The Bloomsbury Handbook Of Food And Popular Culture 1474296246, 9781474296243

Table of contents :
Title Page......Page 4
Copyright Page......Page 5
Contents......Page 6
About the Contributors......Page 8
List of Illustrations......Page 13
Acknowledgments......Page 14
Introduction Where Popular Culture Meets Food Studies......Page 16
What Is Popular Culture?......Page 17
The Book’s structure......Page 19
References......Page 24
Part One Vicarious Consumption: Media and Communication......Page 26
Chapter One Gender and Food Television: A Transnational Perspective on the Gendered Identities of Televised Celebrity Chefs......Page 28
The Birth and Rebirth of the Cooking Show......Page 29
The Cooking Housewife......Page 31
Male Professionalism and Connoisseurship......Page 32
Postfeminist Celebrity Chefs and New Culinary Masculinities......Page 34
Gender, Class, and Ethnicity
in Cooking Shows......Page 37
Conclusion......Page 38
References......Page 39
Chapter Two Food and Cinema:......Page 42
Banana Peels, Wheat, and Leather Shoes:
From Early Cinema to the Second World War......Page 43
From Social Criticism to Food Porn:
the Emergence of the Food Film Genre......Page 44
Documenting Food: Trends in Non-Fiction Food Films......Page 47
Scholarship on Food in Film......Page 48
Food Film as Genre......Page 49
Food, Film, and the Viewer’s Body......Page 51
Conclusion......Page 52
References......Page 53
Chapter Three Global Food, Global Media, Global Culture: Representations of the New Indian Cuisine in Indian Media......Page 55
Cosmopolitan Aspirations and Anxieties in
the Media Representation of Indian Food......Page 59
The Reimagining of Indian Identity in
the Media Representation of Food......Page 62
Conclusion: The Politics of Representing
Food in Media......Page 65
Notes......Page 66
References......Page 67
Chapter Four Tasting the Digital: New Food Media......Page 69
New Food Media: From #food
to @jamieoliver......Page 70
Understanding New Food Media:
Culinary Capital, Food Porn,
and Creative Production......Page 71
Examining New Food Media:
The Medium Shapes the Message......Page 74
References......Page 78
Chapter Five Cooking, Eating, Uploading: Digital Food Cultures......Page 81
Digital technologies, digital data,
and popular culture......Page 82
Digital food cultures:
from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0......Page 84
Food imagery and embodiment
in new digital media......Page 86
Big food data......Page 87
Conclusion......Page 91
References......Page 92
Part Two Visceral Practices:
Material Cultures of Eating......Page 96
Foundational Concepts of Food and Age......Page 98
Food in Infancy: Infant Formula and Baby Food......Page 100
School Lunch: Food in Childhood......Page 102
Diets and Dieting Products: Adulthood......Page 104
Food and Older Adults......Page 106
Future Research Directions......Page 107
References......Page 108
Chapter Seven Cooking at Home:The Cultural Construction of American “Home Cooking” in Popular Discourse......Page 111
References......Page 117
Background......Page 126
Challenges to the Supermarket Model......Page 128
Scholarly Perspectives......Page 129
Supermarket Futures......Page 134
References......Page 135
Chapter Nine Haute, Fast, and Historic: Restaurants and the Rise of Popular Culture......Page 139
From Fine Dining for the Elite to
Middle Class Consumers......Page 140
Race and Ethnicity: Purity and the Exotic......Page 142
Global Fast Food......Page 146
References......Page 149
Chapter Ten No Longer Tied to the Local: Street Food’s Technological Revolution......Page 153
What is Street Food? A History of Urbanization and Utility......Page 155
New Technology, Social Media, and Television: Street Food in the United States......Page 157
Street Food, Appropriation, and Cultural Imperialism......Page 161
Conclusion......Page 163
References......Page 164
Part Three Aesthetics of Food......Page 168
Chapter Eleven Food, Design, and Innovation: From Professional Specialization to Citizen Involvement......Page 170
Design and Food......Page 171
Diverging Definitions and Academic Perspectives......Page 172
Practice: Products, Innovation, and Technology......Page 175
Practice: Experience, Performance,
and Service......Page 178
Towards Processes and Systems......Page 180
References......Page 181
Chapter Twelve Food and Urban Design: Urban Agriculture as Second Nature?......Page 184
