15 May 2005TO EAT THE WORLD OR TO SERVE IT?I love food and cooking, as is probably tediously obvious from previous jottings here as from the more self-advertising sections of my website. Cooking is an important form of meditation for me. At the same time, for me, preparing and sharing a good meal with someone is almost on par with great sex. I realized lately that I owe my penchant for cooking to my mother, though I am not trying to impute the same emotions it invokes in me to her. Like her mother before her (and, incidentally, like my father's mother), she took the trouble to prepare and cook a variety of wholesome and tasty meals. It helped that she only ever worked part-time. My recent awareness was prompted by talking with friends who do no appreciate food the way I do, and whose parents worked full-time, so that they were brought up on frozen or factory-prepared foods. I am sure that there is some strong correlation between lack of exposure to diverse fresh foods in youth and a lack of appreciation for fine food (not to mention incomprehension of cooking beyond re- heating). I also had the good fortune of being dragged around much of Europe when I was a child, and as an adult, I had the means and found the opportunity to travel more widely still. Wherever I went, I ate what was available, which often had not suffered the industrial processes that many comestibles in the United States do. Consistent with my interest, I now watch food and cooking programs on television, on the few occasions when I legitimately have time to offer myself up to the electronic brain-vampire. I am wont to say glibly that food TV, such as the programs shown on PBS and the Food Network, is the only thing that justifies the existence of television. This is overstatement, of course, though it may not be far from the truth of US television. Furthermore, not all food TV is good. I don't mean to review comprehensively what I watch here; suffice it to say that there is very little that doesn't inspire me to get up and try something new or to vary my cuisine. I even have found grudging respect for Emeril Lugasse, in spite of his inconsequential jabbering, his moronic sense of humor, and his tendency to laugh at his own poor jokes. Granted that he also appeals to an all-too- bachelor sense of flavor -- lots of red pepper, garlic, and (among those sophisticated enough to know leafy greens) basil -- he has probably done considerably well to encourage many Americans who are entrenched in sloppy or deleterious culinary habits to prepare interesting and nutritious meals without putting on airs or worrying about the techniques involved. A particular aspect of American food TV I like, as opposed to the British culinary programs I was watching for the past few years, is the peculiar fusion of classic European cuisine with that of East Asia or with tastes from South of the border -- such as those called "Pacific Rim" and "Tex-Mex." (I spell these out for readers from the other side of the Pond who sometimes visit this site.) In Britain in recent years, the fusion tendency has been toward melding classic Continental cooking with revived but inveterate British dishes. Rick Stein, for example, is very expressive of this trend and deserves credit, though I think he sometimes waxes pompous and feel his talk is tinged with British bulldogism. It is an unfortunate commonplace that the British -- or the English, at least -- can't cook, and Stein, among others, has done much to dispel this notion. However, like any stereotype that is widely plausible, there has to be a kernel of truth to it. A product of Britain's forced and rapid industrialization was a diminution of cooking standards and of absolute nutrition among the majority, which was only exacerbated by scarcity following the world wars of the last century. Recent positive trends in British cuisine are probably knock-on effects of the rise of the welfare state (whose late decline is not yet perceptible in the culinary realm.) It is equally commonplace to say that the best British cuisine is Indian. The truth at the heart of this is related to the bad reputation of English food. For the decline in cooking and food for the majority of the English (and British, more broadly) coincided with the rise of the British Empire, the jewel in the crown of which was India. I recall reading an old essay of Alexander Cockburn's several years ago about the relationship between imperialism and diet, called "Culinary conquests." In it, he quotes a political science professor friend from UCLA, whom he names mysteriously only as "Mercator," concerning the appeal of Third World cuisine in the First World: It is the exoticism of the subordinate.... The English, for example, eat Indian food. They tell each other that the true Indian eats fiery curries to make himself cool in a hot climate. What they are really saying is that the Indian is impervious to pain and hence can be treated abominably, because they think that the Indian must be silly to think he can get cool in this way. The Dutch say that the Indonesians eat such mountains of rijsttefel that they cannot work hard, proving that they must be lazy. Take this craze for Mexican food ... though Mexico has come of the most sophisticated food in the world, in the United States, we basically eat what the cowboys have round the campfire: beans, enchiladas, rice, and tacos. What's being enforced is a peasant stereotype, a version of the pastoral.... Now the colonized are not only exotic but also threatening. Mexico conjures up an image of illegal immigrants flooding across the Rio Grande, of perilous external bank debt, of drug smuggling. It has these dual connotations -- quaint but threatening. Hence you get attempts at domestication and cultural pacification via a pastoral version of Mexican cuisine and, even less threatening, the notion of New Mexican food. New Mexico isn't going to threaten America. It is America.... Ideally our conspicuous consumers must ingest all these symbols at the same time, for then