Food and Eating An Anthropological

Food and Eating: An Anthropological Perspective By Robin Fox The Myth of Nutrition We have to eat; we like to eat; eating makes us feel good; it is more important than sex. To ensure genetic survival the sex urge need only be satisfied a few times in a lifetime; the hunger urge must be satisfied every day. It is also a profoundly social urge. Food is almost always shared; people eat together; mealtimes are events when the whole family or settlement or village comes together. Food is also an occasion for sharing, for distributing and giving, for the expression of altruism, whether from parents to children, children to in-laws, or anyone to visitors and strangers. Food is the most important thing a mother gives a child; it is the substance of her own body, and in most parts of the world mother’s milk is still the only safe food for infants. Thus food becomes not just a symbol of, but the reality of, love and security. All animals eat, but we are the only animal that cooks. So cooking becomes more than a necessity, it is the symbol of our humanity, what marks us off from the rest of nature. And because eating is almost always a group event (as opposed to sex), food becomes a focus of symbolic activity about sociality and our place in our society. The body needs fuel. But this need could be served by a rough diet of small game, roots, and berries, as it was for several million years. Or, even more extreme, pills could be synthesized to give us all we need (except bulk). But our “tastes” have never been governed solely by nutrition. Modern nutritionists chanted the litany of the “four food types” (vegetables, grains, dairy products, meats) from which we were supposed to take more or less equal amounts daily. But dairy and domestic meat fats are now considered harmful, and a new “food pyramid” – equally misleading – is being touted. In fact, nutrition plays only a small part in our food choices. Adele Davis, whose bossy opinions on food were to a whole generation as authoritative as Dr. Spock’s on childrearing (she recommended a diet of liver and yogurt), held that European history was determined by food habits. The French ate white bread and drank wine and strong coffee, she said, and this was about as nutritionally disastrous as possible; the Germans, on the other hand, ate dark bread and drank beer – both nutritionally sound. Was it any wonder, she asked, that the Germans kept beating the French? But even if both nations were to accept this interesting hypothesis as sound, do we believe they would change their food preferences?| Social Issues Research Centre 1 Nor are these preferences solely governed by what is available. All cultures go to considerable lengths to obtain preferred foods, and often ignore valuable food sources close at hand. The English do not eat horse and dog; Mohammedans refuse pork; Jews have a whole litany of forbidden foods (see Leviticus); Americans despise offal; Hindus taboo beef – and so on. People will not just eat anything, whatever the circumstances. In fact, omnivorousness is often treated as a joke. The Chinese are indeed thought by their more fastidious neighbors to eat anything. The Vietnamese used to say that the best way to get rid of the Americans would be to invite in the Chinese, who would surely find them good to eat. You Eat What You Are Since everyone must eat, what we eat becomes a most powerful symbol of who we are. To set yourself apart from others by what you will and will not eat is a social barrier almost as powerful as the incest taboo, which tells us with whom we may or may not have sex. Some cultures equate the two taboos. Margaret Mead quotes a New Guinea proverb that goes, “Your own mother, your own sister, your own pigs, your own yams which you have piled up, you may not eat.” Own food, like related women, is for exchange, for gift giving, for social generosity, for forging alliances, but not for personal consumption. The obverse of this is that you identify yourself with others by eating the same things in the same way. To achieve such identification, people will struggle to eat things they loath, and avoid perfectly tasty food that is on the forbidden list. In the process of social climbing people have to learn to like caviar, artichokes, snails, and asparagus, and scorn dumplings, fish and chips, and meat and potato pie – all more nutritious, but fatally tainted with lower-class associations. There are as many kinds of food identification as there are the same in fashion, speech, music, manners and the like. The obvious ones are ethnic, religious and class identifications. Ethnic food preferences only become identity markers in the presence of gustatory “foreigners,” such as when one goes abroad, or when the foreigners visit the home shores. The insecure will cling desperately to home food habits: English housewives on the continent even break open tea bags