What is Urban Agriculture?......Page 185
Wicked Problems Require Wicked Solutions......Page 186
Second Nature and Urban Agriculture:
A Cultural Framework......Page 187
The Growing Practice of Urban
Agriculture......Page 189
Urban Agriculture and Urban Food Systems......Page 191
Designing for Urban Agriculture......Page 192
Conclusion: From the Present to the Future of Urban Agriculture......Page 194
References......Page 195
Chapter Thirteen Procrustean Boxes: Architecture and Slaughter......Page 199
Red Box......Page 200
Black Box......Page 203
Transparent Box......Page 207
References......Page 209
Chapter Fourteen Food and Art: Changing Perspectives on Food as a Creative Medium......Page 212
Studying the Ephemeral......Page 213
Food as Art Medium—Early Influences......Page 214
Chef as Artist......Page 216
Beyond Modernist Cuisine......Page 218
Growing to Composting—Exploring
the Food Cycle......Page 219
Kitchen Space as Art Space......Page 220
Conclusion......Page 222
Notes......Page 223
References......Page 224
Chapter FIfteen A Cultural History of Restaurants in Art Museums: Collaborative Creativities......Page 226
Food and Museums: Multiple Intersections......Page 228
Eating in Museums: Building up
the Restaurant......Page 229
A Brief History of Restaurants
in Art Museums......Page 231
Tasting the (Art) Museum:
The Restaurant as Cultural Space
and the Chef’s Creativity......Page 233
Conclusion: Artful Dining in Museum Restaurants......Page 236
References......Page 237
Chapter Sixteen Performing With(in) Food......Page 241
Lights Up......Page 242
Act I......Page 244
Act II......Page 246
Act III......Page 248
Denouement......Page 251
Notes......Page 252
References......Page 253
Part Four Sociopolitical Considerations: Contemporary Debates and Trends......Page 258
Chapter Seventeen From Food Advertising to Digital Engagements: Future Challenges for Public Health......Page 260
Review of the Literature......Page 262
Marketing to Children and Adolescents......Page 263
Corporate Capture of Popular Food Culture......Page 265
The Impact of New and Social Media......Page 266
Methodologies and Paradigms......Page 267
The Future......Page 268
References......Page 269
Chapter Eighteen Scourge or Savior? The Complex Relationship between Food and Science......Page 275
Little Shop of Horrors: Fears of Hybrids......Page 276
Day of the Triffids, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, and More: Frankensteinian Visions of Genetic Modification......Page 277
Silent Running, Silent Spring, and Producing Food with Neither Earth nor People......Page 279
Delight or Deception? Additives Gone Bad......Page 281
New Ways of Combining Science and Food......Page 283
Conclusions......Page 285
References......Page 286
Chapter Nineteen Nutrition, Health, and Food: “What should I eat?”......Page 289
The Rise of Nutrition in the United States......Page 290
Nutrition and/as Popular Culture......Page 292
Conclusion......Page 297
References......Page 298
Introduction......Page 301
Ethical-Eating Discourse: Themes and Debates......Page 302
Understanding The Kind Diet: Competing Perspectives on Ethical Eating......Page 305
Conclusion......Page 311
References......Page 312
Chapter Twenty-One Food and Cultural Heritage: Preserving, Reinventing, and Exposing Food Cultures......Page 316
Heritage, Tradition, and Typicality......Page 317
Intangible Cultural Heritage:
From UNESCO to Food Museums......Page 321
References......Page 326
Chapter Twenty-Two A Smiling Face is Half the Meal: Setting a Place for Culture in Food Advocacy (*Latvian proverb)......Page 329
The deculturing of agriculture......Page 330
Inserting culture into the four food discourses......Page 331
The human rights discourse......Page 332
The public health discourse......Page 333
The food security discourse......Page 334
The sustainability discourse......Page 336
Adding culture to the four discourses......Page 338
References......Page 339
Chapter Twenty-Three What is (not) Food? The Construction of Food Waste as a Social Problem......Page 344
What is food waste?......Page 346
Popular Culture and Cultural Production......Page 347
Popular Discourses about Food Waste
within the Foodscape......Page 348
Articulating Food Waste through Technologies, Bodies, and Capital......Page 351
Concluding with Small Steps: Eating
and Tasting (All of Our) Waste......Page 353
References......Page 355
Index......Page 358

