweed and goat meat dish, and viper sashimi (Yamagishi et al. 1995: 78). Notably, culinary diversity is presented as primarily geographic rather than the consequence of economic, ethnic, or religious differences, for example.

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Consider an episode from the late 1980s that begins with the sound of the sanshin, an Okinawan string instrument, and the image of waves lapping at a rocky shore. In his deep voice, gourmet reporter number seven, Takenori Murano, announces that today an “interesting” and “strange” squid dish will be introduced. The camera zooms in on two men sitting on a large piece of rock, Murano asks the man sitting next to him, Uesedo, what the squid is called locally. Uesedo answers that it’s called “white squid” or “water squid” and puts pieces of the squid into a large metal pot filled with water sitting on the rocks. When Uesedo adds green herbs to the pot, he is asked what they are called locally (senmoto, tree onion). Then Uesedo uses chopsticks to grab something small. “This is the ink,” he says. “Are you going to put that in?” Murano asks in response. We see Uesedo use the chopsticks to open the small sac and squeeze out the ink. “It’s jet black!” Murano exclaims. Uesedo explains that without the ink, the soup won’t possess the true taste of squid. It’s at this point that Murano asks and is told the name of the dish—ika no sumi jiru (squid ink soup). When Murano tries the soup and is asked how it tastes, his first words are “Koku ga arimasu ne, kore. Ne!” (“It’s got a lot of depth. Wow!”) and smiles. He takes a piece of squid, chews it, and praises its softness. Then Murano says that while the color of the soup is black, it’s delicious. His host confesses that when he was a child he thought the color made the soup disgusting, but over time he found that if the ink was missing from the soup, he didn’t feel he’d actually eaten squid. To which Murano says, looking at the camera, “Delicious foods are less about appearance and more about what’s inside them!” Murano admits that when he first saw the dish, the appearance made him wonder if it was edible. “The taste is delicious!” he states and as the camera pans out, we hear him say, while chuckling, one final time, “It’s jet black!” In this two-and-a-half-minute episode, Murano talks to the audience and to his host in such a way that the unusualness, even strangeness, of the featured dish and especially its color—from the perspective of non-Okinawan Japanese people—is clear. If squid ink soup is an acquired taste, however, then he makes it seem like one that is worth acquiring, or at the very least worth experiencing or understanding. Indeed, Murano has explained elsewhere that while he certainly has his own preferences, he adopted a policy of approaching each meal without prejudice (Yukawa 2003). This episode calls upon both memory and imagination, as do other episodes. It treats local foods from rural areas as heritage, associated more with the past than the present, in line with the program’s original mission. Locals’ memories are not presented in story form as unique and idiosyncratic. Rather, diverse memories of a past that in retrospect seem more grounded in a sense of place are shared with viewers when they are revealed in the show’s short episodes. Differences are thus made to be variations of a whole, emphasizing commonalities rather than irreconcilable differences. Local dishes also serve as the materials for imagining a national cuisine, if one that is often imagined in contrast to local cuisines and even sometimes as an average or compromise between local cuisines.

KUISHINBŌ! BANZAI AND THE IMAGINING OF A NATIONAL CUISINE Food studies scholars have been critical of the notion of a national cuisine as natural or inevitable, identifying instead, in many cases, an amalgamation of regional dishes cobbled together in modern times by states and other actors as a tool for instilling nationalist sentiments and encouraging the domestic consumption and the export of food products.

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As anthropologist Sidney Mintz put it, a national cuisine might be appropriate for restaurants or embassy dinners but is far removed from local cuisines that are created through the daily discourse of the people who prepare and consume them (1996). In the Japanese case, the term washoku, used today to refer to Japanese cooking and to promote it domestically and abroad, emerged in the late nineteenth century after Japanese society became more exposed to Western cuisines (Rath 2018: 148). The term for Western cuisine, yōshoku, predates that for Japanese cuisine. While popular conceptions of washoku today include dishes that originated in various parts of the archipelago (with a long history of influences from outside), dishes strongly linked to urban areas dominate (ibid.). Hence dishes like Edo-mae (Tokyo style) sushi and local cuisines like Kyoto style kaiseki are highlighted as representative of national foodways. Most episodes of Kuishinbō! Banzai introduce viewers to a particular local (read: rural) food or ingredient, but the national level regularly appears on screen. One way this happens is via the gourmet reporter, whose role is to perform as that elusive mythical figure, the ideal “typical” Japanese person (by default male). The role of the reporter is to assist his interlocutors in bringing the featured food to the screen by asking questions, eating, and providing commentary for the camera. When gourmet reporter Shinji Yamashita visited Yamanashi Prefecture in the mid1990s, he was presented with something dry and round made of corn flour—including the cob—that had been cooked at the back of the hearth. He asked why they didn’t boil the corn to enjoy its sweetness. The response: “No, no, Yamashita-san, during the war, we gave all the rice to the army. We only had corn so we ground this up and ate it instead of rice” (“Shin warera no jidai” 2015: 69). In an interview Yamashita uses the episode to reflect on the labor of Japan’s food producers, their precarious livelihoods, and the privilege of contemporary consumers. Yamashita’s framing of the incident sets the local food against both national and contemporary norms, namely rice as a staple food (more on this below) and the luxury of prioritizing of taste in food preparation and consumption. When reporter Tatsuo Umemiya visits Teradomari town in Niigata Prefecture in 1985, two women from the town prepare two dishes for him using squid, a local specialty. As Umemiya introduces the town and the foodstuff being featured, an image of fishermen hauling in nets appears on the screen. We then find Umemiya sitting at a kitchen table with two women. Through the window behind them we can see treetops and the roofs of nearby buildings. The camera zooms in on the dishes on the kitchen table: a soup with dumplings, a small bowl with what appear to be julienned vegetables cooked together, and two plates. The larger plate contains five squid, two of them sliced so that we can see the white flesh inside, and all resting on bamboo leaves. The smaller plate contains two squid, also sliced, with what appear to be Japanese pepper leaves atop. Umemiya reaches for a piece from the larger plate with his chopsticks and one of the show’s classic hashiire katto, this time of a ring of squid stuffed with what looks like a grainy tan substance inside. Umemiya chews, then says, “Huh? I thought it was rice, but this isn’t rice.” One of the women explains that the dish is squid and okara sushi, okara being the pulp leftover from making tofu. When Umemiya samples the other woman’s dish he asks for the name. He is told it is squid chimaki (usually a type of cake wrapped in bamboo leaves and steamed). As he extends his chopsticks, he remarks “This is properly made with rice, isn’t it?” After he puts it in his mouth, he looks at the camera and confirms that it does, indeed, contain rice. He compares it to another dish, ika meshi from Okayama Prefecture. After asking some questions about its preparation with glutinous rice and the seasonality of the

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dishes, he confesses that he prefers the chimaki dish, saying that the squid sushi is sweet, and perhaps a dish preferred by women. “Because this one,” he says, picking up another piece of the chimaki, “Mostly isn’t sweet.” The woman sitting directly to his right, who made the squid sushi, retorts, “But today, we made this sweet for a fine man!” To which all three laugh. Here, we find Umemiya reinforcing several tenets of Japanese food culture today. White rice, in contemporary times, is given the symbolic status of “staple food” to the point that in the construction of the ideal daily meal, ichiju sansai (one soup, three side dishes), it is not counted. The presumption that white rice is a part of every “Japanese” meal is very much based on modern and urban conceptions of a meal. The episode from Teradomari demonstrates local distinctiveness, with okara and glutinous white rice instead of the expected white table rice. Umemiya’s comments also tap into popular conceptions regarding taste at the time. While men are expected to drink alcohol and prefer the kinds of salty foods that accompany sake, women are assumed to prefer sweetly flavored dishes. It should be apparent that the show’s portrayals of a shared national cuisine have much to do with gender. The women who prepare food on the show include homemakers like the ones from Teradomari, cooking teachers, and specialists in local ceremonial and home cooking. Some of the men are professional chefs. Farmers of both genders and fishermen appear on the show, often preparing food outside. Kikkoman, the show’s official sponsor, also invokes contemporary gender constructs in its representations of national cuisine. Its commercials, which directly precede the short episodes, usually feature young women cooking with the company’s soy sauce products. Early episodes such as the one discussed above ended with a note scrolling across the screen, encouraging viewers to call the phone number displayed for instructions on recreating the dishes featured on the show to encourage their recreation at home, across Japan. Gender, though, features on the show in ways that extend beyond simply mirroring or documenting how Japanese foodways themselves are gendered. All of the gourmet reporters, for one thing, have been men. While several possessed cooking skills, most seem to have been selected for their star power and their screen presence. Murano, one of the few who could cook, explains that for a long time he followed the saying “danshi chūbō ni hairubekarazu” (men shouldn’t enter the kitchen) and only went to the kitchen “to get water to sober up,” though fishing eventually served as an entryway to food preparation (Yukawa 2003: 6). It might initially seem that this saying is old-fashioned and out of date, but current reporter Shuzō Matsuoka doesn’t cook at home and in Japan everyday domestic cooking for others continues to be categorized as women’s work (see Yuen 2014, for instance). Consider that after his stint as a gourmet reporter, actor Joe Shishido released a men’s cookbook, the cover of which features him in a chef ’s uniform complete with toque—and the first dozen pages feature him cooking outside, even roasting an entire lamb on a spit (miraculously without sullying his denim outfit). As Kuishinbō! evolved, so did its reference points for depictions of a national cuisine. If the show sought to rediscover Japanese culinary heritage in its initial years, in the mid1980s Kuishinbō! started to look outside Japan and position the country and its foodways against global foodscapes with trips to countries as far away as Italy, New Zealand, and Brazil. Today this time is referred to as Japan’s “bubble period,” characterized by abundant profits and the expansion of consumerism and leisure time, with companies and consumers spending money freely (see Kerr 2017). During the bubble era people became more familiar than ever with cuisines from overseas, thanks to an increase in international travel as well as an enhanced ability to purchase imported luxury foods for many people.

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In an episode filmed in Singapore, actor Yusuke Kawazu visits the acclaimed Aziza’s Restaurant, where Malay entrepreneur Aziza Ali serves him a five-dish arrangement on a banana leaf. In spite of the high-end context, the dialogue is about “tradition” and festival foods, with Kawazu finding similarities between the Malaysian foods and Japanese foods like hamba-gu and chicken cutlet. Such episodes remind the audience that even unusual domestic dishes like squid ink soup are, in the end, familiarly “exotic” because there are often shared cultural understandings of norms for ingredients, preparation techniques, and taste aesthetics. On the other hand, other episodes filmed overseas introduced items that were likely more familiar to some television viewers than, say, bee larvae or hearth cooked corn cob biscuits: Frankfurt’s famous sausages or a Bavarian cream made with Belgian chocolate and rum, for instance. The increasing availability of foods like these in Japan, after all, often glossed as Westernization, was part of the impetus for Kuishinbō! to begin with. Kikkoman’s advertising campaigns also adapted to the times. In a commercial from 1987 the camera pans over a green country landscape and a lake to zoom in on the front lawn of a house where a young white woman playfully shifts from foot to foot behind a table set with fresh fruit and vegetables. The slogan shoku no, atarashii kaze / fū (“a fresh breeze for food” or alternately “a new style of food”) appears and a voiceover of the company’s name with a decidedly French intonation follows. In its marketing efforts in the 1980s, the maker of Japan’s standard soy sauce included symbols of international notions of health and the good life. But references to “traditional” food culture and concomitant gender roles persisted too: a series of commercials from 1986 with the same tagline has the comedian Sanma Akashiya give accolades for Kikkoman’s ponzu shoyu (soy sauce with citrus and vinegar) and addressing a lover through the camera, asking her to prepare a hot pot with the seasoning. As Goldstein-Gidoni (2018) shrewdly observes, after the economic bubble burst in the early 1990s and people and companies began to rein in their spending, women were encouraged to continue to support the economy as consumers and by and large in ways that reinforced notions of women as wives, mothers, and homemakers. Kuishinbō! Banzai and its publications continued to feature local and international food culture in its episodes, though its approach seems to take on some of the uncertainty many associate with what came to be known as the “Lost Decade.” In contrast to the show’s early gloss of local foods as rural and associated with memories of the past, in the 1990s, for example, we have gourmet reporter Takuro Tatsumi being filmed discovering “Tokyo cuisine” via a picnic in Yoyogi Park and a “Versailles style” pastry served with tea. When the gourmet reporter was Fumio Watanabe, you may remember, a visit to Kyoto meant seeking out “ordinary” foods eaten by local citizens. In the 1990s, however, the show’s Kyoto episodes include an appearance by Kyoto vegetables, by this point a nationally famous product of contemporary place branding (de St. Maurice 2013).

CONSUMING THE LOCAL, CONSUMING THE NATIONAL Looking back, the casting of former professional tennis player and television personality Shuzō Matsuoka in 2000 as the eleventh gourmet reporter was a turning point for the show. Matsuoka has held the position for longer than any of his predecessors and has filmed the most episodes—well over a thousand. What is especially worth noting, however, is the renewed focus on Japan’s local food culture and the notion of a national

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cuisine. Matsuoka has explained that in his tennis career he traveled across the world and that as the latest gourmet reporter he really looked forward to exploring Japan and its foodways, which he was relatively unfamiliar with (“Iwai!” 2020). Matsuoka has described himself as a supporter or cheerleader for local producers and communities and the persona he adopts onscreen is that of an enthusiastic entertainer, very much in line with his peers introducing foods on other shows. He eagerly stuffs his mouth with foods, even when they are visibly steaming or the portions are extra-large. In a recent episode, after he samples some fritters made with small shrimp local to the Bizen area of Okayama, he takes the cooking chopsticks from his host and makes his own fritter, which is much larger (and which he declares to be superior). At first glance, Matsuoka’s Kuishinbō! Banzai is about the “re-rediscovering” of Japanese foodways. But Japanese foodways have undergone a sea change since 1975, when the show first aired. The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) as well as traditional media point to the food self-sufficiency rate (measured in calories) as a sign of decline: from 54 percent in 1975 to 38 percent in 2020 (MAFF 2020: 14). In 2020 the average age of full-time Japanese farmers was 67.8 years, up almost 5 percent from 5 years prior (“Japan’s agricultural” 2020). Over this period the size of the farming population that derives most of its income from farming shrank to 1.36 million, a recordbreaking decline of 22.5 percent (ibid.). The abandonment of agricultural land and the depopulation of rural areas are also of concern. On top of all this, in today’s globalized world, it is clearer than ever that food is inseparable from such things as socioeconomic conditions, environmental concerns, labor issues, and nutrition and public health. Looking at Kikkoman’s advertising campaigns, we get a sense that marketers understand that Japanese society has changed. Their commercials continue to target women but do so while broadening their vision of what a contemporary Japanese woman is and aims to be like. In a newer commercial we see a sleepy young woman with bed hair eating a bowl of white rice with soy sauce and a raw egg before she rushes out the door in work attire but having neglected to change out of her pajama bottoms. In another we see a woman making and then eating a vegetable salad dressed with low sodium soy sauce. Neither of these women is defined by the role of caring and cooking for others, a break from earlier decades. Matsuoka’s Kuishinbō! envisions Japanese citizens’ participation in local and national foodscapes primarily via domestic consumerism. The show’s new website includes recipes for recreating dishes featured on the show, replacing the cookbooks of earlier decades. But today most episodes also focus on foods produced for sale, with restaurant or store names included on screen and additional information such as addresses and phone numbers listed online. This enables viewers to easily make restaurant reservations or place orders for meat, seafood, vegetables, or processed foods. This is a shift from the show’s original focus on disappearing foodways and preserving local traditions. The types of foods featured on the show today depict the local as more than a repository of endangered tradition. Some recent episodes highlight dishes that restaurants or communities wish to establish as new local specialties, like an oden (an assortment of foodstuffs like daikon, boiled egg, and fishcakes simmered in dashi broth) from Odawara City and a nabe (hot pot) from Mimasaka City in which grated nagaimo yam is added, representing the white “sea of clouds” that pool around the local mountain valleys in the winter. Other episodes are less anchored to a particular location than episodes in past decades. For Christmas 2020, for instance, Matsuoka visits a cooking school teacher from Yokohama City who teaches him how to make a sushi roll that looks like a Santa head

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using rice, seaweed, fishcakes, and cheese. Earlier that fall, meanwhile, a young couple that had moved from Tokyo to Saitama Prefecture taught him how to prepare a French style cake salé using locally grown vegetables like bell peppers and zucchini. Whereas in the show’s first decades dishes that may have been more of an acquired taste for nonlocals received regular screen time, today it is by and large marketable dishes and commercial products or services that are featured. This is in line with broader trends of culinary nationalism projects that cast foodways as a means for commercial consumption that supports Japanese food producers. The application to have UNESCO inscribe a version of Japanese cuisine (“Washoku, traditional dietary cultures of the Japanese, notably for the celebration of New Year”) on its list of intangible cultural heritage is a notable example. Since the application’s approval in 2013, MAFF and other groups have used the fact of inscription as a means of promoting culinary tourism and boosting food and agricultural exports (Cwiertka 2018).3 Matsuoka’s Kuishinbō! positions the celebration of local foodways primarily as an avenue for spurring contemporary consumerism. In fact, in the 2000s a Kikkoman subsidiary, Kikkoman Delica, capitalized on the show’s name and opened up stores that sold prepared foods and lunch boxes under the name “Kuishinbō Banzai!” In a “mom and pop” atmosphere, the stores sold at least sixty varieties of dishes at affordable prices that were marketed as “local based” (Takahashi 2006). While there were as many as twenty stores in 2006, when Kikkoman Delica sold the stores to Food Works in 2010 only nine remained (“Fu-do wa-kusu” 2010). Two stores in Tokyo were still operational under the name “Kuishinbō no Shokutaku” (and the English name Kuishinbō’s Table) at the end of 2020. One thing that has not changed is the show’s privileging of geographic diversity over other kinds. The release of the show’s “seasons” is even organized by prefecture and region (e.g., Aichi Prefecture for April and May 2018). The contributions of minority groups to national food culture are minimized, with the exception of Okinawan foodways, which have become visible in the wake of the development of Okinawa’s tourism industry and connections to culinary tourism (and also because most of Japan’s Okinawan population lives in Okinawa Prefecture). Even Okinawan foodways, however, are often treated as a local variant or offshoot of national traditions, while the legacy of discrimination and inequality experienced by Okinawans is unexamined. Other groups receive very little recognition. The Ainu, the indigenous people of northern Japan, for instance, were the first to harvest and cook with kombu (the kelp used to make dashi stock), now considered to be one of the most essential components of Japanese cuisine. Hokkaido regional specialties like Ishikari nabe, a hot pot traditionally made with salmon, kombu, miso, and a pat of butter, is said to also be an adaptation of an Ainu dish. The show’s Hokkaido episodes gloss over Ainu contributions. The burakumin, meanwhile, are a minority group sometimes compared to a caste because historically their inherited inferior status was connected to “dirty” occupations like butchery and tanning (Yamashiro 2013). Burakumin found ways to take the least desirable of meat products and create palatable dishes like saiboshi (dried meat—often horse), kogori (offal in gelatin), and aburakasu (intestines boiled to remove the fat). Burakumin foodways, along with those of ethnic Korean and Japanese Brazilian communities, are overlooked when Japan’s diverse food culture is celebrated. Kuishinbō! Banzai also pays short thrift to socioeconomic class and associated issues, even those directly tied to the sustainability of local foodways and economies. Economic hardships of the past, especially those that have given rise to foods considered traditional,

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are given attention—in line with the show’s original focus on “local” as part of a past considered simple and authentic. People face economic disparities today too, and their tools and strategies could be featured on the show, whether they work in the food industry, are engaged in food activism, or are trying to provide their families with satisfying and nutritious meals on a strict budget. Kushinbō! Banzai’s influence may have waned. According to Shūkan Taishū in 1989 it was broadcast every weekday and according to an interview in Chūshū Tsūshin by 2003 it had decreased to eighteen different episodes a month. In 2016 it aired at 9:54 pm in the evening and by 2020 this had shifted to Sundays at 11:45 am. Conversations with acquaintances in Japan confirmed that quite a number of people who were regular viewers of the show when it featured previous gourmet reporters are unaware that the show is still broadcast (Tsubouchi 2016). Of course, the Japanese TV and media industry has undergone significant change since Kuishinbō! Banzai’s first season. For one thing, as in other parts of the world, live television now competes with subscription streaming services accessible on computer screens and smartphones. While it is possible for viewers of Japanese shows to watch scenes or episodes via services like TVer or on platforms like YouTube, Kushinbō! Banzai content is largely unavailable this way. Fuji TV uses the website it created for the show as a key means of viewer outreach, in ways that mimic the traditional media publications of the show’s early decades, with photos and text, and also recipes. Some episodes are also uploaded to the show’s website for a short time. Mintz and others have argued that a cuisine is more than a compendium of dishes, that it is the product of a discourse and requires the participation and imagination of citizens who are invested in shared practices, symbols, relationships, and economies (Mintz 1996, Appadurai 1988). Benedict Anderson demonstrated how print capitalism facilitated the cultivation of national identities in Imagined Communities ([1983] 1991). Today, feelings of belonging to a national community and discourses about divergent and shared gastronomic practices extend to social media platforms. The rise of social media has, after all, more than simply changed media consumption, it has transformed contemporary life. This includes how people think about and interact with the food systems around them. Social media have opened up ways for people to be, in Booth and Coveney’s phrasing, active “food citizens” rather than passive “food consumers” (2015). Researchers such as Reed and Keech (2019) and Takaya and Goto (2020) have demonstrated that people use social media platforms as tools to bring about positive change in food systems. Social media platforms create opportunities for citizens to exercise agency and coordinate action. How has Kuishinbō! Banzai positioned itself in this new context? The show supplements episodes with content on Instagram, where users who follow the account can find outtakes, unique video content, and information about photo contests, for example. On April 28, 2020, as the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic was spreading in Japan, Matsuoka took to the show’s Instagram account to explain that while food is a means of accomplishing things like entertaining and caring for others, he urges viewers to “Stay home!” and to use food to have fun—at home. Kuishinbō! doesn’t have accounts on Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. Though the show only maintains a minimal social media presence, users have uploaded recordings of older episodes unavailable on the show’s website (though these sometimes do not remain accessible on YouTube for long), posted about visits gourmet reporters made to viewers’ hometowns, created a slew of imitations and parodies, and use the show’s title and taglines to caption their own gastronomic creations and experiences.

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CONCLUSION When Kuishinbō! Banzai was first launched, it aimed to preserve memories of local foods while imagining a shared national cuisine. The show’s producers sought out what they called “buried” foods that were already marginalized, their future existence uncertain. This framing reinforced portrayals of the local as a repository for distinctive traditions and heritage and to build a sense of a national foodscape. Four and a half decades later, Kuishinbō! Banzai is itself viewed nostalgically. The show’s theme song is included in books for learning guitar and piano and YouTube users nostalgically upload old episodes and clips of commercials that ran before and after the show. In its current form, Kuishinbō! Banzai encourages viewers to bolster local food economies and contribute to national foodways as consumers and homemakers and little else. At present, there is but a hint of foodscapes in which viewers become “food citizens” and this comes primarily from the existence of parodies, cherished episode uploads, imitation videos, and impassioned Tweet exchanges. “Determining what the future will look like is our collective responsibility. It’s not enough to vote with our wallets,” Fabio Parasecoli argues (2019: 190). To truly empower local and national food industry stakeholders, it is necessary to go beyond consumption and generate a more widespread understanding of problems that exist in contemporary foodways and identify opportunities for collective action.

NOTES 1 While the convention is for Japanese family names to come first, because in this text I refer to celebrities whose names in English have their given names first, for clarity I have applied the given name first name order to all the individuals in this text. 2 You will not find information in the References section about the episodes discussed in this chapter. Most of them were watched via social media platforms. This means that for those episodes filmed decades ago, I could not find original broadcast dates. Moreover, because Japanese television broadcasters have episodes taken down (even if they are not otherwise available) and sometimes pursue users for copyright infringement, I have chosen not to identify the exact sources for the episodes I watched. 3 For more about the connection between UNESCO world heritage, nostalgia, and nationalism, please, see Nakano (2021).

REFERENCES Anderson, B. ([1983] 1991), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Appadurai, A. (1988), “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30 (1): 3–24. Booth, S., and J. Coveney (2015), Food Democracy: From Consumer to Food Citizen, Singapore: Springer. Cwiertka, K. (2018), “Serving the Nation: The Myth of Washoku,” in K. Cwiertka and E. Machotka (eds.), Consuming Life in Post-Bubble Japan: A Transdisciplinary Perspective, 89– 106, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. de St. Maurice, G. (2013), “The Movement to Revitalize Local Food Culture in Kyoto, Japan,” in C. Counihan and V. Siniscalchi (eds.), Food Activism: Democracy, Economy, and Agency, 77–94, London: Bloomsbury.

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Goldstein-Gidoni, O. (2018), “Consuming Domesticity in Post-Bubble Japan,” in K. Cwiertka, and E. Machotka (eds.), Consuming Life in Post-Bubble Japan: A Transdisciplinary Perspective, 107–28, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. “Iwai! Matsuoka Shuzō ga zenjinmitō no 1000 kai shutsuen! Korekara mo ‘isshoku nyūkon’ atsui kimochi de tabetsudukeru!” (2020), March 6. Available online: https://www.fujitv.co.jp/fujitv/ news/20200172.html (accessed May 30, 2020). Ivy, M. (1995), Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. “Japan’s Agricultural Population Drops 400,000 to 1.36 million in 2020, Posting Record High Fall,” (2020), Japan Agri Press News, December 4. Available online: http://english.agrinews. co.jp/?p=9824 (accessed December 30, 2020). Kerr, H.-Y. (2017), “Envisioning the Bubble: Creating and Consuming Lifestyles through Magazines in the Culture of the Japanese Bubble Economy (1986–1991).” PhD dissertation, the Royal College of Art and Design in collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum. “Kuishinbō! Banzai (Fuji TV kei)” (1989), Shūkan Taishū, May 29: 50–3. Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAAF) (2020), “Reiwa gannen do shokuryō jikyūritsu / shokuryō jikyūritsuryoku shihyō nit suite.” February 8. Available online: https:// www.maff.go.jp/j/press/kanbo/anpo/attach/pdf/200805-2.pdf(accessed December 30, 2020). Mintz, S. (1996), Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past, Boston: Beacon Press. Nakano, R. (2021), “Mobilizing Meiji Nostalgia and International Forgetting in Japan’s World Heritage Promotion,” International Journal of Asian Studies, 18 (1): 27–44. “Fu-do wa-kusu, sōzai jigyō ni honkaku shinshutsu Kikkoman kei kara mise keishō” (2010), Nikkei MJ, September 9: 15. Parasecoli, F. (2019), Food, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rath, E. (2016), Japan’s Cuisines: Food, Place, and Identity, London: Reaktion Press. Reed, M., and D. Keech (2019), “Gardening Cyberspace—Social Media and Hybrid Spaces in the Creation of Food Citizenship in the Bristol City-Region, UK,” Landscape Research, 44 (7): 822–33. “Shin warera no jidai ni 621 kai ‘Kuishinbō! Banzai’ ga tsutaeta nihon no shokutaku 40 nen jidai ha tsugitsugi kawatte mo, ‘kawaranai nanika’ ga soko ni aru” (2015), Josei Sebun, October 1: 64–70. Takahashi, M. (2006), Yoku Wakaru Nakashoku Gyōkai, Tokyo: Nippon Jitsugyō Publishing. Takaya, K., and A. Goto (2020), “Gyoshokubunka fukyū ni muketa kyōiku purogramu no kenkyū – Hachinohe ika no hi fesutibaru wo jirei toshite –,”Bulletin of Hachinohe Institute of Technology, 39: 73–81. Tsubouchi, Y. (2016), “Kuishinbō! Banzai ga tsuduiteiru fushigi,” Sande- Mainichi, October 18: 109. UNESCO (2013), “Washoku, Traditional Dietary Cultures of the Japanese, notably for the Celebration of New Year.” Available online: https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/washoku-traditionaldietary-cultures-of-the-japanese-notably-for-the-celebration-of-new-year-00869(accessed December 30, 2020). Watanabe, F. (1984), Watanabe Fumio no Gochisō Techō, Tokyo: Obunsha. Yamagishi, M., S. Hanawa, H. Maeebisu, M. Kondō, F. Watanabe, Y. Takeuchi, S. Usukawa, S. Yamashita, J. Shishido, T. Miyashita, K. Ryuzaki, M. Tomotake, Y. Kawazu, T. Umemiya, T. Nomura, and T. Tatsumi (1995), “‘Tsui tsui mitemimashou’ nihon yūsū no chōshū gurume bangumi no ura men totteoki no aji wo oshiemasu Kuishinbō! Banzai 20 shūnen 20 himitsu,” FLASH, July 11: 78–80.

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Yamashiro, J. (2013), “The Social Construction of Race and Minorities in Japan,” Sociology Compass, 7 (2): 147–61. Yuen, S. M. (2014), “From Men to ‘Boys’—The Cooking danshi in Japanese Mass Media,” Women’s Studies International Forum, 44: 220–7. Yukawa, M. (2003), “’Kuishinbō! Banzai’ no shinshitsu: Murano Takanori—Shoku no tatsujin tōjō!,” Chūshūtsūshin (199) (February): 4–9.

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Food, Rituals, and the Selective Remembrance of (an Idealized) Home in Diaspora: Iranians of New Zealand AMIR SAYADABDI

Introduction In this chapter, I investigate the relationship between food and memory and discuss how food-based rituals—and memories and imaginations associated with them—can be central to understanding the processes by which diasporic Iranians of Aotearoa/New Zealand build and feel at home, however far away from it. In order to do so, I deploy Hage’s (1997; 2010) notion of “home-building” and his theoretical framework around nostalgia, and analyze the experiences of diasporic Iranians through four key feelings of familiarity, community, security, and sense of opportunity and hope. I argue that Iranians engage in several forms of memory registers that simultaneously remediate the negative aspects of the origin home by selectively highlighting the positive aspects in order to generate a better home in the diasporic present (and as part of an aspirational future). As part of this process, they not only validate their diaspora and diasporic status, but also articulate an idealized genuineness, a selective truth, of their pre-migratory Iranian ways of life that is now pragmatically adapted to the material and sociocultural norms of their current diasporic home. Iranians’ migration to the West, and the consequent formation of the contemporary Iranian diaspora, is often identified by scholars of Iranians studies in distinct waves, each corresponding to a different type of migrant (Gholami 2015; Mostafavi Mobasher 2018; Hakimzadeh 2006). The first wave, which occurred between 1950 and 1977, was composed of middle- and upper-class families who often sent their children abroad (mainly the UK and the United States) for higher education. The second wave took place in the middle of, and immediately following, the Iranian revolution of 1979, during/after which an estimated one million people left Iran. This wave mostly consisted of military

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personnel, religious minorities, and families closely associated with the monarchy who fled Iran to avoid persecution by the newly established Islamic regime. This was followed by the migration of socialist and liberal elements, political dissidents, intellectuals, and skilled workers, as well as those concerned with their safety and affected by the deteriorating economic situation caused by the Iran-Iraq war (1980–8). The final wave, which began roughly around 1995 and continues until present day, included two separate waves itself with two very distinctive populations: one cohort was a continuation of a previous trend consisting of highly skilled and educated individuals who left Iran for the purpose of obtaining higher education in Western universities. The other consisted of less-educated and less-skilled economic refugees and working-class labor migrants whose migration was mainly caused by “economic crisis, deteriorating human rights record, diminishing opportunities, and the enduring tension between reformist and conservative factions” (Hakimzadeh 2006, para. 23) of postrevolutionary Iran. As a result of these multiple waves of migration, a rapid dispersal of Iranians took place worldwide in the past forty years, creating a global population of the Iranian diaspora estimated to be between 4 to 5 million (Axworthy 2013). Of this, and according to the latest census in 2018, New Zealand is home to 4,425 Iranians (F = 2,064; M = 2,358; median age: 35.2), with the majority arriving between ten to nineteen years ago, thus mostly belonging to the final wave of Iranian migrants. The material with which I engage in this chapter is extracted from a larger research project (2015–20) on food and identity among diasporic Iranians of New Zealand. The project drew on more than fifteen months of extensive fieldwork including in-depth, semi-structured interviews and conversational interviews with Iranians of New Zealand about their food and food practices, as well as participant observation at Iranian private and public, as well as everyday and ritual, settings, involving more than eighty Iranian individuals in total. For the purpose of this chapter, however, I solely draw on my ethnographic material from one specific private ritual setting in 2016 in the Canterbury region, attended by eleven Iranian individuals including myself (F = 5; M = 6), ranging from thirty to forty-eight years, who had been living in New Zealand between three to fifteen years at the time.

FOOD, MEMORY, RITUALS, AND NOSTALGIC HOMELY FEELINGS IN DIASPORIC CONTEXTS The relationship between food and memory within transnational, migratory, or diasporic contexts is highly under-researched and under-theorized (Holtzman 2006). This is despite the pivotal role of home-food in the migrants’ experience and the nostalgic feelings evoked by its sight, smell, and taste in away-from-home contexts. Among a few detailed anthropological works that have explicitly framed their focus on food and memory while giving attention to transnational/migratory/diasporic contexts is David Sutton’s Remembrance of Repast (2001). At the beginning of his book, Sutton recounts the story of a recent migrant from Greece who, upon smelling a pot of basil in London, makes immediate connections with, and feels a strong sense of belonging to, the origin home. Sutton argues that such association suggests “the importance of the sensory in reconnecting and remembering experiences and places one has left behind for shortor long-term migration” (74). Building on this, he concludes that eating can transport migrants across place and time, adding “there is an imagined community implied in the act of eating “food from home” while in exile, in the embodied knowledge that others

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are eating the same food” (84). Sutton also highlights the power of tangible experiences of ritual foods and food rituals in evoking the memories on which identities are formed, yet are still becoming. Considering rituals as one of the obvious places in which food and memory intertwine, he invokes the idea of “prospective memory” (19), suggesting that food and eating practices not only construct memories in the immediate present and invoke memories from the past, but also orient people toward memories in the future—for past joyous experiences of food consumption are, at times, eagerly awaited and looked forward to. Recent concerns with diasporic and transnational identities have also brought the issue of nostalgia to attention, with some studies regarding foodways as a nexus of nostalgia and diasporic identity, and highlighting the important role of food preparation and consumption in maintenance of identity and reconstruction of home in diasporic conditions (Sutton 2008; Mannur 2009; Ray 2004; Roy 2002; Mankekar 2002). Such prominence of food in eliciting nostalgic memories of both “good old days” (Sutton 2008: 170) and “bad old days” (Duruz 1999: 239) can be utilized by the migrant in the processes of “home-building,” that is, “the building of the feeling of being at home” (Hage 2010: 417). As Hage (2010) notes, there are four key feelings that contribute to migrants’ homebuilding. First is the feeling of security—that is not only having, but also feeling empowered to seek, the satisfaction of our basic needs and removing threatening or harmful otherness, making home a place where we can act as agentic subjects and govern it by what we consider “our law” (418). Second is the feeling of familiarity—which is generated in a space and in contexts where one possesses significant practical competencies and control. Third is the feeling of community—which is the feeling of recognizing people as one’s own and the feeling of being recognized by them as such through shared morality, values, and language. Last, and extremely crucial (yet often forgotten in theorizations of the diasporic home) is the feeling of opportunities and hope, through which home becomes not only a familiar, secure, and communal shelter, but also a platform that provides possibilities for the symbolic self to progressively move upward. I argue in this chapter that food rituals and ritual foods can be of great significance to feeling homely in the context of diaspora and migration, for they provide facsimiles of security, familiarity, and community all at once. Consequently, these amount to a homely space in which one can perceive and enact opportunities of a better life that would allow one to advance socially and emotionally. Building on this, I illustrate that the mnemonic power of rituals can be intensified in changed situations such as migration, turning them into important sources of identifying with a real and/or imagined originary past that also enforces expectations of continuity with, and possibility for, the future. I show how, in the diasporic context, the change-continuity interrelation—which is inherent in rituals and their power to create new meanings and structures (Feuchtwang 2010; Bell 1992; Kapferer 2004; Gardner and Grillo 2002)—are used by my Iranian interlocutors to negotiate and (re)construct new identities and status. I further show that while these ritual performances are perceived by my interlocutors as sort of a reenactment and recreation of a time and space in the past, they are performed in rather different ways than before. Rather, my interlocutors give selective attention to particular sensory experiences and bodily practices in a way to invoke relevant memories and imagination, while consciously ignoring the irrelevant or undesired ones. Such alternations in the past rituals, as I argue, not only involve different ways of doing things, but also different meanings that have become “integrated into personal biographies [and] family networks” (Pedersen and

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Rytter 2018: 2608), giving rise to a range of invented traditions (Hobsbawm1992), though these newly invented ways and meanings of expressions are always interrelated with the old ones at the origin home. In this sense, while such performances provide a sense of continuity with an often idealized past for Iranians, they are also means to forge transitions and transformations. Such “vital conjunctures” (Johnson-Hanks 2002: 871) urge my diasporic interlocutors to “reflect on, renegotiate and question notions of identity, affiliation and belonging both locally and transnationally” (Pedersen and Rytter 2018: 2609). Thus, they potentially encompass not only the “ways of being and ways of belonging” (Levitt and Schiller 2004: 1002), but also the transformative ways of “becoming[s]‌” (Biehl and Locke 2010: 317). Like many other diasporic groups, Iranians of New Zealand too, have a longing for home and in this way both purposefully and unconsciously utilize, among other things, familiar food rituals to feel at home. However, their desire for home, as I demonstrate in this chapter, is not a “desire for a homeland,” but a “homing desire” (Brah 1996: 16), and a nostalgia for homely feelings of familiarity, security, and community. What they seek, I argue, is not returning to, but a reimagining and a reexperiencing of an often idealized homeland—either directly as quintessential statements and/or as problematic negations that should be avoided—away from home through a series of home-building practices. In this chapter, I focus on one specific ritual practice: the preparation of nazri on the day of Ashura.

MUHARRAM, ASHURA, AND NAZRI RITUALS In the Shia doctrine, nazr is a binding pledge with a divine power (like a vow or oath): “a pious system of quid pro quo, in which a supplicant makes a request and, should the request be granted, offers thanks” (Gruber 2016: 250). The “thanks” come in many forms, from a merely oral declaration to a votive object. If this votive, tangible artefact happens to be edible, it is collectively referred to, in Persian, as nazri. In Iran, one can give or receive nazri any time during the year, but it is particularly during the month of Moharram, specifically on its tenth day, that nazri rituals build to a peak and are most widely observed. Muharram is the first month in the Islamic lunar calendar and the period for the most important commemorative ceremony held in Iran, commemorating the death of Hossein (the third Shi’i imam and the grandson of Muhammad) in the Battle of Karbala on the tenth day of the month (known as Ashura, literally meaning “the tenth”). The first ten days of the month are thus regarded as an intense mourning period, during which various sets of mourning and lamentation rituals and performances have been practiced for centuries, having constituted a collective memory among all Iranians. These include public mourning processions (dasteh), ceremonious chest-beating (sineh-zani), the theatrical reenactment of the Battle of Karbala (ta’zieh), and votive food practices (nazri), just to name a few. Among these the latter have turned into one of today’s most “popular” rituals of Moharram in Iran. During this time, the cities of Iran become abuzz with countless kiosks and food stalls, serving a wide range of nazris from traditional beverages to elaborate Iranian dishes, freely offered to any passerby. It is not only the act of giving the nazri that is considered a good deed, but also receiving it, for nazri is believed to be filled with God’s blessing, and thus having mystical and metaphysical qualities that can prevent and/or heal illnesses (Shirazi 2015) and bring its consumers benediction (Flaskerud 2010). What

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makes nazri even more sought after is its distinctive taste and smell due to the generous use of top-quality and aromatic ingredients as well as the application of special, lengthy cooking techniques, complemented by its preparation by highly skilled (and at times professional) cooks—factors that are usually absent in home cooking. Such symbolic, social, and sensual aspects that are embedded in nazris have made them extremely popular among Iranians and are the reason that every year during Muharram people regardless of age, class, status, political, or religious beliefs participate in one or more nazri practices, whether be its preparation, distribution, or consumption. Iranians of New Zealand had mixed feelings about their memories of Muharram and the many rituals associated with it. Given the current Iranian government’s increasing efforts in recent years to politicize the event and use it as a tool to reinforce its own theocratic leaning, some of my interlocutors were not particularly fond of the period. They dreaded and despised a “general air of gloom” that masked the cities during a period when “fun would cease to exist” and thought of its rituals as “superstitious,” “insincere,” “utterly outdated,” and even “backward.” Some, on the other hand, saw Muharram as a cultural, rather than a religious, event; they completely shrugged off its morbid undertones and considered it a “proper festival” with “so many fun-to-watch rituals,” fondly remembering the period as a time to “socialize, laugh, and flirt.” The one aspect of Muharram rituals that almost everyone (even those “despising” the period) remembered fondly, associated with positive memories, and drew from when reconstructing identities in diaspora, was the food-related aspect, the rituals of nazri. At the time this research was being conducted, I was informed by one of my key informants that there was no “official” Muharram ceremony held by Iranians in the Canterbury region (one of the main research sites). However, I was advised that a small group of Iranians have been holding a “private” ceremony for at least the past ten years. What follows is a brief ethnographic summary of one such event to which I was invited a few years back by Bita (pseudonym) who, along with her husband, had been holding what she called a “small private gathering” on the day of Ashura for more than a decade in New Zealand.

NAZRI-PAZUN Prior to attending Bita’s gathering, I found myself visualizing what a diasporic Muharram ceremony would look like. I was expecting to face a scene familiar to what I had seen in Iran: walls of the house covered with black mourning cloths, decorated with flags and banners with elegiac poems calligraphed on them in green and red, with men dressed in black shirts and women in black scarves. In fact, I specifically bought a black shirt the day before, as I did not want to be deemed inappropriately dressed for the event or look disrespectful toward my host. I had also prepared myself for an intense and emotional atmosphere of grief, with lots of weeping and crying possibly to the sound rozeh (eulogy singing). However, none of my expectations came true—at least in the way I had anticipated. On the day, while I was walking through the alley and scanning the house numbers to find Bita’s residence, I was suddenly struck by a rather joyful sensation of being in a familiar territory, though I was sure that I had never been in that neighborhood before. Unable, for a few seconds, to quite put my finger on what had given rise to that familiar sense, I finally identified the source to be the aroma of gheimeh (a stew made of lamb meat and split peas served on white rice) in the air which was signaling that I was getting

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closer and closer to Bita’s residence. In the few seconds that followed, I could think of nothing but my father and how, during the first ten days of Muharram especially on Ashura, we would cruise around the town to observe different Muharram rituals and, most importantly, enjoy sharing a nazri meal together—a Proustian moment, indeed. Upon arriving at Bita’s residence and being greeted by her and her husband, the sight of two relatively large pots (one filled with rice and the other with gheimeh) on two portable gas stoves in the back of the yard emerged. Contrary to my expectations, no one had stuck to what I had assumed to be the proper dress code for the event. Nor were there any signs of black mourning cloths, flags, or banners. I was then introduced to the other eight guests present and was briefed by Bita as to the “history” of what she and her friends called nazri-pazun (nazri-cooking ceremony)— which is what I, too, use hereafter for ease in referring to the event: [Back in Iran] my family used to hold mourning ceremonies every Muharram for ten days in our house. … They are still doing it. … Every night would end by everyone sitting together around the sofreh (dining cloth) and sharing the nazri. Bita regarded the whole experience of these ceremonies as one of her most cherished memories, but there were particular bits that she preferred over others: I was always an active member. … I could do a little when I was a kid of course, but I gradually got more responsibility as I grew up … Most of all I enjoyed when we would distribute nazri, though … Not that I disliked the actual mourning rituals, but I wasn’t a fan either. You know, seeing all those people crying and beating themselves was not very pleasant, at least for a kid, to see. … But I never complained, because I knew that once those parts are over, we would get to my favorite part. … When I got older I also started participating in the cooking process. … That was quite memorable, too. … All those planning, shopping, cooking, distributing. … I really miss those days! She then explained that since she and her husband moved to New Zealand more than a decade ago, nothing had hit her harder than her first experience of Muharram in ghorbat (exile) which, contrary to the Muharrams she had experienced since childhood, was extremely “cold and empty” (khoshk-o-khali), leaving her aching with a great internal void and making her feel utterly homesick: It was particularly hard that first Muharram. I wasn’t used to that. So I thought why not do the whole thing here [in New Zealand] from next year? … My husband said we can’t do the whole thing here, but when I think about it, I don’t even want the whole thing, you know? Just some things from those days would suffice. Given that nazri-centered rites were, for Bita, the most memorable and favorite part of those days, she had decided to do just that. However, given that cooking nazri for a period of ten days was not, economically and pragmatically, feasible for her in New Zealand, she had decided to cook only on the day of Ashura, and spend the other nine days preparing for, and looking forward to, the tenth. Bita then elaborated on her first year of making nazri in New Zealand and how it turned from a “personal” to a “collective” project: First year it was just me … which was okay … I cooked some gheimeh and took it to the doorsteps of a couple of friends like we used to do in Iran; they were shocked! This one here (pointing to one of the guests) burst into tears. … Later they asked me

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if they can be involved next year, and I happily agreed. … [So] the following year it got even better because there were more of us… which was more fun … and more importantly, doing it this way (as a group), which is the way it’s supposed to be done, sometimes makes me think that I’m still doing this in Iran. I suddenly forget I’m here and get moony and stuff (laughing). Bita’s account was complemented by others who reportedly had experienced a nostalgic rush upon receiving Bita’s first nazri in New Zealand (as I had, earlier that day!). Their narratives were mainly nostalgic ones exhibiting a strong connection between food, memory, and emotion by aligning nazri rituals with idealized geographical and social pasts. For instance, one guest said that every year on Ashura, he and his father used to “fill up the trunk of their car with pots and go for a ‘nazri hunt,’ ” an experience that I myself could easily relate to. Another guest expressed similar sentiments and said that he and his father still talk about their “nazri trips” when getting close to Muharram, and regard that as one of their most cherished father-son memories. At the same time, however, these narratives also implied at times that the current (diasporic) ritual, despite all its “shortcomings,” is in fact somehow preferred to the ones experienced in its “authentic” context. As one woman put it: This here is just as good [as those in Iran], only much better, cause although I really liked nazri-cooking in Iran, here you can do it with a peace of mind … not having to consider 1,001 things in your mind, so you enjoy it better. This was complemented by her husband who, regarding nazri as “one of the nicest traditions of us [Iranians],” added: Also, I don’t think I could deal anymore with some of the nasty things you would sometimes see in nazri-distribution in Iran, like people who jump the line or those who exceed their allotment … Those things annoy me now. Don’t take me wrong, I’m not saying I haven’t really missed those days; I certainly have! But this isn’t short of all that, really. The choice of gheimeh as the nazri dish in New Zealand’s nazri-pazun was also discussed by guests in length. Gheimeh was unanimously regarded by the guests as the “ultimate” nazri of Muharram. Not surprisingly then, it was the dish they had prepared in all but one year of nazri-pazuns in New Zealand. The memories of the one year they did not make and eat gheimeh was particularly interesting as the following exchange show: – So after five years of having gheimeh as our nazri, we felt that we should perhaps spice things up. So we talked among ourselves, and we came up with the idea of preparing adas-polo (lentils and rice pilaf) instead, because adas-polo is also a common nazri and a lot of us had it as nazri when we were kids, right? But that year anything that could go wrong did go wrong. – That’s right! That was personally my least favorite year in the past several years I’ve been involved. It didn’t feel right. It was very, I don’t know how to put it, ordinary! – Like something was missing, no? I mean the food itself didn’t turn out bad, but it didn’t turn out to be a proper nazri. … The feeling was not right. – We thought at first “okay, let’s try something different this year,” but that year with gheimeh gone, it felt like other things were gone, too. … I think some traditions shouldn’t be altered. … From then on we stuck to the common-sense nazri dish.

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Although the process of planning the meal was, for the most part, done by Bita herself, the preparation of the meal on the day was performed by all guests. Every now and then, we took turns to stir the pot once or twice in keeping tradition with collective nazri preparations—where individuals would ask the divine power for favors (hajat) while stirring the pot of nazri. Somewhere along the way, we were offered a chilled glass of tokhm-sharbati (basil seed drink, a very common nazri drink during Muharram) as a sort of aperitif. The drink was made in vintage crystal pitchers and served in paisley patterned mugs which were brought by one of the couples from Iran for the sole purpose of being used in their nazri-pazuns. I was also told that each year the group would have a “what to add next year?” discussion when they decide to add a new element to the next year’s ceremony to make it even more memorable in the future. Judging from what they had added the previous years, these appeared to be mostly food-related items or practices such as eating around sofreh added on the second year, drinking tokhm-sharbati added on the third year, paisley patterned mugs and vintage pitchers added on the fifth year, or walnut-filled dates which was decided to be introduced the following year. Once the meal was ready to serve, Bita spread out on the floor the sofreh that she had recently brought from Iran for this very purpose, around which we all sat and ate our nazri in Styrofoam food containers1—exactly in the fashion of contemporary mourning ceremonies of Muharram in Iran. The meal was then consumed while talking and laughing and reciting often amusing personal memories and anecdotes of Muharram, Ashura, and “nazri adventures” back in Iran. The meal was followed by drinking freshly brewed, aromatic, Iranian tea (another common nazri drink), prepared in kamar-barik (curved-waisted) glass teacups and lab-tala (gold-edged) saucers with some noghl (sugared almonds) on the side.