to make a “proper” cup of tea (the taste is identical). Popular songs attest to the food difficulties of interethnic marriages’ “bangers and mash vs. macaroni.” When various ethnic groups are forcibly thrown together, there is both an intensifying of food identity and a growing mishmash. The American melting pot is almost literally that: the food preferences of dozens of nations are put side by side, and there cannot help but be overlap and mixing. The most startling example is the popularity of the Chinese kosher restaurant, and it is not uncommon to find a restaurant advertising itself as “Chinese-Italian-American” along with the proud boast “All Our Wines Are Chilled.” The ubiquitous “diner” with its vast menu served twenty-four hours a day is a microcosm of the melting pot, having Greek salad, Italian pasta, German rye bread, Polish kielbasi, Chinese chow mein, Belgian waffles, French quiche, Hungarian goulash, Irish stew, Jewish gefilte fish, Russian blintzes, English muffins, Austrian pastries, Swiss cheese, Social Issues Research Centre 2 Food and Eating: An Anthropological Perspective You Eat What You Are Mexican enchiladas, Spanish gazpacho, Canadian bacon, Japanese teriyaki, German sausages, Norwegian herring, Lebanese pita, Nova Scotia salmon and Virginia ham. Tables and Table Manners Not knowing how to eat “properly” is universally a sign of outsider status. Proper eating includes the kind of food used, the way of preparing it, the manner of serving it, and the way of eating it. The intricacies of the tea ceremony are known only to experienced Japanese; social climbers in the West can be spotted immediately by their inability to master the details of place settings; “using the wrong fork” is an offense as grave as spitting in public. Since anyone wishing to integrate himself into a group must eat with it, there is no surer way of marking off those who are in and those out than by food etiquette. Dipping with hands into a communal dish is de rigeur in some cultures, abhorrent in others. Shovelling food into the mouth with a fork would be seen as the height of indelicacy by some; the absence of forks as the height of barbarity by others. Fingers may have been made before forks, but ever since Catherine (and Marie) de Medici brought these essential tools for noodle eating from northern Italy to France, the perfectly useful finger has been socially out, except for fruit and cheese. It took the elaborate dining habits of the upper classes to refine the use of multiple forks (as well as knives, spoons, and glasses). The timing of eating shows up class differences. In the past, as in the novels of Jane Austen, for example, the upper classes breakfasted late (about 10 o’clock), as befitted their leisure status. (This distinguished them from the lower orders, who eat very early before going off to work.) They had perhaps an informal lunch of cold meats, but the next main meal was dinner, which was eaten anywhere between five and seven, depending on the pretensions of the family. A light supper might be served before bedtime. The lower orders, meanwhile, would be eating a light midday meal and then a hearty “tea” after the day’s work was done, with again a supper before bed. The importance of “lunch” as a main meal came later from the business community, and “dinner” was pushed back into the evening, with supper more or less abolished. The lower orders continued to make midday “dinner” and “high tea” major meals, and since dinner was pushed later for the middle classes, “tea” became an institution around four o’clock. There is no nutritional sense to the timing of eating. It could be done differently. The late breakfast was primarily a sign of status and nothing else; Jane Austen’s characters always had to kill time in some way before breakfasting, and these were good hours in which to advance the plot. In France, the enormous midday meal, with its postprandial siesta, is what the day revolves around. The entire country comes to a stop and wakes up again between three and four. The order in which foods are eaten, which really does not matter, becomes highly ritualistic: Soup, fish, poultry, meat, dessert (which echoes the process of evolution) becomes a standard. Sweet should not be eaten before savory, Social Issues Research Centre 3 Food and Eating: An Anthropological Perspective Tables and Table Manners and rarely (in France never) with. The French eat salad after the main dish, the Americans rigidly before; the English, to the disgust of both, put it on the same plate as the (cold) meat. In the East, it is more common to serve all the food together, often in communal dishes, and allow a wide sampling of different items. In the more individualistic West, place settings are rigidly set of from each other, and so are “courses.” The serving of wine with food becomes even more rigidly a matter of protocol, and operates to mark off differences of