Food and Culture

Seminar Organizer: Laura Goering, Professor of Russian

In The Physiology of Taste, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote, “The pleasure of the table belongs to all ages, to all conditions, to all countries, and to all areas; it mingles with all other pleasures, and remains at last to console us for their departure.” To Brillat-Saverin’s list, we might add “to all disciplines,” for there are few academic fields that do not in some way touch on the study of food. The topics of scholarly inquiry are many and varied—from culinary history to food security, from global foodways to depictions of food in art, from food rituals and taboos to diet and public health—yet all share a fundamental concern with food and culture.

As Massimo Montanari reminds us, while rooted in biological necessity, food has no meaning outside the sphere of human activity. In its production, preparation and consumption, “food is culture.” This seminar seeks to bring together scholars from disparate fields in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, with a goal of bringing a multidisciplinary perspective to the study of food in all its guises.  

The basic premise of this year’s Seminar is that even highly specialized approaches to the study of food can be enhanced by conversation and engagement with scholars in other fields. What these conversations will look like will depend largely on the interests and expertise of the participants.

Imagine, for example, the possibilities for intellectual engagement between these hypothetical pairings:

  • A scholar of public health and a sociologist who studies food and identity in immigrant communities; an advocate of sustainable agriculture and a culinary historian who examines the interactions of national cuisines over time
  • An economist who analyzes global foodways and a scholar interested in local cultural meanings of food production and consumption
  • A scholar of religion who studies food taboos and a political scientist interested in food security in developing nations.

By reading broadly outside our own areas of expertise, we will also address a secondary goal of understanding the central issues, problems and contradictions in the nascent field of “food studies.”

Again this year the Humanities Center has collaborated with the Global Engagement Initiative to select a Seminar topic that has global implications. Indeed, from the migration and metamorphosis of national ethnic cuisines, to the benefits and perils of interconnected global foodways, to the collision of indigenous farming practices with external factors—everywhere we look in the world of food we find examples of “the flow of people, goods and capital, of ideas and images,” or, conversely, of cultural practices that “elude the discourses and networks of global flows.” The GEI grant will offer additional opportunities (guest speakers, links to Off-Campus Studies programs, field trips, etc.) for connecting the work of Seminar participants to the broader campus community.

We will begin by discussing a few seminal food studies texts such as Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and power: the place of sugar in modern history (1985), but ultimately the choice of readings will be guided by the specific interests and research projects of participants.

Preliminary Bibliography

Included here is an abbreviated bibliography to give applicants a sense of the range of topics and authors that might be considered:

  • Theoretical approaches to the study of food and culture: E. N. Anderson, Everyone eats: understanding food and culture (2005); Roland Barthes, “Toward a psychosociology of contemporary food consumption” (1961); Massimo Montanari, Food is culture. Arts and traditions of the table (2006); Anna Meigs, “Food as a Cultural Construction” (1997).
  • Comparative historical studies of culinary practices: Jack Goody, Cooking, cuisine, and class: a study in comparative sociology (1982); Krishnendu Ray and Tulasi Srinivas, eds. Curried cultures: globalization, food, and South Asia (2012); Peter Scholliers, Food, drink and identity: cooking, eating and drinking in Europe since the Middle Ages (2001); Richard Wragham, Catching fire: how cooking made us human (2009).
  • Global foodways: Theodore Bestor, “How sushi went global” (2000); Jennifer Clapp, Hunger in the balance: the new politics of international food aid (2012).
  • Diet, food safety and food politics: Warren James Belasco, Appetite for change: how the counterculture took on the food industry (2007); Marion Nestle, Food politics: how the food industry influences nutrition and health (2002); Heather Paxson, “Slow food in a fat society” (2005); Eric Schlosser, Fast food nation: the dark side of the all-American meal (2001).
  • Food and issues of race, gender and class: Alison Hope Alkon and Julian Agyeman, Cultivating food justice: race, class, and sustainability (2011); Patricia Allen and Carolyn Sachs, “Women and food chains: the gendered politics of food” (2012); Psyche A. Williams-Forson, Building houses out of chicken legs: Black women, food, and power (2006).
  • Food and identity: Arjun Appadurai, “How to make a national cuisine: Cookbooks in contemporary India” (1988); Richard R. Wilk, Home cooking in the global village: Caribbean food from buccaneers to ecotourists (2006).
  • Physiology, diet and culture: Kristen Borré, “Seal blood, Inuit blood, and diet: a bicultural model of physiology and cultural identity” (1991); Gary Nabhan, Why some like it hot: food, genes, and cultural diversity (2004).

Faculty Fellows

Trish Beckman, Assistant Professor of Religion, St. Olaf College will explore how beyond commensality but before monism, food emerges as a site of genuine and generous theological speculation with pragmatic consequences. In particular, Kabbalist exegesis of Passover and manna materials, Christian Eucharist mysticism, and Sufi fasting practices all manifest comparable—but not identical—approaches to Divine Being itself.

Clara Hardy, Professor of Classics will investigate the motif of child eating, particularly in the context of the story of Tereus, Procne and Philomela. While Sophocles wrote a tragedy with this plot, it survives only in fragments; the fullest and most influential version of the story from the ancient world is found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (6.412-676). Exploring this version and its ancient context (literary, mythological, and cultural) will form the foundation of her research.

Christine Lac, Senior Lecturer in French will analyze the 2010 UNESCO resolution that added the “Gastronomic meal of the French” to its register of intangible heritage and the problematic and political consequences it has for our understanding of culture and identity in France in the 21st century.

Constanza Ocampo-Raeder, Assistant Professor of Anthropology will complete an article titled “Cevichito Rico, Cevichito Fresquito: Revealing Freshness Fantasies of the Peruvian Gastronomic Movement and Harsh Realities of Artisanal Fishing in Northern Piura.” Based on multiple seasons of ethnographic work with artisanal fishing communities, her research confronts the limited understanding of artisanal fishing practices and the inherent problems within a scarcely questioned culinary movement that promises sustainable development.

Katie Ryor, Professor of Art will engage in an examination of the imagery of plants and marine creatures by literati artists and primary sources drawn from a variety of texts to elucidate not only the expansion of a specific painting genre in China, but to explicate the new meanings that images of plants and food had during the late Ming dynasty.