Food, Social Change and Identity (Consumption and Public Life) 303084370X, 9783030843700

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CONSUMPTION AND PUBLIC LIFE

Food, Social Change and Identity Edited by Cynthia Chou · Susanne Kerner

Consumption and Public Life Series Editors Frank Trentmann Birkbeck, University of London London, UK Richard Wilk Indiana University Bloomington, IN, USA

The series will be a channel and focus for some of the most interesting recent work on consumption, establishing innovative approaches and a new research agenda. New approaches and public debates around consumption in modern societies will be pursued within media, politics, ethics, sociology, economics, management and cultural studies. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14914

Cynthia Chou  •  Susanne Kerner Editors

Food, Social Change and Identity

Editors Cynthia Chou Department of Anthropology University of Iowa Iowa City, IA, USA

Susanne Kerner Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies University of Copenhagen Copenhagen, Denmark

Consumption and Public Life ISBN 978-3-030-84370-0    ISBN 978-3-030-84371-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84371-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Hugh Barnes and James Liang for having stood by us always

Praise for Food, Social Change and Identity “This book is ideal for courses that link food studies with contemporary issues of social identity. The essays are original and engaging; students will find much here that relates to their own personal histories and social backgrounds. It builds on earlier research and points to the future of this field.” —James L. Watson, John King and Wilma Cannon Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society and Professor of Anthropology (Emeritus), Harvard University

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Cynthia Chou and Susanne Kerner 2 Ingesting the Contemporary: Food and Angst 17 Mandy Thomas 3 Fish, Identity, and Social Change 37 Richard Wilk 4 The Social Life of Food 57 Tamara L. Bray 5 Prejudice, Assimilation and Profit: The Peculiar History of Italian Cookery in the United States 73 Anthony F. Buccini 6 Narratives on an Independent Cuisine: Catalan Food as Identity in the Contemporary Independence Movement 91 Venetia Johannes 7 The Danish Meal Partnership: A Shortcut to a Healthier Diet121 Claus Egeris Nielsen

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8 Food and Identity in the Fifth mill. BCE139 Susanne Kerner 9 In Search of Authenticity: The Banana Pancake Trail and Roti John163 Cynthia Chou and Martin Platt Index181

Notes on Contributors

Tamara L. Bray  is Professor of Anthropology at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. She received her PhD from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1991 and joined the faculty at Wayne State University in 1995. In 2010, she was promoted to the rank of Full Professor and was named Michigan Distinguished Professor of the Year in 2013. She is recognized nationally and internationally for her contributions to the study of Inca imperialism and the archaeology of food. She is the author of several books and edited volumes, including The Archaeology of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires (2003), and The Archaeology of Wak’as: Explorations of the Sacred in the Pre-Columbian Andes (2015), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. Anthony  F.  Buccini  is an independent scholar who formerly taught at the University of Chicago in the Departments of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Linguistics. He received his BA from Columbia University in New York and his PhD in Germanic Linguistics from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. In linguistics, his main areas of research are historical linguistics, dialectology and language contact and the Germanic, Romance and Celtic languages. In food studies, his research focuses on the culinary history of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic World; he is a two-time winner of the Sophie Coe Prize in Food History. Cynthia Chou  is Professor of Anthropology, C. Maxwell and Elizabeth M. Stanley Family Chair of Asian Studies, and Director of the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Iowa. She received her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, UK, in 1994 and xi

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was awarded in 2011 the highest Danish academic degree of Dr. Phil. by the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, in recognition of her work on the sea nomads in Indonesia. Her areas of research interest include food studies, sea nomadism and breast cancer among Asian women. Her publications on food studies include co-editing the book, Commensality: From Everyday Food to Feast (2015). Claus Egeris Nielsen  is Head of the Secretariat of the Danish Healthy Food Council in Copenhagen, Denmark. He received his MSc degree from Roskilde University in 1995. His areas of work are consumer and market communication, eco-labeling, co-creation and partnerships. As Head of Secretariat of the Danish Meal Partnership (2013–2018) and later as Head of Secretariat of the Danish Healthy Food Council (2019–), Nielsen has worked for healthy food in Denmark through collective impact. The goal is for everyone to eat healthier regardless of age, gender, ethnicity or level of education. The Danish Healthy Food Council works to change the situation in today’s Denmark, where too many eat unhealthily, to a future where every generation eats healthier than the previous one. The Danish Healthy Food Council is a cross-sectoral public-private partnership that mobilizes a national effort for healthy food. Venetia  Johannes  completed a DPhil degree in Anthropology at the University of Oxford in 2015, where she also completed an MSc in Social Anthropology in 2011. The subject of her doctoral research was how Catalans use food to express their national identity. As a postdoctoral research affiliate with the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford (2016–2020), she published this research as an ethnographic monograph, Nourishing the Nation: Food as National Identity in Catalonia (2019). She has also co-edited The Emergence of National Food: The Dynamics of Food and Nationalism (2019). Previously, she studied BSc (Hons) in business management at the Royal Agricultural University (2007–2010) and has worked in finance and marketing research. She is an independent researcher and manages a small investment vehicle. Susanne  Kerner is Associate Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, since 2004. She was director of the German Protestant Institute for Archaeology of the Holy Land in Amman from 1990 to 1996 and received her PhD in Near Eastern Archaeology at the

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Free University of Berlin, Germany, in 1998. Her areas of research interest include food and gender studies, theoretical archaeology, ritual and pottery. She is directing an excavation and survey project “The Ritual Landscapes of Muaryghat” in Jordan. Her publications on food studies include co-editing the book Commensality: From Everyday Food to Feast (2015). Martin  Platt  is an independent researcher, translator, and consultant based in the United States. He received his PhD in 2002 from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London. Thereafter he was Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen, where he taught languages, literature, history and other subjects for twelve years. His book Isan Writers, Thai Literature: Writing and Regionalism in Modern Thailand was published in 2013. Mandy  Thomas  is a recently retired Dean of the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Australia. She received her PhD from the Australian National University, where she became Professor of Anthropology. Her research was focused on the migration experience, and her interest in food stemmed from her research into the relationship between Vietnamese people in their homeland and those who have migrated. She has published on the anthropology of senses and has also written about culture, landscape and space within the lived experience of migration. Richard  Wilk is Distinguished Professor and Provost’s Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Indiana University, where he co-founded the Indiana University Food Institute and a PhD program in Food Anthropology. He has also taught at the University of California (Berkeley and Santa Cruz), New Mexico State University, the National University of Singapore and University College London, and has held visiting positions at Gothenburg University, the EHESS in Marseille and the University of London. His research has been funded by three Fulbright Fellowships, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation and a number of others. He has edited or authored 24 books, more than 200 journal articles and book chapters, and many more book reviews, op-ed pieces and online publications.

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2

Fig. 4.3

Fig. 4.4

Fig. 6.1

A Staffordshire container for anchovy paste from the late nineteenth century (Susan Blatt, with permission) 50 Inca nobleman sharing a drink with his father the Sun. (Image from on-line digital facsimile in archives of the Royal Library of Denmark, p. 150 [150], http://www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/ poma/info/es/foreword.htm)64 Another Inca ruler partaking in a commensal event with his father the Sun as part of ceremonial activities during the month of June. (Image from on-line digital facsimile in archives of the Royal Library of Denmark, p. 246 [248], http://www.kb.dk/ permalink/2006/poma/info/es/foreword.htm)65 Collasuyu nobles engaged in ritual commensal activities with the dead. (Image from on-line digital facsimile in archives of the Royal Library of Denmark, p. 293 [295], http://www.kb.dk/ permalink/2006/poma/info/es/foreword.htm)67 In this image, Guaman Poma portrays an imagined encounter between the Inca ruler Huayna Capac and the Spanish conquistador, Pedro de Candia, in which the Inca queries his guest as to whether he eats gold. (Image from on-line digital facsimile in archives of the Royal Library of Denmark, p. 369 [371], http://www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/poma/info/es/ foreword.htm)68 Pans de Sant Jordi in a Barcelona bakery window, April 2013. (Venetia Johannes, Personal Collection) 98

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List of Figures

Fig. 6.2

Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 6.5 Fig. 6.6

Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 9.3 Fig. 9.4

Pastissos de Sant Jordi, in the form of edible books decorated with roses and senyeres, alongside Pans de Sant Jordi in a Barcelona bakery window, April 2013. (Venetia Johannes, Personal Collection) 100 Pastís de la Diada, as advertised in the Barcelona Cake-Makers’ Guild Calendar (© Gremi de Pastisseria de Barcelona. Published with Permission) 101 Catalunyam’s T-shirt design representing the ‘Botifarra de Pagès’ hand gesture (© Catalunyam. Published with Permission)107 ‘In Catalonia, We Make Sausage’: Sausage-inspired protest sign on a Barcelona thoroughfare during the Diada protest in September 2012. (Venetia Johannes, Personal Collection) 109 Chocolate Mona decorated with a map of Catalonia that is emblazoned with an Estelada (pro-independence Catalan flag). Displayed in a Barcelona shop window, April 2014. (Venetia Johannes, Personal Collection) 118 The Danish Meal Partnership’s social profile 123 The Danish Meal Partnership’s field of activities within three arenas127 A McDonald’s mooncake (Martin Platt, Personal Collection) 165 Ice cream mooncake (Martin Platt, Personal Collection) 166 Green tea ice cream and red bean paste Mooncake (Martin Platt, Personal Collection) 167 Banana pancake (Martin Platt, Personal Collection) 171

List of Tables

Table 8.1 Table 8.2 Table 8.3 Table 8.4 Table 8.5 Table 8.6 Table 8.7

Distribution of types in the sub-units of Grar (*Hole-mouthjars). Last column (total) gives percentages for the whole site of Grar Distribution of types through the strata in Gilat Distribution of types through the strata in Gilat (percentage). Last column gives the percentages in the whole site of Gilat Distribution of types in Shiqmim, divided by area (after Burton 2004, Table 5.2) Distribution of types in different areas in Tuleilat Ghassul Distribution of types in different areas in Tuleilat Ghassul in percentage (without Areas F and P, where the numbers are too small for statistical relevance) Comparison of all sites

146 150 151 152 154 155 155

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction Cynthia Chou and Susanne Kerner

Everyone eats. No one can do without it. We eat for the very sustenance of life. Nonetheless, we also eat for many more reasons beyond our physiological requirements. Food permeates into every aspect of our lives and touches upon everything that matters: it expresses personhood, marks group membership (or non-membership) in all kinds of social grouping and draws lines of where morality begins and ends. Food creates, maintains, negotiates and expresses various social identities.1 Food and foodways—the latter term denoting the socio-cultural and economic practices relating to the production and consumption of food (Camp 1989)—are an important social barometer to reveal who we are, 1  Grateful acknowledgement to the University of Copenhagen’s Pro-Rector Seed Money for Research and Innovation for its support towards making this volume possible.

C. Chou (*) Department of Anthropology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA e-mail: [email protected] S. Kerner Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Chou, S. Kerner (eds.), Food, Social Change and Identity, Consumption and Public Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84371-7_1

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our origin and our aspirations. Wanting to belong is a very strong urge in all human beings. In this, food and foodways are powerful markers and referents of identity. As Brillat-Savarin (2000: 3) remarks, “Tell me what kind of food you eat, and I will tell you what kind of [person] you are”. Selection of our foods and foodways are made not merely to meet our physiological requirements, but also for socio-cultural representations which mark additional constraints on what can and cannot be eaten, what should or should not be eaten and what is liked and what is disliked (Bourdieu 1984; Fischler 1980). Our choice of food and foodways reveals “our thought”, including “choices of people with whom we wish to identify” (Fiddes 1991: 33). As much as food moulds our identities, we negotiate our identities through food too. Every human being has numerous identities. It is a truly multidimensional phenomenon and many of the elements involved in identity creation, such as gender, age, class and culture can be expressed through food preference or dislikes and taboos. Fine (1996: 1) makes the astute observation that “the connection between identity and consumption gives food a central role in the creation of community, and we use our diet to convey images of public identity”. Food draws people into commensal circles as much as they bring about divisions, borders and boundaries (Kerner et al. 2015). Appadurai (1988) shows in an exemplary way how a cuisine can be metonymously used to characterize the Other. Ethnic slurs via the construction of “the Other” and “Us” are often expressed through food. The relationship between food and identity is one that is highly visible and in everybody’s mind. At the same time, it is embodied in such prejudices cum biases so that Germans are “krauts” and Italians are “spaghetti-eaters”. Underlying this is a highly political theme. Closely connected to the construction of the “Other” is the construction of an “Us”. The following quote from Yazid Ibn Rabi (recorded by al-Tawhidi in the late tenth or early eleventh century CE) gives an impression of the longevity of this process: “Kebab is the food of vagabonds, water and salt is the food of Bedouins. Harissa and sheep’s heads are the food of those in power, roast meat is the food of immoral people, and vinegar with oil is the food of people like ourselves” (van Gelder 2000: 100). Food does not only serve biological needs, but also acts symbolically to define boundaries between Self and Other. This “Othering” through food makes more impact than most other ways to describe and define a group as it often pertains to emotions. As can be observed, such emotions are invoked in

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the very recent entrenching of vegans, flexitarians, fruitarians, ovo-lacto-­ vegetarians and other eating groups (c.f., le Grand 2015). Yet, the meanings of food and foodways can also change to signify very different things as social changes happen. As Watson and Klein (2019: 5) observe, “Not only do food practices reflect and channel wider social changes, but people also creatively use food as a medium for reflecting upon these changes in all their complexities, be it through material practices of cooking and sharing food or through ‘food talk’”. Food and foodways are created by dynamic processes. History shows that they have been internationalizing for centuries (c.f., Freedman 2007, 2008; Higman 2012). Change is constant. To a large extent, our ever-changing foodscape tells the story of shifting patterns of politics and conquest as well as of global trade and global empires. They also reflect social changes in so many other ways: contemporary transnational movements of capital and unprecedented volumes of peoples on the move (nomads, migrants, tourists), changes in intergroup relations within societies, wars and the rise of new nation states, famines and hunger, new technologies in mass media and biotechnology, mass production of foods in industrialization, environment, health, family cum work dynamics, status, class and prestige, fashion and style, religion and so the list goes on. Countries that border each other also experience constant changes in food and foodways. A pertinent example for this can be found in the competition over food in southwest Asia, where national dishes have been invented and national identities have come to be based on them, even though these foods are de facto shared with neighbouring countries. The Middle Eastern delicacies of Hummus (chickpea and tahine cream), Tabbouleh (parsley and wheat salad) and Falafel (fried wheat balls) are claimed by Lebanon, Israel and Jordan as their traditional national cuisine. All three dishes are served in small local shops as well as large restaurants that cater to tourists. Lebanon holds the Guinness World Record for the largest serving of hummus (10,452  kilogrammes) on 8 May 2010, Israel holds the record for the largest tabbouleh serving and Jordan claims the title for the largest falafel (74.75 kilogrammes) on 28 July 2012. Furthermore, Lebanese and Israeli restaurants all over the world offer these dishes as typical national cuisine.2 Van Esterik’s (2008) narrative of Food Culture in Southeast Asia captures 2  The only exception to this may be the Restaurant “Hummus and Friends” in Berlin which states on its homepage “make hummus not walls” and does not claim any national exclusivity for its food.

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a similar situation. The region comprising no less than eleven countries is a culinary realm although it has never been a political unity. Through close trade relationships, battles and a shared experience of colonial imperialism, ingredients and recipes have spread across the region. While there are traces of culinary continuities in the region, so do culinary discontinuities abound too. Geographically, Southeast Asia is south of China, east of the Indian subcontinent and north-west of Australia. While this has established traces of continuities in foodways, geography and ecology do not adequately explain the dynamism of the Southeast Asian food realm. As Anderson (2014: 238) muses, “ecology and geography would not predict that Bali’s foodways would be far closer to distant India’s than to those of New Guinea, relatively close and ecologically similar. Southeast Asia, incidentally, is a multicored world system, or perhaps a group of small, closely related world-systems; central Burma, central Thailand, and Java were all historic cores”. Through these ways and complexities, there is constant influence, borrowing and new constellations of food identity politics. The interplay of food, social change and identity has long interested food studies researchers. Some of the most important pioneering works in food studies demonstrate this. Exemplifying this are classics by Richards (1939), Mead (1943), Goody (1982) and Mintz (1985). In Richards’ (1939) ethnography on Bemba life in northern Rhodesia, she maps how changes in conditions of life and age influence choice and availability of food. In Mead’s (1943) report on the problem of changing food habits, she shows how and why people do not always eat what is recommended for them even when it impacts on their own health. As she highlights, psychological factors must not be overlooked to understand how food habits develop and change. In Goody’s (1982) classic comparative historical analysis of the culinary cultures of Eurasia and sub-Saharan Africa, he discusses why only some societies have developed haute cuisines. The inquiry subsequently expands into examining the global rise of “industrial food” and its impact on Third World societies. Mintz has been credited as the father of the anthropology of contemporary food studies. His groundbreaking work on sugar shows how an intelligent analysis of the history of a single commodity can be used to pry open the history of an entire world of social relationships, transformations and human behaviour (Mintz 1985). Characteristic of these pioneering work examples is how patterns of food and foodways provide the lens to sharpen “knowledge and perception of a hundred other things, but mainly of ourselves” (Fisher 1954: 35).

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Ever since the 1980s, studies on the effects of broad societal changes on food and identity, and vice versa, have been gaining momentum.3 Examples giving some measure of this include political and economic changes, mass production and distribution of food and movements of people and food. Studies on food shifts because of economic and political changes, such as war, post-socialist reforms, class rivalries and market integration have emerged. As noted by Mintz and DuBois (2002: 105), the relationship between warfare and food has been under-recognized. Examples of the few works available addressing this gap include research done by Vargas and Casillas (1992), Ikpe (1994), Mintz (1996), Bentley (1998), Tanner (1999), Davis (2000), Cwiertka (2002), Wong (2009) and Collingham (2012). More recent works include those by Collinson and Macbeth (2014) as well as Benbow and Perry (2019). The former uses ethnographic fieldwork and historical sources to explore ongoing conflicts on the global stage to illustrate how food has become so highly politicized to be used as a political and military weapon. In contrast, the latter shines new light on the role of food in old wars. It examines the socio-cultural and emotional significance of food and hunger in Germany’s experience in World War I, World War II and the Global Cold War. Through the harsh conditions of war, food emerged as a form of power, a weapon and an identity marker. Since the Cold War, considerable transformations in everyday life have occurred and are continuing to happen. Food and foodways form significant symbols of the successes and failures of socialist ideals of progress, equality and modernity. Through food studies come revelations about changes in production systems, consumption patterns, food security, health, nationalism and history (c.f., Chatwin 1997; Ziker 1998; Ca ̨glar 1999). Recent studies include Caldwell et al.’s (2009) study of Food and Everyday Life in the Postsocialist World as well as Jung et al.’s (2014) edited volume on Ethical Eating in the Postsocialist and Socialist World. Through food ethnographies, Caldwell et al. (2009) present the concerns of ordinary people to analyse issues of policy, power and social inequalities. Jung et al.’s (2014) offer a groundbreaking contribution to critical food studies by exploring what constitutes “ethical food” and “ethical eating” in socialist and formerly socialist societies. Through a collection of essays on social movements in Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Lithuania, Russia and Vietnam, 3  Identity has been at the heart of anthropological studies, but was only a minor element in archaeological analyses.

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they present how state-market-citizen relations continue to shape the ethical and moral frameworks guiding food practices around the world. Also implicated in these works are the complications of globalization on food, social change and identity. Studies on culinary changes attending to a plethora of other economic and political changes, such as out-migration, class rivalries and market integration have also provided a medium to think about historical consciousness and identity construction (c.f., Mennell 1985; Matossian 1989; Levenstein 1993; Mayer 1996; Lentz 1999). Jing’s (2000) edited volume on Feeding China’s Little Emperors is an apt example. His study reveals how the transformation of children’s food habits, the result of China’s transition to a market economy and its integration into the global economic arena have changed the intimate relationship of childhood, parenthood and family life. Even children are affected by the consumption of changing kinds of “prestige food” and identity construction. Changes relating to the impact of mass production cum distribution of food as well as the introduction of new foods on dietary patterns and social relations are also growing. Mintz (1985) pioneered in this area with his historical study of sugar production and consumption. Subsequently through the lens of soy, Du Bois and Tan together with Mintz (2008) analysed how production changes affected the social lives of consumers living far beyond the production sites. Exemplifications of studies examining reactions to such changes include Leitch’s (2000) study of Italy’s counter culture of the “slow food” movement in response to industrialized consumption, Clark’s (2004) study of punk cuisine comprising scavenged, rotten and stolen food to critique the hierarchy, corporate capitalism and environmental destruction of the capitalist food system as well as le Grand’s (2015) examination of the construction of a vegan identity to advocate environmentalism and social justice. A recent collection of papers edited by Mawere and Nhemachena (2017) critically investigate the use and implications of genetically modified organisms on African identities, cultures and institutions. People on the move—colonizers, migrants, refugees, professionals and tourists—have been agents of dietary change. However, not only do people move across the globe, so also do foods to impact identity construction. Works exemplifying this include the following. Wilk’s (2006) historical anthropology of the transformations in Belizean cuisine from colonial times to the present demonstrates a history of transnational connections that have impacted how Belizean people define themselves and

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their nation. Watson’s (2006) fascinating edited volume explores the various ways that consumers in five different Asian societies engage with McDonald’s. Freedman’s (2008) study of spices out of the East to the rest of the world shows how they moved across the world to become identity markers of beauty, affluence and grace. Tan’s (2011) examination of Chinese migrant food focuses on how they have modified traditional dishes, invented new foods and created hybrid forms. Many more such exemplifications can be highlighted to show how movements of people transform food and practices; and vice versa. Since 2000, much has been developed in archaeological insights into the relationship between food and identity. A particular milestone is Katherine Twiss’ 2007 book, The Archaeology of Food and Identity, where she brought together diverse studies that included VanDerwarker et al.’s (2007) investigation into the creation of indigenous identity through consumption of traditional foods in Contact period Northern Carolina to Lev-Tov and McGeough’s (2007) study on avoidance of pork by elites in Late Bronze Age Syria in the imitation of Egyptian overlords. Prior to that, Tamara Bray’s (2003) volume, The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires, concentrated on feasts to examine identity negotiations including connections between power and identity. Similarly, through analysing archaeological remains related to food, Elisabeth Klarich’s (2010) volume, Inside Ancient Kitchens, focused on suprahousehold meals and their role in power construction, work organization and gender relations. Of significance too is Susan Pollock’s (2012a) work on Between Feasts and Daily Meals: Toward an Archaeology of Commensal Spaces, which concentrated on everyday aspects of food, including hunger, which is—together with its social implications—a much-neglected topic in archaeological discussions. Careful analysis of flora and fauna remains provides in some cases a detailed story about food behaviour and possible identity construction of groups, families or households in an archaeological site (Twiss 2012). A distribution analysis of material, very often pottery, can give information about cooking habits (D’Anna and Jauss 2015), possible ethnic affiliation (Stein 2012) or changes in the social make-up of a commensal group and therefore changes in power relations and self-identification (D’Anna 2010; Pollock 2012a, 2012b). Artistic expressions, such as wall reliefs and pottery decoration might allow interpretations of group compositions and the importance of different cultural elements expressed therein (Hopwood 2017; Restelli 2012).

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Though far from being complete, this brief overview of how researchers have been engaged in analysing the interplay of food, social change and identity provides the setting for this volume to join the discussion. In addition to this Introduction, there are eight chapters in this book. It brings together anthropologists, archaeologists, area studies specialists, linguists and food policy administrators to ponder over the following questions: What triggers change? What kinds of changes in food and foodways are happening? How are the changes impacting on identity politics? Thomas begins the discussion in Chap. 2 by unravelling contemporary theoretical debates in the field of food, social change and identity. In today’s scene of global connectedness, two things are happening simultaneously in contemporary food cultures. On the one hand, there is the fascination of cultural Others in the consumption and production of food. At the same time, there is fear and distrust of the unfamiliar as it threatens customary categories, orderings and sentiments about food. This follows heightened anxieties to retain culturally distinctive food and foodways. As it has been elsewhere aptly commented by Fischler (1990: 70), “If we do not know what we are eating, we do not know what we will become, but neither do we know what we are”. Thomas explores the tension between acceptance and rejection of new foods, tastes and foodways. A plethora of questions are raised about the relationship between food, place and culture; the new meanings of food and identity; gender relations in food change and the construction of Us versus Others. In focusing on these questions, Thomas casts light on the complex changes of each link of the food chain—where we obtain our food, what we eat and shifts in the meaning of food—to analyse the socio-political and economic changes that have affected food, tastes and foodways. In all is the conjecture that food and eating will indubitably become more disordered and tumultuous in the future. In Chap. 3, Wilk continues the discussion concerning the tumultuous transformations in diets that embody our everyday life. People may, for example, want to change their status through consumption. However, striving for cultural capital is a complex task when the valence value and meaning of food and material culture are themselves constantly changing. In this double game, the symbols of status often lose that standing by the time they have trickled down to lower social ranks, the very people who most want to increase their status. The question that Wilk poses is thus, “What is change?” and “How can we generate understandings without falling into bland generalizations about cultural change in food

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dynamics?” Wilk cautions against defining structures that may only make it more difficult to understand change, because the units of analysis would already be premised on a static model. Instead, he challenges us to think about how food can move in opposite directions too. How do people discover that they can eat something that was once thought inedible? How does it move from one extreme end of disgust to the other extreme end of a fashion trend? Unlike the trickle-down process that Mintz (1985) found in sugar consumption, Wilk proposes a more dynamic approach to understanding change: foods can also move up in rank. To understand change, Wilk shows how the study of distastes are often more informative and revealing than tastes. This is because distastes are significant markers of individual cultural capital and identity. Just as essential are the need to study forgetting as a process of change in foodways and for comparative studies to understand how something that can be considered a delicacy in one place can be considered as a stink elsewhere. Through this, insights into the social life of food will be more vibrant than just a list of nutrients. In Chap. 4, Bray brings us into a wider realm of the social life of food. She explores how food moves, changes and penetrates across human and other-than-human spheres to impact identity. Using an archaeological approach, Bray examines the ontological realities of past cultures via material record. In this case, through an analysis of a seventeenth-century pictorial ethnohistoric record created by the indigenous author and illustrator Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, insights are gained into Andean ontology as articulated through food. It reveals how food, drink and commensality materialized and mediated social relations across what in Western ontology would be viewed as unbridgeable divides. Here we see what, and what kinds of, other-than-human entities can be formed as part of the social world of a given community or culture, past or present through the medium of food and food practices. Integral to discussions about the movement of food and its impact on identity concerns the transformation of cooking styles and methods too. In Chap. 5, Buccini begins this conversation with the question: “What do we really mean by the term “cuisine”?” The long history of large-scale immigration in the United States serves as a case study and, more specifically, the history of Italian-American cuisine and identity. In view of the complex make-up of America’s immigrant groups, Buccini also queries if there exists a national cuisine as such or do only regional cuisines prevail? Adopting a linguistic approach to examine culinary grammar in addition to his intimate embeddedness in the Italian-American community, Buccini

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analyses the changes in the American culinary landscape: from one in which there were old regional cuisines into one in which there is a national cuisine. In his analysis, regional Italian-American cuisine gradually meets a slow death because of broader socio-cultural factors such as familial and communal dissolution and the power of American commercial food industry advertising campaigns targeting at changing youth culture tastes. Together, these have all disrupted the generational transfer of structured culinary knowledge. From this perspective, the shift from one food culture to another may seem at the broader social or familial level gradual but is in fact at the individual level generally rather abrupt. Hence the transformation of the American culinary landscape from one in which there were old regional cuisines into one in which there is a national cuisine. In Chap. 6, Johannes goes deeper into discussing the making of a national cuisine. The case that is presented here concerns the contemporary Catalan nationalist and secessionist movement. Catalonia’s separate cultural and linguistic identity has long been a marker of difference from the rest of Spain. In this environment of “Us” versus the “Other”, food takes on new significance, as Catalans imbue nationalist associations with their foods. In this chapter, Johannes adopts the ethnographic lens to consider several aspects of this trend. Firstly, the use of the gastronomic calendar and how this creates an “imagined community” (Anderson 1983). Secondly, how food is used in each of Catalonia’s three national days, the new gastronomic products that have been developed for these days and finally, the role that food played in the 2014 tercentenary celebrations of the Siege of Barcelona. This chapter by Johannes shows how powerful the food and nationalism axis can be in the movements to effectuate political change and to consolidate an identity. While Johannes investigates the making of a national cuisine, Nielsen in Chap. 7, provides another twist to this conversation: How to change an entire nation’s diet? Nielsen, a policy maker brings into focus the state’s Danish Veterinary and Food Administration’s initiative called the Danish Meal Partnership to change the nation’s diet. In collaboration with consumers, business corporations, commercial enterprises, health organizations, professional bodies, research institutions, policy makers and aid organizations, the Administration’s aim is to strengthen meal competencies of future generations of Danes to improve the nation’s social equality in healthier food patterns. Change through instilling commensality,

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training more Danes to master cooking and nudging more Danes to be more courageous to try something are some of the strategies that are discussed to steer the entire nation into a healthier identity. In Chap. 8, Kerner throws light on how material culture in food production from the past also provides crucial information about the dynamics of identity negotiations. Firstly, in elaborating on archaeological evidence derived from Stein’s (1999, 2012) work in Hacienebi, a fourth mill. BCE village in Turkey, Kerner shows how it reveals processes of identity construction of two different groups. Secondly, in investigating pottery from different fifth mill. BCE sites in the southern Levant, she shows how pottery studies, butchery practices and cooking practices provide important clues into the daily life of people, how different commensal groups were constructed and what can be deduced about their identity politics from this evidence. Eating, as Kerner emphasizes, has always been a contested area where many actors, such as the state, health authorities, political and social groups as well as individuals interact and negotiate the identity of all involved. As highlighted by the contributors of this volume, complex and conflicting dynamics underline the interplay in food, social change and identity. The final chapter of this volume brings the discussion to a full circle. In the contours of movements of food and foodways, there have arisen yearnings in the search for authenticity in eating across cultures. Herein lies a postmodern paradox. The quest for authenticity is a cauldron that stirs contradictions. Our final taste of banana pancake in Thailand and roti john in British Malaya that were created to satiate expectations of the authentic food experience form thought provoking examples of invented traditions (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1993) that have re-invented the old to become something new. The banana pancake and roti john arose in the nexus between Southeast Asia and Western cultures, in which perceptions of the Other contributed to the development and dissemination of particular foods. Both are expressions of certain cultural and historical interactions. The paradoxical result is that in the quest for authenticity, new recipes and new foodways reflect ever so more clearly the complex issues of the interplay of food, social change and identity. Our final course of banana pancakes and roti john serve the reminder that food and foodways are constantly changing. How much more exciting can our adventure into food and foodways be. Bon appétit!

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References Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Anderson, E.N. 2014. Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture. New York: New York University Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 1988. How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India. Comparative Studies in Society and History 30 (1): 3–24. Benbow, Heather M., and Heather R. Perry. 2019. Food, Culture and Identity in Germany’s Century of War. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bentley, Amy. 1998. Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bray, Tamara, ed. 2003. The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum. Brillat-Savarin, Jean A. 2000. The Physiology of Taste: Or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy. Trans. M.F.K.  Fisher. Washington, DC: Counterpoint. Ca ̨glar, Ayşe S. 1999. McDoner: Döner Kebap and the Social Positioning Struggle of German Turks. In Changing Food Habits: Case Studies from Africa, South America and Europe, ed. Carola Lentz, 263–284. New York: Routledge. Caldwell, Melissa L., Elizabeth C. Dunn, and Marion Nestle, eds. 2009. Food and Everyday Life in the Postsocialist World. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Camp, Charles. 1989. American Foodways: What, When, Why and How We Eat in America. Little Rock, AS: August House. Chatwin, Mary E. 1997. Socio-Cultural Transformation and Foodways in the Republic of Georgia. Commack, NY: Nova Science Publishers. Clark, Dylan. 2004. The Raw and the Rotten: Punk Cuisine. Ethnology 43 (1): 19–31. Collingham, Lizzie. 2012. Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food. London: Penguin. Collinson, Paul, and Helen Macbeth, eds. 2014. Food in Zones of Conflict: Cross Disciplinary Perspectives. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Cwiertka, Katarzyna J. 2002. Popularising a Military Diet in Wartime and Postwar Japan. Asian Anthropology 1 (1): 1–30. D’Anna, Maria Biana. 2010. The Ceramic Containers of Period VI A.  Food Control at the Time of Centralisation. In Economic Centralisation in Formative States: The Archaeological Reconstruction of the Economic System in 4th Millennium Arslantepe, SPO 3, ed. Marcella Frangipane, 167–191. Rome: Sapienza Università di Roma.

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D’Anna, Maria Biana, and Carolin Jauss. 2015. Cooking in the Fourth Millennium BCE: Investigating the Social via the Material. In Commensality: From Everyday Food to Feast, ed. Susanne Kerner, Cynthia Chou and Morten Warmind, 65–85. London, New Dehli, New York and Sydney: Bloomsbury. Davis, Belinda. 2000. Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin. North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press. Du Bois, Christine, Chee-Beng Tan, and Sidney W. Mintz, eds. 2008. The World of Soy. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press. Fiddes, Nick. 1991. Meat: A Natural Symbol. London: Routledge. Fine, Gary A. 1996. Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant Work. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fischler, Claude. 1980. Food Habits, Social Change and the Nature/Culture Dilemma. Information (International Social Science Council) 19 (6): 937–953. ———. 1990. L’Homnivore. Paris: Odile Jacob. Fisher, M.F.K. 1954. The Art of Eating. New York: Macmillan. Freedman, Paul. 2007. Food: The History of Taste. London: Thames and Hudson. ———. 2008. Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Goody, Jack. 1982. Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Higman, B.W. 2012. How Food Made History. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. 1993. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hopwood, Marie. 2017. More Than Just a Pretty Face: The Meaningful Use of Painted Pottery in the Halaf Period. In Painting Pots, ed. W.  Cruells, I. Mateiciucova, and O. Nieuwenhuyse, 166–176. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Ikpe, Eno B. 1994. Food and Society in Nigeria: A History of Food Customs, Food Economy and Cultural Change, 1900–1989. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Jing, Jun, ed. 2000. Feeding China’s Little Emperors: Food, Children, and Social Change. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Jung, Yuson, Jakob A. Klein, and Melissa L. Caldwell, eds. 2014. Ethical Eating in the Postsocialist and Socialist World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kerner, Susanne, Cynthia Chou, and Morten Warmind, eds. 2015. Commensality: From Everyday Food to Feast. London, New Delhi, New  York and Sydney: Bloomsbury. Klarich, Elisabeth A., ed. 2010. Inside Ancient Kitchens: New Directions in the Study of Daily Meals and Feasts. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. le Grand, Yvonne. 2015. Activism through Commensality: Food and Politics in a Temporary Vegan Zone. In Commensality: From Everyday Food to Feast, ed. Susanne Kerner, Cynthia Chou, and Morten Warmind, 51–64. London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney: Bloomsbury.