SELECTIVE REMEMBRANCE OF AN IDEALIZED HOME In the ethnographic evidence I illustrated above and the account given by the guests, several themes emerged. Many of the guests asserted that, upon eating and preparing nazri in New Zealand, they were reminded of pleasant memories, of their personal connections, of their social interactions and exchanges with others, and in general, of the “good old times” that were experienced in an idealized past and were now missed and longed for in diaspora. However, to comfort such yearning desires, what was preferred was not returning to the past (as well as to the past place) in its wholeness, but rather reliving and reexperiencing those select ideal and pleasant moments of the past in the company of a select community of Iranians; an attempt to mediate between the past and the present home to achieve and create a better home. The performances that emerged from such selective remembering of positive chunks of Muharram rituals, namely those related to food, sometimes led to feelings that were even homelier than home, even though they were now being practiced outside their original context. This suggests that nostalgia is more than a simple, romantic longing for a lost past. Rather, it can entail complex, ambivalent, even contradictory affects, sometimes in the same individual. This was seen, for example, in the statement by the guest who expressed a sense of loss and longing for a past, but at the same time felt a sense of relief for having left that same past. Furthermore, nostalgia often draws on a selective remembering and forgetting of the past (Berdahl 1999): while the positive chunks (in my case the positive socialness or family bond generated by engaging in certain food rituals) are remembered

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in a highly idealized version of home, the negative chunks are conveniently forgotten. Such remembrance of the best bits, such idealization and sanitization of home, not only awakens a longing for the past which often leads to the yearning for home and its traditions, but also stimulates the idealized recreations of the familiar spaces of the home and a reflective appraisal of the homeland, its cultural values, and norms (Sarwal 2017). In this sense, Iranians’ nostalgia for the past was as much about the reproduction of the past as it was about the production of the present (Berdahl 1999), reflected in their attempt to reclaim and rebuild the homely feelings of security and community that could, in turn, replace their “exilic” feelings (feelings of ghorbat) with familiar homely feelings. Second, the attempts of rebuilding of the homely feelings prompted Iranians to now look forward to nazri-pazun every year due to the many homely vibes attached to the ritual. Proposing a new, yet familiar, item/practice to future nazri-pazuns and the active planning of the future occasions points to a remembering through a “prospective memory” (Sutton 2001; 2008), through which Iranians consciously planned to remember, in the future, shared nazris and the tastes, smells, and practices associated with them. Such prospective memory had thus the power “not only to reinforce the memory of a particular food ritual or food experience, but to also regenerate the desire to recreate past occurrences” (Aboubakr 2019: 141). Finally, in order to further generate and enforce feelings of familiarity, certain nazri dishes and practices fostered, more than the others, positive nostalgic feelings of the premigratory, idealized past. This was most clearly seen in the case of gheimeh, the central epiphanic object of nazri-pazun, whose absence from the ritual and replacement with an “alternative” created a sort of discontinuity both with the past and present home and failed to evoke the same feelings of being at home—and a better home, at that (i.e., sense of hope)—which would have otherwise been generated. Other objects were also deployed to foster feelings of familiarity: stirring the pot in turn, drinking tokhm-sharbati and aromatic tea, using old-fashioned and traditional drinkware, nibbling on noghl, or eating the nazri in foam containers on the floor around sofreh. In Iran, such elements were only associated with the nazri of Muharram, meaning that not much significance was attached to what type of food/drink was prepared/distributed/consumed as nazri, what type of dish it was served in, or what type of context it was consumed in. However, the same elements interestingly seemed to have become the sine qua non of the nazri-pazun of diaspora. As a result, with any of these elements changed or removed, the tradition did not “feel right” to the participants as if there was “something missing” in an otherwise performative reminiscence of home. As Connerton (1989) notes, for rituals to function effectively as mnemonic devices, they should be “organized so as to appear and be experienced as qualitatively identical” (66). However, this was clearly not the case with Iranians who were highly selective of which Muharram (and especially which nazri) rites and sub-rites to retain and which ones to relinquish. The ritual, despite being visibly unidentical to the ones in Iran, functioned nevertheless as a strong mnemonic device for them, perhaps because what was trying to be achieved was not qualitative identicalness to their experiences of home, but more so an idealizingly identicalness—that is an idealized and pragmatic nearness to their reimagining and reenacting of home in diaspora. Just like many other rituals practiced out of their “original” context, Iranians’ nazri-pazun, too, had adapted to its own sociocultural, diasporic situation with many of the rites substituted, altered, interpolated, omitted, reduplicated, and (re)invented.

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Yet, there is often a limit to ritual adjustments with some core elements rarely exchanged or substituted (Gutschow and Michaels 2005). The way in which Iranians co-memorized Muharram suggested that for them it was food and food rites that were regarded as most desirable elements, thus indispensable. Through their private ritual of nazri-pazun and practicing its associated rites in New Zealand, Iranians maintained a sense of familiarity from, and continuity with, the past, which helped them see themselves as a community that exists and endures in the present, thus affirming their importance and value in their diasporic condition and experiencing a sense of security, as well as a sense of hope for betterment in their new homes.

CONCLUSION In general, my interlocutors seemed to engage in at least three primary forms of memory work/registers with regard to food rituals and ritual performances. These included (1) selectively highlighting idealized and positive aspects by simultaneously remediating their past negative experiences in Iran and working toward generating a better present in New Zealand—and somehow validating their diaspora in the process; (2) as part of this, identifying and foregrounding core aspects (rituals, symbols, and socialness) of food preparation, sharing, and consumption—which also articulates the idealized genuineness of their pre-Iranian ways of life; and (3) pragmatically adapting these to the material or sociocultural norms they now encounter in New Zealand. As I demonstrated, although all of these forms are importantly individual, they are also significantly collective. Deploying Hage’s (1997; 2010) theoretical framework around four key feelings necessary in the process of transnational home-building, I showed the ways in which food rituals and ritual foods connected Iranians to home in multiple social levels and reminded them of a continuing sense of familiarity, community, and security, all of which contributing to a sense of opportunity and hope and making a better home. In particular, I observed the fostering of such feelings of social connectedness in the collective preparation of nazri, a homely ritual during which a selective and idealized remembrance of home was consciously performed by Iranians through the materiality of food and food practices that fostered feelings of familiarity and community, security, and eventually a sense of hope and positive anticipation for the future. The reimagining and reenactment of homely feelings in the here and now of diaspora (that is in New Zealand) was a dominant theme in these home-building narratives. Although my interlocutors expressed nostalgic feelings toward idealized, pragmatic, and genuine versions of their past, this was not necessarily a feeling of homesickness or a desire to return. Rather, they deployed the positive chunks of their memories of the past to promote an idealized assertion of being both here and there. In other words, although they were continuously re-remembering and reframing an idealized version of their origin home, this was often a means to craft a better diasporic home (which, like their origin home, had both ideal and nonideal, desired and rejected, versions); therefore, the movement was always dialogic: referring back to go forth. The familiar objects Iranians surrounded themselves with, and the familiar practices they immersed themselves in, all gave rise to feelings of being at home. In this way, those objects and practices not only conveyed social connectedness with the home through their previously obtained meanings in the homeland, but also acquired new meanings in the here and now of diaspora, where the old home’s invented traditions were reinvented in the new home and gave rise to some new traditions which, at time, even overtook the

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previous ones. As Hobsbawm (1992) notes, traditions are invented and reinvented by social groups particularly at moments of crisis when sudden changes incapacitate those desired social patterns that had until then been held together by old traditions. In this way, by reinventing nazri traditions, Iranians reestablished a sense of continuity with those parts of past that were deemed by them worthy and capable of preservation, and in so doing, built the feelings of being genuinely at home. It was through such practices that Iranians could feel re-homed, through concurrently imaginatively revisiting their homeland, without having to physically go back there, thus generating a new, better, hopeful home in their present diasporic condition. Finally, in their remembrance through food, Iranians developed an active sense of nostalgia, not only realized in their looking back to the past, but also in looking forward to the future, in their “prospective memories” (Sutton 2001), which not only triggered the past experiences, but also structured anticipatory desires of looking forward to similar consumptions in the future. Through the many Proustian moments that Iranians (myself included when detecting the aroma of gheimeh-nazri) experienced, their sensory remembering evoked past events, persons, or situations in an involuntary and unconscious manner through the taste, smell, and sight of certain ritual foods and food rituals; however, the remembering was also generated through highly conscious processes to create, in the present and for the future, memories that are inspired by the past but are going to be prospectively celebrated.

NOTE 1 In Iran, nazri meals are often served in Styrofoam containers on the ground of being more convenient (for both givers and receivers) and also more cost-effective.

REFERENCES Aboubakr, F. (2019), The Folktales of Palestine: Cultural Identity, Memory and the Politics of Storytelling, London: I. B. Tauris. Axworthy, M. (2013), Revolutionary Iran: A History of the Islamic Republic, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bell, C. (1992), Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berdahl, D. (1999), “‘(N)Ostalgie’ for the Present: Memory, Longing, and East German Things,” Ethnos, 64 (2): 192–211. Biehl, J., and P. Locke (2010), “Deleuze and the Anthropology of Becoming,” Current Anthropology, 51 (3): 317–51. Brah, A. (1996), Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, Abingdon: Routledge. Connerton, P. (1989), How Societies Remember, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duruz, J. (1999), “Food as Nostalgia: Eating the Fifties and Sixties,” Australian Historical Studies, 29 (113): 231–50. Feuchtwang, S. (2010), “Ritual and Memory,” in S. Radstone and B. Schwarz (eds.), Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, 281–98, New York: Fordham University Press. Flaskerud, I. (2010), Visualizing Belief and Piety in Iranian Shiism, London: Continuum. Gardner, K., and R. Grillo (2002), “Transnational Households and Ritual: An Overview,” Global Networks, 2 (3): 179–90. Gholami, R. (2015), Secularism and Identity: Non-Islamiosity in the Iranian Diaspora, London: Routledge.

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Gruber, C. (2016), “Nazr Necessities: Votive Practices and Objects in Iranian Muharram Ceremonies,” in I. Weinryb (ed.), Ex Voto: Votive Giving across Cultures, 246–75, New York: Bard Graduate Center. Gutschow, N., and A. Michaels (2005), Handling Death: The Dynamics of Death and Ancestor Rituals among the Newars of Bhaktapur, Nepal, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Hage, G. (1997), “At Home in the Entrails of the West: Multiculturalism, Ethnic Food and Migrant Home-Building,” in H. Grace, G. Hage, L. Johnson, J. Langworth, and M. Symonds (eds.), Home/World: Space, Community and Marginality in Sydney’s West, 99–153, Annandale: Pluto Press. Hage, G. (2010), “Migration, Food, Memory and Home-Building,” in S. Radstone and B. Schwarz (eds.), Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, 416–27, New York: Fordham University Press. Hakimzadeh, S. (2006), “Iran: A Vast Diaspora Abroad and Millions of Refugees at Home,” Migration Policy Institute, September 1. Available online: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/ article/iran-vast-diaspora-abroad-and-millions-refugees-home (accessed January 19, 2021). Hobsbawm, E. (1992), “Inventing Traditions,” in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, 1–14, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holtzman, J. D. (2006), “Food and Memory,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 35: 361–78. Johnson-Hanks, J. (2002), “On the Limits of Life Stages in Ethnography: Toward a Theory of Vital Conjunctures,” American Anthropologist, 104 (3): 865–80. Kapferer, B. (2004), “Ritual Dynamics and Virtual Practice: Beyond Representation and Meaning,” Social Analysis, 48 (2): 33–54. Levitt, P., and N. G. Schiller (2004), “Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society,” International Migration Review, 38 (3): 1002–39. Mankekar, P. (2002), “‘India Shopping’: Indian Grocery Stores and Transnational Configurations of Belonging,” Ethnos, 67 (1): 75–97. Mannur, A. (2009), Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Mostafavi Mobasher, M. (2018), “Introduction,” in M. Mostafavi Mobasher (ed.), The Iranian Diaspora: Challenges, Negotiations, and Transformations, 1–18, Austin: University of Texas Press: Pedersen, M. H., and M. Rytter (2018), “Rituals of Migration: An Introduction,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44 (16): 2603–16. Ray, K. (2004), The Migrant’s Table: Meals and Memories in Bengali-American Households, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Roy, P. (2002), “Reading Communities and Culinary Communities: The Gastropoetics of the South Asian Diaspora,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 10 (2): 471–502. Sarwal, A. (2017), South Asian Diaspora Narratives: Roots and Routes, Singapore: Springer. Shirazi, F. (2015), “Sofrih and Walima: Food as Ritual in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” in P. Khosronejad (ed.), Women’s Rituals and Ceremonies in Shiite Iran and Muslim Communities: Methodological and Theoretical Challenges, 25–40, Münster: LIT Verlag. Sutton, D. (2008), “A Tale of Easter Ovens: Food and Collective Memory,” Social Research, 75 (1): 157–80. Sutton, D. E. (2001), Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory. Oxford: Berg Publishers.

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“The Taste of Earth and Homeland”: Remembering Palestine in “Little Ramallah” JENNIFER SHUTEK

Introduction At around 11:15 a.m., many women, some with young children and babies, begin to arrive. They greet one another by holding hands, kissing both cheeks, and exchanging personal news. One woman, whose birthday fell on the day of the gathering, enters carrying several containers filled with small round sweets of different colors: Oreos covered in dyed chocolate and adorned with delicate marzipan flowers. After she sets up a bejeweled silver cake tray, she pulls out the green, white, dark brown, and red chocolate-covered Oreos. She arranges them to make the Palestinian flag, transforming the Oreo, an icon of American processed food, into a symbol of Palestinian identity and political resistance. Preparations for the meal begin several hours before it is supposed to start. The earliest attendee arrived just after 11:00 a.m. She sat with me, drinking black coffee and discussing food in a mixture of Arabic and English. “I am from Syria,” the older woman told me. “Do you know kibbeh? Of course, you know kibbeh. Well, in Syria, we make kibbeh helwa!” She shared a shortened version of its preparation, explaining how to make this regional variation of a dessert that fuses kibbeh (usually a savoury food made with ground meat, onions, bulghur, and spices and formed into balls or patties) and knafeh (a dessert of fresh cheese layered between finely shredded pastry and topped with syrup, orange or rose blossom water, and, often, pistachios). As she spoke, I was transported to a crowded sweets shop in Bethlehem, West Bank, where I—alongside nearly every other customer in the shop—ate knafeh, the cheese partially melted by hot syrup poured over on top, the crisp angel hair-like pastry crunching in sharp contrast to the gooey cheese and aromatic flavor of orange blossom water. Her recipe for kibbeh helwa uses knafeh pastry to form the outside layer, and fat skimmed off of cooked milk that is mixed with sugar, rose water, and pistachios as the filling. Each sweet is then deep-fried before

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FIGURE 17.1  Chocolate-covered Oreos arranged to make a Palestinian flag at a women’s brunch at the Palestinian-American Community Center, in Clifton, New Jersey. Green at the bottom of the flag signifies earth, red on the far left signifies blood, white to the right represents peace, and black on top signifies occupation. Source: Photograph by author.

serving. This pastry is popular throughout the Levant and is often associated with the West Bank city of Nablus (Issacharoff 2009). “It is so good, but you can only eat it once in your life,” she says, laughing; her daughter is a nutritionist who reprimands her for preparing and eating knafeh. Several women drape long tables with cloths before arranging platters of food heaped with a variety of dishes including roasted chicken, ouzi (vegetables and meat with rice), lentils with rice, salads, hand-made savory pastries, and stuffed grape leaves. Some attendees distribute food to the queue of people that has formed, and as plates fill up, the women filter into the dining area and sit at long tables to eat and socialize. Conversations in Arabic permeate the room, mingling with the scents of garlic, roasted meat, and fragrant rice laced with onions. After half an hour of animated conversation exchanged over plates of food, some of the women return to the buffet tables for sweets, cutting thick slices of heavily frosted cake and taking doughnuts, fresh dates, and helpings of fruit salad. Several women work together to set up a large urn to brew coffee, and its rich scent wafts through the air. Meanwhile, one of the women in attendance gives a presentation on Palestinian cultural symbols and politics. Showing a picture of the Palestinian flag, the woman who used

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chocolate-enrobed Oreos to recreate the Palestinian flag explains to the group that the green at the bottom of the flag signifies earth, the white peace, the black occupation, and the red, blood. She discusses the frequent confusion between al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, and talks about the demographics of Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. The inclusion of Palestinian national identity and politics in everyday cultural artifacts such as songs, celebrations, and food is common, as events or gatherings of Palestinians routinely include discussions of identity, loss, and homeland. Everyday items like food, music, and clothing can indicate physical separation from, but also connections to, a homeland and are used to remember and to memorialize this land (Lehrer 1991; Serhan 2008: 25; Sutton 2001). The event I’ve described took place in March 2017, as part of a women’s brunch series. These potluck-style brunches take place on the last Monday of every month, when the multipurpose rooms of the Palestinian American Community Center (PACC) in Clifton, New Jersey, transform into a vibrant, bustling, aroma-filled kaleidoscope of women and children of all ages.1 Women with great-grandchildren alongside energetic toddlers come together to share food in an all-female space in which they laugh openly, eat heartily, and discuss personal and political items over home-cooked Palestinian food. While the topics discussed at these brunches differ, the presence of an abundance of home-cooked Palestinian food is a constant. The Women’s Brunches are both social occasions and opportunities for the dissemination of information. Guest speakers are brought in to present on topics such as health care, financial planning, domestic abuse, and Palestinian politics while the women in attendance eat brunch. The commensality at Women’s Brunches occurs between several generations of Arab American women, many of whom are Palestinian, who prepare totem Palestinian foods, ephemerally (re)creating the culinary experience of cooking, sharing, and eating emblematic foods from their homeland while sitting in a multipurpose room in their local community center. This intergenerational mixing also brings together women who were born in Palestine with women and children born in New Jersey, thus allowing not only the preservation, but also the transmission, of memories and cultural practices. In contexts of migration, food provides connections to homeland, playing essential roles in memories of home (Janowski 2012: 177; Sutton 2001). This chapter explores the associations between food, memory, and the creation of a diasporic identity within Paterson and Clifton, New Jersey, investigating the roles of foodways in the conjoined acts of remembering and memorializing a Palestine often framed as lost due to wars, occupation, emigration, and exile. It argues that food-related practices and their associated smells, flavors, and textures, are central to memory and identity among diasporic Palestinians and Arab Americans living in New Jersey. Food and food-related practices serve as lieux de mémoire, or “sites of memory.” These lieux de mémoire are profoundly evocative items or events that have the power to conjure up specific memories (Nora 1989: 12). Memories of Palestine are frequently mobilized through culinary practices in private and public spaces and at community events to maintain identity and community, while also contributing to the building of new communities and homes in New Jersey (Hage 2010). The memories and post-memories (memories of events experienced by a previous generation and transmitted to younger generations) of food preparation and traditions play key roles in the practices and narratives of Palestinian Americans of different generations in which a sense of displacement and ties to a national homeland are repeated and transmitted (Hirsch 1997). The importance and meanings of food, consumed in

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public and private spaces such as homes, cafés, restaurants, and the PACC, gesture to the everyday significance of foodways in remembering, memorializing, and (re)creating a lost homeland. Theories of food, memory, and migration facilitate discussion and analysis of the multiple functions of foodways as cultural, social, and political symbols among Palestinians and, more broadly, an Arab diaspora in New Jersey. The evocation of Palestine through totemic dishes and the culture of sharing plays important roles in facilitating continued ties, both verbal and visceral, between diasporic Palestinians and their homeland. A focus on agriculture and food has been central to Palestinian and Israeli claims to the contested land of present-day Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank since the establishment of the World Zionist Organization in the late nineteenth century; the agricultural production of this land has been mobilized as tangible evidence of organic and authentic rootedness, and consuming the food of the land is a way to literally and metaphorically conflate the body with national territory (Braverman 2009: 59–63; Shutek 2013: 30). The holistic act of cooking, involving the transmission of recipes, the purchasing of ingredients, and the preparation and serving of food, is also an act of embodied narration. Through these processes of food preparation, stories about a remembered (or, in the case of some younger generations of Palestinian Americans in New Jersey, an imagined) Palestine are told and retold. Discussions about recipes, for instance, preserve memories of embodied knowledge learned by older generations of women who grew up in Palestine. Some of the women debate the correct way to make certain dishes, while simultaneously exposing younger generations to methods of cooking that were learned in Palestine and are being preserved in New Jersey. These gatherings also imaginatively recreate Palestine in diaspora. In the absence of the homeland, the brunches weave together Arabic language, flavors, smells, and aesthetics of the West Bank. The strong association and, at times, conflation of agriculture, food, and the land of Palestine is a trope within Palestinian culture. The idea that home has a particular smell and flavor may be individual (as in the adult reminded of childhood foodways when tasting a particular dish or ingredient), or it may be communal (as when certain foods take on the status of an icon, immediately conjuring up a sense of home) (Fishwick 1978). The ubiquity of landscape, food, and agricultural imagery in Darwish’s poetry, as well as in Palestinian political posters, literature, paintings, and film, indicates that the importance of foodways is a motif throughout Palestinian artwork and cultural artifacts (Aboubakr Alkhammas 2014: 80 and 84; Shohat 2014: n.p.; Serhan 2008: 26; Shlaim 2001: 522; Zerubavel 1996). One stanza from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “A Lover from Palestine” encapsulates the conflation of earth, agriculture, yearning, nostalgia, love, and the land of Palestine: “Take me, wherever you are, Take me, however you are, To be restored to the warmth of face and body, To the light of heart and eye, To the salt of bread and song, To the taste of earth and homeland” (Lindholm Schulz 2003: 1).2 Food is a synecdoche for homeland, both creating and signifying a multisensory knowledge of home.

FOOD, MEMORY, AND MIGRATION While Arabs make up less than 20 percent of the total population of Paterson and Clifton (New Jersey), the majority of Arab Americans in these cities live within a small radius (Arab American Institute Foundation 2011: n.p.).3 Along several blocks of Main Street in Clifton and within community-oriented spaces like the PACC, however, a type of transformation takes place. Many aspects of the visual, auditory, and olfactory landscape change from the surrounding streets and neighborhoods. This multisensory construction

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of Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria outside of these countries draws on memories and intergenerational transmission of cultural practices. The heart of Paterson and Clifton, New Jersey, sometimes referred to as “Little Ramallah” due to the density of Palestinians living there, is Main Street (Adely 2014; Yoked 2017). This street contains an embodied geography, with aromas, flavors, and social practices that evoke Palestine. Many Arab Americans living in Clifton and Paterson migrated or are descendants of those who migrated following the 1948 creation of the State of Israel and the 1967 June Six-Day War (Serhan 2008: 27). While Arab Americans from various countries live in Paterson and Clifton, most trace their family histories to Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, or Palestine. Within this population, many whose families emigrated to the United States were originally from Palestine and had migrated temporarily to these neighboring countries following the creation of the State of Israel. There are an estimated 85,950 Arabs living in New Jersey, and an estimated 4,300 or 5 percent are of Palestinian descent (Arab American Institute Foundation 2011).4 According to Rania Mustafa, the executive director of the PACC, the Palestinian population of New Jersey began to expand in the early 1980s when chain migration began to occur more rapidly (Mustafa 2017). Palestine is a homeland for many migrants and carries additional meaning as a unifying symbol for Arab identity and solidarity (Khalidi 2010: 6; Christison 1988/89: 29). Memories and post-memories of Palestine not only articulate multisensory yearnings for and commemorations of a time and place of the past, but are also used to advance political and legal claims to the land of Palestine/Israel (Gvion 2012; Swedenburg 2003; Shutek 2013). In official and personal memories of Palestinians and Israelis, cultivating and eating the produce of the land indicate a lineage of connections to a specific place. This informs disputes about land claims by referencing traditional practices of food and foodways as evidence of an authentic and historical tie—and thus a legitimate claim—to the land of Palestine. In this way, the personal, group, and official memories told by Palestinians in diasporic communities narrate stories of loss and nostalgia embedded with a sense that the land belongs to them, symbolically if not legally. The public life of this population is centered around a several-block stretch in Paterson, New Jersey, where Arabic is the predominant language of signs and communication. In the stretch of Main Street spanning just shy of 1.5 miles that connects Clifton and Paterson, at least twenty Arab bakeries, restaurants, cafés, supermarkets, and small shops sell a wide array of Middle Eastern foods and ingredients. Close to the southernmost point of this section of Main Street, Al-Aqsa Supermarket, several halal meat shops, and a Turkish supermarket are clustered together. The signs on clothing stores, restaurants, supermarkets, legal offices, and pharmacies are almost all written in both English and Arabic, and inside these shops, transactions are conducted almost exclusively in Arabic. All of the food shops along this section of Main Street are halal and usually display the bismillah (an Arabic phrase meaning “in the name of God”; it is the first phrase of the Qur’ān and also begins the call to prayer). Nearly an entire block is occupied by Al-Basha’s shops—a restaurant, café, and bakery, selling ma‘amoul, manaqeesh, baklava, and knafeh, among other savory and sweet baked goods. The small supermarkets offer fresh produce and a common set of spices and ingredients, all carrying the same several brands of tahina, sumac, za‘atar, and olive oil. I purchased za‘atar and tahina at one shop, observing the forms of sociability that took place while I browsed. The aisles were narrow and small but abundantly stocked with imported foods, mostly from Jordan and Lebanon. Several people came in while

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I shopped, sometimes purchasing food, sometimes simply greeting and exchanging news with the woman working at the till. When I went to pay for my items, she briefly stopped speaking with her friend to tell me the price, before returning to their conversation. In several other bakeries and shops that I visited, as well, patrons and owners were familiar with one another, indicating a small and tight-knit community. The organization of public and social space is not exclusively nostalgic or memorybased, however. It can contribute to community-building in New Jersey. In this way, a national homeland is imaginatively and synesthetically constructed within a diasporic community (Janowski 2012: 179). The frequent trips back to Palestine made by some Palestinian Americans continually renew memories of a lost homeland among Palestinian communities in New Jersey, fortifying this conceptualization with the addition of spices and ingredients that “taste of the homeland.” Bringing back ingredients and foods (such as spices and olive oil) from Palestine reinforce what “authentic” and high-quality Palestinian foods taste like, inscribing these aesthetic values into the sensory perceptions of Palestinians now living outside of their home. Cafés, sweets shops, and restaurants in Paterson and Clifton also create the smells and tastes of traditionally Palestinian foods which function as lieux de mémoire for those born in Palestine and a way of smelling and tasting homeland in absentia for younger generations who were born in New Jersey. Community programs run by the PACC, alongside the private businesses that contribute to sensory landscapes that evoke Palestine, evidence the importance of food and agriculture in transmitting knowledge about Palestine to younger Arab Americans. People often use food as a mnemonic for remembering the past. Food frequently features in individual histories (e.g., in recollections of childhood or of key events in a person’s life) and foods are often associated with memories of participating in production, processing, and consumption (Janowski 2012: 176). These reminiscent multisensory symbols of home are not exclusively nostalgic. The individuals with whom I spoke did not indicate a desire to move back home (and many are also unable to do so), and Palestinian American and Arab American migrants to New Jersey have used foodways from their homes in Palestine, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon to construct new ways of life after their migration. Food-related memory emerges as a collection of shared narratives in which the discussion and consumption of food represents and preserves a lost homeland. While Palestinians living in New Jersey eat stereotypically American dishes (such as pizza, pasta, or hamburgers—all of which are themselves products of earlier waves of immigration to the United States), they also consume home-cooked Palestinian foods and discuss their recipes for traditional Palestinian dishes (Mustafa 2017). On a daily basis, many families consume a mixture of foods from various cultural backgrounds; during larger social gatherings, the food is almost exclusively food associated with practices from Palestine (or the Levant more broadly) (Mustafa 2017). Observation of and interviews with Palestinians living in Paterson and Clifton allow for a sensory understanding of the ways in which migrants use multiple senses to create a synesthetic new and old home, involving multisensory memories of the space from which they emigrated within a new cultural and political context. Previous studies on food, memory, and migration, as well as interviews and participant observation carried out in Paterson and Clifton, indicate the potential of further research on foodways among Middle Eastern diasporic communities, whose post-migration experiences draw upon foodways to commemorate trauma, transmit knowledge to younger generations through embodied practices, and build homes in new locations.

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Nayef Sweets is adjacent to Main Street in Paterson and sells iconic Palestinian sweets including knafeh, baklava, and, during Ramadan, qatayef (stuffed sweets made of a pancake-like dough filled with sugar, spices, and nuts or cheese that are crimped, baked, and covered in warm syrup). The owner, Saif Tawara, demonstrates “positive nostalgia,” which can function as an “enabling memory”: in this context migrants encounter or engage with sounds, smells, and tastes that provide comfort by reminding them of home, and can additionally be used to create new homes by integrating certain aspects of the previous home (Hage 2010: 416, 423). Tawara uses his knowledge of cooking and baking learned in Jordan in order to create a home and life for himself in Paterson (Tawara 2018). He takes great pride in his home cooking and the sweets that he sells in his shop, making his own cheese for the knafeh filling and ensuring the quality of the foods that he produces. In addition to working long hours at Nayef Sweets, Tawara does a great deal of home cooking, making dishes such as mansaf, maqloubeh, hummus, and homemade pickles (Tawara 2018). The experiences he had working in the famous bakery, Habibah Sweets, in Amman, Jordan and the traditional desserts found in sweets shops in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, inspire what he sells. In the case of Nayef Sweets, then, memories of home not only elicit a sense of yearning, but in fact help Tawara to build a new sense of individual and community identity in Paterson. Tawara sees his bakery as a way of remembering and paying tribute to his family’s origins in the West Bank, his upbringing and baking experience in Jordan, and to his father. He learned to make knafeh from his late father who, he notes, “was the best at making knafeh” (2018). At the same time, he works to forge ties with other communities and cultures while maintaining connections with the Palestinian American community in Paterson, as he sees food as a potential bridge between different cultures. While many of his clients are Arab Americans, he also caters to people of diverse backgrounds. Tawara shares that this brings him joy, as providing kindness and food is an effective way to share knowledge about Palestinian Americans with others who may know little about this community. “A lot of people cannot wait to go back to their country,” Tawara states, “but this country gave me an opportunity” (Tawara 2018). For Tawara, New Jersey is now his true home, a place with familiarity and community, and also with many opportunities and possibilities. Tawara’s integration of his experiences of baking in Jordan and the education in sweets baking that he learned from his father within the geographical, cultural, and political context of New Jersey illustrates how memories of foodways can be utilized to creatively forge new practices and community. In New Jersey, for instance, Tawara created his own sweet based on knafeh but including coconut and cream. This “coconut cream” is now his signature baked good and encapsulates the idea of establishing identities and communities after immigration, using memories and traditions from pre-migration life as well as practices from the new location to build a sense of home. Consumption of iconic Palestinian foods that refer to pre-migration foodways participate in everyday, grassroots enactments of “symbolic ethnicity,” which can be political acts (Serhan 2008: 21). The preparation and eating of food usually belong to the quotidian, repetitious, and private lives of individuals and families. Eating involves a community of participants bound together through commensality and consumption of often-totemic Palestinian foods. As a result, when families eat Palestinian food in their homes, they are, in fact, being exposed to the sensory experiences that their parents and grandparents had living in Palestine.

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Research on Palestinian ceremonies in New Jersey reveals that songs at Palestinian weddings also included the topic of Palestinian politics, often relating to occupation, land, and war (Serhan 2008: 25). The integration of politics into everyday practices of sociability and consumption is also visible in the realm of food, as demonstrated by the use of Oreos and colored chocolate to create the Palestinian flag as an edible visual aid to a lecture about the symbolism of the colors of the flag that took place during the Women’s Brunch discussed earlier. An Oreo cookie, not part of the culinary lexicon of Palestinian national cuisine, was used as an ingredient to create the Palestinian flag, thus demonstrating the use of stereotypically American processed food to prepare and display an iconic symbol of Palestinian identity. The Oreos also stood out in this context as they were one of the few processed foods (other than doughnuts) present at the brunch. Several of the women pointed out to me, smiling, that the flag had been cleverly created with dyed chocolate. While Oreos are, of course, edible, I did not observe any of the attendees actually consuming the Oreos; rather, they served the symbolic and decorative purpose of incorporating a common symbol of Palestinian identity into the brunch. Complicating the notion of traditions directly transmitting memory from one generation of immigrants to their children, scholars have raised questions regarding exactly how food and memory function. While taken almost for granted since Proust wrote about his redolent madeleine dipped in tea, scholars do not fully understand the relationships between food and memory. As Holtzman suggests, because food is synesthetic, its embeddedness in multiple senses allows for the creation of dense memories, and the engagement of multiple senses makes food a particularly strong memory carrier (2006: 373). Much of the current literature looks at nostalgia as memory, asking how migrants in different contexts use food to memorialize a past that they may or may not have directly experienced (Holtzman 2006: 367–8). This “remembering” of events not directly experienced is termed post-memory and refers to the transmission of particular memories to generations that did not experience a specific place or event but learned about these memories and adopted them as their own. These observations about the multisensory nature of food-related memories and the prevalence of post-memories are demonstrated through several of the PACC’s initiatives. Some of PACC’s programs explicitly aim to create connections between the land of Palestine and Palestinians living in New Jersey, including through the transmission of knowledge of food and agriculture. The PACC’s Holding onto Palestinian Existence (HOPE) summer program teaches teenagers about the history, significance, and practices surrounding Palestinian dishes (Mustafa 2017). Few participants were born in Palestine, and many have never visited, yet, through classes and stories, they take on post-memories of the land of Palestine and its foodways. Similar to HOPE in its objectives, the Homeland Project sends a group of Arab Americans to Palestine to familiarize participants with the history and landscapes, cultures, and flavors of Palestine. Additionally, nearly every issue of Falastin, the literary journal published by PACC, contains articles about food and the land, and some also contains recipes for Palestinian foods. Mustafa, the executive director of the PACC, has been involved with the PACC for years, and has an intimate knowledge of the history of the community and its center, as well as having close relationships with many Arabs living in Paterson and Clifton. The purpose of the PACC, she notes, is to preserve and promote Palestinian identity and community through education, cultural awareness, empowerment, and the creation of spaces in which Palestinians can participate in sports, crafts, and recreation (Mustafa 2017). The PACC is an axial point in the community, offering Arabic and English language

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classes, hosting men’s and women’s brunches, inviting guest speakers, organizing projects that educate people about Palestine, and running informational sessions in English and Arabic about finances, health, and legal issues. Among populations that experienced forced migration, the nonvoluntary displacement can be essential in creating a very specific type of memory, one that often tends to romanticize the homeland. Some Palestinians living in Paterson and Clifton feel that this is the case; one attendee of a Women’s Brunch in November 2018 shared her perspective that some Palestinians in New Jersey are overly concerned with preserving a “pure” Palestinian culture and food, when in fact all cultures are constantly changing. She expressed the sentiment that many Palestinians in New Jersey have created an almost ossified version of Palestine. She indicated that this is because many Palestinian Americans wish to preserve their memory of the time and space from which they emigrated, and thus, in her view, the Palestine created in New Jersey is in many ways a Palestine of the 1970s or 1980s. This may result from the practices of migrants who do not perceive their migration as voluntary. A sense of exile can lead to more overt and purposeful preservation of practices associated with home due to a fear of forgetting or losing connections to it, as well as seeking comfort in metonymical representations of home via food (Bardenstein 2002: 354). In this way, migrants and children of migrants continue to imagine a strong, even uninterrupted link to their homeland through careful reproductions of their memories. Both the observation that notions of uninterrupted or “pure” memory transmission tend to over-romanticize migration and migratory memory (Bardenstein 2002) and the argument that migration is not exclusively a narrative of dislocation, tragedy, and trauma (Hage 2010) are applicable to Palestinians in Paterson and Clifton. While food and foodways are viewed by Palestinian Americans and Arab Americans as important markers of tradition and constitute imaginative and physical ties to home, Palestinians living in diasporic communities also employ food-based syncretistic memories and traditions as they build communities following their migration.

CONCLUSIONS Palestinian Americans and Arab Americans living in New Jersey engage with foodways as processual and not only as a method of replicating practices from their pre-migration homes. While certain events, organizations, and daily practices seek to recreate aspects of foodways found in Palestine, these food memories are one of several sources of identity and community building among diasporic communities. For example, the increased consumption of non-Palestinian foods (often foods seen to be more traditionally “American” such as pizza and cheeseburgers) indicates an openness to the fusion of different cultural practices (Mustafa 2017). The Women’s Brunches, sites of the consumption of Palestinian dishes, are also arenas in which information about New Jersey’s legal, medical, and social systems are shared. Many Palestinians living in New Jersey do not indicate a desire to return to their homes. Instead, Palestinians and Arab Americans more broadly draw upon memories of foodways and preparation of foods associated with Palestine to create new senses of community and home in Paterson and Clifton. Many Palestinians in New Jersey were born there, and those who were born in Palestine, Jordan, Syria, or Lebanon and who are able to periodically visit their homes actively preserve and pass along traditions and memories to their children, often through patterns and practices of food preparation

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and consumption. In this way, memories and post-memories are one tool through which diasporic groups can create senses of community in new locations. Feelings of nostalgia for a homeland are constantly mobilized to create and maintain identity and community. While those who emigrated from Palestine or from surrounding countries identify themselves as Arab and, often, as Palestinian, there is great diversity in the functions of food as a lieu de mémoire and a symbol of identity. As migrants and subsequent generations born into migrant communities have unique experiences and perspectives, so, too, are foodways interpreted and used in unique ways. There is no single way in which food memories function among Palestinians and Arab Americans living in New Jersey, evidenced by the diverse perspectives on food practices expressed at Women’s Brunches and by business owners and residents of New Jersey.

NOTES 1 The PACC also hosts men’s brunches on the last Sunday of each month; these brunches were started after the women’s brunches, and I did not attend as they are male-only events. 2 ‫ والملح الخبز‬/ ‫ وضوء القلب والعين‬/ ‫ أردّ إلى لون الوجه والبدن‬/ ‫ كيفما كنت‬،‫ خذيني‬/‫ أينما كنت‬،‫عاشق من فلسطين “خذيني‬ ‫ وطعم األرض والوطن‬/ ‫”!واللحن‬ 3 Statistics regarding ethno-racial demographics are problematic as the US Census defines “White” as “the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. It includes people who indicate their race as ‘White’ or report entries such as Irish … Lebanese, Arab, Moroccan, or Caucasian” (US Census Bureau 2019). 4 The Arab American Institute believes that there are many more Arabs living in the United States than this number from the United States Census.

REFERENCES Aboubakr Alkhammash, F. (2014), “The Folktale as a Site of Framing Palestinian Memory and Identity in Speak, Bird, Speak Again and Qul Ya Tayer,” PhD dissertation, University of Manchester. Adely, H. (2014), “Hundreds of Palestinians Rally in Paterson in Protest of Israeli Military Campaign,” NorthJersey.com, July 19. Available online: http://archive.northjersey.com/news/ world/local-community-shows-support-of-palestinians-1.1054058 (accessed March 3, 2017). Arab American Institute Foundation (2011), “New Jersey.” Available online: https:// d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/aai/pages/7777/attachments/original/1431630656/New Jersey.pdf?1431630656 (accessed November 15, 2018). Bardenstein, C. (2002), “Transmissions Interrupted: Reconfiguring Food, Memory, and Gender in the Cookbook-Memoirs of Middle Eastern Exiles,” Signs, 28 (1): 353–87. Braverman, I. (2009), Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and Law in Israel/Palestine, New York: Cambridge University Press. Christison, K. (1988–9), “The American Experience: Palestinians in the U.S.,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 18: 18–36. Fishwick, M. (1978), “Icons of America,” in R. Browne and M. Fishwick (eds.), Icons of America, 3–12, Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press. Gvion, L. (2012), Beyond Hummus and Falafel: Social and Political Aspects of Palestinian Food in Israel, Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Hage, G. (2010), “Migration, Food, Memory, and Home-Building,” in S. Radstone and B. Schwarz (eds.), Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, 416–27, New York: Fordham University Press. Hirsch, M. (1997), Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Holtzman, J. (2006), “Food and Memory,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 35: 361–78. Issacharoff, A. (2009), “Palestinian Sets Guinness Record for World Largest Knafeh,” Haaretz, June 21. Available online: https://www.haaretz.com/1.5068008 (accessed December 1, 2018). Janowski, M. (2012), “Introduction: Consuming Memories of Home in Constructing the Present and Imagining the Future,” Food and Foodways, 20: 175–86. Khalidi, R. (2010), Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, New York: Columbia University Press. Lehrer, A. (1991), “As American as Apple Pie—and Sushi and Bagels: The Semiotics of Food and Drink,” in T. A. Sebeok and J. Umiker-Sebeok (eds.), Recent Developments in Theory and History: The Semiotic Web 1990, 389–401, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Lindholm Schulz, H. (2003), The Palestinian Diaspora: Formation of Identities and Politics of Homeland, New York: Routledge. Nora, P. (1989), “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, 26: 7–24. Mustafa, R. (2017), Telephone interview, interview by Jennifer Shutek, March 16. Serhan, R. (2008), “Weddings: Inventing Palestine in New Jersey,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 37 (4): 21–37. Shlaim, A. (2001), The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, New York: W. W. Norton. Shutek, J. (2013), “Romanticizing the Land: Agriculturally Imagined Communities in Palestine Israel,” Illumine: Journal of the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society, 12 (1): 14–37. Shohat, E. (2014), “A Voyage to Toledo: Twenty-Five Years after the ‘Jews of the Orient and Palestinians’ Meeting,” Jadaliyya, September 30. Available online: http://www.jadaliyya.com/ Details/31283 (accessed November 17, 2018). Sutton, D. (2001), Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory, New York: Berg. Swedenburg, T. (2003), Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. Tawara, S. (2018), Telephone interview, interview by Jennifer Shutek, December 22. US Census Bureau (2019), “Quick Facts New Jersey,” United States Census Bureau, July 1, 2019. Available online: www.census.gov/quickfacts/NJ (accessed January 25, 2021). Yoked, T. (2017), “Welcome to Little Palestine, New Jersey,” Haaretz, December 20. Available online: https://www.haaretz.com/misc/article-print-page/.premium.MAGAZINE-welcome-tolittle-palestine-new-jersey-1.5629141 (accessed July 12, 2018). Zerubavel, Y. (1996), “The Forest as a National Icon: Literature, Politics, and the Archaeology of Memory,” Israel Studies, 1 (Spring): 60–99.

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Everyday Militarisms in the Kitchen: Baking Strange with Anzac Biscuits LINDSAY KELLEY

Anzac biscuits are simple sweet biscuits made by adding dissolved bicarbonate of soda to melted butter and golden syrup, then adding the foamy results to a mixture of oats, flour, desiccated coconut, and sugar. Slight variations to the recipe and baking process produce chewier or crispier biscuits: adding self-rising flour and soft brown sugar makes them chewier; pressing them down during baking makes them thin and crispy.1 Any Australian or New Zealander will have an impassioned view on whether the biscuits should be chewy or crispy. Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand both claim the Anzac biscuit as their own (not an uncommon situation: the meringue-based pavlova causes similar controversy). This chapter builds on a brief history of the Anzac biscuit and accompanying mythology to explore the biscuit’s importance to the collective memories of Australasian eaters. The research I discuss in this chapter sits within a larger project titled “Tasting History: Biscuits, Culture, and National Identity” (Kelley 2020). The project develops a series of participatory tasting workshops where I witness and facilitate stories and taste experiences of three foods, each of which is derived from cultural experiences of war or occupation: hardtack, Anzac biscuits, and fry bread, together and separately. The workshops develop a process of “baking strange,” a term inspired by Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky’s ostranenie, or defamiliarization. Through practice-led methods, I make everyday foods such as Anzac biscuits unfamiliar and strange in order to investigate eaters’ capacities to reimagine the biscuit and reimagine Australasian identities. The chapter opens with the Anzac biscuit’s surprisingly eclectic history and eventual consolidation into a regulated standardized product. Legislation in both Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand stipulates that commercially produced Anzac biscuits must “generally conform to the traditional recipe and shape” (Australian Government Department of Veterans’ Affairs 2019). This regulatory activity grants the biscuits a form of political agency, as biscuit manufacturers are regularly embroiled in controversies. I will draw on experiences of baking Anzac biscuits at the Cementa Contemporary Arts Festival in Kandos NSW to argue that even the most iconic and culturally overdetermined foods can be imagined differently, made strange, and recognized as political agents. Focusing on

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how military technologies and cultures impact our everyday lives, this chapter adapts an “everyday militarisms” framework to consider how past wars continue to unfold in our kitchens, markets, and cookbooks.2 Everyday militarisms can be observed in countless processes and products taken for granted in the contemporary moment (a few examples include dehydrated food, canned food, tea bags, flexible plastic packaging, and margarine).

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ANZAC BISCUITS On April 25 of each year, Anzac biscuits are baked and eaten to commemorate Anzac Day, a day of remembrance similar to Veteran’s Day in the United States. Anzac biscuits derive their distinctive place in Australasian culture from both their deep connections to the national identity narratives associated with Anzac Day and their material ingredients. In addition to the coconut, a Pacific ingredient important to other iconic Australasian desserts including the Lamington, Anzacs are one of only a handful of biscuit recipes that rely on golden syrup to bind the mixture in the absence of eggs. The Anzac biscuit, similar to Annemarie Mol’s clafoutis, “is also composed. The diverse worlds in which it figures, are, in their turn, absent/present within it” (2016: 246). Anzac biscuit worlds taste of domestic kitchens, war, national belonging, care package baking, and real stories of deployed soldiers, making the biscuits an exceptional cultural site. Anzac Day was first observed in 1916, following the Australia New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) landing at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915. The campaign was a devastating failure, ending in withdrawal in December of the same year. The first Anzac Day fell just after Easter. Richard Ely reminds us that “it is worth noting that an unusually wide swing of that moveable religious festival—Easter—threw it very late in April that year [1916]. Good Friday was on 21 April and Easter Sunday on the 23rd. The Anzac celebrations therefore virtually overlapped with the traditionally widespread public re-enactment of the ancient Christian drama of death and resurrection” (Ely 1985: 58). Martin Crotty describes the “quasi-religious status” of Anzac Day as “a national equivalent to the Book of Genesis” (2008: 102). Bianca Slocombe and Michael Kilmister’s examination of Anzac as a “civil religion” notes that “Gallipoli was a watershed in Australia’s national consciousness,” for “despite Australia becoming a nation in 1901, Gallipoli is popularly considered the ‘birthplace’ of Australian nationhood” (2020, 3), while Ann Curthoys finds that “in the story of Anzac lies the emotional locus of Australian narratives of nation” (2001: 130; see also Ely 1985: 41, 48, 51–2; Crotty 2008: 109–11). Perhaps the depth of feeling surrounding the “civil religiosity” of Anzac mythology is what makes Anzac legends and “the Anzac spirit” difficult to critique or question. Mark McKenna traces a history of forgetting associated with Anzac mythology, specifically forgetting the dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and observes that “before Anzac, we bow down, we close ranks and we remain silent” (Lake 2010: 133). As Sidney Mintz points out, “war is probably the single most powerful instrument of dietary change in human experience” (1996: 25).3 In the Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand context, Anzac biscuits are a complex example of a (possibly imagined) wartime food entering into mainstream diets and becoming, in culinary historian Allison Reynolds’s words, “an everyday national icon” (2018). Sociologist Sian Supski finds that “Anzac biscuits link Australians powerfully and instantly to a time and place that is regarded as the heart of Australian national identity” (2006: 54). An enduring and sensory reminder of this moment, Anzac biscuits highlight the role of women during wartime and cement a

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national identity born from care and resilience amidst military aggression and (hopeless) battle. In his comprehensive book Bully Beef & Balderdash: Some Myths of the AIF Examined and Debunked, Graham Wilson unpicks many of the most persistent myths about the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) during the First World War (2012). Wilson’s research affirms that the food and supply chain problems lamented by soldiers and historians alike were very real, but finds that there were bakeries, cookhouses, and access to local food above and beyond the “iron rations” of bully beef and biscuits (2012: 262, regarding bakeries, 246–8, regarding field kitchens, 226–7). There were, however, no canteens at Gallipoli. Wilson writes that “the Australian Comfort Fund, through quite herculean efforts, managed to deliver a large shipment of luxury food items to the peninsula in October … Needless to say, the shipment sold out in less than a day” (2012: 248). The Anzac biscuit inserts itself into the powerful nation-forming myths that have coalesced around the ANZAC forces precisely on the site where a canteen should have stood in Gallipoli. These absent “luxury goods”—simple foods such as sweets, jam, cakes, and biscuits—are exactly what go into care packages, then and now. The story goes that after receiving stories and letters from ANZAC soldiers describing their rations, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand sisters, wives, girlfriends, and mothers felt compelled to intervene in their terrible combat diets. Sometimes soldiers wrote correspondence about hardtack or “Anzac tiles” directly on hardtack biscuits: this ration was so durable that it could be used as an inscription device that would survive international postal journeys. Across all the wars that relied on it, hardtack was creatively repurposed in the trenches. In addition to serving as a postcard, hardtack became a canvas for painting, a picture frame, and its holes were even used for embroidery. Hardtack was designed to be durable and to survive long journeys. Although more palatable than Anzac tiles, the Anzac biscuit recipe, like hardtack, was developed to survive transportation across vast distances. Anzac biscuits suggest that Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand identities were and continue to be formed in transit, in a physical and temporal elsewhere, waiting in tins at sea. The sea journeys of biscuits, soldiers, settlers, and even contemporary refugees recall historic colonial invasion by sea, ongoing support for overseas military campaigns, and the strength of maritime borders. The idea that biscuits resembling today’s Anzac biscuits were sent to the front in Gallipoli, let alone made there, has been thoroughly debunked. Supski tackles two unsubstantiated scenarios: that soldiers baked them at Gallipoli (not possible as there were no ingredients or facilities available to do so), or that an Imbros bakery devised the biscuits (unlikely because bakery records only mention bread) (2006: 53). While this evidence suggests that the biscuits originated in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand kitchens, Supski’s research does not confirm that Anzac biscuits as understood today were sent overseas during the First World War. Supski writes the biscuit as a ritual of belonging: “In the same way that other aspects of the Anzac myth have become a form of civil religiosity, Anzac biscuits can be regarded as the communion wafer—through eating the biscuits, one ‘belongs’ in and to the Australian nation” (2006: 58). The earliest published recipes for Anzac biscuits can be found in newspapers and cookery books from 1915 onwards (Reynolds 2018: 30–9). But as we will see below, actually preparing these early recipes does not necessarily produce a familiar result. I have come to understand the Anzac biscuit as arising from the same complex set of cultural

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conditions that commemorated and memorialized the First World War in many spheres of public life. Just as roads and buildings in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand were renamed “Anzac” after the First World War, a group of popular biscuit recipes arose, coalesced, and were named “Anzac” in the decade following Gallipoli. Aligned with this view that Anzac biscuits arose alongside commemorations of many kinds, Supski argues that Anzac biscuits are a “culinary memorial” (2006). Referred to as “Australia’s national biscuit” (Supski 2006: 57), and “deeply embedded within Australasia’s intangible cultural heritage” (Cobley 2016: 62), Anzac biscuits are associated with Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand national belonging to such a degree that this recipe has become an “invented tradition” (Hobsbawm in Supski 2006: 52). “Invented” because the biscuits arose from a mythologized time, cohering in their current form only after many years of practice and experimentation, what Hobsbawm describes as “emerging in a less traceable manner” (as quoted in Supski 2006: 52). Even if the care package and fundraiser biscuits baked during the First World War were closer to distant relatives than direct ancestors of today’s Anzac biscuits, subsequent wars quickly established Anzac biscuits as an iconic care package food. A tin of Anzac biscuits from 1966, returned from Vietnam still sealed with masking tape, evidences the popularity of Anzac biscuits as a care package food long after the First World War (Rutherford 2016b). The Anzac biscuit is so enshrined in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand’s culinary and broader culture that there have been calls to add the recipe to the UNESCO’s Lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage (Cobley 2016). (To date, although there are many breads and food items on the list, “Gingerbread craft from Northern Croatia” is the only biscuit to have been added to the UNESCO Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage.4) Anzac biscuits are a beloved and popular part of daily life in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, with people baking and eating them all year round, not just on Anzac Day. Recipes for Anzacs are nearly always included in the dessert section of Australasian cookbooks.5 When asked to bring biscuits along to a fundraiser or volunteer tearooms, Anzacs are the biscuit of choice. Given their ubiquity as an “everyday” food and their association with the First World War, they are a perfect example of everyday militarisms, or the entanglement of military technologies, cultures, and histories with the objects and practices of everyday life.