truly they can fold their napkins with a contented sigh and say, "We are the world." [1] By and large, I think these rather Marcusean observations still ring true: throughout human history, an important means of controlling distant resources and exotic knowledge has been to consume their material forms, often with showy display, sometimes literally to incorporate them in ourselves. The proletarian poor of the British Empire lived in the shadow of those who grew fat on the delicacies of their conquests. However, I would like to suggest that the cultural tensions and political contradictions are not so simple as nation versus nation or the exotic versus the familiar (nor were they when Cockburn quoted his interlocutor in 1985) and that perhaps under the prevailing tides of global capitalism, the complex of "inside" / "outside" and "above" / "below" relationships is currently undergoing a perceptibly different transformation from what Mercator describes. Mercator's analysis seems to imply that there is just one America, or at least one America that matters from a culinary point of view. I don't think this stance addresses the important issue I raise above of differences in eating and taste within a single politically and legally defined nation-state. The negotiations and conflicts at this level of analysis are at least as intense and complicated as those between the imperial center and its colonized periphery; they are perhaps more so because of the symbolic unity of the Nation that the masters and bureaucrats project onto the unstable and shifting patterns of relationships that constitute "society." America may be exceptional, but not unique, among modern nation-states insofar as its political unity was defined very much in terms of a common opposition to distant, foreign control. However, the source of much of this opposition was the indignation of those of means to being subject to the ancien rˇgime, which seemed increasingly irrational. By the same token, there were those who were excluded from the start, or who did not participate. Hence one does not find a developed Native American cuisine as part of the national economy, though a nod may be given in history textbooks to the indigenous population's contribution of maize to European agriculture. Ironically, as well, the eating choices of the early American bourgeoisie often emulated those of the European aristocracy, another mark of distinction, thought appropriate to the circumstances. I must be made clear that Mercator is talking about the development of American elite cuisine -- the way in which food is transformed into part of a class identity. To be fair, the professor specifies "conspicuous" consumption: to be seen to be able to consume something valuable without any detriment to oneself has long been an important strategy for maintaining authority. One means of assuring that not everyone can partake in such ceremonies of power is to incorporate consumables that are -- to be somewhat redundant for the sake of emphasis -- socially scarce. The distribution of scarce resources such that people are permitted or denied participation in formalized consumption at different times and in different places is thus an important strategy of social control. Hence the struggle for scarce resources is also a struggle for social identity and for whose words and deeds carry the most weight. However, the sides need not be drawn up in terms of elites who consume "the exotic" -- for instance, classic Italo-Gallic haute cuisine -- and plebes who consume some undistinguished variety of "peasant food." The rediscovery of America's other "ethnic food" has the seeds of the class struggle in it. This is not to suggest ominously, waxing Marcusean again, that the cooking of Germans, Scots, and the Southern plantations will of necessity be coopted into the eating habits of a self-obsessed Floating World or ideologically unified concept of America. On the contrary, it could draw attention to the diversity of social identities that always threatens the boundaries of the nation-state despite the enormous institutional effort put into maintaining them. The popularity of Cajun food in America in the 1990s is an interesting case study. One the one hand, the "Bubba factor" could render it quaint, and on the other hand, for a while at least, to be dining finely meant to be eating foods with a spicy, blackened crust on them. Cajun food could claim to be authentically American. It could even be exported as such (as I know, having worked briefly at a self-styled Cajun restaurant in the North of England). At the same time, it was disarmed -- the bayou tamed, as it were -- for many Americans who regarded the hybrid culture of Louisiana, like it exotic legal system, as too French, too "Injun" (like "Cajun"), or too close to the blurry margins of America. In spite of the strengths of the foregoing analysis, the mention of the export of Cajun food to Britain leads me to an equally important point -- the trade in tastes and its relationship with an aspect of the myth of individual sovereignty that American capitalism is founded upon, namely, consumer choice. The growth in this market is consonant with the trend away from the rhetoric of nationalism toward that of "globalization" in contemporary capitalism. With the realization of capitalism's logical end, the world market, in the last couple of decades, the means of constructing social identities (supposing there is no resistance) depend increasingly upon commodity relations. The theoretical question is as much how different identities are maintained or preserved as how they are constructed at all, when the market and the "productive" forces that underlie it are unraveling the practices that once sustained these identities. As much as the television programs I watch may be taken as celebrations of the variety of foods and traditions of cooking, especially in America, they may also be seen as evidence that America at a certain scale of analysis constitutes the world's middle class, or at