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Leitch, Alison. 2000. The Social Life of Lardo: Slow Food in Fast Times. Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 1 (1): 103–118. Lentz, Carola, ed. 1999. Changing Food Habits: Case Studies from Africa, South America, and Europe. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Levenstein, Harvey. 1993. Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lev-Tov, Justin, and Kevin McGeough. 2007. Examining Feasting in Late Bronze Age Syro-Palestine Though Ancient Texts and Bones. In The Archaeology of Food and Identity, ed. K.C. Twiss, 85–111. Occasional Paper 34. Carbondale, IL: Center for Archaeological Investigations. Matossian, Mary K. 1989. Poisons of the Past: Molds, Epidemics, and History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Mawere, Munyaradzi, and Artwell Nhemachena, eds. 2017. GMOs, Consumerism and the Global Politics of Biotechnology: Rethinking Food, Bodies and Identities in Africa’s 21st Century. Cameroon: Langaa Research and Publishing. Mayer, Adrian. 1996. Caste in an Indian Village: Change and Continuity 1954–1992. In Caste Today, ed. C.J.  Fuller, 32–64. New  York: Oxford University Press. Mead, Margaret. 1943. The Problem of Changing Food Habits. Bulletin of the National Research Council 108 (325): 20–31. Mennell, Stephen. 1985. All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present. Oxford: Blackwell. Mintz, Sidney W. 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin. ———. 1996. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom. Boston: Beacon. Mintz, Sidney W., and Christine M. Du Bois. 2002. The Anthropology of Food and Eating. Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 99–119. Pollock, Susan, ed. 2012a. Between Feasts and Daily Meals: Toward an Archaeology of Commensal Spaces. Special issue e-Topoi 2012 (2). ———. 2012b. Politics of Food in Early Mesopotamian Centralized Societies. ORIGINI XXXIV: 153–168. Restelli, Francesca Balossi. 2012. Eating at Home and ‘Dining’ Out? Commensalities in the Neolithic and Late Chalcolithic in the Near East. In Between Feasts and Daily Meals: Toward an Archaeology of Commensal Spaces, ed. Susan Pollock, 75–95. Special issue e-Topoi 2012. Richards, Audrey I. 1939. Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia: An Economic Study of the Bemba Tribe. Münster, Hamburg: Lit. Stein, Gil J. 1999. Material Culture and Social Identity: The Evidence for a 4th Millennium BC Mesopotamian Uruk Colony at Hacinebi, Turkey. Paléorient 25 (1): 11–22. ———. 2012. Food Preparation, Social Context, and Ethnicity in a Prehistoric Mesopotamian Colony. In The Menial Art of Cooking: Archaeological Studies of

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Cooking and Food Preparation, ed. Sarah R.  Graff and Enrique Rodriguez-­ Alegria, 47–62. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Tan, Chee-Beng, ed. 2011. Chinese Food and Foodways in Southeast Asia and Beyond. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press. Tanner, Jakob. 1999. The Rationing System, Food Policy, and Nutritional Science During the Second World War: A Comparative View of Switzerland. In Changing Food Habits: Case Studies from Africa, South America, and Europe, ed. Carola Lentz, 211–242. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Twiss, Katherine C. 2007. The Archaeology of Food and Identity. Occasional Paper 34. Carbondale, IL: Center for Archaeological Investigations. ———. 2012. The Complexities of Home Cooking: Public Feasts and Private Meals Inside the Çatalhöyük House. In Between Feasts and Daily Meals: Toward an Archaeology of Commensal Spaces, ed. Susan Pollock, 53–73. Special issue e-Topoi 2012. Van Esterik, Penny. 2008. Food Culture in Southeast Asia. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press. Van Gelder, Geert J. 2000. Gods’ Banquet: Food in Classical Arabic Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. VanDerwarker, Amber M., Margaret Scarry, and Jane M. Eastman. 2007. Menus for Families and Feasts: Household and Community Consumption of Plants at Upper Saratown, North Carolina. In The Archaeology of Food and Identity, ed. K.C.  Twiss, 16–49. Occasional Paper 34. Carbondale, IL: Center for Archaeological Investigations. Vargas, Luis A., and Leticia E. Casillas. 1992. Diet and Foodways in Mexico City. Ecology of Food and Nutrition 27 (3–4): 235–247. Watson, James L., ed. 2006. Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Watson, James L., and Jakob A. Klein. 2019. Introduction: Anthropology, Food and Modern Life. In The Handbook of Food and Anthropology, ed. Jakob A. Klein and James L. Watson. London, New York, Oxford, New Delhi and Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic. Wilk, Richard. 2006. Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists. Oxford: Berg. Wong, Hong Suen. 2009. Wartime Kitchen: Food and Eating in Singapore, 1942–1950. Singapore: National Museum of Singapore and Editions Didier Millet. Ziker, John P. 1998. Kinship and Exchange Among the Dolgan and Nganasan of Northern Siberia. Resource Economics Anthropology 19: 191–238.

CHAPTER 2

Ingesting the Contemporary: Food and Angst Mandy Thomas

Introduction Food and eating can catalyse enormous pleasure but can also bring anxiety, distress and anguish. This chapter will examine the ways in which the contemporary moment is marked by these divergent turmoils over food. Any discussion of the nature of contemporary food cultures around the globe must address itself to two simultaneous projects—the first is the undeniable global interconnectedness of food practices—both its consumption and its production through what Duruz (2010: 17) has called “culinary cosmopolitan citizenship”; and the second is the culturally distinctive although everchanging nature of specific eating practices. This tension, or movement back and forwards between the flows and consumption of food and the selection and markers of food distinctiveness are not something particularly new. However, in the contemporary moment the

M. Thomas (*) Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Chou, S. Kerner (eds.), Food, Social Change and Identity, Consumption and Public Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84371-7_2

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to and fro between these two poles has become so pronounced that it is almost dizzyingly elastic. At the same time as we are bombarded by a stunning rise in gastronomic images of delectable taste sensations, slow-cooked pure food, or the lure of healthy eating, we are also made viscerally more anxious about swallowing or absorbing food as it becomes more polluted, as climate change impacts upon the food bowls of the world, as seafood becomes more scarce in our oceans, and as travel brings food as well as disease much closer. As eating itself becomes more contested, being slender or obese both become a marker of either wealth or decay in different cultural settings. Why do we eat, what we eat and why have different cultures and societies at different times eaten other things? What fosters social change to affect dietary patterns and changing identities? How can food offer the lens to understand the cultural and social affinities in moments of change and transformation? Food is a profound marker of social and political change and it is through our stomachs that we mark out the popular and collective movements of our times as well as the metamorphosis of the social worlds of our immediate surrounds and our families. Food transitions have occurred so rapidly and so intensively that they have impacted every corner of the globe. There does not appear to be many places that are immune to these affects, although they are felt to a lesser or greater degree in different parts of the globe depending on a multitude of factors. What are these affects? Firstly, that there has been a disentanglement of food from place and culture. Secondly, that, for various reasons that I will discuss below, foods have been reinvested with new meanings, and thirdly, that power has become a key vector in this reconfiguration of sensemaking. What are the new forms of sociality to which food has been integrated? As Elspeth Probyn (2000: 9) has argued, food and eating are earthy internally felt markers of all the arenas that we live within. They mark out the scenes and conflicts of wider issues of concern to us and that we rotate through, key relationships and lifespan, social and ethnic differences, and the wider political and economic environment (ibid.). As the global changes are more rapid than ever before so too do our bodies embed those changes in their engagement with the world in an increasingly rapid, socially differentiated way. Our tastes roll with these alterations, always changing and moving with greater rapidity to the next and newest flavour. In 2020 and 2021, COVID has disrupted food supplies and the way that people eat in unexpected ways. For example, there have been

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restrictions of movement of people and food, and closures of food production sites, as well as large-scale transformations to the way that people eat, with the move from eating out to eating at home in much of the world. In some places during lockdowns, there has been an emphasis on buying certain food that will maintain a long shelf life, like tinned food, pasta and rice. The overall impact of the virus on food and eating will play out over time but it is inevitable that the effects will be widely experienced. It is unambiguous that the changes to the ways that we eat are speeding up as people become more interconnected than ever before. I will argue in this chapter that these transformations which are affected by our new modes of communication are deeply impacted by power, as power is felt and experienced through our bodies. Following Foucault (1977: 25–26) in his work Discipline and Punish, “The body…is directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs”. It is power in its multiple forms in the present day, from economic power to political power, from the power of gender to the military power that invest contemporary food with very specific meanings and configurations. It is not just through our bodies as eaters that power is manifest but also through the wider global food movements, agriculture and the distribution of food that power differentials govern how people eat. I will begin by exploring food culture imaginaries. That is to say, how food and eating are now experienced around much of the globe given that the contemporary moment is marked by a celebration of eating and food in many parts of the world. I will then move on to surveying the speed of change in taste that is occurring and finally I will investigate how both ‘gender’ and ‘the senses’ have become incorporated into these food changes. In doing so I scope out how we might traverse these radical transitions in the world of taste and eating and how we might understand the nature of the privileged position that food holds in social analysis, and in our everyday contemporary lives.

The Nature of Food Change So what have been the primary changes to eating and global diets over the last few decades? The key transformation has been a stripping away of the ‘local’ so that the way that food is produced, transported and disseminated more intensively than ever before means that it is being detached from its very local production. This has led to an increasing interdependency of the

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networks of labour surrounding the growing and transportation of food with intensifying linkages between the economics of food production and food cultures, and hence the intermeshing of food varieties and food cultures (Pelto and Pelto 1983: 309). This deep contemporary link between food and technology disrupts our connection along the path that food travels to our mouths, to our regions and to our nation, as we no longer have certainty surrounding where food is grown or provenanced. This delocalisation has been met by an increasing anxiety about eating and food origins. As an example of this, as the use of garlic in Australia (where I live) has risen over the post-Second World War period with the changes in diet, so too has its importation, now being the bulk of the garlic eaten. The origins of this garlic are primarily China but also Spain, Argentina, Mexico and the United States. Where it was difficult to find garlic prior to the 1960s now it is widely eaten as part of a staple diet. As more is consumed and more is imported, the anxieties about eating it have increased.1 Even though we cannot grow enough garlic to meet our growing desire for it in Australia, the angst about eating ‘foreign’ garlic, and the uncertainty about its exact provenance, has increased, with some local markets banning the sale of Chinese garlic.2 As Tomlinson (1999: 128) has argued, these changes to how we eat have impacted on us in complex ways so that now familiar foods become strange, and as foods grown elsewhere become more intimately connected to our experience we feel at the same time both more vulnerable and more globally connected and open to possibility. The increased desire to eat garlic along with the fear of eating ‘foreign’ garlic are played out in intense fear-mongering amongst Australian growers and consumers where the local produce is seen as ‘pure’ and the foreign as ‘polluted’. A number of authors have written about the changing nature of the sociality of eating—from eating jointly with others in a shared communion, which is historically and ethnographically the perceived norm, to an increase in the scale of people eating alone. Simmel (1994: 350) describes 1  For example, note the language of fear in the following—“In China, chemicals banned in Australia are still being used to grow garlic. Australia imports 95% of our garlic from China. Chinese garlic is gamma irradiated to prevent sprouting and is also sprayed with Maleic Hydrazide to extend shelf life. All imported garlic is fumigated with Methyl Bromide by AQIS on arrival in Australia”. http://www.australiangarlic.com.au/about.html. Here the language of pollutants is captured in the chemical words employed. 2  See, for example, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-05-18/chinese-garlic-moves-localproduce-debate-to-brisbane-markets/6477058.

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the experience of eating together as “the coming together for a shared meal … and the socialization mediated (which) thereby promotes the overcoming of the sheer naturalism of eating”. Eating alone, a feature of the contemporary world that is all pervasive, and the inverse of eating together at a shared table, is a key aspect of contemporary cultural life. At the same time as delocalisation has meant that food has become separated from place, so too have people become more separated from each other. More people eat alone more often—at home, in airplanes, places of work, in cars, and in restaurants. This reduction in the commensal eating experience is magnified by contemporary lifestyles where food is available almost everywhere and at any time. At the other end of the spectrum, there can be an almost cultural obsession with food and a hedonistic focus on the pleasures of eating, both of which are manifest in numerous ways. When we explore the multiple threads of this overwhelming food narcissism as is evident in the huge growth in food programming on television, there is clearly much about the contemporary moment that has led to this. Goody (1982) has argued that food and eating are fundamentally about power, and that cooking and the production of food items have to be related to the distribution of power, goods and authority on a global scale. As power has become both more apparent and more tangible globally, food fetishism has risen. As I argue, eating is not only about power, but is also deeply entwined with the sets of social relations that we are part of. Food has diversified faster and we are more angst ridden about it. We are also more concerned about food and weight; food and travel; and food and ingesting the other’s diseases. That is, as food from diverse cultures of the world has entered our worlds, we have become increasingly more anxious about eating. It is not just food but the act of eating, where we eat and how we eat that have become areas of increasing concern as Probyn (2000: 12) has so persuasively argued. That is, the more we separate from other groups in terms of food consumption, the more we are able to, and are willed to, both connect with our own and individualise our eating. One of the most profound changes that has occurred is the delinking of place from specific food items. As Ian Cook and Philip Crang (1996: 140) have suggested, foods not only arise from particular places and sites but are also put to work in the making of those places, and thus have become important in the place-making experience. That is foods are actively employed in the making of place through the imagination of different groups and through their sense of embeddedness in the local (see Chou

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and Platt, Chap. 9, this volume). Right at this moment, different regions in the world have worked assiduously to define their local food as having an ‘intangible cultural heritage’. Di Giovine and Brulotte (2014: 2) have reported that people in many regions in the world are increasing their focus on applying for UNESCO classifications of food as intangible cultural heritage with numerous countries identifying their cuisines this way. Thus, French cuisine, Viennese coffee culture, gingerbread in Croatia, the ‘Mediterranean diet’ (from Italy, Spain, Greece, Morocco, Portugal, Cyprus and Croatia), Washoku (the traditional dietary cultures of the Japanese), traditional Mexican cuisine and Turkish coffee, are all seen as ‘intangible cultural heritage’. The notion of terroir, which is a French term meaning ‘earth’ or ‘soil’, is important in this context and has been transferred from its specific use in the wine industry to food. It refers to the unique qualities conferred upon food or wine by its location, which might refer to the weather, the soil, the features of the landscape and the geology of a particular place. Terroir also encapsulates the notion that the very particular configuration of all these aspects of location mean that it is unlikely to occur in that formation anywhere else on earth. This idea of provenance might also refer to the specific ways in which communities have transformed and manipulated their local landscape and environment (Brulotte and Di Giovine 2014: 6–7). However, with the global flow and movement of things, and as place has been delinked from food so profoundly, then terroir is lost or the very precise and specific notion of place is abandoned, meaning not only the makeup of the soil and the local geology but the weather pattern and local climate, and all the aspects of a place that distinguish one area of land from another, disappear (Sutton 2001: 216). What has been happening in the terroir identifications is, just as the global swirling of food items has reached dizzying proportions, so has the mutually defining nature of place and taste become more entrenched as a reaction to this movement. Although terroir deals with land-based associations, something that few writers have focused upon is the relationship between seafood and specific areas in the ocean. Merroir, referring to this connectivity and affinity of seafoods to areas of coastline or ocean, is a word that seems to have first been used in the Seattle Times in 2003.3 Probyn (2014: 3) has further discussed the notion of merroir or sea-based identifications that give each 3  http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20030314&slug =ptaste16.

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specific watery environment its particular flavour. However, as seafood is being more and more farmed from aquaculture, some suggestions are that it is now approximately 42% of the seafood eaten in the world (FAO 2014), then the idea that seafood is closely connected to the area that it is caught is being radically altered. Clearly the links between the sea and the food that comes from it is being further and further delinked at the same time as the connection between foods and landscape is being broken. Adaptation of so-called traditional eating patterns is also interesting and demonstrates the ways that the boundaries around particular cuisines are locally fluid. In my own work in Vietnam (Thomas 2004), I have argued that food and styles of eating have become the predominant markers of social change for the Vietnamese in both Vietnam and in the diaspora.4 In post-socialist Vietnam the transition to a market economy has allowed for a huge growth in the number of restaurants and cafés, and in the north, a return to an earlier style of cooking. There is only the slightest whiff of glamour in foreign goods, and mostly these are not everyday food items, but chocolates, cheese and wine—items that are seen as ‘additional’ to the everyday. The intense interest and emphasis on food as embodied pleasure has meant that it has come to stand for the transition away from a heavily state-controlled economy. The new configurations of family and friendship are being framed by newly available ways of ‘eating out’, which are both a means of social display and distinction as well as an indicator of the tensions between reform and festivity within an authoritarian nation-­ state struggling to define itself in a globalising world. The surging movement of people around the world away from their particular terroir and merroir has meant further disruption in notions of food cultures. So, for example, at the same time as food in Vietnam is undergoing rapid transformation so too has the Vietnamese diaspora generationally changed its eating patterns. Although there has been a focus in the literature on food in the diaspora that emphasises the nostalgic and recuperative elements of ‘migrant food’, I have argued that food is the prime mechanism of intercultural engagement for each diasporic generation. For older Vietnamese, Vietnamese restaurants and barbecues have been the sites of interplay between cultural ‘tradition’ and innovation, and between Australianness and Vietnameseness, and these interstitial places continue to be important for younger Vietnamese. Within this established 4  A version of sections of this chapter can be found in my 2004 paper, “Transitions in Taste in Vietnam and the Diaspora”, The Australian Journal of Anthropology 15(1): 54–67.

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framework of cross-cultural interaction, for Vietnamese youth the social settings of ‘ethnic food’, eaten at home and shared with family, have been grafted onto a sociality of eating fast food. This melding together of both invention and convention, of transgression and ordinariness provides the background against which young people from migrant backgrounds are reinvigorating the social spaces of food consumption and in the process both re-enchanting and destabilising the notion of migrant food (see Buccini, Chap. 5, this volume). The ‘restaurant’ and the ‘café’ have in many ways come to symbolise many of the aspects of change in relation to food and eating. Places to have a coffee and to eat out, from the coffee pop-up store, the café, the fast food establishment to the fine dining restaurant, have become the sites in which public and private boundaries are reconfigured as people’s more private selves get lived out in public space (see Finkelstein 1989 and Buccini, Chap. 5, this volume). The ultimate cup of coffee, or eating out at Mirazur in France, Noma in Copenhagen, or Gaggan in Bangkok5 or drinking the fine wines of France, Italy, Spain or the US, reveals the way in which food and drinks have become fetishised but also the way that the travel undertaken by people around the world has heightened the engagement with different foods, at the same time as food has become an essential element of the travel experience. The ubiquity of MasterChef has more to do with food as a performance of the self or as an art practice than it is about eating and drinking with family and friends. The impressions and encounters of the global tourist indicates that some foods have become the focus of interest and transformation as tourists engage with the ‘local’ travel experience. Food for the tourist is often the way that the local is fully engaged and embodied. Take, for example, Llama meat curry in Peru, which has emerged as a particular touristic product that people indulge in to express their understanding of the relationship between place and taste, and is something that has emerged recently and which has little association with what local people eat (Brulotte and Di Giovine 2014: 6). So it is not just that travel brings people in direct contact with the ‘authentic’ foods of different locales but that travel itself seeks to continually mark out the ‘authentic’ over the ‘inauthentic’ food experience (See Chou and Platt, Chap. 9, this volume).

5  Three of the ten restaurants in the world as listed in The World’s 50 Best https://www. theworlds50best.com/list/1-50.

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The Speed of Food Change Food has undoubtedly sped up in terms of its passage around the globe— food change is heightening, all due to food transportation, the movement of people around the globe, the internet and heightened communications. I was struck by the recent story of a man in the United States who had lived outside society for 27 years, in a mountain hut where he never spoke to anyone for the entire period, living on the fringes of communities, but where he had eaten a diverse range of foods and had noticed the foods change over time. Of all the things he remarked upon in entering people’s homes for the 27 years was the profound change in eating practices.6 This story reveals one of the most remarkable changes in our embodied everyday life—the transformation in diets (See Wilk, Chap. 3, this volume). At the same time as the speed of food change is intensifying, so has the lure of slow cooking, and the non-speeded up ways of engaging with food culture. It is not just eating that has changed but the technology of communicating it is transforming as well. The ways in which the globalised food system operates has created a foodscape where the place of origin is no longer able to be determined, and hence, as a reaction to this, there has been a subsequent return to ‘localism’ and so-called slow food (Willis et al. 2014: 153). That is, at the same time as food has become deterritorialised and disconnected from its place of emergence, so have the very local “slow food, locavore, and ‘zero-kilometre’ movements emerged from the … terroir concerns” (Di Giovine and Brulotte 2014: 8). As working lives have changed, people do not spend the amount of time they used to in elaborate food preparation (Delamont 1995: 39). As a reaction to this speeding up of food preparation, the emphasis on slow food also brings us back to the perceived goodness and memorialisation of the past. The provenance of food products has been a key tool in marketing in the contemporary moment which is obsessed with the media (Light 2014: 214) and where the definition of ‘local food’ has become involved in the marketing passion for information about food. The number of descriptors on food products has intensified—where it is from, what has been added, who has made it and whether or not it is organic have all become part of a marketing strategy (Tuters and Kera 2014: 244–245). The nature of the contemporary moment means that it is increasingly difficult for the food of particular sites to be wholly local as it is also problematic to define any 6

 http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201409/the-last-true-hermit.

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global food or style of eating as dominant (ibid.: 245). ‘Slow food’ has clearly also been a reaction to the anxiety surrounding the speed of the changes in diet and the intensification in the movement of food. The shifts in alimentary cultures has been described by Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2016), when he argues that as food preservation and transportation has improved, there has been a delinking of cultural influences from food. By making food from anywhere available all year around, the relationship between food and culture have become confused. Globalisation has sped up the processes of dietary change, but at the same time, surprisingly, local food identifications have intensified. That is, as people’s global eating becomes more exaggerated, the local group-­ based associations become more concentrated. The movement of populations around the globe—migrants, refugees, labour movements as well as mass tourism—has intensified the travel of food types and with it the mechanisation of food. The move to large-scale farms and automated food production is happening all over the globe, as the movement of food intensifies. At the same time, the insecurity and unpredictability of food in many parts of the world is escalating. No matter how much the desire to mark out a food ‘territory’ becomes more urgent to particular groups, the interwoven nature of food cultures has meant that the idea of a unitary culture, always problematic, becomes even more so. As I have argued in the case of the Vietnamese, the scarcity of food over decades has been replaced by an emerging focus on bodily pleasure rather than bodily discipline as the country has moved away from an ascetic, carceral past of the communist regime, into a sensuous lively present, and the efflorescence of eating pleasure has seen a remarkable flourishing of food cultures. The notion then of a single ‘authentic’ food tradition in Vietnam is clouded by the history of a dramatically changed diet. When Vietnamese people migrate to Australia they remember Vietnam nostalgically as a place of sensory pleasure, where food tastes were not only more ‘authentic’ but were qualitatively better. Clearly food provides an extraordinary sensory palette upon which we can elaborate our cultural connections through its embodied displays of colour, odour, texture and taste, and through the remarkably diverse ways that these can be combined and expressed (Counihan and Van Esterik 1997a: 2). This constant ability to shift and change food intake to diversify the embodied experience means that food cultures have the potential to be highly selective and everchanging.

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Gender and Food Change How is gender marking out new territories of food and eating? There is a robust literature on the relations between gender and food which indicates that eating has become a major lens through which to view contemporary approaches to gender (See Nielsen, Chap. 7, this volume). It is apparent that the provision of food for the family is embedded in ideas about the caring relations that are centred on women and that there are significant emotional components to these notions of care (cf., DeVault 1991; Lupton 1996). This focus on women as the provider of food has persisted to such an extent that globally women continue to undertake the greater proportion of food work. It is important to analyse cooking quite differently from eating, and domestic cooking from cooking outside the home. As women continue to undertake the bulk of domestic cooking in every society in the world, professional chefs in much of the world are still predominantly male. This divergence between the experience at home and that outside has to be an area where we undertake more research. We know that rural women around the world, through their role in carrying out most of the food processing at home, play a critical role in their family’s health and the diversity of food stuffs available for consumption (see www.fao.org/gender). It is clear that while women’s influence over the preparation of food may provide an avenue for power, overall social hierarchies may be solidified through women’s ongoing provision of food. As the world of eating has been transforming so too have the gender relations embedded so profoundly in those activities. While food preparation has been historically and ethnographically located within the domain of women, it is within and upon women’s bodies that power differentials deeply involved in our relations to food are played out. In many societies that have been studied it is apparent that “men eat first, best, and most” (Counihan 1999: 2), and this continues to be the case in much of the world. This privileging of men’s needs has meant that women’s activities are often centred on the provision of food for the males around them at the same time as diet restriction is often associated with an idealised femininity (Lupton 1996). Around the globe gender is also imbricated into the ‘eating out’ experience, as men’s economic power may signal that the restaurant experience is also deeply gendered. That is, as men’s average earnings are very much higher than women’s, men can more often afford to take others to restaurants, to buy the most prestigious food items and to display their wealth and power through eating.

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That women have often been the guardians of food but have also been the cultural focus of an embodied sexualised appearance has meant that food, weight and sexuality are often closely linked. Women often have a troubled relationship to food with a significant number of women in cycles of dieting and abnormal eating patterns, and of hypercontrol of their food intake (Bordo 1993). However as gender is a major arena of transformation, and as gender relations are changing at the same time as diets change, then gender distinctions in eating and cooking get marked out in new ways such as through so-called eating disorders. The ways in which gender becomes entangled with the ways of eating have often been described through the ‘problems’ of eating including anorexia, which are seen as predominantly located in the domain of women. As Counihan (1999: 107) has written, “because of the mandatory nature of food-sharing, food refusal and fasting have powerful social and symbolic weight”. Hence, the refusal of food by women can be seen to be a means of embodying an opposition to the oppressive dominance of male-oriented society. At the same time fasting can be a means of distancing oneself from all forms of social connectivity. Eating therefore is a key area for control, and rejecting food may become a path to empowerment and freedom. The refusal of sexuality and the associated denial of reproductivity have become a shared characteristic of people who fast to an excessive degree (Counihan 1999: 117). One’s appetite thus becomes a powerful symbol of engagement or rejection of others. Control is thus not only in the domain of eating but also in the area of sexuality as Probyn (2000) has convincingly argued. The image of women’s bodies as objects of beauty to be admired with an emphasis on slenderness means that women’s thin bodies may be seen as being delinked from reproduction. These intersections between sexuality and eating have been explored extensively elsewhere and clearly the relationship between food and gender is complex. It is indeed apparent that any discussion of food and eating should accommodate a gendered dimension to encompass the ways in which gender continues to be a key rhythm over which eating is played out.

The Senses and Food Change I have touched on how gender has marked out the social changes occurring with food. I want to now briefly examine how food and eating is also marked out by the senses (see Nielsen, Chap. 7, this volume). There is now a significant literature that has explored the way that eating displays

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social difference and distinguishes social groups, but as Sutton (2010: 213) has pointed out there are very few authors who have analysed these differences in terms of the senses. Constance Classens (2005) has argued that the senses encode social values. Here the arrangements in which we place these sensory experiences reveal that all the senses are placed in careful hierarchies of meaning and value depending on our cultural predispositions (Howes 2005: 3). While the sensory experiences of eating are often seen as enhancing the shared experience of food, there are also ways in which they appear to demonstrate the differences between groups. My work with the Vietnamese in Australia revealed the complex ways in which garlic on breath is often felt to mark out cultural difference. That is, while they were often aware of the negative connotations in countries other than Vietnam of garlic emitted from the body, the Vietnamese also proudly grow and eat it to indicate their deep feeling of pleasure and satisfaction in being Vietnamese, which is very much associated with eating Vietnamese food. Odour is a strong indicator of cultural difference, and as it may escape from the body, also means that odour can easily become involved in subtle cultural negotiations about acceptance and cultural norms. So an odour which is exceedingly pleasant and sweet in one cultural environment may be negatively perceived in another. The Durian fruit is an example of this, where it is banned in upmarket hotels and in Singapore subways and representative of an extreme form of ‘otherness’. That the skin is thought to emit odours that mark out what we have eaten is indicative of the fact that the senses are linked closely to our bodies (Howes 2005: 1), particularly taste and smell which are seen as those which most closely belong to food. Food such as Durian fruit or fish sauce may ‘smell’ of cultural difference and otherness, and of a particular class (ibid.: 10). These sensemaking aspects of food have also played a role in the relationship of food to specific places in that odours have a capacity to remind one of different places and times (DeLind 2006: 121). In the contemporary buzz around the ‘latest’ in food experiences, flavour sensations have been taken to an extreme. For example, at a London restaurant, diners can order food that comes with instructions for their mobile phones which provides sounds to accompany the meal. The eating experience “is the latest example of a growing movement known as multisensory dining” (Hui 2013). So here is an extreme of food experience which is likely to slowly embed itself more generally into other cultural experiences. What were perhaps the subtle ways in which the senses were imbricated into

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eating sensibilities are now fully expressed by food faddists. This may seem a minority experience; however, the sensory dining experience is rapidly impacting on eating experience around the globe.

Food and Power The increasing inevitability of the obsessiveness directed towards food leads us to a complex variety of power imbalances. When people have studied periods of famine they reveal the way that it almost always is associated with a surge of unrest (Arnold 1988: 3), and see access to food as the means to embed divergent and distinctive access to power across groups (Counihan 1999: 2). Goody (1982) has revealed the way in which gender and class differences are maintained through differential access to food and the provision of food supplies, both adequate and inadequate. In the Syrian refugee crisis in Europe, news reports indicate how fleeing refugees were “fed like animals in a pen” when Hungarian police threw food at them.7 Here we get to the heart of the issue as access to food is one mechanism for the power differential but the other is how much a particular group defines itself through food. It is not only what we decide to eat that brings with it a power mismatch, but the fact that others may not be able to eat what we do. A clear example of the impact of the global desire for certain products is the taste for quinoa, a grain crop grown in the Andes, and one which has become ‘trendy’ to consume in much of the world due to its apparent nutrition value (see Wilk, Chap. 3, this volume). The year 2013 was declared the ‘International Year of Quinoa’ by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, which indicates the increasing attention that this grain has attracted. At the same time as quinoa has appeared in supermarkets around the world with the consequent soaring of its price, there have been an increasing number of land disputes where it is grown and growers have tried to exert local control. Importantly too there have been problems growing enough of it for the regular consumers of quinoa in the Andean countries where it is produced (cf., Collins 2013). Quinoa, chia seeds and goji berries are all examples of food which have become food ‘phenomena’ recently, yet the impact of this popularity in the areas where these products are locally grown has meant a range of impacts 7  http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-11/asylum-seekers-in-hungary-fed-like-animalsvolunteers-say/6770016.

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including tension over land, as local consumers of the products find it too expensive to eat what was once a staple in their diets. The availability of food and water and access to these are often seen as a basic human right, and the lack of access to these items is viewed as the key indicator of powerlessness. The more marginal a people are economically, the more they may suffer from chronic food shortages. Sometimes cultural groups only eat the “despised cuts or innards, some of which may serve as the foundations of entire cultural cuisines, as pig’s feet, chitterlings, and cracklings do in the African-American culture of the southern US” as Counihan and Van Esterik have outlined (1997a: 3). Thus, it is that food choices have become the marker of social status, an effect that has become more pronounced with the advance of capitalism and the market economy. Cwietka (2002: 3) has argued that “As conflict and social consumption often find articulation in social display, of which conspicuous consumption is a magnificent example, individual food choices serve as perfect indicators of social standing and mark the distinction between groups within society”. That is, eating has become the mechanism through which societies mark out the complexity of their relationship to the changes in their worlds and demonstrate that they continually desire to obtain influence and possibility through their food choices (Appadurai 1998: 31). In this context, food becomes increasingly turned into a means of differentiating groups of people and in creating imagined worlds to a much greater degree than was ever the case before. Just as people are diversifying their food intake so too has the accumulation of food waste heightened. So, for example, when I was first in Vietnam there were no garbage removal processes, and as wealth accumulated and came to more people so did waste grow. Now the poorest Vietnamese look through waste to find the next meal. And so one of the most tragic images of the contemporary moment has come to be an individual searching through waste to find food, a symbol of disconnection and non-human experience. The richly diverse reasons for waste-picking have been analysed by Bryson (2014) in her study of those who live at a major waste site in Cambodia to indicate that the search for food is only one small aspect of the reasons why people search through waste for a living. Nevertheless, any analysis of the efflorescence of food cultures must at the same time explore the experience of those who are left hungry and in need of food.