ANZAC BISCUIT ANCESTORS Historians look to several biscuits of the past when tracing the genealogy of the Anzac biscuit. In conversation with National Museum curator Kirsten Wehner, Supski finds Anzac biscuit precursors in Scottish oatcakes (2006: 53). While this seems sensible given that both biscuits feature oats in their mixtures, the method for oatcakes often calls for rubbing softened but not melted fat into the dry ingredients. Culinary historian Allison Reynolds follows the “melting method” to trace a different genealogy for Anzacs: “The use of golden syrup (earlier recipes used treacle and molasses) and the melting method technique had their origins in the British gingerbreads and parkins” (2018: 11).6 The melting method involves melting the fat before adding it to the dry ingredients. Anzac biscuits always call for a foamy melted mixture made up of butter, golden syrup, and bicarbonate of soda dissolved in water. Australian War Memorial (AWM) curator Dianne Rutherford experimented with baking early Anzac biscuit recipes and found that the results were far removed from

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contemporary understandings of Anzac biscuits. Aligned with Reynolds and Supski, Rutherford writes, “While these days what makes an Anzac Biscuit is very well defined, it took many years for the biscuit as we know it to become entrenched in Australian society under that name” (2016a). She undertook two rounds of historical baking, starting with an Anzac biscuit recipe published in a 1916 newspaper. The “Anzac Ginger Biscuit” resembles a ginger snap, while the recipe from the 1917 War Chest Cookery Book looks nothing like a contemporary Anzac biscuit as it is layered with jam and has icing on top. Rutherford’s second round of baking, this time focusing on recipes from the 1920s, included some biscuits that resemble present day Anzacs, and others that taste and look very different, again including icing, eggs, and even cinnamon (2013). These contemporary productions of historical baked goods are part of Rutherford’s practice as a curator. She looks after the biscuits and other perishable items in the AWM collections and has undertaken hands-on experiments to animate the collections she maintains, writing that as a curator she tries to “get an understanding of how … items held in the Memorial’s collection were made or how they were used” (2015). Rutherford’s historical Anzac biscuits would likely violate Australia’s Department of Veterans Affairs legislation regulating commercial preparations of Anzac biscuits. To the best of my knowledge, Anzac biscuits are the only biscuit in the world to be regulated by government legislation. While many state and national governments around the world take an interest in biscuits, for example, by declaring certain baked goods to be the “state biscuit,” only Anzac biscuits are explicitly protected. Anzac biscuit legislation is included in the Australian Protection of Word “Anzac” Act, passed in 1920 and updated in 1994 to explicitly address biscuits. Aotearoa New Zealand protects the word “Anzac” with its Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage “Use of the word ‘Anzac’ guidelines” (2020). The current Australian guidelines read: “Applications for Anzac biscuits are normally approved provided the product generally conforms to the traditional recipe and shape, and are referred to as ‘Anzac Biscuits’ or ‘Anzac Slice.’ Referring to these products as ‘Anzac Cookies’ is generally not approved, due to the non-Australian overtones” (Australian Government Department of Veterans’ Affairs 2019). All commercially sold Anzac biscuits must apply for permission to use the name “Anzac” or if found in violation of “the Crimes Act 1914, a penalty of up to $10,200 for a natural person and $51,000 for a body corporate may be imposed by the Court” (ibid.). More often than not, April comes around and at least one business causes controversy. Notable instances include Subway, unable to cost-effectively modify its US-made dough base to satisfy Department of Veterans’ Affairs requests to conform to “the traditional recipe,” and Gelato Messina, asked to change the name of a seasonal gelato from “Anzac Bikkie” to “Anzac Biscuit” (Boys 2019). This focus on the authentic and “traditional” recipe recalls Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson’s assertion that what she names “culinary nationalism” takes “recipes as primary indicators of identity” (2010: 102). This would explain why legislation protecting Anzac biscuits focuses on the recipe, as does museum educator and academic Joanna Cobley’s proposal to “safeguard the idea of the Anzac biscuit recipe” (2016). Cobley does not seek to add the Anzac biscuit itself to the UNESCO world list of intangible cultural heritage; she seeks to add the “idea of the recipe,” “which includes both the transmission of baking knowledge and skills and the act of eating the biscuit” (ibid.: 63). Cobley’s approach supports Ferguson’s claim that “recipes remain so important as identity markers” because “they connect food to place” (Ferguson 2010: 109).

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TASTING HISTORY, CEMENTA, AND THE KANDOS CWA In 2019, I participated in the Cementa Festival of Contemporary Arts in Kandos, NSW (Cementa 2019). Cementa is a four-day festival of contemporary art and performance located in Kandos, NSW, a postindustrial town that was the home of a large cement works, which closed in 2011. One of the town’s mottos is: “The town that made the cement that built your town.” Kandos faces unemployment and drought, is vulnerable to bushfires, and does not have many employers based in town. All artists who participate in the festival spend time in Kandos scoping their project, engaging community members, and giving a talk at Cementa’s new headquarters, located in the old Kandos community hall. I undertook my residency in June of 2019. My goal was to engage the Kandos Country Women’s Association (CWA) in order to collaborate with them on a series of Anzac biscuit-baking workshops under the auspices of my Tasting History project. The CWA, founded in 1922, currently has 44,000 members and nearly 2,000 branches across Australia. Writing about how the CWA facilitated solidarity between Aboriginal and white country women, Jennifer Jones observes that “the Country Women’s Association is easily stereotyped as a conservative white organization controlled by the ‘blue-rinse set’ and resistant to social progress or innovation,” but “this image does not do justice to diversity amongst CWA members, nor their willingness to support social initiatives that challenged some fundamental assumptions in their rural communities” (2015: 175). My collaborator in Kandos called the CWA “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” referring to the radical political work that the women manage to accomplish despite a seemingly benign activity base, much of which is centered on cooking, baking, and handicrafts. The Kandos CWA branch nearly closed several years ago because the aging member population dwindled until the branch’s offices could no longer be filled. When threatened with closure, Kandos women started a campaign to save the branch and, therefore, the building. CWA branches are often housed in association-owned properties, with branches maintaining their upkeep. Kandos women joined the CWA, filled the offices, revitalized the branch, and were able to keep the building (“Kandos CWA saved” 2014). Kandos CWA won a renovation grant to install a commercial kitchen in late 2018. Jams and pickles are some of the more popular cottage industries in the Kandos/Rylstone area, so by having access to a commercial kitchen, makers could sell their products without fear that they would be fined or shut down for selling jam made outside of a commercial kitchen. The Kandos CWA branch enthusiastically supported the Cementa Festival and my project. We decided to partner with the Cementa coffee shop and collect donations for the biscuits we made to support CWA projects. Kandos CWA members were excited to show off their new kitchen, and the branch supported every aspect of my residency, attending my talk, inviting me to their homes for dinner, and even providing accommodation for me during the festival. During the workshops, held on Friday and Saturday mornings, festival goers joined locals to bake Anzac biscuits in groups. Participants formed their groups after introductions that answered the critical question, “chewy or crispy?” Although I emphasized that participants could work with any Anzac biscuit recipe they preferred, including their favorite family recipes, I also provided a booklet containing three recipes excerpted from CWA cookbooks, which participants could consult if they wished. The CWA recipe from Western Australia was first published in 1936, and the two other CWA recipes

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were noted as first judged in 1981 (Country Women’s Association New South Wales 2012; Country Women’s Association Western Australia 1992). As we experimented with ingredients, form, and taste, the participants and I reflected on our level of commitment to “conforming to the traditional recipe and shape.” The workshops sit somewhere between contemporary art practice, public scholarship, and ethnography. The methodologies that informed their planning and execution were drawn from both the engaged scholarship of previously mentioned Anzac biscuit experts Allison Reynolds and Dianne Rutherford and social practice and participatory art works focused on food and eating. Contemporary artists have taken up Anzac biscuits as a medium, as with Kingsley Baird’s Tomb (2013) and Stela (2014). With an invitation to audience members to take and eat a soldier-shaped Anzac biscuit from a large cenotaph structure covered in stacks of biscuits, Tomb’s participatory elements comment on the intersection of memorial, war, and taste. Because my work in Kandos was ephemeral, without an installation opportunity or sculptural outcome, I modeled the workshops on practices that were oriented toward collective making. Michael Rakowitz and the Barbara Cleveland Institute provide two further examples among many relevant socially engaged practices. Rakowitz’s Enemy Kitchen (2003–) appears to be a food truck but is actually a participatory art event designed to involve American eaters in Iraqi cuisine (Boucher 2018). Although the position of Iraqi cuisine within the United States is very different to the accepted, celebrated position of the Anzac biscuit in Australia, the collective workshop format and the project’s engagement with everyday militarisms influenced my development of the Kandos workshops. The Barbara Cleveland Institute, a performance collective based in Sydney, collaborated with the CWA to create MASS ACTION: 137 Cakes in 90 Hours (2012). Over three days, the four-person collective baked in shifts around the clock to produce all of the recipes in the just-released Jam Drops and Marble Cakes cookbook and celebrate ninety years of the CWA. The recipes were presented to a certified CWA judge for evaluation, and the results were consumed at a generous afternoon tea. This endurance performance event, similar to Barbara Cleveland’s One Hour Laugh (2009), was designed to push an everyday event such as laughing or baking “beyond its normal boundaries” (Grey 2013). Artist Diana Baker Smith estimated that given the room capacity there would be more than one cake per person (Michelmore 2012). My Cementa Tasting History workshops were informed by Mass Action’s location in CWA rooms, CWA member engagement, and the project’s emphasis on the process and symbolic resonance of baking.

BAKING STRANGE AND IMAGINATION The workshops at Cementa were part of an active, diverse program focused on community engagement in the small town of Kandos, NSW. Participants signed up for the workshops based on a short description that opened with “What exactly do we eat when we eat a biscuit?” Based on my previous work with critical culinary interventions, I developed an approach that I call “baking strange,” named after “making strange,” also referred to as defamiliarization or ostranenie. Viktor Shklovsky found this to be the point of art, to upend familiar assumptions: “The goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing, things; the device of art is the ‘estrangement’ of things and the complication of the form” (2015: 162). What is recognized is automatic and unremarkable; what is seen is “deautomated,” experienced “as if happening for the first time” (Shklovsky 2015: 162). Shklovsky illustrates ostranenie with examples from

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literature, while Bertolt Brecht made theater strange by defamiliarizing and distancing audiences: “Verfremdung estranges an incident or character simply by taking from the incident or character what is self-evident, familiar, obvious in order to produce wonder and curiosity” (2018: 167). Although the workshops were neither literary nor theatrical, baking strange activates these principles of wonder, complication, and seeing as if for the first time. Given their nostalgic sense memories and significance for national belonging, Anzac biscuits are easily “recognized” or “automated”; their preparation and consumption seemingly “self-evident, familiar, obvious.” Because the goal of the workshops was to look at Anzac biscuits in a new way and reveal them as critical political agents, new baking and conversational methods were trialed at the workshops. The creative outcomes of the workshops had little to do with the objects we created—the biscuits themselves— and everything to do with the way we committed to interrupting and destabilizing the easy, sometimes nostalgic, fantasy stories that unfold from smelling familiar smells and touching and tasting familiar textures. Baking and tasting allowed us to experience and observe how Anzac biscuits have become more than themselves: their deep sociopolitical meaning emerged in casual conversation throughout both days. One participant mentioned that when she was annoyed with the government, she considered a refusal of Anzac biscuits to be a comment on the situation. Another recalled her grandmother introducing her to the recipe as a child, describing the vivid sense memories inspired by the biscuit. One of the men present reflected on the fragility of Anzac biscuits as a nation-forming activity. Aligning this fragility with whiteness and masculinity, he questioned how secure concepts of the nation-state can really be when the humble biscuit must be regulated and policed. A recent survey of fragile masculinity in the political psychology literature would support this participant’s comments, with researchers finding that “there is indeed a link between fragile masculinity (both manipulated and measured) and support for masculine and aggressive political means and ends” (DiMuccio and Knowles 2020: 27). Even biscuits are folded into a nation-forming mythology centered on war and military service. I used a few techniques to bake strange. I was aware that I was using some of these techniques and I heard them reflected back from participants. Others were pointed out by participants and only later did I understand how we had developed them together. First, we considered how the kitchen is a space of knowledge creation. During our initial introductions I framed my research in these terms, referring to my interest in kitchens as sites of new knowledge. I repeatedly checked in about how our kitchen was producing new knowledge by naming the expertise of participants. Although we succeeded in complicating and “estranging” the kitchen, I found responses to this approach to be predictably gendered. Naming knowledge and expertise in the kitchen was noticeably uncomfortable for many of the women whose knowledge and expertise I reinforced; they responded with deferral and modesty, redirecting toward safer territory such as their experiences with motherhood and care work. A professional baker attended the second workshop. He explained how he made and sold something he called an Anzac biscuit for many years, but then he began experimenting with the mixture, substituting coconut oil for butter and adding unusual ingredients. One day he looked at the biscuits he was making and decided it was time to stop calling them Anzacs. Instead, he decided to highlight these unusual ingredients in the commercial descriptions of his biscuits. Mindful of his commercial context, he had internalized the strict definition of the Anzac biscuit in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand’s legislation.

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The biscuit was not capable of growing and evolving beyond its strict definition. Rather than regard this as a straightforward instance of self-policing, this decision points to the ways in which our memories of a food contain and even limit our capacity to imagine foods differently. This baker influenced the Saturday workshop a great deal. Although he occasionally caused tension by opening the oven unexpectedly and frequently, his effect on the workshop was generally positive and freeing. His training and knowledge meant that he had a mixture prepared and in the oven in less than five minutes, and his open, lacey biscuits inspired participants to experiment with form and method, pushing their Anzac biscuits into new shapes and textures. Many of the biscuits produced during the second workshop were open and airy, while others had the crunch of a brickle, with an almost toffee-like candied consistency. One of our participants, a CWA member who served as our food safety supervisor at the first workshop, had a great deal of knowledge about baking and biscuits specifically. She became a consultant for the entire group, with participants asking her questions about their techniques and mixtures. Nearly every group checked in with her before deciding if their biscuits were done baking. Reflecting on the two workshops, while the professional baker in the second workshop had a liberating effect on that day’s biscuits, it could also be said that the first workshop’s results were more consistent and standardized because of our food safety supervisor. While the baker influenced the group by means of disruptive performances, the food safety supervisor influenced the group by means of consensusbuilding consultation. Her quiet confidence and knowledge about biscuit baking produced remarkably similar results across all groups. The professional baker and our food safety supervisor each demonstrated different ways of expressing and transmitting knowledge in the kitchen. To further reveal the kitchen as a site of knowledge creation, I revisited these different ways of communicating kitchen knowledge during our closing conversation. Second, we were noncompetitive. Kitchens can become competitive places, and the theme of competition emerged in the CWA kitchen in several ways. The CWA has a history of judging and competition, and this is written into the recipes I distributed in the handout. CWA recipes are perceived as classic, correct, and trustworthy. I distributed three Anzac biscuit recipes, two from Jam Drops and Marble Cake: 60 Years of CWA Award-Winning Recipes, a cookbook published by CWA NSW, and one from Western Australia CWA’s The C.W.A. Cookery Book and Household Hints. CWA recipes often include the year first judged and stipulate conditions for competition. For example, the Anzac Biscuit recipe in Jam Drops and Marble Cakes specifies that the biscuits should be “approximately 7 cm in size” with “six biscuits to be displayed on plate provided” (2012: 110). Participants noticed and remarked upon this language in the recipes, which gave me the opportunity to emphasize that during the workshops we would not be competing or be judged. CWA judges are articulate, knowledgeable women capable of forensic analysis of a given baked good, commenting on everything from whether or not parchment paper was used, the heat and settings of the oven, and the ingredients and mixing process. Most CWA members contribute to competitions and receive feedback from judges; this process is central to the organization’s mission to empower and educate. My efforts to set competition aside during the workshops in no way dismiss the work of CWA judges; instead, I wanted to emphasize our collective memories of Anzac biscuits and consider their cultural significance. In addition to CWA’s established culture of competition, baking in groups has been co-opted by television shows like MasterChef to the degree that everyone expects a

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competition. At the time of the workshops in Kandos, MasterChef Australia was one of the most popular television shows in Australia. Writing about MasterChef ’s changing format, Deborah Philips finds that the show has moved away from the idea that television might have a pedagogical role, instead finding that “cooking on television is now informed by the drama and competition of reality television shows” (2016: 177). Competition and judging have become the norm for any situation where several groups are at work in the same kitchen. Drawing on our experience with television shows, we imagine ourselves to be contestants more than cooks. Undoing the expectations of competition that participants brought to the workshop was an ongoing process that disrupted expectations. Third, following from the noncompetitive format, the workshop was a permissive space. I said, perhaps more than anything else, “you can do whatever you want,” regarding everything from wearing an apron or not to combining ingredients in the order given in the recipe or not to baking at a certain temperature or not. A permissive approach seems at odds with the principles of following recipes. However, I found that allowing for both mistakes and a wider range of decisions than typically permitted in more structured competitive environments freed participants to think critically about their actions and choices. In this way our biscuits were “de-automated”: feeling as if we had choices about our processes and ingredients allowed us to imagine our biscuits in new ways (and indeed create some entirely new things, such as the batches supplemented with fruit and nuts in the first workshop, and the open, lacey olive oil confections in the second workshop). Finally, the phrase “everyday militarisms” mattered to us a great deal. I introduced everyday militarisms at the beginning of the workshop, discussing the entanglement of military technologies with food and eating and the mobilization of domestic kitchens in wartime. We talked about how Anzac biscuit mythology contributes to everyday militarisms in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand by connecting contemporary kitchens with the First World War whenever we bake and eat Anzac biscuits. Cultural and sometimes family memories became additional sites where taste, history, and everyday militarisms intersect. The phrase stuck with participants, who shared stories about everyday militarisms in their own kitchens and in their lives beyond the kitchen. Once introduced to the idea of everyday militarisms and encouraged to see through that lens, it becomes difficult to see otherwise. An entanglement and an estrangement at once, everyday militarisms catalyzed the process of baking strange by prompting a reassessment of the simple activity of baking Anzac biscuits. Perceiving the home kitchen and the CWA kitchen as connected to a global military industrial complex gives additional weight to our activities and assumptions within these spaces. For example, the participant who connected Anzac biscuit legislation with policing the fragile norms that define white settler masculinity has created a complex string of associations connecting the intersections of his own identity with national belonging, military history, societal expectations, and the no longer simple activity of eating an Anzac biscuit. Taken together, these approaches, actions, and conversational gestures ask participants to imagine baking and the kitchen differently. Although none of these individual interventions explicitly enacts a literary or theatrical device that exemplifies ostranenie, as an ensemble, these conditions allowed the biscuits we produced to be unlike any Anzac biscuits any of us had ever tasted. Baking strange activates the imagination. We baked strange when we were prompted to “see” rather than merely recognize the biscuits we made. After mixing, rolling, and baking biscuits, we gathered around a table full of Anzac biscuits, more than we could possibly eat. Sitting with cups of tea, we reflected on biscuits as cultural objects that carried the weight of historic association and myth as well

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as present-day notions of national belonging. Our dialogue about an everyday, takenfor-granted food invited both celebratory and critical stories about what it means to be Australian. Participants ascribed political force to the biscuits, as with the woman who interpreted her refusal of Anzac biscuits as an act of political defiance. We discussed how Anzac biscuits figured in family histories: one participant contacted their grandmother to use her recipe, another recalled baking Anzac biscuits to send overseas to a deployed family member. Bakers ruminated on ingredients and methods, experimenting with the recipe and articulating their own definitions of what makes an authentic Anzac biscuit. Our plates of biscuits became cultural knowledge created in the kitchen, a space we newly appreciated for its connections with a larger apparatus of global war (Marx de Salcedo 2015).

CONCLUSION Revisiting the contested history of the Anzac biscuit in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand produces new understandings of the biscuit’s place within the collective memory and “culinary nationalism” of two nations whose concepts of nationhood are deeply tied to the physically and temporally distant First World War Gallipoli campaign. The series of Anzac biscuit baking workshops I facilitated in collaboration with the Kandos CWA build on this history by activating techniques from participatory social practice art to reflect on entanglements between everyday life and military cultures and technologies. The workshops developed a methodology I call “baking strange.” We approached a familiar food, Anzac biscuits, from unfamiliar directions, considering how our kitchens, the CWA’s kitchens, even the shared kitchens installed in workplaces, are political sites that constitute and potentially critique an apparatus of global war. David Sutton asks, “What would it mean for our studies of food if we thought of memory itself as a sense?” (Korsmeyer and Sutton 2011: 470). From my research, workshops, and interviews, I have found that the distinctive taste and texture of Anzac biscuits evoke collective cultural memories of a time and place when, tellingly, Anzac biscuits as such did not exist. Regarding memory as a sense reveals how, as with our other senses, memories might be shifted, changed, and made strange. New associations and alliances might emerge. By perceiving the iconic Anzac biscuit as if for the first time, baking strange unsettles previously fixed or unnoticed correspondences, everything from how military technologies infuse daily life to the ways in which legislating the Anzac biscuit reveals the fragility of nationalism, whiteness, and masculinity. A culturally loaded food such as the Anzac biscuit can create the possibility that we might taste and imagine other Australias and other Aotearoa New Zealands.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This research was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. I am a non-Indigenous person working on the unceded lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation as well as the unceded land of the Dabee tribe of the Wiradjuri People. I would also like to acknowledge the Piscataway and Ute land where I was born and raised. The Cementa workshop was undertaken under UNSW human research ethics reference number HC190344. Thank you, CWA Kandos and Cementa participants and organizers, for your commitment to the project.

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NOTES 1 In her exhaustive history of the Anzac biscuit recipe, culinary historian Allison Reynolds has included Crispy and Chewy Anzac biscuit recipes, which when read side by side illustrate some of the key adjustments that need to be made to achieve either a chewy or crispy result (2018: 96–7). 2 I am part of an international research network called Everyday Militarisms, and the work of this network has influenced this project. Founded by Astrida Neimanis, Tess Lea, Caren Kaplan, and Jennifer Terry, the network’s purpose is to “generate new perspectives and dialogue on the ways in which militarisms are inseparable from everyday life” by focusing on decolonial, intersectional approaches that acknowledge “the transpacific entanglements that suture US and Australian histories.” “Everyday Militarisms.” Available online: https:// everydaymilitarisms.squarespace.com/ (accessed May 5, 2020). 3 Such dietary change can be subtle, emerging over time. Katarzyna Cwiertka finds that in Japan, “the catering reforms and nutritional policies of the military during the wartime period exerted a powerful impact on contemporary Japanese food,” highlighting the permeability between military rations and everyday meals of civilians (2002: 23). 4 In language that evokes Australasian rhetoric about the Anzac biscuit, UNESCO reports that “gingerbread has become one of the most recognizable symbols of Croatian identity.” United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, “Gingerbread craft from Northern Croatia.” Available online: https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/gingerbread-craft-from-northerncroatia-00356 (accessed May 5, 2020). 5 For example, every CWA cookbook will have at least one Anzac biscuit recipe. The three recipes I collected for the workshops outlined below were sourced from Jam Drops and Marble Cakes: 60 Years of CWA award-winning recipes (2012) and The C.W.A. Cookery Book and Household Hints (1992). Recipes for Anzac biscuits can be found in nearly all other Australasian cookbooks. Maggie Beer, Margaret Fulton, Allyson Gofton, and Donna Hay each offer an Anzac biscuit recipe. 6 Parkins are sticky ginger cakes common in Yorkshire and Lancashire, UK. Some recipes use golden syrup, others use molasses or black treacle. Parkins, like Anzac biscuits, can be made in many different ways, fluffy, crispy, flat, or sliced.

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Michelmore, K. (2012), “Too. Much. Caaaake,” ABC Local August 31. Available online: https:// www.abc.net.au/local/audio/2012/08/31/3580190.htm (accessed May 10, 2020). Mintz, S. (1996), Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past, Boston: Beacon. Mol, A. (2016), “Clafoutis as a Composite: On Hanging Together Felicitously,” in J. Law and E. Ruppert (eds.), Modes of Knowing: Resources from the Baroque, 242–65, Manchester: Mattering. Philips, D. (2016), “‘Cooking Doesn’t Get Much Tougher than This’: MasterChef and Competitive Cooking,” Journal of Popular Film and Television, 44 (3): 169–78. Rakowitz, M. (2003), Enemy Kitchen, Cooking Workshop and Food Truck, Smart Museum of Art, Chicago. Reynolds, A. (2018), Anzac Biscuits: The Power and Spirit of an Everyday Icon, Mile End: Wakefield. Rutherford, D. (2013), “ANZAC Biscuits but Not as You Know Them …,” Australian War Memorial Blog, August 9. Available online: https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/blog/anzacbiscuits-not-you-know-them (accessed May 5, 2020). Rutherford, D. (2015), “How to Make a ‘Butterfly’ Belt,” Australian War Memorial Blog, November 24. Available online: https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/blog4/how-make-butterflybelt (accessed August 20, 2020). Rutherford, D. (2016a), “An Anzac Biscuit Bakeoff!,” Australian War Memorial Blog, November 1. Available online: https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/blog/anzac-biscuit-bakeoff (accessed May 5, 2020). Rutherford, D. (2016b), “Terry’s Biscuits,” Australian War Memorial Blog, November 30. Available online: https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/blog/terrys-biscuits (accessed August 19, 2020). Shklovsky, V. (2015), “Art, as Device,” trans. Alexandra Berlina, Poetics Today 36 (3): 151–74. Slocombe, B. and Michael Kilmister (2020), “Breaking Disciplinary Walls in the Examination of Anzac as Religion,” Human Arenas (April), n.p. Supski, S. (2006), “Anzac Biscuits—a Culinary Memorial,” Journal of Australian Studies, 30 (87): 51–9. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, “Gingerbread Craft from Northern Croatia.” Available online: https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/gingerbread-craft-fromnorthern-croatia-00356 (accessed May 5, 2020). Wilson, G. (2012). Bully Beef & Balderdash: Some Myths of the AIF Examined and Debunked, Newport: Big Sky.

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CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Next Apicius ANDREW DONNELLY

Remembrance is a process solidified from things and spatial encounters. —Christopher Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape, 1994: 27

INTRODUCTION This is a chapter about a single meal, a lavish dinner I ate at the Chicago restaurant Next. Next’s concept is to change its menu every few months and adopt a new cuisine based on a time, place, or idea. Its opening theme was “Paris in 1906,” an homage to Auguste Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire, which makes a clever bookend with one of its most recent endeavors, a two-part retrospective of its parent restaurant Alinea, one of the most celebrated establishments in the United States. The themes vary significantly, from “The Hunt,” with its focus on game and the earth, to the lunchboxed meal and mac and cheese of the whimsical “Childhood.” I visited there in April of 2017 for “Ancient Rome,” a meal based on the cookbook of Apicius, a first-century Roman culinary text I know quite well. I went to this meal a cynic, prepared to dislike the entirety of it and convinced it was going to be a gimmick. My academic work has focused on ancient foodways of the Roman Empire and its aftermath, specifically cooking vessels and references to those vessels in texts, changing patterns of cooking over time, and the relationship between changes in food cooked and the people who ate that food. I have been critical of certain attempts to reproduce ancient cooking, primarily because these reproductions tend to focus less on the ancient context of cooking and more on adapting recipes to suit the needs of the modern chef. This desire to create ancient food, to experience eating and tasting in the manner of a Greek or Roman—or, at least, how the modern author or cook perceives how a Greek or Roman would have eaten—often seems incongruous with any attempt to understand ancient recipes and foodways. By recreating these recipes in a modern kitchen, that very context of use is removed, and what emerges instead is a pastiche of ancient sources and modern interpretation. I was prepared to find yet another example of an inauthentic meal whose primary purpose was to make a higher-end consumer walk away feeling they had “eaten like a Roman.” Yet my time at Next was remarkable, though I have never been certain if my particular reason was the result of the chef ’s intent. I wish I could tell you I remember every morsel of the eighteen dishes served that night, but in truth for several of them toward the end, the majority of which were accompanied by a glass of wine or other drink, I chewed with a hazy determination, focused on getting to the finale with the spirit of one completing

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a very decadent marathon. Certain details stand out, such as the smell of the wonderful bread when it was torn open, or the bite of mastic in the dessert course that reminded me of childhood summer days in the kitchen of my best friend, who was Greek, eating a βανίλια υποβρύχιο (vanilla submarine), or a spoonful of mastic dunked in cold water. Much of my memory of the rest of the meal is lost, not due to a lack of inventiveness or the quality of the food, but rather because I was caught up in a bit of reverie, as somewhere in the middle of my feast I had experienced a revelation. I am an historian and archaeologist of the Roman empire, specifically the end of the Roman world—this is what the English historian Edward Gibbon referred to as its “decline and fall” (though we now more politely refer to this as its transformation)—and during this meal I came to understand this transformation in a way that no book or potsherd or architectural ruin has been able to offer. The sensorial experience of the meal, one I associate with the scholarly field of phenomenology, or use of multivalent sensory experience to understand the past, was transformative, and was both informed by and fundamentally altered my understanding of that past. The experience sat somewhere between the twin themes of this book, memory and imagination. My memories of my studies, of countless hours spent analyzing pottery and reading ancient texts, were enriched and transformed by my experience. This allowed me the opportunity to engage with a past—not the past, but a somewhat imagined landscape of diet, foodways, and changing taste based on my experience engaging with the remainders of the ancient world—in a visceral way, one that has fundamentally shaped my view of how to discuss and how to convey an experience of the end of the Roman world. I hope to share that experience with you here and discuss its potential pedagogical impact.

APICIUS AND THE ROMAN MEAL Who was Apicius? This question, as is often the case regarding the identity of ancient authors, is a difficult one to answer. He is remembered as the most famous culinary writer of his day and composed a book on the topic—the De re coquinaria, or On the Matter of Cooking. But this does not tell the entire story. I have referred to Apicius as a writer, but in truth we know almost nothing reliable about the man, and specific information about his identity is conspicuously lacking (see Johnson 2006: 1–5; Grainger 2007: 71–7). His name appears as early as the first century CE and was associated with decadence. In the Historia Naturalis, or Natural History, written by the Roman writer and philosopher Pliny the Elder, he is referred to as a famous chef but also called “the most gluttonous gorger” (Pliny 1983: 207). A poem by the Roman Juvenal less than a century later indicates that by his time the name Apicius had become a word used to refer to anyone who fancied themselves a gourmet (Juvenal and Persius 2004, 199). The perpetually dour author Tertullian, who converted to Christianity in the very late second century CE, observed that Apicius could be understood as the founder of a discipline, much as Plato was associated with Platonism (Tertullian 1870: 33). The legend of Apicius grew, but the person behind the cookbook, if ever he existed, has been lost. What remains is not one book produced by one hand, but a collection of recipes cobbled together from a variety of sources and range in date from the first century BCE to the third or fourth century CE (Lindsay 1997: 146). Apicius’s cookbook is divided into ten chapters, each titled according to the food to be cooked (e.g., shellfish, quadrupeds, or poultry), though these categories are not exclusive and there is overlap across chapters. There are over 450 recipes in Apicius, making it the most extensive cookbook in the Greco-Roman world.

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The large number of spices listed in many recipes suggests that only the very wealthy could cook most of the meals present in the text, and thus much of the food in Apicius is ultimately best viewed as provender produced for feasting by only the most aristocratic of kitchens (though see Grocock and Grainger 2006: 28, whose editors argue that several recipes, including the majority of Book 3, could have been prepared in modest kitchens). Other features also stand out, indicative of the hodgepodge nature of the collection. The first book of Apicius focuses on the preservation of foods, a reminder that such endeavors were not only the purview of the poor struggling to overcome food scarcity, but also the wealthy, for whom serving food outside of its season could be seen as a display of power. Apicius also reminds us that food’s importance was not only confined to the banquet, but was also medicinal. The text includes several recipes that address ailments, especially stomachaches, indicative that writing on cooking focused not only on pleasure, but also on dietetics (Raga forthcoming). The recipes are often little more than lists of ingredients and a few generic verbs for cooking. A recipe for a sauce for colocasium, a bean from Egypt, reads “pepper, cumin, the herb rue, honey, liquamen [a type of fermented fish sauce I will discuss, along with garum, in detail below], and a little oil. When it boils, bind it together (thicken) with meal.” (Apicius 2006: 256 This is sparse to be sure—weights and amounts are rarely if ever mentioned, and cooking time is an afterthought—though the opinion of the scholar John Edwards that the text is “spare to the point of postmodern bleakness” is perhaps a stretch (Edwards 2001: 255). What can Apicius tell us about dietary practice in the Roman Empire? It is a mistake to use Apicius to discuss the Roman diet. The vast majority of people living in the Roman world ate seasonally and locally, and thus determining what constituted the “Roman” diet is next to impossible. In an empire that governed, at its peak, between 50 to 75 million people across three continents, there were many diets (for population, see Harper 2017: 31). But Apicius gives some insight into a particular aspect of dietary practice in the Roman Mediterranean that was integral to Rome’s existence: that of an elite with the resources of the Mediterranean at their disposal and the funds to acquire those resources. The text is indicative of a—but not the—Mediterranean diet that endured for some time under the empire. Apicius and his kitchen were products of a well-connected Mediterranean supported by a highly sophisticated economy and great amount of mobility, and represent the ultimate potential of a unified network of food, spices, and vessels for cooking. Consider, for example, the following recipe, one of the more detailed in the text: In flamingo: You pluck, wash, and dress a flamingo and include it in a caccabus [a type of rounded-bottom cooking vessel]; add water, salt, dill, and a small amount of vinegar. When the cooking is halfway done, bind a collection of leeks and coriander so it might cook. When it is nearly cooked add must [so that] you color it. Add in a mortar and grind pepper, cumin, coriander, root of laser [an extinct plant also known as silphium], mint, rue. You pour on vinegar, you add caroenum [a reduced sweet wine], you cover it with its own juice. You will pour out from the same caccabus, you thicken with meal. Cover with sauce and you will serve. You will also make this for parrot. (Apicius 2006: 228) The exotic nature of the animal—though flamingo may not have been exotic to them— is what our eye is drawn to (as well as the poor parrot!), and this element of the fantastic and unusual is often the appeal of reading ancient Roman recipes. Perhaps the most

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well-known example of this is the honey and poppy-seasoned dormice present in the feast of Trimalchio in Petronius’ Satyricon, one of the more famous scenes of banqueting in the Latin sources. But there are other details worth noting. Recipes in Apicius, as noted, are complex and require a significant mobilization of resources for one table. Another recipe, also for flamingo, called for a spice named silphium, which was extinct by the first century CE (see Pliny 1950, 445), an amount of garum, and the flamingo itself. In Apicius’s day Spain dominated the garum industry, while silphium could only be acquired in Cyrenaica or modern Libya. This means ingredients from at least two continents were required to produce this one meal. The Roman Empire, with the Mediterranean Sea at its center, was uniquely suited to harness the ecological bounty of these continents. This movement of foodstuffs might not seem unusual in our age where the contents of a humble $2 cup of sweetened coffee have been brought together from a similar number of continents, but was at the time one of Rome’s greatest achievements. Our globalism, at least in terms of access to food, often rewards downward, and makes inexpensive, mass-produced meals possible. So, too, did Roman globalism, though the state-subsidized transportation of bulk goods (e.g., olive oil, grain, and wine) also facilitated the exchange of luxury items and foodstuffs (Wickham 2005).

COOKING AT THE END OF EMPIRE The western half of the Mediterranean was increasingly fragmenting in the century after the Apician text was produced. The eastern Mediterranean, which we often associate with the emerging Byzantine state, would endure for some time as a relatively unified polity. The transformation of the western Roman world is often discussed—perhaps most famously and certainly most lastingly by the English historian Edward Gibbon—as a period of cultural decline (Gibbon [1776] 1983). Modern historians and archaeologists have claimed various positions on the nature and extent of this decline. To recap the scope of this debate would take longer than the space in this book allows. In short, some scholars remain convinced that this was a time of economic stagnation and brutal invasion by outsiders (Ward-Perkins 2005). Others, perhaps best represented by Peter Brown, see a period of cultural continuity and the emergence of new, dynamic, and longlasting traditions (Brown 1971). No matter which camp one prefers, it seems indisputable that the once-unified Mediterranean world was, by this time, fragmenting. One of the many things this fragmentation affected, as a formerly cohesive polity broke apart into smaller kingdoms, was the connectivity of the Mediterranean. First used by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell in their book The Corrupting Sea, connectivity refers to the delicate balance of resources in the Mediterranean (2000). The regions—they use the term “microregions”—of the Mediterranean were, on their own, resource-poor and had difficulty sustaining themselves. It was only the larger umbrella of empire and its resulting unification of regions and the movement of goods over long distances that allowed the Mediterranean to flourish. The bonds of connectivity began to fray, and then break, by the fifth century as Rome’s pan-Mediterranean sway waned and new kingdoms ruled by men Romans called “barbarians” were established. The elaborate meals described in Apicius would have been affected, as the ability to supply a table with resources from so many areas became increasingly difficult. Thus Roman aristocratic identity, which depended in part on food and the meal, began to transform. This transformation was aided by the advent of Christianity, especially in its ascetic form, which called for the situational rejection

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of certain foods and meals, as they were connected to physical pleasure, which was increasingly to be renounced (Brown 1988; Grimm 1996; Raga 2018). It was also aided by the arrival of new peoples—people both Romans and modern scholars refer to as “barbarians” (Pohl 1998). This term is the collective word for the varied peoples—groups with names like Goth, Vandal, and Frank—who carved out pieces of the Roman empire for their own and helped transform the political and cultural norms of the Mediterranean in the process. These barbarians brought with them their own traditions, ones that at times appalled, or at least surprised, the people they now governed, people who still thought of themselves as Romans. These new traditions include culinary ones. The Vandals, who took North Africa, enjoyed—as St. Jerome relates—eating horsemeat, and indeed the archaeological evidence from Carthage in this period reveals a number of butchered equine long bones (McCormick 2001: 26). So too did the barbarians prefer different methods of cooking: roasting on grates or spits increasingly became the dominant method of cooking meat, replacing the Roman custom of cooking in ceramic vessels (Donnelly 2015: 146). The nature of sauces also began to change: formerly ubiquitous and reliant on fermented fish, sauces are infrequently mentioned in this period and, when they are, are a mixture of sweet and sour (Adamson forthcoming). Aspects of this changing palate can be observed in two other cooking manuals from the late Roman period: Vinidarius and Anthimus. Like Apicius, little is known of either, though neither attracted the status that Apicius did. The Vinidarius text is an emendation to the manuscript of Apicius, though the reason why it was added is not known (Grocock and Grainger 2006: 32–5). The name Vinidarius closely matches the name “Winitharius,” which is Gothic in origin. This Gothic name, combined with other textual clues, indicates that Vinidarius was alive likely in the fifth century CE. If Apicius represents a “GrecoRoman” tradition, Vinidarius represent a transitional “Romano-Gothic” one that was similar to Apicius and possessed a certain amount of continuity of cooking practice. Sauces were still used, liquamen remained prominent, and a particular two-vessel method of cooking that appeared frequently in Apicius is present here as well. Spices were still quite common: indeed, Vinidarius opens his text with a list of spices and herbs needed in the kitchen, though only half of these are used in the text itself. But there are some differences. Vegetables, which had been an important part of Apician meals, were, in Vinidarius, now little more than garnishes (Plouvier 2002: 1361). Bread and grains appear infrequently. Cooking is simpler: there are fewer verbs used to describe cooking and fewer types of vessels mentioned. Apicius represented a variety of Mediterranean ingredients brought together under the umbrella of empire. Vinidarius is, for lack of a better word, a bit of a simpler text than Apicius, and this change hints at a diet somewhat less connected to the former thriving pan-Mediterranean economy and less able to provide the complex meals Roman aristocrats loved. The differences between Vindarius and the past suggest a developing cultural transformation of elite dining tradition, but a subtle one. A final important recipe book is the sixth-century De observatione ciborum, or On the Observation of Foods, by the physician Anthimus. Anthimus, like Apicius and Vinidarius, is relatively unknown. He appears to have been Greek, based on his name, and later in life came west and served as a legate at the court of the Frankish king Theuderic (Hen 2006: 187). De observatione ciborum is a letter written to Theuderic regarding the dietary practice of the Frankish people. Although Latin was not Anthimus’s first language, he was familiar with Gallic Latin, indicative of more than just a passing understanding of Frankish culture (Adams 2006: 331–5). Unlike Apicius, this is a medical text, not a cookbook, though it is so rich in culinary information it allows for a number of observations to

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be made about diet in a portion of Europe once very connected to the Roman world. The historian Liliane Plouvier notes a Levi-Straussian dichotomy within the text, with a Frankish method of cooking that preferred raw or roasted food competing with a Roman one, which she labels Aristotelian, that preferred boiling (Plouvier 2002: 1362–3). The work is a clear break from the previous texts on food already discussed. Meat is far more prominent than in earlier works, a phenomenon historians have associated with the arrival of barbarians (Montanari 2000: 169). The use of spices continues, though the variety is far smaller than in earlier texts, indicative that these goods were harder to obtain. Anthimus confirms this when discussing the positive effects of cucumber seeds on the kidneys, noting, perhaps wistfully, that they were not to be found in this area at this time (Anthimus 1963: 47). The formerly ubiquitous garum and its variants are not present: indeed, Anthimus warns against the consumption of garum, noting its ill effects on the digestive system (Anthimus 1963, 9). Perhaps most telling, cooking itself seems changed: not only does Anthimus reference a Frankish passion for raw bacon, certain things common in Roman cookbooks, such as ovens and cooking vessels, appear infrequently or not at all. Anthimus being caught between two cultural groups, Roman and “barbarian,” makes him a definitive and emblematic source for the study of Late Antiquity. Writing in the sixth century, he discusses aspects of diet in the Frankish world tinged with Mediterranean sentiment, and the result is a “pastiche of Gallicisms, Germanisms, and Greekisms on a Latin base” (Paolucci 2002: 63). Vinidarius’s kitchen, meanwhile, is a place of accommodation. His text emphasizes the preservation and adaptation of Roman cooking customs in the face of cultural and technological change, and is a reminder of the complex political and social negotiations taking place among norms that helped define elite culture during the transformation of the Roman world. Anthimus, however, wrote about barbarians outside of the Roman world, ones with their own cooking traditions. Anthimus offers a view of a post-Roman kingdom where elite cooking was a break from earlier practice. The Roman pan-Mediterranean elite diet was waning and no longer required in order to display royal authority, as the people who would come to hold power in the western Mediterranean and Europe had new foodways they prized. Vestiges of Roman tradition could be seen, but they were increasingly fleeting, and sometimes scorned.

THE MEAL I entered Next smugly, confident in my expectations, notebook in hand and pen poised to strike. I, perhaps unoriginally, remembered Petronius and the feast of Trimalchio. It seems I was not alone in this opinion: a review of the meal written by a colleague and good friend struck a similar note, even down to the title, “Trimalchio in the Windy City” (Lippmann and Gawlinski 2017). That meal is often discussed for its depiction of the excessively fantastic: the above-mentioned dormice; a wild boar was brought out to be eaten, and when punctured with a knife birds flew out and were caught to be cooked; a pig was gutted in front of the guests and sausage and puddings poured out of the wound, ready to be consumed. The dinner hosted by the parvenu Trimalchio is a commentary on the decadence of the nouveau riche (and perhaps even the emperor Nero himself), an observation on how those with too much money and too little taste spent the former. It is not for nothing that a working title for The Great Gatsby was “Trimalchio in West Egg.” I was prepared to write something scathing linking these books and my meal, an account

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of too-wealthy diners gorging their way through an excessive amount of luxurious food coated with history’s patina in order to find a corresponding veneer of culture. And yet my desire to critique melted away almost instantly, as I found from the start a myriad of little things that made me reflect upon the ancient world and the place of food and dining in it. Oil-burning lamps were the major source of light for my meal, and one sat on our table along with singed copies of Apicius’s manual, the burn-marks a result of accidental exposure to open flame. This reminder of nighttime lighting in the preindustrial world and the dangers it posed in an urban setting—fire was the greatest fear in an ancient city—was reinforced when I unwittingly set my small notebook ablaze. Early on in the meal, a fire-blackened ceramic dome was placed on our table. It, a baking cover, was used to cook bread in ash while we talked. I have read about these vessels, even excavated them myself, but have never seen one in use. It was to my mind out of place. Odd as it may seem to call an element of a recreation of a nearly 2,000-yearold feasting manual anachronistic—one that cost over $350 per person and held approximately 5,000 miles from Rome—this form did not belong in an elite setting. This pottery form is called a clibanus in ancient sources, a ceramic vessel usually discussed as a portable bread-baking oven, and is a reminder of how bread was prepared by the poor before the efflorescence of large commercial bakeries in the heyday of Rome’s empire. Despite this—or perhaps even because of it—the arrival of this vessel was exciting. It was experimental, and there is tremendous discussion and disagreement in the archaeological community over how these vessels functioned (Cubberley et al. 1988; I am grateful also to Lorraine Knop Gagliano for sharing her unpublished work on this type of cooking with me). The common thinking is that hot ash was poured over them; I had never considered the idea that the heated ash might be placed inside the dome itself with the bread. A Roman banquet had many purposes. One was conviviality. As stated above, another was the display of power. A host used feasting to entertain, to be sure, but also to show his wealth and prestige to his guests, who were often his clients, or subordinates. This power was exhibited by the decadent, expensive, and exotic foods provided. An aristocrat’s table reflected the breadth of his command and ability, and the giving of such a luxurious repast was a way of demonstrating this to guests. But this was not the case here, something I was reminded of when I, after having admitted I had written a dissertation on Apicius, was invited back to the kitchen to meet the chef. A Roman aristocrat’s triclinium, or dining room, was often at the rear of his home, and the invitation into what was a usually private area was an indication of the esteem the client was held. This was not lost on me as I made my way past the tables of my fellow diners and into the sanctum of the restaurant’s kitchen. The chef greeted me cordially, asked how I liked the food, and engaged with me in small talk about some of the choices made on the table. But here I was the supplicant; my benefactor was not the host sitting at the head of my table, but rather the person running the kitchen. Apicius might have been pleased. Cooks were usually slaves who toiled in tiny, blackened hovels, a far cry from the pristine place I had just visited. My trip to Next’s kitchen caused me to think about one of the darkest aspects of life in the ancient world, slavery, an institution we should always keep at the forefront of our minds when we study the past. So too did the omnipresent and hyper-competent wait staff. Many slaves would have been present in a Roman dining room. One would have ignored them other than to make demands of them. That I did not—indeed, my dinner companion and I often lowered our voices when the waiter came over so he or she would not hear us gossip about the meal—is a reminder of the telling sociocultural gap that exists between then and now.

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TASTING HISTORY It was the food itself that provoked the most important experience. The first courses, heavy with the tastes of salt and umami, offered a hint of the palate of a people whose meals were flavored with ingredients that came from the sea and who required salt to preserve their food. Garum would have been ubiquitous then. Garum (liquamen is a variant of this) is “the generic modern name for a variety of ancient sauces, pastes, and condiments produced from fermented and salted fish entrails, and was among the Romans’ favorite foods” (Williams and Mataloto forthcoming). It is often described as “Roman ketchup,” but this is a mistake, as ketchup tends to stand alone as a condiment, while garum could be used as a condiment but was more often an ingredient, serving primarily as a base for sauces. It could also be diluted with water—hydrogarum—or other liquids and drunk. It was ubiquitous, its taste omnipresent, and appears in many of Apicius’s recipes. But then came a course I was not expecting. The twelfth plate served was venison with a prune and date purée, accompanied by slivers of roasted chestnut. The presentation was a visual feast—as had been all the other courses—a sumptuous contrast of colors on a plate seemingly made of hammered golden leaves. But to the tongue this dish was jarring. Venison in a sweet sauce is, of all the courses served, the one I am most likely to emulate in my own cooking or order when dining out. But this food, coming on the heels of so much umami and salt, was not something I was prepared for. The sauce was sweet and rich, the meat too heavy. It took me a while to figure out what I was experiencing. I was aided by the chestnuts. Romans, or at least elite Romans, detested chestnuts. They were peasant food, one no respecting Roman aristocrat would touch (Squatriti 2013: 103). Pliny called the chestnut “the most worthless” food. It had no place here. But the chestnut was cultivated intensively in Italy in the period after the end of the western Roman empire, increasingly serving both as a source of wood and food. Its dominance came as the Roman elite diet began to wane and disappear, and is an emblem of an Italy free of its old Roman aristocratic traditions, increasingly fragmented, increasingly localized in its diet, and now under the dominance of new peoples. This bite of food was a big deal. The combination of sweet and savory merging together to the point where they became indistinguishable was less a Roman phenomenon and more a medieval one. While this recipe was taken from Apicius, it had been modified. The original called for honey, dates, and raisins, the sweetness of which would have been cut by the presence of pepper, leeks, and liquamen, the flavor of the sea. The sweetness of this dish, compared to the previous foods, combined with the presence of the chestnut, meant I was experiencing something new. This course, and its place in the entire meal, was representative of a transforming Roman world. A world increasingly removed from the Mediterranean and dominated by new peoples. Peoples—barbarians—who ate roasted meats often covered in sweet sauces. Meals much like the dish I’d just eaten. My dinner companion remarked that this dish seemed different from the others. But to me our gastronomical tour had sensorily moved us from the Rome of Apicius to a culinary and historical era reminiscent of the people like Vinidarius and Anthimus. I was eating a course that could be obtained locally, with no need for shipping and transportation. The infrastructure required to provide the Roman aristocratic meal would not have been needed for this course. The food and sauce on my plate seemed less “Roman” and more part of the world we know now. We had turned our backs to the sea and to empire. I had experienced, via this meal, via this course, a transformation in European history. It was

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fleeting, but it was powerful. For a fragment of time, I understood in an entirely different way what it meant to experience the transformations of the Roman world, to be a Roman aware of evolving customs and new barbarian rulers, both jarring changes that would bring an end to norms I once held dear. The question I have wrestled since that night is: what to do with this experience? I found insight in Christopher Tilley’s A Phenomenology of Landscape. Its premise comes from the post-processual school of archaeology, which believes that interpreting the past must be subjective, and that the search for objective truths in the past is impossible and not desirable. Tilley insisted that an archaeological understanding of the past must include a sensory study of that past. It is only by relying on smell, sight, taste, hearing, and touch that one can form a relationship with the environment that contains archaeological ruins; it is only by engaging with sensory experience that one can come to understand how the people who made those ruins would have interpreted and understood their environment. This does not just relate to nature and the environment, but to changes to the landscape people had worked and manipulated, such as sight lines and paths, and how these changes structured their social relationships and relationships of power. The devil, therefore, is really in the details, in the very small shifts. I find this thinking compelling in the context of this meal. I did not go to the restaurant Next to dine like a Roman. One cannot drop into the past no matter how much one has sought to duplicate perceived environmental conditions. Indeed, many of the re-creations of ancient foodways I have seen and experienced have focused on the historical veneer, so that one can go home having tried something unusual, and enjoy the experience of having, briefly, “eaten like they did.” But the menu at Next seems designed to do something different—as was noted when the restaurant opened, authenticity and a need to replicate the past exactly matter far less than trying to imitate a philosophy. Experiencing the phenomenology of this—the lights, the people, the movement through physical space, the subtle and overt shifts in tastes—was a testament to the sort of mutual cooperation between chef and scholar that allows us to interpret, understand, and experience the past in altogether new, exciting, and undiscovered ways. The meal did not allow me to eat as a Roman, nor devour as a barbarian. I was no closer to inhabiting ancient skin and tasting food as they did. The meal instead allowed me to understand, to conceive of, historical change in a new way. This dietary change was gradual, and few if any contemporaries would have been aware of its existence, but it is one that historians have paid significant attention to. My experience at Next was a walk through a landscape both new and familiar, as I interpreted the new through memories of my studies of the past. This interpretation required training in languages, experience with pottery, and, yes, imagination. Through it, through one meal I was given a way to perceive the transformation of the Roman world, an experience that merged my understanding of the past with the memory of consuming food itself and provided me with a very different, very tangible, very teachable sense of history’s long arc.