status within classes: those who “know” wine and those who do not. Classes in “corporate health” in the United States now include sessions on “How to Read a Wine Label.” The rationale is that without such knowledge corporate executives may be subject to “stress,” which would impair their performance. Foreign foods tend to be shunned by the working classes, but among the upper-middle and upper they become items of prestige. A knowledge of foreign food indicates the eater’s urbanity and cosmopolitanism. Until recently, being conversant with foreign food was a privilege of those who could afford to travel, but now the knowledge has been democratized by cheap travel and television. Julia Child taught the aspiring middle classes how to be “French” cooks, and now TV abounds with every kind of cooking course. Publishers often find their cooking list to be their most lucrative, and cookbooks of all nations now crowd the bookstore shelves. When Joy of Sex was written, it deliberately took its title from the hugely successful Joy of Cooking – which tells us something. While a lot of this can perhaps be attributed to a genuine pleasure in new tastes, a lot more can probably be accounted for by the aura of sophistication that surrounds the food “expert.” The very word “gourmet” has become a title of respect like “guru” or “mahatma.” Vast changes have occurred, for example, in English eating habits, with extended travel in Europe. Ethnic identifications in food have not by any means disappeared, and the French do not, by and large, eat fish and chips; the English have not taken wholeheartedly to escargot or octopus. But spaghetti no longer comes exclusively in cans for the English. Even so, a relative conservatism of food habits persists in all countries, particularly with the lower-middle and working classes. Conspicuous Digestion: Eating on Ceremony The conspicuous consumption of food has always been important as an indicator of status, from three thousand pigs at a New Guinea feast to mountains of caviar and truffles at little Max Spielberg’s fourth birthday party. Lavish food entertainment is part of the ancient tradition of food hospitality used mainly to impress strangers. This can vary from the inevitable putting on of the kettle to make tea in British and Irish homes, through the bringing of bread and salt in Russia, to the gargantuan hospitality of the Near East where if the guest does not finish the enormous dish of sheep’s eyes in aspic the host is mortally affronted. We are not only what we eat, but how well we eat. Next to showing off military hardware, showing off food is the best way to impress the “outsider.” The twenty-one-gun salute – fired with blanks – reminds the visitor that we can, but will not, hurt him; the twenty-one-course meal serves Social Issues Research Centre 4 Food and Eating: An Anthropological Perspective Conspicuous Digestion: Eating on Ceremony to show him our good will and to impress him with our prosperity. Here again, the manner of serving becomes important. Whether entertaining the in-laws at home or royalty at the palace, formality and lavishness are the key. Mrs. Beeton’s recipes astonish us today (“take thirty-two eggs and five pounds of butter...”), but she was in charge of entertaining at Ascot, and impressing royalty and business moguls was the name of the game. (Her magnificent Household Management is not only the definitive English cookbook, but what it says – a detailed and fascinating directive for young wives on everything from how to manage a large household staff to how to judge, hire, and address a second footman or upstairs chambermaid – indispensable reading for all social historians or “Upstairs Downstairs” buffs.) The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, like all his countrymen attuned to the niceties of food customs, notes how we reserve “rich” food for the grandest occasions. The ordinary daily menu is not served, he says, and cites saumon mayonnaise, turbot sauce mousseline, aspics de foie gras, together with fine wines. “These are some of the delicacies which one would not buy and consume alone without a vague feeling of guilt,” he maintains. And this “rich food” has nothing much to do with “the mere satisfaction of physiological needs.” It is food meant to be shared, and to be shared with those we wish to impress. To feed someone is one of the most direct and intimate ways to convey something of ourselves to the impressee. We are never just saying, “see how we can satisfy your hunger.” We are saying more like “see how lavish and hospitable and knowledgeable we are.” Of the most basic things in our behavioral repertoire, eating is the most accessible and effective for conveying our messages to others. We can, of course, offer sex and violence, and sometimes we do, but food, along with superior accommodations, is on the whole easier and safer. Eating In: Dining Settings and Styles