least that Americans are guided toward achieving this euphoric state in the face of contrary forces. As the world's middle class, Americans have to assume that the world is their oyster (or broccoli rabe or filet mignon), that they can attain all things, usually through purchasing goods and services. Hence the exotic has a positive appeal, rather than being threatening. It provides means of renewing or reconstituting one's identity, if not necessarily keeping up with the Joneses or truly ostentatiously consuming in the old-fashioned way [2]. The other side of the relationship between food and consumption is that between cooking and production, which lies at the heart of capitalist social relations. Again, I think that it is refreshing and important that most of the programs I see on food TV emphasize timing and technique, especially the subtle combinations of all the properties of the materials involved. Good food is altogether corporeal and sensual; it is not forged, molded, or injected; it cannot be reduced to a single chain of operations. However, another tendency exists in food television that emphasizes the product rather than the production. This is typical of programs concerned with trendy diets or aimed at people who want to fit a showy bit of cooking into one of the 15-minute slots kept on their PDA. One the last count, I don't mean to disparage people who find themselves very busy, as I do, and want to break away from the grind by doing something as therapeutic as cooking. Nevertheless, these programs appeal as much to this type as to that which wants to have it all and thinks most of it can be bought: an 18-year-old body (one's own or someone else's), a flashy (but fuel-efficient) SUV (or two), a house full of antiques (and a housekeeper to clean them), a wine cellar (to impress guests), etc. In the category of fatuous trends, I am thinking particularly of George Stella's "Law carb and lovin' it." This program's proselyte of the Atkins Diet seems constantly to be pumped up on a cocktail of cocaine, crystal meth, and caffeine-based diet pills. His perverse purpose, like that of other advocates of this diet, seems to be to make pretty dishes that will starve you. It's as if contemporary bourgeois decadence's answer to that of the old school is to have one's cake and not to eat it. Under contemporary economic conditions, is this not commodity fetishism at its most absurd? The problem remains that cooking -- except in the debased sense of rendering matter ingestible, disgestible, and aseptic -- does not fit the traditional mold of productive practice. It is common and banal. How then in an epoch of the globalization of cuisine can the preparation of food assume the "value-added" character proper to a commodity in the market? One way, of course, is to add a notoriously scarce ingredient to food. Thus nothing is truly haute cuisine no matter how "ethnic" its basis, until it is decorated with caviar, truffles or gold filigree. This is not particularly new: it's how many French and Italian peasant dishes were transformed into classic cooking. I have in mind some of the creations of the Food Networks Iron Chefs or the preposterous omelets and ice cream sundaes offered recently by certain New York restaurants. Another way, which often also strives after some rare essence, is giving emphasis to "originality" and thereby encouraging the perception of good cooking as a matter of individual expression and even competition. This emphasis also hardly a new strategy for adding value, though we may be witnessing a resurgence in its importance; it is, after all, what supposedly elevates the (generally male) chef above the (generally) female cook, or the restaurateur above the homemaker. To apologize again, I don't mean to denigrate the talents, skills, and techniques of great cooks; I myself have taken pains to learn classic recipes and to make and re-make till satisfied delicate mother sauces and pastry doughs. What I am trying to point out is that the meanings and values we attach to food are as contentious a terrain in the politics of reproduction and social identity as one will find. And one can see much of the contest played out on the seemingly most unprepossessing programs on TV. Perhaps some of the solutions to the problems and contradictions raised here are found in the words I started with. Cooking as meditation provides a way of stealing ourselves away from the one-dimensional world of progress and accumulation. The intricacy of its flows and ebbs, its mixtures and separations, and its harmonies and melodies may restore respect in us for the inherent variety of the material world, for how the measure of time is always relative to action, and for how our practices create the spaces we inhabit. But we need not inhabit these spaces alone: cooking can be as much something we do for others as we do for ourselves. Empire has no objection to the metaphor of the global village per se; villages may have headmen, fools, kept women, and whipping boys. While serving food may be means of accruing symbolic power in some circumstances, such as in a potlatch, sharing food around a table is a moment of equality. Perhaps the example of commensality -- reciprocal and expansive -- is a recipe more threatening to imperialism than the stores in your cupboard suggest. 1. First published in House and Garden, December 1985, reprinted in Corruptions of Empire, London, Verso, 1987. [Back] 2. I talked to my sister Helen about the thoughts that I am trying to express here, and she made a point relevant to this discussion of the appropriation of foods for a diverse and sometimes competing social identities. She noted the recent trend among African Americans, mainly in the middle class, to eat "native" African foods, both because they are presumed to be more suitable to their "ethnic" metabolism and a symbol of their resistance to an oppressive European dietary regime. But they also do so because they have the means to do so. 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