REFERENCES Primary Sources Anthimus (1963), De observatione ciborum ad Theodericum regem Francorum epistula, ed. Eduard Liechtenhan, Berolini: Adad. Scient. Apicius (2006), Apicius: A Critical Edition with an Introduction and an English Translation of the Latin Recipe Text Apicius, trans. C. Grocock and S. Grainger, Devon: Prospect.

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Juvenal and Persius (2004), Juvenal and Persius, S. Braund (ed.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Petronius Arbiter (1995), Satyrica, K. Müller (ed.), Stuttgart: Teubner. Pliny (1983), Natural History III, H. Rackham (ed.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pliny (1950), Natural History V, H. Rackham (ed.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Tertullian (1870), De Anima, P. Holmes (ed.). ANCL 15, 181–235.

Secondary Sources Adams, J. N. (2006), The Regional Diversification of Latin 200 BC-AD 600, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Adamson, M. W. (forthcoming), “Sauces and Condiments in the Middle Ages,” in A. Donnelly, B. Forrest, and D. Murphy (eds.), Sauces and Identity in the Western World, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, P. (1971), The World of Late Antiquity 150–750, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Brown, P. (1988), The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, New York: Columbia University Press. Cubberley, A. L., J. A. Lloyd, and P. C. Roberts (1988), “Testa and Clibani: The Baking Covers of Classical Italy,” Papers of the British School at Rome, 56: 98–119. Donnelly, A. (2015), “Cooking Pots in Ancient and Late Antique Cookbooks,” in M. Spataro and A. Villing (eds.), Cooking, Cuisine and Culture: The Archaeology and Science of Kitchen Pottery in the Ancient Mediterranean World, 141–7, Oxford: Oxbow. Edwards, J. (2001), “Philology and Cuisine in De Re Coquinaria,” American Journal of Philology 122: 255–63. Gibbon, E. ([1776] 1983), The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, New York: Penguin Classics. Grainger, S. (2007), “The Myth of Apicius,” Gastronomica, 7: 71–7. Grimm, V. (1996), From Feasting to Fasting, the Evolution of a Sin, New York: Routledge. Grocock, C., and S. Grainger (2006), “Introduction,” in C. Grocock and S. Grainger (eds.), Apicius: A Critical Edition with an Introduction and an English Translation of the Latin Recipe Text Apicius, 13–123, Devon: Prospect. Harper, K. (2017), The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of Empire, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hen, Y. (2006), “Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul,” in B. Kasten (ed.), Tätigkeitsfelder und Erfahrungshorizonte des ländlichen Menschen in der frühmittelalterlichen Grundherrschaft (bis ca. 1000), 99–110, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Horden, P., and N. Purcell (2000), The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History, Oxford: Blackwell. Johnson, C. (2006), “An Etymological Exploration of Foodstuffs and Utensils: the Sociolinguistic Fortune of Culinary Terms of Apicius’ De re coquinaria,” PhD Dissertation, UNC-Chapel Hill. Lindsay, H. (1997), “Who Was Apicius?” Symbolae Osloenses 72: 144–54. Lippmann, M., and L. Gawlinski (2017), “Trimalchio in the Windy City,” Eidolon, April 20. Available online: https://eidolon.pub/trimalchio-in-the-windy-city-233ef344fd52 (accessed January 15, 2021). McCormick, M. (2001), The Origins of the European Economy: Communication and Commerce AD 300–900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Montanari, M. (2000), “Production Structures and Food Systems in the Early Middle Ages,” in J.-L. Flandrin and M. Montanari (eds.), Food: A Culinary History, 165–7, New York: Penguin Books.

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Paolucci, P. (2002), Profilo di una dietetica tardoantica: saggio sull’Epistula Anthimi de observatione ciborum ad Theodoricum regem Francorum, Napoli: Edizioni scientifiche italiane. Plouvier, L. (2002), “L’alimentation carnée au Haut Moyen Âge d’après le De observatione ciborum d’Anthime et les Excerpta de Vinidarius,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, 80: 1357–69. Pohl, W. (1998), “Telling the Difference: Signs of Ethnic Identity,” In W. Pohl and H. Reimitz (eds.), Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of Ethnic Communities, 300–800, 17–69, Boston: Brill. Raga, E. (2018), “The Impact of Christianity on Diet, Health and Nutrition in Late Antiquity,” in P. Erdkamp and C. Holleran (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Diet and Nutrition in the Roman World, 229–42, New York: Routledge. Raga, E. (forthcoming), “Sauces in Late Antiquity and the Ascetic Redefinition of the Discourse on Food, Health, and Pleasure,” in A. Donnelly, B. Forrest, and D. Murphy (eds.), Sauces and Identity in the Western World, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Squatriti, P. (2013), Landscape and Change in Early Medieval Italy: Chestnuts, Economy, and Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilley, C. (1994), A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments, Oxford: Berg. Ward-Perkins, B. (2005), The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wickham, C. (2005), Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, J., and R. Mataloto (forthcoming), “What’s Roman about Fish Sauce?: Garum and Garum Containers in Early Roman Portugal,” in A. Donnelly, B. Forrest, and D. Murphy (eds.), Sauces and Identity in the Western World, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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CHAPTER TWENTY

Remembering and Promoting Grandma’s Cooking through the Mediterranean Diet, Apulia, Southern Italy ELISA ASCIONE, VINCENZA GIANFREDI, AND DANIELE NUCCI

Introduction In this chapter, we analyze how food is claimed as cultural heritage through a strategic selection and reappropriation of memories of the past, which acquire new cultural and economic significance in the present. We analyze food-centered life histories of women aged between seventy and eight-five, living in the town of San Vito dei Normanni, in Apulia, Italy. The women we interviewed were all agricultural workers up to the 1970s, and have had a long and rich experience in food production and preparation. They were born and lived in the countryside in extended families up to the 1970s. Some of the women owned land while others were sharecroppers; as well as being agricultural workers, they also worked inside and outside the home in food preparation. Their tales focus on memories of poverty, lack of formal education, time-consuming and strenuous activities to produce raw materials, to cook and to prepare food. However, in talking about the past, they were nostalgic for a stronger sense of conviviality during meals, and for more “genuine” flavors.1 We also conducted interviews and participant observations in restaurants, masserie (old country houses turned into agriturismi during the last decades, namely country resorts attached to productive farms), local festivals and public events in the area of San Vito in order to explore how local actors use and interpret their food culture and heritage in the present. We juxtapose women’s narratives and practices to those of restaurant and masserie owners, showing how a renewed version of “grandma’s cooking” is refashioned and valorized as a tool for the development of local economies, tourism, and for the promotion of the Mediterranean Diet (MD). This often happens with an omission of the unpleasant (Nowak 2013), such as the widespread poverty and unequal working

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conditions before the modernization of agriculture, and through the selection of positive values such as simplicity, seasonality and re-territorialization of production. We focused on San Vito dei Normanni because the surrounding area has been declared the homeland of the “Mediterranean lifestyle” by the Foundation for the MD in 2010, and because local administrators, restaurants, and associations are very active in the revitalization of the area through past practices and traditions. Furthermore, one of the authors of this chapter (Vincenza Gianfredi) is originally from San Vito, who facilitated access to the participants and acted as an intermediary with key people and institutions, and as a translator from the local dialect into Italian when needed. San Vito dei Normanni is a municipality of about 19,000 people in the province of Brindisi, located 10 kilometers away from the seaside in the Alto Salento region. It was predominantly an agricultural and trade center until the establishment of petrochemical industries in Brindisi in the early 1960s. Now its economy is mostly based on the third sector, especially on tourism (IPRES 2010). In San Vito, like in the rest of Italy, food consumption patterns have shifted greatly in the past fifty years due to growing urbanization and the development of an articulated food industry that have favored the passage from a society of scarcity to a society of abundance (Vercelloni 1998: 951). Although Italy has changed from a society of poverty to a society of mass consumption, food has remained a central concern for people, with new worries over excesses of consumption and loss of traditions in a globalized world (Seppilli 1994). These changes have favored countercultural movements, including the promotion of the MD, constructed as a gastronomic and cultural revival of the past. This chapter is the result of an interdisciplinary conversation between a dietician (Daniele Nucci), a medical doctor of hygiene and preventive medicine (Vincenza Gianfredi), and a cultural anthropologist (Elisa Ascione) with the common interest in the study and the promotion of the MD.

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE MEDITERRANEAN DIET The traditional cuisine of Apulia has been considered very adherent to the ideal model of the MD, because the region, thanks to its geographic and pedoclimatic characteristics, is very suitable for the cultivation of vegetables, cereals, and olives (Renna, Rinaldi, and Gonnella 2015). The diet that is referred to as “typically Mediterranean” is, in fact, usually a plant-based diet with a low share of animal origin products and with extra virgin olive oil as the main condiment, a notable presence of fresh fish and pasta, fruit, vegetables, cheeses, legumes, cereals, and eggs. Among many other healthy lifestyles and diets, the concept and the promotion of the MD has gained popularity from the 1960s: physicians, dietitians, epidemiologists, and other health professionals have studied it and promoted its development as a healthier lifestyle for chronic disease prevention. However, the health effects of MD are not just about food. Indeed, MD could be translated as a ‘Mediterranean way of life’, as the UNESCO stated in 2010: The Mediterranean diet (from the Greek diaita, or way of life) encompasses more than just food. It promotes social interaction, since communal meals are the cornerstone of social customs and festive events. It has given rise to a considerable body of knowledge, songs, maxims, tales and legends. The system is rooted in respect for the territory and biodiversity, and ensures the conservation and development of traditional activities and crafts. (UNESCO 2010)

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This feature, along with scientific evidence of its health benefits, makes the MD unique and successful in protecting and promoting health (Dinu et al. 2018). Health professionals are, in general, strongly convinced that the Mediterranean paradigm is absolutely good for human health and easy to be followed by non-Mediterranean populations also, thanks to its wide range of ingredients that allow people to adhere to MD without looking for “special foods” (Martinez-Gonzalez et al. 2017; Nucci, Minelli, and Gianfredi 2020). Furthermore, the MD is considered an environmentally sustainable diet (SaezAlmendros et al. 2013; Maybeck et al. 2015). The MD, the Mediterranean Lifestyle, and the Mediterranean Way are terms that refer to the Mediterranean Sea and the territories around it, and they refer to very diverse cultural and religious food cultures, preparation, and lifestyles. The idea, however, that the MD is an immutable food model inherited from the past has been deconstructed and criticized by authors such as Vito Teti (2014), claiming that instead we should think of the MD as an aspiration, a mobile tradition. For Teti, current levels of obesity do not constitute the betrayal of the MD, but they actually represent the realization of dreams of food abundances that were impossible in the past as a result of centuries-old hunger. We should therefore think of the MD as a new nutritional model, rather than an ancient one that is extracted from an immutable past, which actually often entailed hunger and deprivation. In a similar vein, Gillian Riley argues that it is highly unlikely that a rural Mediterranean population, sunk in poverty, could reach the required balance of nutrients, and therefore the healthiness of the MD is something of a “figment of our overfed imaginations” (2009: 319). She adds that the myth of a simple and beneficial diet, universally enjoyed by “a legendary race of sprightly elderly peasants is a salutary ideal rather than a reality” (ibid.: 319), even if the concept itself is admirable. The MD has been, nonetheless, road-tested by scientific and medical organizations and shown to be a force for the good: a tool for weaning the developed world from too much processed food and a diet with too much fat, sugar, and salt. The MD not only identifies preexisting foodways, but also actively forges a new cuisine, linking into a single narrative a number of elements that were actually divided by country, class, ethnicity, religion, and gender (Sammells 2014: 144; Moro 2014). Because of its positive aspirations, rather than simply deconstructing the “realness” of the MD, we explore the ways in which it is used by social actors as a useful resource for the present.

FROM FOOD SCARCITY TO SIMPLICITY: REINVENTING THE PAST Food and the MD are highly attractive for tourists who visit the Alto Salento region (Kilburn 2018: 37), as tourism destinations can leverage on high-quality cuisine and distinctive local food products to enhance their local identity (Presenza and Del Chiappa 2013: 183; Long 2004). In this section we show how the owners of local agriturismi, who could be defined as “heritage entrepreneurs,” have converted the past into desirable experiences, products, and services with the added value of traditionality and authenticity by transforming ordinary food into something special both qualitatively (healthy and sustainable) and culturally (Mediterranean and traditional) (Pfeilstetter 2015: 215). Many masserie in the area have now been refurbished and transformed into beautiful agriturismi. The name masseria refers to an agglomeration of buildings in the countryside, where rich landowners used to live alongside poor farmers. Historically, they are linked to the organization of latifundia. This can also be observed at Masseria Il Frantoio, a luxury

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hotel located in the countryside, near Ostuni. Il Frantoio, located among thousand-yearold olive trees (millenari), is all about “rediscovering” the past, and it has become a popular destination for tourists from the United States for its cooking classes on the MD. The owners of the masseria have planted a variety of “heritage” wheat (Senatore Cappelli variety) to make fresh pasta, and they offer foods and wine produced on the premises. Guests are always welcomed personally by the owner, Armando, an elegantly dressed man in his sixties, who acts as a storyteller for the place. As soon as we arrive, Armando shows us the vegetable gardens, the olive and fruit trees cultivation, and the ancient dry stone walls he has restored. He explains that they are also an organic farm, and that, as tourist operators, their mission is to preserve history and beauty. Armando always greets people who arrive for dinner and gather in front of the main gate before they can reach their tables: “Welcome to this place. How shall we call this place, you may ask? Consider it like an old ‘casa della nonna,’ grandma’s house. You are her guests here tonight. After you had dinner, if you like the cuisine, you can tell us: thank you, granny.” He wants guests to feel like as if they are spending time inside the home of a fictional granny, not in a hotel. After a walking tour of the gardens that surround the outside restaurant, he brings us into the ancient underground olive oil mill (frantoio ipogeo) typical of the Salento region, now transformed into a museum where the history of olive trees and traditional rural society (civiltà contadina) becomes part of a spectacular narration of the masseria, taking place every night before dinner. He explains to customers that they won’t find steak or Parmigiano cheese on their menu, since Apulia is rich in vegetables and legumes, and since they are keen to celebrate the MD. Despite these premises, in luxury masserie like Il Frantoio tourists are able to experience what has been called the “Tourist MD,” with an incredible abundance of beautiful food, including fresh meat, aimed to cater to the tourists’ expectations, and mirroring modern affluent diets (Kilburn 2018, 10). The countryside is celebrated here, but it is also explained to tourists in a sanitized form, devoid of real stories of workers’ labor; rather, it is projected as a beautiful and bountiful place, a garden of Eden, in which to relax and enjoy the pleasures of life. It has been argued that often agriturismi benefit from the desire of urbanites to visit places associated with the past, which may draw on selective memory or nostalgia for childhood in the older visitors (Che 2016: 80). Traditional, rather than modern, farms, and a bucolic countryside that refers to old ways of farming are in fact considered attractive to tourists in advanced industrialized countries (Che 2016: 80). As Fabio Parasecoli explains, this is a broader Italian trend: Only recently, as a consequence of the new appreciation for traditional and artisanal products, have the jobs of running a small farm or producing high-end wine become respectable, and at times even glamorous (of course, that is not the case for rural labor engaged in large-scale agriculture for industrial uses, often composed of undocumented immigrants). This does not imply that the fabrication, the flavor or even the looks of these newly cherished items are the same as fifty years ago. Many have evolved over time to respond to different needs and unprecedented opportunities. (2014: 19) The ability to self-produce all of the raw ingredients used in restaurant kitchens is an added value, and the countryside attracts tourists that want to experience nature’s regenerative power. On the contrary, in the past farmers had no choice but to eat what they produced as agricultural workers. Our interviews with the grandmothers, who

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are evoked as archetypes by owners of many masserie, show how food production was linked to hard physical labor since people had no cars, mechanical tools, or tractors to reach the fields, to cultivate, to harvest, and to transform the crops. They worked in the fields from a very young age, up to twelve hours per day, with significant caloric expenditure that often was not balanced by adequate caloric intake: an aspect that is often omitted in the romanticization of the MD. During their childhood, the women self-produced the majority of their food, and sometimes bought it from small shops called, in the local dialect, “putee.” The daily diet consisted of plant-based meals, low in calories, characterized by frugality and simplicity, with the exception of festive meals. As Vincenza says: “We could only eat what we harvested.” All the women interviewed had barnyard animals: chickens, broilers, rabbits, pigeons. “It was very tiring; everything had to be made by hand. For example, we had to preserve all the animal fodder for the winter, the skins of dry peas and straws” (Maria). Only a few families could afford a horse to help with work in the fields, or a cow, or a few sheep and goats to produce cheese. Butchering and preservation of meat always happened in the household: from one pig, they produced each year prosciutti, capocollo, and sausages that were left to dry in their kitchens. All the members of the family would participate in agricultural production from a very young age. The wellbeing of the family depended on the work of every family member, according to their sex and age. The products were mainly consumed by the family and sometimes sold at the local market. Women remember the repetition of their daily meals according to the different days of the week, and to the different seasons. For example, during the spring season, women consumed fresh fava beans on Mondays, on Tuesdays, lasagne, a fresh egg string pasta, different from the more renowned lasagne from Bologna. On Wednesdays, women prepared legumes (cicerchie, beans, chickpeas, dry fava beans, lentils, or peas). On Thursdays and Sundays, meals would be richer, including some meat, and on Fridays they always had fish. Planned weekly menus allowed the consumption of a variety of foods even in a regime of scarcity. Legumes, vegetables, and bread represented the majority of food consumed and, even today, women continue to privilege these staples in their daily preparations. Maria complains that in the evening they always had the same things to eat “over and over again,” such as fava beans, chickpeas, beans, vegetables, zucchini, and potatoes. “The same things to eat” represented a perceived monotony and a lack of variety, as women constantly desired richer and more elaborate foods. On the other hand, they had a variety of food that are not available anymore, especially certain kinds of fish: I used to eat more fish than I eat today. Today I mostly eat octopus and squid. Now fish is mostly farmed, fed with artificial food, and I don’t like that. There was a fish that now doesn’t exist anymore, called “cavisciole”; it was long, thin and pink. We could eat the head as well. We fried it, and it was so good! Then there was another one, li jattuddi, a white fish, very nice. Now I can’t find them anymore at the market, people don’t know them and you can only find tons of the usual fishes. (Cenzina) Meat was an exception, only available during festivities, in striking difference with the abundance of meat now available as part of the everyday menu. Meat was mostly eaten on Thursdays and Sundays, since they were non-fasting days in the Catholic calendar, and it was highly coveted because of its scarcity. The passage to a society of mass consumption has made meat cheaper and more available, inevitably changing its status as a special food that could be consumed only occasionally. Vincenza remembers:

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If you had animals, you had meat; we didn’t go to the butcher shop. Now I eat much more meat. I like it, but I also know that if I eat too much of it, it is bad for my health. I have to say, in the past making a meat ragù sauce was something exceptional. Now that I can make it more often, we don’t even appreciate it anymore as much. Maria had meat during festivities, or seasonally when labor in the fields was more intense: “My dad wanted to feed us with more substance during that time.” As those memories suggest, what is praised as traditional cooking and cucina contadina (peasant cuisine) is actually linked to a regime of scarcity (Baronti 2015). Cucina povera (poor rural people cuisine), with its emphasis on simplicity and seasonality, is celebrated today as a fashionable cuisine, because it is now part of a wider choice of foods and preparations (Meneley 2004: 167). By retelling the story of food production and consumption of the past in a more sanitized way, heritage entrepreneurs can use tourists’ desire for authenticity to encourage the development of products and services that eventually will boost and benefit rural regions for visitors and residents alike (Sims 2009: 322). Retelling of the past and the reshaping of memory are also tools that locals use to create a shared sense of belonging (Timothy 2016). An example of this is the festival called Rezzica. It was created ten years ago by an association of young residents with the aim of “giving value to local traditions,” as they told us. The name is a combination of the word pizzica, music and dance, and rezza, a wooden curtain typical of the Alto Salento region. The curtain is mainly used to shelter from summer heat and flies but also has a social function, that of allowing people to watch and listen to neighbors and passers-by without being seen or heard. During the festival, actors and local young residents sit behind the rezze, staging gossiping sessions, engaging with the audience in humorous ways. Among other activities, during the festival, there are folklorist reenactments of artisanal works and agricultural practices, with people dressed as peasants pretending to thresh wheat or crush grapes. The performance of history has been largely dismissed by cultural critics as a form of nostalgia, but it actually has a significant role to offer, particularly as a form of public commemoration of shared remembrance of the past (Gapps 2009, 395; Pizza 2015).

FROM GRANDMA’S TABLE TO GRANDMA’S RESTAURANT The rural life that women described during the interviews was maintained until the late 1960s, when many people moved from the countryside to the cities as agricultural activities were often identified with poverty and perceived as backward. The postwar generations could in fact embrace new industrial products, partly stimulated by the growing influence of media, in particular television (Parasecoli 2014: 19). During the interviews, all of the women we talked to told us that they experienced the transition from the countryside to the town as a positive change, including their temporary migration to the Americas and to Northern Europe: by leaving the fields and working elsewhere they actually improved their socioeconomic status. Talking about memories of their past meals, women remember that their breakfast was based on legumes and leftovers from the night before. Cenzina remembers that before going to school she had a simple slice of bread by itself, or she warmed up the fava beans of the night before, or pasta and chickpeas, or whatever was left from dinner. Barley coffee was the most common drink that they consumed for breakfast: “As soon as we

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woke up, we prepared barley coffee, we roasted barley grains, we grinded them and we boiled them in a terracotta pot on the fire. At times we also had milk because we owned sheep and goats. Then at nine in the morning we had fava beans and chickpeas from the night before” (Vincenza). Their day was then organized around the work they had to do in the countryside. They had lunch, often preparing acquasale with the leftover bread. For this recipe, they would soak hard bread in water and rinse it, adding onion, cherry tomatoes, and “whatever vegetable you had,” for example, dry peppers. During the day they would also pick up and eat wild herbs, like zanguni (a milkweed) and wild salad (insalatedda), that they collected in bunches (rodde). They also remember wild varieties of artichokes and cardoons that were small, thorny, and very tasty, which they picked up by the roadside. During the day, at school or working in the fields, they only had a slice of bread with a tomato or with pickled vegetables, and a few dried figs. Maria, for example, would bring from home a slice of bread that she “seasoned” with wild herbs picked up in the countryside on the spot. Lucia remembers a recipe when she owned nothing but tomatoes: This is a recipe for when you had nothing to cook with. You take two tomatoes together with olive oil and garlic, chili pepper, a bay leaf, and let them cook with a lid on the pot. These are called in dialect “pomodori scattirisciati o sfritti.” You must use green and red tomatoes. To me, they taste like, how can I say, like sincerity. Like my childhood. Lucia remembers that she used to eat prickly pears to fight the feeling of hunger, and that she had stomach aches when she gorged on lupines when they were available. Another very important part of women’s diets were dried figs: they were available in abundance, easy to transport inside their pockets, and rich in calories and fibers. Their staple foods were wheat-based products: frise (a hard bread that must be soaked in water before it can be consumed), and pasta and bread, since Apulia is a region historically linked to the cultivation of hard wheat. They rarely bought industrial dry pasta in shops; they would purchase dry pasta only on special occasions. Since it represented a departure from the norm, industrial pasta was an object of desire, and for the women, it represented modernity and fastness. Instead, they usually brought their own wheat to the mill and then they sifted the flour at home. The coarser bran was for animals, while the remaining whole-wheat flour was used to make homemade pasta and bread. Bread represented the most important food for every meal, as it has been in so many Mediterranean countries for its fundamental nutritional value, while also acquiring religious significance through Christianity (Montanari 2007; Papa 1992). From what emerged from the interviews, dinner was always consumed with all of the family members and had the function of social integration inside and across families (Seppilli 1994), serving also as an education and correction space for their own sons and daughters since they were spending time together. Dinner was always served in common, rather than individual, dishes. Lucia describes the physical proximity of her family at the dinner table. “We were eight people at the dinner table when I was young. Everybody had his or her fixed place that never changed. We used three plates for eight people. We owned more plates, but we wanted to use them only when we had guests. If we broke one plate, it would have been a disaster!” Maria remembers that her neighbor had thirteen sons and daughters and “they were so poor that they didn’t even own a table. They used instead ‘nu piticoni di arvulu di fica’ [in dialect, the trunk of a fig tree] and all ate fava beans from the same dish, standing around the tree.”

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In rural Southern Italy, food production and preparation were divided into complementary and subordinate activities among gender and generations (Counihan 2004). The kitchen was the space of women’s work, helped by daughters, and only rarely by their husbands. Vincenza remembers that her mum was the only family member responsible for meal preparation, and that she would be the last one to sit down, only after everyone was served. Even though men sometimes helped, older women were mainly responsible for the kitchen. During the interviews, they recalled that people used to say that a woman was ready to marry when she could prepare orecchiette, an ear-shaped hard wheat pasta, typical from the region. The figure of nonna persists in narrations of contemporary cooking, sometimes as a decontextualized archetype, an anchor to a past perceived as a resource for the present (Parasecoli 2019). This is the case of Locanda Nonna Mena (the Inn of Grandmother Mena), a popular restaurant in the historic center of San Vito that offers “cuisine of the territory” in what used to be the owners’ grandmother’s house, granny Filomena. The restaurant was opened by four brothers and sisters with the intention of turning their grandmother’s house into a restaurant. A life-size drawing of the grandmother can be seen on the wooden rezza at the entrance: her presence suggests to the customers the restaurant’s connection to the past and attention to local traditions. The house itself has been transformed into a well-designed, minimalist, intimate space with only a handful of tables (twenty-seven seating in total), where locals and tourists can experience the flavors of “times past.” Hanging on the walls are old pictures of the town, of the nonna and other family members, creating a sense of cultural intimacy and closeness to the owner’s family. The restaurant is specialized in “typical recipes from Apulia” using “traditional artisanal recipes,” as Luigi, one of the owners, explains. They work in partnership with the Slow Food organization, since one of their relatives is a distinguished member of the association. They have been selected by Slow Food in their Osterie d’Italia 2018, for “the love they have for their job, a great respect for their guests and the deep links with their territory” (Nonna Mena 2108). They offer Slow Food presidia (foods that deemed unique and endangered by the organization) like fava bean from Carpino, black chickpeas of Murgia Carsica, capocollo (a cured pork meat) from Martina Franca, red onions from Acquaviva, tomato fiaschetto from Torre Guaceto—all places in Apulia. They support the Community of Cheese Producers of Alto Salento, buying directly from the producer Francesco Lanzilotti, which has a very popular cheese shop in the center of San Vito with a wide selection of fresh and aged products. Although customers can find the menu outside, the owners decided not to have a printed version inside the restaurant. “Just like at home” people should trust those who are serving the food: Luigi is there to give suggestions, to explain that they work with fresh ingredients and only have a few choices for each course. Some dishes are not available every day or can have variations. Luigi tells us that in their restaurant tradition “goes hand in hand with innovation”: for example, among other dishes, they serve an eggplant flan in small portions on a bed of melted sweet caciotta cheese, which is not how their grandmother would have served this recipe, despite the similarities in the ingredients. The owners decided to open the restaurant ten years ago, when people’s views on gastronomy were changing. Before Nonna Mena opened, there would mainly be pizzerie in San Vito: traditional dishes were cooked at home. When families went out to eat, they were not looking for foods with strong roots to the territory. Although we revisit some dishes, others must remain the same. For example, fave e cicoria, fava beans and chicory, cannot be changed, it’s simply a staple of our cuisine.

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Today, women under forty years old do not really have the time to make these dishes at home. Fave e cicoria takes hours to make, and if a modern woman only has three hours of free time in the day, she’s not going to spend them crushing fava beans with a stone. We are here for this reason, to propose dishes of the tradition for locals and people that come from outside. (Luigi) It is interesting to note that Luigi points out “modern women’s” obligations and time management choices in order to explain the lack of time to prepare traditional dishes. As a professional restaurateur, he has now entered a space that was mainly feminine and linked to older age. Traditional food has now become the field of paid professionals rather than unpaid housewives, and it has become a new opportunity for economic development of the territory rather than only a domestic activity. Although he links his cuisine to a “Southern family culture,” he is not simply nostalgic of a time-gone-by where ties were tighter, but is also somehow critical of the power structures inherent in extended family arrangements: For us Southerners, cooking is a sacred thing, eating is like a ritual. The dinner table was sacred, sometimes it was actually like a dictatorship, since elderly people would dictate the rules, and you couldn’t rebel as a younger person. There was a hierarchy of the seating arrangements, and if you didn’t finish one thing you were obliged to have it the day after. (Luigi) In his restaurant, customers can instead enjoy family cooking and a familiar decor without the obligations of traditional family arrangements, the taste of traditional recipes without the hard agricultural labor that are at their origin, combining a more refined cuisine with the warm feeling of a nurturing old-fashion granny. In order to provide this experience, Luigi puts a lot of effort and labor into his restaurant, as he describes the very long working hours, including weekends and holidays, the management of the stress, as well as the pleasures and satisfactions linked to work in the restaurant business. Hanging on the wall of Nonna Mena is an article of a famous food critic praising the restaurant’s MD style. Luigi comments saying that they promote the MD every day by offering a great variety of vegetables, legumes, soups, and cereals. They also have meat dishes, but that is not the main focus of their menu. For Luigi, the promotion of cooking and foods with a strong connection to the local countryside are crucial for the revitalization of the town. “All we have to offer is our beautiful seaside, our beautiful countryside, and our traditions.” For him, young people must capitalize on these assets if they want to counteract the depopulation of San Vito and develop the local economy through tourism. Tourists’ interest in different food cultures and in the MD is an important factor for local development, while also contributing to the enhancement of cultural heritage. As part of the tourist experience, eating local cuisine is a way of breaking with standardized, everyday routine by taking tourists into unknown culinary realms (Bessiere and Tibere 2013; 3420). Food tourism can encourage sustainable agricultural practices and support local businesses: “grandmother’s restaurants,” which are a relatively new phenomenon, become a “brand” that can benefit the region by attracting visitors and investments (Sims 2009: 322).

CONCLUSION We have offered an analysis of memories of food practices of the past, and the ways in which they are reimagined in new cultural and economic trajectories in the present. We have juxtaposed the tales of elderly women with the narratives of restaurant owners and

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tourist operators who reinterpret, through the promotion of the MD, the past into a cultural heritage discourse. Like other forms of heritage, heritage cuisine invokes a sense of inherited tradition that must be preserved from the transience of time particularly in the face of a kind of modernity that seems to threaten the integrity of social ties (Di Giovine 2014: 77). Heritage, however, is not a simple passage from the past, but indicates a form of cultural production with reformative significance, often claimed through a series of practices that entail arbitrations and engineering in the realm of cultural politics (Kuutma 2013; Palumbo 2003; Dei 2002). Cultural heritage is about the regulation and negotiation of the multiplicity of meanings of the past, and the mediation of the cultural and social politics of identity, belonging and exclusion (Kuutma 2013: 1–2; Di Giovine and Brulotte 2014). As Fabio Parasecoli has argued “the revitalization (or even resurrection) of a culinary tradition does not only operate on the past, but also tends to solidify the present, guaranteeing a better future for the communities involved in global tourism and consumption” (2014: 20). Elderly women are considered the repositories of a culinary and agricultural knowledge that should be preserved, while the celebration of local and peasant traditions are in fact used to promote new food behaviors and productions, evoking, renewing, and idealizing the past to promote tourism in this area of Southern Italy (Teti 1998: 163). Despite the shortcomings of the commodification of cultures, culinary tourism can also bring awareness, appreciation, and participation to places, informing experiences that are enjoyable and valuable to everyone involved (Kilburn 2018: 33). Nonetheless, while in contemporary narratives of culinary tourism women’s past practices are often romanticized and celebrated, women’s unpaid labor in the house, both in the past and in the present, fails to be critically analyzed and assessed in these new reinterpretations of tradition. In the tales of the MD, grandmothers become instead a “pure” symbol of good food and hospitality in which people anchor their renewed sense of identity and cultural specificity, stimulating new cultural and economic activities for the development of the territory. Rather than a food model directly inherited from the past, the MD could be more accurately thought of as a heuristic device that allows valuable past food practices to be remembered and reimagined in the present, and a tool to promote healthier behaviors that can help the contemporary valorization of foods and landscapes. Food providers are using these features to signal food distinctiveness to tourists and to build their own sense of belonging, offering historically, socially, and environmentally layered culinary traditions (Sidali, Kastenholz and Bianchi 2015: 1179) that are constantly remembered, recalled, and reinterpreted.

NOTE 1 For this research we carried out formal interviews with four women, including participant observation inside their homes. We had numerous informal conversations with their family members, and with friends and relatives (many in the same age group of our interviewees) who also shared their stories with us. During the interviews we asked women to recollect memories from their childhood and early adult life regarding food consumption, agricultural works, meal preparation, patterns of shopping, and household arrangements. The interviews lasted between one and three hours, and were conducted in Italian and in the local dialect. At the time of the interviews, they all had grandchildren, and they lived inside the historic center of the town with their husbands, or in flats near their relatives. Despite differences due to differing socioeconomic backgrounds we found common themes and experiences.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Pharmacological Table: Environmental Memory in New Nordic Cuisine C. PARKER KRIEG

We do not stop the world when we eat; we go into it a little more deeply. —Olafur Eliasson (2010: 7) Twentieth-century consumer economies have not only transformed social relationships to food and environment, but they have also reinscribed relationships to taste and time, shaping memory, desire, and imagination in the process. In this sense, food constitutes a pharmakon, a Greek term that implies an object or practice which operates as both poison and remedy. As climate change and biodiversity loss intensify in the twenty-first century, food becomes a necessary site for transforming culture. Within this context, New Nordic Cuisine has received global attention for its use of avant-garde techniques to reimagine environmental relationships. The narrative texts and recipes of this movement place a shared emphasis on memory and imagination to create (and reestablish) environmental connections across regional difference. This chapter argues that New Nordic Cuisine provides a model for a “pharmacological table,” where food is conceived as a method of writing and rewriting taste, culture, and desire. Through memory and imagination of the environment, this reframing of food aims to transform contemporary life. The movement’s origin is attributed to the 2004 “Manifesto for the New Nordic Cuisine,” and rose to prominence with René Redzepi’s Copenhagen restaurant, Noma. The authors of the manifesto declare their aspirations that food “express the purity, freshness, simplicity, and ethics” of the Nordic region, by reflecting the “changing of the seasons in every meal.” They declare that ingredients should be drawn from produce that thrives in the “Nordic climates, landscapes, and waters,” and combine “demand for good taste with modern knowledge of health and well-being.” By promoting these ingredients, the signatories of the manifesto aim to build networks of Nordic producers and the cultures of production throughout the region, with an emphasis on animal and environmental welfare. Simultaneously renewing culinary traditions and combining them with “impulses from

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abroad,” they hope to find “new applications of traditional Nordic food products” that support both “local self-sufficiency” and “regional sharing” (Redzepi and Meyer 2004; Leer 2016: 2). The manifesto’s ultimate goal is to realign the interests of organized producers, politicians, journalists, eaters, researchers, teachers, and industries around an ethos that recognizes food as central to earthly habitation. New Nordic joins other movements such as vegan/plant-based diets, in that it aims to transform perceived constraints on cooking into a more conscious engagement with the worldly relationships that connect bodies, societies, and environments. In contrast to locavorisms that focus abstractly on food miles or embodied energy, these chefs appeal to cultural memory and imagination. This chapter explores the connection between memory and place through prominent books of the New Nordic movement. The cookbooks are composed out of memory texts, such as diaries, reflections, and personal accounts, which become part of the recipe in that they perform a memory that connects ingredients to particular environmental experiences. As a discourse around food and regional identity, the cookbooks are themselves texts that aim to build a “transnational memory” of overlapping environmental and social experience (Assmann 2014). Nordic literary scholars argue that narrative “helps a community conceptualize physical spaces and environments as cultural entities, locales filled with meanings that have been negotiated and contested by community members over time” (Ringgaard and DuBois 2017: 21). By evoking such narrative memory through food, these chefs enable the recognition of past experience in a geographical context. By drawing on seasonal and ecological temporalities, they intend to reinscribe taste and reintegrate the cultural economy of food into environmental rhythms beyond the consumer society. This production and consumption of memory through food would be impossible without the use of imagination. Reading comparatively across regions highlights the shared imaginative processes at play in food and environmental memory. To illustrate this, I turn to Virgilio Martínez, chef of Central in Lima, Peru, who experiments with Andean altitudes and recreates ecosystems on plates that radically challenge the eater’s expectations. By reconfiguring cultural and environmental relationships through food, these narrative dishes must evoke an imagination of possible tastes beyond those produced by contemporary food system. The argument draws on two concepts that help explain the way memory and imagination operate within New Nordic Cuisine: environmental memory and the pharmakon. Environmental memory comes from the intersection of literary ecocriticism and cultural memory studies. This memory refers to recalled experience that is produced, transmitted, and actively received across generations and geographies by means of narrative texts (Buell 2017; Erll 2011; Goodbody 2011; Iovino 2014). The making of environmental memory is a process that shapes real and imagined environments over time. As selective recall and recombination of experience, memory always requires some form of supplement or support that lies outside the self. This supplemental nature of memory is what gives it the status of a pharmakon, as it constitutes the subject through external technologies and practices such as writing. This account draws on the philosopher of technology, Bernard Stiegler, who argues that the consumer economy generates new configurations of knowledge and desire in which older organizations of savoir-faire (“how-to” knowledge) and savoir-vivre (knowledge of how to live) are rendered obsolete (2010: 33). As circuits of production subsume the cultural experience of earthly temporalities, this process actively produces forgetting and therefore demands that forms of life be reinvented. To speak of a “pharmacological table” then, means taking food as a material and discursive site for the making and remaking of environmental memory through taste and imagination.

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In what follows, I explore these conjunctures of memory and taste in the two most prominent Nordic chefs. I then turn to Martínez to highlight the role of imagination as it relates to forming new tastes: in his case, edible ecosystems. This comparative reading highlights necessary geographic differences and illustrates a future-oriented cuisine that aims to transform taste while constructing sustainable livelihoods and conserving endangered ecosystems. Finally, I return to the concept of the pharmacological table as a cultural project that links lived memory to material environments in an era of anthropogenic change. Not only do these overlapping discourses of environmental memory and imagination explore processes at work in food, they may serve as a guide to creatively transform the food system and its relation to the future.

CONJUNCTURES OF MEMORY AND TASTE The cookbooks NOMA (Redzepi 2010a) and Fäviken (Nilsson 2012) are distinguished in their approaches through introductory texts by well-known writers and artists. NOMA opens with an essay by Olafur Eliasson, the Icelandic-Danish artist known for his large installations and abstract sculpture, while Fäviken begins with Bill Buford, the American literary critic turned food writer known for his role in establishing the genre of “dirty realism.” In many ways, these framing essays infuse the cookbooks with additional genre conventions and open up a useful comparison. The former, high art; the latter, everyday life. Eliasson’s collaborative projects with figures like Bruno Latour (Hornby 2017) and Timothy Morton (2015) explore the ontological relations between objects, and the manifold ways humans know a world that is always in a process of being made alongside nonhuman others. By extending defamiliarization as an artistic practice to food, food becomes a means to unsettle the relations between self and world that have become normalized through consumerism. “We are constantly confronted with a trivialized sensory world,” he writes, “the product of banal commercialization” (2010: 8). For Eliasson, food mediates perception and carries with it implicit norms. “What we eat affects how the world looks. And that affects the way we understand it,” he writes. “When we look at a plate of food, we should see the greater ecosystem” (2010: 9). Memory is posed as the multisensory “site” where this ecosystem is assembled and reassembled in the experience of eaters. With the example of potatoes from the Lammefjord region of Denmark, he suggests that not only are knowledge (whether as technique or experience) and flavor combined in the same way that art unifies form and content, but that knowledge itself can become a “flavor enhancer” in its own right. In Eliasson’s words, René Redzepi strives for “the integration of the experience of dining and the social dimension, of memories, cultural spaces, the raw ingredients of the Nordic countries, individual and collective experiences” (2010: 9). Yet these ambitious efforts at recomposing memorybased and place-based relationships through food are also accompanied by what may be interpreted as defensive gestures. As Gora observes, the book’s second essay uses the word “unpretentious” four different times to describe Redzepi’s practice (2017: 12). This may be expected as the experimental nature of the Nordic Food Lab and New Nordic manifesto lends itself to the philosophical register of high concept art in an era suspicious of avant gardes. In contrast, Fäviken opens with Bill Buford’s essay “Nowhere.” Buford is an American literary critic who coined the term “dirty realism” in the early 1980s to describe a thenemerging set of authors who were turning away from postmodern fireworks toward the

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mundane settings of lower middle-class life. This is a useful allegory for Fäviken’s ethos and appeal. “You wouldn’t describe it as the romantic postcard north,” Buford writes. “It was more middling north than extreme north, and more ordinary north than exotic north” (2012: 11). In this setting that is not quite nowhere, Chef Magnus Nilsson is depicted as a “nineteenth-century” scientist whose time in the wilderness enables him to challenge disciplinary convention (2012: 12). His chief discovery is the meat of local, retired dairy cows. Not only has dairy meat long been seen as not worth eating, EU regulations restrict their slaughter for restaurant consumption and even make export for dog food cost-prohibitive. Nilsson’s preparation methods rescue these “externalities” of the modern food system with innovative curing practices. Downplaying his experience in some of the world’s top restaurants, Nilsson suggests that he merely “re-discovered the seasons” and “learned how to shop” for exceptional produce (Buford 2012: 14). While Buford’s essay situates Nilsson’s development amidst his life in Sweden’s rural Jämtland, he cannot help placing this “nowhere” in the larger world of contemporary gastronomy. Food journalist Mattias Kroon suggests that “there has never been such a thing as a ‘concept’ at Fäviken,” because it has slowly evolved in isolation from other high profile restaurants (2012: 16). However, Buford’s essay illustrates that this precisely is the concept. As if to anticipate the large, text-heavy book that is to follow, Buford explains Nilsson’s eagerness to write as part of his passion for cooking: “You are no longer alone when you are telling a story” (2012: 12). These cookbooks are examples of how food and memory are embedded in social narratives as much as the environment. NOMA, on the other hand, emphasizes travel, and tells the origin story of New Nordic through Redzepi’s diary of his 2003 trip to the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and Greenland. These three countries, it should be noted, are to varying degrees former colonies of the Danish empire and may suggest a particular vision of Nordic region and identity. Accompanied by another chef, and “television personality and entrepreneur” Claus Meyer, the three embarked on a seventeen-day North Atlantic tour of the periphery of the Nordic region and the European Union (Redzepi 2010a: 11). An essay by journalist Rune Skyun-Nielsen provides a metanarrative about the trip and establishes the diary’s historical significance. The idea is that by traveling to the most “remote” and “rustic” locations in the Nordic region, Redzepi was to come into contact with the “raw materials” of food and culture. “We should explore the extremes of nature,” Redzepi declares, “seek out the thousand or more species of edible fungi, the many wild plants, roots and seashore plants” (Skyun-Nielsen 2010: 13). Their travels include rugged camping, a harrowing flight over Greenland, and the comforts of cozy domestic interiors. They go out with local fishermen, consult with ministers of culture, and eat with the former president of Iceland at her summer house. It is not your average tourist trip, yet this “frontier” experience enables Redzepi to reimagine Danish food at his Copenhagen restaurant. His diary contains the elements of any good piece of travel writing, which ranges from “picaresque adventure to philosophical treatise, political commentary, ecological parable, and spiritual quest” (Holland and Huggan 1998: 8). Redzepi combines these genres in his text to express a sublime personal vision that he describes as “the perfect storm.” As a memory text, “René’s Diary” showcases the conceptual formation of the New Nordic Cuisine. In the Faroes, they meet award-winning Dano-Faroese writer Gunnar Hoydal, whose ideas about culture and identity emphasize the importance of place and mobility (Redzepi 2010b: 20). While eating halibut in Iceland, he describes the meal as “universally European” as opposed to “ethnically Icelandic” (2010b: 26). In terms of geography, however, the Atlantic halibut ranges from Iceland to the east coast of North

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America. The historical rise and fall of halibut in the North Atlantic is a prime example of what happens when a “worthless by-catch” species (with a thirty-five to fifty year life cycle) becomes a prized commodity only to be consumed to the brink of extinction (Grasso 2008: 79). The taste Redzepi describes as “universally European” says more about markets in the late nineteenth century and the fact that he traveled to Iceland before halibut fishing was outlawed there in 2011. This is an example of the way that memory is conditioned by processes beyond the knowledge of the experiencing subject. In Greenland, his explorations of food and place lead in more imaginative directions where the iron-rich game and acidic flora are considered for use as flavorings in new dishes rather than their connection to a particular cultural history. Throughout the diary, the shift in tense between past and present indicate an effort to reconcile a desire to lead the reader through an immersive experience within the conventions of the evening journal. The personal narrative of discovery is made to inspire similar revelations on the part of the reader and restaurant-goer. “It was no longer just food on a plate,” Redzepi is quoted saying, “there was a story contained in it” (Eliasson 2010: 14). But what kind of story? If the dish on the table is “about time and place and about reconstructing habitats,” what does such a story look like (Skyum-Nielsen 2010: 14)? Redzepi details the kind of recognitions Noma hopes to evoke in restaurant-goers and describes a meal that connects personal memory with particular histories. Everyone has tried walking round a lake, where the dead leaves crunch under your feet—or at any rate they have visited a farm. A visit to Noma should reflect these experiences, and many Scandinavians have told me that a meal in our restaurant reminded them of something lying hidden way back in their memory. Maybe they tasted gooseberries while walking in the woods as a child. For foreigners … several have said that it was like hearing a new language and being able to understand what was being said (2010a: 14). This narrative about food and memory describes the way that shared experiences are established with particular places and encounters. Continuing with Redzepi’s language metaphor, pragmatists argue that there exists no universal meta-language or final vocabulary capable of reconciling all meanings. One can only engage in communicative exchange through inherited and learned tongues. The same may go for taste. Worries by some that New Nordic is a nationalist project ignore the fact that Redzepi was born to an Albanian Muslim immigrant father and a Danish mother. He spent his childhood in Macedonia before the breakup of Yugoslavia warranted his family’s return to Copenhagen. For Redzepi, food is a way of reimagining belonging through environmental experiences, which do not begin and end at the borders and cultural memory of nationstates. He shares this sensibility with Gunnar Hoydal whose own travels between the North Atlantic and South America lead him to adopt a “place-polygamous” hybridity in response to both globalization and its national-populist reaction (Moberg 2017: 184). Where globalization falsifies memory by promoting an ethic of placeless mobility, the nationalist reaction falsifies memory by asserting the lack of commonality in a world long-contoured by connection. In this sense, Redzepi’s vision of New Nordic Cuisine is a desire for alternative forms of development that enable regional cultures of production to flourish without closing themselves off from exchange with the wider world. In contrast to the frontier travel narrative, Fäviken’s memory texts are about dwelling in one place. Nilsson believes that one can still have an ambition to be “one of the world’s great restaurants” but do so through discovering the resources that exist close

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to home. “Fäviken is a lot more than just a geographical location,” he writes, “it also has a cultural heritage that was very close to being lost” (2012: 21). The story of Nilsson’s journey as a chef who returns to his hometown after working in some of the top French restaurants is meant to encourage others to discover the unique resources of their own region. This homecoming is also, in a sense, an allegory for the recovery of endangered local knowledge, cultural heritage, and regional economies. He impresses on readers the importance of using “the best,” most fresh ingredients, defined as those near where one lives. His approach appeals to those who wish to transform their own ways of inhabiting place and time, albeit without the romance of international travel. If NOMA voices an avant-garde idealism, Fäviken strives for honesty at the risk of demystifying the labor and ingredients that make the cuisine. The cookbook reflects Nilsson’s approach to memory as social in nature, that is, made by practices and people rather than something that formally resides in the food as a work of conceptual art. In contrast to Redzepi’s passage on his food as a medium for memory, for instance, Nilsson’s account of root vegetables highlights the cultural palates that people carry. An ideal dish, he tells us, “helps them to rediscover their connection with nature and their place in the world” (2012: 21). He regularly invites feedback from his guests and observes the way cultural differences shape the reception of his food. By including examples of when and why a desired connection with memory fails, Nilsson’s work illustrates a kind of experimental falsifiability. It exposes the limits of the chef ’s intention by highlighting the interpretive agency of eaters. A Finnish couple once talked with warmth in their voices of a dish they cooked at home during their childhood with turnips and crushed barley, a dish I later tried cooking and which eventually became a garnish with cod. The dish was almost universally loved by our Scandinavian customers, but not by many others … the non-Scandinavians did not mention the dish at all—it was as though it had passed over them without leaving any impression. (Nilsson 2012: 150) Given the unpredictability of reception, Nilsson’s recipes rely on narratives that demystify the labor and thought behind them. These range from encounters with landscapes and people, as well as sensory descriptions. Memory is invoked in texts that consider the ethically ambiguous experience of butchering livestock (2012: 43). Memory instructs, as when Nilsson recounts the digestive dangers of wild plant foraging (2012: 144). Memory frames particular dishes as a future anterior, such as the “raw blueshell mussel and wild pea pie,” a recipe that “takes one year to make, because you will need two summers to produce both fresh and fermented parts” (2012: 134). The recipe that one starts a year before eating is precisely the kind of long-term rhythm Nilsson aims to revalorize: by committing to a place, one works more intensively with time. By turns sincere, sentimental, and humorous, his recipe narratives illustrate the immense amount of work and experiment that is involved in the operations of the restaurant. In the dirty realist spirit of Buford’s opening essay, readers are encouraged through these examples (and through the “how to use this book” note) to approach cooking as a practical experiment with making relationships informed by personal experience. Despite their difference in personal styles, these New Nordic chefs are connected by a profound appreciation for the link between memory, food, and landscape. This triad transforms the traditionally aesthetic concept of landscape, whose visual and representational mode is unable to account for the environment as a lived place of action alongside nonhuman ecological others. W. J. T. Mitchell’s influential critique of

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landscape treats the concept as primarily visual, in wait of an Emersonian poet-critic who can “integrate its parts” into a lived realization of an ideal (2002: 29). One may argue that New Nordic Cuisine offers only the latest and most highly aestheticized version of imagining oneself, that is, to see oneself as being seen, within the landscape. However, when food is understood as a medium of biophysical exchange, one that is simultaneously production and consumption, the relation between culture and landscape shifts from a postmodern representationalism to a kind of “porous” material and bodily sensibility (Iovino 2014: 102). Here, environmental memory is more than visual depictions of the past. Rather, it is constituted by the ongoing reinscription of individual and collective memory of landscape through food practices.