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Conclusion Given these impacts of the global on our eating styles and our relations to food in this moment of change with the intensification of interaction of tastes and flavours, this chapter has developed the idea of how, through food and eating, one identifies with a particular culture and how the markers of taste become obscured by the swirl of competing desires and whims. As Levi-Strauss (1963: 89) has argued in his oft-quoted and simple but lucid comment, “food is good to think”, indicating how valuable food is in representing the vast array of ideas and conceptualisations that link the wider world back into the body. In this chapter I have tried to unravel the key contemporary theoretical debates in the field of food, identity and social change, and in doing so hopefully have revealed the deeply connected way that food continues to engage us viscerally with other people, with other cultures, and with all landscapes and environments of the globe. The speeding up of food movements, travel, the extremes of taste and the senses in new eating experiences, and the mixing and mingling of tastes, are all testament to the fact that global eating has transformed over the last decades in a dramatic manner but also in very specific ways. The quest for both the food industry and consumers to find novelty and the speed of social change have together impacted on the ways that we eat, but people the world over have also reacted to these changes by eating different things in different ways, and in different places, which has led to the continual remaking of specific ethnic characteristics of food. This flow back and forth between the global with all that encompasses to the local, the specific and the ethnically defined has intensified and become a remarkably persistent feature of the present moment. At the same time as anxiety has arisen in relation to food and eating, from the impact of food anxiety and our sick oceans on seafood to the polluting of land, so too has the focus been harnessed back to the local, and the celebration of terroir and merroir. This swinging backwards and forwards between the local and the global does not remove us from the reality of food as a key arbiter of a sense of place. Food is carrying different symbolic weight than in the past as it does not as clearly mark out the seasons which are changing due to both climate change and the rapid passage of food between different climatic environments. In addition, periods of celebration, observances or festivities have been reconfigured and have thus influenced eating patterns (Gofton 1990: 92). Food for others carries more symbolic weight than ever, firstly signifying our relationships with

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our bodies, but then also, our relationships to others. Issues of ageing, health and illness, of body weight and shape as well as the purity of foodstuffs entering into us, all indicate the continuing centrality of the body in relation to any discussion of food (Bell and Valentine 1997: 13). It is the body on which these larger social and political issues are played out and reconfigured in increasingly intense ways. The central conundrum as to why food has attained such a privileged position in contemporary social analysis is understood by the ways in which food stands as a marker between our bodies and the world, being at the boundaries between our interiors and the external world, and also as the bridge between these two fields (Atkinson 1983: 11). In essence, food has become more and more imbricated into plays of power as it both unites and divides people. At the same time food is no longer the unequivocal marker of cultural difference. Food attracts a complex range of activities and relationships around it. It allows us to explore many of the boundaries between us and the wider social world that we live within, and it is the everydayness of it that enables us to analyse the dimensions of social change in every society in which we live, travel and work. Food, with its extraordinary ability to convey meaning, continues to be the window onto experience, and it is through eating as a medium, through our mouths, that we engage with others, internalise the outside world and construct an understanding of who we are. In the contemporary moment, the fact that who we are is in such disarray means that what we eat and how we eat is increasingly chaotic and fractured. Furthermore, food and eating will undoubtedly become even more disordered and tumultuous in the future.

References Appadurai, Arjun. 1998. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Arnold, David. 1988. Famine: Social Crisis and Historical Change (New Perspectives on the Past). London and New York: Basil Blackwell. Atkinson, Paul. 1983. Eating Virtue. In The Sociology of Food and Eating, ed. Anne Murcott, 9–17. Aldershot: Gower. Bell, David, and Gill Valentine. 1997. Consuming Geographies: We are What We Wat. London and New York: Routledge. Bordo, Susan. 1993. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Brulotte, Rhonda L., and Michael A. Di Giovine. 2014. Edible Identities: Food as Cultural Heritage. London and New York: Ashgate. Bryson, Cindy M.D. 2014. A Valuable Life: Seeing Transformative Practice among Phnom Penh’s Waste Pickers. PhD thesis, Australian National University. Classens, Constance. 2005. McLuhan in the Rainforest: The Sensory Worlds of Oral Cultures. In Empires of the Senses: The Sensual Cultural Reader, ed. David Howes, 147–163. Oxford and New York: Berg. Collins, Dan. 2013. Quinoa Brings Riches to the Andes. The Guardian, 15 January. Cook, Ian, and Philip Crang. 1996. The World on a Plate: Displacement and Geographical Knowledge. Journal of Material Culture 1 (2): 131–153. Counihan, Carole M. 1999. Introduction—Food and Gender: Identity and Power. In Food and Gender: Identity and Power, ed. Carole M. Counihan and Steven L. Kaplan, 1–11. New York: Harwood. Counihan, Carole M., and Penny Van Esterik. 1997a. Introduction. In Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. Carole M.  Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, 1–7. New York and London: Routledge. Cwiertka, Katarzyna. 2002. Introduction. In Asian Food: The Global and the Local, ed. Katarzyna Cwiertka and Boudewijn Walraven, 1–15. Surrey: Curzon Press. Delamont, Sara. 1995. Appetites and Identities: An Introduction to the Social Anthropology of Western Europe. London and New York: Routledge. DeLind, Laura. 2006. Of Bodies, Place, and Culture: Re-Situating Local Food. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 19 (2): 121–146. DeVault, Marjrie L. 1991. Feeding the Family: The Social Organisation of Caring as Gendered Work. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Duruz, Jean. 2010. Four Dances of the Sea: Cooking “Asian” as Embedded Cosmopolitanism. In Globalization, Food and Social Identities in the Asia Pacific Region, ed. James Farrer, 1–19. Tokyo: Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture. Finkelstein, Joanne. 1989. Dining Out: A Sociology of Modern Manners. New York: New York University Press. Food and Agriculture Organisation. 2014. The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2014. Sofia. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish. London: Pantheon. Gofton, Leslie. 1990. Food Fears and Time Famines: Some Social Aspects of Choosing and Using Foods. Why We Eat What We Eat, British Nutrition Foundation Bulletin 15 (1): 79–95. Goody, Jack. 1982. Cooking, Cuisine and Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Howes, David. 2005. Introduction: Empires of the Senses. In Empires of the Senses: The Sensual Cultural Reader, ed. David Howes, 1–20. Oxford and New York: Berg.

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Hui, Ann. 2013. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/food-­and-­wine/food-­ trends/the-­5-­senses-­of-­flavour-­how-­colour-­and-­sound-­can-­make-­your-­dinner-­ taste-­better/article9957597/. Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1963 [1962]. Totemism. Boston: Beacon Press. Light, Ann. 2014. The Allure of Provenance: Tracing Food through User-­ generated Production Information. In Eat, Cook, Grow: Mixing Human Computer Interactions with Human-Food Interactions, ed. Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, Marcus Foth, and Greg Hearn, 213–226. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Lupton, Deborah. 1996. Food, the Body and the Self. London: Sage. Pelto, Gretel H., and Pertti J.  Pelto. 1983. Diet and Delocalization: Dietary Changes since 1750. Journal of Interdisciplinary History XIV (2): 507–528. Pollan, Michael. 2006. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin Press. Probyn, Elspeth. 2000. Carnal Appetites: Food, Sex, Identities. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2014. Oyster Tasting. Unpublished Manuscript, pp. 1–29. Simmel, Georg. 1994. The Sociology of the Meal. (Translated by M.  Symons). Food and Foodways 5 (4): 345–350. Sutton, David. 2001. Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory. Oxford: Berg. ———. 2010. Food and the Senses. Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 209–223. Thomas, Mandy. 2004. Transitions in Taste in Vietnam and the Diaspora. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 15 (1): 54–67. Tomlinson, John. 1999. Globalisation and Culture. Oxford: Polity. Tuters, Marc, and Denise Kera. 2014. Hungry for Data: Metabolic Interaction from Farm to Fork to Phenotype. In Eat, Cook, Grow: Mixing Human Computer Interactions with Human-Food Interactions, ed. Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, Marcus Foth, and Greg Hearn, 243–264. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Willis, Katharine S., Katharina Frosch, and Mirjam Struppek. 2014. Re-Placing Food: Place, Embeddedness and Local Food. In Eat, Cook, Grow: Mixing Human Computer Interactions with Human-Food Interactions, ed. Jaz Hee-­ jeong Choi, Marcus Foth, and Greg Hearn, 153–170. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.

Websites http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20030314&slug =ptaste16. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-­05-­18/chinese-­garlic-­moves-­local-­produce­debate-­to-­brisbane-­markets/6477058. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-­09-­11/asylum-­seekers-­in-­hungary-­fed-­like-­animals-­

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http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-­09-­11/asylum-­seekers-­in-­hungary-­fed-­like­animals-­volunteers-­say/6770016. http://www.australiangarlic.com.au/about.html. http://www.gq.com/news-­politics/newsmakers/201409/the-­last-­true-­hermit. https://www.theworlds50best.com/list/1-­50.

CHAPTER 3

Fish, Identity, and Social Change Richard Wilk

Introduction My anthropology of food course, like many others, begins with Lévi-­ Strauss, Mary Douglas, and Pierre Bourdieu, and then moves on to Sidney Mintz on sugar, with short excursions into Foucault and the Frankfurt school along the way. Often this introduction comes as something of a shock for the students who are expecting to learn about Cambodians eating bugs, but it is very useful to get students to recognize that food is a fundamental way to understand the politics of culture and the foundation of the social order. They can see how an infinite variety of meals are generated by a relatively small set of grammatical rules and understand how basic dichotomies of food are grounded in more general structural models of nature versus culture, male and female, and so on. Bourdieu introduces them to the way that unequal endowments of economic, social, and cultural capital structure food and taste.

R. Wilk (*) Anthropology Department, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Chou, S. Kerner (eds.), Food, Social Change and Identity, Consumption and Public Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84371-7_3

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Unlike the others, the Mintz reading (Sweetness and Power, 1986) explicitly discusses patterns of change over time, the origin, and spread of sugar as part of the European diet, based on an analysis of global capitalism and political economy. He connects the wealth of consumers with the poverty of producers, and political struggles with nutritional regimes. Accepting that capitalism is fundamentally unstable, prone to booms and busts, Mintz still finds and defines general processes of change in diet, showing, for example, how the taste for sugar that began among the British elite and then moved progressively downward to lower ranks of society until sugar became a key part of the industrial workers’ diet. In Mintz’s world, food is contingent, unstable, and in constant motion just like capitalism itself, but at the same time there are regular predictable processes like the downward diffusion of dietary elements, as production increases and prices come down.

The Paradox of Structure and Change Mintz further framed the problem of structure and change in his book Tasting Food Tasting Freedom (1996). He points out that following the structural rules of Douglas, Lévi-Strauss, and Bourdieu, we would predict that people in the United States would never eat raw fish. It violates a number of North American dietary rules, particularly that of separating raw and cooked, and excluding raw meat. During World War II raw fish was closely identified with the hated enemy, the Japanese, and that generation of American men who fought in the war still harbored grudges. Who could have predicted that starting in the 1970s Americans would start to eat raw fish with great enthusiasm? Or that thousands of sushi bars would be scattered across the country in cities and towns large and small? Or that sushi would become such an essential part of the diet that it was carried in almost every large supermarket? For those of us who followed it, the adoption of raw fish happened remarkably quickly, turning something that was quite disgusting first into an exotic gourmet treat for urban yuppies, into an item that appeared in children’s lunchboxes. The transformation could be evidence for a generalization about the proximity of disgust and desire. As Falk (1994) argues, the humor associated with disgust  hints at this proximity, and that though disgust and desire seem to be opposite ends of a scale, the scale is actually a circle that brings the two ends together. Though a structural model separates them with an indelible line, Falk advocates a general principle that it is easier to move from one extreme to

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the other, which suggests to me that the avant-garde is often looking for a particular kind of disgust as a possibility for the next fashion trend. I call this general issue the “Mintz Paradox”: a situation where what seems securely determined by existing structures and rules, changes quickly, like those rapid changes described in catastrophe theory, which happen all at once after a cusp is passed (Arnold 2004). There are many more examples in food, drink, and other cultural fields. Home-distilled moonshine, once the rough drink of the rural poor, became a boutique liquor in the late twentieth-century United States, highly sought after by well-educated drinkers.  This jump from in categories is also a jmp in social class. On a larger scale, the diets of (mining) extractive workers in the nineteenth century, based on simple wheat  biscuits and salted pork, fish, or beef, a diet much despised when issued as a ration to manual laborers, were quickly transformed into a highly valued (and often expensive) nostalgia food in the twentieth century in the form of corned beef, bacon, and salted cod (Wilk 2008). Unlike the trickle-down process that Mintz found in sugar consumption, these foods moved up in rank, which I have generalized under the term promotion (Wilk 2006). The Mintz paradox occurs when these changes happen very quickly but trickling down and promotion are general processes that we can see in any consumer culture. There are many examples from the literature on globalization when expensive imported products are adopted quickly by the cultural  elite. But we also see elites adopting culture from poor people in other countries or ethnic groups, Reggae music for example.  At the moment we have no way of predicting why some kinds of foods get promoted and others trickle-down, whether those changes will be fast or slow. In consumer culture, people are using those very goods to define and assert their own identity, wealth, and cultural capital. This means that while people are trying to improve their own status through consumption, the meaning of foods can change even before the relationship is consummated. For an example think of quinoa, which entered the American food fashion system as an exotic grain demonstrating sophisticated knowledge of indigenous South American cuisines (Mcdonell 2015). Now, quinoa is in every supermarket and you can get quinoa snack bars, quinoa pie crusts, and even yogurt fortified with quinoa. As it was popularized, quinoa quickly lost its cultural capital, and the cutting edge may now have to search out rare colors or varieties of quinoa, or move on to the next underappreciated grain, like teff or fonio, both of which are small-grain grass

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staples from Central and East Africa. Teff has already garnered some attention as a “superfood” because it is the basis for the Ethiopian fermented staple injera. Striving for social position and cultural capital becomes a much more complex task when the value and meaning of food and material culture are themselves changing. In this double game, the symbols of status often lose that status by the time they have trickled down to lower social ranks, the very people who most want to increase their status. As Bourdieu (1984) showed us, the concept of simple social ranks is insufficient as well. Economic capital is distributed in different ways from social and cultural capital. This is very much evident in the world of fine wines or wine collecting, for example. The contrast was made very clear in feudal societies, where merchants were of very low social status, even though they owned a lot of property and controlled the money supply. It might take two or three generations of using that wealth carefully to gain social position and the knowledge of language,  cuisine, art, and dress that is necessary to attain the highest ranks (McCracken 1988). We need to use a good deal of caution in using historical examples however. Given the way that history is written, or prehistory is reconstructed by archaeologists, it can be very difficult to tell rapid change from gradual change. It can also be very difficult to tell what kinds of capital are at play, particularly when the objects themselves are changing in meaning. In a much wider study of time and the way scholars depict time, Zerubavel (1981) says that there are two essentially different modes for depicting the rhythm of cultural change. The first, which he calls legato, depicts a continuous line or curve of change; and the second, a series of short sharp steps. The practice of giving names to periods or particular categories of objects or artifacts can hinder understanding as much as it helps organize long periods of time. This is a variation of the Mintz paradox, that once you define structure, it becomes much more difficult to discuss or understand change, because the units of analysis are already premised on a static model. Structural models have the tendency to force narratives about change into relatively conventional stories of origin, rise and fall, writing the past using a limited number of predetermined story lines. This tendency can also be seen in literature on globalization, which depends upon narratives of progress and modernity, or spreading corruption, conflict, and collapse. Ritzer’s (1993) well-known McDonaldization thesis, for example, explains globalization as the spreading debasement of local and real food, displaced by a mechanical cuisine that reproduces

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“nothingness,” an absence of meaningful taste. This story of decline, mediocrity, and loss of local diversity has been a staple of cultural criticism for thousands of years, usually by members of a cultural elite. The alternative is a narrative of gradual and continuous progress toward higher civilization, or a moral story about total failure and collapse (Pyburn 1998). This is exactly why current controversies about the industrial food system tend to fall into two camps, one that sees continual progress founded in technology and new sources of energy, or imminent starvation in the face of dried up rivers, exhausted soil, and toxic chemicals. The same storylines turn up in long term predictions of the future of food (Belasco 2006).

From Acculturation to Appropriation The limited vision of twentieth-century cultural anthropology had only three models (or perhaps stories would be a better term) for what can happen when cultures come into contact with one another. The more civilized and aggressive global culture could destroy or absorb others, those local or traditional cultures could remain essentially unchanged under the right circumstances, or they could gradually adopt the characteristics of the dominant culture, a process often called acculturation. Cultures that were on the way out might go through a period of “revitalization,” but this was just a pause in the slide toward oblivion. By the late twentieth century anthropologists developed a new vocabulary which included terms like resistance, hybridity, creolization, and appropriation, as it became clear that many non-Western cultures were refusing to disappear, and that alternative ideas about progress and modernity were becoming commonplace. Perhaps the most innovative was Hannerz’s (1987) idea of creolization, which allowed for a kind of mixing that creates new fusions, rather than displacing singular cultural identities (see also Pieterse 2003). Although creolization is a process of mixture while maintaining continuity, the direction of cultural flow is usually from the dominant global, colonial, or metropolitan culture to the local, and local cultural elites are the ones at the vanguard of creolization. Appropriation in contrast can go in both directions. One culture effectively borrows elements from the other, but in the process absorbing them and neutralizing the alien by transforming it into something familiar. Rather than the strict bounded units so characteristic of earlier anthropology and ethnology, appropriation assumes that culture is flexible, adaptable, and far from uniform or sharply bounded. Many scholars, for

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example, have argued that Japanese culture has been able, for thousands of years to take in food, dance, religion, and a host of other cultural elements from abroad, without losing its continuity and identity. Baseball did not turn the Japanese into Americans, but instead baseball became Japanese (Whiting 1977). In a similar way, as Tobin (1992) demonstrates, French cuisine absorbed many other regional and international cuisines as sauces, so for example we have sauce Lyonnaise, Normande, Hollandaise, Espagnole, and even sauce Africaine. In many situations, appropriation reveals the asymmetry of power, for only the dominant cultures in the global arena are capable of choosing and appropriating whatever they want from the cultures of the world. Other people inevitably suffer cultural imperialism, since they do not have the economic or cultural power to resist the flow of foreign products and culture. Compare the position of French cuisine in the world when France was a global power, with today’s France, with protests against McDonald’s, and the Academy Française working to root out foreign words from the language to keep it “pure.” North Americans are not worried that their children are being “Sinified” when they eat Chinese food, but in Belize parents have a legitimate fear that their children are growing up to prefer Chinese fried chicken, pizza, ramen, and Pringles rather than local foods like  rice and beans (see also  Weismantel 1989). Governments and civic organizations can revive and fund local cuisines and other domesticated aspects of indigenous cultures like music art and dance, but these expressions of “ethnicity Inc.” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009) can become dangerous to governments when cultural revival leads to  indigenous land claims, greater political power and representation, or control of dams, oil wells, and other forms of “development.” The issue here comes down to power, but also a kind of confidence that can be undercut by anxiety and fear. A group or nation that has strong cultural institutions, including a national cuisine and some degree of food security and sovereignty, has less to fear about an “invasion” of foreign food (see Johannes, Chap. 6, this volume). Appadurai (1988) touches on this point in his much-cited paper on Indian cookbooks, but not all cookbooks provide the security of a recognized cuisine. In Belize most of the recent well-publicized cookbooks are oriented toward cooking for tourists; some are written by foreigners, and none explain why some dishes are given the national label as Belizean food, while others are categorized as belonging to a particular ethnic group.

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These issues are echoed in the literature on invented traditions and authenticity which were common themes in early food studies, and which remain the preoccupation of food television and culinary tourism, constantly in search of “real food” (see Chou and Platt, Chap. 9, this volume). The opposite position celebrates fusion, but the question remains of whether or not the fusion replaces previous identities, or whether the fusion just occurs at boundaries between pre-existing traditions. Only the first kind of fusion should be labeled creolization, because it is quite different. In the cultures of the Caribbean, creolization has an even more specific meaning, referring to a synthetic culture built from disparate elements in a new and mostly empty habitat. When Europeans first arrived in the Caribbean, their diseases and enslavement of the indigenous Arawaks and Caribs effectively destroyed their culture within a single generation. Over the next 350 years Europeans and their slaves of diverse origins crafted an entirely new and synthetic creole culture. Of course we can trace the African or European origins of many individual elements, but the culture and its cuisine are much more than the sum of the parts (Mintz 2010; Burton 1997; Higman 2008). Both fusion and creolization have given us intellectual tools for understanding the flow of foodstuffs, technologies, recipes, and modes of eating in this era of globalization. On the other hand, the study of globalization has also weighed us down with a lot of millennial political projections about flat worlds, clashes of civilization, and the inevitable McDonaldization of everything. How can we generate and understand repeated patterns in the dynamics of food, without falling into bland generalizations, like the “Columbian Exchange?” (Which has turned out to be a dramatic oversimplification of an uneven and highly contingent sequence of events over 500 years according to Kiple 2013).

Some Familiar Patterns Food has particular properties as a consumer good: much more than a source of nutrition, it has always been a social and bodily pleasure. In contemporary consumer culture, this makes food into another component of the entertainment industry. From very early in human history, the feast was a unique institution, which connected food consumption with affect, turning what could be an intensely private activity into a social event that was valued for itself as much as for the reason for each celebration (Jones

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2008). Feasts, moreover, are associated with excess, and the fare was generally exceptional in quantity and/or quality. We generally assume that the poor and food insecure are living on the edge of starvation so they eat for sustenance, not entertainment. Students of poverty, however, point out that luxury can be much more important for the poor than it is for those who can regularly afford it (Taylor 2013). Even the Soviet Union, dedicated to a classless society, began to produce popular luxuries like champagne and caviar (Gronow 2004). Poor people still have preferences and may be very picky about the way their food is prepared. Kekchi people in southern Belize showed me that when you are eating mostly tortillas every day, you learn to taste the subtle differences between them and favor those produced by one woman over another (see also Weiss 1996). In consumer capitalism food has become an important part of the entertainment industry, intended to be fun, absorbing, endlessly complicated, and meaningful. Like other entertainment industries then, fashion demands constant change, and all fashion systems depend on a division of the population into avant-garde, followers, and resisters. Fashion cycles require active producers willing to research and experiment, an advertising and promotion industry, and constant awareness of the past, which is continuously recycled. Consumers participate in a fashion system, often driving it forward, because the basic task of consumption in a fashion system is negotiating the balancing act of fitting in and standing out time (Simmel 1902). Fitting in means wanting and consuming the same things as  everybody else. If this was the only thing driving consumer culture, it would be static and unchangeable. Because people are simultaneously trying to stand out, to express their individuality as well as their loyal membership in a social group, there is an inherent dynamism and disequilibrium in fashion. In order to be alive fashion must move; frozen and preserved it dies. Fashion leaders are not the only ones who have their eyes out for the next big thing; as Cairns and Johnston argue (2015), everyone in a fashion system, whether they know it or not, is involved in a constant exercise of calibration. This means keeping an eye on your reference group directly and with mass and social media, judging how to balance between fitting in and standing out. Miller and Woodward (2010) show how denim is an unusually versatile fabric, so ordinary that people rarely focus on it; camouflage for those trying to fit in, but also enough difference to make it possible to stand out. Staple foods like rice and beans in the Caribbean have exactly the same properties. Almost everyone likes their national or

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ethnic version of rice and beans, and they also have specific personal preferences for their own favorite rice and beans, its texture, condiments, the crust at the bottom of the pan, the style of gravy, moistness, and so on (Wilk and Barbosa 2011). To this point my goal has been fairly abstract, taking an entire cuisine as the unit of analysis. The complex texture, velocity, and direction of changes in food systems also have an intense specificity of time and place, which can be analyzed by looking at the changing values and perceived tastes of specific foodstuffs. Staying with a particular kind of foodstuff reduces the complexity that is injected when comparing cases at the level of particular dishes, modes of preparation, cooking and spicing, or the sequences and social contexts of meals (Wilk 2015). As Murcott (2013) warns us, lumping together these different units of analysis under the label food or foodways leads to a snarl of confusion rather than clarity.

Something Fishy I am currently working on a research project tracing the edibility and prices of different kinds of fish in different countries, part of a larger project conducted with Shingo Hamada (Hamada and Wilk 2018). As a lifelong angler, I also have a lot of practical experience in catching and eating many varieties of fish in both fresh and saltwater. While fishing in different places, I began to notice that species considered choice edibles in one place are rejected as inedible “trash” fish elsewhere. For example, the Tarpon is a highly valued “game” or “sport” fish in the southern United States where it is also considered inedible. But when I started fishing in Belize in the 1970s people considered it not just edible, but among the best eating fish, which was reflected in its high price. In scientific terms, few fish are actually poisonous or dangerous to eat. The famous blowfish (fugu) so highly valued in Japan is very unusual in having a poison gland that must be removed before the rest of the fish can be eaten. Large adult predatory fish can cause fish poisoning (ciguatera) in some tropical areas. Other species can be infested with worms or other parasites, though they are still perfectly edible if cooked. But the rest of the Marine world, including unlikely comestibles like starfish, seaweed, and barnacles are quite edible, even delicacies in some places. Nevertheless, in every place we have studied, some types of common fish or shellfish are considered inedible and even disgusting or dangerous.

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If we ask people why a particular fish or shellfish cannot be eaten, they generally give one or more reasons from a relatively short list, claiming: • They are full of worms and parasites. • They taste bad because they live in muddy, dank, or rank water. • Their dangerous bones cannot be removed. • Poisonous organs/mud line/blood cannot be easily removed. • They eat good fish, or compete with them for food. • As “bottom feeders” they eat dead and rotten things. • They can bite or jab you and cause infections/poisoning. • Only poor people or ethnic minorities eat them (implying that they have no choice). While there are many fish with sharp spines fins or scales, none of those makes a fish inedible, and there are many ways to deal with bony fish. Other reasons are scientifically invalid, and the association of some species with poverty or low status is arbitrary. The actual reasons why certain species can become marked as inedible are more complex. Tarpon are a good example of how a fish can quickly become inedible for endogenous and economic reasons. Just in the last 20 years the species has become inedible in Belize. Fishermen no longer pursue tarpon because they are much more valuable as the prey of sports fishermen, who pay a lot of money to catch them. Following the advice of NGOs, in about 2005 the government made it illegal to catch tarpon for food, with the threat of very high fines. They also banned keeping and eating other species valued by foreign sports fishermen and women, including bonefish and permit. These bans have been effective, and nobody admits to eating these species anymore. In a sense these three species now belong to an international sportfishing community which values them because they are hard to catch, and strong fighters. In a way we can look at this as a sumptuary law, though such laws applied to dress or food are generally seen as ineffective by historians (Bosco 2014). It works in Belize because many commercial fishermen are also fishing guides in the high tourist season, so they want to see stocks preserved. The remarkable thing about this change in edibility is how quickly people forgot the previous deliciousness of tarpon and bonefish, and today many people deny that these fish were ever eaten. This demonstrates that forgetting is an essential part of the process of change in foodways.

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Intentional or semi-intentional forgetting is generally seen as an individual process, like false memory (Golding and MacLeod 2013). In this case we have a process of social forgetting: unfortunately, we know much less about forgetting then we do about social memory (Sutton 2001). In other research I have also argued that distastes are often more informative and revealing than tastes, because tastes are visible and demonstrable and are therefore well suited to showing conformity with a group. Distastes, on the other hand, are only demonstrated by refusal or avoidance and are generally more difficult for strangers to see (absence is usually harder to observe than presence), so they are more likely to mark individuality and difference (Wilk 1997). Learning new tastes is a relatively public process, while learning distaste seems to require active intervention and unvoiced consent, so for the next generation there is no possibility of seeing a substance as food. Rather than changing cultural categories like edible and inedible, people are moving particular kinds of foodstuff from one category to another, applying a rationale that is already well established in discourse. There are many examples of fish moving in the opposite direction, as people discover that they can eat something that was once thought inedible. New fashions and information can impel this kind of move. Catfish is a good example. When I was a child fishing in New England, I was told to kill small catfish (bullheads) and throw them back or use them for fertilizer in the garden. People reacted with disgust at the sight of one, and greatly exaggerated the danger of the sharp spines on the dorsal and pectoral fins. They were doubly disgusting among middle-class white fishermen because they were reputedly eaten by black people, or poor rural “trailer trash.” Catfish had always been eaten widely in the much more subsistence-­ oriented southern portions of the United States, where commercial catfish farming started up in the 1970s and 1980s. When farmed catfish began to appear in supermarkets and on restaurant menus, markers emphasized that they were domestic and raised scientifically in clean water. They were also relatively cheap and sold in a plastic wrapped denatured fillet rather than a whole fish, and the farmers had a clever and effective marketing campaign. This catfish case is interesting because forgetting a distaste takes a good deal more social and memory work than forgetting something tasty, which can happen slowly and gradually, and therefore imperceptibly. Turning something disgusting into an edible food, or even a gourmet treat, requires a dramatic breaking of a barrier. Forgetting an edible food can be a hardship for people lacking economic capital, since it removes a possibility

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from their diet. Forgetting an inedible on the other hand requires no sacrifice, though a broader market may drive up prices and therefore deny the food to those with less money. We have seen this same dynamic in the market for “superfoods” and health fad foods, like quinoa and açai, which used to be staples for the rural poor, but which they can no longer afford. Many of today’s Western luxury foods, including sardines, lobster, caviar, and wild game, were once important parts of the hunted and gathered diets of the rural poor, people who rarely benefited from the commercialization of that foodstuff (Van Esterik 2006). In its simplest form, often found in colonial or recently ex-colonial contexts, I have labeled the transformation of a poverty food into a gourmet treat “promotion.” Once promoted, however, luxuries can drop out of fashion as prices come down and the foodstuff loses its exotic and erotic power, which is rooted in the mystery of its origin (Taussig 1980). Sometimes the rural poor continue consuming a foodstuff (often illegally), long after it has been adopted as a gourmet treat by the elite. I have labeled this situation a “style sandwich,” where a food is considered edible or even choice amongst rural poor people, as well as among the educated urban elite (Wilk 2014). In colonial Belize and other British colonies, hunting was one of the few entertainments for expatriate men, who sometimes competed with the rural poor who were hunting for subsistence. Between the elite and the poor majority of the population, there was a thin stratum of lighter skinned mixed “creoles” who worked as government functionaries or ran small businesses. Because of their status as “mixed race,” often the children of illegitimate unions, their local education, and their tenuous economic position, they tended toward what linguists have called “hyper-correct behavior” (Labov 1966). As a consequence they had to assiduously avoid the kinds of foods eaten by the poor (even though they were often connected to them by kinship), which meant avoiding wild game, wild plant foods, and the kinds of delicacies and homemade drinks so relished by rural people who lived what was called “backabush.” This created a sandwich, where on the bottom, the rural poor ate things like lobster because it was cheap and abundant, and the elite ate lobster because it was a relatively rare delicacy in Europe. But in between, the middle class shunned lobster, game meat, and wild fruits, things the poor ate daily, and the rich found exotic and desirable.

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Food and Class in Motion The most important thing about a style sandwich is that like fashion itself it is constantly changing in content but not in form. As people contest status through accumulating Bourdieu’s (1984) three kinds of capital, the valence of the symbols of status are constantly changing. There are a number of quite regular ways that the position and meaning of food changes through time. Probably the most common is the downward movement observed by Sidney Mintz (1986) on sugar in England. Starting as an expensive luxury, sugar initially graced the tables of members of the elite who had social connections abroad, or who were wealthy enough to procure it themselves. As sugar became cheaper and more abundant, it fell gradually down through different ranks who found many new uses for it. Eventually cheap sugar became the carbohydrate fuel of factory workers, providing a cheap food that made the industrial revolution possible. In some cases, the elite begin to give up consuming a food or good as it becomes cheaper and common, often by opting for specialized versions or varieties, or specialized means of preservation and presentation. With sugar this meant opting for more expensive varieties of sugar, the very whitest formed into little cubes, or sugar from particular named sources like Demerara sugar. For a fishy example, we can look to preserved sardines. They initially appeared caught in a short season on the coast of Brittany in France and then hand-packed by teams of women in glass jars of olive oil, or in a vinegar-based pickle, that was sealed with a solid layer of fat and a carefully stretched and tied paper cover (Simmonds 2001). Sardines and anchovies could also be salted and then crushed with spices to form a paste, sealed with fat in specially made ceramic jars. These garnishes could keep for quite a while, but they were a delicacy, and far more expensive than other preserved fish products like salted herring or dried cod, among the cheapest proteins available, and staples of the European diet (Fig. 3.1). Preserved sardines and anchovies continued to appear on the tables of the elite for quite a while, and even spawned a new kind of tableware, in the form of the silver sardine box. By the middle of the nineteenth century however, canning technology made all sardines abundant and cheap, like our contemporary ubiquitous canned mackerel, sardines, and salmon. Only brands that were exclusive and expensive or which used special varieties of sardines or anchovies, managed to remain on the elite table, holding onto the archaic packaging, which survives to this day.

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Fig. 3.1  A Staffordshire container for anchovy paste from the late nineteenth century (Susan Blatt, with permission)

Conclusions Elsewhere, I have to find a number of other processes by which food and cuisine can move between within and between cultures (Wilk 2012). Here I want to elaborate on the significance of these changes in food fashion, embodied as tastes, because they are connected over long distances through intermediaries and markets with distant producers and their natural environments. These issues of environmental sustainability and food justice have been foundational in the growth of a political food movement over the last 30 years. This brings urgency to understanding the ways that food fashions change over time and requires building basic knowledge about how these changes are ramified through markets to have often

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counter-intuitive effects on plant and animal populations, and ecological systems. For example, during the last hundred years, North American preference for beef has changed from lean to fatty and now back to lean (Horowitz 2005). This in turn affects prices and markets, leading cattle producers to change the way they feed their animals, providing different mixes of silage, grain, and pasturage, with further effects on the environment. Another similar example is the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century custom of eating elaborately prepared turtle soup at European banquets, elite dinner parties, and expensive restaurants. The trade in sea turtles from the Caribbean to Europe began in the seventeenth century; the initial attraction for sailors was the fact that turtles placed upside down could stay alive for three or more months, providing a respite from endless salted meat. Around 1850, Simmonds (2001) estimated the trade at about 50,000 turtles a year from the Caribbean alone (many were also caught in the Pacific). Production costs were very low—itinerant fisherfolk caught turtles all over the region with nets and sold them to passing ships. The main cost was transportation to Europe, until they became more difficult to find, and prices went up. Nevertheless, hunting pressure continued because the cost of a turtle was still a minor expense for the nobility and other commercial elites who needed them for their feasts. The taste for turtle soup in Europe and the United States did not decline until the Great Depression, for reasons that are still unknown. It may have been that the populations had declined so much that fishers could no longer catch enough to make a living, but this does not explain why the taste, and the social necessity disappeared. Another cause of the decline in sea turtle populations is the widespread belief that their eggs boost male sexuality, a belief that has remained remarkably consistent for a long time. Again, we do not know how this kind of belief might decline or disappear—an issue urgently important for a whole range of species whose secretions, bodies, or parts have a reputation as aphrodisiacs, cures for male impotence and other maladies. Economists approach problems like this by using the concept of elasticities, a way of recognizing that demand for some kinds of goods respond to prices (elasticity), while demand for other kinds of goods remains the same regardless of price (inelasticity). Economists use this distinction to separate necessities from luxuries, but they never explain the cultural context  that determine different elasticities. They cannot tell us why the

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demand for corn among Q’eqchi’ Mayan people is inelastic because it is the sacred staple of their diet, while demand for rice is very elastic because it cannot substitute for corn and satisfy hunger. A meal without corn is not a meal. In all these cases social taste plays an active rather than passive part in markets, productive systems, and the environment. As I hope I have demonstrated, policies aimed at making agriculture or fisheries more sustainable are incomplete and will be ineffective unless they are closely connected to food studies. In contemporary global neoliberal capitalism, changes in taste have dramatic effects on far distant cultural ecologies, on the lives and livelihoods of many people as well as the survival of endangered plants and animals. This is why it is so important that we work more intensively on understanding food fashion, food as entertainment, and the magical powers that give food such potency and so much agency in social life. Food studies in food history have produced an extremely rich set of case studies on changing food habits and customs. But so far, we have not developed the kind of comparative study that I have outlined in this paper, giving us robust principles that might help us contribute substantially to environmental conservation and the necessary transition to a more sustainable food system. It may be difficult for some disciplines to accept a close connection between something as cultural as a dinner party and another thing as physical as the stink of dead fish washing up on the shore. But I think we need to be prepared to cross more and more disciplinary boundaries and get more involved in food policy. The problems of the future will be much more challenging than just feeding nine billion people—those billions have appetites for more than the calories needed for survival. Food is about much more than survival, and the social life of food will always be much richer and more complex than a list of nutrients.