Every meal is a message, and where we eat is as important as what we eat in getting the message across. Why do we not eat all our meals in the dining room? Its name would suggest that this is its purpose. But the very fact that we call it the “dining” room and not the “eating” room, tells its own story. The dining room is usually reserved for “ceremonial” meals: those involving extended families on special occasions – older relatives, in-laws, and important guests to be impressed. It is probably the most absurdly underused room in the house, and a conspicuous waste of space. Despite the modern trend to more informal dining, recent surveys have shown an overwhelming majority of home buyers requesting a dining room. When asked for what purpose it was needed, they usually replied, “to entertain the boss and his wife” – something that might happen at best once a year. This suggests that the fourteen-by-twelve-foot room with its dignified and dedicated furnishings is more a shrine to ambition and hope than a functioning part of the home. The whole idea of separating the dining room from the kitchen was, of course, part of the general middle-class attempt to ape the upper class. The latter wished to sever their seating experience from the dirty, noisy, and smelly Social Issues Research Centre 5 Food and Eating: An Anthropological Perspective Eating In: Dining Settings and Styles process that produced it. This often meant that food had to travel literally miles from kitchen to banqueting hall. On a smaller scale, the ambitious middle class imitated this practice. Perhaps it was because servants were relegated to the kitchen and entered the dining room only as menials, that the progressive, egalitarian members of the middle class in the 1950s and 1960s consciously revolted against the tradition of separate dining. An orgy of wall destruction ensued which erased the distinction between the kitchen and dining room. This became a popular trend and influenced new-house design, where dining rooms gave way to “eating areas” and dinner parties to informal buffets. Of course, this was done in the name of efficiency rather than ideology, but we often disguise our ideological preferences this way, even to ourselves. And it was not a universally recognized efficiency: the dining-room crowd hung in there, and with a swing back to a more conservative ideology, there has been a swing back to more formal dining. Despite this, entertaining at home has in general become more informal, less predictable, and more fun. There is no longer a rigid formula for “perfect entertaining,” and media advice reflects this trend. There is much more room for spontaneity; more of what the hostess (or often the host) is into at the time. We no longer need to impress with the solemn procession of courses: soup, fish, meat, dessert, etc. (a system of eating that originated in Russia and was brought west by the Frenchman Careme). We can present a mixture of Japanese, Regional Italian, Vegetarian Gourmet, and Cuisine Minceur. The basic rule now seems to be: do what pleases you and is fun. The main requirement is: be innovative and surprise people. And this does not require elaborate and impressive preparation. Indeed, there is a premium on elegant simplicity: the original and unusual combination of simple elements. Thus, entertaining has become livelier, more expressive of personal style and flair, more creative, and undoubtedly more enjoyable. Compare two different entertaining menus: one a formal dinner party of 1953, served in the dining room, with perhaps coffee and liqueurs in the sitting room; the other an informal evening buffet of 1993, served in the kitchen/dining area, with the guests ranging over the “reception” rooms of the house to eat. Both menus recognize the importance of the occasion – entertaining important guests, for example. Despite the informality of menu 2, there are still some distinctions that are strictly observed. The essence of entertaining is still the display of concern and effort for the welfare of the guests. Despite the enormous popularity of frozen and convenience food, and of ready-made “take-out” meals, these would never be served to guests. The foods served on these ceremonial occasions have to be “special” – to demonstrate thoughtfulness and care on the part of the hosts, even if they no longer need to demonstrate the conspicuous consumption of time, money, servants, and energy. The food on the 1993 menu can all be made in advance, but it is all hand prepared and requires thought and effort. The mode of preparation fits the lifestyle of the new working couple, and the Social Issues Research Centre 6 Food and Eating: An Anthropological Perspective Eating In: Dining Settings and Styles new kitchen technology – particularly the food processor and the microwave oven. No one expects beef Wellington any more, but the quality, style, and flair of the chili con carne