MAKING TRANSNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL MEMORY Given the importance placed on memory and imagination by chefs as they assemble networks of small-scale farmers, foragers, and fishers, it may be tempting to believe that the rise of New Nordic Cuisine rests on the creative and cultural force of narrative alone. Thanks to the work of organizational sociologists, we now have a more complete picture. While the concept originated among the committed culinary few, the involvement of many others was required to turn it into a transnational phenomenon. Without “the active involvement of entrepreneurial leaders from the culinary profession,” “highprofile political supporters” such as ministers of culture and national councils, and “disseminators” across a variety of media platforms, these narratives would not have found an audience (Byrkjeflot, Pedersen, and Svejenova 2013: 38). In much the same way as the restaurant is a focal point that connects an array of small-scale producers, the New Nordic brand is a nexus for an array of economic interests linking tourism and investment initiatives with the creation of a regional culinary identity distinct from the French and Spanish cuisines that hold high status in European gastronomy. We can see how the appeal and social creation of environmental memory is as much a textual project as it is one of reimagining the national geographies of food and culture. Nilsson follows up Fäviken with The Nordic Cook Book (2015). As if reasserting his difference from the manifesto writers, he takes a characteristically humble approach. “For me,” Nilsson writes, “this book is about documenting and telling you how it really is, rather than trying to curate something into what I dream an ideal, nostalgic world being” (14). The Nordic Cook Book is an effort to build a transnational cuisine, but like most things Nilsson does, he begins “without” a high concept. In the opening paragraph, Nilsson tells readers what he first told his publisher who pitched him the idea: “To write a book like this is not only impossible, it doesn’t make sense” (2015: 11). Likening it to a book on “American cooking” that includes Canada and Latin America, he imagines that there are too many differences to speak of a singular cuisine. In order to accomplish this enormous task (and convince himself), his project had to be different than Redzepi’s. It must be descriptive rather than prescriptive. To put it simply, Nordic cuisine is whatever people in the Nordic countries happen to do (or have done) for food. In order to compile such an archive, Nilsson travels much further and wider than Redzepi, visiting Finland as well as Sápmi (the transnational territory of indigenous Sámi people that stretches from Norway into Russia). He orders some four hundred obscure cookbooks off the internet, distributes web-based polls, solicits recipes, and cross-checks them with locals whose knowledge redefines the relation of expertise in Nordic cooking (2015: 17). The book is

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a product of social memory that exists in the form of recipes, intergenerational exchange, and shared practices that exist across borders. Nilsson’s effort to collect a disparate cultural memory under a single “name” has historical parallels. Alexander Beecroft, author of An Ecology of World Literature, looks to ancient Greece and China, who each commissioned what was to become a “panchoric literature.” Homeric and Confucian texts “act as allegories for, or literalizations of, some sort of imagined historical process by which local traditions were gradually assimilated to an emergent … culture” (Beecroft 2015: 63–100). From one perspective, The Nordic Cook Book’s project is a similar act of hubris. From another, this archivebuilding is a hope that shared food histories can create transnational solidarity rather than reinforce national chauvinisms (Nilsson 2015: 12). The recipe, like culture in general, is understood as a living, unfinished exchange that is not reducible to intellectual property (Phaidon 2016). In this, Nilsson stands against the tendency to define ownership in terms of group identity, where a competitive logic reduces culture to commodity, resulting in essentialized (and fetishized) national differences on the one hand and an indifferent “market multiculturalism” on the other (Dyson 2003: 55). The recipe stands as an invitation to play with history and tradition, and to appreciate how taste is formed out of circulated texts. But what kind of memory object is a recipe? Recipes can be understood as “tertiary memory,” that is, memory that “always already precedes the constitution of primary and secondary retention” (Stiegler 2010: 9). Like Nilsson’s example of turnips and crushed barley, recipes shape intergenerational tastes and associations before we are conscious of it. They determine what we are likely to remember or forget about a dish. A recipe is a kind of object that combines text, material ingredients, and skill (or knowhow). It encodes practices, such as how and when to deviate from a recipe to achieve a desired effect. Like a musical score, it relies on performance for life; otherwise, it exists as a trace of past culinary knowledge and skill, disembedded from particular settings. However, the ability of a recipe to travel in time and place enables it to become a means of recontextualizing memory in new territories. If The Nordic Cook Book is an archive that builds a regional memory of what people already know, imagine, and practice, the chef behind Central, Virgilio Martínez, goes one step further to use imagination and memory to construct new recipes based on Andean ecosystems in Peru. Reading environmental memory across Nordic and Latin American contexts illustrates the constructive role of imagination in building new geographies of memory between food and environment. Virgilio Martínez’s project combines ecosystem imaginaries with sourcing practices that conserve endangered landscapes and habitats, as well as livelihoods based on generations of local knowledge and cultural memory. “At Central we cook ecosystems,” writes Martínez. “The plate has to communicate what we experience in nature” (2016: 8). Central’s menu orients the eater altitudinally, taking them vertically through microclimate ecosystems that define Peru’s food cultures. There is much to cook. “Eighty-four of the earth’s 117 microclimates” are represented in Peru, and the country is home to an estimated 10 percent of the planet’s biodiversity (2016: 23). Like Nilsson, Martínez has worked in restaurants abroad before returning home, and like Redzepi he spends much of his time outdoors, exploring and foraging the microclimates of Peru. His restaurant has a research arm that conducts ethnobotanical studies on otherwise unknown plants, searching for flavors and uses such as dyes and gelling agents that might become sustainable alternatives to industry standards. They partner with indigenous and local producers involved in

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conservation efforts, stressing the interrelations between culture and environment. He attributes the importance of integrating these disparate geographies to the country’s history of conflict and segmentation. “Each region, each ecosystem,” Martínez writes, “is not defined by borders or numbers, but by its relationship to the world around it.” “Without one ecosystem there is not the other. Everything is connected” (2016: 23). As a growing economy and a rising middle class generates new demands for restaurants like his, bringing the country’s diverse ecologies together on a table is intended to imaginatively create a new environmental memory as well as social recognition for Peru’s regional, indigenous cultures. Central is a deeply textual cookbook organized by regional altitudes. The first-person narratives that introduce each ecosystem embed the reader in a particular environment. As Redzepi was the object of “René’s Diary,” Central’s narration contains numerous moments of transparency where the author disappears behind vivid descriptions of place. The ecosystems that Martínez strives to cook are a metonymy of actual environments. Each recipe is a fragmentary constellation of an ecosystem through the relationships of a few of its constitutive elements. “Imagine a camouflaged octopus,” it asks readers for “pulpo en su coral” (octopus in its coral). “This dish is all about that sense of place, of where the octopus lives” (2016: 31). By including edible elements of algae and coral, one not only consumes an octopus but is also invited to imagine its environment. With this example, we can see a move beyond thinking of food through isolated ingredients but as living parts of larger sets of relationships. Another recipe, scallop fossil, uses innovative plating to evoke a geological imagination of the ancient seas and those who fished there (2016: 60). In addition to his recipes, introductory texts to ecosystems provide vivid examples of how traditional ecological knowledge and conservation efforts combine in creative ways as a response to commercial abuse and climate change. For instance, his partnership with a representative of a fishing community in Marcona highlights the way community regulation of sea urchin harvests saved the species (2016: 27). Another instance highlights a “centuries-old process of potato fermentation” by a farmer restoring biodiversity at high altitudes (2016: 122). Moving to the altiplano, the future of kañiwa production (an Andean relative of quinoa) is secured against increasingly volatile temperature changes through the revival of ancient, stone-walled beds called canchones (2016: 142). Foregrounding these production practices illustrates the way that particular ingredients are maintained through generations of knowledge and memory. If Redzepi is about “reconstructing habitats” of time and place in the past tense, Martínez’s present tense is about the active construction of new sensory habitats and sustainable futures through greater continuity with those whose foodways are associated with the past.

TOWARD A PHARMACOLOGICAL TABLE The concept of a pharmacological table describes a site where practices, tastes, and desires are inscribed and may be reinscribed. For philosopher Bernard Stiegler, individual and collective memory is constituted through the technical pharmakon that shape historical subjects. By situating subjective temporal experience within the technological history of practices (like fire or writing or recipes) that make it possible, he argues that the pharmakon is that which creates an external memory and therefore contains the possibility of rewriting the cultural experience of time. Only through cumulative experience, registered in textual tools like recipes or archives conditioned over time by evolving tastes, can

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“the possibility of a heritage” arise (2009: 4). This is to say the possibility of a past and therefore of a future. Such an understanding, as I have argued, is anticipated by the project of New Nordic Cuisine in the effort to reimagine food as a means to reconfigure the senses toward the environment as a remedy for market-driven appetites. Through its food labs and experiments with both old and new practices, the movement cannot be accused of appealing to nostalgia out of fear of the future. Rather, it embraces science in the service of art and culture. As such, it will be a necessary component for transforming global appetites in the twenty-first century. It illustrates Eliasson’s point, which serves as this essay’s epigraph, that eating differently is not an exit from the world. All of our worldly efforts can only take us further into ecological and cultural entanglement. As with memory, there is no escape except to work through the past and use it as a guide for the present. These cookbooks engage readers not only as imaginative consumers but also as potential producers of environmental memory. By narrating these new cuisines through the memory texts of chefs, they invite readers to take up similar experimental projects in transforming food culture through knowledge and reflection. While the philosophical outlooks of these chefs may differ, they each offer examples of food as a way of organizing memory and imagination to redefine the relationship between geography and culture. For Redzepi, a dish approaches a conceptual work of art, reintegrating material sense memory in a postmodern consumer society that has reduced the environment to abstract space. For Nilsson, the restaurant can become a vehicle for resuscitating rural networks of production and the recipe an opportunity for everyday creativity with forgotten methods of preparation. Through his ecosystem dishes, Martínez combines the environmental memory of indigenous cultural heritage with a scientific and activist imagination to promote ecological conservation of endangered habitats and livelihoods. What may have begun, in part, as a means to rebrand regional food economies for environmentally conscious global tourism has laid the conceptual groundwork for vastly more imaginative projects. While these three chefs have enjoyed media visibility in Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown (2013), The Mind of A Chef on PBS (2014), and the Netflix series Chef ’s Table (2017), by 2014 one could open a local newspaper in Reykjavik and read interviews with other Nordic chefs declaring that the movement is effectively over, and that it is time to move on to other things. In 2019, Nilsson announced that Fäviken would be closing after ten successful years. Noma has been the primary reason that private planes stop at the Copenhagen airport, and with a menu price of roughly US$300 (not including wine), one finds merit in the criticism of such atmospheric contradictions (MAD 2018). Moreover, some see an approach that links producers, consumers, and policies together at such an individual level as a neoliberal politics that substitutes consumption for citizenship (Johnston 2016: 19). However, we may look to examples like Copenhagen’s ever-expanding MAD symposium and “dispatch” publications, such as You and I Eat the Same: On the Countless Ways Food and Cooking Connect Us to One Another, to see how their food activism reaches well beyond their restaurant doors (Ying and Redzepi 2018). Rather than presenting New Nordic as the unique invention of a few, the movement’s second decade has sought to reframe their approach as part of an international movement to transform the way societies understand food as an environmental and cultural exchange. These experiments in imagining food futures expose the plurality of ways we remember our geographically interconnected pasts and the contingencies of the present.

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REFERENCES Assmann, A. (2014), “Transnational Memories,” European Review, 22 (4): 546–56. Beecroft, A. (2015), An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day, New York: Verso. Buell, L. (2017), “Uses and Abuses of Environmental Memory,” in S. Hartman (ed.), Contesting Environmental Imaginaries: Nature and Counternature in a Time of Global Change, 93–116, Leiden: Brill Press. Buford, B. (2012), “Nowhere,” Fäviken, 11–14, New York: Phaidon Press. Byrkjeflot, H., J. S. Pederson, and S. Svejenova (2013), “From Label to Practice: The Process of Creating the New Nordic Cuisine,” Journal of Culinary Science & Technology, 11: 36–55. Dyson, M. E. (2003), Open Mike: Reflections on Philosophy, Race, Sex, Culture, and Religion, New York: Basic Books. Eliasson, O. (2010), “Milk Skin with Grass,” in R. Redzepi (ed.), NOMA: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine, 6–9, New York: Phaidon Press. Erll, A. (2011), Memory in Culture, trans. S. Young, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Goodbody, A. (2011), “Sense of Place and Lieu de Mémoire: A Cultural Memory Approach to Environmental Texts,” in A. Goodbody and K. Rigby (eds.), Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches, 55–70, Charlottesville: University of Virginia. Gora, L. (2017), “Eating the North: An Analysis of the Cookbook NOMA: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine,” Graduate Journal of Food Studies, 4 (2): 7–20. Grasso, G. M. (2008), “What Appeared Limitless Plenty: The Rise and Fall of the NineteenthCentury Atlantic Halibut Fishery,” Environmental History, 13 (1): 66–91. Holland, P., and G. Huggan (1998), Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Hornby, L. (2017), “Appropriating the Weather: Olafur Eliasson and Climate Control,” Environmental Humanities, 9 (1): 60–83. Iovino, S. (2014), “Bodies of Naples: Stories, Matter, and the Landscapes of Porosity,” in S. Iovino and S. Oppermann (eds.), Material Ecocriticism, 97–113, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Johnston, E. L. (2016), “Agrarian Dreams and Neoliberal Futures in Life Writing of the Alternative Food Movement,” Food and Foodways, 24 (1–2): 9–29. Leer, J. (2016), “The Rise and Fall of the New Nordic Cuisine,” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 8: 1–12. MAD (2018), “Why is What You Do Important? | Vincent Hendricks.” September 11. [YouTube Video] Available online: https://youtu.be/aaCvRkM-VMA (accessed July 10, 2019). Martínez, V. (2016), Central, New York: Phaidon Press. Mitchell, W. (2002), “Imperial Landscape,” in W. Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power, 5–34, Chicago: University of Chicago. Moberg, B. (2017), “There Must be a Periphery,” in S. Sondrup and M. Sandberg (eds.), Nordic Literature: A Comparative History, Vol. 1, 173–85, Amsterdam: John Benjamin’s Publishing. Morton, T. (2015), “We Have Never Been Displaced,” in M. Olof-Ors (ed.), Olafur Eliasson: Reality Machines, 113–15, Stockholm: Koenig Books. Nilsson, M. (2012), Fäviken, New York: Phaidon Press. Nilsson, M. (2015), The Nordic Cook Book, New York: Phaidon Press. Phaidon (2016), “Magnus Nilsson on the Nordic Cookbook,” March 7 [YouTube Video]. Available online: https://youtu.be/LylNkijZoss (accessed July 10, 2019). Redzepi, R. (2010a), NOMA: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine, New York: Phaidon Press.

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Redzepi, R. (2010b), “René’s Diary,” in R. Redzepi (ed.), NOMA: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine, 18–36, New York: Phaidon Press. Redzepi, R., and C. Meyer (2004), “The New Nordic Food Manifesto,” Nordic Co-operation. Available online: https://www.norden.org/en/information/new-nordic-food-manifesto (accessed July 10, 2019). Ringgaard, D., and T. DuBois (2017), “The Framework: Spatial Nodes,” in S. Sondrup and M. Sandberg (eds.), Nordic Literature: A Comparative History, Vol. 1, 19–30, Amsterdam: John Benjamin’s Publishing. Skyun-Nielsen, R. (2010), “The Perfect Storm,” in R. Redzepi (ed.), NOMA: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine, 10–17, New York: Phaidon Press. Stiegler, B. (2009), Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation, trans. S. Barker, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Stiegler, B. (2010), For a New Critique of Political Economy, trans. D. Ross, Malden: Polity Press. Ying, C., and R. Redzepi (2018), You and I Eat the Same: On the Countless Ways Food and Cooking Connect Us to One Another, New York: Artisan.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Remembering Food Waste and Recovery: Imagining Food and/as Citizenship LEDA COOKS

For five years I have run a community Breadhouse, an international network of spaces, where community members of all ages and backgrounds come together to bake bread, tell stories, and make art. As we wait for the bread to rise, we tell stories about baking and cooking in other times, other places. These conversations are often—if not always—nostalgic, recalling home spaces and the people who inhabit them: kitchens, family members, celebrations, a slowing down of life, and the taste of good food. While sometimes told with sadness, these stories almost always touch on themes of family and belonging. Food memories are intimate and powerful because they connect the materiality of our bodies, flesh and bone, with the sensuality of touch, taste, and smell. Memories of food are often also memories of relationships, connections with others in space and time. Food, as the symbolic and material threshold between our bodies and the social world, “has the uncanny ability to tie the minutiae of everyday experience to broader cultural patterns, hegemonic structures, and political economic processes” (Holtzman 2006: 373). Indeed, national and regional food practices are linked discourses of rights, obligations, and participation: processes of re-membering that connect us, through food, to belonging and citizenship (Lozano-Cabedo and Gómez-Benito 2017). Food citizenship is defined variously, but definitions generally include: (1) the social right of all citizens to food, and autonomy and independence in their food choices, (2) people’s participation in the food supply chain, albeit primarily passively, and (3) the responsibility to engage in food-related behaviors that support justice, equity, and environmental sustainability. The language of citizenry brings to the forefront ideas about rights, duties, and governance of the (local, national) food system. Commonly, food advocacy groups make connection to food as a form of citizenship in contrast to citizen identities marked by food consumerism. More recently, renewed calls for food citizens have envisioned a global populace tied together through the concern for the future of our food system (“Food Citizenship” 2021). Important to this chapter, food citizenship is also performed through our collective food memories, reflected and refracted through national and historical narratives about who we are and who we should be as a people. These various shades of meaning for food citizenship evoke the political tensions in discourse around the word “citizen”: belonging

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and exclusion, consumption/capital and democracy, and interdependence. Food waste plays a central role in these tensions and marks the power to re-member and to forget or erase. Strasser (1999) observes that the history of trashmaking in the “developed” world is one of dislocation and forgetting, especially as an era of “disposable” products and relations between and among people and products has become common. About 40 percent of food is wasted globally, and estimates of food wasted in the United States range between 33 percent and 50 percent (“Food Loss and Food Waste” 2021). Given that wasted food threatens the sustainability of our food system and environment even as food insecurity is rising globally, the social, economic, and cultural history of waste brings about interesting questions of memory and remembering. Set against increasing calls among industrialized nations for awareness and reduction of the amount of food unnecessarily wasted, this chapter compares individual and collective stories about food waste as intertextual discourses and performances that also re-member economies, cultures, and national identities. Carolan (2013) notes that economies, like histories, are enacted, and as such are relational. They are also time and place based, located in the positioning of bodies and experiences brought to bear in interaction with one another. Holtzman (2006) asks researchers of food and memory to consider which memories of food are surfaced and which might be (consciously or unconsciously) forgotten, how food-centered memories might be connected to other forms of memory, and what remembered foodways might tell us about the present or imaginings of the future. These questions point to the value of thinking through our remembrances of food waste as well, for their implications for how we (wish to) see ourselves, individually and collectively, and what those memories might mean for our futures. Moreover, if food memories allow us to value and assign significance to sensing/sensual food, then the same could be said about the food not eaten. These memories are embodied in our senses of taste and mediated through cultural beliefs about disgust (Douglas [1966] 2003) or insignificance and practiced (dis)regard. These ideologies also place us within and without spaces of belonging—whether as citizens, aliens, or “Other.” In response to these concerns, this study considers how what we remember about food and waste might open up other possibilities for food citizenship. Two questions are at the heart of this work: How is food citizenship imagined in the interstices between international or national rhetorics about food waste and individual memories of wasting food? What can comparative analysis of individual and national narratives of food loss and recovery help us to understand about the relational and cultural dimensions of food valuation and food citizenship? The first portion of the chapter looks at prominent international as well as national government food waste reduction and recovery websites in the United States, the UK, and the EU to better understand how and why food waste is connected internationally to citizenship and consumption. The second part of the chapter comprises a narrative analysis of thirty consumer interviews about food and waste memories conducted in the United States and Italy. The final portion of this chapter looks again at the governmental discourse regarding food waste in light of the stories recalled in the interviews. Placing the discourse of government-affiliated efforts to reduce food waste side by side with stories of food wasted provides one indication of how we are “hailed” (Althusser 1971) as potential citizens and how, in turn, we utilize these rhetorics to narrate our once and future selves. In other words, gaining an understanding of how food memories adhere or do not to national or regional ideas of place and belonging has implications for how we imagine food citizenship.

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(DIS)PLACING WASTE IN WESTERN SOCIETY As a vital resource for survival beyond borders, food mediates the material and symbolic relationship between nation and citizens in the process of nation building. Cuisine, recipes, practices of cooking and eating, and local resources are used to mark the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion regionally and nationally. Food has become a part of national ideologies through historical records and governmental oversights as well as the mundane activities of everyday living (de Certeau 2011; Appadurai 1988). Mass production, taste, and convenience (Belasco 2008) have dictated the disposability of food, and throughout history disposability itself has been an indication of prosperity. Similarly, the morality that has dictated sins of wastage and gluttony has also been suspended in times of abundance (Mennell 1987). As the food industry expanded after the Second World War, collective memories of thrift and reuse were discouraged in the name of modernization, and overproduction and consumption became key indicators of the growth of the nation. Western European and US histories of food and waste reveal the contradictions in citizenship that permeate market democracies. Where once there was the request by these governments for citizens to participate in national food systems to reduce waste and preserve democracy, governmental anti-waste efforts now call for individual acts of smart consumption and patronage of corporate entities that donate their excess or unused goods. In the following section I illustrate these contradictions by exploring a few of these government or government-affiliated sites. I pose the question as to how these arguments for food waste reduction furnish us with a discourse for imagining both a national past and a future of food citizenship.

IMAGINING FOOD WASTE AND CITIZENSHIP The top results for an internet search on the topic of food waste show international (United Nations), national, and state (UK, EU, US) government websites devoted to the national and global issues of hunger and food system sustainability. Prominent on these sites is the warning that we all should be concerned about the amount of food wasted around the world, citing statistics ranging from 30 to 40 percent wasted globally. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization page begins, “Up to 1/3 of all food in the world is spoiled or squandered before it is consumed by people. It is an excess in an age when almost a billion people in the world go hungry, and represents a waste of the labor, water, energy, land and other inputs that went into producing that food” (“Food Loss and Food Waste” 2021). The European Commission (EC) page, “Stop Food Waste,” reads, “In the EU an estimated 20% of the total food produced is lost or wasted, while 55 million people cannot afford a quality meal every second day” (“Stop Food Waste” 2021) The juxtaposition of waste and hunger, repeated throughout state-sponsored websites as well as other large-scale efforts analyzed, finds then a logical solution through the donation of excess or unused food: in the distribution of our waste to people who need a quality meal. In the United States as well, the message throughout the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) websites on food waste is that Americans are fortunate to live in a land of plenty, and yet food is wasted as others go hungry. Most of the sites studied in the United States, UK and EU, whether government, industry, or nonprofit, appear to place the responsibility for our excessive waste on those of us who shop for food, plan, and prepare meals, and teach others to do so (“Sustainable Management of Food” 2021). A 2015 EPA press release states, “Imagine

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37 million tons of food. Think of how many people that amount could feed. The money it cost to buy, and the resources needed to produce it. Then imagine almost every pound of that sitting in a landfill or incinerator instead of on someone’s dinner table” (“Reduce Food Waste” 2015). The language of excessive waste while others go hungry is a frequent and (inter)national refrain. The US EPA’s food waste hierarchy (an upside down pyramid listing different ways to divert waste from the landfill, from most to least effective) and associated webpages on reducing food waste note that reduction offers benefits such as saving money, reducing methane emissions, and conserving energy (“Food Recovery Hierarchy” 2021). While the food waste hierarchy features prominently on EPA pages, the number one priority, reducing waste at its source of production, is not discussed as an option to reduce waste. Instead, in addition to buying smarter and in smaller amounts, consumers can “support your community” by donating unopened and unused food to those in need. The USDA (Department of Agriculture) website on reducing food waste at the consumer level prominently displays a Second World War–era poster on reducing food waste, suggesting that a similar call to perform this civic duty exists today. The poster is placed adjacent to EPA guidelines: among other things, to reduce waste at home, consumers are encouraged to only buy what is on their menu and not what is on sale, take less food at all-you-caneat buffets, to freeze, can, or preserve abundant fruits and vegetables, and to buy smaller amounts of items that often go uneaten. While all of these suggestions encourage smart consumption for people who are middle class and who eat the same food together, they leave behind those working full time who might not have the time, energy, or storage space to freeze, preserve, or can fruits and vegetables, to plan a menu and shop each day for food. The recommendations parallel those made in the Second World War poster and throughout the nineteenth century when, for middle class white women, daily shopping, canning, and preserving were common. Citizen rhetoric continues to be tied to middle-class consumers who are asked to “vote with their wallet” to buy “local” and sustainable food, to “get to know their fridge,” and to prepare recipes that utilize leftover food (“Wasting Food: It’s Out of Date” 2021). The UK’s Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) is likewise aimed at consumer-citizens who are concerned about food waste. Excluded from these messages are, most obviously, those (presumably nonconsumers) who cannot participate in buying, refrigerating, or preparing food with other appliances and in presumably private spaces. But these people have a place too in this system, as we see in the parts of the websites and other media aimed at food businesses: they are the recipients of leftovers, figuratively and literally. Citizenship is connected not to collective efforts to reduce waste at the source of production, but to individual efforts to buy smarter (but keep buying!) and to being more inventive, creating new recipes from leftover or otherwise wasted food. Buying smarter for many consumers, however, means prioritizing taste and aesthetically pleasing fresh and healthy appearing food. Consumers equate freshness with aesthetic perfection and abundance, which leads producers to produce more than necessary, so that the less-thanperfect items might be culled (Gaiani et al. 2018). This standard of abundance presents the consumer who cares about issues of taste and waste with a dilemma: how do I buy food that is/looks healthy and tastes good and be an environmentally conscious citizen? On these websites, in support of the neoliberal ethos that permeates efforts to reduce food waste, consumerism is encouraged rather than discouraged. Deepening the contradictory messaging, because waste is seen as a consumer-end issue, the larger portion of the sites are devoted to individual behaviors and actions to reduce waste.

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In this ideal(ogical) system, food waste is redistributed efficiently, with financial incentives to food businesses to continue or even increase production (through niche markets and diversification) and to increase donation of unsellable items. Those national and multinational corporations leading the way in these efforts are featured on these websites and are involved in crafting policies. The USDA’s “Food Waste Challenge” offers a roadmap to a collective future inspired by the work of their Food Loss and Waste Champions: corporations who attain this status by completing a form that pledges to reduce food loss and waste 50 percent by 2030. Champions are featured as achieving this goal through donating excess food, and include multinational corporate agents such as Walmart, Aramark, General Mills, PepsiCo, Unilever, ConAgra, Sodexo, and Kellogg, with several seemingly “local” corporations such as Sprouts Farmers Market (with a meager 280 stores in fifteen states). While corporations are rewarded by the USDA for donating excess food, individuals are called upon to consume wisely and ethically. The (inter)national rhetorical construction of food waste and ways to reduce it provides one basis for analyzing food and waste in the national imagination. In what follows, I assess the food and waste memories of heretofore imagined consumers in light of these promoted values and actions. My research took place in the United States and Italy because both of these countries have anti-waste campaigns and legislation in place at a national level, and both have engaged in struggles over the level and character of citizen involvement with the food system, albeit in differing ways. In the next section, I discuss participants and procedures for gathering stories of food and waste in narrative interviews conducted in these countries.

FOOD AND MEMORIES OF (NOT) EATING In 2018, I conducted fifteen narrative interviews in Western Massachusetts in the United States and fifteen in Rome, Italy. Due to my interest in the relationship between food and waste memories and imagining citizenship, in the United States I included five dual citizens and immigrants from China, Estonia, Brazil, Spain, and Jamaica. All Italian participants were Italian citizens, although three held dual citizenship with Ethiopia, Brazil, and the United States. Altogether, interviewees ranged in age from fifteen to eighty, and represented diverse occupations or former occupations. Twenty-four identified as female and six as male, and together they ranged from working class (and former working class) to upper middle class. Participants were chosen based on accessibility, and I chose people with no professional ties to food, with the exception of a café owner who did not cook. Most interviews lasted thirty minutes, with several lasting one hour, and all were conducted in private, at homes or workplaces. The format was open ended: I asked people first to tell me a story about food, and we graduated to discussing memories of food that was left over, went unused, or was wasted. The stories that emerged were recorded, transcribed, and thematized. In what follows, I represent the larger themes that emerged around relationships and the value of food in each country. I then abstract from the themes as they relate to the questions posed earlier regarding memories of food, waste, and imagining citizenship.

When, Where, and How Italians Eat: Food, Meals, and Waste For participants in both the United States and Italy, family served as the locus for the majority of memories of food and for many memories of food waste. On occasions where

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the setting for the story was not in the home, home or home country was referenced as a touchstone for values and foods kept or lost. In contrast to the US participants, when asked about food memories, most of the Italian participants offered detailed descriptions of meals and when and how they ate. The value of eating together, at the same time and as a family, was referenced by all participants, whether or not their current situation allowed them to do so. When I first asked about food waste, I was told that “Italians don’t waste food.” Repeatedly, I heard that Italians love their food, take great care in preparing it and sharing it, and consequently have little left over. When pressed, however, interviewees discussed the ways time and space, notably feelings of being rushed, eating alone or “displaced,” away from home and family, led to wasted food. For Sophia, an Italian teacher whose work brought her to the center of Rome during the week, working hours and living alone meant little time for making food, and she often could not finish the prepared food she bought or had delivered. She threw the food away, she said. On the weekend, however, she made meals for her family and they all sat down together to eat and were careful not to waste food. For these middle-class interviewees, waste and space were also linked to norms of propriety when dining in restaurants. Italy had recently instituted a “doggie bag” policy, but none of the participants felt comfortable taking leftover food home. Julia, who discussed composting at length and seemed quite knowledgeable about how not to waste food, recalled just starting her lunch at a restaurant when she was called back to work and had to leave. Although she was still quite hungry, she could not imagine walking out of the restaurant with the leftover food in a bag. Stories about Italian food were made first through family foodways that extended outward to the nation, and shifted or multiplied depending on nationalities. Silvia, a participant with citizenship in both Ethiopia and Italy, felt that compared to Ethiopians Italians wasted a lot of food. She lived in an apartment with communal bins for recycling and trash. When she emptied her trash, she frequently noticed unused groceries, and sometimes delivered meals that had gone uneaten. In Ethiopia, she said, such waste would not happen because people were poor and food was often scarce. For these participants, memories of waste expressed a citizenship in and through food: a performative and discursive contradiction embedded in slower times and more “at home” spaces, stories of collectively valuing food in ways not currently convenient or perhaps even possible. Ironically, and as indicated above, waste seemed to indicate national prosperity, while also expressing the devaluing of food and communal repast. When waste is remembered, the performance of food citizenship becomes a complicated dance among the goods of capital and community, individual and collective prosperity, thrift and novelty, and above all, discourses about food and identity. These tensions are elaborated in the following sections.

Punishment, Food, and Waste in the United States Stories of punishment in childhood, or of children being punished, provided a common thread in food, waste, and family relationships. Some variation on the well-worn command, “Eat your food; children in (some other country) are starving,” often served as the beginning of a story of parental warnings and many ingenious ways of getting rid of the offending food without eating it. Connie (United States) remembered learning early in her life how to cook for herself and stressed her parents’ rule that food was never to be wasted. However, she recalled a time when her mother, who rarely cooked,

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thought Connie might have leukemia and fed her liver constantly. Her father’s mealtime rule: “You eat it, or you wear it,” resulted in Connie’s strategy of feeding the liver to the dog. Dogs were mentioned by US interviewees more than once as receptacles of leftover food, along with the strategy of placing it behind kitchen appliances, in clothing, or secretly feeding to siblings. Another participant, Craig (United States), while eating pizza, described how he hated the taste of Chef Boyardee pizza as a child, though his parents would demand that he ate all of it. Consequently, he refused to eat pizza with friends throughout his teenage and early adult years, though he loves it now. Of the 50 percent of participants who were parents, none said that they had made their children eat all their food, though many mentioned their own parents who did so. Adult participants often conveyed continuity in their beliefs with the dictums about food and waste expressed by their parents (don’t waste food, eat all the food you are given), even though they also resisted unwanted foods as children. This contradiction—valuing choice and autonomy as well as responsibility for food-related behavior—also mirrors the national discourse about food, waste, and citizenship mentioned earlier. For participants, wasting the food shared with you was clearly viewed as an immoral act; however, it could be forgiven in children as an expression of separation and independence. Food waste connected with bodies and identities as habitus—its symbolic and material presence or absence part of the moral codes. Preparing and sharing meals and food provisioning have always been key aspects of families and communities. In these participants’ memories of childhood, their parents’ beliefs about wasting food points to their own responsibility as community members and, reflecting the popular discourse on food waste, as food citizens. Mass or socially mediated top-down narratives about reducing food waste are a reminder of our excesses and of the hunger of others, echoing parental admonitions about food waste as a way to teach social and relational accountability. But these stories also reveal that guilt over wastage resonates most with middle-class food citizens overly burdened with choices about what to feed themselves and their families.

Over or Under Feeding and Waste Patrick (United States) called himself a “human garbage disposal,” who says that his wife “always buys a bunch of different foods for the kids, and we never want to force food on them. So, I try to eat all the leftovers, but it’s impossible. I’m stuffed, but I also feel guilty about the waste.” Gloria (United States) said that her kids eat “anything” now but had gone through “picky phases” when finding something they liked was difficult and a lot of food was wasted. “I didn’t think about it then, but now my daughter talks to me all the time about wasting food.” Stories in both Italy and the United States were also told of mothers for whom overfeeding their daughters was both culturally sanctioned and a form of control. Three middle-aged female participants who emigrated to the United States and currently live with their mothers recalled being overfed routinely, both as a child and currently. Though they still find it difficult to refuse their mothers’ cooking, they choose to not to eat it and accept that it will go in the trash. Being hungry or food insecure and eating others’ leftovers or “trash” food was another theme repeated in the narratives of two US participants, Marco and Tereza. Each had experienced food insecurity both in the country where they grew up and in the United States where they hold citizenship. Marco, who as a child had to eat the food others threw out or did not want, talked of his hatred for bone marrow, a US delicacy that was a stark reminder of his constant search for food as a child in Brazil. Tereza, an immigrant from

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Bulgaria, discussed the shame she felt in stealing leftover vegetables from farms on her way home from school—a shame that followed her to graduate school where, years later with an advanced degree and residency in the United States, she still had to go to food shelters for donated food. For each of these participants, food, or potentially rejected food, serves as a signifier of relational, social, and economic identities. Taste is constructed as preference, desire, and status in relation to others who define, discriminate, and confer power. Waste, or that which is no longer deemed useful in the taste economy, loses its value only in relation to that economy—as its unrealized potential. For this reason, our memories of waste always contain loss, and thus the opportunity to imagine other ways of acting toward and valuing food.

Food-Waste Relationships, Complexities, and Contradictions When discussing memories, the interviewees began, without prompting, with childhood. Food memories were personalized, often a sense memory evoked when eating a particular food. The memories seemed, for many, to involve a particular nostalgia for family rituals. These were good memories for most, and for some recreated in making the foods for themselves or their own families. Notable exceptions were the flip side of this romantic childhood view, where family meals involved opening up a can or the meals of Hamburger Helper night after night. Sometimes a favorite restaurant was recalled, but this was in the context of meals with family or places that no longer existed. Food waste memories were personalized when they involved parenting (self as child or self as parent). These stories were of punishments invoked by parents for refusing to eat unwanted food or, in one case, guilt felt over food wasted by one’s own children. Food waste researchers note that many consumers unintentionally waste food (Aschemann-Witzel et al. 2018) and feel guilt over wasting it (Watson and Meah 2012), perhaps even more so than other forms of waste (Gierris and Gaiani 2013). Given these findings, it appears many of my participants articulated or deflected such emotions by denying their own food wastage (unless as a child) and speaking of (significant) others who wasted food. Elsie (United States) mentioned that her mother is extremely frugal but she “wastes food because she wants everything fresh but never eats it.” George (United States) admits to buying “whatever my kids might want to eat” and then throwing it out when they don’t. But he also cans, preserves, and freezes “everything” from his garden. These contradictions in food saving and wasting behaviors pervaded food waste stories in the United States, indicating a good deal of confusion over how, when, or where to value food. The neoliberal right inherent in food citizenship in the United States to choose the best food for oneself may be in tension with the social right to food for all and the responsibility to act (purchase) in ways that maintain the sustainability of the food system. George’s and others’ tendency to compartmentalize is mirrored in US national histories of devaluation—where collective stories of depression-era and wartime thrift gave rise to the industrialized food system and postwar emphasis on abundance and standardization. In Italy, it seemed even more so that no one wanted to personally admit to wasting food, though there was some generalization to the younger generation, or Italians in general having less sense of a national cuisine, less time to learn to cook from elders, and more time spent with media that glamorized fast food. On several occasions this statement was connected to ignorance and the assertion that the interviewee cared more about food and waste than others.

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Perhaps mirroring the EPA’s Second World War–era poster discussed earlier, participants expressed an almost nostalgic longing for a return to the good old days of saving, preserving, and conserving. However, this longing was complicated by familial and economic relationships. Most participants described a childhood where wasting food was forbidden, and children were forced to eat all their food. Some of those same participants described mothers who were frugal but nonetheless overfed their families. On the flip side, a few of the parents interviewed described offering their children choices and feeling guilt over the waste that was subsequently produced, one going so far as to eat the remains himself and feeling overly full and uncomfortable as a result. These values of food and family offer an opening into better understanding the relational economy of food and waste. How is the value of food determined in relation to what we choose to throw away, donate, or reduce at the source? How does this relational economy help determine the ways we imagine our food futures? The stories we tell about food and waste map our relationships with ourselves and others, offering a picture of reality as we paint it, and provide the opportunity to imagine better futures (McConway and Hopkins 2019). Participants spoke of wasted food with shame and regret as well as humor. The interviews also seemed to prompt hopefulness for changing participants’ actions in light of the memories produced. They imagined the ways they might be implicated in the huge amounts of food wasted and discussed taking more time to eat and sharing more meals. Likely because they were asked to narrate their memories, only one of the interviewees (who worked in a factory that made cereal) mentioned that food producers or suppliers or the government encouraged food waste by producing too much food. Within the proliferation of mediated stories of food waste that blame consumers, only two solutions for reducing waste are presented: buy smarter or donate food or money to shelters. For consumers, it can be difficult to imagine other ways of practicing food citizenship. Indeed, as advocates of degrowth and zero waste know well, imagining a world where less (food) is more, particularly in countries with a highly industrialized food system, can be uncomfortable and undesirable for consumers conditioned by the mantra that more is better and that quality food must appear flawless.

FOOD WASTE CITIZENSHIP Returning to the primary questions that undergird this chapter, in what follows I identify some of the complementarities, confusions, and tensions produced in identifying and imagining food citizenship. Carmen Lozano-Cabedo and Cristobal Gómez-Benito (2017) summarize eight core ideas underlying food citizenship, among them being an assumption of rights and responsibilities, private and public behavior, individual and collective participation in the food chain, and the promotion of justice, fairness, and sustainability in food systems. Each of these principles implies the enactment of economic relationalities discussed earlier. While food access is viewed as a right, the right is performed in relation to habitus, or the embodiment of one’s position in society, as access (or lack thereof) to choice, taste, and discernment (Bourdieu 1984). One’s identity as a food citizen is determined by the ability to participate in the food chain balanced by the obligation not to hoard or waste it. In the United States and Western Europe where, during wartime, being a good food citizen was framed as thrift and patriotism, now national campaigns around food appear to impugn citizens for their excessive consumption and provide ample reasons for feelings of guilt over doing so. Contemporarily, neoliberal practices and policies place the burden (choice) of creating a better future on individual consumers. The

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enactment of social justice and change happens through our patronage of corporate Food Loss and Food Waste Champions (“United States Food Loss and Waste 2030 Champions” 2021), through our conscientious choice of consumer goods and donating extras to food agencies. Reducing food waste often means consumers are asked not to buy less, but to buy smart and donate what they do not use to those who do not have the capital to purchase goods. While this circular chain makes sense from a neoliberal standpoint, it imagines a food citizenry reliant on collective action in the form of spending (more) money and creating more waste for redistribution or diversion from landfills. However, the analysis of narratives about food and memory suggests that what creates an opportunity for civic action is not necessarily the money spent, but the time and spaces and moments spent together with others where food is the vehicle for connection. Telling food stories can place us in the position of sharing our lives, not merely providing data or money—of presenting a (ethical) self to another person, and of giving value to our memories. This act could provide an opening for relational economies that can build to collective action through recognition of our interdependence. Through imagination and storytelling, we can show how food and waste accrues or loses value in other than monetary ways. If we could build on those values to provide more experiences of sharing community through food, we could begin to imagine a collective future without relying primarily on our separated and isolated donations.

CONCLUSION Deliberately or not, we choose what to remember and what to forget, about family, meals, mundane and special, and, more importantly for this chapter, about food that goes unused or uneaten. Both personal and national stories of food wasted or used in excess pose a kind of biopolitics of individual responsibility, both impelling consumer citizens to purchase more and to feel guilty for their (bodily) excesses, with hunger and malnutrition the consequence. Into this picture, food donation and recovery enter as the perfect solution, allow redemption from guilt through giving excess food to others and supporting the businesses that also do so. The question remains as to how waste can be reduced in “developed” capitalist countries. Current governmental, corporate, and entrepreneurial attempts in the United States to assign value to waste within a capitalist economy occur through making consumer products from waste. Thus far these are niche items such as imperfect produce and micro-brewed beer from leftover bread that are far from accessible to people who are food insecure. Our imagination of a different, more sustainable future is constrained by the contingent and colonizing narratives of neoliberal national values displayed on government-affiliated websites and mirrored in mainstream media. When food waste is pointed out in the news or entertainment media as an issue of concern, it is never discussed historically, but as a recent phenomenon most often equated with hunger and excess (though not excessive consumerism). Without a (mediated) collective memory of waste, we fail to see the structures that contribute to hunger and excess, and thus the role of waste in postindustrial food system design. In the junctures between nationally and internationally sponsored food-waste-reduction campaigns and the participants’ memories of food and waste, we find complex and often contradictory narratives about imagined food futures. Uprooting these ideologies requires careful analysis of discourses and stories as performances of identities. Much of the rhetoric around waste reduction points toward good citizenship through better (though not less) consumption. If citizens, communities,

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and nations are constituted in food discourse, then the discrepancies between rights and belonging can be told not in stories of taste, status, and capital but revisioned in stories of interdependence in the face of uncertainty. Keri Facer (2019) observes that imagination, coupled with storytelling, has led us to think of food in new ways (food from waste, plantbased “meat,” etc.) as well as citizen-led reclaiming of “commons,” or public spaces for all to grow food. We need to conceptualize our futures not as different times and spaces but as the multiple different temporalities of overlapping stories about food and waste told in the present time. Our future exists in these ongoing stories of the meanwhile, in the interconnection between lives, economies, and ecologies (Facer 2019). This essay brings reflections on what we remember and forget about food waste to the conversation on imagining food citizenship. Relational economies and storytelling, in particular, can play a generative role in that process. If our talk, performance, and writing about food communicate meanings for identities and structures social life, then it may be said to be equally important to study what is communicated when what is intended to be food goes uneaten, and what has the potential to be eaten is wasted. Citizens in capitalist democracies have been told to waste more or waste less, but consistently to buy more. Food waste communicates as much about who we are as who we imagine ourselves to be, as socially and gastronomically conscientious consumers, as food (in)secure, as good family and community members, and as citizens who are part of a national and global food system. In an extension of the famous Brillat-Savarin quote, this chapter has looked at what the food we waste tells us about who we are, and who we imagine ourselves to be. Discourse about food and waste makes memory a presence, carried in our talk about what we have not eaten or chosen not to eat and what that tells us about ourselves individually and collectively as national and global citizens.

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“Food Recovery Hierarchy” (updated January 2021), Environmental Protection Agency. Available online: https://www.epa.gov/sustainable-management-food/food-recovery-hierarchy (accessed November 19, 2018). Gaiani, S., S. Caldeira, V. Adorno, V. Segrè, and M. Vittuari (2018), “Food Wasters: Profiling Consumers’ Attitudes to Waste Food in Italy,” Waste Management, 72: 17–24. Gjerris, M., and S. Gaiani (2013), “Household Food Waste in Nordic Countries: Estimations and Ethical Implications,” Etikk I Praksis—Nordic Journal of Applied Ethics, 7 (1): 6–23. Holtzman, J. (2006), “Food and Memory,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 35: 161–78. Lozano-Cabedo, C., and C. Gómez-Benito (2017), “A Theoretical Model of Food Citizenship for the Analysis of Social Praxis,” Journal Agricultural Environmental Ethics, 30: 1–22. McConway, S., and R. Hopkins (2019), “Imagination, Creativity and Activism,” Resilience.org. Available online: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-02-21/storytelling-imagination-andactivism/ (accessed September 12, 2019). Mennell, S. (1987), “On the Civilizing of Appetite,” Theory, Culture & Society, 4 (2–3): 373–403. “Reduce Food Waste and Feed People not Landfills” (2015), Environmental Protection Agency, November 10. Available online: https://archive.epa.gov/epa/newsreleases/reduce-food-wasteand-feed-people-not-landfills.html (accessed November 13, 2018). “Stop Food Waste,” European Commission (updated 2021). Available online: https://ec.europa. eu/food/safety/food_waste/stop_en (accessed December 7, 2018). Strasser, Susan (1999), Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash, New York: Metropolitan Books. “Sustainable Management of Food” (updated July 29, 2021), Environmental Protection Agency. Available online: https://www.epa.gov/sustainable-management-food (accessed September 4, 2021). “United States Food Loss and Waste 2030 Champions” (updated July 1, 2021), Environmental Protection Agency. Available online: https://www.epa.gov/sustainable-management-food/ united-states-food-loss-and-waste-2030-champions (accessed September 4, 2021). “Wasting Food: It’s Out of Date” (2021), Waste and Resources Action Programme. Available online: https://outofdate.org.uk/take-action/ (accessed March 21, 2021). Watson, M., and A. Meah (2012), “Food Waste and Safety: Negotiating conflicting social Anxieties into the Domestic practice of Provisioning,” Sociological Review, 60 (2): 102–20.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Sweet Disturbances: Candy as Speculative Imagination for a Socially Grounded Memory IÑAKI MARTÍNEZ DE ALBENIZ

Introduction What is candy? How and when is it eaten? Which kind of candy stands out in your childhood memory? We can assume the hypothesis that candy was consumed originally because of its nutritional value and human’s biological preference for sweetness, but it slowly developed into a food with a social function: it was reserved for special occasions or rituals. Nowadays, however, in a “liquid world” (Bauman 2000), a world that is unable to be stabilized in long-lasting institutions and social rituals, candy is eaten freely (most of the time in solitude) on any occasion and in any place. This ubiquity has made candy, and sugar consumption in general, a potential problem from a social and nutritional perspective. This is especially so because of the incorporation of free or added sugars into every type of food, not only those considered to be culturally or gastronomically sweet. What we are facing is not exclusively a problem of health, but also a cultural challenge, since this “ubiquitous and invisible sugar” is perceptible by the body but not so easily perceived by the sense of taste. Since sugars became invisible, we no longer have an understanding of its cultural and social power. However, by focusing solely on its negative aspects we overlook the potential of candy to act, among other things, as a vehicle for nutritional socialization, education in taste, and a source of memory and imagination. Redeeming candy thus involves changing the social imaginary that sees it as the new villain of alimentation. Regarding social imaginaries, the relation between imagination and memory might be understood as one of opposition: more imagination, less memory, and vice versa. The opposition in this case might be taken to mean that memory tends to be static because it is oriented toward what has already happened, whereas imagination is dynamic and is projected onto the possible, onto what is to come. In the realm of candy, however, this relation between memory/past and imagination/future is not one of simple opposition,

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but of antagonism instead: both sides of the dichotomy need each other. In this case, memory and imagination adopt the form of a Moebius strip: to be memorable, the candy has to involve an effective exercise of the imagination. To be imaginative, it has to resort to childhood as a past time or a repository subject to an open and flexible remembrance. What makes this memory/imagination articulation possible is the extraordinary plasticity of candy as food and the great suspension of reality it often embodies. Candy is to food, so to speak, what Photoshop is to photography. Any combination of elements, even if defying the “principle of reality,” is possible. We could perfectly well imagine a piece of candy as fish-shaped and purple-colored with a peppery flavor and a licorice texture. It is this exercise of imagination that makes candy a memorable food associated with the territory of play and experimentation. Contrary to what happens with free sugars, which are hidden in foods that are not culturally defined as sweet, and are incompatible with any kind of social ritual, candy exposes sugar in all its rawness. Candy makes sugar hypervisible when it presents itself as the epitome of sweetness. Nevertheless, does it mean that candy can display its power without limits? In plastic capitalism (Preciado 2013), where commodities are extremely flexible and bypass not only traditions but also social norms and values, risks can be detected in candy consumption. Apart from being ubiquitous, candy is an infinitely malleable product that is capable of, literally, reproducing everything the world contains on the basis of joining fat and sugar—like chains of carbon atoms in the case of plastic. Together with plastic, candy contributes to the construction of an artificial parallel world, a type of matrix of food made by calories that do not suppose any nutritional contribution. Now, this imagination made by “plastic and sugar,” which resolutely seeks the idealized memory of childhood, lends itself to excesses: as a malleable material, this sort of edible plastic composed by sugar and fat intermingle with the unlimited imaginary of childhood. Such a confabulation is an obstacle to consolidating a socially responsible gastronomic culture around candy consumption. Our curiosity about different candy cultures led to the creation in 2013 of The Candy Project,1 a sociological (and gastronomic) project, which aimed to create a map of candies around the world and identify the similarities and differences between different sweet cultures. The study was divided into two parts. The theoretical part sought to generate basic knowledge about the history of candy production. The second part looked at more contemporary contexts, focusing on the role of candies in global societies and their possible uses as a gastronomic culture driver. The project also sought to show the effects of globalization on candies. If globalization means a loss of food variety, then it also means a standardization of products like the most common sweets and the resulting sociocultural local practices connected to them. This chapter is certainly inspired by The Candy Project (Martinez de Albeniz 2015), since the knowledge accumulated there could serve as a repertoire of not only a sugar limited but also a “mindful” candy consumption.

NEORITUALS: “TASTES IN SPACES THAT MAKE PLACES” Regarding gastronomic uses of candy, in the framework of a research project called The Meal Experience, in which the Department of Creativity of Mugaritz Restaurant collaborated with neuroscientists from different universities. Mugaritz Restaurant, one of the partners of The Candy Project, included a piece of candy in its tasting menu (Muñoz et al. 2018). The following is how they describe the result of an experiment that seeks to use candy as food for thought:

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On some occasions, preparations that might seem magnificent to us are not appreciated in the way we hoped. This happened with our Gominola de vaca. No one would have any problem with eating a pineapple flavored, pink crocodile. The amusing thing about candy is the charming way in which it deconstructs reality and the ease with which it wins the complicity of the other. Our Gominola2 worked in the opposite way. It was presented using literalness. It had the face of a cow, it had the colour of beef soup, and it tasted like beef soup. We thought people would appreciate what we were saying between the lines, without the need to contextualize too much, until the measurements confronted us with a different panorama: more frequently than we like to admit, people rejected our proposal. (Aduriz 2019: 160) Most of the restaurant customers refused to eat the gominola (gummy), left it on the plate half-eaten, or expressed their discomfort to the waiter (Figure 23.1). A few weeks later, when these same diners were asked in The Meal Experience about their memory of the dish, the displeasure they expressed was even greater. This time, the displeasure was not only because the customer’s memory of candy was so divorced from the taste of beef soup, but also because a gummy occupied in the menu the almost sacred place of the sirloin, which thus became a perverse “essence of an essence”; a gelatin that was served cold instead of hot, sweet instead of salty, and that had the form of what a cow may be in the child’s imagination rather than the bloody stuff any customer would expect. From this experiment, we can infer that a conventional fine dining restaurant, a welldefined “place” in the common sense, is not the most appropriate “space” to experiment with these contra-intuitive “tastes” and “forms.” However, in the case of Mugaritz, a restaurant that makes reflexivity an essential ingredient of its tasting menus, this type of experiment (risky as it may seem) makes sense because displeasure is an aspect of the gastronomic experience with which they speculate. As the chef of Mugaritz, Andoni Luis Aduriz, explains, the work, almost “research,” on displeasure is based on the fact that the activity of every restaurant is constrained by a series of certainties and common-sense

FIGURE 23.1  Gominola de vaca, Mugaritz Restaurant. © J. L. Lopez de Zubiria.