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Bosco, Joseph. 2014. The Problem of Greed in Economic Anthropology: Sumptuary Laws and New Consumerism in China. Economic Anthropology 1 (1): 413–452. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burton, Richard D.E. 1997. Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition and Play in the Caribbean. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Cairns, Kate, and Josée Johnston. 2015. Food and Femininity. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Comaroff, John L., and Jean Comaroff. 2009. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Falk, Pasi. 1994. The Consuming Body. London: Sage Publications. Golding, Jonathan M., and Colin M.  MacLeod. 2013. Intentional Forgetting: Interdisciplinary Approaches. London: Psychology Press. Gronow, Jukka. 2004. Caviar with Champagne: Common Luxury and the Ideals of the Good Life in Stalin’s Russia. Oxford and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Hamada, Shingo, and Richard Wilk. 2018. Seafood: Ocean to the Plate. London: Routledge. Hannerz, Ulf. 1987. The World in Creolization. Africa 57 (4): 546–559. Higman, B.W. 2008. Jamaican Food: History, Biology, Culture. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press. Horowitz, Roger. 2005. Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Jones, Martin. 2008. Feast: Why Humans Share Food. New  York: Oxford University Press. Kiple, Kenneth. 2013. A Movable Feast: Ten Millennia of Food Globalization. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Labov, William. 1966. The Effect of Social Mobility on Linguistic Behavior. Sociological Inquiry 36 (2): 186–203. McCracken, Grant. 1988. Culture and Consumption. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. McDonell, Emma. 2015. Miracle Foods: Quinoa, Curative Metaphors, and the Depoliticization of Global Hunger Politics. Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies 15(4): 70–85. Miller, Daniel, and Sophie Woodward, eds. 2010. Global Denim. Oxford and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Mintz, Sidney. 1986. Sweetness and Power. New York: Penguin. Mintz, Sidney W. 1996. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 2010. Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Murcott, Anne. 2013. Interlude: Reflections on the Elusiveness of Eating. In Why We Eat, How We Eat, ed. Emma-Jayne Abbots and Anna Lavis, 209–218. London: Routledge. Pieterse. 2003, January. Globalization and Culture. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Pyburn, K.  Anne. 1998. Consuming the Maya. Dialectical Anthropology 23: 111–129. Ritzer, George. 1993. The McDonaldization of Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Simmel, Georg. 1902. Fashion. International Quarterly 10: 130–155. Simmonds, Peter. 2001 [1859]. The Curiosities of Food. Berkeley: 10 Speed Press. Sutton, David E. 2001. Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory. Oxford: Berg. Taussig, Michael. 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Taylor, Erin B. 2013. Materializing Poverty: How the Poor Transform Their Lives. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Tobin, Joseph. 1992. Introduction: Domesticating the West. In Re-Made in Japan: Everyday Life and Consumer Taste in a Changing Society, ed. James Tobin, 1–41. New Haven: Yale University Press. Van Esterik, Penny. 2006. From Hunger Foods to Heritage Foods: Challenges to Food Localization in Lao PDR.  In Fast Food/Slow Food. Walnut Creek, ed. Richard Wilk, 83–96. California: AltaMira Press. Weismantel, Mary. 1989. The Children Cry for Bread: Hegemony and the Transformation of Consumption. In The Social Economy of Consumption, ed. Benjamins S.  Orlove and Henry Rutz, 85–99. Lanham: University Press of America. Weiss, Brad. 1996. The Making and Unmaking of the Haya Lived World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Whiting, Robert. 1977. The Chrysanthemum and the Bat. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company. Wilk, Richard. 1997. A Critique of Desire: Distaste and Dislike in Consumer Behavior. Consumption, Markets and Culture 1 (2): 175–196. ———. 2006. Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists. Oxford: Berg Publishers. ———. 2008. Anchovy Sauce and Pickled Tripe: Exporting Civilized Food in the Colonial Atlantic World. In Food Chains, ed. Warren Belasco and Roger Horowitz, 87–107. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2012. Loving People, Hating What They Eat: Marginal Foods and Social Boundaries. In Reimagining Marginalized Foods: Global Processes, Local Places, ed. Elizabeth Finnis, 15–33. Arizona: University of Arizona Press.

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———. 2014. The Politics of Taste and Assimilation. In Political Meals, ed. Regina Bendix and Michaela Fenske, 315–323. Munster: LIT Verlag. ———. 2015. Paradoxes of Jews and Their Food. In Jews and Their Foodways, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, ed. Anat Helman, vol. 28, 231–251. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilk, Richard, and Livia Barbosa, eds. 2011. Rice and Beans: A Unique Dish in a Hundred Places. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Zerubavel, Eviatar. 1981. Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 4

The Social Life of Food Tamara L. Bray

With food concerns at the front and center of contemporary discourse, it is little wonder that the subject of food has become a primary research topic across a broad spectrum of disciplines. Matters of food shortages, food labeling, food costs, contamination, disorders, genetic modification, and so on confront us on an almost daily basis. It is perhaps not surprising then that academic interest in the subject of food and foodways has similarly exploded, spawning a plethora of new specialty journals including Anthropology of Food, Food and History, Food and Foodways, Food Policy, Gastronomica, and Food, Culture, and Society. While a mere 20 years ago we could not have made the claim that food and foodways were topics at the forefront of social science research, this is clearly no longer the case. Anthropology and the humanistic sciences have contributed immensely to the ongoing conversation by providing insights into the social dimensions of food and food consumption. What, how, and with whom we eat is widely recognized as one of the fundamental ways we define ourselves as

T. L. Bray (*) Department of Anthropology, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Chou, S. Kerner (eds.), Food, Social Change and Identity, Consumption and Public Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84371-7_4

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social beings and members of specific groups. Countless recent studies make clear that food preferences and prejudices are closely tied to questions of cultural, community, and individual identities. Collectively these works demonstrate the analytic value of focusing on food for exploring both who and with whom we are as social beings. In this chapter, I offer some thoughts on the present state of affairs in the realm of anthropologically oriented food studies and highlight some of the key conceptual issues guiding contemporary research. I organize my comments around the conceptual axes of “materiality,” “mobility,” and “relationality.” I begin with the basic observation that food unequivocally has both symbolic and material dimensions. Until rather recently, however, anthropologists (and others) have tended to focus mainly on the former—for example, on the symbolic and communicative aspects of food and eating practices. Since the early days and works of Claude Levi-Strauss (1969 [1964]) and Mary Douglas (1966), investigation into the ways in which food is symbolically used to draw lines between insiders and outsiders, assert membership, negotiate status, compel allegiance, make political claims, and so on has been highly productive and provided many insights into the relations among food, identity, and politics. But food is neither inert nor non-substantive. It does not merely symbolize or represent in a static or abstract way—rather it moves, changes, penetrates, and transforms (Fajans 1988: 165). Thus, while it is important to analyze the social context of food, it is equally important that we do not neglect its materiality or its mutability. Foods have specific physical characteristics and sensual qualities that provoke particular bodily responses. In this sense we can speak of foods as having agentive potential insofar as they interact with and affect human bodies in both general and particular ways. When we eat, we literally incorporate food—we embody it and it transforms us—in the most ordinary of senses, through the production of human tissue but in other ways as well. Rather than simply approaching food as a passive substance, it is important that we begin to think about the capacities of foods—as active and key elements within broader relational networks—to generate not only biological effects but public and social ones as well (Bennett 2007, 2010). To take but one example, consider the various “onion crises” that have brought significant social and political turmoil to India in recent years (e.g., Bhowmick 2013; Gettleman et al. 2019; “India Struggles”, 2013); New York Times, October 1, 2019; Time Magazine, October 24, 2013).

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Onions are a staple element and essential ingredient of almost every cooked dish on the subcontinent for people of nearly every class, caste, and religion. Periodic shortages related to crop failures in recent decades have led to street protests and occasional violent clashes with vendors and government workers (ibid.). In 1980, Indira Gandhi swept back into power on a wave of popular indignation over the high price of onions, while in 1998, even nationalist pride deriving from the testing of a nuclear weapon conducted by the Bharatiya Janata Party could not help it hold onto power in the face of a widespread onion shortage. When in late 2013 the price of onions quadrupled, national government leaders moved quickly to shore up supplies and calm the public. Thus, in the Indian context, we see a common vegetable moving people to protest, violence, political action, and governmental policy changes. Here the lowly onion may legitimately be viewed as an agentive element within a broader socioagro-political network—its political power over the Indian government today nearly the equivalent of a terrorist threat. On a different level, we can consider how the ingestion of a double espresso, chili peppers, or foods rich in omega-3 fatty acids like fish and nuts act upon individuals by inducing changes in mood, behavior, or energy levels. The heat in chili peppers, for instance, is produced by the compound capsaicin, a nitrogen-containing lipid that has the same effect on pain receptors in the body as excessive temperature. Following the initial discomfort resulting from the shut-down of the protein receptors, a secondary physiological reaction occurs involving a pleasant numbing sensation related to the release of endorphins as well as associated feelings of well-being and happiness (Highfield 2014). Caffeine and omega-3 fatty acids have similar mood-altering affects (Fontani et al. 2005; Herz 1999; Quinlan et al. 2000), though each substance interacts differently with persons who ingest it based on a whole host of other “actants” (sensu Latour 2004) comprising the human organism at any given moment, including, for example, other chemical substances, microbes, utensils, appliances, and the environment. These examples highlight the agentive and social nature of foodstuffs, leading to the construction offered by Jane Bennett (2007) of food as “vital matter.” Focusing on the materiality of food underscores its status as active agent alongside—as well as inside—active human agents (ibid.). Following proponents of actor-network theory, social life can be understood as constituted through ongoing interactions among artifact agents and human agents within a heterogeneous network (or assemblage)

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composed of overlapping ties, flows, and connections. Within such a framework, food may be understood as a special type of artifact or category of material culture. Interestingly, foodstuffs—specifically scallops (Callon 1986) and milk (Latour 1988)—were integral to some of the earliest formulations of actor-network theory. But while these studies explicitly advocated for the importance of things in the analysis of the social, they rather ironically failed to take account of the specific material properties—that is, the actual “thing-iness”—of the things, or foodstuffs, involved in the assemblages under investigation. In his analysis of a failed intervention to rescue the scallop population on the north coast of France, for instance, Michel Callon (1986) began by identifying the principal actors involved, very deliberately admitting participants from the realms of both “Nature” and “Society.” The author’s declared intention was to eschew the lines traditionally drawn between Nature and Society and treat all actors as ontological equals vis-à-vis the problem at hand. With respect to the non-human actors from the domain of Nature, however, for example, the scallops, the only real concern expressed by the author was whether their larvae anchored themselves (or free floated) during the formative stage of their existence. Missed in this analysis was a consideration of both the morphology and delectability of the scallop and the contribution of these properties to the problem at hand; the material composition of the nets to which it was hoped the larvae would attach; the form, construction, and properties of the protective device placed on the seabed to house the juvenile scallops; the types of boats and other equipment used in the intervention and so on. Greater consideration of such materialities would have both widened and deepened the analysis of the assemblage under investigation and further illuminated the roles and potentialities of the non-human actants. The ways in which materials matter has recently become a key concern across a wide array of disciplines (e.g., Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Atkins 2009; Bennett 2010; Coole and Frost 2010; Whatmore 2006). Focusing on the materiality of food highlights the different ways in which culinary elements and activities actually hold together people’s days and relationships through material practice and objectification of the otherwise intangible and abstract. With whom, what, and where one cooks creates social relations and expectations formed through and around food. Meal times and meal composition materially set both the temporality of an ordinary day and the seasonal cycles of the year. The cuts, quantities, and quality of foodstuffs served, as well as the order of service, materializes both status

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(egalitarian or hierarchical) and degrees of intimacy (close kin to stranger) at any given commensal event. Admitting the agentive materiality of foodstuffs (and other things) allows for a more complex understanding of the construction and entanglements that constitute our social worlds, offering new ways of thinking about and investigating ecologies of sociality (cf., Bennett 2007; Latour 2004; Latta 2014). It is also worth considering how the materiality of food and the things we make and eat create certain affordances and bodily dispositions. What does a coffee drink require of us, for instance? What about oysters or leavened bread or a McDonald’s hamburger? Specific foodstuffs permit, enable, or demand specific behaviors or responses on the part of cooks and consumers. A bowl of soup is not as easily ingested while walking as a cheeseburger, a cake requires a large network of human and non-human actants to create, and a plate of lutefisk essentially demands a commensal partner. Focusing on the opportunities (and constraints) afforded by foods based on their physical properties leads to insights regarding cultural choices, social networks, identities, and the materiality of social life more broadly. Taking into account the materiality and agency of food in the construction of identity and social relations is a move that can be seen as aligning with the larger “materialist turn” in the social sciences in general (Coole and Frost 2010). In addition to the materiality of food being a productive avenue for research, I also see a focus on relationality and its theoretical entanglements as having much potential within the context of food studies. If cultural meanings, identities, and structures are relationally and processually constituted in the engagement between humans and other-than-­ human constituents of the world, then what might we be able to learn by focusing on the relationship between specific foods, peoples, and places; between different types of foods; and between foods and other artifacts? What types of networks or assemblages come into focus by following the connections associated with foodstuffs, cuisines, and culinary affects, and what kinds of insights can we gain in terms of political economies, political ecologies, social strategies, and identities? A number of studies that take food chains and foodscapes as their unit of analysis have begun to illuminate the value of such approaches (cf., Kurlansky 1998; Mintz 1996; Jackson 2013; Pendergrast 2010; Psarikidou and Szerszynski 2012). Often it is easier to discern the significance of associations when we focus on movement and change. People have been on the move around the globe for millennia. Throughout this history, foodstuffs and culinary

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practices have played a key role in the creation and maintenance of identities, the re-production of histories and memories, the binding of diasporic communities, and the generation of new foodscapes. We can look to the Jewish ritual feast of Seder, which marks the beginning of Passover, as a prime example here—a commensal event practiced throughout the Jewish diaspora that explicitly links food, religion, and social memory. Recent studies focused on the close analysis of cultural negotiations, appropriations, and mixings in the context of colonialism, immigration, dislocation, global trade, and so on have usefully begun to concentrate more directly on material culture (Dawdy 2010; De France 2003; Dietler 2007; GiffordGonzalez and Sunseri 2007). In particular, investigating the articulation of foods and foodways in these contact situations provides a material angle on how social identities and relations are consolidated, extended, or selectively re-configured in the dynamic spaces of culture contact. Equally important—in light of the materiality of foods—is the way in which foodstuffs have also sometimes traveled independently, circulating outward from their places of origins, substantively impacting other cultures and being simultaneously re-signified in the process, as, for instance, in the case of potatoes, chocolate, and tea. The novel conjoining of disparate elements within zones of contact created through the movement of both peoples and things alters the foodscape and gives rise to new assemblages, relations, and hybrid forms. It is through analysis of such heterogeneous assemblages that we can gain insight into the complex interplay of identities and the formation of new subjectivities that simultaneously express past histories, present needs, and future possibilities. Food links people across space and time—mentally, materially, practically, and bodily—through memory, through the senses, through cooking, and through ingestion. This idea is in general widely shared and accepted. Along with these important observations, I would also like to consider the claim that food creates linkages across ontological divides as well, for example, between different categories of beings. People feed their plants and animals, after all, and offerings of foodstuffs in various forms have been made to the ancestors and “gods” throughout human history. The type of foods, the manner of preparation, and the mode of presentation all figure importantly in the creation and maintenance of connections across these ontological divides. Focusing on the nature of the foodstuffs involved and the material aspects of preparation and presentation may provide insight into how such non-human entities are understood in relation to the human members of a society at different times and places. This

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is a proposition that I have made in an earlier paper that I will expand on a bit further below. As an archaeologist, I have been particularly interested in the possibility of exploring the ontological realities of past cultures via the material record. I have previously made the argument that commensality—which I view as inherently social and relational—offers a potential window into what, and what kinds of, other-than-human entities may have formed part of the social world of a given community or culture, past or present (Bray 2012). I take as my starting point for this proposition the understanding that commensality, whether ritual or quotidian, has as either a goal or a consequence the construction of specific relations of sociality. What may distinguish these two principal forms of commensality, for example, the extraordinary versus the everyday, however, are the types of persons engaged in the acts of shared consumption. If everyday commensality is understood to produce and re-produce social relations among close kin (cf., Anigbo 1987; Weismantel 1988), ritual commensality may be seen as a means of constituting social relations with extra-familial others—a process which (not coincidentally) constitutes such others as social beings (Bray 2012: 199). I thus suggest that evidence of ritual commensality can offer insight into ontological systems potentially distinct from our own by indicating with whom (or what) foodstuffs were or could be shared. My focus on commensality, then, is as a method for ascertaining the kinds of persons with whom it was possible to establish social relations via shared consumption. While I illustrated this approach with reference to archaeological data from the late pre-­ Columbian Andes in the earlier paper, here I offer a few additional examples from the ethnohistoric record that provide further insight into Andean ontology as articulated via the medium of food and food-related practice. Early ethnohistoric information from the Andes provides ample cause for positing the existence of a native ontology distinct from that of the sixteenth-century Christian invaders or the West in general (cf., Albornoz 1984 [1584]; Arriaga 1920 [1621]; Avila 1918 [1645]). Specifically, the rich pictorial record created by the indigenous author and illustrator, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1936 [1615]), during the first decades of the seventeenth century provides insights into how food, drink, and commensality materialized and mediated social relations across what from a western ontological perspective would be viewed as unbridgeable divides. Figure 4.1, for instance, portrays an early Inca nobleman, Cusi Huanan Chiri Inca, “drinking with his father, the sun” (ibid.: 149–150; my

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Fig. 4.1  Inca nobleman sharing a drink with his father the Sun. (Image from on-line digital facsimile in archives of the Royal Library of Denmark, p. 150 [150], http://www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/poma/info/es/foreword.htm)

translation). All Incas of royal birth claimed genealogical descent from the sun. The commensal act of drinking with and to the lord of the heavens was the material expression of a key social relationship linking the Inca to his non-human progenitor, as similarly seen in another drawing of an Inca king rendered by Guaman Poma (ibid.: 246 [248]) (Fig. 4.2).

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In addition to linking human persons to “supernatural” non-human persons, the sharing of food and drink also bridged the divide between the categories of living and dead, bringing these realms together within a single social world. In referring to the burial practices of peoples from the southern (Collasuyu) sector of the Inca Empire, Guaman Poma (1936

Fig. 4.2  Another Inca ruler partaking in a commensal event with his father the Sun as part of ceremonial activities during the month of June. (Image from on-line digital facsimile in archives of the Royal Library of Denmark, p. 246 [248], http:// www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/poma/info/es/foreword.htm)

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[c. 1615]: 293–294) states that “they [the Collasuyus] give the deceased food, chicha, water, gold, silver, dinnerware, garments, and other things… [and] thus they are buried with their food and drink… [and] the living always take care to send the dead food and drink” (translation given by Roland Hamilton in Guaman Poma 2009 [1615]: 230). The commensal nature of these practices is depicted by Guaman Poma in Fig. 4.3. One final intriguing example is that in which Guaman Poma illustrates an imagined meeting between the conquistador Pedro de Candia and the Inca king Huayna Capac (Fig. 4.4). In the text, the author writes that the Inca had been informed that “men with long beards who had the appearance of corpses” had landed in his kingdom, upon which the Inca orders that one of them be brought to his court. In the accompanying drawing, Guaman Poma depicts the encounter between the two as a commensal event mediated by an array of foodstuffs in which the Inca is shown presenting a plate to the foreigner and simultaneously asking: “Is this the gold you eat?” and the Spaniard replying: “This is the gold we eat” (my translation). In this encounter, the Inca negotiates with what, to his eyes, was likely a non-human person via a commensal act, the literal sharing of a table. The main foodstuff being presented, in addition to all the other items indicated by the variety of serving vessels arranged between them, seems to be a plate of gold—not the normal fare of human persons. In this provocative image, we are presented with a clear example of how social relations were literally constructed through ritual commensality and the way in which ontological status could be materialized through food. We see, too, the way in which the personhood of the Spaniard was figuratively constructed within a relational framework comprising a heterogeneous assemblage of human and non-human actors, among which foodstuffs featured prominently. A century of anthropological research provides clear indication that cooking and eating are important arenas for the production and re-­ production of social life (see Mintz and DuBois 2002). In my own research, I have focused specifically on commensality as a practice aimed at the creation of social bonds and networks, with all the attendant benefits and obligations implied in such (see Nielsen, Chap. 7, this volume). If we view everyday commensality as solidifying social relationships internally, within the domestic or consanguinal spheres, then we might consider extraordinary, or ritual, commensality as a strategy aimed at establishing social relationships in the external, or affinal, realm. In other words, it may prove productive to explore ritual commensality as a mechanism for

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Fig. 4.3  Collasuyu nobles engaged in ritual commensal activities with the dead. (Image from on-line digital facsimile in archives of the Royal Library of Denmark, p.  293 [295], http://www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/poma/info/es/ foreword.htm)

bringing others into one’s own social order, in this way, and through this process, making them into social beings and “true persons,” as I have attempted to briefly illustrate here. Numerous ethnographic studies in the Andes have shown that for indigenous peoples, “all material things (including things we normally call inanimate) are potentially active agents in human affairs” (Allen 1998: 20;

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Fig. 4.4  In this image, Guaman Poma portrays an imagined encounter between the Inca ruler Huayna Capac and the Spanish conquistador, Pedro de Candia, in which the Inca queries his guest as to whether he eats gold. (Image from on-line digital facsimile in archives of the Royal Library of Denmark, p. 369 [371], http:// www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/poma/info/es/foreword.htm)

also, Allen 1982, 1988, 1997; Bastien 1978; Gose 1994). This would suggest that native Andean people operated with a radically different set of ontological premises than those that tend to dominate western thinking. The ethnohistoric examples presented here, as well as the archaeological data I have presented elsewhere (Bray 2012), suggest that ritual

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commensality may have been an important way of recognizing and interacting with significant non-human entities as members of the humanly constructed social universe. In concluding, I put forward the idea that directing our attention to the materiality and relational entanglements of foodstuffs and food-related activities holds much promise for generating further insight into the social worlds made and inhabited by peoples both in the present and in the past.

References Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman. 2008. Material Feminisms. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Albornoz, Cristobal de. 1984 [1584]. Instrucción para descubrir todas las guacas del pirú, ed. Pierre Duviols. Revista Andina 2 (1): 169–222. Allen, Catherine. 1982. Body and Soul in Quechua Thought. Journal of Latin American Lore 8 (2): 179–196. ———. 1988. The Hold Life Has. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. ———. 1997. When Pebbles Move Mountains. In Creating Context in Andean Cultures, ed. Rosaleen Howard-Malverde, 73–84. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1998. When Utensils Revolt: Mind, Matter and Modes of Being in the Pre-Columbian Andes. RES 33: 19–27. Anigbo, Osmund. 1987. Commensality and Human Relationship Among the Igbo. Nsukka: University of Nigeria Press. de Arriaga, Pablo Joseph. 1920 [1621]. La Extirpación de la Idolatría en el Perú. In Colección de Libros y Documentos Referentes a la Historia del Perú, vol. 1. Lima: Sanmarti. Atkins, Peter. 2009. History of Food Exchanges: A New Agenda. Food and History 7 (1): 111–123. Avila, Francisco de [1645]. Prefación al Libro de los Sermones o Homilías en la Lengua Castellana, y la Indica General Quechua. In Informaciones acerca de la Religión y Gobierno de los Incas, Colección de Libros y Documentos Referentes a la Historia del Perú, ed. Horacio Urteaga and Carlos Romero, vol. II, 57–89. Lima: Sanmarti. Bastien, Joseph. 1978. Mountain of the Condor: Metaphor and Ritual in an Andean Community. St. Paul, MN: West Publishing Company. Bennett, Jane. 2007. Edible Matter. New Left Review 45: 133–145. ———. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Bhowmick, Nilanjana. (2013, October 24). How Onions Could Bring Down the Indian Government. Time USA. https://world.time.com/2013/10/24/ why-an-onion-crisis-brings-tears-to-indian-eyes Bray, Tamara. 2012. Ritual Commensality Between Human and Non-Human Persons: Investigating Native Ontologies in the Late Pre-Columbian Andean World. eTopoi: Journal of Ancient Studies 2: 197–212. Callon, Michel. 1986. Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay. In Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge, ed. John Law, 196–233. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dawdy, Shannon. 2010. A Wild Taste: Food and Colonialism in Eighteenth-­ century Louisiana. Ethnohistory 57 (3): 389–414. De France, Susan. 2003. Diet and Provisioning in the High Andes: A Spanish Colonial Settlement on the Outskirts of Potosi, Bolivia. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 7: 99–125. Dietler, Michael. 2007. Culinary Encounters: Food, Identity, and Colonialism. In We Are What We Eat: Archaeology, Food, and Identity, ed. Katheryn Twiss, 218–242. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Fajans, Jane. 1988. The Transformative Value of Food: A Review Essay. Food and Foodways 3: 143–166. Fontani, G., F. Corradeschi, A. Felici, F. Alfatti, S. Migliorini, and L. Lodi. 2005. Cognitive and Physiological Effects of Omega-3 Polyunsaturated Fatty Acid Supplementation in Healthy Subjects. European Journal of Clinical Investigation 35 (11): 691–699. Gettleman, Jeffrey, Julfikar Ali Manik, and Suhasini Raj. (2019, October 1.) India Isn’t Letting a Single Onion Leave the Country. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/world/asia/india-modi-onionprices.html Gifford-Gonzalez, D., and J.U. Sunseri. 2007. Foodways on the Frontier: Animal Exploitation and Identity at an Early Colonial Pueblo in New Mexico. In We Are What We Eat: Archaeology, Food, and Identity, ed. Katheryn Twiss, 260–287. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Gose, Peter. 1994. Deathly Waters and Hungry Mountains: Agrarian Ritual and Class Formation in an Andean Town. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe. 1936 [1615]. El Primer Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno. Paris. ———. 2009 [1615]. The First New Chronicle and Good Government: On the History of the World and the Incas up to 1615. Trans. and Ed. Roland Hamilton. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

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Herz, Rachel. 1999. Caffeine Effects on Mood and Memory. Behavioral Research Therapy 37 (9): 869–879. Highfield, Roger. (2014, July 24.) How Your Chili Addiction could be Helping our Live Longer. Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/2014/08/01/usstudy-finds-chilli-day-could-stave-old-age-260739.html. India Struggles to Handle Onion Crisis. 2013. Al Jazeera, October 26. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2013/10/26/india-struggles-to-handleonion-crisis/. Jackson, Peter. 2013. Food Words: Essays in Culinary Culture. London: Bloomsbury. Kurlansky, Mark. 1998. Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World. New York, NY: Penguin Books. Latour, Bruno. 1988. The Pasteurization of France. Trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latta, Alex. 2014. Matter, Politics and the Sacred: Insurgent Ecologies of Citizenship. Cultural Geographies 21 (3): 323–341. Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1969 [1964]. The Raw and the Cooked. New  York: Harper and Row. Mintz, Sydney. 1996. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Mintz, Sidney, and Christine DuBois. 2002. The Anthropology of Food and Eating. Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 99–119. Pendergrast, Mark. 2010. Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World. Revised ed. New York, NY: Basic Books. Psarikidou, Katerina, and Bronislaw Szerszynski. 2012. Growing the Social: Alternative Agro-Food Networks and Social Sustainability in the Urban Ethical Foodscape. Sustainability: Science, Practice, and Policy 1 (8): 30–39. Quinlan, Paul T., Joan Lane, Karen L. Moore, Jennifer Aspen, Jane A. Rycroft, and Dawn C. O’Brien. 2000. The Acute Physiological and Mood Effects of Tea and Coffee: The Role of Caffeine Level. Pharmacological Biochemical Behavior 66 (1): 19–28. Weismantel, Mary. 1988. Food, Gender, and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Whatmore, Sarah. 2006. Material Returns: Practicing a Cultural Geography in and for a More-Than-Human World. Cultural Geographies 13 (4): 600–609.

CHAPTER 5

Prejudice, Assimilation and Profit: The Peculiar History of Italian Cookery in the United States Anthony F. Buccini

Introduction The cultural impact of large-scale immigration is a topic that is currently much discussed both in Europe and in North America. While the issue is hardly new in Europe, it has a particularly long and complex history in the United States, a country which is regularly referred to as a ‘nation of immigrants’. In recent times, there has developed a range of views regarding cultural assimilation both among members of the older, resident ‘mainstream’ populations of countries receiving immigrant populations and among immigrant groups themselves. On the one side, there are those who believe immigrants must be encouraged and helped, even forced, to assimilate culturally to the mainstream and, on the other side, are those who believe immigrants can be integrated into their new nations’ societies with only partial cultural assimilation. The former view is the

A. F. Buccini (*) Independent Scholar, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Chou, S. Kerner (eds.), Food, Social Change and Identity, Consumption and Public Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84371-7_5

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assimilationist or ‘melting pot’ model and the latter the multicultural or ‘salad bowl’ model. Of course, the older metaphor of the melting pot had nothing to do with food but rather with metallurgy, which seems particularly apt for the period of its coinage in the nineteenth century, when there reigned in the United States a close relationship between the process of industrialisation and the nation’s need for immigrant labour. The melting pot metaphor has gradually come to be reinterpreted by many Americans as a culinary one: rather than a crucible in which different metals are transformed into a new and presumably superior alloy, the pot is thought of as a grand soup kettle in which the ingredients have been thoroughly blended and culinarily harmonised. Thus reinterpreted, the older metaphor has given rise to the newer one, the salad bowl, which by contrast represents—as an ideal or as an unwelcome reality—a different outcome for a society receiving immigrant groups, namely, as a collection of identifiably distinct and even disparate elements. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during the period of the great waves of immigration from southern and eastern Europe to the United States, there was a widespread sentiment that the foodways of immigrant groups, no less than their languages, religious practices and other cultural attributes, were not just alien and undesirable but also essentially ‘un-American’. While some mainstream Americans (including often enough the descendants of immigrants who came in the just mentioned great waves) now harbour similar negative feelings towards more recently arrived and still more or less unassimilated immigrant groups from Latin America, Asia and Africa, it is noteworthy that contempt for alien languages, religious practices, and others remains intense but seems at most vanishingly rare with regard to these newcomers’ foodways. This partial change in attitude is not a reflection of some fundamental difference in the characters of the immigrant groups’ foodways in the two periods but rather a change in the culinary culture of the American mainstream. In considering the history of an immigrant group’s cuisine, it is naturally important to consider that cuisine both in relation to the traditional cuisine(s) which the immigrants have brought with them and the cuisine of the society in which they make a new home (See Thomas, Chap. 2, this volume). What do we really mean by the term ‘cuisine’? In common parlance and also in many works by food scholars, the term is thought of simply as a ‘style of cookery’. In practice though it is commonly conceived in rather concrete terms, as a set of dishes, ingredients and cooking methods. Obviously, these perceptible realisations of food and its preparation

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are a proper focus for our study of a given cuisine. However, if we conceive of cuisine as a cultural subdomain, as I believe we must, then we must recognise that these surface manifestations are the expressions of a wide array of learned ideas about food that exist in the minds of the members of the community that share a culture, ideas which, if the cuisine in particular and the culture more generally are to continue to exist, must be transferred from the one generation to the next. That the culinary culture of the United States has been influenced by the cuisines of a number of its immigrant groups is well-known and indisputable. Among the more influential of the immigrant cuisines has been that of the Italian Americans. Consequently, the history of Italian-­ American cuisine in the United States has been much discussed both in popular and scholarly food writing. Yet, in many respects, the subject has been poorly understood, in part on account of the fact that most of the discussions have been written by people who themselves are not Italian American and therefore have a limited understanding of the most crucial part of the community’s food culture, namely, the domestic. Misunderstanding of Italian-American cuisine has been deepened by a widespread misappreciation of the nature—even a denial of the existence—of the mainstream American cuisine that Italian Americans encountered upon their arrival in the United States. Finally, misunderstanding of the subject at hand has also arisen from a more basic short-coming, namely, a too superficial notion of what cuisine is and how it is structured and evolves over time. In this chapter then, I offer an analysis of the history of Italian-American cuisine informed not only by an intimate knowledge of the community and its foodways but also by a more careful consideration of mainstream American culinary culture, an analysis that is furthermore based on a more sophisticated conceptualisation of cuisine.