Citation preview

THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF FOOD AND POPULAR CULTURE

Also available from Bloomsbury Bite Me, Fabio Parasecoli Culinary Capital, Peter Naccarato & Kathleen LeBesco The Handbook of Food and Anthropology, edited by Jakob A. Klein and James L. Watson The Handbook of Food Research, edited by Anne Murcott, Warren Belasco & Peter Jackson The Handbook of Sociocultural Anthropology, edited by James G. Carrier & Deborah B. Gewertz

THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF

FOOD AND POPULAR CULTURE Edited by Kathleen LeBesco and Peter Naccarato

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 © Kathleen LeBesco, Peter Naccarato and Contributors, 2018 Kathleen LeBesco and Peter Naccarato have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-9624-3  ePDF: 978-1-4742-9622-9 ePub: 978-1-4742-9623-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Cover image © sandoclr/Getty Images Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

A bout L ist

of

the

C ontributors

I llustrations

A cknowledgments Introduction: Where Popular Culture Meets Food Studies Kathleen LeBesco and Peter Naccarato

vii xii xiii 1

Part I—Vicarious Consumption: Media and Communication 1

Gender and Food Television: A Transnational Perspective on the Gendered Identities of Televised Celebrity Chefs Jonatan Leer

2

Food and Cinema: An Evolving Relationship Laura Lindenfeld and Fabio Parasecoli

3

Global Food, Global Media, Global Culture: Representations of the New Indian Cuisine in Indian Media Rohit Chopra

13 27

40

4

Tasting the Digital: New Food Media Isabelle de Solier

54

5

Cooking, Eating, Uploading: Digital Food Cultures Deborah Lupton

66

Part II—Visceral Practices: Material Cultures of Eating 6

A History of Food in Popular Culture Over the Life Span Amy Bentley and Shayne Leslie Figueroa

7

Cooking at Home: The Cultural Construction of American “Home Cooking” in Popular Discourse Jessamyn Neuhaus

83

96

8

Trends in Food Retail: The Supermarket and Beyond Shelley Koch

111

9

Haute, Fast, and Historic: Restaurants and the Rise of Popular Culture David Beriss

124

10 No Longer Tied to the Local: Street Food’s Technological Revolution Bryan W. Moe and Kendall R. Shurance

138

viCONTENTS

Part III—Aesthetics of Food 11 Food, Design, and Innovation: From Professional Specialization to Citizen Involvement Fabio Parasecoli

155

12 Food and Urban Design: Urban Agriculture as Second Nature? Katrin Bohn and André Viljoen

169

13 Procrustean Boxes: Architecture and Slaughter Paulette Singley

184

14 Food and Art: Changing Perspectives on Food as a Creative Medium Yael Raviv

197

15 A Cultural History of Restaurants in Art Museums: Collaborative Creativities Irina D. Mihalache

211

16 Performing With(in) Food David Szanto

226

Part IV—Sociopolitical Considerations: Contemporary Debates and Trends 17 From Food Advertising to Digital Engagements: Future Challenges for Public Health Rebecca Wells and Martin Caraher