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assumptions that are coined as “taste” or “good taste.” This is especially visible when dishes based on other culinary cultures are served on the menu, since they bypass the safety system of learned eating patterns. Mugaritz’s aim is to provoke these controversies and share the reflection on them with its customers, while they are eating, thanks to the mediation by the waiters. The Candy Project has influenced Mugaritz’s approach to the sweet world. The reflection that candies are hypercreative objects where shape, color, and flavor do not coincide— without this being challenging to those who consume them—influenced the conception of future dishes: Sugar Fork; Cod Marshmallow and Garlic Biscuit; Caramelized Chicken Skin with Lime Marshmallow; Sweet Beans with Cinnamon; Parsnip and Cod Toffee Cake; Blood Marshmallow and Caramelized Kojis, among others. Nevertheless, perhaps the most significant outcome is that The Candy Project has contributed to removing the barrier between the sweet and the salty world so that it has provoked the elimination of desserts in the traditional sense of the term. Results like those obtained in the experiment with the Gominola de vaca in a formal context (like a top restaurant) led those of us participating in The Candy Project to use candy as an experimental device in other settings, less susceptible to “stage fright” than a fine dining restaurant. This shift of focus resulted in two happenings3 that we designed as part of The Candy Project: “Kiss my Kiss” and “Muxua da mezua”4 (The kiss is the message). In these two events, the kiss was the factor that established synergies with the candy, but not just any kiss: interposing the candy in the kiss made the latter more difficult and thus more interesting and reflexive (Figures 23.2 and 23.3). “The kiss for the one who works on it” would be the motto of this intervention that invoked a kiss that was—if you will allow me to use the term—counterhegemonic with respect to the kiss of the Hollywood happy end.5 The Hollywood kiss was considered in this experiment as an emotional device characteristic of plastic capitalism, which seeks to produce the kiss as a secure space, free from any catastrophe or storm, in which forms are repeated without risk of transformation or transgression. But why the kiss? Because of its anthropological relevance. The French ethnologist Leroi-Gourhan (1993) argued that the human species only managed to speak when it freed the mouth from its predatory function, in this way culminating the civilizing operation. This is the main axis of the process of civilization, the strict separation between eating and talking: there was thus a shift from the pressing need for sustenance to the virtuosity of communication. For his part, Roland Barthes added that it was this very liberation from our condition as predators that gave rise to the kiss (Leroi-Gourhan 2002). Candy is therefore a bridge that connects us to our infancy, a period when talking, eating, and kissing were not yet clearly separated actions. It is when we are infants that, with the help of candy, we start to get to know the complex folds and concavities of our mouth; besides, candy is likewise the most recurrent subject in conversations with our peers and awakens our first predatory drive. It is worth pointing out that in both of the happenings, the kiss and the candy constituted a speculative gathering, a socio-technical assemblage (Latour 2005) that tried to generate a distancing effect from the everyday—but not from the position of some supposed exteriority, but precisely from within everydayness itself. In these projects, we tried to mobilize three of the resources that Latour mentions for making visible and activating mediations (and thus candy): two of them, innovation and fiction, deliberately, and the third, accident, somewhat less so. With respect to innovation and fiction, we designed, together with the creativity department at the Mugaritz

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FIGURE 23.2  Kiss my Kiss. © Oscar Oliva.

FIGURE 23.3  Kiss my Kiss. The Kiss. © Oscar Oliva.

Restaurant, four candy prototypes with culturally challenging and disruptive flavors, from extra sweet to extremely spicy, based in a childish imaginary related to alive mouths, tongues, and lips, as if they were characters of a literary fiction.6 The function of these four candies was to “warm up” the palate—as if it were a sequence on a tasting menu—in preparation for the culminating moment of the kiss: rings in different shapes made of sugar that, once eaten, worked as a symbol to break with kinships and social commitments previous to the happening. The second type were sweet syrups for printing love messages on the participants’ skin that they were invited to lick

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mutually. The third type were chili hot and pasty cookies, known as polvorones in Spanish that, once in the mouth, made it difficult to perform the Lebanonese British singer MIKA’s 2007 pop song Lollipop that participants were invited to sing in karaoke style. Finally, we offered some tongue-shaped candies for couples to share, elaborated from mochiko, a rice flour originating in Japan that is difficult to chew, and equally hard to ingest.7 The final device was a kit with which the participants had to literally make a kiss8 out of a mixture of water and alginate (the substance dentists use to make their casts), which is increasingly used in fine dining as a thickener. Once a suitable texture had been obtained, the paste was introduced between their mouths and kept there long enough for it to solidify (see Figure 23.3), obtaining a perfect cast of a kiss (an unrepeatable kiss) with the shape generated by the concavities of the mouths while kissing. We invited the participants to take the kiss home with them and experiment with it there. The kiss finally gelled as a candy-sculpture of a permanent or a never-ending kiss. In “Muxua da mezua,” the second intervention, we tried to shift the experimental gesture involving candy to the design—also speculative—of the ritual space. That was how we manually produced a cloud-shaped carpet made of marshmallows, covering an area of some 100 square meters. A Spanish term for this type of candy is precisely nube (cloud). The place where the ritual was to be developed was therefore a cloud of clouds (Figure 23.4). Our intention was for the whole ritual to be held on this surface. Nevertheless, that was when innovation and fiction came together in Latour’s third, fortuitous path for activating mediations: accident. During the happening, which lasted for one hour, the spotlights and trampling feet heated up the cloud in such a way that, in spite of the public’s having taken off their shoes following our instructions so as to feel the direct contact of their feet on the carpet of candy, this became a sticky spider’s web. Surprisingly, however, only the adults who accompanied their children to the event understood it as a trap. The children, at least those who were able to ignore the calls to behave from their parents (or while they were able to ignore them), continued without any problem to run around the ritual space—that place that Johan Huizinga called the

FIGURE 23.4  Cloud of clouds (Muxua da mezua). © Oscar Oliva.

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“magic circle” of the game (1949). In a memorable performance, “The Model: A Model for a Qualitative Society” (Nielsen 2010), carried out with children by Danish artist Palle Nielsen,9 at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Nielsen noted: “This is only a museum for the one watching.” On that occasion too, those watching were the parents of the children. Without doubt, at the phenomenological, experiential level, what happened in these two happenings entered the episodic memory of the participants, which is responsible for filing the lived events and sensations produced by our experiences, allowing us to recall them without having to depend on an act of will. The memory of the kiss, the cloud, and everything surrounding them, comes to mind recurrently, without our being able to control this. Now, beyond the ritual space and the imaginaries it produces, what happens in material terms? First, once the sugar of the candy begins to do its work in the mouths (and bodies) of those who kiss, a complex synergy. It is enough to name, no matter how anticlimactic this might seem, all the “ingredients” of this process: noradrenaline, dopamine, phenethylamine, testosterone, oxytocin, and cortisol. Second, the counterpart to this chemical-hormonal symphony was the awkward —even challenging—presence of the “cloud of clouds” after the happening. The safety protocols for clearing the residue from the site, after the performance, were overwhelmed by this sugary monster. In the same way that greasy residues, so-called fatbergs, are invading the sewage systems of contemporary smart cities,10 this sugarberg became stuck in some of the diverticula of the institution that hosted the event (see Figure 23.5).

BETWEEN MATERIALITY AND IMAGINATION: CANDY TRAPPED IN AMBIVALENCE The monstrous figure of the sugarberg is a reminder that both, in material and technical terms, candy is a confectionary product that takes various shapes and sizes and is composed of a solid paste sweetened with sugar, and flavored and colored by the generous use of additives (Figure 23.5). To speak of candy is to speak of sugar in its most diverse and curious presentations and of numerous ingredients like gelatin, aromas, colorants, and other additives: acidifiers, thickeners, gelling agents, or taste enhancers (Zudaire 2013). In short, according to an exclusively nutritional point of view, candy could be defined as a pathogen and basically superfluous: fatty and sugared caloric bombs, an “industrial, nutritionally unbalanced foodstuff ” (Jackson et al. 2004: 1236), “junk food,” “hypercooked” food (Pollan 2014). The corollary is that, regardless of the knowledge about more traditional, already forgotten uses, candy—and the consumption of sugar in general—could be considered the epitome of deregulation and cultural lack-of-memory in alimentation. In a word, what Claude Fischler has called gastro-anomie (Fischler 1995), that is, a state of nutritional affairs in which a life released from any social and anthropological link compulsively devours foods without nutritional value. Candy would thus be the perfect food for a dystopian future: empty food (empty of nutrients) for empty spaces (empty of social life) consumed by empty bodies (empty of health).11 If, as Claude Fischler says, to incorporate food is to incorporate all or part of its properties on both the material and imaginary levels, candy is the perfect example of “incorporating a bad object” (Fischler 1995: 69). It thus implies fear of a series of essential risks: not only a health risk, but also loss of the sense of one’s “place” in the world, in the anthropological sense of Marc Augé, which implies a deficit of memory, identity, and social relations (Augé 1995).

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FIGURE 23.5  Sugarberg (Muxua da mezua). Photo by the author.

The solution to this radical and Manichean split in candy between the material (the bad) and the imaginary (the good) is necessarily located in what mediates between imagination and matter: symbolic or cultural production. The “Candy Project” tries to address this cultural dimension, which can help us to avoid two unwanted extremes: in the first place, memorabilia as the repository of a fetishized infantile imagination; and, in the second place, the unlimited technical and material versatility that makes candy into a superfood, making the impossible possible. The lack of articulation between the material/technical and the imaginary means that a form of candy is imposed that is empty of both nutrients and social life: a perfect storm, that is, the solitary and compulsive consumption of a substance that, given that it is made with sugar, contains a deep ambivalence. Sugar has two facets occupying an ambivalent position in what Claude Fischler calls the omnivore’s dilemma (Fischler 1995). On the one hand, it is necessary for the working of our organism. When we digest sugar, our organism attains a chemical balance and attracts certain nutrients, like minerals and vitamins. But, on the other, when consumed in excess, it increases our calorie intake, removes hunger, and reduces the ingestion of foods richer in nutrients, which can favor an unhealthy diet.

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Sugar, as happens with fat and other energy-dense foods, is a powerful source of neurobiological reward: it provides sensorial enjoyment and more pleasure than other foods (Fischler 2010). This is called the positive hedonic response. In its radical ambivalence, candy can be compared to Derrida’s concept of the pharmakon, which signifies remedy and venom at the same time. Also crucial is candy’s social articulation, a dimension that is also ambivalent. On one side, we have the deterritorialization of sugar in the form of a ubiquitous “freely” incorporated foodstuff. On the other, territorialization in the form of socially and culturally sustainable and responsible candy, that is, sugar as a social link—like those generated in our happenings—that contributes to preserve the three conditions that give anthropological and social meaning to a place or a ritual: memory, identity, and social relations. If it is to leave behind the stigma of empty calories, of a food characteristic of non-places as spaces of anonymity (Augé 1995) or empty meeting grounds (MacCannell 2002), and produce memory, assure identity, and foster social relations, candy must have resources to types of narratives that are less stigmatizing than its medicalization.

NARRATIVES ON CANDY: BETWEEN MEDICALIZATION AND DEMONIZATION In the film Brazil (1985), there is a hilarious sequence worthy of the most deranged dystopia. The protagonist, Sam Lowry, and his mother go for a meal in a restaurant. Lowry is asked what he wants to eat and replies—“a steak, please, rare”—in answer to which the waiter rudely insists that he say the number of the dish—“Say the number, please. You’ve got to say the number!” When the meal is placed on the table, the diners, without apparent surprise, find themselves facing some dishes in which material and image are radically separated. The camera zooms in to show dish number eight: “braised veal in wine sauce.” What Lowry (and we) see, however, are three identical green-colored scoops of a pasty substance, crowned by a photograph of the recognizable dish. Candy is a perfect example of a foodstuff that can take this discrepancy between material/technique (infrastructure) and the imaginary (superstructure) to the extreme. At the material/technical level, candy is gratifying to the palate and infinitely malleable. In food production, palatability is the set of organoleptic characteristics that, irrespective of their nutritional value, make the food pleasurable. This sensation of pleasure is obtained through what is known as the bliss point. It is through the combination of ingredients such as salt, sugar, and fat at their bliss point that palatability and tastiness is optimized and the brain responds with a “reward” in the form of a jolt of endorphins; it later remembers what we did to get that reward, and makes us want to do it again. Candy is thus a perfect device for producing happiness and pleasurable memories. But what happiness and what type of memories are we talking about? Is it about a merely organoleptic happiness and memories, independent of the social context in which the food is ingested (guaranteed thanks to the fact that specific combinations of sugar, fat, and salt when well resolved technically act synergistically)? If candy is indeed “the matrix of alimentation,” that perfectly malleable interface that can do everything, it is not surprising that it lends itself to dystopian narratives. As Cypher, one of the crew of the rebel ship in the film Matrix12 puts it: “You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss” (1999). Nowadays, a scientific or “realistic”—not to say, brutal—narrative has

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been imposed concerning sugar and candy. By means of this narrative candy is demonized to the extent that it becomes a scapegoat in the hands of a discourse on balanced diet that disqualifies it as it is a (non)food that is consumed at any time, in any place, and in any way. In the first place, demonization of candy is effected through its medicalization.13 This consists in reducing candy to an isolated and individualized consumer good, exclusively focusing on its material (and technical) component, as Terry Gilliam does in Brazil by means of that shapeless paste on a plate. What is relevant in this context is the product’s composition, what we eat, isolating it from any context except that of its design and manufacture. In a word, its condition as a processed food is defined in a narrow sense. Any social aspect, which does not refer so much to the product as to the process, to how (where, when, with who) we eat, is ruled out beforehand. Second, in the “social” part of the equation, from the point of view of medialization— of media discourses—candy is defined as a way of consuming that is socially isolating, preventing both socialization (the construction of a socially full subjectivity) and sociability (the social relationship). To give an example of this stigma, the Spanish political scientist Víctor Lapuente in an article on the rise of populism in the printed press titled “Payasos gladiadores” (Gladiator Clowns), makes the following point: “Spectators prefer to ingest this policy of insults and (gestures of) spitting that, like fast food, floods our brain with sugar. And that makes us dependent. Slowly cooked articles and reporting are greens; more nutritional but less effective” (Lapuente 2018). The identification of fast food and sugar— candy could be defined as sugary fast food—with post-truth is done almost automatically. Consequently, the politics of candy is shaped by means of an analogy between sugar and lying: sugar as a state of alimentary exception. In the field of alimentation, states of exception are gastro-anomic situations: they are not governed by any system of rules. By gastro-anomie one should understand the modern tendency to make flexible the rules that govern “the everyday unconscious of culture” in questions of alimentation. As Fischler says, “amongst certain ‘atomized’ individuals who live in big cities, the traditional framing of behavior does not really make sense any longer … socialized, ritualized food, no longer finds its place unless it is inscribed in leisure time” (Fischler 1995: 205). One final example: In September 2018, a study on gaming as a factor that contributes to developing skills for active social change was presented at the Complutense University of Madrid (Jover et al. 2018). At the presentation of the study, the dean of the Education Faculty made an analogy between the nutritional pyramid and a supposed ludic pyramid. In this rather unfortunate analogy, candy represented “those games that children must play alone, because there is no one else they can develop them with.” Greens, for their part, “were collective games and active games.”

CANDYVERSITY: CANDY AS A (SOCIO-TECHNICAL) MEDIATION The answer from gastronomic discourse to the stigmatization of sugar consumption oscillates between a somewhat complex avoidance of sugar by means of establishing a security regime (full of regulations) or by having recourse to a culinary memory, deeply rooted in tradition, that attempts to dignify the use of sugar, providing it with memory and ritual meaning. Two recent texts synthesize these two positions. In 2018, the British chef Jamie Oliver published a manifesto in which the consumption of sugar is addressed using a

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scientific-technical and juridical logic that separates it from any social contextualization. “Ban” is the most repeated word in Oliver’s normative manifesto (ban TV ads, ban use of cartoon characters, ban cheap promotions, ban the sale of energy drinks) along with “restrict,” “enforce,” and “compulsory” (Oliver 2018). Following a more propositional line, the Israeli pastry chef Yotam Ottolenghi proposes a return to the time when sugar had a “cultural” meaning insofar as it symbolized a celebration. This counter-manifesto attempts to take sugar off the black list of the new villains of food and drink and assert the role of dessert as a celebratory ritual and source of shared pleasure beyond the bliss point. For Ottolenghi, the problem with sugar lies in the fact that it is found everywhere and has ceased to evoke a special occasion. “The Ottolenghi way has always been about abundance, inclusion and celebration. It’s the way we’ve always cooked and it’s the way we’ve always baked. It’s the way we’ve always eaten and the way we’ve always lived” (Ottolenghi 2017: 12). The corollary is that sugar’s de-ritualization increases both its consumption and the speed of its ingestion. Therefore, rituals operate as a social framework that gives meaning to the passage of time. Among other factors, in rituals, eating is accompanied with a set of actions that slows down the speed and anxiety related to consumption. Does not compulsive consumption result from de-contextualization? To what extent is candy integrated in the forms of life of the community or is it an external agent? Facing the loss of the seasons in terms of food choices and the deterritorialization typical of liquid societies, initiatives like Slow Food are trying to establish a new spatialtemporal articulation in the field of alimentation: to recover the cyclical time of the seasons and the territorialization of food through the Kilometre 0 label. In short, I argue that we need to re-moralize sugar consumption through the promotion of forms of life that seek to preserve social ritual and eating together as factors that decelerate everyday life and also the ingestion of food. We are not only what, but also how we eat. In today’s complex societies, nevertheless, it is increasingly clear that the technical cannot be separated from the social (Latour 2005). If candy had thus far been considered as a vehicle for palatability, judged independently from the social context in which it was inserted, it can now be considered an interface that precisely seeks other ways of associating the material/technical and the imaginary through its insertion in the flux of the social. To that end, beyond the return to a dubious but reassuring culinary tradition, it is necessary to update the relationality of candy. As Spinoza observed, things are not what they are in themselves, but what they are related to. Due to its medicalization, analyzing candy, and sugar in general, has become a mere laboratory controversy (with juridical or normative consequences). That said, candy might not only be defined on the basis of its technical, nutritional, or organoleptic characteristics, but can also be approached based on how it is used, the way it is employed in concrete social contexts: observing the social life that candy articulates around itself, the things candy makes us do, in short, analyzing the multiple forms of sugar as assemblage (Latour 2005) or a social technology. Against medicalization of candy, candy shows its power as a (social) mediation. As Bolter and Grusin (2000) observe, the discourse of the immediate, of the nonmediated, in which candy is usually enrolled, has been and continues to be a cultural imperative of our time. The immediacy of things and their accessibility produces a sensation of naturalness that things, sensation of naturalness, as if things, including candy, were there waiting for us. No effort has to be done in order to reach them. Immediacy ensures a “faceless” interface: we do not “really” know what we eat and we do not realize how we eat when we eat.

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If the logic of immediacy leads us to erase the act of representation, its opposite, the logic of hyper-mediation, recognizes multiple actions of mediation and makes them visible. Hyper-mediation makes us aware of the mediations that are in play and permanently reminds us of our own desire for immediacy, turning eating into a reflexive act. It is not the same thing to consider candy as an intermediary and as a mediator. For Bruno Latour, an intermediary is what transports meaning or force without transformation. As an intermediary, as sugar transportation, candy is swallowed in an almost imperceptible way. Mediators, on the contrary, “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry” (Latour 2005: 39). Objects, due to the very nature of their common sense connections with humans, shift rapidly from being mediators to become simple intermediaries. When this happens, it is unimportant how complex they might be. They become black boxes. As consumers we move in a space in which we interact “naturally” with the objects around us, just as we operate in the physical world. It is from this fluency that candy exerts its influence as a kind of an alimentary black box: we know what we get from it, but we ignore how and why we get it. When this happens, specific tricks must be invented to make objects speak, that is, make them offer alternative descriptions of themselves, producing scripts of what they potentially make others do. This strategy, the hyper-mediation, constitutes in fact the philosophy behind the two “happenings” I referred to earlier, Kiss my Kiss and Muxua da Mezua.

CONCLUSION The Candy Project: Candy, Social Change and Maps of Taste around the World, the research project that serves as a basis for this chapter, seeks such multiplicity of meanings of candy, or if you will allow me to use the term, candyversity, a wordplay that refers to what candy has of a complex dispositive, far beyond its restrictive medicalized profile. It makes candy express itself as a mediator rather than an intermediary. Activating objects, analyzing them as visible mediators, before they become invisible intermediaries, consist, in the first place, of studying the extent of their innovations. In this sense, The Candy Project has developed a large part of its field work in the Department of Creativity of the Mugaritz Restaurant, with which it has collaborated in prototyping a series of candies that have been used in social experiments such as Kiss my Kiss and Muxua da mezua. In this chapter, I have tried to address the importance of candy, a foodstuff increasingly despised in contemporary society in terms of memory and imagination. Although the first refers to the past and the second points to the future, memory and imagination must work together. An effective memory has to be imaginative, and an imagination that aspires to be transformative and seductive must refer to the never-ending deposit of childhood memories. Candy constitutes an effective bridge between these two shores—childhood memories and speculative imagination. In medicalizing discourse, candy has been judged according to nutritional and organoleptic qualities, without paying attention to the social links, and transformative force, that candy can promote. To activate candy as a device for the production of memory and imagination, it is necessary to overcome this medicalized image, in which both the product and the process (Martinez de Albeniz 2018), its way of feeding compulsively, converge in the stigmatizing category of empty calories. The way in which candies are consumed are sometimes characterized by gastro-anomia (Fischler 1995), a compulsive and solitary intake, at any time, in any place, and in any

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way. However, this fact should not lead us to demonize candy. It can also be considered as a device that, at least potentially, can lead to rituals in which the speed of intake is slowed down and the consumption of sugar is re-enchanted. There are traditions that highlight this socializing potential of candy (Halloween, lördagsgodis, etc.). However, better than looking at the past, the chapter has analyzed two happenings in which, through mobilization of critical design, candy is not only something we eat, but it is also a way of eating that transforms the evil of sugar in a promise that feeds at the same time our bodies and our social life, as well as a memory open to speculative imagination.

NOTES 1 The following are participating in The Candy Project: the Mugaritz Restaurant (Basque Country, Spain), the University of the Basque Country (Spain), Slow Food International and the University of Gastronomic Sciences (Piamonte, Italia). 2 Gominola means gummy in Spanish. However, in the case of Gominola de vaca, we are not talking about a sweet food. Nor is it to be understood as an exercise in nominalism, as if calling this way would make a beef soup sweet. It is relevant here to remember that, as The Candy Project makes clear, in many gastronomic cultures treats are not only sweet, for example small dried fish in Japan or spicy snacks for children in the Mexican tradition. 3 “Happening” is perhaps the term that has acquired most legitimation through the work of the artistic avant-gardes, but the design of these interventions in a social setting by means of candy is not far from what has come to be known in recent years as “flashmobs.” In any case, it is an inescapable fact that these events were inspired by Situationism. 4 “Kiss my Kiss” was carried out in the CA2M Art Center in Madrid on July 15, 2015. “Muxua da mezua” took place in the Tabakalera Cultural Center of San Sebastián (the Basque Country, Spain) on March 12, 2017, in the framework of the congress Dialogos de Cocina (Kitchens Dialogues). 5 The kisses in From Here to Eternity (Zinnemann, 1953) and Titanic (Cameron, 1997) are perhaps two of the most iconic in this sense. 6 The happening was directed in its entirety by a master of ceremonies, the poet Martxel Mariscal, who wrote an ad hoc text. 7 A video summary of Kiss my Kiss is available at https://vimeo.com/180147130. 8 The tutorial on how to make a kiss can be seen here: https://vimeo.com/205221504. 9 The Model received more than 33,000 visitors, 20,000 of whom were children. 10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatberg. 11 I am referring here to a dystopian world. Nevertheless, art and literature offer some examples that point to a more utopian and optimistic future (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Nutcracker) and we can also focus on more healthy uses of sugar, for instance, as a way to make medicine more palatable for children and cancer patients with chewing problems. 12 The Matrix is a science-fiction blockbuster that shows how reality is created as a digitally simulated environment thanks to the energy produced by human bodies that, once they have been subtracted from social life, are used like batteries that fed the very matrix that alienate them. 13 Medicalization (Conrad 2007) can be basically described as a process through which “nonmedical problems” are defined and treated as “medical problems,” whether these are “diseases” or “disorders.” All of this produces a deactivation of individual and collective powers by reducing the complexity of vital processes to questions of a medical or psychological order.

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REFERENCES Aduriz, A. (2019), Mugaritz: puntos de fuga, Barcelona: Planeta Gastro. Augé, M. (1995), Non-Places Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, London: Verso. Bauman, Z. (2000), Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bolter, J. D., and R. Grusin (2000), Remediation. Understanding New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Brazil (1985), [Film] Dir. Terry Gilliam, USA: Universal Pictures. Conrad, P. (2007), The Medicalization of Society. On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fischler, C. (1995), El (h)omnívoro. El gusto, la cocina y el cuerpo, Barcelona: Anagrama. Fischler, C. (2010), “Gastro-nomía y gastro-anomía. Sabiduría del cuerpo y crisis biocultural de la alimentación moderna,” La Gazeta de Antropología, 26: 1–19. Jackson, P., M. Romo, M. Castillo, and C. Castillo Duran (2004), “Las golosinas en la alimentación infantil. Análisis antropológico nutricional,” Revista Médica de Chile, 132: 1235–42. Jover, G., and S. Sanchez Serrano (2019), “La promoción de actitudes de cooperación a través del juego en la infancia,” in J. Vera (ed.), Formar para transformar. Cambio social y profesiones educativas, 277–80, Madrid: Editorial GEU. Huizinga, J. (1949), Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, London: Routlege. Lapuente, V. (2018), “Payasos Gladiadores,” El País, December 4. Latour, B. (2005), Reassembling the Social: an Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford: Clarendon. Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1993), Gesture and Speech, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Leroi-Gourhan, A. (2002), La prehistoria en el mundo, Madrid: AKAL. MacCannell, D. (2002), Empty Meeting Grounds: The Tourist Papers, London: Routledge. Martinez de Albeniz, I. (2015), “The Candy Project: The Re-Enchantment of Candy in a Liquid World,” ESSACHESS Journal for Communication Studies, 8 (2): 75–94. Martinez de Albeniz, I. (2018), “Foundations for an Analysis of the Gastronomic Experience: From Product to Process,” International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science, 13: 118–16. Matrix (1999), [Film] Dir. Wachowski Brothers, USA: Warner Brothers. Muñoz, F., A. Hildebrandt, A. Schacht , B. Stürmer, F. Bröcker, M. Martín-Loeches, and W. Sommer (2018), “What Makes the Hedonic Experience of a Meal in a Top Restaurant Special and Retrievable in the Long Term? Meal-Related, Social and Personality Factors,” Appetite, 125: 454–45. Nielsen, P. (2010), The Model. A Model for a Qualitative Society, Barcelona: MACBA. Oliver, J. (2018), “Jamie’s Sugar Manifesto.” Available online: https://cdn.jamieoliver.com/sugarrush/pdf/FINALJamiesSugarManifesto.pdf (accessed January 17, 2021). Ottolenghi, Y. (2017), Sweet. Desserts from London Ottolenghi, London: Random House. Pollan, M. (2014), “En los últimos 75 años hemos conseguido crear una dieta de lo más fiable para hacer que la gente enferme,” Papeles de Cocina, 10: 3–4. Preciado, B. (2013), Testo Junkie, New York: Feminist Press. Zudaire, M. (2013), “¿Existen las chuches saludables?,” Eroski Consumer, October. Available online: http://www.consumer.es/web/es/alimentacion/aprender_a_comer_bien/infancia_y_ adolescencia/2013/10/03/218245.php (accessed January 17, 2021).

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Eating in the Time of the Dead: Farming, Foraging, and Food Insecurity in Zombie Cinema TAYLOR REID AND MAUREEN COSTURA

Introduction One would be hard pressed to find anything that is as entrenched in our cultural imagination as the zombie. Since the 1960s the figure of the zombie has become a wellestablished and familiar part of horror cinema. The term “zombie apocalypse,” likewise, is now shorthand for any form of massive and widespread cultural collapse. A zombie apocalypse is a systemic change that leaves no safe spaces, no corners of the old world untouched, and reflects our fears about an uncertain future. As Todd Platts (2013) notes, there is a correlation between the production of cinema focusing on zombie apocalypses and periods of heightened social anxiety. The image of the zombie apocalypse has become a popular model for imagining the social change that will accompany many apocalyptic scenarios including climate change induced ecological collapse. The authors watched and analyzed numerous examples of zombie cinema including fourteen postmillennial zombie films, and nine seasons of AMC’s The Walking Dead. Our analysis focuses on how these films and shows depict the acquisition and consumption of food after a zombie apocalypse. We argue that these depictions are reflective of a society grappling with unease about future food security in a world full of what Beck (1986) called techno-scientific risk. Films and popular culture often provide a way for individuals to imagine their own response to challenging situations, and modern zombie cinema is now a rich forum for images of survival in a food-insecure future.

HOW WE UNDERSTAND ZOMBIE FILMS In recent years zombie movies have garnered significant critical attention within the social sciences. The focus of these analyses is not primarily on the zombie films of the 1930s and 1940s, with their tropes of racial and sexual paranoia, but on those beginning with the

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classic zombie films of George Romero in the 1960s and 1970s, and proceeding through the new millennium, which has seen significant growth within the genre. These modern zombie movies have more in common with the science fiction disaster films described by Susan Sontag in her seminal essay “The Imagination of Disaster” (1965) than they do other movies that are considered “horror.” Modern zombie movies are more concerned with civilization-ending apocalypses than the struggles of isolated individuals, although it is often through the narratives of these individuals that the stories are told. Sontag argues that the science fiction disaster film is a response to the anxiety, or better, the trauma suffered by everyone in the middle of the 20th century when it became clear that from now on to the end of human history, every person would spend his individual life not only under the threat of individual death, which is certain, but of something almost unsupportable psychologically-collective incineration and extinction which could come any time, virtually without warning. (1965: 48) While the threat of nuclear annihilation has somewhat faded from immediate concern, there are now other issues that have the potential to end human civilization, and individuals still cope daily with the stress of living in a society under existential threat. A common thread running through many analyses of modern zombie films is the extent to which the figure of the zombie and the depictions of survival in a postapocalyptic zombie world are a reflection of sublimated cultural anxiety (Dendle 2007; Newbury 2012; Platts 2013; McReynolds 2015). There is, however, some question as to what the anxiety being reflected in zombie films is actually about. To Dendle (2007) modern zombie films represent “deep-seated anxiety about society, government, individual protection, and our increasing disconnectedness from subsistence skills” (54). Geoffrey Wright (2017) sees zombie films, and especially AMC’s television version of The Walking Dead, as a meditation on forms of government when the veneer of human civilization has been stripped away, leaving humans subject to Darwinian evolutionary forces. Ambrosius and Valenzano (2016) see an argument for the redemptive power of family as the foundation of civilized behavior, while Canavan (2010) sees the zombie film as an example of the ways in which speculative fiction and horror apply the colonial gaze to their subjects, the zombies, who stand in for subjugated peoples. Zombies, like subjugated or colonized peoples, have generally been gazed upon while lacking agency or voice to respond. Newbury (2012) explicitly explores the role of food in zombie films, particularly in 28 Days Later (2003), which, he argues, reflects the shared visual language that has developed around the looming industrial food apocalypse. His analysis of the diets of survivors in 28 Days Later focuses on the persistent imagery surrounding junk food and fast food, and his analysis is that modern zombie films are a commentary on the industrial food complex and the impact it has on modern society. He compares scenes from zombie movies to imagery from fast food documentary films such as Food, Inc. (2008) and Super Size Me (2004), arguing that the similar scenes of blood, cruelty, and faceless masses act as visual clues for the viewers who understand zombie films. These visual clues are proof that “the dislodging of humans from their comfortable place atop the industrial food chain is, in the end, one of the central, even defining features of recent zombie films” (Newbury 2012: 90). The end of human domination over the natural world is a theme that occurs in several analyses, and it is worth parsing more closely to see how humans are either toppled from dominance or replaced more symbolically. Are zombies, and those who survive their appearance, a metaphor for our increasing dominance, or the consequence of the misapplication of that dominance?

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Zombies can be considered a form of posthuman uber-predator, our replacement atop the food chain, but without human motivations, creativity, or hope of a future. Lauro and Embry (2008) propose the zombie as a new form of posthuman, one that offers none of the usual narrative trajectory of catharsis or resolution. The figure of the zombie serves to nullify the concept of the subjective gaze, leaving a void where agency and human civilization once existed. Lauro (2011) also argues that the viral nature of zombie outbreaks in recent films is evidence of nature turning against humanity. She points out that in these zombie films and books, there is often a link between the appearance of the zombie and ecological disaster. Her examples include Joe McKinney’s 2006 novel Dead City, where the post-hurricane wreckage of a major city provides a breeding ground for the zombie virus, the 1978 French zombie film Les Raisins de la Morte, where pesticides are the culprit, and the 2006 movie Severed, a gore-fest that depicts the capitalist inoculation of trees as the catalyst for the zombie outbreak. Bringing several of these strains together, Philip McReynolds (2015) argues that zombies are both a trope for the posthuman and a response to the ecological anxiety of human dominance over nature in late capitalism. He uses the newly accepted geological epoch of the Anthropocene1 as a way to unite the concepts of the posthuman and the daunting ecological toll our actions have taken on nature. He further argues that the zombie—both human and inhumane, incomprehensible in scope and yet the product (often) of our own actions—is a reflection of the role of the human in impacting the environment. In this formulation of the zombie film, then, humans are reimagined as zombies, losing individual identity and subjecthood to become effectively a collective force of nature, beyond the control of any civilizing force, capable of wreaking global catastrophe yet incapable of understanding the repercussions of our actions, or of altering our behavior. McReynolds says human effects on the globe are of such a scale that they are no more subject to human control, intelligence, and agency than are other forces of nature. Human beings aren’t so much actors as actants, producing far ranging effects in concert with other nonhuman actants. Thus, ironically the Anthropocene, literally the epoch of the human, is the first posthuman epoch. (2015: 149) The zombie apocalypse, like climate change and other Anthropocene effects on global systems, is both our own fault and utterly beyond individual control.

ZOMBIES, CLIMATE CHANGE, AND RISK With the publication of Risk Society (1986) Ulrich Beck introduced the idea that the condition of modernity involves a transition from a society dominated by concerns about scarcity to a society dominated by the risks associated with techno-scientific production. Within the Anthropocene,2 now accepted as beginning with the spike of the post-Second World War nuclear testing in the late 1940s and early 1950s, we find ourselves firmly entrenched in this risk society, and often overwhelmed by a litany of concerns surrounding the effects of techno-science and industrialization on our bodies and ecosystems. To many people these risks seem so real, so threatening, and so imminent that apocalyptic disaster appears to be a scenario worth preparing for. It is no accident that the rise in the popularity of zombie movies has coincided with the growth of the Prepper Movement, members of which are preparing for social or ecological collapse by storing food, guns, water, and other supplies. In keeping with Sontag’s disaster film analysis, we contend that the

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dominant theme within postmillennial zombie movies is an actualization of catastrophe caused by techno-scientific risks, and a subsequent return to an era dominated by primal fears of food insecurity and lack of personal safety. Zombie movies are no longer simply slasher films for thrill seekers. They now appeal to a wider audience grappling with the implications of threats that seem to be both plausible and immediate (Ogg 2011). Many risks pervade our society today, and we hold many collective fears, though different fears also manifest more pervasively with particular social groups. This disparity can be seen within the Prepper Movement where people “prep for reasons as varied as their anxieties and experience” (Feuer 2013). Preppers’ fears range from climate change to global pandemics, terrorism, worldwide economic collapse, nuclear catastrophe, and more (Kabel and Chimiding 2014). Fear of immigration and fear of climate change are particularly salient partisan issues today, and both have been linked to the zombie phenomenon by different researchers (Comaroff and Comaroff 2002; Dendle 2007; Lauro 2011; Stratton 2011; Newbury 2012; Platts 2013; McReynolds 2015). The mass appeal of the zombie genre in its current manifestation is due, we believe, to its ability to cross political lines. Despite the well-publicized ideological and political divisions that we currently face as a society, zombie movies and television series speak to those on both the left, imagining zombies as representing capitalist consumption and climate change (Oloff 2012), and on the right, imagining them as illegal immigrants and rebuffed through a celebration of gun culture. One thing seems absolutely clear: that people from all walks of life feel less secure about the ability of the current social order to hold against the many forces and changes (risks) that seem to be imminently approaching (Parker, Morin, and Horowitz 2019). This transformation of cultural fear is implied by a change in the zombie genre itself, where the focus has shifted perceptibly from protagonists simply fighting zombies at the time of an outbreak or surviving in the immediate aftermath of catastrophe to the more complex challenge of survivors figuring out how to build new lives in a dangerous and food-insecure world. This transformation is symbolic of our transition from an era in which the primary fear is of risks manifesting (through terrorist attack, nuclear war, etc.) to one in which there is a sense of living with the consequences of risks that are already being actualized (border crisis, climate change). “Risk society is a catastrophic society,” Beck points out, and “in it the exceptional condition threatens to become the norm” (1986: 24). Indeed, the central focus of most of the postmillennial zombie films we watched is the process of adjusting to a new normal. The characters in these movies are struggling, not just to avoid being eaten by zombies, but with building a meaningful life in a world filled with them. The immediacy of the climate crisis has coincided with the explosion of the zombie genre, and its potential to cause drastic social change has been consistently documented in the popular press and reports from government agencies (Wallace-Wells 2017; Goodell 2018; USGCRP 2018). Half of Americans believe that climate change is “very serious” (Bowden 2018), and even most Republicans now acknowledge that it is real (Meyer 2019). While the warnings that we need to draw down carbon emissions immediately have become more pointed and dire, global carbon emissions actually increased by 2.7 percent in 2018 (Harvey 2018). These kinds of statistics lend credence to the claims of those who believe that catastrophic climate change is now inevitable. Meanwhile, we are beginning to see the calamitous predictions of climate-driven human displacement becoming a reality, as crop failures and drought in the developing world create waves of migration into postindustrial areas such as the United States and Europe (Semple 2019).

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Thus, the linked but disparate anxieties of immigration and climate change that seem to be driving both modern politics and the plots of zombie movies are effectively united in the current cultural moment. As the reality of long-ignored predictions of environmental catastrophe edge closer to daily reality, some segments of the population, particularly climate scientists and scholars of sustainability, have begun to discuss what acceptance and adaptation to impending environmental catastrophe will look like (Kingsnorth and Hine 2009; Bendell 2018). It is precisely this anxiety about learning to live in a changed and dangerous world that is presented in the postmillennial zombie narrative. If we agree as a society that apocalypse is likely in the near future, then the process of imagining what it might be like to live through it can assist us in processing our ideas about what our own future might hold. The zombie apocalypse in postmillennial cinema has been one of the ways that this sublimated anxiety has been expressed, allowing people to project themselves into situations of survival and scarcity. On the flip side, there is also evidence that disaster movies can promote fatalistic tendencies, and they spur their viewers to believe that social and ecological change will likely occur in a way that is quick and explosive rather than gradual (Schneider-Mayerson 2013).3 Whether the belief in impending environmental disaster and an accompanying social collapse is causing a surge in interest in zombie movies, or is being caused by them, it is clear that the two phenomena are related. It is hard to imagine a better stand-in for our fear of apocalyptic social collapse, whatever its cause, than the zombie. Transformed by biotechnology4 and presenting a clear and present danger to all of those who remain alive in their midst, zombies have come to represent the ultimate consequence of techno-scientific risk. What the new zombie movies depict, in other words, is our shared sense that we have now fully entered the “risk society,” where “the unknown and unintended consequences come to be a dominant force in history and society” (Beck 1986: 22).

FOOD INSECURITY AND ACQUISITION IN THE ZOMBIE NARRATIVE Food security concerns preppers across multiple disaster scenarios, and the scientific basis for anxieties regarding food availability in a warming world is well established. Research has shown that climate change is likely to affect food availability, food access, and the stability of local and regional food systems (Wheeler and von Braun 2013). The United States alone produces about 40 percent of the world’s corn and soybeans, and recent analyses show that yields are likely to decrease by between 30 percent and 82 percent depending on which climate change prediction scenario is borne out (Schlenker and Roberts 2009). We have observed that, while scenes of obtaining and securing food are not unique to postmillennial zombie cinema, the importance of the food security theme has increased substantially. In many cases zombies have simply become a backdrop for stories that focus primarily on resource scarcity and the psychological struggles of adapting to change. We have suggested that the zombie apocalypse films present our hypothetical emergence through a fully articulated risk society and into a new era of scarcity. In the analysis that follows, we review a series of segments from current (since 2007) movies and television shows within the zombie genre that focus on food acquisition and food security. Our analysis explores the themes and ideas that these scenes present and examines their relevance to cultural anxiety around the issue of food scarcity in a changing world.

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Carol’s Cookies—The Walking Dead (2015) Within the zombie genre, there is nothing that comes close to The Walking Dead in terms of the detail and attention given to food insecurity and acquisition. In this series, a cagey band of survivors works to find security in a world filled with threats from zombies and humans alike. There is an iconic scene in Episode 13 (“Forget”) from Season 5 in which Carol Peletier (Melissa McBride) bakes acorn and beet cookies for members of a walled community within which the group has sought refuge. After years of surviving on the outside, Carol is mistrustful of the people in this community, and despite being a badass zombie fighter and tenacious survivor, she is putting an older set of skills to use here, utilizing her domestic skills to help gain acceptance from the group. Despite being physically secure, the food security situation in Alexandria is tenuous, reflecting a common tension in zombie films between the need for total physical security and the need to go outside to secure resources. The vignette begins with Carol surveying the dregs of the community’s pantry. She selects arrowroot powder, water chestnuts, a couple of cans of beets, and some brown sugar. We cut to a scene in which she is outside the walls collecting acorns in an old, rusty pail. After a few moments there is a groaning sound, and a zombie stumbles toward her. Carol sighs, draws a machete and whacks the zombie right in the middle of her forehead, showering herself in zombie blood in the process. In the following scene, she is stepping out of a shower and sorting through a closet full of clothes. Next, she is shown wearing a flowered blouse and blue sweater taking acorns out of the oven and lifting cookies into a Tupperware container with a spatula. She then walks through Alexandria handing out cookies to the surprised residents. She ends at the home of Tobin, a resident of Alexandria with whom she has made a connection. “Tobin, you deserve … cookies,” she says, handing him a container full. “No, no, not with the kids as hungry as …” he protests. “No, there’s plenty,” she insists, “I foraged a lot of acorns” (“Forget” 2015). This piece is an illustration of the strong focus on food insecurity and foraging in modern zombie media. The challenges of food provisioning in a postapocalyptic world are stressed in the opening of the scene as Carol walks through a depleted pantry of stored food products, and again at the end when Tobin, one of the cookie recipients, talks about how hungry the kids in the community are. Food insecurity and the need to provide for children as representatives of future generations are themes that consistently come up throughout the series. The characters forage for food in abandoned stores, houses, and other locations. In Episode 1 of Season 3 (“Seed”) the group, constantly on the run with no safe place to hide from the zombie hoards, clears the zombies from a prison, and one of Rick’s (leader of the group of survivors) first thoughts is that they can plant crops in the prison yard. In Season 4 they do end up farming the prison yard, growing vegetable crops and raising pigs. While there are many illustrations of foraging, farming, and food insecurity in other zombie movies, this is the only example we know of that involves foraging for wild plants. The absence of the practice is somewhat curious given that wild plants are an important food procurement strategy emphasized in zombie survival guide literature (Kessel 2018; Wilson 2014). Edible plants are nutritious, easy to find, and were the main sources of food for many preindustrial societies. Wild plant foraging has also experienced a popular resurgence, led by a creative group of young celebrity chefs who are searching for the authentic taste of a place.5 Farming images, though more common, are still relatively rare within the zombie genre. Most food procurement imagery involves gathering canned or

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packaged food from abandoned stores or, more often, houses. This is notable because it represents a failure within the films and television shows to imagine beyond the current globalized industrial food production regime. A future that is totally reliant on processed food items produced in the past by an industrialized system that no longer exists does not feel promising.

I Am Legend (2007) One of the few movies that does include food acquisition beyond industrially preserved products is I Am Legend. Of all the zombie movies we watched, this film offered the most creative alternatives when imagining food procurement strategies. In this film, based on a 1954 novel, Dr. Robert Neville (Will Smith), the only surviving resident of New York City, searches for a cure to the zombie virus while fighting for survival. The movie begins with an epic hunting scene in which Dr. Neville pursues a herd of deer through the abandoned streets of New York City in a Shelby Mustang GT500. In the next scene he stalks a large buck on foot through the overgrown savannah of Times Square. The scene ends, memorably, with a mother lioness leaping in and taking down the deer right before Neville can shoot it. There are a couple of elements of this scene that are worth exploring. The first is the regrowth and other images of nature reclaiming what was one of the most densely peopled places imaginable, the concrete jungle. The idea that even our most iconic and built places would quickly become wild again if we were not there to maintain them is an important comment on the tenuousness of our current economic and social systems. It is a reminder that we are not, despite our big brains and technological cleverness, the center of the universe. This image of the posthuman world has been on the rise in other media lately as well, particularly the 2007 book and documentary series The World Without Us. If the zombie in the Anthropocene is an avatar of the posthuman, images of human absence allow us to contemplate a different sort of future. The rewilding shown in I Am Legend is hopeful because it allows us to imagine a posthuman future in which the environment has begun to heal, though our imprint is still quite obvious. To our eyes, it is tragic because it is subjectless, lacking what Gerry Canavan (2010) calls “the colonial gaze” of human dominance. The second element of the opening scene that we wish to examine is the image of hunting as a means of food procurement in a postapocalyptic future. Outside of The Walking Dead, a fishing scene in The Battery that we explore in the next section, and a brief mention of eating pigeon in The Night Eats the World, this is the only presentation of wild animal procurement that we found in the fourteen zombie movies we explored for this project. Like the absence of wild plant foraging, this seems curious to us, given the potential of wild game as a food source in a depopulated world, and the celebration of gun culture in which many of these movies indulge. Despite the alternative means of procurement, Dr. Neville’s apartment, we later see, is full of canned and preserved food scavenged from abandoned apartment buildings. Each of the zombie movies we watched that depict food procurement have at least one scene where people are scavenging industrially preserved food. The supposition seems to be that we may have produced enough during the time of our ascendance to carry a few of us through our decline. The idea that any of us will be able to live long after social collapse without having to produce our own food seems unreasonably idealistic to us, but it appears to be central to the current imagining of a postapocalyptic food future.

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There is a scene a little bit later in the movie that shows Dr. Neville in Central Park harvesting cobs of corn. This is the only scene in a movie or show we watched outside of The Walking Dead in which zombie outbreak survivors have been shown farming. This is important because it represents the return to a preindustrial condition. It presents a food procurement practice that isn’t about simply appropriating the leftovers of a capitalist society. Instead, it shows that there is a part of the cultural imagination that is conceptualizing the return to agrarian traditions, or perhaps more accurately, understanding the survival value of urban agriculture. It is also important to note that the end of the film depicts a sanctuary in Vermont—a walled compound that is the very picture of a pastoral agricultural community. This image suggests that the future of humanity may lie in a return to the agrarian past, not just basic survival within the wreckage of the present.

The Battery (2012) Like I am Legend, The Battery at least hints at some hybrid form of food procurement strategy. The film presents the story of two minor league baseball teammates, Ben (Jeremy Gardner) and Mickey (Adam Cronheim), negotiating the zombie-infested world of rural New England. It is different from most other zombie movies in that the setting is generally quiet, peaceful and decidedly nonurban. The movie centers around an exploration of the relationship between this former pitcher/catcher “battery,” their struggle to adapt to the loss of everything that was familiar and comfortable to them, and the differences in the way each of them copes. The movie is emblematic of most modern zombie cinema in one very important way: that zombies are the background for a story about people—about who we are and what we might become if our world were suddenly turned upside down. In one early scene they come upon an abandoned summer camp in the woods. After establishing that the camp is clear of zombies, the film cuts to a later sequence when Ben is fishing in the camp’s lake and Mickey is slouched in a lawn chair with his back to Ben. Ben asks Mickey if he wants to fish for a while, and Mickey says “no.” “Okay, might be a nice trick to learn,” Ben suggests. “I think I could figure it out,” is Mickey’s response. “Oh you do? You know it’s not so easy Mickey. There’s a subtlety to it. Finesse.” Ben says. “Yeah, you’re subtle,” Mickey replies, “you’re Mr. Finesse. You’re about as subtle as a fucking sledgehammer. Anyway look …” and he begins pulling cans of food out of his backpack and tossing them over his shoulder toward Ben “fish, fish, fish, more fish,” he sighs. “Point taken,” Ben says, reeling in his line, “why don’t you start a fire.” Mickey rolls his eyes, puts on his headphones, gets up from his chair and walks away (The Battery 2012). This scene encapsulates the divergent worldviews of the two main characters and sets up the conflict between them that develops throughout the rest of the film. Ben has adapted to the changed world in many ways and is the one that is keeping them alive by pursuing subsistence and security-related activities. He doesn’t like it, but he has accepted it and has made the calculations and adjustments necessary to live in this new environment. He understands that this change means living in a different way and giving up some of what was once considered normal in order to survive. He is trying to get Mickey to accept this too, to learn how to cope with their changed reality. That is why he’s trying to help Mickey learn how to fish, even though they have plenty of canned tuna. In this way, alternative forms of food procurement within the film symbolize our refusal to abandon industrial culture despite the risks we have incurred from it.

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We are intrigued by this exploration of denial and acceptance in the face of tragedy. It recognizes the human tendency to hang on to old behaviors and assumptions and refuse to accept the reality of change. This movie deeply explores the inevitability of transformation that our society faces, and the unwillingness of many of us to even acknowledge that it is happening, never mind change our behavior in response to it. In the film, Mickey can’t let go of the fantasy that somehow things might return to “normal” for them, that the zombie apocalypse is just temporary. It is the same set of impulses that lead to climate change denial, and our cultural inability to change our behaviors in a way that is necessary to head off the most severe risks associated with it. Risks, Beck (1986) argues, must be “either eliminated, denied, or reinterpreted” (26). The Battery captures the tension that we face as we struggle to process risk within this limited set of choices. Reinterpretation, in fact, may be exactly what zombie cinema is helping us to do within our modern risk-filled reality. Perhaps it is even helping us to deal with our inherent psychological resistance to change.