American Culinary Culture The culinary reputation of the United States around the world and especially in Europe is generally rather negative, a judgement that derives in large measure and somewhat paradoxically from the incredible success of the American-style fast foods that have for several decades been purveyed globally by United States-based restaurant chains and their non-United States-based imitators. Of course, the United States is very large and socio-economically complex; alongside the widely consumed processed and junk fast foods, there is a great deal of very good food to be had there,

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with respect both to high quality ingredients and to sophisticated cookery. A further important source of complexity in American culinary culture is the country’s ethnic make-up, adding the culinary sub-cultures of both earlier and more recent immigrant groups to a landscape in which the older, pre-twentieth-century American regional cuisines (e.g. Carolina Low Country, Coastal New England, Mid-Atlantic, Gulf Coast Creole) have diminished greatly and in some cases all but disappeared. Consequently, for those who know the American food scene well and bear no overarching prejudice towards the nation or its population, appreciation of the complexity and variety of American foodways renders it very difficult to reduce the whole to a simple caricature, negative or otherwise. Indeed, caricatures and facile generalisations aside, it is devilishly difficult even for food scholars to analyse American culinary culture. For beyond the complexity of interaction between identifiable sub-cultures, such as the aforementioned vestigial old regional cuisines, the many immigrant cuisines of various ages and states of health, as well as newer regional cuisines which themselves are linked to regionally important immigrant cuisines, there is a plethora of other factors that affect production and consumption in the United States, from the layering of socio-economic diversity onto food culture with the ostensibly opposing trends of the continued expansion of industrial foods over-against the important upscale foodie or global-gourmet scene, on to the ever-increasing number of ethical or health-related food movements (veganism, the Palaeolithic diet, the organic movement, etc.). Out of this all arises the question: if we wish to examine the relationship of a given American culinary sub-culture such as ‘Italian-American cuisine’ to the American culinary mainstream, how do we define that mainstream? One of the more insightful broad discussions of American culinary culture appears in the book Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom by the anthropologist Sidney Mintz (1996), himself an American and an astute student of foodways from a cross-cultural perspective.1Though written already some twenty years ago, his analysis remains remarkably fresh and surely no less provocative for most Americans today than when it first appeared. He argues at length that the United States does not possess a national cuisine. This claim follows directly from his own definition of the term ‘cuisine’, which he gives as: 1  This section is a condensed version of material in Buccini (2016) in the context of a more detailed discussion of the structure of culinary ‘grammar’ and the typology of cuisines.

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“Cuisine,” more exactly defined, has to do with the ongoing foodways of a region [emphasis added], within which active discourse about food sustains both common understandings and reliable production of the food in question. (Mintz 1996: 104)

Thus, for Mintz, the United States’ lack of a cuisine is actually not anything out of the ordinary. Indeed, he also argues that there is no such thing as ‘French cuisine’ or ‘Italian cuisine’, terms which, despite their popular currency, are just abstractions based in large measure on restaurateurs’ and cookbook authors’ and other food enthusiasts’ inclination to present to their audiences collections of dishes from a given nation’s regional cuisines as if they did together represent a single, focused national cuisine: A “national cuisine” is a contradiction in terms; there can be regional cuisines, but not national cuisines. I think that for the most part, a national cuisine is simply a holistic artifice based on the foods of the people who live inside some political system, such as France or Spain. (Mintz 1996: 104)

This is not to say that Mintz equates the overall structure and dynamics of culinary culture in the United States with those of countries such as France or Italy or India. Rather, he clearly recognises that there is something peculiar at work in the United States and more specifically discusses three aspects of American foodways that set it apart from those of many or most other nations, to wit, (1) Americans are exposed to a great many ethnic cuisines and are generally quite promiscuous in their eating habits, often consuming in a given week meals of very disparate origins, say, of Anglo-­ American origin one day, Chinese, Mexican, Italian and Thai origins on subsequent days; (2) an extraordinarily high percentage of the meals they eat are not home-cooked but rather purchased already prepared for home consumption or eaten in restaurants; and (3) despite a recent surge in interest in local and seasonal foods, ‘industrial’ and seasonally independent imported foods purchased from grocery chains constitute the norm for the majority of the American population. Of course, what is ‘peculiar’ about the culinary culture of the United States is not just that there is an ever-growing presence of industrial foods and increasing consumption of prepared meals in restaurants or at home and an increasing exposure to ethnic cuisines from around the globe. These trends can be observed in all the richer nations of the world; rather, it is the fact that these three

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developments have been at work in the United States already for a very long time and have advanced to an exceptionally high degree (See Thomas, Chap. 2, this volume). Though I agree wholeheartedly with most of what Mintz (1996) has to say about American culinary culture, including his remarks about its exaggeratedly modern, ‘global’ nature, I disagree strongly with his claim that the American mainstream lacks a ‘cuisine’ and no less so with his narrow definition of cuisine which denies the existence of any sort of cuisine but the regional. The contradiction in terms that Mintz sees in the term ‘national cuisine’ flows, to my mind, not naturally from the way that culinary cultures are structured but simply from Mintz’s own definition. As a linguist who has been active in the field of food studies for a long time, I applaud his inclusion in his definition of the role of communication— where a central element is “active discourse about food [which] sustains both common understandings and reliable production of the food in question” (Mintz 1996: 104). However, also as a linguist, I find it bizarre that he limits the possibility of such discourse to a regional level: it is akin to a student of language claiming that the only real linguistic systems are regional dialects and that standardised, supra-regional, national languages are something fundamentally different. The differences between what we linguists consider dialects on the one hand and supra-regional or national standards on the other hand are from a sociolinguistic standpoint many and important. However, the two kinds of ‘lects’ are not fundamentally different in a great many respects as well, particularly with regard to their structural characteristics. Analogies between cuisine and language have a long history but for the most part, they have been carried out by food scholars with at best only a rudimentary understanding of how language really works. For example, attempts to draw close parallels between specific structural domains such as morphology and syntax to cooking techniques and meal structure respectively or parts of speech—nouns, adjectives and so on—and different kinds of foods, such as staple fats, starches and spices, as suggested by Montanari (2006: 100ff.) are unworkable and give us insight neither into the internal structures of cuisines nor into the real relationship between cuisine and language, which is that they are parallel, highly structured sub-­ systems of cultural knowledge that are shared within a given community. As such, both language and cuisine have broadly speaking two levels of structure which in turn have their own internal organisation: there is the level of the readily observable surface manifestations of a cuisine—the

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ingredients and composed dishes and meals—and the deeper, more abstract, underlying system of, as it were, grammatical rules which govern the choices a given culinary community makes regarding ingredients and the composition of dishes and meals. These rules are in part aesthetic in nature but in part too they are governed by and in dialogue with other cultural institutions, including religion, agricultural practices, market structures, the technology of food preservation and preparation. The dynamics of a culinary system, of a cuisine, is in a crucial way affected by the means by which it is propagated, by which it is learned by new generations of the community. It is here that we must consider again Mintz’s (1996) very narrow definition of the term ‘cuisine’. While it is quite clear from his discussion of American foodways that he, like most food scholars, recognises the existence of the sort of ‘grammatical rules’ just mentioned, he also falls into the common pitfall of giving precedence to the surface manifestation of cuisine: for him, the aforementioned promiscuity of the American palate, the fact that American cooking and consumption routinely includes a jumble of ingredients and dishes from a wide range of traditional regional cuisines, renders it for him a non-cuisine. However, this openness is a learned behaviour, an aspect of culture, and itself an integral part of the American culinary grammar. Indeed, if one analyses the foodways of mainstream America, one finds that it has a grammatical structure not all that much less complex than that of any of the regional cuisines that Mintz accepts as genuine cuisines.

Endo-cuisine and Exo-cuisine Wherein lies the difference between these regional cuisines and the sort of culinary culture we find in mainstream America? Clearly, it lies in the method by which the cuisine is propagated, which is to say, how the culinary community is structured and how its “active discourse about food” (Mintz 1996: 104) is constituted. In a traditional regional cuisine, the central locus of that discourse is the family, then the extended family and circles of friends and then the broader local, sub-regional and regional communities. Such discourse is not ‘closed’ and thus the cuisine remains to a degree open to external influence and change, but the higher the degree that culinary knowledge is passed on within familial or very local circumstances, the more it will show continuity across generations. A reasonable name for this sort of cuisine might be an ‘endo-cuisine’, not in the

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limited sense that Levi-Strauss (2008: 42) first used the term, but rather to express the idea that the network of communication and culinary discourse that supports a cuisine is focused locally: Definition of ‘Endo-cuisine’ (Traditional Regional Cuisine) A given community’s traditional system of (primarily but not exclusively) domestic cookery which is based on a relatively closed set of principally local ingredients and involves specific dishes, styles of dishes, methods of food preparation, procurement and preservation, and the gustatory aesthetics and cultural constraints (for example, religious and technological) that govern their use and moderate the incorporation of new ingredients and dishes.

Standing in natural contrast to the endo-cuisine would be then the ‘exo-­ cuisine’, a cuisine supported by a network of communication and discourse that is more outward looking and diffuse, in which much of the transfer of culinary knowledge is not face-to-face and in the family kitchen but rather through the written word or television and commonly crosses ethnic, socio-economic and even national boundaries. In the case of mainstream America, there has been a wide range of socio-economic factors at work for a long time which have led to looser familial bonds, greater mobility of individuals and nuclear families and increased reliance on commercially prepared foods. In addition, some of the forces, mutatis mutandis, that Appadurai (1988) describes at work in the formation of an Indian national cuisine in the 1970s and 1980s were also at play in the development of a bourgeois supra-regional American cuisine earlier in the twentieth and even in the nineteenth centuries. Finally, there has been in the United States a long-standing and pervasive intrusion of corporate marketing in all levels of food discourse. Thus, if we are to allow for the existence of national cuisines, then mainstream American cuisine can be seen as a somewhat precocious and extreme version thereof, a quintessential exo-cuisine. However, amending our definition of an endo-cuisine to better suit the nature of an exo-cuisine, the definition remains by and large the same, with the main difference residing in the differing natures of the communities and their culinary discourses: Definition of ‘Exo-cuisine’ A given community’s evolving system of domestic and commercial cookery which involves a relatively open set of ingredients, dishes, styles of dishes, methods of food preparation, procurement and preservation, and the gustatory aesthetics and cultural constraints (for example, religious and

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technological) that govern their use and moderate the incorporation of new ingredients and dishes.

Before moving on to the question of Italian-American cuisine, let me briefly call attention to some of the salient grammatical rules of mainstream American cuisine. First off, regarding taste inclinations, mainstream America has a particular love of the sweet, which extends well beyond the boundaries of desserts and sweet snacks and is a marked characteristic also of American savoury cookery, where sweet sauces and glazes are used to a remarkable degree, as discussed by Barthes (1970: 307). There is also a general aversion to the bitter, largely absent in traditional Anglo-American cookery and now accepted with reservation as vegetables such as Belgian endive and broccoli di rapa have become trendy. Along similar lines, American beers have traditionally been rather sweet with little hops flavour and bitterness, a taste-profile now countered with a fad among microbrewers of making extremely hoppy, bitter beers. The same process of exaggerated use of a flavouring agent formerly absent from the Anglo-American repertoire can also be seen in the popularity of dishes with a great deal of garlic or extremely high levels of chilli-induced piquancy. Related to the last mentioned, there is a pervasive fondness of table condiments, from hot sauces to ketchup to soy sauce to grated cheese to seasoned olive oil, which is to say that it is normal for individuals to alter cooked dishes according to their tastes at table. There is also an overarching aesthetic of ‘more is better’, which extends beyond the extreme use of single flavouring agents such as garlic and also beyond the famously large portion sizes of American eateries—it also can be seen at work in adaptations of dishes from other cuisines, where there is a marked tendency to ‘improve’ recipes with numerous additional ingredients. Beyond such aesthetic features, there are naturally also well-established mainstream notions regarding what foods are proper to what meals of the day, as well as the canonical form of a proper main meal (soup or salad followed by protein, starch and vegetable served on one plate and followed by dessert). One could go on but clearly there is a ‘grammatical structure’ in mainstream American cuisine, however varied the origins of its surface manifestations are.

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Italian-American Cuisine Italian immigration to the United States was to a great extent focused in the period from 1880 to 1920, when each year there were more than one hundred or two hundred thousand arrivals.2 Of these, the vast majority were poor and hailed from southern Italy and especially from the regions of Campania, Sicily, Calabria and Basilicata. Though the larger part of them had been agricultural workers, Italian immigrant communities took root primarily in urban settings, particularly in the cities of the Northeast, from Boston down to Baltimore, and to a lesser degree in the Midwest with a few outliers elsewhere, such as in New Orleans and San Francisco. The largest concentrations were in New  York City, Philadelphia and Chicago. Many smaller cities also had large Italian populations, such as Newark, New Haven and Providence, where there flourished very dense communities, the ‘Little Italies’, which survived until the urban upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, when most of their inhabitants moved to less densely Italian neighbourhoods or the suburbs. There are three remarkable aspects of Italian-American cuisine: (1) the degree of resistance shown by the Italian-American community to culinary assimilation; (2) its disproportionate influence on mainstream American cuisine; (3) the fact that this Italian-American culinary influence occurred in the face of widespread and deep prejudice towards Italian Americans: for mainstream America, southern Italians were dirty, emotionally unstable, untrustworthy and naturally inclined towards violence and criminality. Indeed, there were extended public debates about whether southern Italians could be considered ‘white’, which in the context of the even more virulent prejudice towards African Americans in the United States says a great deal. Southern Italian foodways, so different from those of mainstream northern-European Americans, were an additional source of horror and even well-intentioned social workers active in Italian immigrant communities commonly suggested that the newcomers might be saved from their barbarism if only they would abandon their unhealthy eating habits (Levenstein 1985), an opinion which is deliciously ironic in light of the current American obsession with the health benefits of the so-­ called Mediterranean diet.

2  See Buccini 2015 for a more extensive discussion of Italian immigration to the United States and more generally on the history and nature of Italian-American cuisine.

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Perhaps even more ironic is the fact that mainstream prejudice towards southern Italians served both directly and indirectly to strengthen the immigrants’ maintenance of their traditional culinary culture. In this regard it must be said that food scholars from the United States and Italy who have written about Italian-American cuisine—almost all outsiders— have grossly failed to appreciate the conservative nature of the group’s domestic cookery, commonly mistaking Italian-American restaurant food as representative of the cuisine as a whole. In my view, based on a lifetime of personal experience in New Jersey, New  York and Chicago, Italian-­ American domestic foodways were remarkably conservative and fairly homogeneous across the United States, evolving according to the shared culinary grammar that underlies all the regional cuisines of southern Italy.3 Increased consumption of dried pasta, meat and fresh fish do not constitute instances of Americanisation but rather exploitation of improved economic situations—all have direct parallels in the dietary evolutions of the sister cuisines in Italy during the twentieth century. Even so, greater prosperity did not erase the traditional basic template of weekly meals, with, alongside the de rigueur Sunday celebration of pasta with meat sauce and possibly a roasted meat as well, dinners on at least two or even four days a week being meatless, with a very significant and non-mainstream American focus on salted fish, organ meats and especially legumes, bitter greens and traditional garden vegetables such as eggplants, zucchini and artichokes. A great many Italian-American families adhered to this southern Italian diet—and some still do—into the second and even third American-born generation, especially in places where there has remained enough of a community to support it.4 3  It is worth noting that before the ‘unification’ of Italy, continental southern Italy (from Abruzzo and what is now the southern part of Lazio southwards) all belonged to one and the same nation for well more than half a millennium, called in its last period the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. During most of this time, Sicily was also part of the great southern kingdom. It is therefore not surprising that despite considerable variety across this large area, there also developed a great many unifying traits in all cultural domains, from language, architecture, music and so on to cuisine. A crucial step in Italian unification was the conquest and subjugation of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, a process whose negative impact on the south contributed to the mass emigration of southern Italians to the United States and elsewhere. 4  The importance and stability across time of the weekly template of meals in Italian cuisine is generally underappreciated by outsiders and has been a central element of foodways throughout Italy and among Italian emigrant communities (see, e.g. Camporesi’s (1995: 164ff.) discussion in a northern Italian context). Of course, the basic frame of the template

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There are two key reasons for the exceptional degree of conservatism in Italian-American foodways and in both, mainstream prejudice played a role. The first is the centrality of intimate social networks in the formation of Italian-American culture—of family, extended family and circles of friends from their home villages in Italy, which were gradually reshaped along the same lines in the new immigrant communities (cf., Cinotto 2013). In this way, the grammatical deep structure of southern Italian cuisine(s) was passed on essentially intact to the first and very often also to the second generation of the immigrants’ American-born offspring. Prejudicial attitudes of the mainstream only reinforced the cultural importance of the family and gave in-group foodways a greater importance, fostering an intense pride in and covert prestige of southern Italian culinary traditions—from my personal experience among family and friends, whatever cultural insecurities we felt in the face of mainstream prejudice, we had no doubt that we ate better than the Merican’. This fidelity to traditional foodways demanded that from the start, Italian Americans play an active role in the production and procurement of the foodstuffs required for their cookery. This they did in two ways: (1) Italian Americans, even those living in densely urban settings, stood out for their cultivation of kitchen and herb gardens even on impossibly small bits of space, so much so that productive fig trees in the hostile climate of the Northeast came to be a symbol of Italianità, alongside home production of preserved vegetables and wine;5 (2) from their arrival in the United States, Italian Americans constructed their own commercial networks for the production and shipping of traditional foodstuffs within the United States and for imports from Italy, one of the only entrepreneurial fields open to them in the face of mainstream prejudice. It is a direct result of this activity that Italian Americans soon gained a foothold in the commercial world of food production and distribution. is related to Catholic traditions—the old rules regarding abstinence and the tradition of celebrating each Sunday—but it is interesting to note that in the United States, many families that have lost any strong attachment to the Church nonetheless continue to follow to varying degrees the originally religiously based template. 5  While the home production of wine and preserved foodstuffs surely had in part an economic motivation, the aesthetic and also symbolic values of the homemade products have always been of great or greater importance. For many Italian Americans (as well as Italian immigrants elsewhere, e.g. Australia), the arduous work of processing vast quantities of fresh tomatoes in late summer for use throughout the year became a sort of institution for the entire extended family.

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In a somewhat more complicated way, they also managed from early on to enter the hospitality industry. Originally, up to World War I, Italian-­ American public cooking was primarily aimed at the many single-male Italian immigrants then present in American cities. However, after the war Italian-American restaurants began to flourish, aiming not at an Italian-­ American audience but at a mainstream American audience, giving rise to the Americanised cookery of ‘red sauce’ restaurants that so many people have confused with the actual domestic cuisine of the group. Indeed, Italian Americans were known for their disinclination to dine outside the home and in strongly ethnic neighbourhoods, the Little Italies, the many restaurants that now give them their pseudo-ethnic feel were by and large absent until the resident Italian populations moved out and the neighbourhoods were transformed into urban ethnic theme-parks (Kosta 2014). It is this urban flight and the suburban diaspora that really took off in the 1960s and 1970s that has opened the doors to culinary assimilation. The community support, crucially involving Italian bakeries, pork stores, cheese stores, butcher shops, green grocers and fishmongers, is steadily disappearing, with—by necessity or choice—increasing reliance on the chain-operated grocery store. The intensity of family bonds have weakened and, for an ethnic group that tended to be strongly endogamous, exogamy is now surely the norm. In this way, the old culinary grammar is less frequently passed on and, even though many individual dishes are commonly retained, they have been divorced from their grammatical underpinnings and necessarily take on completely different meanings and eventually different forms in their new American setting. Indeed, virtually all of the grammatical rules of mainstream American cuisine mentioned above are diametrically opposed to those that underlie Italian-American and southern Italian cuisine, and all of them can be seen at work in the Americanised adaptations of Italian dishes that are pawned off as ‘traditional’ and ‘authentic’ by television chefs and the American mainstream media and food industries (See Chou and Platt, Chap. 9, this volume). Contemporaneous with these changes to the social structure of the Italian-American community came another destabilising force: the ‘discovery’ by Americans of ‘northern Italian’ cuisine, one of the first upscale foodie trends of the late twentieth century. Again, irony is an important element here, in that the popularity of northern Italian restaurants and foods in America built crucially on the success of the older Italian-American restaurants and foods among mainstream Americans. However, the northern Italian trend established its place in the upscale market in part through

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a conscious separation from and scorn for Italian-American and southern Italian cookery. Coinciding suspiciously with the immigration era disdain for southern Italians and acceptance of northern Italians, northern Italian cuisine was taken to be a ‘refined’ and ‘elegant’ antidote to the southerners’ heavy peasant fare as imagined through mainstream American experience in Italian-American restaurants that had designed a version of southern Italian food that appealed precisely to mainstream American tastes. With the breakdown of the old communities and traditions, culturally assimilated Italian Americans themselves have increasingly taken on this pro-northern perspective, from which the southern Italian-American traditional dishes and their names have come to be widely regarded as corruptions of (pseudo-)northern Italian analogues, when in fact the Italian-­ American dishes and names are actually quite faithful reflections of their equally valid and ‘authentic’ southern Italian sources.6 As shrewd entrepreneurs in this post-modern, late capitalist market for well-packaged culinary ‘authenticity’, Italian Americans have become major players. As such, they know well how to sell their wares to a maximally large audience that wants the otherness of Italian cuisine moderated by the filters of mainstream American culinary grammar, all served up with lots of garlic, jalapeño chillies, extra cheese and a final drizzle of EVOO. For the American mainstream, this kind of Italianoid cookery is merely one of many seemingly ‘authentic’, appropriated and adapted foreign cuisines, while for culinarily assimilated Americans of Italian descent, it represents a well-spring of faux tradition. For culturally conservative Italian Americans, it represents just a new means for the American mainstream to express its contempt for Italian-American and southern Italian culture and likely the final nail in the coffin of their ethnic cuisine in America.

6  For example, ‘pasta e fasul’ (pasta with beans) is felt by many to be an Italian-American corruption of the ‘real’ Italian ‘pasta e fagioli’, when in fact the former is the proper southern Italian dialect name for the version(s) of the dish made by so many Italian-American families of southern Italian descent. One also regularly hears the Italian-American usage of ‘lasagna’ as the name of the stuffed and baked noodle dish being said to be ‘incorrect’, presumably the product of Italian-American ignorance, when in fact it is a faithful continuation of the name of the composed dish throughout southern Italy with a collective singular. Standard and northern Italian usage of the plural ‘lasagne’ for the composed dish is correct in its own context but for the southern Italian and Italian-American contexts it is inappropriate. On this, see Buccini 2013: 95.

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An Endo-cuisine In terms of the typology of cuisines proposed above, Italian-American cuisine was (and, to the increasingly limited degree to which it survives, is) an endo-cuisine, a cuisine that continued to a remarkable degree not just its deeper ‘grammatical’ structure but the full array of traditional dishes from southern Italy, with culinary adaptation to the new American setting involving a degree of ‘koinisation’ between the closely related foodways of southern Italy’s different regions and sub-regions and limited adoption of previously unfamiliar American foodstuffs. As much as possible, wherever Italian Americans found themselves able to (re-)construct communities and networks of food production and food procurement, they devoted strikingly high levels of time (gardens and home food preservation) and money (expensive imported olive oil and hard cheeses, fresh produce from elsewhere in the United States) on producing a culinary culture that corresponded not to an American dream but to the southern Italian ideal, with all the traditional structure of sober days featuring familiar vegetables, pulses and preserved fish and offal and more festive meals with fresh fish and meat, all elevated by traditionally made bread and pasta in relative abundance. What renders such fidelity to traditional foodways in an alien environment not just possible but necessary and natural is culinary discourse and activity that is strongly focused inwardly, within the nuclear family, the extended family and the local ethnic community—as is the case with language acquisition, such discourse, observation and shared experience are the only means by which traditional knowledge can be transferred across generations. Crucial too is an attitude of younger generations that find greater value in tradition than in assimilation to the surrounding, alien culture. What is at issue here are not individual recipes and, most typically, holiday dishes, which easily survive as isolated relicts into new culinary settings, but rather a full array of gustatory aesthetics and culturally complex patterns of preferences and taboos regarding meal structures, food calendar, cooking methods and techniques. In the context of an American mainstream society, in which exogamy and work constraints antithetical to close habitual family interactions reign, it was inevitable that Italian-­ American cuisine would in effect disappear. That the process has taken so long is especially surprising, given that mainstream American cuisine had already started down the path to becoming the quintessential exo-cuisine in the period when Italian immigrants first arrived in the United States in

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the late nineteenth century, a cuisine in which the focus of discourse, observation and shared experience has gradually but steadily been shifting away from the family and immediate community to public spheres of corporate marketing, cookbooks, journalistic food writing and television cooking shows.

Conclusion If we look at cuisine in a more sophisticated manner than is generally used, distinguishing between its superficial level and its deeper structural level, that is, its grammar, and further take into consideration the discourse-­ based typology suggested here, we can understand why in the increasingly few homes in the United States in which Italian-American families’ cookery conforms to the traditional grammar of their endo-cuisine, the salad bowl arrives at the end of the meal, with its typically sober contents dressed simply in olive oil and red wine vinegar or lemon, and why in the homes and restaurants where the American mainstream’s exo-cuisine reigns, including most ‘Italian’ restaurants and the homes of Americans of Italian ancestry, the salad bowl—with sometimes bewildering arrays of far-flung ingredients—normally arrives at the start of the meal, with its contents dressed with creamy, sweet and very often commercially produced concoctions. In the end, Italian-American cuisine gradually meets its death as a result of broader socio-cultural factors—exogamy and, more importantly, the fragmentation of the extended and even nuclear family have rendered the generational transfer of structured culinary knowledge impossible, while the dissolution of focused ethnic communities and their supporting culinary infrastructure has further weakened opportunities to remain faithful to traditional ways. From the other side, even in a context of only partial familial and communal dissolution, the seductive power of mainstream America’s commercial food industry and its relentless advertising and skilfully targeted appeals to simple tastes with the trappings of youth culture make it inevitable that the traditional bowl of artfully prepared tripe loses out to the double bacon cheeseburger, or for that matter, that the homemade pizza with anchovies loses out to the commercially produced and delivered pizza with extra cheese and pepperoni. From this perspective, we see that the shift from the one food culture to the other can seem at the broader social or familial level gradual but is in fact at the individual level generally rather abrupt. In a given family, one

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or both of the parents may well retain a broad knowledge of Italian-­ American cuisine. However, their children may be with regard to their culinary grammar essentially American, with culinary continuity being essentially superficial and limited to a set of traditional Italian-American dishes that are the ones that are most accessible to the American palate. In such cases, once those children leave home, they will typically have little or no interest in the many traditional dishes that do not conform to the American culinary grammar. They may though eventually have some nostalgic attachment to the idea of those dishes or else develop a fondness for them in the context of ‘foodie’ or gourmet interests in later life and then often with a preference for pseudo-authentic (and especially ‘northern Italian’) versions thereof that they have encountered through celebrity chefs. In this paper I have characterised a number of developments in the history of Italian-American cuisine as ironic and must need do so again. The relatively strong fidelity of Italian Americans to their traditional southern Italian culinary grammar was, as we have noted, in part a product of a social and economic inversion in the face of mainstream prejudice. However, it was also in good measure enabled by the rapidly growing industrialisation and de-location through long-distance shipping of food in America: without the ability to import olive oil, cheeses and other foodstuffs from Italy and fruits and vegetables from elsewhere in North America, Italian-American communities would have had to redesign their cuisine fundamentally or else simply adapt to the foodways of the local mainstream. But then, in holding so stubbornly onto their old world cuisine for the better part of a century, they also played a crucial role, along with a few other key immigrant groups, in the transformation of the American culinary landscape from one in which there were old regional cuisines into one in which there was a national cuisine, in most or all basic respects still firmly northern European in its grammatical structure, but ever more open to accept and adapt to its own tastes a wide array of ethnic ingredients and dishes.

References Appadurai, Arjun. 1988. How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India. Comparative Studies in Society and History 30 (1): 3–24. Barthes, Roland. 1970. Pour une Psycho-sociologie de L’alimentation Contemporaine. Cahiers des Annales 28: 307–315.

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Buccini, Anthony F. 2013. Lasagna: A Layered History. In Wrapped and Stuffed: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2012, ed. Mark McWilliams, 94–104. Totnes: Prospect Books. ———. 2015. Italian. In Ethnic American Food Today: A Cultural Encyclopedia, ed. Lucy Long, 314–233. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Little. ———. 2016. Defining ‘Cuisine’: Communication, Culinary Grammar and the Typology of Cuisine. In Food and Communication: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2015, ed. Mark McWilliams, 105–121. Totnes: Prospect Books. Camporesi, Piero. 1995. La Terra e la Luna. Alimentazione Folclore Società. Milano: Garzanti. Cinotto, Simone. 2013. The Italian American Table. Food, Family, and Community in New York City. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kosta, Ervin. 2014. The Immigrant Enclave as Theme Park. Culture, Capital, and Urban Change in New  York’s Little Italies. In Making Italian America. Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities, ed. Simone Cinotto, 225–243. New York: Fordham University Press. Levenstein, Harvey. 1985. The American Response to Italian Food, 1880–1930. Food and Foodways 1: 1–24. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 2008. The Culinary Triangle. In Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, 36–44. New  York: Routledge. Mintz, Sidney W. 1996. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past. Boston: Beacon. Montanari, Massimo. 2006. Food Is Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.

CHAPTER 6

Narratives on an Independent Cuisine: Catalan Food as Identity in the Contemporary Independence Movement Venetia Johannes

Introduction Food has been an important means of expressing Catalan identity in the pro-independence movement in the Catalan Autonomous Community (CAC). In my research, I have considered the ways in which Catalans living in the CAC use food as a means of expressing their Catalan, national identity. Since 2010, there has been a visible strengthening of support for Catalonia’s independence as a separate state. Even members of the population who do not support this favour a re-evaluation of the area’s relationship with the Spanish state, particularly in light of fiscal and political demands.1  In 2006, the Catalan government passed a new Statute of Autonomy. Despite having been previously ratified in Madrid, the right-wing Popular Party immediately challenged the 1

V. Johannes (*) Independent Researcher, Gloucester, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Chou, S. Kerner (eds.), Food, Social Change and Identity, Consumption and Public Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84371-7_6

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It is this current trend in Catalan identity politics that has catalysed (or perhaps better ‘Catalanized’) a re-evaluation of expressions of national and cultural symbols in Catalonia in all walks of life. The case of food and cuisine provides a particularly illuminating means of studying this process in Catalonia. This is because they are intricately connected to other markers of national identity, such as the Catalan language, observances of national festivals, ideals of national ‘character’ and, most importantly, a historic (and historicized) past that can be called upon to justify contemporary nationalistic demands. My primary fieldsite was the city of Vic (population 45,000), the capital of the county of Osona, about 70 km north of Barcelona. The data presented in this paper was gathered over 15 months of residential fieldwork, from June 2012 to September 2013, and also during shorter visits of several weeks during 2014. The visits in 2014 have particular relevance for this chapter. This was a significant year for contemporary Catalanism, since it represented the tercentenary anniversary of the end of the Siege of Barcelona on 11 September 1714, a significant event in Catalan history as well as in Catalonia’s relationship with the Spanish state. As an anthropologist, my primary data methods included ethnographic interviews with informants (semi-structured interviews taking place over several months in everyday settings), and participant observation. The latter predominantly involved attending meals and cooking sessions in home and restaurant environments, as well as being present at festivals and public events. Other research methods included group interviews with pro-Catalan cultural and activist groups; photo elicitation; and the study of books, print and online media (such as magazines, newspapers or blogs). The language used in fieldwork was largely Catalan, although some informants preferred to speak in Castilian, and some media I accessed was also written in Castilian. However, for the purposes of this chapter, all quotes provided here are taken from interviews conducted in Catalan, or from articles, books or media in Catalan, and translated by myself into English.

Statute. In 2010 the Spanish Constitutional Court ruled that the most pro-Catalan clauses should be removed, particularly the recognition of Catalans as members of a nation. This resulted in a massive demonstration of approximately 1.5 million people in Barcelona against the decision and the Spanish government in general. Demands to rectify the fiscal deficit between Catalonia and Spain (whereby 8–10% of Catalonia’s earnings leave the area and are not returned in public investment) have also been refused, leading to widespread discontent (Gibson 2010).

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In broad terms, my research can be placed into that of culinary nationalism, or the study of gastronationalist movements. DeSoucey’s (2010: 433) pioneering definition of gastronationalism reads as follows: a form of claims-making and a project of collective identity, is responsive to and reflective of the political ramifications of connecting nationalist projects with food culture at local levels… attacks (symbolic or otherwise) against a nation’s food practices are assaults on heritage and culture, not just on the food item itself.

DeSoucey (ibid.) also argues that gastronationalism has appeared due to new worldwide trends in culture and politics. She has described the situation as springing from “globalism’s homogenizing tendencies and the appearance of new forms of identity politics invigorated by an increasingly homogenous environment which is causing this gastronationalism”. Drawing on this conceptual framework, my focus in this chapter is on the new trends in Catalan gastronational identity that have come out of the nationalist resurgence. Within the context of this inquiry, insights will be drawn from six ethnographic exemplifications. They are namely, (1) the renewed importance of the time-honoured gastronomic calendar, (2) national days and national foods, (3) the invention of entirely new foods for nationalist festivals, (4) the role of sausages in Catalonia’s anti-festival, Dia de la Hispanitat, to insult Spain, (5) the marking of the Tercentenary Diada with a celebration of the year 1714 in food and (6) the making of nationalist chocolates.

The Gastronomic Calendar The gastronomic calendar is a popular concept in Catalonia that defines certain foods as associated with certain festive days. It is a food schedule that has been acknowledged in Catalan gastronomic literature since the early twentieth century (Domènech 1930). As a symbol of Catalan culture, awareness of this calendar amongst the local inhabitants has increased, as have attempts to follow it, since it is a symbol not only of a historic past but also national unity. Aside from national days, there are other festivities that are almost universally celebrated throughout Catalonia. Examples include Easter, Christmas and All Saints Day. However, these are placed in a different category to the Catalan-specific days as they are celebrated throughout

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Europe too. Nonetheless, what makes their celebration different in the eyes of many Catalans is the way in which they are celebrated: through the consumption of particular Catalan foods associated with these festive days. This means of associating food and time or the gastronomic calendar features prominently in the lives of Catalans. No consideration of food and identity in Catalonia is complete without reference to the existence of the gastronomic calendar. The way in which food and festivity are associated is often considered a unique or defining characteristic of Catalan culinary culture. As one interlocutor remarked, in no other country do you have a cake or something else for each festival. It’s something that we have clearly here.