CONCLUSION Our analysis illustrates the emergence of several food-related themes within postmillennial zombie movies. The first is the presence of food insecurity as a threat, often as pressing as that of zombies themselves, to characters surviving in a postapocalyptic world. The fourteen zombie movies and all the seasons of The Walking Dead that we watched each incorporate this theme in some way, suggesting that there is significant cultural anxiety currently manifesting around the issue. As we grapple with the many threats present in our current “risk society,” part of our cultural response has been a projection of fears about the future within the zombie genre. That our collective fears have begun to focus so significantly on food procurement suggests a growing recognition of the impact that climate change is likely to have on our ability to feed ourselves in the near term. Despite the emphasis on food insecurity, most recent zombie movies continue to imagine postapocalyptic food acquisition primarily as appropriation of processed industrial food that remains preserved in the ruins of our old society. Even those that feature images of farming do so in a way that is secondary and primarily urban. This suggests our ethnocentric inability to imagine an agrarian future within a postapocalyptic world and speaks to the extent to which most of us have become detached from the source of our food in our current societies. It is evidence of not only cultural myopia but also a profoundly postmodern disconnect from history. Agrarian and agricultural societies have become foreign and often unimaginable to many, and our lack of ability to imagine a preindustrial world is reflected in these cinematic moments. We have also seen emerging depictions of other preindustrial food procurement strategies including hunting and wild food gathering, though they are still rather limited. It may be a manifestation of our denial impulse that even as we have begun to focus on the possibility of social collapse, we are having difficulty thinking beyond the current food system for our sustenance. In any case, we will continue to watch eagerly as the zombie genre develops and depicts our shared ideas about what our food future might look like.

Postscript Since the initial writing of this article, we have seen the world change dramatically as a result of the emergence of the novel coronavirus. We have watched as this deadly

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epidemic has become firmly linked through social media and news reporting to fictional zombie outbreaks. From half-serious memes (the person who refuses to wear a mask is the same person who would hide a zombie bite) to more serious debates over the depiction of mass protests (Berkowitz 2020; Judkis 2020), zombie cinema appears to have become a model for the ways in which we think about public contagion and the breakdown of social order. The disruption in food supply chains during the early part of this global pandemic has also mirrored the visual language of the zombie film, with empty grocery store shelves (Knoll 2020), the hoarding of supplies (da Silveira 2020), and uncertainty over the status of food production and transportation (Felix et al. 2020) all playing a role in the public trauma of the pandemic. At the same time, there has been an anecdotal rise in the number of people seeking increased self-sufficiency in food production, with some artisanal foods, such as sourdough bread, achieving cult status during the various lockdowns (Mull 2020). In a time of real global crisis, the preoccupations of zombie cinema have become the concerns of daily life.

NOTES 1 The Anthropocene is the age in which human activities have become so intensive and widespread that they are counted as a dominant geological force, capable of altering natural systems that were once self-managing, such as weather patterns, global pollination, species extinction and distribution, and the water system. 2 We use a definition and dates for the Anthropocene developed by the Sub-commission on Quaternary Stratigraphy’s Anthropocene Working Group (http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/ working-groups/anthropocene/). 3 According to archeologists, this is not the way that collapse has tended to happen in the past. Most of the often-referenced social collapses are undergoing academic reexamination, and previously held images of societies such as Easter Island and the Classic Period Maya are giving way to more nuanced understandings of long-term social, environmental, and organizational changes (Simpson, Van Tilburg, and Dussubieux 2018; Evans et al. 2018; Webster, Freter, and Gonlin 2000). 4 Many zombie movies depict biotechnology gone wrong as the cause of zombie outbreaks. 5 This adds an interesting class element to the event, as foraging has come to be seen as the purview of elite chefs, while the baking of cookies has a domestic and gendered connotation.

REFERENCES Ambrosius, J., and J. Valenzano III (2016), “‘People in Hell Want Slurpees’: The Redefinition of the Zombie Genre through the Salvific Portrayal of Family on AMC’s The Walking Dead,” Communication Monographs, 83 (1): 69–93. The Battery. (2012), [Film] Dir. J. Gardner, USA: O Hannah Films. Beck, U. (1986), Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage Publications. Bendell, J. (2018), “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy,” IFLAS Occasional Paper, 2: The University of Cumbria Institute for Leadership and Sustainability. Berkowitz, J. (2020), “The Zombie-Like Fervor around Reopening the Economy—in One Haunting Image,” Fast Company. April 16. Available online: https://www.fastcompany. com/90491476/the-zombie-like-fervor-around-reopening-the-economy-in-one-hauntingimage (accessed August 12, 2020).

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Bowden, J. (2018), “Poll: Nearly Two Thirds of Republicans Now Acknowledge Climate Change,” The Hill. November 29. Available Online https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/418887poll-nearly-two-thirds-of-republicans-now-acknowledge-climate (accessed November 16, 2019). Canavan, G. (2010), “‘We Are the Walking Dead’: Race, Time, and Survival in Zombie Narrative,” Extrapolation, 51 (3): 431–53. Comaroff, J., J. Comaroff (2002), “Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millennial Capitalism,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 101 (4): 779–805. da Silveira, G. (2020), “Coronavirus Hoarding: Why You Can Stop Amassing Toilet Paper,” The Conversation. April 12. Available online: https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-hoardingwhy-you-can-stop-amassing-toilet-paper-135659 (accessed August 12, 2020). Dendle, P. (2007), “The Zombie as Barometer of Cultural Anxiety,” in N. Scott (ed.), Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil, 45–57, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Evans, N., T. Bauska, F. Gázquez-Sánchez, M. Brenner, J. Curtis, and D. Hodell (2018), “Quantification of Drought during the Collapse of the Classic Maya Civilization,” Science, 361 (6401): 498–501. Felix, I., A. Martin, V. Mehta, Vivek, and V. Mueller (2020), “US Food Supply Chain: Disruptions and Implications from COVID-19,” McKinsey & Company. July 2. Available online: https:// www.mckinsey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/our-insights/us-food-supply-chaindisruptions-and-implications-from-covid-19# (accessed August 12, 2020). Feuer, A. (2013), “The Preppers Next Door,” New York Times, January 26. Available online: https:// www.flightfromperfection.com/files/post_attachments/The%20Doomsday%20Preppers%20 of%20New%20York.pdf (accessed January 18, 2020). “Forget” (2015). [TV Program] The Walking Dead, AMC, March 8. Goodell, J. (2018), “Can Civilization Survive What’s Coming?” Rolling Stone Magazine. October 9. Available online: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/can-earth-surviveclimate-change-735067/ (accessed November 16, 2019). Harvey, C. (2018), “CO2 Emissions Reached an All Time High in 2018,” Scientific American. December 6. Available online: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/co2-emissionsreached-an-all-time-high-in-2018/ (accessed March 4, 2020). Judkis, M. (2020), “That Ohio Protest Photo Looked Like a Zombie Movie. Zombie Movie Directors Think So, Too,” Washington Post. April 17. Available online: https://www.washingtonpost. com/lifestyle/style/that-ohio-protest-photo-looked-like-a-zombie-movie-zombie-moviedirectors-think-so-too/2020/04/17/b518fc48-801c-11ea-9040-68981f488eed_story.html (accessed August 12, 2020). Kabel, A., and C. Chmiding (2014), “Disaster Prepper: Health, Identity, and American Survivalist Culture,” Human Organization, 73 (3): 258–66. Kessel, A. (2018), Zombie Gardening: An Urban Plant Foraging Guide for Zombie Survival. 2nd edn. Chicago: Sunflower Trail Publishing. Kingsnorth, P., and D. Hine (2009), Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto, London: The Dark Mountain Project. Available online: https://dark-mountain.net (accessed August 11, 2020). Knoll, C. (2020), “Panicked Shoppers Empty Shelves as Coronavirus Anxiety Rises,” New York Times. March 13. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/nyregion/ coronavirus-panic-buying.html (accessed August 12, 2020). Lauro, S., and K. Embry (2008), “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism,” Boundary 2, 35 (1): 85–108. Lauro, S. (2011), “The Eco-Zombie: Environmental Critique in Zombie Fiction,” in S. Boluk and W. Lenz (eds.), Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead in Modern Culture, 54–67, Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

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McReynolds, P. (2015), “Zombie Cinema and the Anthropocene: Posthuman Agency and Embodiment at the End of the World,” Cinema, 7: 149–68. Meyer, R. (2019), “The Unprecedented Surge in Fear about Climate Change,” The Atlantic. January 23. Available online: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/do-mostamericans-believe-climate-change-polls-say-yes/580957/ (accessed January 8, 2020). Mull, A. (2020), “Americans Have Baked All the Flour Away,” The Atlantic. May 12. Available online:  https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/05/why-theres-no-flour-duringcoronavirus/611527/ (accessed August 12, 2020). Newbury, M. (2012), “Fast Zombie/Slow Zombie: Food Writing, Horror Movies, and Agribusiness Apocalypse,” American Literary History, 24 (1): 87–114. Ogg, J. (2011), “Zombies Worth Over $5 Billion to Economy,” NBC News. October 31. Available online: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/45079546/ns/business-stocks_and_economy/t/zombiesworth-over-billion-economy/#.X1Ox21VKjIU (accessed August 12, 2020). Oloff, K. (2012), “ ‘Greening’ the Zombie: Caribbean Gothic, World-Ecology, and SocioEcological Degradation,” Green Letters, 16 (1): 31–45. Parker, K., F. Morin, and J. Horowitz (2019), “Looking to the Future, Public Sees and America in Decline on Many Fronts,” Pew Research Center. March 21. Available online: https://www. pewsocialtrends.org/2019/03/21/public-sees-an-america-in-decline-on-many-fronts/ (accessed March 4, 2020). Platts, T. (2013), “Locating Zombies in the Sociology of Popular Culture,” Sociology Compass, 7: 547–60. Schlenker, W., and M. Roberts (2009), “Nonlinear Temperature Effects Indicate Severe Damages to U.S. Crop Yields under Climate Change,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106 (37): 15594–8. Schneider-Mayerson, M. (2013), “Disaster Movies and the ‘Peak Oil’ Movement: Does Popular Culture Encourage Eco-Apocalyptic Beliefs in the United States?,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, 7 (3): 289–314. Semple, Kirk. (2019), “Central American Farmers Head to the U.S., Fleeing Climate Change,” New York Times, April 13. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/13/world/ americas/coffee-climate-change-migration.html (accessed January 8, 2020). Simpson Jr., D., J. Van Tilburg, and L. Dussubieux (2018), “Geochemical and Radiometric Analyses of Archaeological Remains from Easter Island’s Moai (statue) Quarry Reveal Prehistoric Timing, Provenance, and Use of Fine–Grain Basaltic Resources,” Journal of Pacific Archaeology, 9 (2): 12–34. Sontag, S. (1965), “The Imagination of Disaster,” Commentary, October 1965: 42–8. Stratton, J. (2011), “Zombie Trouble: Zombie Texts, Bare Life, and Displaced People,” European Journal of Cultural Studies, 14 (3): 265–81. USGCRP. (2018), Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume II. D. R. Reidmiller, C. W. Avery, D. R. Easterling, K. E. Kunkel, K. L. M. Lewis, T. K. Maycock, and B. C. Stewart (eds.), Washington, DC: U.S. Global Change Research Program. Wallace-Wells, D. (2017), “The Uninhabitable Earth,” New York Magazine. July 9. Available online: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans. html (accessed November 16, 2019). Webster, D., A. Freter, and N. Gonlin (2000), Copán: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Maya Kingdom. Orange County, CA: Harcourt College Publishers. Wheeler, T., and J. von Braun. (2013), “Climate Change Impacts on Global Food Security,” Science, 341 (6145): 508–13.

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Wilson, L. (2014), The Art of Eating Through the Zombie Apocalypse: A Cookbook & Culinary Survival Guide. Dallas: BenBella Books. Wright, G. (2017), “Hobbes, Locke, Darwin, and Zombies: The Post-Apocalyptic Politics of Survival in AMC’s The Walking Dead,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 34 (2): 148–70.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Cooked in Milk and Full of Froyo: Food and Eating in Hell in the American Imagination BETH M. FORREST

The sweeter memories are in themselves, the greater their bitterness in hell, is it not strange? Nay, it is dreadful … Despair is one’s daily bread here; it is in us, it is about us. Absorbed at times—closing my eyes I had almost said, but it is no use doing that here— withdrawing within myself, however, I have the strangest fancies and imaginings. —V. A. Thisted (1906: 237) So reflects Danish author and priest V. A. Thisted, in his 1866 novel, Breve fra Helvede. The novel was so popular that it was translated into English and eventually published in the United States in 1887. In a 1906 edition, published under the title A Message from a Lost Soul, or Letters from Hell, the novel is bookended with an introduction on Hell (“As God Has Revealed It in His Word,” Thisted 1906: 7–25) by the American evangelist R. A. Torrey and a concluding chapter by the Ohio-based Rev. William H. Lindemuth, on Heaven (“The Home of the Redeemed,” Thisted 1906: 363–82). Torrey argues that hell does exist and that it is a place of “extreme bodily suffering” not only due to the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, but also because it is “a place of memory and remorse” (Thisted 1906: 18–20). He illustrates the point by retelling the Biblical story of the rich man and poor Lazarus, the latter of whom wanted nothing more than to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Upon the death of the two men, Lazarus went to heaven, while the rich man went to hell. Shortly after, the rich man was desperate for Lazarus to appear by his side so that the beggar would dip his finger in water and place it in the rich man’s mouth, in order to cool it and to offer a taste of relief from the heat. He called out to Abraham to send Lazarus over. “Abraham said to the rich man ‘Remember.’ The rich man had not taken much with him that he had on earth into the future world, but he had taken one thing, he had taken his memory” (ibid.: 20). Thus, hell can be understood as a continuation of the cultural milieu of a contemporary and

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temporal earthly world inhabited by those whose memory sustains a critique either of personal failings or of the flaws and sins of hell’s inhabitants. At the same time, because hell is either a physical place in the afterlife about which few can offer first-hand experience (or that which no one can, depending on your sensibilities); a state of mind; or a literary device, it demands a strong imagination. In a short note between Torrey’s introduction on hell and the novel itself comes a short address to the reader that begins, “The reader will be impressed with the strong imaginative energy, and powerful statements of truth in these letters” (ibid.: 28). Hell is constructed through a collective imagination that reflects cultural notions that range from sin and suffering to free will and justice. According to Lum, in Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction, “The threat of hell influenced prescriptions for what it meant to be both a good Christian and a good American in an age of nation-building, territorial expansion, and debates whether the nation’s labor force should be slave or free” (Lum 2014: 2). Scholars, however, have largely underappreciated how food and eating in the chimerical netherworld offers a lens through which we can understand concrete, shared cultural ideas. For example, when I casually ask my students the question, “what food do you imagine is served in hell?” their answers rarely challenge hell’s existence. Rather they ponder for a moment before suggesting burnt food (from the heat of hell—or perhaps it is the memory of earning poor grades in their kitchen class when they have presented burnt offerings to the chef instructors). The most popular answer is spicy foods, giving reference to the many hot sauces on the market today with the names inspired by the devil’s abode, including “Sweet Reaper,” “Hot Sauce from Hell,” and “Hellfire Hot Sauce: Devils God [sic]” to name but a few. Some joke that it is their mothers’ cooking while others suggest that it is pineapple on pizza (although that may be more hell on earth, showing a decisive lack of imagination on behalf of the students). Perhaps such jokes reflect how students of the culinary arts focus on taste and popular culture, or the persistence of continued gendered expectations in the twenty-first century. Other students envision that no food is consumed, explaining that it is the afterlife, and no nutrition is needed nor is any pleasure to be had. A few even reference the allegory of the long spoons, illustrating the continued Judeo-Christian impact on contemporary moral codes.1

A CHRISTIAN TRADITION: EAT OR BE EATEN This question of food and eating in hell is not a new one. Authors and artists have given attention to such material matters in the spiritual world for more than a millennium. In early Anglo-Saxon depictions, Hellmouth—a beast of a gaping, cavernous expanse with teeth and fangs—is always open, always receiving, and swallows the condemned. As this beast of hell demonstrates, one didn’t eat in hell, one was consumed by it. And, as we shall see, the answer to this question, “what is eaten in hell?” depends on time and place, memory and imagination, and, for citizens of the United States, “Hell was never distant” (Lum 2014: 4). According to the medieval Christian imagination, hell was envisioned as wilderness. It had long been understood as a subcategory of “nature,” one in which the unaffected environment held extreme promises. Wilderness embodied the cultural projection that reflected extremes of the same spectrums: safety-danger, light-dark, good-bad, original Eve-fallen Eve, pristine existence(unsullied)-fallen from grace, paradise-hell. On the one hand, one could discover luscious berries and fleeting delicacies of ramps and morels,

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with copious sources of meat to be hunted, roasted, and enjoyed. Yet at the same time, such wilderness also encompassed the reign of chaos, full of potential danger. There were poisonous mushrooms that appeared suspiciously safe, toxic greens and prickly nettles, and beasts that turned humans into the hunted to satiate carnivorous beasts. For example, for thirteenth-century Franciscan Brother Giacomino da Verona, hell was full of ferocious predators unleashed by the devil to hunt the damned. When caught, the ill-fated would have a cord strung around their necks and “a string through their noses,” after which they would be dragged back to the cursed city in a nod to contemporary hunting practices (Camporesi 1991: 73). The image of the damned becoming food in hell did not entirely disappear. As one unnamed woman from Huntsville Alabama, who had been born into slavery, reported as part of her conversion narrative: When I woke up in hell, I was traveling along a big road. Down on each side I saw the souls in torment. Many of them were people I had known in life. They were just roaming and staggering along. They were saying, “Oh, how long?” I met on the road a great lot, some walking, some on mules, going down to hell. I cried and said, “Lord, have mercy!” What is the meaning of this?” A voice said, “These are going down to destruction, but I have delivered your soul.” The next thing I saw was a little man before me. He said, “Follow me.” I followed. We came to where the roads forked. One way was broad, and the other was a little, narrow path that led upward. I saw all kinds of animals and people. They looked like they wanted to devour me. (Johnson 2010: 170) This passage was not without cultural reference. For enslaved people across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there existed a very real visceral fear of cannibalism tied to experiences of hunger and eating (Hermann 2019: 197). The narrative of Black African people sustaining White people traced back to the early slave trade and the Middle Passage. The trope, which was both based on reality and used as a metaphor, served as a commentary on exploitation and power dynamics between enslaved Blacks and dominating Whites. Such transgressive behavior was also understood by Africans and enslaved people as a source of the corruption of their souls (ibid.: 199). For our unnamed woman, this vision, as led by the Spirit, marked her final transformation from enslaved, exploited, corrupted, and consumed to a new “identity and self-worth” with “infinite value as children of God, chosen from eternity to be saved” (Johnson 2010: xxv). Back in Europe, in the late medieval and early modern periods, the earlier image of “wilderness-as-hell” in Europe had been reimagined. Hell was now a crushing, stinking, overcrowded city with open sewers and nagging wives, with liquor distilled from pain and torment. These references were based on lived experiences, where waterways were contaminated, and underutilized plots became dumping grounds for waste, muck, and vile matter. Here, then, it was the excrement of food and eating that appeared as a dank prison of despair, and which furnished a dramatic backdrop for the chaotic rush to materialism. Rather than remain constrained to questions of sanitation infrastructure, causation and responsibility became part of larger philosophical debates. The “deteriorating cityscapes were submitted as evidence of serious deficiencies in the prevailing moral and political order” that appeared from Dante’s 1380 Divine Comedy to contemporary English debates over appropriate governmental intervention (Fay 2015: 152). What this illustrates, of course, is that one’s understanding of hell has always depended upon the cultural zeitgeist. In this case, it was moving from the wild state of nature to that of an

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urban environment. Hell was both a tangible, sensorial place, and a state of consciousness (Twining 1998: 129–201; Duncan 1957). During the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, however, hell receded from the minds of Europeans even as, in the American imagination of the same period, it intensified. In the absence of a state religion, competing religious leaders fought for believers, and evangelicals used hell to assert a “moral hegemony” and as a way to “establish peace and virtue in the new republic” (Lum 2014: 4–6). In fact, the connection between hell and wilderness-as-chaos remained in the American Protestant psyche. In 1741, during the Great Awakening, Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards preached the primacy of symbolic consciousness. Wilderness, for the Puritans “was more than a physical locality, more than a Biblical myth. It was the symbol of an unstructured state of mind … And it was used to preach the only path to god” (Williams 1987: 14). So, to be clear, this strain of Calvinism stressed that wilderness was not only in the mind, but it was also part of a mental/spiritual journey through chaos that one must embark upon in order to find God. This is, in part, because hell parallels the very nature of wilderness: boundaries of the physical and cultural body intersect with potential sensory pleasures or threats. And perhaps food assists in a form of grotesque realism, to borrow from Mikhail Bakhtin, to ground abstract concepts of morality into a tangible form of Puritan self-denial in the face of potential danger (2009: 278–302). But if the wilderness as hell as state-of-mind intersection is no longer the understood American cultural reference, where does the collective psyche live in relation to hell? How, across the past two centuries, have Americans understood the role of food as nourishing not our bodies but our souls in terms of constructing the perception of hell? To consider this question, I’ll examine five examples of Americans imagining food and eating in hell to consider shifting values and ideas around a diverse set of topics—morality, politics, economics—through the lens of food and eating.2

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: NATIONAL FARE The first example of an American discussing food in hell comes from an 1832 translation of Francisco de Quevedo’s 1627 book Sueños y discoursos by American Wm. Elliot, Esquire, which he renamed Dreams of Quevedo. In it, the book’s narrator dreams of encounters with the devil and demons over the course of a week, witnessing the Day of Judgment, debating whether demons or constables were eviler than the other, and touring the palace of Hell, accompanied by the demon, Curiosity. Quevedo’s original book, written during a time when cracks were beginning to appear in the Spanish empire, was a cautionary tale of the pitfalls of pride, greed, and power. Elliot’s version, written after both the Napoleonic Wars and the loss of most of Spain’s colonies, is an explanatory novel that serves to reveal why Spain’s downfall happened. In the last chapter, we find Lucifer holding audience with the disgruntled damned in the large hall. By the time he finishes justifying the fate of the damned, he is hungry, and they proceed to feast. At the end of the banquet, “the dessert served up to this great demon, was very pleasant to behold: it consisted of hypocrites, bigots, and apostate monks, all preserved in sugar” (Quevedo [1627] 1832: 182–3).3 But all of this wealth, all of this economic development—which was now preserved within a saccharine prison—had arrived in hell because it had been obtained through ill-gotten gain. How much of the wealth of Spain could likewise be attributed to the conquest of the Americas, through the taking of land and enslavement of people, justified by the

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church, and returned in the form of a perfect, white, sweet sugarloaf? Would the “City upon a Hill” as described by the Puritan leader John Winthrop, a contemporary of Quevedo, protect the colonists from the same fate as the Spanish? Likely so, Winthrop evidently thought, in recounting the potential of the new world’s natural resources, as found in Massachusetts Bay: If we have sufficient to fill the belly and clothe the back, the difference in quality may a little displease us, but it cannot hurt us … God will by this means bring us to repent of our Intemperance here at home, and so cure us of that disease, which sends many of us to hell. (as quoted in Shi 1985: 13) Indeed, the mortal sins of gluttony, greed, and pride were all charges leveled at Spain by Quevedo as, in a word, decadent; or, by Americans in the nineteenth century as both Catholic and monarchical (Lea 1898; Forrest, forthcoming). Elliot’s translation, conversely, came after the fall of the Spanish empire. The explanation for this decline, for Elliot, becomes a cautionary tale that includes themes pertinent for the nineteenth-century reader. This political discourse was situated against the backdrop of republican virtue and sovereignty. This would have been important for an American, for whom the American Revolution was still very much a fresh memory, swirling with arguments by Locke and Smith. Moreover, in Elliot’s translated version, the banquet’s savory courses are also worth considering more closely. In it, Lucifer demands that the cooks and confectioners of hell bring him some food. In the great hall, a table of gold, laden with linens and silver platters (all made from stolen goods) is set. The first course, which our narrator witnesses, was a heap of tailors, who had been spit-roasted.4 The second course, too, was nothing but tailors. Of these, some were roasted upon the gridiron: after that, others, baked in pates, smothered in a pot, fried in a pan, and dressed in a hundred different ways, with this only difference, that those of each nation had a particular dressing. The French tailors were spitted; the English, grilled; the Holland, fried; the Germans, smothered in a pot; the Italians, made into ragout; the Spanish, boiled, because they are ordinarily hard; the Polonese, in pates; the Hungarians, salad; the Turks, cooked in rice; the Greeks, in wine; the Arabians, dried in the sun; the Egyptians, with onion sauce; the Algerines, fried in lard; the Portuguese, preserved in sugar; the Danish, Swedish, and Muscovite; were almost all dressed in the same manner; that is to say, baked in brandy; the Tartar, boiled in horse grease; the Persian, fricasseed with gravy de demon; the Indians, baked in bananas; the Chinese, and all the islanders, were very much seasoned with spices and sugar; the Ethiopians, negroes of Fez, Morocco, and Guinea, were baked in black butter; and the Americans, in milk. (Quevedo [1627] 1832: 178–9) Remarkably, the entire banquet passage where tailors were cooked according to nationalities is completely absent from all earlier editions and translations of the book, only appearing in Elliot’s translation. Thus, the framing of the politics, character, and morality is conceived, understood, explained, embedded in, and reflected from two newly forming constructs of nationalism and gastronomy. In this scene, revelations and judgements are created from the claim, “Show me how you are cooked, and I will tell you who you are.” The flavor and technique might be different, but judgment remains, albeit gastronomically rather than strictly morally (Koerner 2004).

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EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY: A CAPITAL FEAST Almost a century later, we again return to hell, but this time through the mind of Upton Sinclair, known more famously for his 1906 exposé on the Chicago slaughterhouses and the plight of the immigrant laborer. Although in The Jungle he wonders if there was, “above the earth, a heaven for hogs, where they were requited for all this suffering?” (Sinclair [1906] 2006, 38), by 1923, he turns his gaze and pen to the opposite direction. In his play Hell: A Verse Drama and Photo-Play, we find a hell full of capitalists and imperialists, and a bevy of demons plotting to take over earth. Although one 1923 cover blurb boldly promises “A Gargantuan Epic” and banquets are mentioned at a few different points in the work, there is nary a discussion of what exactly is consumed, thus any details of a proper Rabelaisian feast are greatly lacking. There are, notably, some exceptions. First, in the opening scene, Beelzebub (often understood as the demon of gluttony) watches a movie screen from the throne room in Hell, on which he observes a middle-class family enjoying an “abundant dinner” to Belial (the demon of pride), “behold the world’s prosperity!” (Sinclair 1923: 8). While the scene is not technically set in hell, it sets up a much larger discussion whereby Satan and his associates discuss capitalism and industrialization. Furthermore, they recognize that progress has even improved hell to the point that “these golden halls [now come] with ventilation, sanitation, all conveniences of modern home de luxe” (ibid.: 20). This, however, does not mean that all is well in the world, which accounts for hell being populated with such business-minded men. Soon after, one of Satan’s minions appears who has shockingly obtained the key to the gates of heaven, locking in all but three angels and diminishing the power of the Holy Trinity until they cease to exist. This means that the living are left largely unprotected from the compelling sway of the demons who support chaos and widespread misery. The plot to take over the world begins. And, as Beelzebub remarks, “If we succeed, and dividends come in we’ll all move up in the social scale,” to which Belial retorts, “Hell will become a country club select with tea and golf clubs and books on etiquette” (Sinclair 1923: 29). Later, while feasting (on unknown delicacies) and gambling, two demons wager a bet with the winner choosing if in hell they will have “mothers who their infants eat, Or vice versa” with a third option of “infants eating infants (Sinclair 1923: 36). Rather than being an oddly placed debate, or a retreat to a Swiftian satirical critique of political economy in the past, infanticide was a very real issue in the mid-to-late nineteenth century and again in the first decade of the twentieth century. As Batzell and Coffman have argued, it was those lowest in the ranks of a proprietary capitalist system who most commonly committed the crime (2020). Mothers did so in order to earn a living which, by now, had become the dominant way to purchase food (Tilly 1983) as American farming transformed from small, family-run enterprises to large-scale industrialized farming reliant on machinery rather than human labor (Poppendieck 2014: 1). Perhaps as part of the Efficiency Movement, it was simply pragmatic to move from killing a baby in order to make money to purchase food, to simply eating one’s baby. Babies-as-food appear again toward the end of the play. When the demons are watching war unfold on earth, readers see babies impaled on bayonets with the demon Moloch (demon of child sacrifice), who remarks that “babies on bayonets would make a special tidbit for our feasts” (Sinclair 1923: 64). In the dark shadow of the First World War, the innocents were tender in more than one way. In the end, the Bolsheviks lead a revolution, take over hell, and decide to run hell in a more equitable way. Sinclair’s imagined scene becomes a pointed critique of capitalist

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ideology. For Sinclair, individual desires and self-interest have outweighed the mutually beneficial collective, and not for the better. Capitalists and imperialists receive scathing condemnation (through mock admiration) throughout the play. Civility, nay humanity, has been overrun, much like that in Dante’s hellish city, “as a place of conflict, endless grudges, and unholiness” (Timmerman 2012: 73). Yet for Sinclair, it is the modern political economy that has caused such wickedness. The connection between capitalism and cannibalism runs deep. Similar to Sinclair in both time and theme, John A. Chaloner offers a very different perspective of hell. Rather than relying on his imagination, he returns to “memory and remorse.” Chaloner was born into a wealthy, elite family of the New York ton. Orphaned at the age of twelve, he did not become destitute, but was educated in Europe, and at the age of twenty-one inherited both the family estate and money to sustain it. He became particularly interested in experimental psychology and what he called the “X-Faculty” a sense from the brain that allowed automatic writing—meaning, a psychic ability to write without conscious intent. Instead, through his pen, he recorded the words of those beyond this world, a scribbled séance. Chaloner was contacted by a former friend (deceased at the time), Thomas Jefferson Miller, who had been a member of the Confederate army and a member of the well-known Manhattan Club of NYC, a social club (1865–1979) organized at Delmonico’s. The correspondence of Miller, communicating from hell, was captured by Chaloner and published in the 1912 Hell Per a Spirit-Message Therefrom (Alleged) and the Infernal Comedy. It shares similarities with Quevedo in that Satan holds court to judge the damned, but at the same time, it also asserts that individuals do have agency in determining their fate: “For as you rule the powers of your mind; Just so from torture full relief you’ll find” (Chaloner 1924: 135). Indeed Miller/Chaloner attempts to reframe hell, arguing that it has been unjustly maligned and is, in fact, quite hospitable. For example, a ghostly voice visits an imprisoned Miller who sits in his cell, concerned that he is bored. He asks if Miller would like to attend Satan’s dinner and be entertained by delightful sights, songs, and rich foods. Miller accepts and on upon entering: He saw a vast and lofty Banquet-Hall Arranged with tables its vast entire length Richly bedecked as for a festival Loaded with plate and wine of richest strength. No viands on the board did yet appear. (Chaloner 1924: 143) The guests were divided into groups determined by nationality, country, town, and social rank they held in life. A surprised Miller first joined a table of distinguished men— the bishop from his Episcopal church, his priest, and a Roman Catholic cardinal, as well as an acquaintance who had been a judge. Next though, he was elated to find another table with many of his friends from the Manhattan Club, including a stockbroker who explained to Miller: “Beware, my brothers, lest in sin ye fall But now fall to and leave nought but the bones.” A mighty shout as from an armied host Cheered to the echo this hint of their host. Laden with oysters cold and succulent

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An oyster fork them by each platter laid Then at it tooth and nail th’assemblage went. Goblets of gold were by gold flagons filled Silent and swift and not a drop was spilled. “We have nought to eat for one whole week” His Club friend said as he a lemon squeezed— “Hence secret of our zest’s not far to seek E’en with less fairy fare would we be pleased. But once a week we eat—as you now see And each may have his fill sans ought of stint At the same time we ‘watch out’ warily Bearing in mind our stern Preceptor’s hint. Each man may drink as much as he can stand But let him dread beware of drunkenness     I’th’ calaboose [in the prison] for one month that will land The brother who doth show such thoughtlessness. Thus drinking is a test of self-control     Strengthens the will and cheers the striving soul.” (Chaloner 1924: 149; original emphasis) The passage very much reflects the contemporary social clubs of New York, whose purpose was meant to serve as a refuge from the home and the larger world (and in the case of the Manhattan Club, from Republicans). Like other social clubs of the time, members were cultured, and had deep-pockets (the cost to join in 1865, its inaugural year, was $200 [the average wage for a laborer in the city was $1.02 per day in 1860 (Edmunds 1866: 512)]). Members of the Manhattan Club also had a marked affinity for fine food and wine (Watterson 1915: xxiii–16; see Freedman et al., this volume). But such capital—economic, social, and cultural—did not come without responsibilities for these club members; namely, maintaining a paternalistic relationship with the working class and maintaining social order. The industrialists (who were likely members), according to the Journal of Commerce in 1857, “do now exert … a greater amount of influence for good or evil than any other class” (as quoted in Becket 2001: 70). To put it in the words of Henry Watterson, Manhattan Club member and author of its history: “Club-land and club-life might be described as that narrow stretch of territory lying betwixt the devil and deep blue seas, too high for the sea to wash and only within the devil’s reach when his imps become uncommonly enterprising and lively; a safe region for those that walk straight and look wary” (1915: xix). Similar to Sinclair’s critique of American society, whereby it was conceivable that there was a less distinct difference between earth and hell, as one reviewer of Chaloner’s book, published in the Sacramento Bee, noted that the deceased Miller may not have found hell tortuous. This was, as he reasoned, “largely because I had my share of Hell on earth in being a New Yorker of social standing, but no money” (Chaloner 1924: 100).

THE PAST THIRTY YEARS: NEVER ENOUGH OF THE GOOD STUFF The associations between hell, food, and eating abided in American culture in the past thirty years. Since 1989 the American animated television show, The Simpsons, has

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reliably served up scathing critiques of American culture. The 1993 episode, “Treehouse of Horror IV,” consists of three shorts, including “The Devil and Homer Simpson.” In it, we find Homer willingly selling his soul for a mere donut presented by a demon with “Hell’s Kitchen” emblazoned on its apron. Homer gobbles the donut but, in a clever move to outwit the devil, he leaves a single bite unconsumed. This move allows Homer to avoid contractual obligations, for it is only after he eats the entire donut that his soul belongs to the Prince of Darkness. Such legitimate trickery infuriates the devil, who disappears in a cloud of smoke. Later that night, in a drowsy nighttime raid of the family refrigerator, Homer scarfs the remaining bite of the “forbidden donut” despite the cautionary post-it notes that he wrote to deter himself from doing so. The devil quickly reappears, followed by the formation of a flaming pit in the middle of the kitchen floor. The entire Simpson family congregates in the kitchen, only to witness Homer’s descent into hell. He is given a temporary reprieve, stuck in a linoleum purgatory between kitchen and hell due to the girth of his waist blocking his smooth passage. At this point, his daughter, Lisa, protests in a manner that follows the traditional plot of “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” She reminds the devil that the United States Constitution protects due process and the right to a fair trial before judgment can be passed. The devil agrees to a trial but insists that Homer spend a day in hell in the interim. There, Homer is both chopped up to be added to hotdog meat and, in an ironic attempt at punishment, force-fed donuts, to which he makes grunts of pleasure and asks for more, leaving the demon perplexed. The following day, the trial takes place, with various infamous characters from American history serving as the jury. Yet, the case is quickly dismissed when the savvy Marge provides evidence that Homer’s soul had been pledged to her on their wedding day after he had eaten their entire wedding cake before the ceremony could even take place (thus making it her property). The devil leaves with one final remark, “Let that illgotten donut be forever on your head” (“Treehouse of Horror IV” 1993). This reference to Proverbs 10:25 suggests Homer will still face justice upon death. In one final twist, the writers introduce a satirical-cum-literal interpretation of the verse. Homer’s head is turned into an actual donut while a congregation of police officers wait outside his home drinking coffee. The episode is a parody of American Faustian tradition, which includes Washington Irving’s 1824 “The Devil and Tom Walker,” and Stephen Vincent Benét’s 1936 “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” both of which center on making a deal with the devil in exchange for economic prosperity and security. But, for Homer in the late twentieth century, one’s soul is worth trading for a double carb-load of sugar-laden processed starch. Gluttony had replaced avarice. And yet, this is not a complete change of perspective if one considers Alice Julier’s article, “The Political Economy of Obesity: The Fat Pay All.” In it, she revisits Herbert Gans’s thirteen economic, cultural, and political functions of poverty, but she replaces his use of the word “poverty” with “obesity.” She argues that the obesity epidemic has been construed as a social problem, one that induces moral panic by which fat people are exploited in order to strengthen the economy to the benefit of others (2012).6 Indeed, in the United States since the Progressive Era, thinness has not only become the aesthetic ideal but the “moral ideal, a sign of inner strength and self-control” (Veit 2013: 186). Food and one’s relation to it has been understood to extend beyond the self by impacting the nation and its very future. Such an understanding runs parallel to a Calvinist mentality whereby American citizens also reflected self-interest by connecting

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“their own eternal destiny with others’ everlasting fates” (quote, Lum 2014 6. See also Moyer, 2011). Food that was nutritious and economical was seen as both morally and politically “good,” but to succeed in changing the diet of Americans, proponents of this ideology had to downplay, or even renounce, the pleasure of eating (Veit 2013: 4). Therefore, to have Homer Simpson eat a donut rebels against this attitude, while the satirical consequence of his spending the day in hell eating donuts confirms the status quo. Furthermore, donuts “have been transparently moralized as ‘bad’ foods symptomatic of a variety of individual and social evils” (Mullins 2008: 121). We can imagine then, via Homer’s story, that eating donuts results in going to hell, and it is in hell that we absolutely abandon our self-control (by being forced to eat, and perhaps take pleasure in that). At the same time, we also forsake any appearance of a culturally advocated thinness. Conversely, if we choose our food wisely and lose weight, we may be graced with repentance. The final example of American constructs of food and hell that I’ll consider is NBC’s television show, The Good Place. The series opens when the newly deceased main character, Eleanor, ends up in a heavenly paradise where nothing has been left to chance. In fact, urban planners have removed any last vestige of wilderness in their attempt to construct a world in which every aspect of life is accounted to both satisfy all desires and simultaneously remove all desires. Furthermore, in what may be a nod to Mary Douglas, what had been myth-religion-science progression of civilization (or a Newtonian nod to math/science explaining the universe), a mathematical-moral calculation governs those who have just joined the heavenly elect. Among the actions that must be tabulated are the following:7 Poison a river: –4015.55 Stiffing a waitress: –6.83 Eat a sandwich: +1.04 Purify water in a village of less than 250 people: +295.98 Eat vegan: +432.04 Give out full-sized candy bars on Halloween: +633.59 Brought own grocery bags to grocery store: +1980.43 Self-monitored potentially nauseating mouth-sounds while chewing: +1971.20 Never discussed veganism unprompted: +9875.37 (“Everything is Fine” 2016) In this heavenly realm, food abounds and gives the show’s writers seemingly limitless symbolism to convey larger American cultural attitudes. For example, in the first season, food meant frozen yogurt. An unbroken line of froyo establishments occupies one block in the neighborhood where our protagonists reside, including: Yogurt Acres; Let’s All Eat Yogurt; GPBY: Good Place’s Best Yogurt; Yogurt Yoghurt Yogurté; and Yogurt Horizons. Eleanor: “There’s a lot of frozen yogurt places.” Michael (host of “the good place”) “Yeah, it’s the one thing we put in all the neighborhoods. People love frozen yogurt. I don’t know what to tell you.” (“Everything is Fine” 2016) The following episode, set outside the shop, The Suggestion of Yogurt, again focuses on the treat. This time with another character, Tahani: Tahani, while tasting frozen yogurt: “I can’t believe they’ve managed to mix one million flavors together and yet, somehow, I can taste each individual one. It’s remarkable!”

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Michael: “I got no flavor. It’s all I deserve, really” (as penance for having designed a flaw in his created environment). (“Flying” 2016) Yet, just as it had appeared that The Good Place was heaven, one realizes that there is no ice cream. Indeed, we find out that our characters have actually been living in hell. The inhabitants torture each other by embodying the opposite of each character’s moral flaw. For example, our main character, Eleanor, is self-serving and corrupt. Her job on earth was selling medicine and defrauding the sick and elderly. Her soul mate, conversely, is a professor of ethics and moral philosophy who we first encounter reading Kant’s The Metaphysics of Morals. (He gets a stomach ache when he learns the truth about Eleanor’s past.) The entire premise is a clear nod to French existentialist Sartre whose 1944 play, No Exit, is also set in hell. Its most famous line, “Hell is Other People,” argues that we are forced to see ourselves as others see us. The same message is shown through The Good Place and its characters, but in this modern Americanized version (pineappletopped pizza, chili with M&Ms and peeps, a restaurant named “The Cowboy Skyscraper Buffet” where Uncle Sam proclaims, “I Want You … To Stuff Yourself ”), food becomes but another avenue through which the tortures of hell are realized. There is plenty of food, but it never really satisfies (Wong 2017). Ultimately, we realize that twenty-first-century America has transformed every bit of the wilderness of European concern into a “civilized” suburban environment. But, in a cruel twist of fates, it is possible that we now have turned the civilized into the inhospitable, and food that is readily available into food that is unfulfilling.

CONCLUSION The hell of the medieval wilderness, of the early modern crowded city, of early twentiethcentury capitalism is now a suburban alt-paradise, where no nature exists, except for our human nature: hungry and thirsty for self-interest and gratification. I fear Piero Camporesi, in his 1991 book, The Fear of Hell: Images of Damnation and Salvation in Early Modern Europe, might have it right when he wrote that wilderness has disappeared. He argues: now hell is here … It is here in the poisoned wines, the tomatoes fertilized with temik, the meat swollen with carcinogenic hormones, the spring vegetable produce covered with pesticides, the beautiful, worm-free apples which have poisonous juices …; it is in … fish full of mercury, in water contaminated … in the air polluted … The hell of the stomach is no longer a literary metaphor but a day-to-day, tough, chemical reality. (Camporesi 1991: viii) Christian Scientist, Mary Eddy Baker, was perhaps not off the mark when she wrote: I am asked, “Is there hell?” Yes, there is a hell for all those who persist in breaking the golden rule or in disobeying the commandments of God. Physical science has sometimes argued that the internal fires of our earth will eventually consume this planet. Christian Science shows that hidden unpunished sin is this internal fire … Only the makers of hell burn in their fire. (as quoted in McLellan 1914: 55–6) What Baker is arguing, of course, is that we humans are architects of our own hell.8 In the past two hundred years, American writers have imagined hell using references to food, food access, and inequities around food access. Last year (2020, the year of Covid-19),

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the pandemic magnified and exacerbated issues in our food system and food provisioning. At one point in the early spring 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggested (even if tongue-in-cheek) that we prepare for the zombie apocalypse, while others of us baked loaves of sourdough bread (see Reid and Costura, this volume) in order to calm our nerves and feed our cravings. To return to Thisted, who opened this chapter, “Despair is one’s daily bread here; it is in us, it is about us” (1906: 237).

NOTES This is an expanded version of the 2020 paper “Damned Dinner: Eating in the Wilderness of Hell,” Food, Culture & Society, 23 (1): 3–10. Some passages appear in my dissertation “Hungry and Thirsty: The Role of Food and the Senses in Spanish Identity, 1750–1850” (Forrest 2015). My eternal thanks to Deirdre Murphy, Willa Zhen, and Greg de St. Maurice for offering feedback. 1 The allegory of the long spoons imagines that all people in hell are required to eat with exceedingly long spoons. Because they are selfish—and will not cooperate by feeding each other—they starve, unable to feed themselves. 2 There are many more narratives that discuss hell in American writing and media, but most of these do not touch on the subject of food and eating. I have chosen ones where food and eating have a prominent role (or in the case of Sinclair, promise it). 3 Elliot’s version was more inclusive than any other edition: “After the desert [sic], the Jews and Turks brought coffee, tea, chocolate, tobacco, aqua vitae, liquors, and opium” (Quevedo [1627] 1832: 183) but he makes no comment about avenging the atrocities until later in the text. 4 Tailors were important in sixteenth-century Spain, as clothes became a way that those who were gaining economic power gained social power by dressing like aristocrats. The intertwined issue of economics and clothing would again surface during the first phase of the Industrial Revolution, and issues of political economy and national destiny would be realized through “The Boston Associates” and the burgeoning New England textile industry. 5 King James version: “Treasures of wickedness profit nothing: but righteousness delivereth from death.” 6 Within the scene, the demon-torturer references 1970s actor James Coco who weighed an excess of 250 pounds at 5ʹ9ʺ and who lamented that there were no roles for fat actors, illustrating the idealized vision of bodies in contemporary America. 7 Some numbers may be approximate due to numbers fluctuating on screen. 8 In 1996 and 1999, the Church of England and Pope John Paul II, respectively asserted that hell was not a physical place but a state of mind.

REFERENCES Batzell, R., and S. Coffman (2020), “Infanticide and Abandonment in the Industrial Metropolis: Gender, Reproduction and Capitalism in Chicago, 1870–1911,” Gender & History, 32 (3): 581–601. Bakhtin, M. (2009), Rabelais and His World, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Becket, S. (2001), The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie 1850–1896, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Camporesi, P. (1991), The Fear of Hell: Images of Damnation and Salvation in Early Modern Europe, trans. L. Byatt, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

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Chaloner, J. ([1912] 1924), Hell Per a Spirit-Message Therefrom (Alleged) and The Infernal Comedy, New York: Palmetto Press. Duncan, J. (1957), “Milton’s Four-in-One Hell,” Huntington Library Quarterly (February): 127–36. Edmunds, J. (1866), Statistics of the United States, (Including Mortality, Property, in 1860: Comp. From the Original Returns and Being the Final Exhibit of the Eighth Census, Under the Direction of the Secretary of the Interior, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. “Everything is Fine” (2016), The Good Place [TV program] Universal Television/NBC, September 19. Fay, I. (2015) Health and the City: Disease, Environment and Government in Norwich, 1200– 1575, York, UK: York Medieval Press. Forrest B. (2015), “Hungry and Thirsty: The Role of Food and the Senses in Spanish Identity, 1750–1850,” PhD Dissertation, Boston University. Forrest B. (2020), “Damned Dinner: Eating in the Wilderness of Hell” Food, Culture & Society, 23 (1): 3–10. Forrest B. (forthcoming), “’To Change this Sauce would be Little Short of Heresy’: The Geopolitics of ‘Rancid’ Olive Oil in 19th-Century Spain” in A. Donnelly, B. Forrest, and D. Murphy (eds.), Sauces and Condiments in the Western World, Oxford: Oxford University Press. “Flying” (2016), The Good Place, [TV program] Universal Television/NBC, September 19. Hermann, R. (2019), “’The Black People Were Not Good to Eat’: Cannibalism, Cooperation, and Hunger at Sea” in R. Hermann (ed.), To Feast on Us as Their Prey: Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic, 195–214. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. Johnson, C. (ed.) ([1969] 2010), God Stuck Me Dead: Voices of Ex-Slaves, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock. Julier, A. (2012), “The Political Economy of Obesity: The Fat Pay All” in C. Counihan and P. Van Esterik (eds.), Food and Culture: A Reader, 546–62. New York: Routledge. Koerner, J. (2004), “Impossible Objects: Bosch’s Realism,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 46 (Autumn): 73–97. Lea, H. (1898), “The Decadence of Spain,” The Atlantic 82: 36–46. Lum, K. (2014), Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction, New York: Oxford University Press. McLellan, A. (1914). “Editor’s Table,” Christian Science Journal 32 (1): 55–6. Moyer, J. (2011), “‘The Food Police’: Sumptuary Prohibitions on Food in the Reformation,” in K. Albala and T. Eden (eds.), Food and Faith in Christian Culture, 59–82. New York: Columbia University Press. Mullins, P. (2008), Glazed America: A History of the Doughnut, Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Poppenieck, J. ([1986] 2014), Breadlines Knee-Deep in Wheat: Food Assistance in the Great Depression, Berkeley: University of California Press. de Quevedo, F. ([1627] 1832), The Visions of Quevedo, trans. William Elliot, Philadelphia, PA: Henry H. Porter Publishing. Shi, D. (1985), The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture, Athens: University of Georgia Press. Sinclair, U. ([1906] 2006), The Jungle, London: Penguin Classics. Sinclair, U. (1923), Hell: A Verse Drama and Photo-Play, Pasadena, CA: Self-published. Thisted, V. (1906), A Message from a Lost Soul or Letters from Hell, Philadephia, PA: P. W. Ziegler. Timmerman, P. (2012), “My Streets Are My Ideas of Imagination’: Literature and the Theme of the Natural City,” I. Stefanovic and S. Scharper (eds.), The Natural City: Re-envisioning the Built Environment, 65–86. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.

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Tilly, L. (1983), “Food Entitlement, Famine, and Conflict,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 14 (2): 333–49. “Treehouse of Horror IV” (1993), The Simpsons, [TV program] 20th Century Fox, October 28. Twining, J. (1998), London Dispossessed: Literature and Social Space in the Early Modern City, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Veit, H. (2013), Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Twentieth Century, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Watterson, H. (1915), History of the Manhattan Club, NP. Williams, D. (1987), Wilderness Lost: The Religious Origins of the American Mind, Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press. Wong, A. (2017), “How the Good Place Gets its Weird, Magical Food,” GQ, October 25. Available online: https:// www.gq.com/story/good-food-on-the-good-place (accessed May 2, 2019).

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers followed by “n.” indicate endnotes in the text. Abarca, Meredith 82 Abrahams, Roger 180 Abruzzo 83 Achatz, Grant 70 acquisition 81, 321, 325–9 Actor-Network Theory 35n.2 Adamson, Matthew W. 126–8 Addis Ababa 3 aeroir 187 aesthetics behavior and 7 culinary 187, 189 gastronomic 5 tastes and 3, 207 terroir for 190 of the West Bank 230 Africa 6, 168 African Americans 3, 183n.2 Africans 3, 127, 162, 164–5 enslaved 337 Age of Enlightenment 54 Age of Innocence, The (Wharton) 94 agriculture 127, 189–90 conflation of 230 and culinary aesthetics 187 and food 230, 232, 234 modernization 268 urban 328 Ahmed, W. 36n.9 al-Aqsa Mosque 229 Al-Aqsa Supermarket 231 Alighieri, Dante Divine Comedy 337 Allen, John 117 Ambrosius, Joshua D. 322 America/American 94, 100 Arab women 229 conscience 33 cooking 287 culture 3 gastronomy 106

imagination 173–83, 335–46 influence from England 105 Midwestern 173–83 Nordic 288 North 175 RET tradition 188 South 285 taste 95 television comedy 7 American Anthropologist 188 American Jockey Club, Jerome Park 95 American Revolution 339 Anatomy of Disgust, The (Miller) 32 Anderson, Benedict 3, 182n.4 Ann Arbor, Michigan 60 Anthimus 260, 262 De observatione ciborum (On the Observation of Foods) 259 Anthropocene 323, 330n.1–2 anticipation 5, 40, 65, 71–2, 219, 224, 290 Anzac biscuits 239–49 ancestors of 242–3 baking 245–9 Cementa Festival of Contemporary Arts in Kandos, NSW 244–5 history 240–2, 250n.1 imagination 245–9 Kandos Country Women’s Association (CWA) 244–5 outline of 239–40 tasting 244–5 Anzac Day 240 Aotearoa/New Zealand 6, 215, 239, 240–3, 241, 246, 248–9 Apennines 83 Apicus 255–63 apocalypse civilization-ending 322 industrial food 322 in postmillennial cinema 325 zombie 321, 323, 325, 329, 346

350

Appalachia 94 Appellations d’Origine Protégée (AOP) 192–3 apples 173–83 cider 175, 177–80, 183n.2, 184n.12 collective memories 180–1 festivals 180–1 imagined community 182–3 memories 175–80, 182–3 in MidWest 175–80 rituals 180–1 in United States 175 Appleseed, Johnny 181 Arab 236 Arab Americans 230 Aramark 297 Arancino/a 161–70 origin 162–3 outline of 161–2 sense memories and 166–9 Sicilianità 163–6 Archer, E. G. 44 artisanal activities 139 chocolate production 139 foods 330 products 194, 270 recipes 274 small-scale production 142 Artusi, Pellegrino La scienza in Cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene (The Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well) 84, 87 ashura 218–19 Asian Americans 2 Aspergillus oryzae 29 At the Edge of the Orchard (Chevalier) 175 attitude(s) 5, 35n.1 cultural 7, 344 defined 48n.2 food preferences and 41 implicit 44–7 negative 45 stimuli and 40 toward food 35n.1, 39, 43, 45–7 Auberge du Pont de Collonge 136 Augé, Marc 313 Auschwitz 5 death marches from 119–20 food and hunger 110–13 Yom Kippur 118 Australia 239

Index

Australia New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) 240 Australian Imperial Force (AIF) 241 Australian Protection of Word “Anzac” Act 243 Australian War Memorial (AWM) 242–3 Austrian-Hungarian Empire 84 authenticity 3, 141, 163, 203, 210, 221, 230– 2, 243, 249, 263, 269, 272, 326 autobiography 54–6, 63n.1 classic models 57 as a literary genre 54–5 and memoir 54, 63n.1 auto-ethnography 82 Avakian, Arlene 54, 56, 58, 62 Baird, Kingsley Stela 245 Tomb 245 Baker, Mary Eddy 345 Bakhtin, Mikhail 338 baking strange 245–9 Baltimore 102 banal nationalism 3 Barad, Karen 34 Barbara Cleveland Institute 245 “barbarians” 258–60, 262 Barnabas 126–30 Barthes, Roland 310 Bascom, William 137 Basile, Gaetano 163 Basso, Keith 157 Bates, Tarsh 30–1 Unsettling Eros of Contact Zones, The 30 Bath, P. A. 36n.9 Battery, The 328–9 Battle of Karbala 218 Beard Beer 31 Beck, Ulrich 329 Risk Society 323 Beecher, Henry Ward 182 Beggs, Alex 58 Belgium 117 Benét, Stephen Vincent 343 Bennett, Jane 35n.2 Berkeley, George 14 Berler, W. 119 Berlin 4 Beyond Meat 35n.4 bias(es) cognition and 67 gender and 137 implicit 45

Index

memory 69–70 personal 40 social desirability 44 Bildungsroman/Coming-of-age story 56–7 Bildungsroman Project, The 57 Billings, Michael 3 biodynamic 190–1 biscuits. See Anzac biscuits Bitton-Jackson, Livia 117–18 black boxes 318 Blaisdell, A. P. 66 Blood, Bones & Butter (Hamilton) 5, 54, 56–62 Blumenthal, Heston 70 body(ies) composites 25, 34 ecosystems and 323 female 31 hands and 88 idealized vision in America 346n.6 and identities as habitus 299 individual 5 inside 16 losing weight 113 physical 34 positioning 294 and sensory memories 90 Bologna 271 Bolter, J. D. 317 Bordeaux 98 bouchon 146n.9 Bourdain, Anthony Mind of A Chef, The 58, 290 Parts Unknown 290 Brachybacterium alimentarium 197 Brazier, Eugénie 139–40 Brazil 206, 297, 299 Brazil (film) 315–16 bread Ancient Rome 261 baking 30, 87, 293 distribution 111 dry 113 and female bodies 30–1 leftover 273 microbes 32 ration 111–12 rye 27 sauce 100 sourdough 346 stealing of 109 stuffing 100

351

Tuscan 155 use of yeast in 30–1 Brecht, Bertolt 246 Breve fra Helvede (Thisted) 335 Brevibacterium auranticum 197 Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme 72 Physiology of Taste, The 66 Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping 184n.10 Bulgaria 300 Bully Beef & Balderdash: Some Myths of the AIF Examined and Debunked (Wilson) 241 Burgundy 95, 97–8, 102, 104, 188–9 Calvin/Calvinism 338, 343–4 Campanilismo 165 Camporesi, Piero Fear of Hell: Images of Damnation and Salvation in Early Modern Europe 345 Canavan, Gerry 322, 327 Candida albicans 30–2 candy 307–19 candyversity 316–18 demonization 315–16 imagination 313–15 materiality 313–15 as a (socio-technical) mediation 316–18 medicalization 315–16 narratives on 315–16 neorituals 308–13 outline of 307–8 trapped in ambivalence 313–15 Candy Project: Candy, Social Change and Maps of Taste around the World, The 7, 308, 310, 314, 318, 319n.1–2 candyversity 316–18 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer) 94 Cantù, Como 85 Carbone, L. P. 69 Carolan, M. 294 “Carol’s Cookies” 326–7 cavisciole 271 Cementa Festival of Contemporary Arts in Kandos, NSW 244–5 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 48n.1, 346 certificat d’aptitude professionnelle (CAP) 141, 146n.1 Ceylon 4

352

Chaloner, John A. 7, 341–2 Hell Per a Spirit-Message Therefrom (Alleged) and the Infernal Comedy 341–2 Chapman, John 175, 181 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 319n.11 Château Haut-Brion 195 Château Lafite 1865 99–101 Chaucer, Geoffrey Canterbury Tales, The 94 cheese 6 American 189 blue 192 caciotta 274 caves 188, 193 Danish pastries 116 disgusting 35n.1 knafeh 227–8, 233 microbial communities 191 and Nesselrode pudding 101 Parmigiano 270 piacentinu 162 positioning 97 ricotta 162 Roquefort 188–9 salami and 117 sourdough 28 specimens 192 surfaces 193 taste 188, 191–7 terroirs 188–9, 195 chefs 2, 27–8, 66, 68–70, 100 creative project 58, 60 elite 330n.5 French 137 memories 63 mother and 144 Nordic 282–3, 286, 290 nostalgia at mealtimes 70 women 5, 7, 54, 56, 60–2, 136–7, 139, 144–5, 206 Chef ’s Table 290 Chesapeake Bay 94 Chevalier, Tracy At the Edge of the Orchard 175 Chicago 7, 255, 340 Child, Julia 2 childhood 2, 13–14, 56, 58, 60–2, 255–6 artistic maturity 57 autumnal 70 foodways 230 idyllic 176 meals 151–2

Index

memories 57, 70, 117, 181, 276n.1, 299– 300, 307, 318 nostalgia 90, 270 punishment in 298 women 271 China 4, 94, 297 Chop Suey Craze 106 Christians conversion 256 Judeo 336 Mediterranean countries 273 morality 258–9, 336–8, 343–5 Samburu 127 wedding 130 Church of England 346n.8 Chu ¯shu ¯ Tsu ¯shin 210 cider, apples 175, 177–80, 183n.2, 184n.12 cinema, zombie 7, 321–30 citizenship, food waste and recovery 295– 7, 301–2 Cleveland, Barbara One Hour Laugh 245 Clifton, New Jersey 6, 228–35 climate change 323–5 Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India (Jaffrey) 2 clubs American Jockey Club 95 Amsterdam supper 72n.11 country 340 dinner 7 golf 340 Knickerbocker Club 93, 95–6, 101 Manhattan Club 106n.1, 341 Metropolitan Club 93 New York Club 95 private 93 social 342 Terrapin à la Maryland Club 107n.6 Union Club 93, 96, 101, 105 Zodiac Club of New York 5, 93–106 Cobley, Joanna 243 Coco, James 346n.6 collective identity 3, 163–6, 174, 176, 180, 182–3, 239 collective memories 3, 218, 249, 287– 90, 293–5 ethnography of apple 180–1 Combray, France 2 coming-of-age stories 56 commensality 124–5, 132, 151, 153, 157, 158n.4, 162, 168, 229, 233

Index

commercials/advertisements 42, 44, 85, 201, 206–8, 211 Communion 84 complexities in food waste and recovery 300–1 Complutense University of Madrid 316 ConAgra 297 Conigliaro, Tony 70 Connerton, P. 223 consumption 6, 35n.4 alcohol 98 and climate change 324 commercial 209 compulsive 317 domestic 204 food preparation and 90, 205, 217, 235– 6, 282 of foods and food groups 42 of fruit or chocolate bar 46 guidebooks facilitated 141 of iconic Palestinian foods 233 mass 268, 271 preparation of apples for 177 research 41 rich foods 43, 100, 102, 273, 324, 343 sugar 316–17, 319 underreporting of fat 44 contemporary nutritional research 41–4 contradictions in food waste and recovery 300–1 cooking 6–7 American 287 chopsticks 208 at end of empire 258–60 French 151 and grocery gathering 40 holistic act of 230 home 178, 233 Japanese 205 Madeleine 61 mastery 155 method 162, 219 mothers/motherhood 54, 59, 82, 299, 336 nazri 220 nonprofessional 142 Nordic 287 pleasures of 55 professional 57 school 57 self-confidence around 154 sharing of recipes and tips 111 skills 206 together 89–90

353

women 135, 139–41, 143, 146 Corrupting Sea, The (Horden and Purcell) 258 Counihan, Carole 59 Country Women’s Association (CWA) 244–5, 247–9, 250n.5 Covid-19 pandemic 210 cravings 155, 346 Critique of Judgement (Kant) 194 Cronheim, Adam 328 Crotty, Martin 240 cucina economica 87 cuisine Arabic 163 des mères 142 foreign 4 French 87, 105, 135, 143 Italian 84 Japanese 29, 209 lyonnaise 138–9, 141 national 3, 204–7 New Nordic 29, 35n.5, 281–90 Sicilian 162, 169 culinary 94–5 aesthetics 187, 189 (see also aesthetics) history 6, 83, 135, 138–9, 141–2, 145, 178 industry 29 labor 142 memories 86–9, 140–1, 316 nationalism 243 tourism 209, 276 culinary experience in Italian family 81–91 cooking together 89–90 discursive memories 83–6 embodied memories 89–90 knowledge sharing 90–1 making memories 90–1 outline of 81–3 technological memories 86–9 written recipes 83–6 cultural heritage 135, 142, 163, 209, 242–3, 267, 275–6, 286, 290 culture 149, 174, 182, 223–5, 288 American 3, 96–7, 101, 105–6, 175, 178, 187–8, 338–9, 342–6 elite 93–4 Midwestern 175–81 culinary 142 food 27, 175, 206–7, 209, 290 French 140–2 industrial 328 Iranian 218–19 Islamic 218–19

354

Italian 83–4, 150, 156 Japanese 202–3 Jewish 118 literary 56 material 82, 91 Palestinian 229–30, 235 regional 285 Samburu 124–6, 128–32 Sicilian 164–6 and terroir 190 Curthoys, Ann 240 C.W.A. Cookery Book and Household Hints, The 247, 250n.5 Cwiertka, Katarzyna 250n.3 Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction 336 dangers in microbial foods 29–32 Darwish, Mahmoud “Lover from Palestine, A” 230 da Verona, Giacomino 337 Day of Atonement 118 28 Days Later 322 Dead Birds Revisited (Gardner) 131 Dead City (McKinney) 323 defamiliarization 239 deGrasse Tyson, Neil 22n.4 de La Quintinie, Jean-Baptiste 190 Delhi 2 Delica, Kikkoman 209 delicious narrative 28–9 deliciousness 5, 25–7, 29, 35n.1 Delmonico 96 Demartini, G. 36n.9 demonization, candy 315–16 Denmark Noma (restaurant) 29 De observatione ciborum (On the Observation of Foods) (Anthimus) 259 Department of Veterans Affairs (Australia) 243 de Quevedo, Francisco Sueños y discoursos 338–9 De re coquinaria 256 Descartes, René 14 de Serres, Olivier 190 Le Théâtre d’Agriculture 189 De Silva, C. 116 diaspora 224 Arab 230 Iranian 215–18 nazri-pazun 223 Palestine 230

Index

diet 43, 46 balanced 316 change 250n.3 Mediterranean 257, 260, 267, 268–9 prisoners 113 Roman 257, 260, 262 Samburu 124 vegetarian 151 di Lampedusa, Giuseppe Leopard, The 164 Direction de l’animation de la recherché, des etudes et des statistiques (DARES) 137 “Discover Japan” campaign 203 discursive memories 83–6 disgust/disgusting narrative 29–32, 34 Divine Comedy (Alighieri) 337 Dome of the Rock 229 Douglas, Mary 3, 33, 344 Purity and Danger 30 Dreams of Quevedo 338–9 Druckman, Charlotte 145 Dunn, Robert Never Home Alone 197 duration neglect 68–70, 69 Dutton, Rachel 191 East Asia 165 eating in the time of dead 321–30 acquisition 325–9 climate change 323–5 food insecurity 325–9 risk 323–5 zombies 321–5 Edwards, Jonathan 338 Efficiency Movement 340 Egypt 4 Einstein, Albert theory of relativity 4, 8 theory of special relativity 4 Einstein, Elsa 4 Elliot, William 338–9, 346n.3 Ely, Richard 240 embodied memories 89–90 Embry, K. 323 empty calories 315, 318 encoding 40, 43 Enemy Kitchen (Rakowitz) 245 England London 2, 69, 105, 216 Restaurant That Makes Mistakes in Bristol 72n.4 English Rose Garden 70

Index

ensembles 174, 182 environment 7, 27–8 competitive 248 cosmopolitan 94 dangerous 30 disaster 325 food 43–4, 46 material 81 microbial 191 natural 41 sensory 89–90, 151 social 90 urban 337 working 197 environmental memory in New Nordic Cuisine 281–90 memory and taste 283–7 outline of 281–3 pharmacological table 289–90 transnational environmental memory 287–9 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 295–6, 301 Epicurean, The (cookbook) 99–100 Escherichia coli 30 Escoffier, Auguste Le Guide Culinaire 255 Estonia 297 ethics in reverse-engineered terroir 194–6 Ethiopia 3, 297–8 ethnographic memoir 123–32 Barnabas 126–30 outline of 123–6 ethnography 6, 82, 125, 131, 173, 175–6, 183n.2, 203, 245 of apple (see apples) Europe 6, 61, 164, 168, 179, 260, 337, 341 European Commission (EC) 295 European Union (EU) 164, 294 evaluative conditioning 47 everyday militarisms 6, 239–49, 250n.2 exemplary dinners 98–101 explicit memory 40 extreme bodily suffering 335 Fabio, Parasecoli 276 Facebook 210 Facer, Keri 303 fait maison 146n.11 false memory 1, 46 family meals 63, 139, 151–3, 154, 300, 302 farming 127, 129–30, 140, 179, 181, 189–90, 208, 270, 326, 328–9, 340

355

fascism 83–5, 154 Fat Duck, The (restaurant) 70 Fear of Hell: Images of Damnation and Salvation in Early Modern Europe (Camporesi) 345 feeding food waste and recovery over 299–300 food waste and recovery under 299–300 Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst 53–4, 143, 243 fermentation 25–35 changing narratives 34–5 dangers in microbial foods 29–32 delicious narrative 28–9 disgusting narrative 29–32 microbes in taste 28–9 outline of 25–7 selective memories 32–4 self reimagination 32–4 festivals 3, 6, 111, 175, 177, 179–81, 183n.2, 267 ethnography of apple 180–1 fieldwork 6, 125, 128, 135–6, 166, 183n.2, 216 film 202, 230, 322–3, 327–30. See also zombies First World War 94, 103–4, 138–9, 240–2, 248–9, 340. See also Second World War First World War Gallipoli campaign 249 Fischler, Claude 313–14 Fisher, M. F. K. 66 FLASH magazine 203 flavor 2, 16, 22, 22n.1, 267, 270, 274. See also taste aromatic 227 artificial 195 delicious 29 disruptive 311 enhancement 28 enhancer 283 of food 21 and memories 16 mushroomy 192 peppery 308 perception 66–7 right 14 of saltines 17 smoky 178 wrong 14 Fletcher, P. C. 47 Florence, Italy 149–57 family meals in memories 151–3 memory and food-centered life 149–51

356

shame 153–6 food 95–7, 230–6 advocacy 293 anomalous 156 choice 39–47, 293, 317 citizenship 7–8, 293–4, 293–5, 298, 300– 1, 303 critics 67 cultures 30, 288 and hunger 110–13 imagination 115–17 insecurity 294, 299, 325–9 intake surveys 48n.3 local 6, 175, 201, 202–4, 207–11, 241, 269 memory 40, 47, 109–21, 157n.1 national consumption 207–10 non-food 316 poisoning 30 preservation 184n.10 production 28 refusal 151, 246, 249, 328 and religious traditions 117–18 role in identity formation 3 scarcity 269–72 scientists 67 service à la Russe 95, 102 sharing 113–15 unfamiliar 156 writing 54–6 Food, Inc. 322 Food and Agriculture Organization 295 food-based rituals, New Zealand 215–25 ashura 218–19 muharram 218–19 nazri 218–19 nazri-pazun 219–22 nostalgic homely feelings in diasporic contexts 217–18 outline of 215–16 selective remembrance of an idealized home 222–4 food-centered life 149–51 food-frequency questionnaire (FFQ) 42 Food Loss and Food Waste Champions 302 food memoirs 53–63 autobiographical subjects 54–6 food writing 54–6 gastronome 56–8 maternal kitchens 58–62 outline of 53–4 food waste and recovery 293–303

Index

citizenship 295–7, 301–2 complexities 300–1 contradictions 300–1 under feeding 299–300 imagining 295–7 Italians 297–8 memories of (not) eating 297–301 outline of 293–4 over feeding 299–300 (dis)placing waste 295 punishment in the United States 298–9 Food Waste Challenge 297 foodways 3–4, 6–8, 149–50, 164, 168, 173–4, 176–80, 201–3, 206, 208–9, 217, 229– 32, 255–6, 260, 263, 294, 298 foraging 60, 84, 286, 288, 321–30 Forney, John W. 102 France 2, 4, 139, 141, 190 Frankl, Viktor 111, 116 Frauenroman 61 Freeman, S. Mutton and Oysters 105 free sugars 308 French cuisine 87, 105, 135, 143 Gagliano, Lorraine Knop 261 Galsworthy, J. 106n.4 Gans, Herbert 343 Gardner, Jeremy 328 Gardner, Robert Dead Birds Revisited 131 gas chromatography and mass spectroscopy (GC-MS) 195 gastroanomia 313, 318 gastronomic aesthetics 5. See also aesthetics gastronomic literature 140–1 gastronomy/gastronome 55–8, 106, 124, 140, 195, 274, 284, 339 gastrophysics 69 Gaza Strip 229 gender 2, 7–8, 44, 56–7 approach to Holocaust studies 110 association 32 and cooking 54–6, 89, 135–7, 205–6 and creativity 62 expectations 54, 59, 202, 207–8, 296, 336 and female mentors 54 and fishermen 206 food and 129, 206 identity 170n.2 impurities 31 in the kitchen 135–46

Index

male roles 115 narrative 269 normative roles 111, 114–15, 120, 125, 130, 135, 206 patriarchal norms 57 segregation of labor 139 social construction 116 stereotypes 47 women and 116 Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS) 35n.3 General Mills 297 genetically modified yeasts 28 George (United States) 300 Germany 119 Gianfredi, Vincenza 268, 271 Gibbon, Edward 256, 258 Gilded age 7, 96, 99 Gilliam, Terry 316 Gino Pozzoli 85 Giuffre, Patti 142 Glick, Thomas 8 globalization 86, 106, 285, 308 goats 6–7, 124, 126, 132, 196, 271, 273 Goldenberg, Myrna 111 Goldstein-Gidoni, O. 207 Gómez-Benito, Cristobal 301 Gominola de vaca 309–10, 319n.2 Good Place, The 7, 344–5 Goto, A. 210 Gramsci, Antonio 164 Grancher, Marcel E. Lyon, Capitale de la gastronomie 140 grandma’s table to restaurant 272–5 Gran Sasso Mountain 83 Great Britain 96, 102, 105, 294 Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) 296 Great British Bake Off, The (television baking competition) 3 Great Gatsby, The 260 Greenwald, A. G. 45 Gregg, A. P. 46 Griselda Rehe of Juvia restaurant, Miami 100 Grosz, Elizabeth 32 group identity 3, 288 Grusin, R. 317 Guide Michelin 141, 146n.8 Hage, Ghassan 217, 224 Hamburger Helper 300 Hamilton, Gabrielle Blood, Bones & Butter 5, 54, 56–62

357

happening 319n.3 Harari, Yuval Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow 66 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind 65–6 Harris, Deborah A. 142 Hart, Kitty 109 Haut-Brion 195 haute cuisine 144–5 Hawking, Stephen 22n.4 hedonics 66–7 Heldke, Lisa 33 hell (food and eating) 335–46 Christian tradition 336–8 nineteenth century 338–9 outline of 335–6 past thirty years 342–5 twentieth century 340–2 Hell: A Verse Drama and Photo-Play (Sinclair) 340 Hell Per a Spirit-Message Therefrom (Alleged) and the Infernal Comedy (Chaloner) 341 Hepburn, Audrey 59 heritage entrepreneurs 269 Hilton, J. L. 45 Historia Naturalis (Natural History) (Pliny the Elder) 256 Hobsbawm, Eric 225, 242 Invention of Tradition, The 3 Hokkaido 35n.6 Holding onto Palestinian Existence (HOPE) summer program 234 Hollands, G. J. 47 Holocaust 110–11, 115, 120 Holtzman, Jon 150, 157, 173–4, 234, 294 Holy Trinity 340 home building 215, 217–18, 224 Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Harari) 66 Hong Kong 4 Horden, Peregrine Corrupting Sea, The 258 Houben, K. 46 Hudson River 100 Huizinga, Johan 312–13 human memory processes 41 Hume, David 14 hunger 2–3 death due to 109 deprivation and 269 extreme 120 female 56 food and 110–13

358

physiological sensations 40 satiety 40 waste and 295 Huntsville Alabama 337 Hyde , R. J. 68 hygienism 33 I Am Legend 327–8 identity. See reverse-engineered terroir I. G. Farben 112 Il Cucchaio d’Argento (The Silver Spoon) 155 Illinois 175 imagination 1–3, 5 anticipation 71 Anzac biscuits 245–9 candy 313–15 collective memory and 3 food 115–17 food and eating in hell in American 335–46 food memory and food 109–21 food waste and recovery 295–7 interrelationship between memory and 1 objects of memory 173–83 imagined communities 3, 182–3, 182n.4, 183n.4, 216 ethnography of apple 182–3 Imagined Communities (Anderson) 3, 210 immigration and climate change 324–5 communities 233 politics 168 protestors 169 Implicit Association Test (IAT) 45 implicit attitudes 44–7 implicit memory 40 Impossible Burger 28, 35n.4 India 2–3 Indiana 175, 182n.2 In Search of Lost Time (Proust) 125 Institut National de l’Origine et de la Qualité (INAO) 188 Institut Paul Bocuse 144 intersubjectivity 18 Invention of Tradition, The (Hobsbawm and Ranger) 3 in vitro meat (IVM) production 28 Iran/Iranian 6, 215–24, 225n.1 Iran-Iraq war 216 Israel 229 Italianness 3 Italians food waste and recovery 297–8

Index

Italy 6, 8, 61–2, 83–5, 87, 114, 116, 168, 190, 206, 294, 297–300. See also Mediterranean Diet (MD), Apulia, Southern Italy southern 8, 87, 164, 276 Jaffrey, Madhur Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India 2 Jamaica 297 Jam Drops and Marble Cake: 60 Years of CWA Award-Winning Recipes (cookbook) 245, 247, 250n.5 James, King 346n.5 James, William 14, 19, 21, 68 Japan 203, 206–7 Jasper Hill Creamery 188 Jasper Hill Farm 191 Johnny Appleseed Educational Center and Museum 184n.7 Johnny Appleseed Festival in Fort Wayne, Indiana, 181 Johnny Appleseed/John Chapman 175, 180–2 John Paul II (Pope) 346n.8 Jones, Jennifer 244 Jordan 231 Josei Sebun (magazine) 203 Journal of Commerce 342 Julier, Alice 343 Jungle, The (Sinclair) 340 justification 22n.8 Kant, Immanuel 14, 188 Critique of Judgement 194 Metaphysics of Morals, The 345 Kaplan, Caren 250n.2 Kaplan, Stephen K. 59 Karlin, Patty 196 Karpik, Lucien 141 Karpinski, A. 45 Katsu, Ryu ¯zaki 201 Kawazu, Yusuke 207 Keech, D. 210 Kehler, Andy 188 Kehler, Mateo 188 Kellogg 297 Kendallville (Indiana) Apple Festival 181 Kenya Northern 123–32 Kilmister, Michael 240 Kingdom of Italy 84

Index

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 6, 27, 174, 182 Kiss my Kiss 310–11, 318, 319n.4 kitchen conversation 86, 120, 143, 228, 232, 247–8, 293 Kitchen Theory 69 Knickerbocker Club 93, 95–6, 101 knowing 25, 36n.10, 132, 142, 153, 195 knowledge 1 about “traditional” local foods 6 control and 33 databanks 167 multisensory 230 nutrition 46 sharing 90–1 and skills 8, 89, 243, 288 subjective 23n.9 transmission of 5, 81, 86, 90–1, 232, 234, 243, 247 koji 29, 35n.6. See also fermentation Korsmeyer, Carolyn 14, 18, 22n.1 Kuishinbo ¯! Banzai (television food show) 201– 11. See also television local consumption 207–10 local foods 202–4 national consumption 207–10 national cuisine 204–7 outline of 201–2 Künstlerroman 56–7, 60 kyo ¯do ryo ¯ri (local cuisine) 202 kyo ¯do shoku (local food) 202 Lactobacillus delbrueckii 30 la cuisine des mères lyonnaises 135 La Cuisine Lyonnaise (Varille) 140–1 La Lega (The League) (Salvini) 165 La Mère Brazier 141 La Mère Fillioux 140–1 land for commercial wheat production 127 communal 128 and enslavement of people 338 geographical South 168 Palestine 230–1, 234 reimagining 189 repurposing of abandoned agricultural 188, 208 swamp 190 Land of Cockaigne 3 landscape 4, 55, 62–3, 164, 168, 173, 176, 195, 207, 256, 263, 286–7 Lanyasunya 127 Lanzilotti, Francesco 274

359

Lapuente, Víctor 316 La Repubblica 168 La scienza in Cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene (The Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well) (Artusi) 84, 87 Latour, Bruno 35n.2, 318 LaTour , K. A. 69 L’Auberge du Pont de Collonges (Michelinstarred restaurant) 135 Lauro, S. 323 Lea, Tess 250n.2 Leach, Edmund Political Systems of Highland Burma 131 Lebanon 231 legend 6, 99, 135–46, 163, 175, 256 Legend of Johnny Appleseed, The (animated film) 175 leghemoglobin 35n.3 Le Guide Culinaire (Escoffier) 255 Leibling, A. J. 2 Lejeune, Philippe 54 Lele 3 Lengyel, Olga 109 Leopard, The (di Lampedusa) 164 Leroi-Gourhan, A. 310 Les Mères Lyonnaises 135–46 Brazier, Eugénie 139–40 culinary memories 140–1 gastronomic literature 140–1 motherhood 143–4 outline of 135–7 role models 144–5 tradition 141–3 women finding meaning in 137–8 Les Raisins de la Morte 323 Le Théâtre d’Agriculture (de Serres) 189 Levi, Primo 109, 110, 118 Moments of Reprieve 114 Levi-Strauss, Claude 177 Lewis, Helen 149 Libya 258 Liebfraumilch 100 life histories 149–50, 156, 267 Lincoln, Abraham 181 Lindemuth, William H. 335 Lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage 242 “Little Ramallah” 6, 227–36 Living Handbook of Narratology, The (Schwalm) 55 Llibre de Sent Soví (Catalan cookbook) 99 local apple orchards 181

360

churches 127 commercial orchard 176 consumption of food 207–10 corporations 297 cuisine 135 culinary traditions 142 dialect 84 eatery 27 economy 275 farmers 29 farming community 140, 181 festivals 267 foods 6, 175, 201, 202–4, 207–11, 241, 269 history museums 180 identity 188, 269 ingredients 35n.5 knowledge 286 in Kuishinbo ¯! Banzai 201–11 piacentinu cheese 162 politics 128 and regional food systems 325 resources 295 settlements 129 Locanda Nonna Mena (the Inn of Grandmother Mena) restaurant 274–5 Loftus, E. F. 44 Lollipop (MIKA) 312 London 2, 69, 105, 216 Longoboini, Gabriel 126 Loren, Sophia 59 Loridan-Ivens, Marceline 116–17 Louis XIV 190 “Lover from Palestine, A” (Darwish) 230 Lozano-Cabedo, Carmen 301 Lukins, Sheila Silver Palate Cookbook 94 Lum, K. 336 Lupton, Deborah 182n.3 luxury 13, 57, 60, 113, 117, 205–6, 241, 258, 269–70 Lyon, Capitale de la gastronomie (Grancher) 140 Lyon, France 6, 8, 135–6, 138–42, 144–6 Madeira 98, 101 Magna Grecia 165 Maier, John 31–2 making meals memorable 67–71 making memories 90–1 Manat ¯u Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage 243 Mandrigin, Alisa 14, 17–18

Index

Manhattan Club 341–2 manual skills 81–2, 89, 91 Marseilles, France 4 Marteau, T. M. 47 Martínez, Virgilio 288–90 Marx, Karl 149 Maryland 102 Massachusetts Bay 339 MASS ACTION: 137 Cakes in 90 Hours 245 Masseria Il Frantoio (hotel) 269–70 MasterChef Australia 248 materiality 313–15 maternal kitchens 58–62 Matrix (film) 315, 319n.12 Matsuoka, Shuz ¯o 206–8, 210 Mauss, Marcel 87 McBride, Melissa 326 McCoy, Leah 144 McKenna, Mark 240 McKinney, Joe Dead City 323 McReynolds, Philip 323 meal(s) 260–1 Apician 259 communal 268 enjoyment of 65–72 everyday 59 family 63, 139, 300 in Florence, Italy 149–57 freezer 44 holiday 175 imaginary 117 manipulating memory of 71 memorable 5 memories of 70–1 nazri 225n.1 preparing and sharing 85, 299 the restaurateur 68–70 satisfying 40 Zodiac 96, 98 Meal Experience, The 308–9 (socio-technical) mediation 316–18 medicalization 319n.13 candy 315–16 medieval Christian imagination 336 cookbooks 99 culinary history 178 sweet and savory 262 wilderness 345 Mediterranean 6, 164, 257–8

Index

Mediterranean Diet (MD), Apulia, Southern Italy 7–8, 267–76 critical perspectives on 268–9 food scarcity 269–72 grandma’s table to restaurant 272–5 outline of 267–8 simplicity 269–72 Mediterranean Lifestyle 269 Mediterranean Sea 258 Meehan, Peter 94 Meilleur Ouvriers de France (MOF) 137 memorabilia 314 memories 1–2, 5, 39–47, 230–6 attitudes and preferences 44–7 collective 3, 5, 26, 175, 180–1, 239, 247, 249, 287, 289, 295, 302 contemporary nutritional research 41–4 defined 40 distortions 68 embodied 5, 26, 82, 89–90, 294 environmental 283–7, 290 ethnography of apple 175–80, 182–3 explicit 40 family meals in 151–3 food 115–17 and food-centered life 149–51 general 156 implicit 40 objects of 6, 173–83 operations of 14 outline of 39 post 234 prospective 217, 223, 225 as psychological processes 40–1 research 70 selective 32–4 sense 166–9 of sights and sounds 16 specific 149–50, 153, 155–7, 229 technological 86–9 visual 16 women 5–7, 43, 54, 57, 111, 115, 120, 137, 229–30, 235 working of 14 memories of (not) eating food waste and recovery 297–301 memory-based dietary assessment 41–4, 47 memory of the meal 65–72 in flavor perception 66–7 in hedonics 66–7 making meals memorable 67–71 outline of 65–6

361

Menilek (king) 3 mental wellness 25 merroir 187 Mesplède, Jean-François 141 Message from a Lost Soul, or Letters from Hell, A 335 Messina, Gelato 243 Metaphysics of Morals, The (Kant) 345 Metropolitan Club 93 Michigan 175, 182n.2 microbes 25–6, 28–32, 34, 191–4, 196–7 Middle Ages 94 Middle East 162, 165, 168 Midnight in Sicily (Robb) 164 Midwest ethnography of apple in 175–80 migration 215–17, 230–6 Miller, Thomas Jefferson 341 Miller, William Ian Anatomy of Disgust, The 32 Millu, Liana 109–10, 113–14, 116, 118 Mind of A Chef, The 58, 290 Ministère de l’education 137 Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) 208 “mini TV show” (mini bangumi) 201 Minnesota 175 Mintz, Sidney 205, 240 Mirazur, French Riviera 93 Mol, Annemarie 27 Moments of Reprieve (Levi) 114 Montecatini spa village 85 moral/morality codes 299, 336 ethics and 345 hegemony 338 judgments 32, 34 panic 343 responses 29 Samburu 132 shared 217 superiority 26 transgression 32 Morgan, J. Pierpont, Jr. 103–4, 106 Morgan, J. Pierpont, Sr. 104 Morris, Lawrence 106n.1 mother-daughter relationships/bond 56, 58, 62 motherhood 143–4 Mugaritz Restaurant 7, 308–10, 318, 319n.1 Muharram 218–19 Murano, Takenori 202, 204 Muselmänner 112

362

Mussolini, Benito 3 Mustafa, Rania 231 Mutton and Oysters (Freeman) 105 Muxua da Mezua 312, 314, 318, 319n.4 Nairobi 126 Nakamura, Takaaki 201 Napoleonic Wars 338 narratives on candy 315–16 changing of 34–5 delicious 28–9 disgusting 29–32, 34 gender 269 national 7 zombies 325–9 national belonging 240, 248–9 chauvinisms 288 consumption 207–10 cookbooks 3 cuisines 3, 202, 204–7, 234 culinary history 6 culinary tradition 87 diasporas 6 discourse 299 food systems 295 foodways 201–2 governments 243 holiday 3 homeland 232 identity 229, 240–1 imagination 297 narratives 7 perceptions 201 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 42 nationalism 2–3, 209, 243–9, 339 natural wine 190–1 Nayef Sweets 233 Nazis 110, 119 nazri 218–19 nazri-pazun 219–22 Ndorobo 129 Neimanis, Astrida 250n.2 neorituals 308–13. See also rituals neuroscience 14, 47 Never Home Alone (Dunn) 197 Newbury, M. 322 New England Society, New York 96 New Jersey 234 Arab Americans in 232, 235

Index

Arab diaspora in 230 Arabs living in 231 Clifton/Paterson 228–36 community-building 232 cooking preservation 230 Palestinian Americans in 235 Palestinians in 235 Newland Archers 94 New Nordic Cuisine 29, 35n.5, 281–90 New Orleans 2 Newton, Isaac 4 New York 2, 8, 342 Union Club Archive 107n.9 Zodiac Club 5 New York City 57, 60 New York Sun 95–6, 98, 102 New York Times 58, 63, 69, 165 New Zealand 206 Aotearoa/New Zealand 6, 215, 239, 240–3, 246, 248–9 Next (restaurant) 7, 255–63 cooking at the end of empire 258–60 meal 260–1 Roman meal 256–8 tasting history 262–3 Nielsen, Palle 313 Night Eats the World, The 327 Niigata Prefecture 205 Nilsson, Magnus 290 No Exit (Sartre) 345 Noma (restaurant) in Denmark 29, 93 Nordic. See also New Nordic Cuisine chefs 283 climates 281 countries 283, 287 food products 282 Nordic Food Lab 25–6, 35n.7 North Africa 259 North America 175 North Carolina 97, 173 Northwest Territory 175 nostalgia 5–6, 13, 18, 54, 70, 86, 90, 106, 131, 189, 215, 217–18, 222–3, 225, 231, 233–4, 236, 270, 272, 290 Noyes, Dory 180 Nucci, Daniele 268 Nutcracker, The 319n.11 objects of memory 6, 173–83 O’Connor, Peg 22–3n.8 Ofengenden, Tzofit 1

363

Index

Ohio 175, 182n.2 Okayama Prefecture 205 Okinawa Prefecture 209 olfaction 18. See also smell Oliver, Jamie 316–17 One Hour Laugh (Cleveland) 245 On the Matter of Cooking 256 oral history 136, 138 orchards 173, 175–6, 178–82, 183n.2, 184n.9 Osteria Francescana, Modena 93 Osterie d’Italia 274 Ottolenghi, Yotam 317 Palestine/Jerusalem 4, 227–36 Palestinian American Community Center (PACC), Clifton, New Jersey 229 Parasecoli, Fabio 211 Paris 131, 139, 190 Parts Unknown (Bourdain) 290 pasta 86, 140, 156, 162–3, 167, 232, 268, 270–4 Pasteur, Louis 33 Paterson, New Jersey 229–36 Paul, Monsieur 135 Paxson, Heather 142, 188 Penicillium camberti 192 Penicillium roqueforti 192 Pennsylvania 178 PepsiCo 297 performativity 27, 184n.21 Perl, Gisella 112 Peru 282, 288 Petronilla 85 pharmacological table 7, 281–90 pharmakon 315 phenomenology 7, 256, 263 Phenomenology of Landscape, A (Tilley) 263 Philadelphia 102 Philips, Deborah 248 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein) 17 Photenhauer, Paul “Fotie” 32 Physiology of Taste, The (Brillat-Savarin) 66 Pichia pastoris 28 Piedmont 87 Pizza di Pasqua 83 place 2, 6, 34, 120, 131, 142, 162–6, 169–70, 173, 176, 183, 187–8, 191–3, 216–17, 231, 234, 240, 249, 255, 270, 276, 282–6, 288–9, 294, 300, 309, 313, 315 -based cuisine 27 branding 207 and dishes 141

displacement 62, 229, 235, 298, 324 out of 30, 32 and recipes 243 sense of 187, 204 and taste 326 (see also terroir) (dis)placing waste food 295 Plato 256 Platonism 256 Platts, Todd 321 Pliny the Elder 262 Historia Naturalis (Natural History) 256 Plouvier, Liliane 260 Poland 110 Political Systems of Highland Burma (Leach) 131 polytemporality 22n.6 Portland, Oregon Rogue Beer (microbrewery) 31 positive hedonic response 315 Postee, Vanessa 145 pragmatism 19 preferences 44–7 Prepper Movement 323 prisoners 109–13, 116–21 prospective memories 225 prospective memory 217, 223, 225 Protestant Christian 175 Protestant Christianity 127 Proust, Marcel 66, 126, 132 Remembrance of Things Past 2 In Search of Lost Time 125 Swann’s Way 8, 131 Proust Effect 70 Prune (restaurant) 57–8 Prune: The Cookbook 58 psychological processes 40–1 psychological science 15 punishment for food waste 298–9 Purcell, Nicholas Corrupting Sea, The 258 Purity and Danger (Douglas) 30 quasi-religious status 240 Queen of Arancino 165 Queen Taytu of Ethiopia 3 racialization 170n.3 Rakowitz, Michael Enemy Kitchen 245 Ranger, Terrence Invention of Tradition, The 3 Ranhofer, Charles 100

364

Ray, Krishnendu 56 recency effect 68, 70 recipes Anzac biscuit 240–3, 250n.1, 250n.5 cookbooks 58, 99, 100, 184n.10, 243, 247, 250n.5, 257–8, 262 CWA 247 family 27, 91, 155, 167, 178, 184n.21, 244 handwritten 81–6, 90–1 obsession 117 Leftovers 32, 273, 296 Palestinian foods 234 sharing of 111, 167, 227, 286, 288–9 transmission of 55, 62, 83, 86, 87–91, 115, 179, 287–90 for women 62, 230 Records of the Zodiac (Records of the Zodiac Club) 93, 95, 97–8, 102, 107n.6 Redzepi, René 290 Reed, M. 210 referential/reference 15–17, 18, 88, 107n.8, 124, 142, 180, 249, 260, 336–8, 343 Réforme des régimes matrimonaux de 1804 146n.4 relational economies 302–3 religious traditions and food 117–18 Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory (Sutton) 3, 72n.2, 216 Remembrance of Things Past (Proust) 2 Restaurant Story, London 69 Restaurant That Makes Mistakes in Bristol 72 restaurateurs 68–70 retroactive interference 15 reverse-engineered terroir (RET) 187–97 context of 188–9 microbial terroir 191–4 outline of 187–8 taste and ethics 194–6 TT models 189–91 Reynolds, Allison 240, 243, 245, 250n.1 Rezzica 272 Riley, Gillian 269 Risk Society (Beck) 323 rituals 174, 215–25, 312–13, 315–17, 319. See also neorituals and cows 124–5 food and 3, 163, 217–18, 307–8 food as 241, 275, 300 Hanukkah 118 mnemonic power 217

Index

Muharram, Ashura, and Nazri 218–23 related to apples 176, 180–1 Sabbath 115–18 Samburu 124–5 Robb, Peter Midnight in Sicily 164 Rogue Ale 31 Rogue Beer (microbrewery), Portland, Oregon 31 role models 144–5 Roman Empire 3, 94, 255–9 Roman meal 256–8 Roman Mediterranean 257 Rome 83, 85, 257, 297 Romero, George 322 Roosth, Sophia 195 Rose, The (restaurant) 70 rosticceria 168 Rutherford, Dianne 242–3, 245 Sabbath 115 Saccharomyces cerevisiae 30 Sacramento Bee 342 Said, E. 4–5 Saitama Prefecture 209 saltines/butter 13–22 Salvini, Matteo La Lega (The League) (Salvini) 165 Samburu 3, 123–32 Samuelsson, Marcus 2 Santa Lucia’s Day 161, 163 San Vito dei Normanni, in Apulia, Italy 7–8, 263, 267 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harari) 65–6 Sartor, F. 45 Sartre, Jean-Paul No Exit 345 Satyricon 258 Savannah River 97 Scandinavia 29 Scheff, Thomas 149, 151–3, 157 Schwalm, Helga 58 Living Handbook of Narratology, The 55 Sciascia, Leonardo 164 Science and Technology Studies 35n.2 Scott, Joan Wallach 55 Scruton, Roger 106 Second World War 83, 151–2, 155–6, 203, 205, 296, 301. See also First World War Seitz, B. M. 66

365

Index

selective memories 32–4 selective remembrance of an idealized home 222–4 self reimagination 32–4 self-report 41–6, 48n.4 sensation. See also taste operations of 14 working of 14 senses 14–16, 18, 21, 22n.1, 25, 53, 61, 89–90, 150, 164, 166–9, 174, 187, 195, 232, 234, 236, 249, 290, 294 Seremetakis, Nadia 150, 158n.4 shame 6, 153–6, 301 Shanghai 4 sharing food 113–15 Shenandoah Valley 173 Shishido, Joe 206 Shklovsky, Viktor 239, 245–6 Shotwell, Alexis 33 Shu ¯kan Taishu ¯ 210 Sicilianità 163–6 Sicily 161–70, 170n.2 Silver Palate Cookbook (Lukins) 94 simplicity, Mediterranean Diet 269–72 Simpsons, The 342–3 Sinclair, Upton 341 Hell: A Verse Drama and Photo-Play 340 Jungle, The 340 Singapore 4, 207 Singer, Peter 35n.4 Slocombe, Bianca 240 Slow Food International 7 Slow Food organization 274 smell 23n.10, 53, 59, 66. See also taste of apple blossoms 176 banana 192 of burned food 90 comforting 116 emotion and 117 fantasy stories 246 flavors and 192, 230 odor 153 reverse engineering 195 sweetshop 70 and taste 15–22, 25, 66, 219 Smith, Andrew 3 Smith, Diana Baker 245 Smith, Sidonie 53 Smith, Will 327 social collapse 7, 325, 327, 329, 330n.3 social connection 149, 155–6 socially grounded memory. see candy

social media 31–2, 36n.9, 65, 202, 210, 211n.10, 330 Sodexo 297 Sontag, Susan 322 Sound of the Sea seafood dish 70 soup 94–5, 102, 104, 113 beef 309, 319n.2 delicious 119 disgusting 204 distribution 110, 112 oysters and 96, 100 pea 105 squid ink 204 turtle 105 weird 114 Southeast Asia 165 Southern Italy 274, 276 Southern Question 164, 168 South Korea 2 Spain 4, 8, 297 Spencer, Paul 124 Sprouts Farmers Market 297 spumantini 89–90 SS Kitano Maru (ship) 4 Staphylococcus aureus 30 Staphylococcus equorum 197 starvation 109–10, 112, 117, 120 Stavri, Zoe 31–2 Steinbacher, Sybille 109 Steiner, Rudolf 190 Stela (Baird) 245 Stephens, Neil 28 sticktion 66, 69, 72n.5 Stiegler, Bernard 282, 289 Stoeger, Melissa Brackney 63n.1 storytelling 69 Strasser, Susan 294 Sueños y discoursos (de Quevedo) 338 Sunee, Kim Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love and the Search for Home 2 Super Size Me 322 Supski, Sian 240, 242–3 survival freezing conditions 119 guiding goal-directed behavior for 40 individuals 117 mechanisms 110, 120 memory role in 40 possibility 117 postapocalyptic 322 strategy 111, 116, 121

366

urban agriculture 328 zombie 326 Sutton, David 22n.6, 66, 71, 90, 150–1, 174, 217 Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory 3, 72n.2, 216 Swann’s Way (Proust) 8, 131 sweet disturbances. see candy sweetness 100, 205, 262, 307–8 Sweetshop, The (restaurant) 70 symbolic ethnicity 233 synesthesia 90, 174 Syria 227, 231 tailors 339, 346n.4 Takaya, K. 210 Talismano della Felicità 85 Taralli 88 taste 15–22. See also reverse-engineered terroir; smell bogus taste test 42 changing 256 elite 105 environmental memory 283–7 evaluation 35n.1 foods “enact” 27 globalization 106 and imagination 282 innovation 28–9, 34, 35n.35 intergenerational 288 neorituals 308–13 for nonlocals 209 preferences 67, 98 prioritization of 29 reimagining 187–97 reverse-engineered terroir 194–6 salt and umami 262 sense 25, 55 traditional 203 umami 29 unpleasant 150 wrong 13–14, 18, 22n.2 tasting Anzac biscuits 244–5 apparatus 20 history 262–3 Tawara, Saif 233 technological memories 86–9 Tedeschi, Giuliana 117 television Japanese 20, 201–11 shows 7, 201–11, 247–8, 324–7, 342–5

Index

Temperance Movement 175 Terrapin 96, 102 terroir 103, 164, 187–97. See also reverseengineered terroir (RET) defined 187 micro 35n.5 Terry, Jennifer 250n.2 Thisted, V. A. Breve fra Helvede 335 Tilley, Christopher Phenomenology of Landscape, A 263 Tokyo 209 Toltonné 87–8 Tomb (Baird) 245 Tomiyama, A. J. 66 tools 28, 81–2, 86–7, 89–90, 189, 192, 194, 210, 271–2, 289 Topham, Anne 196 Topham Creamery, Wisconsin 196 Torrey, R. A. 335–6 Tossicia 83 total energy expenditure (TEE) 42 tradition 141–3 Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love and the Search for Home (Sunee) 2 transnational 6, 216–18, 224, 287–9 transnational environmental memory 287–9 Trentino 84 trigeminal nasal irritants 72n.6 Trimalchio 258, 260 Turner, Victor 131 Twitter 31–2, 36n.9, 210 umami (fifth taste) 25, 29 Umemiya, Tatsuo 205 UNESCO 242, 243, 250n.4, 268 Unilever 297 Union Club 93, 105–6 United States 3, 6–8, 96, 102, 106, 255, 294, 297, 300–1, 343 Department of Agriculture (USDA) 295–7 Food and Drug Administration 35n.3 Food Loss and Waste 2030 Champions 302 punishment for food waste in 298–9 Unsettling Eros of Contact Zones, The (Bates) 30 urban agriculture 328. See also agriculture Valenzano, J., III 322 Varille, Mathieu La Cuisine Lyonnaise 140–1 Verga, Giovanni 164

367

Index

Vermont 188, 328 Versailles, potager du roi 190 Veteran’s Day 240 Vinidarius 259, 262 visual memories 15–16. See also memory vitello tonnato 87 Walking Dead, The 321, 326–7 Walmart 297 War Civil 95 First World War 94, 103–4, 138–9, 240–2, 248–9, 340 Franco-Prussian 103 interwar period 138 Iran-Iraq War 216 Napoleonic 338 nuclear 324 Second World War 83, 151–2, 155–6, 203, 205, 296, 301 Six-Day War 231 War Chest Cookery Book 243 wartime 111, 117, 240–2, 248–9, 250n.3, 300–1 Washington 102 Washington Post 94 Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) 296 Watanabe, Fumio 203, 207 Watson, Julia 53 Watterson, Henry 342 Waxman, Barbara Frey 56 Wehner, Kirsten 242 Weinberg, Felix 113, 117 Weissburg, Liliane 180 Werbner, Richard 131 Wermuth, Henry 109–11, 120 West Bank 228–9, 233 Western Europe 301 Westernization 203 Western Massachusetts 297 Wharton, Edith 95 Age of Innocence, The 94 Wiesel, Elie 111, 113 Wilson, Graham Bully Beef & Balderdash: Some Myths of the AIF Examined and Debunked 241 wines 97–8 Burgundy 95, 97–8, 102, 104, 188–9 Champagne 27, 60, 95, 98–100, 100n.4, 102–4

food and 5, 94, 195, 270, 342 Frech 98, 195 honey 3 red 98 reverse engineering 195 sparkling 98 sweet 100 taste 93 white 88, 95, 98 Zodiac Club preferences for older wines 98, 100, 102, 106n.1 Winterfeld, Hans 119 Winthrop, John 339 Wisconsin 175, 182n.2 Witherly, S. A. 68 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 14, 21, 22–3n.8–9 Philosophical Investigations 17 Wolfe, Ben 191, 195, 196 women chefs 5, 7, 54, 56, 60–2, 134–45, 206 (see also chefs) cooking 205–6, 240 memoirs and life stories 56–8, 267, 271–6 and politics 31–2, 228–9, 244 Women’s Brunch 229, 235 World Zionist Organization 230 Wright, Geoffrey 322 written recipes 83–6 Yamanashi Prefecture 205 Yamashita, Shinji 205 Yom Kippur, Auschwitz 118 Yong, Ed 33 You and I Eat the Same: On the Countless Ways Food and Cooking Connect Us to One Another 290 Youssef, Jozef 69 YouTube 210 Zodiac Club, New York 5, 93–106, 106n.1 144th meeting held on December 30, 1893 101–3 culinary 94–5 exemplary dinners 98–101 food 95–7 outline of 93–4 wines 97–8 zombies 323–5 apocalypse 321, 323, 325, 329, 346 cinema 7, 321–30 narrative 325–9

368

368