While similar concepts may exist in other countries, the individual associations are particular to Catalonia. Most of these festival foods have come about because of the combined influences of seasonal produce and the religious calendar.2 Examples include bunyols de Quaresme (sugared donuts) consumed during Lent to keep up energy levels during a time of fasting, egg-heavy dishes during the spring period such as crema catalana (cream custard) on Saint Joseph’s Day on 19 March, the Easter mona (a bread decorated with eggs until the late nineteenth century, now made from chocolate) and dishes such as the Bacallà de Divendres Sant (Good Friday Cod); Panellets (small sweetmeats) made from almond flour combined with sugar and consumed for All Saints’ Day on 1 November, and finally for Christmas, the universally recognized dish of escudella i carn d’olla which is a rich, calorific hotpot stew made from pig products and winter vegetables suited to feed large gatherings as well as colder weather. To demonstrate a national ideal of thriftiness, Christmas leftovers are reused on Saint Stevens Day (26 December) as the fillings for canelons (stuffed pasta rolls).3 2  For example, Lent or popular saints’ days continue to be celebrated in a secular environment. 3  The Catalan word for this ideal is seny, which describes the rational, down-to-earth, levelheadedness idealized as part of the Catalan character. The question of Catalan national character is discussed further in a chapter in Llobera’s (2004) ethnography on Catalan nationalism, Foundations of National Identity. This ideal of thriftiness has also interacted in interesting ways with the economic recession that since 2008 has had strong effects on Catalonia, as in the rest of Spain. Local experiences of this recession have likely been instrumental in fueling pro-independence Catalanism.

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Today, neither seasonality nor religious prohibitions are so influential on contemporary food availability as they were in former times. However, the association of the gastronomic calendar with the past has lent it new significance in light of the renewed awareness of Catalan culture in everyday settings that has been brought about by the pro-independence movement. As a symbol of national identity, awareness and following of the gastronomic calendar has gained new connotations as a means of expressing Catalanism. My interlocutors noted this not just in their own behaviour in recent years (and that of others) but also in popular media (e.g. magazines, books and television programmes).4 The gastronomic calendar also perpetuates national identity in another way. When consuming dishes on particular days associated with the festive gastronomic calendar, there is an awareness on an individual level that throughout the rest of Catalonia, other Catalans are eating the same dishes. I saw this clearly with one family I knew well, during a Good Friday meal of Bacallà de Quaresme (cod with eggs, covered with a pancake). This is one of many such meals that can be eaten at this time, which includes the Lenten staple of cod (no meat can be consumed) yet makes copious use of the large number of eggs available in spring. One member of the family described what this dish and the gastronomic calendar meant to him: There is a connection at the level of all Catalonia, you feel linked to a culture, we’re all doing the same this Good Friday.

By eating the same (or similar) things that one knows others throughout Catalonia are eating, one can feel a connection with other Catalans. Much like the Catalan language, or the collective celebration of national days, following the gastronomic calendar creates a connection between the individual and the imagined community (Anderson 1983) of a greater Catalan nation through the shared consumption of the same foods.

4  It is also possible that this has been influenced by the development of local food movements across parts of Europe and North America, such as organic produce or Slow Food. However, it is interesting that such sentiments have often developed to include a nationalist bent in contemporary Catalonia.

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National Days: National Foods? There are three national days celebrated in Catalonia. The first of the year is the Diada de Sant Jordi (Saint George’s Day) on 23 April, the day of Catalonia’s patron saint. Over the last century this has become a Catalan Valentine’s Day and literary celebration, “The Day of the Book and the Rose”. The next is La Nit de Sant Joan (Saint John’s Eve) on 23 June, a celebration that Catalonia shares with the rest of Spain and other parts of Europe, but which has evolved to become a celebration of Catalan identity through pro-Catalan activities during the Franco era (1939–1977). Finally, there is Catalonia’s national day on 11 September, simply called ‘La Diada’ (the Festival). Ironically it is a day that recalls a defeat for Catalonia and the conclusion of the Siege of Barcelona in 1714 by the forces of Spain’s new Bourbon monarch. This particular national day provides the focus for most militant Catalanism. In recent years, it has become part festive day and part political protest.5 Following the rise in pro-independence sentiment, in the tercentenary year of 2014, the Diada became heavy with historical significance. Of the three national days, the celebration of Saint John’s Eve is most strongly associated with a food: the Coca de Sant Joan (Saint John’s Bread). The Coca is a sweetened flat bread that is decorated with a variety of toppings. Decoration for the Coca de Sant Joan used to be with fresh fruits and nuts in season at that time. This has now developed into candied fruits and pine nuts which are more suited to mass production. From its positive associations with street parties, revelry and summer, the coca is one of the most universally recognized and loved festival foods in Catalonia. In recent years, it has become a national symbol due to a combination of its positive associations, its position in the gastronomic calendar and its association with a day celebrating national identity. In a glaring anomaly in the concept of the gastronomic calendar, the two other national days in Catalonia namely, Saint George’s Day and the Diada do not have associated foods, an observation at times recognized with some embarrassment by my interlocutors when I raised the topic for discussion. The writers of a cookbook dedicated to festival foods (Sano and Clotet 2012: 84) admit to this in the case of Saint George’s Day: 5  The Diada is a classic example of what Quiroga (2007: 148) describes as the “sacralization of national symbols [that] takes place in patriotic ceremonies where the nation is endowed with holy qualities and patriotic liturgies acquire a religious character previously reserved for the deity”.

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This day has remained more marked by cultural and patriotic symbols than by gastronomy. The thing that one cannot miss about today is the rose and the book and the street shared with fellow citizens. In contrast, the menu does not have any obligatory or complimentary attachment.

Like Saint George’s Day, the Diada also has no strong links with particular foods. None of my interlocutors described an associated food. Nevertheless, food as part of Catalonia’s cultural arsenal is used in multitudinous ways to demonstrate Catalonia’s different identity throughout the day. In the words of one post on a Catalanist Facebook group page on the 2012 Diada contextualizing the consumption of certain foods as part of being Catalan: I was born… where one eats mongetes amb botifarra, allioli, snails, pa amb tomàquet, where one drinks Cava, Vichy Catalan, water from Montseny.6

It is noteworthy that at food-related events on the day of the Diada itself, there is a self-conscious consumption of ‘typical’ Catalan foods. From 2013 onwards, there has been a food market in the central arena of the pro-independence gathering area that specialized in Catalan-produced food and drink, such as beer, cheese, confectionary and sausages. I found this effort to eat Catalan food on Saint George’s Day too. A widow in Barcelona described how she celebrated Saint George’s Day with her late husband through a lunch at a Catalan restaurant every year. The apparent anomaly of Saint George’s Day and the Diada has led to attempts to associate these days with a particular food in line with the other days on the gastronomic calendar. Generally, this has been to promote a baked good. The Barcelonan Cake-Makers’ Guild has been the main driving force in this effort. The most obvious new food now associated with Saint George’s Day is the Pans de Sant Jordi (Saint George’s Bread). This is a fairly recent invention, created in 1988 by a Barcelona baker Eduardo Crespo. This made 2013 the twenty-fifth anniversary—a fact celebrated in packaging from 6  Mongetes amb botifarra are sausage and beans. This is a dish that will be discussed later in this chapter for its nationalist associations. Allioli is one of the most important sauces in Catalan cuisine. Within Spain, Catalans are popularly identified as consumers of snails and pa amb tomàquet, particularly the latter which is bread rubbed with tomato, oil and salt. The rest are drinks brands. Cava is a sparkling wine from a particular region within Catalonia, and Vichy Catalan and Montseny are bottled water brands.

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that year at his bakery. This is a flat savoury bread, containing nuts, cheese and sobrassada (a spicy Mallorcan sausage). The most apparent visual characteristic is the four bars of the Catalan national flag, the senyera, emblazoned on the bread, the colouring from the sobrassada giving the red colour, and the cheese lending a yellow tinge to the other bars in the centre (see Fig. 6.1). This bread has spread from its original bakery and can now be found in most Barcelona bakeries for the festival, and also in Vic. The promotions of Pans de Sant Jordi was often to be found in newspapers and magazines. According to an article for the food magazine Cuina (Cuina.cat 2013): To each celebration, a food. The Catalan calendar is full of festivities that are celebrated with acts, traditions and something to content the palate and the stomach. St. George’s Day cannot be an exception… A roundel decorated

Fig. 6.1  Pans de Sant Jordi in a Barcelona bakery window, April 2013. (Venetia Johannes, Personal Collection)

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with the four bars of the senyera, [pa de Sant Jordi] has become a classic of the Diada [de Sant Jordi]”. [my emphasis]

As suggested in this quote, the attachment of food to festivals is a central element in the celebration of principal feast days in Catalonia. Any possibility that there is now not a food associated with a festive day is denied. An associated food is necessary to make the festival into a total sensory experience of national identity. Pans are sold in most bakeries, as well as in main thoroughfares alongside the bookstalls set out to commemorate the day. This is more a street food type and highly portable. It also resembles the Coca de Sant Joan in that both are festivals that mostly take place in the street. In bakeries, alongside the Pans are Pastissos de Sant Jordi. They comprise cakes in the shape of books (advertised as ‘edible books’ by the Barcelona Cake-­ Makers’ Guild), or simple cream and sponge cakes that are decorated with the senyera, as well as roses, images or figurines of St George (Fig. 6.2). The decoration depends on the cake-maker’s personal taste. These cream and sponge cakes are also available the rest of the year. The origin of Pastissosde Sant Jordi is less clear than the Pans, though they are certainly older. There is reference to them in an important work on Catalan cuisine, The Art of Eating in Catalonia (Váquez Montalbán 1977: 206) published at the end of the Franco dictatorship, where they are described as “a rectangular cake, on a thin sponge cake base with butter filling. Topped with crushed sugar, a glaze, or coco powder, bearing in the middle a stencil of the glorious silhouette of the saint, and red roses”. This suggests that this cake has been around for at least forty years. Even so, it is still considered new and its connectedness with the day is being developed. The new food that is now associated with the Diada is Pastissos de la Diada (Diada Cakes, Fig. 6.3). They are almost identical to many Pastissos de Sant Jordi, though the senyera is the main decoration and there are no references to books or Saint George. Pans de Sant Jordi (Breads of Saint Jordi) are sometimes sold on the Diada, since the national flag is also the main part of its design. The first recorded instance of a physical Pastís de la Diada was on 8 September 1977, at the end of the Franco dictatorship, when a group of members of the Barcelona Cake-Makers’ Guild presented a cake decorated with a senyera to Josep Tarradellas, President in exile of the Generalitat (Cuina.cat 2015). The cake was designed by a cakemaker in Badalona (a town near Barcelona) Miquel Comas i Figueras, who

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Fig. 6.2  Pastissos de Sant Jordi, in the form of edible books decorated with roses and senyeres, alongside Pans de Sant Jordi in a Barcelona bakery window, April 2013. (Venetia Johannes, Personal Collection)

ensured that the cake appeared in pastry shops during that Diada that year (at a time when the senyera was still technically illegal). This was a significant year, because it saw the first Diada celebration for four decades, and the return of Josep Taradellas to Catalan soil in October. This suggests that, like the Pastissos de Sant Jordi, they have a history of at least forty years in Catalonia. Catalans are generally aware of the efforts to develop ‘new’ foods for Saint George’s Day and the Diada, and they do not hold an entirely positive attitude to these new-fangled attempts. Efforts to develop the Pastissos de la Diada for Catalonia’s national day have met with more friction than the Pastís de Sant Jordi. This may be because large cakes of this type are associated with family gatherings that take place within the home, whereas the Diada is a celebration that takes place in the street. This is compounded by the view that the Pastís  de la Diada is promoted for commercial

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Fig. 6.3  Pastís de la Diada, as advertised in the Barcelona Cake-Makers’ Guild Calendar (© Gremi de Pastisseria de Barcelona. Published with Permission)

interests in order to take advantage of the prevailing nationalist sentiment. Many of my interlocutors specifically linked the appearance of these cakes to the burgeoning pro-independence movement, whereas before these cakes were much less apparent. Discussions with one baker in Barcelona that I knew suggested they had been in existence for forty years. As a boy, the baker remembered his father making them in the bakery he owned. Recently though, this baker began to present the cakes with the pro-­ independence flag. In comparison to the Pans and Pastissos de Sant Jordi, promotion of Pastís de la Diada is more muted in the festivities of the Diada in Barcelona. Some bakeries close on this day as this is the end of the holiday season.

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Others make no reference to the day aside from showing senyeres in their windows, and perhaps the calendar from the Barcelona Cake-Makers’ Guild showing the Pastís de la Diada. A few adapt their cakes by placing a senyera or some other Catalanist decoration on top. Nevertheless, a substantial number of bakeries will sell a variation of the Pastís de la Diada. Attitudes in bakeries themselves are mixed: some I spoke with were proud to carry Catalanist products, while others considered it ‘something fun’, not an expression of die-hard Catalanism. On the 2014 Diada, I noticed that they were more prevalent in areas around the central festivities and protest march.

Inventing National Foods The most obvious visual feature of all of these new foods has been the presence of the Catalan national flag as a senyera, but also as the pro-­ independence flag, the estelada, suggesting obvious nationalist associations. When I first noted the presence of these foods, I expected they would be held in great affection by Catalans, as the flags are revered as one of Catalonia’s foremost patriotic symbols. A testament to the growing support for pro-independence Catalanism in my fieldsite of Vic was the increasingly frequent appearance of the senyera and the estelada in the public sphere, hanging from town halls, balconies and windows, painted on walls, or placed in shop windows. Companies have also sprung up to cater for the demand for pro-Catalan memorabilia, and it is common to see individuals wearing the flags on clothing and personal accessories. The senyera is out in force on both Saint George’s Day and the Diada, and the estelada even more so on the Diada. The appearance of the flag on food can be considered a part of this trend, especially in association with the national days. The power of the flag as a symbol of national identity is undeniable, and emblazoned on foods, it gives them a certain appeal. Just as better known Catalan foodstuffs will include a senyera on their packaging to show their origin and highlight their role as Catalanist symbols, so these Pastissos de Sant Jordi, Pans de Sant Jodi and Pastissos de la Diada are connected to Catalan identity in a less subtle manner. Even when interlocutors criticize these foods for being new and not ‘traditional’, they still admit that they like them for the presence of the national flag. In a way, it may be this that allows the survival of these foods in that, since they bear the national symbol, many Catalans will still buy them to

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acknowledge the national day, just as they would get coca on La Nit de Sant Joan, or bunyols for Lent. Yet even with the flag, these still have some way to go before they take their place as a ‘traditional’ food. I also heard criticisms of the jingoistic expression of Catalan identity, which the Pastissos seemed to represent, perhaps another reason why their acceptance has been difficult. Their unsubtle Catalan-ness is off-putting and might not appear to be sincere patriotism. The reactions of many interlocutors to these types of cake were mixed; some appreciating the use of the Senyera, others seeing them as “very consumerist” or “a recent invention”. When an interlocutor was asked whether she liked the Pastissos de la Diada, she replied, I really like everything around the Diada, but this is an exaggeration. I wouldn’t buy it. It’s a business thing.

An interlocutor who organizes popular culture events said dismissively that these “invented” foods were “an attempt to add a cake to the festival because it didn’t have one”. This contrast with “traditional” and “invented” was regularly used in the context of these new national foods.7 Another young woman made the following remark: I’ve seen that thing with the four bars for a few years [Pans de Sant Jordi], but it’s not very well known.

In another conversation with this interlocutor and her family, they remarked in agreement: [T]his is new… something that the cake-makers do to make money now. It’s all marketing, invented. Cake-makers and bakers want to sell, so they do this. It’s not traditional.

It is interesting that these attitudes were present amongst all age groups, suggesting that even members of the younger generation consider the cakes as something new, even though they are older than them! I had an almost identical reaction from a group of Catalan activists, with one saying, 7  This also sounds ironic at times considering Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) on the invention of tradition, in that most alleged traditions are in fact recent inventions for nationalist or regionalist reasons.

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You can want to eat a cake like this one day, but it has no tradition at all.

In spite of the criticisms levelled against these new nationalist foods, the fact that they continue to be sold suggests that there is a market for these products. When I hunted round Barcelona’s bakeries at the end of the Diada in 2013 and 2014, I found that most had been sold already. Likewise, there are very few of the Pastissos and Pans de Sant Jordi left in bakeries on every 24 April. I had a good example of the context in which these cakes are most likely to be eaten from a young Catlan student in Oxford, who admitted that, like many other interlocutors, he was fond of the Pastissos de la Diada because of the appearance of all the senyeres (“it makes me really happy, all the senyeres, it’s nice”). However, he did not see these foods as signifiers of his national identity through food. His father, on the other hand, disliked Pastissos de la Diada, since he considered them too new and untraditional (my interlocutor took care to point out his father is very pro-independence and takes the upholding of Catalan traditions very seriously). However, his mother would always try to buy a Pastís de la Diada as a nod to the national day, which his father would grudgingly eat. It is noteworthy that this informant was from Barcelona. Most of my other informants were from the rural town where I was based for fieldwork. Several of my rural interlocutors associated these new food ‘inventions’ with Barcelona, in line with the prevailing view of the capital as both consumerist and cosmopolitan, the point of origin of new trends (See Chou and Platt, Chap. 9, this volume). When I showed a Pa de Sant Jordi that I brought from Barcelona to friends in my fieldsite, they saw it as something from Barcelona, even though it was sold locally. Once again, the Pans were described as a good moneymaking scheme for bakers, and therefore more a symbol of the perceived over-commercialization of festivals than strongly representative of Catalan gastronomic identity. Nonetheless, as with my Barcelonan informant, the reaction of my local interlocutors was not entirely negative. The obvious presence of the senyera, a national symbol of deep emotional resonance made it difficult for my informants to dismiss these foods entirely, as it would suggest a dismissal of the national flag. Despite their mixed reception, their continued presence year after year suggests that bakeries are making money from them. ‘Consumerist’ as this may be, the fact that there are consumers suggests a market for these new foods with nationalist associations. While there is documented evidence that these foods have been in Catalonia for a generation or more, it seems that they have not yet entered

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popular consciousness as a ‘tradition’, quite possibly because majority of the population can remember a time without it. Even younger Catalans who have grown up with it are very probably influenced by their elders to view it as something new. It is not ‘de tota la vida’, from all of one’s life, a common marker of something legitimated by tradition. However, the increased Catalan awareness of recent years has developed a demand for Catalanist products and memorabilia, and these foods should be seen as an answer to that demand. While they might once have been a side point to the national days, the days themselves have also taken on greater significance as a focus of the expression of Catalan identity, and so things associated with these days have likewise come under much greater scrutiny. Hence the apparent ‘newness’ of these products is no hindrance, as Catalans become sensitized to the presence of these products, and bakeries and cakemakers have also seen an opportunity to further promote them in light of the rise of pro-independence Catalanism. As the Pans, Pastissos de Sant Jordi and the Pastissos de la Diada have continued to be bought, there is nothing to suggest they will disappear in the future. Two respondents also made the point that there was one circumstance in which they would come to accept a Pastís de la Diada, and that was with the arrival of independence. Both these informants were interviewed in separate contexts, but both were strongly pro-independence. One remarked in passing: “Once we are independent, then we’ll have to have a cake, to celebrate”. Another also recalled, rather dismissively, that now they were doing an “independence cake”, adding, more kindly, “of course, the day we proclaim independence, we will have to do an independence day cake”, but not yet. The cake would therefore be acceptable if it were to celebrate a momentous event, since an appropriate foodstuff would be required for the proper celebration of a national day. Time will tell if this becomes reality.

‘Fent la Botifarra al Dia de la Hispanitat’: Catalonia’s Anti-festival and Sausages One can see that the three principal national holidays of Catalonia are clear celebrations of Catalan identity. However, there is another extraordinary day that deserves attention, which Catalans ‘celebrate’, but in such a way as to undermine its nature as a festive day. This is Spain’s National Day (Dia de la Hispanitat) on 12 October, which celebrates the anniversary of

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Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. Since this day is a celebration of Spanish identity, amongst Catalanists this has been transformed into a day on which anti-Spanish sentiment is focused. One of the most visible ways that Catalanists mark this event, a national holiday in Spain, is by insisting on working during that day. In 2012, both the Assemblea Nacional de Catalunya and Omnium Cultural (Catalanist cultural organizations) made well-publicized announcements that their offices would remain open, just as they would on normal weekdays, to show the irrelevance of Spanish festivals to Catalonia. Around Vic, shops were open as usual for the morning and most remained open for the afternoon too. Many of the shop windows also remained decked out in the Catalan flags and displays of the Diada from the month before. Despite the refusal to recognize the day as a holiday, the day is marked throughout Catalonia by pro-Catalan events, generally of a political and pro-independence nature. Just like the other national days, food as an identifiable symbol of Catalan identity has been brought into play for this day, marking a new development of the Gastronomic Calendar. As of 2012, October 12 has become the day of the botifarrada, or botiflerada (sausage eating), one of Catalonia’s many ‘-ades’ (dining events focused on one particular food), designated here for the communal eating of sausages. The consumption and association of sausages with this day is heavy with significance. Aside from their privileged position as a food particularly associated with Catalonia, fer la botifarra (make sausage) also has vulgar connotations as an insult. The company Catalunyam, which specializes in Catalan food-themed T-shirts, provides a demonstration of the gesture, that of placing the left hand on the crook of the elbow, and then bending it up, so that the forearm and fist stand vertically (see Fig. 6.4). The common name for this is the botitfarra de pagès (‘peasant sausage’, due to its obvious resemblance to a sausage sticking in the air), but the name can also sometimes be used for the most common, plainest, uncooked and popular variety of sausage, which contains just pork, salt and black and/or white pepper. This type of sausage is so popular in Catalonia that another name for it in the region is botifarra catalana (Catalan sausage). Both these names (botifarra de pagès/catalana) carry a strong marketing appeal, with implied sentiments of national belonging in the case of the latter, and wholesome, countryfied, ‘natural’, rural associations for the former, and make them more appealing in the eyes of Catalan consumers.

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Fig. 6.4  Catalunyam’s T-shirt design representing the ‘Botifarra de Pagès’ hand gesture (© Catalunyam. Published with Permission)

Catalunyam’s owner and designer, Oriol, admitted that his design was part of a more practical Catalanism that expressed identity, but was not explicitly anti-Spanish (and indeed, he had orders for the T-shirt from Spain, where the gesture is also used). However, his designs have become one of the many militant T-shirts worn on the Diada. As he said himself, part of their intention is to say, listen Spain, through the medium of gastronomy. Yet by its name, the botifarra de pagès image is not just a confrontation, it is also profoundly associated with the countryside, and the casa de pagès, (peasant house) powerful images in the Catalan national identity discourse (though hardly unique to Catalonia—cf., Smith 1988 and Yotova 2014). As the designer said of the image on the T-shirt, “It’s like the botifarra itself. It says it’s a botifarra de pagés, rather like a peasant house”. The idea of the ‘peasant house’, or ancestral farmhouse, has several intertwined connotations in Catalan nationalism. A rural, peasant culture has often been idealized as the starting point of a nation (cf., Gellner 1983; Smith 1988; Yotova 2014). The late anthropologist Susan DiGiacomo (1987) described the importance of rural imagery of ‘la caseta i l’hortet’ (cottage and kitchen garden) in Catalan politics. While Catalan society has had a distinctly urban character since the medieval period, the countryside in the nineteenth-century romantic nationalist movement was still considered the source of Catalan national character and cardinal virtues such as seny (see Footnote 3). This idealization of the rural can be found in political discourse from the nineteenth century to the post-­ Franco era. The casa de pagès also manifests another ideal in Catalan nationalism, that of the casa pairal (ancestral house), and the concurrent

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ideology of pairalism, or loyalty to an ancestral house. Tied up with this too are notions of kinship relations, emotional connectedness and impartible inheritance patterns (Asano-Tamanoi 1987; Bestard-Camps and Contreras Hernandez 1997). In the nineteenth century the industrialist, factory-owning bourgeoisie developed this ideology for their own interests, making the worker colonies (living complexes built around factories) a type of casa pairal, appealing to the workers’ emotional and familial ties, and familiar kinship structures (McDonogh 1986). While this element of the casa pairal image has faded, it has left its mark in the idealized image of the Catalan farmhouse, which is itself a metaphor for national belonging, as physical relatedness through shared connection via the family house parallels fictive kinship through the national “house” (Anderson 1983; Llobera 2004).8 Finally, on the theme of food, the farmhouse is the site of the hort, the kitchen garden where one can grow the ingredients of Catalan cuisine, and keep the pigs that will become the botifarra de pagès—ideally after a celebratory matança de porc (pig killing) that brings together family members and neighbours under the roof of the casa de pages (See Buccini, Chap. 5, this volume). While this image is more an ideal than reality, it was still one that regularly featured in interlocutor discourse, and most of my interlocutors tried to attend at least one pig killing every year in a rural environment. Returning to food-centred protests, during the Diada in 2012, on one of the most prominent thoroughfares of the march was a huge sign of a sausage with the words “A Catalunya, fem botifarra” (‘In Catalonia, we make sausage’—Fig. 6.5). Much like Catalunyam’s T-shirt, through the medium of a popular saying about food, such a phrase not only acts to express a cultural fact that can be mobilized as a source of pride and difference for insiders, but also can be turned to a blatant insult for Catalonia’s opponents. In the same protest, I also saw one protester carrying a placard with the word ‘Prou’ (‘Enough’) emblazoned across the top, with cured sausages (chorizos) hanging down. This is a reference to the expression ‘chorizar’ (Castilian) or ‘xoriçar’ (Catalan), a colloquialism that describes corrupt theft and cheating. In Vic, the verb was regularly used to describe the fiscal relationship between Catalonia and Spain, hence its use here to express 8  It is worth pointing out however that Llobera (2004) warns that seeing nations as “kinship writ large” oversimplifies their complexities.

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Fig. 6.5  ‘In Catalonia, We Make Sausage’: Sausage-inspired protest sign on a Barcelona thoroughfare during the Diada protest in September 2012. (Venetia Johannes, Personal Collection)

‘enough’. Once again, food metaphors act as expressions of dissent through multiple meanings and word play. Returning to the Dia de la Hispanitat, it should be clear that eating this food on Spain’s National Day, and also publicizing this fact, becomes a means of expressing Catalan identity on a day when Spanish identity should be celebrated instead. Food is not a means of covertly expressing group membership, but instead botifarra is eaten openly in gatherings throughout the day. A ‘Botiflerada’ I attended in 2012, organized by Omnium Cultural in the town of La Garriga, about thirty minutes north of Barcelona, was a typical type of event from this day. The day began with a talk on the future of Catalonia as a state, followed by lunch, advertised as a salad and

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mongetes del ganxet amb botifarra de la Garriga (ganxet variety beans and sausages from La Garriga). Both these foods (a type of haricot beans and sausage) are varieties or products particular to the area, and the mongetes del ganxet (ganxet haricot beans) have Protected Denomination of Origin status in the European Union.9 In this context, the emphasis on the local nature of the foodstuffs placed in a Catalanist festival shows how well such foodstuffs can be used as bearers of national identity. They were also called productes de la terra (‘products of the land’). This is again a popular phrase in Catalonia in these contexts that emphasize the connection between foods, land and, by extension, nation. At the event itself, participants and organizers referred to this meal as “a folkloric act”, “a Catalan dish” and “a poor dish”. In the latter case, this refers not to meagreness, but to the way pork products like sausages are used to conserve meat and thriftily use all parts of the pig—a classic example of the application of national behavioural ideals to food. The rural context of this kind of food was also idealized in these comments about botifarra, which is not surprising in light of the discussion earlier in this chapter about the importance of the rural ideal in Catalan nationalism, and nationalist movements generally.

The Tercentenary Diada: A Celebration of 1714 in Food The 11 September Diada has its origins in a momentous event that occurred on this day in 1714. During the War of the Spanish Succession, Austrian Habsburgs and French Bourbons fought over the vacant Spanish throne. Catalans supported the losing Austrian faction. The war ended in 1713, but Catalans refused to submit to their new monarch. Barcelona suffered a protracted yearlong siege, capitulating on the day now celebrated as the Diada. In retaliation, the new King Philip V punished Catalonia by dismantling Catalan institutions, banning Catalan in public and imposing severe economic penalties. It is therefore remembered as a moment that galvanized the Catalan sense of difference within Spain. 9  Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) is one of the European Union’s schemes to register, identify and protect specialist agricultural products and foodstuffs (the other two are Protected Geographical Indication, PGI, and Traditional Specialties Guaranteed, TSG). The PDO guarantees that a foodstuff comes from a particular area or specific place, where the geographic environment significantly or exclusively determines its quality and properties, and where production, processing and preparation takes place exclusively in that area.

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Due to the tercentenary, 2014 saw a remembering of 1714 in all manner of popular acts, for example the creation of historic guided tours and re-enactments, the opening of a museum showing houses destroyed in the siege, nationalist merchandise and memorabilia. Food too entered into these remembrances. In the new museum (Centre Cultural del Born) one wing was taken up by a restaurant run by Moritz (Barcelona’s principal brewer), called ‘The 300 of the Born’, a reference to the three hundred years of the tercentenary and the district of the Born. Moritz also designed a specific beer called ‘Born 1714’, produced by imitating techniques from the era. The space is marketed as an area where “gastronomy converges with history thanks to an extensive menu based on historical cuisine” (Moritz 2014). The menu at Moritz’s restaurant itself was an example of a thorough attempt to associate contemporary Catalan food with the siege of three hundred years ago. The food served was popular Catalan fare, making references to the Escudella (a Catalan national dish, a stew or hotpot), Esqueixat (salad made from vegetables and rough chunks of cod or tuna) Coca de recapta (flatbreads with toppings) and so on. Xuixos, pastry cylinders in a variety of fillings originally from the region Girona, were called “Cannons…to remember the cannons that were the protagonists of the confrontation. Sweet and savoury, ideal to resist a siege”. Other entries included “Historical breakfasts”, “Miquelet10 sandwiches”; “Historical sandwiches”; “The mounted cavalry: eighteenth century tapas”; “Escabetxats11…which do well to maintain food in a good state during the lengthy periods of the siege”; “Bombardejats”, the name used for bombes, a type of stuffed croquette associated with the Barceloneta, “so as not to forget that Barcelona has been bombed many times”; “A land of Escudella. Catalunya is a land of escudelles, and we serve them with the utensil that gave them their name”;12 “Following history with our second courses”, going onto “Platillos with a lot of history” or “Traditional and historic platillos”; The bread offered includes “White bread of the French aristocracy” or the “Catalan black bread of the siege”. Many of these subsections included dishes that have been named after historical figures, places or  Catalan infantry regiments.  A dish that includes a variety of pickled ingredients. 12  The escudella is a type of slow-cooked hotpot or stew, the name based on the word for the pot itself used to cook it. As the short introduction in the menu suggests, it is considered one of Catalonia’s national dishes. 10 11

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events by the restaurant, such as “Bombes del Comte-duc d’Olivares” (a seventeenth-century Spanish statesman hated in Catalonia), “Platillo d’en Rafael Casanova” (a hero of the siege) or “Coca de recapte tradicional de Cardona” (the last centre of Catalan resistance in 1714). On the back of the menu, one can find more details on the background to these people, events, nicknames and so forth, thus acting as a didactic tool to inform diners about an important moment in the national past. The theme of September 2014’s food magazine Cuina also focused on 1714. Its contents include a “Menu from 1714: with recipes from three centuries ago”, an in-depth discussion of the historical cuisine, food culture, cookbooks and a spread advertising the Born 1714 beer. The magazine also organized a series of talks on eighteenth-century Barcelonan cuisine. There was also a food route called “Gastronomia 1714” that was designed by the Fundació Institut Català de la Cuina i de la Cultura Gastronòmica (FICCG). This led to the creation of a guidebook La Cuina del 1714: A Gastronomic Route through Our History. The book begins with a prologue by the Catalan president praising ‘traditional’ Catalan cuisine of the era, followed by overviews of the cuisine of the eighteenth century, the route itself, and information about the selection of the recipes and recipe books entitled A Table that Traverses Time—a title suggesting historical continuity through food between the eighteenth century and today. Finally, another section (“Returning to the Essences”) considers the similarities and differences of present-day recipes to those that have been ‘recovered’ for this book and the gastronomic route. In common with other gastronomic books, this section also contains praise for the richness and variety of eighteenth-century cuisine, the importance of gastronomy in Catalan culture and the joys of cooking the recipes in a convivial atmosphere to “travel to the past to understand how our ancestors ate and lived” (Cases et al. 2014: 31), whilst also bemoaning the fast pace of modern life. Once again, a return to the past to recreate national memory is present here. This is continued in the principal part of the book, entitled Monuments, Landscapes. This details eleven places involved in the war of 1714 and the events that happened there, beginning with the El Born Centre Cultural, and where each place is associated with a particular dish or dishes. The associated website (which effectively contains the same information) also contains a list of the restaurants where one can find these foods, and there are details of the main tourist information points in the book itself.

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The guidebook is only available in Catalan, suggesting it is aimed at Catalan tourists, who will ideally use this book to travel through Catalonia, visiting significant locations in the history of the war, and in doing so relive their national past through food. The ideal of visiting sites of national memory can also be found in other media surrounding the tercentenary. As an example, Descobrir, the Catalan-language travel magazine under the same ownership as Cuina, also dedicated their June 2014 magazine to “Catalunya 1714”, with the subheading “We travel through the key Scenes of the War of the Spanish Succession”. What is interesting for this research, though, is that in the Gastronomia 1714 route, places are associated with tastes. The latter half of the guidebook is a recipe collection of the dishes associated with each place on the route, first the ‘old recipe’ from a historical cookbook, then the modern-day recipe. Of the twenty-two recipes in the book, all but five are recipes based on older recipes from La Cuynera Catalan of 1853. Seven of the recipes are also identical to that provided by the Corpus of Catalan Cuisine.13 Some of these recipes have been assigned to specific places because the dish is associated with that region or locality (place-specific foods are an important element in Catalan gastronational culture). The Coca de Recapte, whilst now found throughout Catalonia, originated in the city of Lleida. Hence this dish’s association with the city of Lleida, and the city’s Bakers Guild have provided the recipe. Other foods are not associated with specific places, and it is unclear how they are attached to the places in the book. For the national dish of the escudella i carn d’olla, however, the association is with the capital city of Barcelona. In practice, none of these recipes are really any different from those used today, and the meals are now easily found in restaurants throughout Catalonia. The organizers and promoters of these tours and gastronomic remembrances would like to see this as an example of how Catalan cuisine has a wonderful sense of continuity with the past. The reality is that dishes are cleverly selected to appeal to both contemporary tastes and also because they are seen as typically ‘Catalan’—listed in Catalan cookbooks, the 13  This book is published by the Fundació Institut Català de la Cuina i de la Cultura Gastronòmica (FICCG—Catalan Foundation-Institute of Cuisine and Gastronomic Culture). This organization ran a campaign to have Catalan cuisine recognized as UNESCO intangible cultural heritage (this campaign is now on hold) and has been involved in a number of other food-related initiatives throughout the region.

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Corpus, and also backed up from the general discourse from interlocutors. Dishes are the classic escudella i Carn d’olla (stew or hotpot), Coca de recapte d’escalivada (grilled vegetables on flatbread—thus including two favoured Catalan dishes, escalivada and coca, in one), stuffed onions, several recipes for stuffed pigeon or chicken, examples of agredolç cuisine (sweet and savoury flavours, a characteristic of Catalan cuisine), menjar blanc (blancmange, associated with Medieval cuisine in Catalonia) and bunyols (mini doughnuts, a traditional pastry associated with the north-­ eastern Empordà region) to name a few. This is also true of Mortiz’s El 300 del Born, where the dishes on offer are marketed under martial names associated with the siege or that era. The four recipes in Cuina’s 1714 issue likewise are familiar to today’s tastes, and indeed could be placed in any other context outside of 1714. They include an example of agredolç cuisine, which is explicitly recalled as “going back a long way with us [Catalans]”, a white fish dish, a chocolate crema catalana14 and a rice dish. A later  visit to the field suggested that some of these remembrances might be out of place. A tour guide in Vic claimed that no one wanted to go on any of the routes or tours organized by tourist offices centred on important places in the 1714 war, bemoaning the wasted time and money involved in their creation. One must presume the same of the culinary routes. Yet whatever the success or motivations of these phenomena, it is not difficult to see the current of both historiography and historical recreation passing through these developments. The repeated element in all of these manifestations of culinary identity in the tercentenary celebrations is the creation of historical continuity through food. The date 11 September 1714 has become a traumatic moment in Catalan national history. The uninhibited labelling of foods in the Born 300 to associate them with the siege of Barcelona and the attempts to recreate foods from that time and place them in a past construction of a national cuisine are all efforts encouraged by the Catalan government and associated bodies to make the celebrations and recollection of this year more immediate and appealing to Catalans. They can be considered in line with similar nationalist remembrances of 1714, for example the creation of a national museum, historic re-enactments, touristic routes of national memory and plays as well as concerts recalling the era.

 This sort of recipe would have been impossible in 1714.

14

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The celebration of the tercentenary year culminated in the Consultation for Catalan independence in November 2014, and the aim of the celebrations was also to sensitize the Catalan population to this vote. One of the means of doing so here was to remind Catalans of conflictual moments in the relationship with Spain. Aside from the fortunate coincidence of the tercentenary, 1714 is also no longer in living memory, so is less open to contestation. It may be for this reason that the War of the Spanish Succession has become a better focus of grievance against Spain than, say, the Franco period or the Civil War.

Nationalist Chocolates A Barcelona chocolatier, Enric Rovira, designed a set of chocolates for the tercentenary year, where he sought to recreate the taste of chocolate from that time. Yet as he admits in the accompanying information, chocolate did not exist in solid form in 1714. However, he wishes consumers to imagine what solid chocolate would have been like considering the available ingredients. For a time, this chocolate was sold in packs (labelled as ‘3 unces de xocolate’, an eighteenth-century measurement) with another chocolate bar representing the year 2014, which contained the fourteen traditional spices of Catalan cuisine (the play on the number fourteen is also present here). Enric Rovira’s efforts are part of a series of chocolate-based expressions of Catalan culinary identity. The use of chocolate as heritage is hardly unique, for example, in France and the attempts to make French cuisine an example of UNESCO intangible heritage, where chocolate has been “newly reinvested with gourmet cachet and cultural authenticity” (Terrio 2014: 178) In the article on 1714 cuisine in Cuina, chocolate is mentioned as an important drink from the era (indeed, it is one of the recipes). Attention is also drawn to the fact that the first industrial chocolate factory in the world was founded in Barcelona in 1777, a fact that was also brought to my attention by more expert culinary interlocutors in the field, to demonstrate its importance in Catalan food culture. Maria Martí Escayol, in her 2004 book on chocolate in Catalonia (El Plaer de la Xocolata), also sees this factory as an example of the privileged place of chocolate in Catalan culinary heritage. A chocolatier based in Vic, Ramon Morató also began our interview by emphasizing this fact, expressing frustration that this pioneering role was often forgotten. Many expert interlocutors agreed that the chocolate industry in Barcelona began amongst cakemakers and

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bakers (Enric Rovira originally came from such a family), which they all consider to have been unusually rich in Catalonia. In the words of my Vic interlocutor: The tradition of cake-making, the sweet world, has always been very active in Catalonia…to sell more, because it’s always been an entrepreneurial [business], the majority of festive days are very strongly tied to this. Crema de Sant Josep, Coca de Sant Joan, Lent bunyols etcetera. There are many specialities, and though the festive days are the same as the rest of Spain (like All Saints, that’s everywhere), there are concrete products that are associated with here.

The words of this interlocutor bring out clearly not just the importance of the gastronomic calendar and its contents as something that defines and differentiates Catalonia from Spain, but also the importance of an entrepreneurial spirit in promoting these foods and their associated days. The foods he mentions are well-loved foods in the calendar, ‘traditional’ foods ‘of all one’s life’. Yet here is the suggestion that they too are still examples of clever marketing on the part of their purveyors. His remarks are compelling as an expert within the industry itself, and suggest that national foods that are considered ‘traditional’ may themselves have been the product of a series of efforts to make them so. Many contemporary Catalan chocolatiers have developed a reputation for their pro-Catalanist leanings. The Vic chocolatier Ramon was open about his pro-Catalanist leanings and their importance in his work. One of his British colleagues recalled that this had sometimes led to heated arguments between the Catalan and Spanish chocolatiers in international events. Like other Catalan chocolatiers, however, they have sometimes had to hide their attitudes from the Spanish-wide public. Enric Rovira, on the other hand, has no such qualms, choosing to base his market squarely in Catalonia, with other product ranges such as bars with packaging showing the senyera or Barça football club colours—inspired by the Pastissos de la Diada in his parent’s bakery. In his own words, It [his Catalan identity] is pretty important … The link is evident and is manifested in the design of our products, the nomenclature, the concepts, the flavours. We try to hang onto the cultural Unique Selling Point.

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When asked about potential problems, Enric Rovira admitted that in Spain it was difficult to sell his products, since he shared a surname with a former leader of a Catalan political party, who was known for his inflammatory, pro-independence remarks. Rovira, however, was willing to accept the consequences for the Catalanist associations. Still, when I left the field, he was having problems with his supply chains and had been forced to close his shop. Perhaps following a purely Catalanist marketing policy had not been beneficial, as even in Catalonia he is not well known. Chocolate art itself has come to be used as a method of political protest in the form of the mona, the chocolate tableaux and figurines given at Easter. In line with the history of chocolate in Catalonia, the mona was originally the domain of bakers. Even before these were made in chocolate, the folklorist Joan Amades records that one of the earliest tableau representations of a mona in bread from 1875 was intended as a political statement. It represented a scene from medieval Catalan history, where a councillor of the Generalitat swore fealty to the city before his oath of allegiance to the Castilian kings. This had become an important moment in nationalist history, showing the Catalan governmental ideal of pactisme15 as best for ruling Catalonia. The first weeks of 1875 had seen the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in Spain, and the design of this mona was a subtle hint that the new monarch should rule Spain and Catalonia in a constitutionally correct way. In the same year one could also find mones representing contemporary Spanish politicians. In the Franco period, a Vic chocolatier called Quim Capdevila (also known as a staunch communist) created a mona on which he wrote the four ideals of the exiled Assemblea de Catalunya: liberty, friendship, statute of autonomy, and coordination. The act earned him a prison sentence (Martí Escayol 2004). In 2013, Enric Rovira chose to make one imitating the barretina, and inspired by Catalan painter Salvador Dalí. One can also find chocolate mones bearing the national flags of the estelada or senyera (Fig. 6.6). In this instance, these mones suggest a way of inculcating children into a national identity.

15  A type of political covenant that existed in Catalonia from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, to protect the interests of the nobility by controlling the power of the monarch (Llobera 2004).

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Fig. 6.6  Chocolate Mona decorated with a map of Catalonia that is emblazoned with an Estelada (pro-independence Catalan flag). Displayed in a Barcelona shop window, April 2014. (Venetia Johannes, Personal Collection)

Conclusion One can take a critical stance on the at times clumsy attempts to record the tercentenary through food. Yet it is noteworthy that Catalans are using food as a way of recreating what has become a significant moment in nationalist history. The reliving of a national past through the senses is, I suggest from these ethnographic exemplifications, a fascinating way of considering how nationalist movements are lived at an everyday level, and the way food is adapted into new political and national contexts. This can be applied more generally to the food experiences from the national days, and also the Catalan interpretation of the Festa de la Hispanitat. This latter example and the gastronomic recreations of 1714 are classic examples of what MacClancy (2007: 68) describes as an “everyday mode of

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nationalism”, and demonstrate very well how “turning foodstuffs and dishes into bearers of national identity is a down-to-earth way to make an otherwise abstract ideology more familiar, domestic, even palatable”.

References Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso. Asano-Tamanoi, Mariko. 1987. Shame, Family and State in Catalonia and Japan. In Honor and Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean, ed. David D. Gilmore, 104–120. Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association. Bestard-Camps, Joan, and Jesús Contreras Hernandez. 1997. Family, Kinship and Residence in Urban Catalonia: The Modernity of “Pairalisme”. In Family and Kinship in Europe, ed. Marianne Gullestad and Martine Segalen, 61–75. London: Pinter. Cases, Adrià, Magda Gasso, et al. 2014. La cuina del 1714. Barcelona: Comanegra. Cuina.cat. 2013. Llibres i Roses Comestibles per Sant Jordi. Cuina.cat, April 19. http://www.cuina.cat/actualitat/llibres-­i -­r oses-­c omestibles-­p er-­s ant-­ jordi_102096_102.htmlCuina.cat. Accessed 15 April 2018. ———. 2015. Una Diada per Llepar-se els Dits. Cuina.cat, September 9. http:// www.cuina.cat/actualitat/una-­diada-­per-­llepar-­se-­els-­dits_104065_102.html. Accessed 17 April 2018. DeSoucey, Michaela. 2010. Gastronationalism: Food Traditions and Authenticity Politics in the European Union. American Sociological Review 75 (3): 432–455. DiGiacomo, Susan M. 1987. “La Caseta i L’hortet”: Rural Imagery in Catalan Urban Politics. Anthropological Quarterly 60 (4): 160–166. Domènech, I. 1930. Àpats: Magnific Manual de Cuina PrÀctica Catalana, Adequate a tots els Gustos i el Més Variat i Seleccionat de Catalunya. 1st ed. [Place and publisher unknown]. Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Gibson, Gary. 2010. Spain’s Secret Conflict (film). Birmingham: Endboard Productions Ltd. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Llobera, Josep R. 2004. Foundations of National Identity: From Catalonia to Europe. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. MacClancy, Jeremy. 2007. Expressing Identities in the Basque Arena. Oxford: School for Advanced Research Press. Martí Escayol, Maria A. 2004. El Plaer de la Xocolata: La Història i la Cultura de la Xocolata a Catalunya. Barcelona: CossetÀnia Edicions.

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McDonogh, Gary W. 1986. Good Families of Barcelona: A Social History of Power in the Industrial Era. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Moritz. 2014. El 300 del Born. Moritz. [online]. http://moritz.com/en/section/el-­300-­del-­born. Accessed 1 July 2015. Quiroga, Alejandro. 2007. Making Spaniards: Primo De Rivera and the Nationalization of the Masses, 1923–30. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sano, Kazuko, and Narcís Clotet. 2012. Cuina Catalana per a Festes i Tradicions. 3rd ed. Grata Lectura: Muval, Solsona. Smith, Anthony D. 1988. The Ethnic Origin of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell. Terrio, Susan. 2014. French Chocolate as Intangible Cultural Heritage. In Edible Identities: Food as Cultural Heritage, ed. Ronda L. Brulotte and Michael A. Di Giovine, 175–184. Farnham: Ashgate. Váquez Montalbán, Manuel. 1977. L’art del Menjar a Catalunya. Barcelona: Edicions 62 s/a. Yotova, Maria. 2014. Reflecting Authenticity: ‘Grandmother’s Yoghurt’ Between Bulgaria and Japan. In Food Between the Country and the City: Ethnographies of a Changing Global Foodscape, ed. Nuno Domingos, José M. Sobral, and Harry G. West, 175–190. London and New York: Bloomsbury.

CHAPTER 7

The Danish Meal Partnership: A Shortcut to a Healthier Diet Claus Egeris Nielsen

Introduction Change in food and foodways are possible. The question is, “How can this change happen?” In 2013, the Danish Veterinary and Food Administration’s (DVFA) in Denmark launched an initiative called the Danish Meal Partnership to make it convenient for Danes to eat healthier meals.1 In collaboration with consumers and business corporations, commercial enterprises, health organisations, professional bodies, research institutions, policy makers and aid organisations, the DVFA hopes to strengthen meal competencies of future generations of Danes and to improve the country’s social equality in food consumption patterns. To achieve this, 1  In 2018, the Danish Meal Partnership changed its name to the Danish Healthy Food Council (Rådet for Sund Mad). This chapter uses its earlier name as it examines projects that were launched in the time when it was called the Danish Meal Partnership. Work launched by the Danish Meal Partnership continues with the Danish Healthy Food Council.

C. Egeris Nielsen (*) Danish Healthy Food Council, Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Chou, S. Kerner (eds.), Food, Social Change and Identity, Consumption and Public Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84371-7_7

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financial incentives are being explored to promote healthier meal solutions. This chapter looks into the focal points and projects of the Danish Meal Partnership to examine how it addresses such questions as “How can healthier food be manufactured and sold at market conditions to trigger change towards a healthier diet particularly among lower-than-average income consumers?”, “What kinds of benefits or attractive business cases serve as incentives for organisations to participate in this partnership?” Change as perceived by the Danish Meal Partnership will come through improving the types of meals and snacks that Danes eat rather than steering them to take note of the specific ingredients that go into their meals. Change is not expected to happen overnight. Instead, the vision is for change to happen one bite at a time.

The Danish Meal Partnership Holding the chair position in the Danish Meal Partnership is the DVFA.  Participating member organisations include Arla Foods, Association of the Hotel, Restaurant, and Tourism Industry in Denmark, Coop, Copenhagen Hospitality College, Danish Agricultural and Food Council, Danish Diet and Nutrition Association, Danish Dietetic Association, Danish Health Authority, Danish Heart Association, Danish Meat Research Institute, Danish Technological Institute—AgroTech, Danish Ministry of Environment and Food, Danish Union of Public Employees (FOA), The Children’s Aid Foundation, Trade Association for Danish Grocers, University College Copenhagen as well as University College Lillebælt. This partnership serves as a forum to coordinate efforts to share knowledge and develop activities to promote healthier cum tastier meals. There are ongoing efforts to increase the pool of collaborators to include educators, lecturers, care staff and other professions involved in food education and dietary culture. Central to the Danish Meal Partnership’s social profile is one of a collaborative effort to make a difference for citizens who are experiencing inequality in health and food habits. The goal is to ensure greater health equality in dietary circumstances for all Danes (Fig. 7.1). Most Danes are more interested in the meal per se rather than in the specific ingredients that make up the meal. Hence, the Danish Meal Partnership believes that meals, in-between meals and snacks are the stepping stones towards enhancing health and creating stronger enthusiasm for healthier food. Meals as defined by the partnership include all meals

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Fig. 7.1  The Danish Meal Partnership’s social profile

small and large, in-between-meals and snacks that are eaten alone or in the company of others. In other words, it is the sum of the daily food intake. A meal is not regarded as an isolated event but is seen as comprising any combination of food and drinks during the day. Meals thus encompass anything eaten between the three main meals during the day.

Focal Points Health Equality Despite health policy goals of a longer mean life expectancy with less illness and reduced social health inequality on a national level, social health inequality has been growing since the mid-1980s in Denmark. In 1995, The National Food Institute conducted a survey of the population’s diet

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and levels of physical activity. The conclusion drawn was that those with the shortest educational background are complying less with official diet recommendations. Furthermore, they are exposed to a considerably increased risk of being overweight and obese (Groth et al. 2014). Clear correlations between social conditions and the occurrences of overweight (particularly heavily overweight) were also documented by the Danish Health Authority (2011a). According to its research, the fewer years of education, the higher the occurrence of being overweight and heavily overweight people. The occurrence is three to four times higher among people with lower educational levels (12 years). Moreover, the rate of occurrence is higher among the unemployed and people on early retirement benefits than among people in employment. Occurrence of heavy overweight is twice as high for people on early retirement benefits than people in employment. Social health inequality is also seen among children and young people. Children of a different ethnicity (bilingual) than Danish are at greater risk of developing overweight and heavily overweight problems (Lind et  al. 2018; Fitzgibbon et al. 2005; Krue and Coolidge 2010; Danish Health Authority 2011b). Research done by The National Food Institute on diets and physical activity documented that social inequality in terms of overweight is higher among boys when considering the educational levels of their parents (Groth et al. 2013). There is a clear pattern indicating that males with low educational levels are complying least with official dietary recommendations. Other surveys show that the occurrence of overweight among seven-year-old children correlates with the profession of their parents, being the highest for unskilled professions and for those without any specific profession and the lowest for white-collar employees. Multiple surveys have also documented that the health-related lifestyle of Danes (diet, smoking, alcohol and exercise) plays a vital part for the mean life expectancy and public health in general. Social differences in children’s diet and activity profiles adult dietary habits (Christensen et al. 2012). Ongoing surveys of the food consumption among Danes are being carried out by the National Food Institute (Pedersen et  al. 2010, 2015). Analyses of food consumption and weight developments for Danes in 2005–2008 and 2011–2013 confirm a higher number of overweight or heavily overweight male Danes compared with women (53% versus 44%). Thus, there is a greater tendency among men to be overweight rather than of normal weight. For both genders, the group of heavily overweight is 15%. Women are closing in on the men, increasing their average weight by

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1.4 kg, equalling a gain of ¼ kg per year for each woman. The share of overweight or heavily overweight women rose from 39% to 44%. The sub-­ group of women characterised as heavily overweight rose from 13% to 15%, or by 40,000–50,000 Danish women. If this trend continues, it will eventually make overweight women more common than women of normal weight. Several reasons underlie these trends. Dietary surveys indicate that the diet on average contains excess calories. At the same time, there has also been a drop in women’s physical activity level (Matthiessen and Stockmarr 2015). Children and young people have maintained their weight during the survey period. However, there are differences between the genders. Overweight or heavily overweight has dropped from 20% to 13% for Danish boys but remains unchanged for girls. Reasons for this trend among the boys is unclear (Matthiessen et al. 2013, 2014). The Danish Meal Partnership’s focus is on bringing about changes in the one half of the Danish population who are facing massive challenges in adopting a healthy diet and in taking responsibility for their own as well as their children’s health. Within this group, attention is particularly on steering male adults with a limited educational background and their sons towards healthier meals and snacks. This segment of the population with lower educational qualifications constitutes half of the Danish population. They make up a significant part of the annual amount, +100bn DKK, spent on foods, drinks and tobacco. It has been noted that this population segment prefers to do their grocery shopping in discount shops. Rather than cooking at home, they also prefer to eat in restaurants, cafeterias and fast-food outlets. To make healthier diets more accessible to this group of people, the Danish Meal Partnership also sees an attractive business possibility emerging here for the retail and restaurant industry.2 To Learn the Basics of Cooking “Learn how to cook—and train others” is fundamentally the Danish Meal Partnership’s message. The goal is to get all Danes to develop their cooking skills and to master the basics of shopping for and cooking simple cum 2  Much attention is on introducing healthier meals and snacks to the lower educated segment of the Danish population. This is because the Danish Meal Partnership deems that a considerable part of the population with higher educational levels are already interested in choosing healthier diets.

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healthy everyday meals. Aspirations to return to the basics of simple daily cooking will as envisioned by the Danish Meal Partnership start with children, their educators, teachers, child-care institutions and the next generation of food professionals. Children and young people will be trained to be significantly better at cooking than their parents. They will be honed with skills to buy, assess, compose and prepare meals. It is hoped that not only will children and youths be taught how to cook, but that they will pass their cooking skills to others. Opportunities will therefore be generated for them to learn how to cook. Underlying this is the conviction that being active in the kitchen is key in a child’s development and upbringing. One gets to know and understand food only through cooking. A deeper appreciation of food can be cultivated through hands-on experiences with the ingredients, seeing, feeling and smelling the food in the kitchen. In this way, cooking skills and a desire for healthier meals will accompany them for life. Undoubtedly, everyone has different resources and it may not be possible (or necessary) to cook from scratch on a daily basis. However, it is the partnership’s view that by knowing how to make good and simple food, one also becomes better at appreciating taste and quality when buying semi-processed food and convenience meals.

Fields of Activity Within Three Arenas The Danish Meal Partnership is embarking on projects to make available healthier all-day diets. Its aspiration is to make a real difference so that anyone and everyone can have healthy meals even in the midst of a busy schedule at daycare centres, schools, workplaces or even while on the move. The partnership is launching initiatives relative to the various daily situations involving a meal. That is to say, what is intended here is to pave the way for healthier main and in-between meals in the arenas of the workplace, dining out places and retails spaces (Fig. 7.2). Within the targeted arenas are the following fields of activities: (a) to provide resources and improve key competences needed to expand the supply and demand of healthier meals, (b) to work on structural initiatives and policies to increase accessibility of healthier meals and (c) to enhance the competences of food professionals and various target groups.

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Fig. 7.2  The Danish Meal Partnership’s field of activities within three arenas

(a) Supply and Demand To boost the supply of and demand for healthier meals and snacks, the Danish Meal Partnership is working on a two-prong approach. Firstly, to increase the availability of healthier food and meals and secondly, to raise consumer awareness of these options. The Danish Meal Partnership has been actively involved in projects that promote product innovation, increase supply of health-related goods cum services, implement convenience in the shopping and cooking process, as well as improve the quality and prices of favourite meals. These initiatives are assessed against various criteria to ensure their relevance and sustainability in creating interest in eating healthier meals. The criteria comprise accessibility, an assessment of how easily the meal concept can be implemented in daily life, market and price competitiveness of the product, impact on health inequality relative to target groups and stimulation of a new collaboration setup among, for example, manufactures and retailers as well as viability after ending the project. (b) Structures and Policies The Danish Meal Partnership is also identifying and developing structural measures and meal policies to promote a healthy choice. It proposes

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attractive business propositions to retailers and manufacturers to encourage them to market more healthy foods. To implement measures with an anticipated general success, the Danish Meal Partnership utilises existing know-how. If this is insufficient, research programmes are carried out by the partnership to search for the best structural measures to support healthier meals. The objective is to make a healthy diet accessible to all people even if they lack the knowledge and know-how to eat healthily. Currently, the Danish Meal Partnership is utilising existing health-­ promoting strategies such as the national nutrition label “Nøglehullet” (the Keyhole) at meal outlets. What is and why the use of the Keyhole label? Oftentimes, consumers lack the time to read detailed labels whilst shopping. Many find it difficult to comprehend all the information provided. The idea behind the Keyhole label is to make it an easy to recognise symbol for consumers to find and choose healthier products. It also helps consumers to adhere to national health guidelines. This scheme has had a positive effect on the market and consumers. (c) Competences Food and nutrition professionals play a pivotal role in promoting food concepts to ensure the consumption of healthy meals. The Danish Meal Partnership is proactively working to involve these stakeholders in identifying and developing courses for educational institutions to raise awareness for the need of healthier meals. Simultaneous to this, the partnership is building meal and nutritional competences among those involved in training, guiding, planning, consulting, purchasing and serving food. Educators, caregivers including others in daily contact with disadvantaged people have been identified and are willing to act as dietary guides and role models to bring about healthy meal practices.

Social Health Equality: One Bite at a Time The following are illustrations of how the Danish Meal Partnership is thinking structurally and using product innovation to ensure healthier meals and social change.

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Case Study One: The Rye Cracker Sausage The Rye Cracker sausage is a case in point of how the Danish Meal Partnership approaches challenges to make a difference. Researchers from The Danish Meat Research Institute at the Danish Technological Institute in cooperation with The Trade Association for Danish Grocers, The Danish Food Industry and two large Danish manufacturers were encouraged to develop a recipe for a healthier sausage. They did so and tested the sausage taste, developed a new recipe for industrial production and conducted market tests of the new sausage in a to-go market and in supermarkets. As in many other countries, there is in Denmark a social gradient in health in the population. This also applies to Danish eating and meal habits as well as to public health. Studies have shown that those Danes who consume many sausages are also those who exhibit several other unhealthy eating habits. Sausages in general are rich in fat. Problems thus arise with an over consumption of sausages. Instead of trying to impart to this population segment more knowledge about healthy living and hope for a change in food behaviour so that they might eat fewer sausages, the Danish Meal Partnership decided to develop a new sausage of high quality both in terms of taste and nutrition. For the half of the Danish population who find it hardest to eat healthily, the Danish Meal Partnership believes that structural measures as such can help to increase social equality in health through one bite at a time. The project has successfully developed the sausage branded “the Rye Cracker” with maximum 10% fat and minimum 3% fibres, complying with the requirements of the Keyhole label and nutrition claims on fibres. The Rye Cracker has become a healthy alternative in a potentially unhealthy context. Opportunities for the retail sale of the Rye Cracker were also explored. The project reaped much success. Firstly, the development of the Rye Cracker has shown that accessibility to tasty food is possible without significantly changing dietary habits. The Rye Cracker provides a healthier alternative coupled with high quality and accessibility. Secondly, the Danish Meal Partnership has avoided having to define what is right or wrong and can instead focus on pointing to the healthy alternative. The Rye Cracker was manufactured by a major Danish company. It was first sold through a discount shop in Kalundborg which is situated in a peripheral area of Western Zealand and to a high-street shop in Hørsholm in the affluent area north of Copenhagen. Samples were provided on a

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single day in Kalundborg and for two days in Hørsholm. Consumers were invited to sample the sausage and their comments were solicited on how well they liked the sausage as well as their views about health. Kalundborg and Hørsholm are cities that represent two different consumer groups. Nevertheless, they both generated nearly identical feedback. Consumers were very fond of the Rye Cracker, mainly for not being overly fat. On the other hand, the negative feedback was its lack of taste. Generally, consumers who chose to buy the Rye Cracker were health-­ focused. In Kalundborg, health was associated with a low-fat content, while people in Hørsholm associated it with a combination of low-fat content and high-fibre content. Strong sales of the Rye Cracker Sausage were registered in both shops showing the potential that it could be marketed as a healthy alternative in a possibly unhealthy market segment (Jakobsen et al. 2014). Following the completion of the project, the research team presented their results at the 12th European Nutrition Conference 2015 conference in Berlin. The Danish Meal Partnership’s project on the Rye Cracker had successfully mapped the market launch of a sausage prototype, including optimised fibre content, consumer tests, industrial manufacturing and marketing. Case Study Two: Food and Meals in Daycare Centres—Play with the Food The goal of the Danish Meal Partnership’s project “Food and Meals in Daycare Centres” is to equip kindergarten teachers and kitchen staff in daycare centres with skills to instil children with food courage and to get them to enjoy healthy food. The project involves collaborating with key players in the daycare segments to develop structures for the promotion of healthy eating habits among children. Partners in the project include University College Lillebælt, the Ministry of Environment and Food, FOA, the Danish Diet and Nutrition Association, as well as the Danish Agricultural and Food Council. The project develops structures that promote children’s food and meal habits. Based on the premise that food choices are not always governed by rational decisions but by the colour of food, appearance, familiarity and taste, the Danish Meal Partnership is working on three concepts, namely food courage, love of good food plus competence to nurture children and the next generation towards eating healthy meals.

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Studies on food habits by the Institute of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Copenhagen reveal that the greatest influence on children’s eating habits include playing with the food. Through this method, children learn and cultivate their appetite for healthy meals. By combining scientific knowledge about children’s eating habits with best practices by food professionals, the project has been promoting a competence development concept for both pedagogical and kitchen staff in daycare centres to make meals and eating together an exciting and educational activity for all. The concept has been tested in selected daycare centres in several districts with a view of implementing it on a national scale. In 2015, the Danish Meal Partnership produced a Madleg (Play with Food) catalogue of inspirations. Taking into consideration the current levels of knowledge about food, meals, meal principles, and food behaviour, the Danish Meal Partnership worked with project manager Ellen Habekost of University College Lillebælt on the catalogue’s content and educational approach. Madleg contains descriptions of seven sub-elements, all combined and illustrated in a food behaviour flower. At the core of the flower exists food and meals. The food behavior flower has seven petals. Each features a different food training element namely craft, language, desire & courage, senses, you and the others, cultural diversity and finally resources. All of the food training elements feature ideas, experiments and a training curriculum that includes advice and guidance for the participating organisations. Examples of how each food training element works is as follows. “Craft” contains ideas of how to learn and gain experience in kitchen basics such as operating basic kitchen tools. Various activities and experiments are designed to be performed to increase knowledge about kitchen basics: potato flour workshops, baking techniques, raising methods and levelling experiments. “Desire” and “Courage” feature tasting workshops to enable children to taste and learn about the basic flavours of sweet, acid, salty, bitter and umami. “Language” focusses on the development of linguistic semantics of meals and in increasing knowledge about various food symbols and signs. Through a game involving senses and experiences, children will develop their linguistic competences in identifying healthy food. This is done, for example, by playing a game of “berry bingo” or by discussing and tasting different varieties of apples.

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Case Study Three: A Gentle, Green Nudge—Nudging of Fruits and Vegetables in Supermarkets In 2014, the Danish Meal Partnership worked together with students from the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen in a project. Most Danes are generally known to look upon meat as “the hero” of each day’s meal. In other words, they plan their meals and purchases only after purchasing their meat. As the students worked on the project, they noticed that most supermarkets were organised in ways so that the first section one meets after the entrance is the fruit and vegetable department. The question that thus arose was, “Do vegetable sections merely serve as a kind of window dressing in supermarkets?” Customers visiting supermarkets frequently walk past the vegetables section and head for the meat refrigerators instead. Not until they had selected the protein for their meal that they might begin to consider vegetables and other side dishes. Therefore, the project looked into how Danes could be brought back to buying vegetables, so they could cook a delicious vegetable side for their chops? The students proposed putting labels on the meat packaging with suggestions for vegetable side dishes, or more radically to move the stores’ vegetables into the same section of the meats. The Danish Meal Partnership thus initiated a project called “A Gentle, Green Nudge” to test various nudging techniques in supermarkets with the hope of increasing sales and consumption of vegetables. This project involved the DVFA working together with the Trade Association for Danish Grocers, Coop and the Danish Agriculture and Food Council. Behavioural scientist Pelle Guldborg and his team from University of Roskilde were also called upon for their expertise. The concept of nudging is one that proposes positive reinforcement to influence behaviour and decision making through a loving and gentle push. It does not involve any kind of punishment, surveillance or criticism; nor does it involve marketing. It is simply a friendly helping hand to making a better choice. Nudging is a technique that the Danish Meal Partnership is proposing to use in its other projects too. Nudging coaxes the sub-consciousness of consumers to make healthier choices. Several partners supporting the Danish Meal Partnership have been experimenting with various nudging methods and have documented that nudging may promote the retail sale of fruit and vegetables by more than 20%.

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For a three-week period, various intervention approaches were tested in a supermarket to measure their impact, for example making vegetables more visible at the entrance or placing them close to products that were obvious to pair them with when cooking. Signs and maps were put up to inform customers about the geographical location of the local vegetable suppliers. Stickers on the packages of the products also provided information about the origins of the crops. Consumers were nudged to select a local produce rather than a foreign one. The tests led to a 20% sales increase in vegetables and a 23% increase in sales of fruits. A particularly effective nudging approach was to co-position fruit and vegetables with other product categories used for a specific meal or in-­ between snack. Pre-prepared vegetables were co-positioned with various cuts of meat to inspire what could be cooked together to make up a meal. The challenge is now for individual supermarkets and their corporations to contemplate the relevant layout of their shops, current work procedures as well as how to compose and display their products. Presently, there is a growing but still limited use of co-positioned food products in Danish supermarkets. Case Study Four: Healthier Technical Schools (Certification, Nudging and Guidance)—Healthier Meals for the Future Generation of Craftsmen The Danish Meal Partnership has implemented three projects targeting technical schools in Denmark. The purpose is to make healthier meals more accessible for students by introducing a broader selection of healthy food in their canteens. Students at technical schools have been identified as a target group. This is because they are young adults on the verge of moving away from home and who will soon have to assume full responsibility for their own lives. By making healthier food more accessible to them, the hope is that this would stimulate their appetite for a healthier diet and bring healthy food habits into their private kitchens. In 2014, the Danish Meal Partnership participated in a project managed by the Danish Heart Association to certify 35 canteens at technical schools according to the national nutrition label, the Keyhole. The Keyhole is a guarantee for healthy food and a shortcut to healthier meals while attending the relevant school. Technical school canteens frequently offer breakfast, lunch and snacks and thus contribute significantly to the diet of students.

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The Danish Meal Partnership is intensifying its efforts in yet another project to make it easy to eat healthier meals in Keyhole certified canteens. The project is developing and broadening the nudging concept with the purpose of influencing students to make healthier choices. Participating organisations include technical school canteens, the University of Aalborg, the Danish Heart Association, the Danish Health Food Council’s secretariat, Association of the Hotel, Restaurant, and Tourism Industry in Denmark, Danish Agricultural and Food Council, FOA, DVFA and the Danish Diet and Nutrition Association. In 2015–2016, the project focused on personal and group guidance of students at technical schools as well as sustaining and developing existing databases of recipes designed for Keyhole certified canteens at technical schools. Statistically speaking, people with lower educational levels often have a less healthy diet and are less physically active compared to people with higher educational levels (Danish Health Authority 2014). According to the Danish Health Authority, these factors contribute to higher sickness absence and a lower graduation rate (Danish Health Authority 2012). Among other things, the project covers training kitchen staff in technical school canteens, focusing on more plus improved recipes as well as a meal-size calculator. Recipes are seasonally adjusted, using spices other than salt and to contain more “hidden” vegetables in the meals. The training programme upgrades the staff’s competences and strengthens the use of Keyhole calculations and new recipes. Another aspect of the project features personal and group guidance of students at technical schools. Students sign up for guidance sessions voluntarily. This would offer them health checks and assessments by nutrition and health professionals. Dietitians are enlisted if any additional personal guidance is necessary. The aim is to improve student health and empower them towards making healthier choices. Experiences gained from this project have confirmed the successful stories of turning around kitchen staff and canteens. General feedback from canteen consumers have also been one of satisfaction with the opportunities for daily offerings of healthier meals. Moreover, the turnaround appears to be financially viable in terms of revenue and profit margins. Case Study Five: Kitch’n’Cool for Disadvantaged Adolescents During 2015–2016, the Danish Meal Partnership worked together with the Children’s Aid Foundation to launch a unique cooking project for

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disadvantaged adolescents aged 15–22  years who are placed in care. Participating members of the project involved the Children’s Aid Foundation, the Danish Agricultural and Food Council, the Ministry of Environment and Food and the Danish Dietetic Association. The Kitch’n’Cool project conducts kitchen workshops to increase the practical knowledge of the target group in terms of healthy meals and cooking. The project has strived to offer better opportunities for disadvantaged adolescents to enjoy healthy and tasteful meals. The project has offered cooking activities to increase the participants’ knowledge of healthy meals and to train them to cook. The aim is to get young people to be interested in healthier food habits by encouraging food courage and equipping them with a better knowledge of ingredients. Other key elements in the training programme include refining kitchen skills, learning to cook varied and nutritious meals, encouraging commensality, promoting hygiene, doing grocery shopping as well as managing financial aspects of cooking. Closing the gap in health inequality has been the guiding concept for launching this project for disadvantaged young people. This is a target group that is particularly vulnerable in terms of health and well-being. Reports on the well-being of placed children and adolescents indicate that they are more exposed to risk behaviour factors compared with their peers. Notably from the age of 15, there is a significant difference between the health behaviour of young people in care with their peers. Their rate of being overweight is twice as high as that of their peers. Moreover, from the age of 17, they are particularly exposed as they transit to live independently. In addition, they are underperforming in terms of personal hygiene, healthy diet, inadequate sleep and their risk behaviour rating is high (Ottosen et al. 2015). The Kitc’n’Cool project is carried out in groups of 10–14 young people who meet five times every second week. When participants graduate from the project, a big event is held with the young people cooking a meal for a well-known person, people from the local area or other Kitch’n’Cool participants. Subsequently, the young people continue to meet regularly once per month with the support of voluntary trainers. Participants of the Kitch’n’Cool project receive a personal chef’s apron and T-shirt as their “uniform”. Each event begins with a healthy snack prepared by the participants. They eat the snack together with all present and discuss matters such as taste and variants. Then follows an introduction of one or more new vegetables that is part of the meal of the day. Two different recipes using the ingredient are prepared with guidance from

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instructors. Each group of 2–3 youths present their dish for the rest of the team. Everyone then eats together. After eating, everyone cleans up and evaluates the event. The aim is that the interventions of this project will impact one or more of the following areas: that young people will want to do more cooking; that young people will feel better prepared to work with a greater selection of ingredients and recipes; that young people will know more about the contents of a varied and healthy diet; that young people will realise that they are better prepared for buying food and cooking meals independently; that young people will appreciate a meal as a positive event for getting together and that they would be bold enough to take on the role as host.

Conclusion Denmark has a strong tradition of making meals a social event in the family, in public institutions and at work. While fast food is very present in the public sphere and is a topic of much public debate, most Danes prepare their own meals. About 85% of Danish families enjoy their dinner together at least five times per week (Madkulturen 2014). In the spring of 2015, the Danish Minister for Food, Agriculture and Fisheries appointed members, including the Danish Meal Partnership to a national meal think-tank. The purpose of the think-tank was to give advice and recommendations on commensality and meal practice as a supplement to the official dietary recommendations. The aim of the think-tank was to strengthen Danish food culture by: • Encouraging more Danes to eat meals together • Training more Danes to master cooking • Nudging more Danes to become more courageous and more willing to try something new • Helping more Danes to have quality play a key role when choosing food and meals The Danish Meal Partnership has become more aware of the social and cultural qualities of meals; thus, meals go beyond the mere food and nutrition aspects. Meals are pleasurable, and taste is key. Eating a meal together may be an important social activity, for example, with children or if one is recently divorced. Meals create a sense of inclusion of children and young

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people at institutions, including those from different social and ethnic backgrounds. All in all, meals play an important role for our well-being.3

References Christensen, Lene M., et  al. 2012. Børn og Unges Mȧltidsvaner 2005–2008. Søborg: DTU Fødevareinstituttet. Danish Health Authority. 2011a. National Sundhedsprofil 2011. Copenhagen: Sundhedsstyrelsen. ———. 2011b. National Sundhedsprofil Unge 2011. Copenhagen: Sundhedsstyrelsen. ———. 2012. Sunde Erhvervsskoler – Inspiration til at Skabe Sunde Rammer og Introducere Sundhed i Undervisningen. Copenhagen: Sundhedsstyrelsen. ———. 2014. Danskernes Sundhed  – Den Nationale Sundhedsprofil 2013. Copenhagen: Sundhedsstyrelsen. Fitzgibbon, Marian L., et al. 2005. Two-Year Follow-up Results for Hip-Hop to Health Jr.: A Randomized Controlled Trial for Overweight Prevention in Preschool Minority Children. The Journal of Pediatrics 146 (5): 618–625. Groth, Margit V., et  al. 2013. Social Differences in Children´s Dietary Habits, Physical Activity and Overweight and Adult´s Dietary Habits. Søborg: DTU Fødevareinstituttet. ———. 2014. Disparities in Dietary Habits and Physical Activity in Denmark and Trends from 1995 to 2008. Scandinavian Journal of Public Health 42 (7): 611–620. Jakobsen, Louise M.A., et al. 2014. Sensory Characteristics and Consumer Liking of Sausages with 10% Fat and Added Rye or Wheat Bran. Food Science and Nutrition 2 (5): 534–546. Krue, Søren, and J. Coolidge. 2010. The Prevalence of Overweight and Obesity among Danish School Children. Obesity Reviews 11 (7): 489–491. Lind, Mads Vendelbo, et al. 2018. Evidens for Livsstilsinterventioner til Børn og Voksne med Svær Overvægt: En Litteraturgennemgang (Evidence for Lifestyle Intervention Treatment of Obesity in Children and Adults  – A Literature Review). Copenhagen: Sundhedsstyrelsen. Madkulturen. 2014. Tal om Mad  – Pejlemærker på det Madkulturelle Område. Roskilde: Madkulturen.

3  The Danish Meal Partnership is acutely aware of the need to include cross-cultural studies to bring about change in the food and foodways of Danish society. This is because such studies offer different perspectives and solutions to dietary challenges other than the research done in human nutrition, engineering sciences and knowledge of markets and marketing with whom conventional collaborations have been taking place in the field of food and meals.

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Matthiessen, Jeppe, and Anders Stockmarr. 2015. Flere Overvægtige Danske Kvinder. E-artikel nr. 2, DTU Food: 10–15. Matthiessen, J., et al. 2013. Misperception of Body Weight Among Overweight Danish Adults: Trends from 1995 to 2008. Public Health Nutrition 17 (7): 1439–1446. Matthiessen, Jeppe, et  al. 2014. Trends in Overweight and Obesity in Danish Children and Adolescents: 2000-2008  – Exploring Changes According to Parental Education. Scandinavian Journal of Public Health 42 (4): 385–392. Ottosen, Mai H., et al. 2015. Anbragte Børn og Unges Trivsel 2014. København: SFI – Det Nationale Forskningscenter for Velfærd 15:01. Pedersen, Agnes, et  al. 2010. Dietary Habits in Denmark 2003–2008. Main Results. Søborg: DTU Fødevareinstituttet. ———. 2015. Dietary Habits in Denmark 2010–2013. Main Results. Søborg: DTU Fødevareinstituttet.

CHAPTER 8

Food and Identity in the Fifth mill. BCE Susanne Kerner

Introduction Food is a main component of negotiating identity in modern times, as will be discussed here briefly, but it played this role already in ancient times. Archaeological evidence will firstly be used to illustrate how Stein’s (1999, 2012) work in Hacinebi, a fourth mill. BCE village in Turkey, sheds light on identity construction of two different groups. Secondly, pottery from different fifth mill. BCE sites in the southern Levant will be used to show how commensal groups were constructed and what can be deduced about identity from this evidence. The relationship between food and identity is at the same time one that is highly visible and in everybody’s mind, embodied through prejudices and biases such as “krauts” and “spaghetti-eaters”, and one that is less obvious and more enduring, such as concepts of food being considered healthy or unethical. The questions of ethnic or national food relate both to these prejudices and to the enduring concepts, but it is also a highly

S. Kerner (*) Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Chou, S. Kerner (eds.), Food, Social Change and Identity, Consumption and Public Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84371-7_8

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politicised theme (see Buccini, Chap. 5, this volume and Johannes, Chap. 6, this volume). Eating could be the most innocent of activities but is in fact a contested area where many actors, such as state, health authorities, political and social groups as well as individuals, interact and negotiate the identity of all involved. This can be shown by two examples: the first comes from one of the new xenophobic movements that demonstrated in 2015/2016 through European cities with slogans such as “Kartoffeln statt Döner” (potatoes instead of doner kebab) in Germany. This slogan actually epitomises the core of the relationship between food and identity and its cultural construction. The slogan supposes that (a) potatoes are genuine German food, which they are not, as they only came to Europe in the eighteenth century, originating from the New World and (b) doner kebab is genuine foreign food, which is also a mistake, because that particular combination of thick Turkish bread and grilled meat is an invention of the Turkish population living in Germany—the kebab in Turkey is quite different (see Chou and Platt, Chap. 9, this volume).1 The other example comes from Denmark, where it has been suggested that pork is served regularly in all kindergartens in the country. Reasons behind this demand were both to boost the economic base of Danish farmers and to emphasise the importance of pork in the Danish culture and to entice non-Christian children to embrace this culture.2 Both cases exemplify how food is used in modern times to construct identities based on assumed ethnic, religious or national characteristics; a mechanism discussed and defined by Appadurai (1998) as well as Anderson (1983). The field of identity expressed through food is contested because it is not only linked to the organic constituents and nutritional aspects of food, but also to its symbolic meaning. Most anthropologists agree that while nutrition is important, the kind of food eaten, its manner of preparation, and the modes of consumption have a social significance that transcends biological necessity and relates more to the construction of identity and status (Goody 1982). Construction is here the key term, as the close relationship between food and national or ethnic identity, which 1  The absurdity of national labels for food can be seen in China, where this particular kind of doner kebab is sold as German food (https://www.zeit.de/2011/49/Peking-Doener/ seite-2). 2  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/21/world/europe/randers-denmark-pork.html. See also Karrebæk 2021.

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is often claimed, is usually constructed and not logical or automatically given. Another contemporary example for this are dumplings and pork, which are eaten in Poland as much as in southern Germany or Austria, but in each case these items are claimed to be typical national dishes.3 Thus, particularly the national food identities between neighbouring or competing nations are often entirely artificially constructed. Boders of any kind relating to natural and climatic conditions, which might explain certain food preferences, seldom follow national borders. The butter/olive oil dividing line that is running through the middle of France, or the difference in tea versus coffee consumption between Northern and Southern Germany obviously does not support the idea of national identity. These differences do not relate to “typical” national foods but directly correlate to geographic and climatic conditions and economic factors. Existing differences, which cannot be explained sufficiently by these “outer” conditions, are often based on traditions. Traditions are past practices, which form constraints for peoples’ actions (Bourdieu 1972). Practices of daily life, the embodied ways to interact with material, constitute peoples’ lives. Relations between people and material are essential for these practices, as people create the material, which in turn influences them (Appadurai 1998; Pollock and Bernbeck 2010). Practices and interactions with material play a part in all social aspects of life, and most certainly food in all its properties of production, distribution and consumption. It is thus food as material, but also all items that relate to food production and consumption, which frame the possible practices for people, or in other words: the traditions of food preferences and ways to eat food. My focus here is to look at some archaeological examples and materials which will show how material evidence can be used to study the practices connected with food. These examples will first deal briefly with a study from Gil Stein’s (1999, 2012) excavation in Hacinebi (Turkey), which used several different elements of food-related evidence in an exemplary way to show how identities were negotiated and reinforced in a fourth mill. BCE archaeological site. The main part of this chapter will study how pottery used for preparation and consumption of food played a role in 3  The most recent version of food identity construction is not a national or ethnic cuisine, but a social (or class based) one. It is very difficult not to notice that lactose and gluten intolerance is particularly common in those people who can afford to buy special food items. The same is true for supposedly healthy diets such as the so-called Paleodiet which again require some financial means.

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creating identities in fifth mill. BCE villages in the southern Levant, and how pottery studies could help carry out such inquiries.

Archaeological Evidence from Hacinebi Excavation by Gil Stein (1999, 2012) in Hacinebi has provided a very good example of how differences in material culture can inform us about the dissimilarities between the people eating them. The site of Hacinebi dating into the fourth mill. BCE is situated in southern Anatolia (modern Turkey), close to the Euphrates. The Late Chalcolithic is a time period where a number of different regions in the Near East develop urban centres and complex socio-political structures. Villages change into towns and cities and large structures, often including storage facilities, indicate communal building projects and a sufficient amount of surplus to allow these transformations. While the changes are most noticeable in Southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) with the site of Uruk, which grows to an unprecedented 250 ha, the changes in other areas are more subtle. The invention of writing had created a research concentration on Southern Mesopotamia that led to a certain neglect of the surrounding areas, both in actual physical terms (for most of the twentieth century there were much less excavations in the north) and in hermeneutic relations. Urbanisation and the development of politically complex societies have been rather one-sidedly studied concentrating on the Southern Mesopotamian example. This has changed in the last 20 years, largely due to the extensive excavations in Hacinebi and Arslantepe, two sites in Anatolia showing clearly that complexity developed in these northern regions already before contact with the Southern Mesopotamian emerging states was established (Frangipane 2007; Stein and Özbal 2006). This particular kind of contact happened in the early fourth mill. BCE and is based on human interaction; actual people moved between Southern Mesopotamia and Anatolia, in order to provide the south with much needed raw materials. The contact led to the existence of two distinct cultural entities in Hacinebi B2, which are physically separate and can be distinguished by pottery, chipped stones, ornaments, architecture and other items (Stein 1999). Contrary to earlier assumptions (Algaze 2001), the exchange between the two cultures was peaceful (Stein 2012). The Mesopotamian population lived more or less separate from the autochthone population. Archaeological material showed that in the local and Mesopotamian

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cultural units, different meat sources were utilised. The Mesopotamian population consumed preferably goat and sheep, while the local population had a far more varied diet including large percentages of cattle and pig (Bigelow 2000: 85) as they had done before any contact with Southern Mesopotamia had been established. The local population therefore continued their traditional food habits, undeterred by changes in other parts of their life. The caprines, eaten by both groups, were nonetheless butchered into different meat cuts (Bigelow 2000: 88, Stein 2012: 55). The meat was not only cut into different parts as the faunal evidence shows, but the cooking and serving of the food also showed a distinctive pattern (Bigelow 2000: 89). According to Bigelow (2000: 88), “As with pottery production, the process of butchery manipulates a natural or material form into new culturally defined forms whose patterns may reflect aspects of social identity. Though not directly related to subsistence activities, butchery may reflect culturally specific technologies. Also, in relation to cooking, indications of consistent patterns of burning, boiling, roasting and breaking up bones for marrow can also mark ethnicity”. The cooking happened mostly in local cooking pots, while the serving, particularly the public serving, was performed in “foreign” Mesopotamian pots (Stein 2012: 55) in the Mesopotamian part of the settlement. Stein interprets this very carefully as evidence for gendered work-patterns, where butchering is also ethnographically overwhelmingly a male task and cooking mostly a female task.4 Regrettably, other projects have not made compatible studies and thus these interesting results cannot be compared on a wider base. However, the fact remains that two rather different groups of population, both in terms of local origin (there are over 1200 km between Uruk and Hacinebi), and in social composition, kept to their traditional ways to cut and cook meat, and at least partly served it in traditional containers. The Hacinebi study allows a very detailed look into the way material has been used and manipulated to construct, negotiate and possibly emphasise different cultural identities. The main part of this chapter will look at the relationship between food and identity by analysing the use of ceramic, the most ubiquitous archaeological material after the Early 4  The ethnographic base is provided by Murdock and Provost (1973), a compilation of information of mostly pre-state societies. Interestingly enough, a brief, not representative, survey of habits from friends and families showed a very similar pattern, particularly the butchering being an overwhelmingly male occupation.

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Neolithic. It has been inspired by research carried out by Susan Pollock (2010) and Meredith Chesson (2000). Everyday food consumption is a practice shaped by social context and is socially constructed; the practices follow traditions, and those traditions limit the actors’ choices. The ceramic repertoire will thus express the social context for food-related practices, which include the use of certain vessels for particular foods.

Pottery Distribution in the Fifth mill. BCE The material used for this study comes from the Late Chalcolithic (mostly late fifth mill. BCE) period of the southern Levant. The time is characterised by a growing social complexity, but little obvious social differentiation (Rowan and Golden 2009; Kerner 2010). The invention of copper production falls into this period and leads to the existence of prestige items (Kerner 2010) and a complicated production system (Goren 2014), which is still difficult to understand, but must ultimately have influenced the socio-political fabric of society. The period ends without further development into increasingly hierarchical political formations, which is quite different from development in the neighbouring regions. The pottery discussed in the following comes from different sites, excavated and published by archaeologists influenced by different traditions and habits, thus showing the influence of practice on our own archaeological work. This means the ceramics have been sorted in each site by different criteria into discrete types, according to the questions asked by the assorted authors. A few types such as the churns and cornets appear in all site reports, where these vessels are present, but in other cases, the same containers can appear under different names. In order to emphasise those characteristics connected with food preparing and cooking, serving/consuming and storing, I have summarised or separated (where possible) given types to reach a more uniform treatment of the pottery vessels in all sites. Information about any changes of the original typology are given in each case. This separation and detailed analysis have proved to no great surprise to be a challenge and showed how important a complete publication of material is (Kerner 2008). Only the publication of as much information as possible relating to not only types, but also the size, decoration and distribution of pottery allows an in-depth analysis concerning other questions than chronological ones. The pottery allows an insight into the daily life of people. Much ethnographic or ethnoarchaeological research has been carried out into the use

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of pottery (Arnold 1985, Kramer 1985, Rice 1987, Skibo 1992, Smith 1985) and allows statements about use of certain containers or the possibility to divide between special purpose vessels and everyday use containers. This latter differentiation is difficult as normal ceramic containers, or other material items, can change their role when framed in a ritual setting (Verhoeven 2002). This problem, however, cannot be discussed here. The architecture of most Late Chalcolithic villages is undifferentiated, and no great difference exists between the size and content of each household. There are clearly differences between settlements, as only the larger ones such as Tuleilat Ghassul and Shiqmim (Rowan and Golden 2009) show households consisting of several rooms and courtyards, whereas smaller villages have one-room houses (Kerner 2010). The existence of basalt bowls in many pits in Grar or copper “tool” finds in several houses in Shiqmim also indicate little obvious social difference between households (Kerner 2020), even though both find categories can again be used in special circumstances. It is in most cases difficult to differentiate between containers used for preparing or cooking when no information about actual signs of fire on the vessels are reported. For both activities larger vessels would be necessary, with a more open mouth for preparing and a more closed mouth for cooking activities, although in both cases extreme openness or restrictedness would not prove practical. The cooking pots of the period are produced from a fabric that can withstand great heat, thus giving a clue about the function. The serving and consuming containers would be open vessels for food, while being smaller and more closed for drink. The size of the consumption vessel depends on the commensal size of the group and the cultural preference. In ethnographic examples, serving vessels can vary between very large vessels for Mensaf dishes, Fufu soup (Weil 2017) or communal bowls in eighteenth-century Germany (Hirschfelder 2001) and the small, individual dishes, which are the common vessels in modern Western societies. The characteristics used in such an analysis are size, shape of opening, relation between mouth and body diameter, stability/ equilibrium and so on (Pollock 2010; Chesson 2000).

Grar The site of Grar is situated in the Northern Negev and its sub-sites together are 7.5 ha, meaning each sub-site is approximately 1 ha. These sub-sites might have existed at exactly the same time, but also at slightly different,

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possibly overlapping periods. Isaac Gilead (1995), the excavator, has always described it as a small village. The pottery has been counted (per sub-site and per unit) and published with a typology (Gilead and Goren 1995). Kangas (1994) used some of the material, the bowls and cornets, for a PhD thesis with more information about sizes and decoration. The sub-sites show certain differences, particularly pertaining to architecture. Only one of the excavated units shows any substantial architecture. All others contain mostly pits, some of which have a very high find density. The pottery is hand-made and the different shapes have different textures, meaning there is a logical connection between form and fabric, with some vessels being made from finer material than others (particularly the cornets). The most common form is the bowl, mostly the so-called V-shaped bowl (with flat base and obliquely flaring walls) with a bi-modal size distribution of 15–20 cm and 30–35 cm range. The former being with 70% the more common type (Gilead and Goren 1995: 143–145). These smaller bowls are also the only shape that has been made or finished on the fast wheel. The numbers in Grar are given as MNI (Table 8.1).5 The distribution of pottery vessels in the sub-sites in Grar shows that these are different: Fields B and C have a very high amount of bowls (with Field D having a smaller amount), and cornets form less than 10% of the assemblages in all three fields. In Fields E and G, the bowls are below 30%, while the cornets are 19% (in Area G) and 32% (in Area E) of all vessels. Both shapes would be used for serving and drinking, and they are together Table 8.1  Distribution of types in the sub-units of Grar (*Hole-mouth-jars). Last column (total) gives percentages for the whole site of Grar

Bowls Cornets HMJ* Basins Jars Churns Burners Sum NR

Area B

Area C

Area D

Area E

Area G

Total

51.7 7.0 16.2 10.1 9.2 4.9 0.2 414

53.7 8.1 8.1 20.8 6.7 1.3 1.3 149

39.5 7.4 11.7 17.9 14.8 4.3 3.7 162

29.9 32.8 10.7 10.7 6.8 4.5 3.9 177

25.5 18.6 17.5 9.5 17.8 6.9 1.7 349

40.5 14.1 14.2 12.3 11.7 4.9 1.8 1251

5  MNI: Minimal number of individuals; it usually gives a lower and more realistic idea of the number of actual vessels than a regular sherd count.

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considerably less in Area D than in the other sub-sites. Kangas (1994: 91–93) studied the bowls in pit 518 in Field B and showed a bi-modal size distribution, while those in pit 713  in Field C had a greater variability in size. The vessels used for cooking and preparation would be the HMJs and the basins, which form between 21.5 and 29% of the material, but with clear differences between these two forms. HMJs are more common in Fields B and G, while basins are more common in Fields C and D.6 The smallest amount of these preparation/cooking vessels appears in Field E, where both types are equally frequent. The basins are between 20 and 50 cm, with a peak at 40 cm diameter (Gilead and Goren 1995: 152).7 Jars, which are not further subdivided by size, and in their larger variety most likely used for storage, are most common in Fields D and G. The pottery specimen that have the highest probability of being special containers8 or at least have the potential to turn into special items on the appropriate occasion are churns and burners. The churns have the same percentage in all sub-sites except Area C where they are very rare (1.3%) and the burners are most common in Areas D and E, and very rare in Area B. The Grar pottery-report does not give precise information about the size distribution of the churns, other than 75% being normal churns, ca. 20% being very large (cream ware) vessels and miniature vessels less than 5%. The latter two groups would most likely form the main bulk of special vessels involved in ritual activities. However, we have no information about their precise distribution. The picture emerging from the vessel distribution is thus not obvious, but some interpretations might be possible: Areas D and G have the smallest number of serving/drinking vessels, but a high amount of storage vessels. These are also the sub-units where no wall fragments at all were encountered. Areas B, C and E have a higher number of serving/drinking vessels, but less storage vessels. These are also the areas with some wall fragments, although the only sizeable wall line has been excavated in area E. Area C is set apart from the others with a rather small amount of cooking vessels (HMJs) and the smallest percentage of special pottery. 6  This is contrary to Gilead and Goren (1995: 202), where only Field C is mentioned in Table 4.3. 7  A similar size for these large containers is given by Commenge-Pellerine in Abu Matar (Commenge-Pellerine 1987: 38) and Bir es-Safadi (Commenge-Pellerine 1990: 19). 8  Special containers in this context refer to containers used in ritual, cultic or similar circumstances. A precise discussion of the exact special use is not possible here.

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“Concentrations of pottery and bone fragments, flint artefacts and stones … spread on flat surfaces” (Gilead 1995: 70) were encountered in Area C.

Gilat The site of Gilat is situated in the Northern Negev at the eastern bank of a wadi. It was only possible to excavate a small part of this large site, which makes the interpretation difficult. The site has been interpreted as a cultic site, although the actual cultural reach of the site is unclear. One fact strongly supporting a larger regional impact of Gilat is the amount of non-­ local pottery (41%) excavated there (Commenge-Pellerine 2006: 438). The production of torpedo-jars as well as large amounts of beakers and urns happened outside Gilat and some churns, basins and several other containers were also imported (Commenge-Pellerine 2006: 401–402, 409). Most of the non-local production is, however, regional and would not have required long transport. The strata from I to III span a period in the second half of the fifth mill. BCE (Levy and Burton 2006: 865), with most architecture dating into stratum II. There is a grouping of possible special vessels such as pedestalled bowls in certain loci (Commenge-­ Pellerine 2006, Fig. 10.5), although the possible interpretations are hampered by the fact that most pottery comes from pits and less from primary room inventories (Levy and Burton 2006: 448–450 in Commenge-­Pellerine 2006). There is a different spatial distribution of firstly basins, secondly what is called “domestic vessels” such as HMJs, jars, pithoi, churns and V-shaped vessels and thirdly so-called ceremonial vessels like beakers, torpedo-jars, tulip-bowls and pedestaled bowls. It is not possible to interpret this any further as the distribution maps have an extremely small scale.9 The pottery amount from Gilat is very large, given as MNI and has a much lower breaking rate than that from Grar (Commenge-Pellerine 2006: 397); it allowed thus a detailed form of typology. This typology by Commenge is summarised here to allow a comparison between the same categories, which have been used in the other sites. In particular, the varied smaller shapes have been subsumed here into two groups of drinking vessels (very small and small), as they are all small, narrow and with an uncertain stand. These include tulip-bowls, beakers and pointed-base beakers, which with 9  From the publication no association of pottery and buildings is possible (Levy 2006, Figs. 10.5 and 10.6).

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the exception of the ring-based tulip-bowls all have narrow bases giving them at best “a precarious state of equilibrium” (Commenge-Pellerine 2006: 416), but often make a secure stand impossible. The very small drinking vessels have a rim diameter between 4.9 and 9.2  cm and have usually a larger height then width. These very small containers are often decorated with red paint, for example 79% of the tulip-bowls, 39% of the beakers and 100% of the cornets. The category of very small drinking vessels should include also the cornets, which are only mentioned separately in the tables, as they are a very well-known type. About 91% of the cornets are between 8.9 and 9.6 cm, while the remainders are around 5 cm. They all have very small, unstable bases and their height is usually four times their width. All these very small drinking chalices have thus a diameter below 10 cm, an elongated shape, an insecure stand and are often decorated. Tubular goblets fall also in this group, as they also have a diameter between 2.4 and 5.6 cm (in a bi-modal distribution) and a height between 8 and 9.6 cm. These goblets exist in two clusters, one is well shaped on the tournette, the other crudely made (Commenge-Pellerine 2006: 418), and they are not decorated. The goblets’ bases are small but relatively heavy and over 2 cm in diameter. The goblets thus fit in the same size-group as the other small drinking vessels, but with the amount of coarsely made items, the lack of decoration and the impetus on a more stable standing area they are clearly distinguished. Particularly the coarsely made sub-­ group is clearly different from the rest of the drinking vessels (Table 8.2). The slightly larger, small drinking vessels have a diameter between 8.1 and 15.4  cm, with only the medium pointed-base beakers being sometimes smaller than 10 cm. Ring-based tulip-bowls are up to 17 cm, redpainted and have a large number of small lug handles. The drinking vessels together make 29% of all vessels in Gilat, which is high, even if one assumes that some of the vessels with a diameter above 15 cm might have been used as serving vessels (particularly the ring-based tulip-bowls might qualify as such). The V-shaped bowls are interpreted as serving vessels, and their amount is with 25% considerably smaller than in other sites (Table 8.7).10 Preparation and cooking vessels (large bowls and HMJs) on the other hand have with 26% an amount compatible with other sites. The same is true for the storing vessels (pithoi and jars) with 9.2%. 10  If the ring-based tulip-bowls would change from drinking to serving vessels the relation would be 27% to 27%.

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Table 8.2  Distribution of types through the strata in Gilat

V-bowls Large bowls Basins Very small drinking vesselsa Cornets Small drinking vesselsb Urns Pedestaled bowls Pithoi HMJ Jars Churns Miniature churns Torpedo-jars

Str I

Str IIA

Str IIB

Str IIC

Str IIIA

Str IIIB

Str IV

264 151 237 398

408 217 149 484

481 306 184 595

314 195 115 413

87 82 51 179

18 26 14 40

10 15 9 24

1582 992 759 2133

46 209 15 44 120 370 96 169 10 27

41 180 17 48 68 421 103 180 12 17

13 242 10 45 85 458 130 187 18 24

9 83 9 41 104 431 122 146 17 21

3 39 7 17 48 198 41 58 13 4

– 8 – 2 4 50 25 16 1 2

– 14 – 3 – 15 10 9 – 1

112 775 58 200 429 1943 527 765 71 96

a Including tulip-bowls, small and medium beakers, small pointed-base beakers and tubular goblets (Commenge-Pellerine 2006, Table 10.1)

Including Ring-based tulip-bowls, medium and large pointed-based beakers (Commenge-Pellerine 2006, Table 10.1) b

The distribution of vessels in Gilat is remarkably similar through the different levels. Although the percentages show certain differences in the lower levels, the absolute numbers in levels IIIB and IV are so low, that any statistical comparison with the upper levels is based on shaky grounds. The V-shaped bowls form a smaller part in the lower levels, while the necked jars and HMJs are present in larger amounts. Cornets, large pointed beakers and urns do not exist in these lowest levels, which is most likely a chronological indicator.11 As the numbers in the lower levels are rather small, it is difficult to argue for a change in the organisation of food through the levels. A possible change could be a move from storing, preparing and cooking to a larger concentration on the consumption (both eating and drinking in individual portions) as expressed in the increase of small individual vessels (Table 8.3).

 Particularly cornets have been suggested as a chronological marker (Lovell 2001: 200).

11

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Table 8.3  Distribution of types through the strata in Gilat (percentage). Last column gives the percentages in the whole site of Gilat Str. I V-bowls Large bowls Basins Very small drinking vessels Cornets Small drinking vessels Urns Pedestaled bowls Pithoi HMJ Jars Churns Miniature churns Torpedo-jars

12.2 7.0 11.0 18.4

Str. IIA

Str. IIB

Str. IIC

Str. IIIA

17.4 9.3 6.4 20.6

17.3 11.1 6.6 21.4

15.5 9.7 5.7 20.4

10.5 9.9 6.2 21.6

2.2 1.7 9.6 7.7 0.7 0.7 2.0 2.0 5.6 2.9 17.2 18 4.5 4.4 7.8 7.7 0.5 0.5 1.3 0.7 99.4 100

0.5 8.7 0.4 1.6 3.1 16.5 4.7 6.7 0.6 0.9 100.1

0.5 4.1 0.4 2.0 5.1 21.3 6.0 7.2 0.8 1.0 99.8

0.4 4.7 0.8 2.1 5.8 23.9 5.0 7.0 1.6 0.5 100

Str. IIIB 8.7 12.6 6.8 19.3 – 3.9 – 1.0 2.0 24.2 12.1 7.7 0.5 1.0 100.3

Str. IV 10.4 15.6 9.4 25

15.1 9.5 7.2 20.5

– 14.6 – 3.1 – 15.6 10.4 9 – 1.0 99.5

1.1 7.2 0.6 1.9 4.1 18.6 5.1 7.3 0.7 0.9 10,429

Shiqmim Shiqmim is situated in the Negev, close to Beersheba and is with 10 ha larger than most Chalcolithic sites. The settlement stretches along the wadi bank and has a lower and upper part, with the upper part also containing subterranean structures (stratum III) as known from other sites in the vicinity (Levy 1987; Levy et al. 1991; Levy et al. 1994). Additionally, seven cemeteries were excavated (Levy and Alon 1987). The typology in Shiqmim differs in some ways from that of the other sites. The most obvious difference is that vessel size has not been used as a defining criterion. Both bowls and HMJs are not subdivided into size-­ groups, even though there are indications that such groups existed (see Table 8.4). In order to make a comparison to the material from other sites possible, I have tried here to come up with estimates for large bowls and small goblets, based on the available data. The V-shaped and more rounded bowls in Shiqmim are by far the majority of the pottery shapes. Over 80% of them have simple rounded or pointed rims (Burton 2004: 186) and more than half of those have a red band as decoration. These “typical” bowls have an average rim diameter of

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Table 8.4  Distribution of types in Shiqmim, divided by area (after Burton 2004, Table 5.2)

Bowls Small bowls Large bowls Basins Goblets Cornets Pithoi HMJ Jars Churn Pedestal Other

Western sector

%

Area X

%

Area Z

%

Sum

10,454

74.17

1773

85.1

1113

81.2

133.40

19

0.9

11

0.8

86 – 205 2033 898 240 26 53 13,995

0.6 – 1.45 14.4 6.4 2.4 0.2 0.4

– 10 158 82 25 1 16 2084

– 0.5 7.6 3.9 1.2 0.1 0.8

– 3 147 57 22 15 3 1371

– 0.2 10.7 4.2 1.6 1.1 0.2

%

76.0 Ca. 60a Ca. 16 116 0.7 125 0.7 1 0 218 1.2 2338 13.3 1037 5.9 387 2.2 42 0.2 72 0.4 17,676

a Burton (2004) did not subdivide the bowls by size in her tables. However, in the earlier work by Levy and Menahem (1987), basins (vertical-sided containers) and large bowls were compiled into one category, so that a comparison of both typologies would allow a rough subdivision of bowls by size as given here

13.5 cm, while the bowls with different rim forms (everted, bevelled, etc.) are larger on average, fluctuating between 15 and 45 cm, with a peak at 25 cm (Burton 2004, Fig. 5.10). Most of these latter bowls should thus be described as large bowls and considered as preparation containers. There are no cornets in Shiqmim, but some “very small holemouth vessels (rim diameters