245

18 Scourge or Savior? The Complex Relationship between Food and Science Rachel A. Ankeny and Heather J. Bray

260

19 Nutrition, Health, and Food: “What should I eat?” Jessica Mudry

274

20 A Kind Diet: Cultivating Consumer Politics, Status, and Femininity through Ethical Eating Josée Johnston, Kate Cairns, and Merin Oleschuk

286

21 Food and Cultural Heritage: Preserving, Reinventing, and Exposing Food Cultures Elisa Ascione

301

22 A Smiling Face is Half the Meal: Setting a Place for Culture in Food Advocacy (*Latvian proverb) Wayne Roberts and Lori Stahlbrand

314

23 What is (not) Food? The Construction of Food Waste as a Social Problem Leda Cooks

329

I ndex 343

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Rachel A. Ankeny is an interdisciplinary teacher and scholar whose areas of expertise cross three fields: history/philosophy of science; bioethics and science policy; and food studies. She currently has several grant projects examining food ethics, animal welfare, and other topics in food studies. She is currently professor in the School of Humanities and the associate dean (Research) and deputy executive dean for the Faculty of Arts at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Elisa Ascione is the coordinator of the Food & Sustainability Studies Program at the Umbra Institute, an American study-abroad program located in the historic center of Perugia, Italy, that hosts students from more than 100 US colleges and universities each year, including Italian students from local universities. Elisa teaches courses on Sustainability and Food Production in Italy, Anthropology of Food, and History and Culture of Food in Italy. She received an MA in refugee studies from the University of East London, UK, and a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Perugia. She has conducted research and published on heritagization processes of foods in Central Italy, and on the intersection of migration, work, and gender relations in Italy. Amy Bentley is professor of food studies in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University. A historian with interests in the social, historical, and cultural contexts of food, she is the author of Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet (University of California Press, 2014), which received the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS) Best Book Award and was also a finalist for a James Beard Award. She currently serves as editor of Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research. David Beriss is associate professor of Anthropology and chair of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of New Orleans. He is coeditor (with David Sutton) of The Restaurants Book: Ethnographies of where we eat (Berg, 2007) and author of Black Skins, French Voices: Caribbean ethnicity and activism in urban France (Westview, 2004). He has written extensively about food and culture in New Orleans and South Louisiana and is currently pursuing research on food media and cultural authority in the United States. He is editor of and a frequent contributor to FoodAnthropology (https:// foodanthro.com/), the blog of the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition. Katrin Bohn is an architect and urban practitioner and a senior lecturer in architecture at the University of Brighton, UK. Until the end of 2014 she also held a guest professorship at the Technical University of Berlin where she set up and ran the City & Nutrition Department. Together with André Viljoen, she forms Bohn&Viljoen Architects, an architectural practice and environmental consultancy based in London. As a design researcher, Katrin has taught, lectured, published, and exhibited widely on the design concept of CPUL [Continuous Productive Urban Landscape] which she and Viljoen contributed to the international urban design discourse in 2004.

viii

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Heather Bray is a researcher at the University of Adelaide exploring community understandings of, and attitudes toward, the role of science and technology in food production, in particular genetically modified crops and food, and farm animal welfare. She has recently returned to full-time research after working for over ten years in science communication, developing community engagement programs for agricultural research centers that use complex and controversial technologies. Her background is in agricultural science and she has worked as an animal scientist in both Australia and the Netherlands. Kate Cairns is an assistant professor in the Department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University-Camden. Her work explores issues of gender, culture, and inequality, with particular focus on food and childhood. She is coauthor of Food and Femininity (Bloomsbury, 2015), and has published in journals such as Gender & Society, Theory and Society, Antipode, and Journal of Consumer Culture. Martin Caraher is professor of Food and Health Policy at the Centre for Food Policy, City, University of London. He has a background in physical activity, health promotion, and public health. His research interests focus on food poverty, social inequalities related to food, fast food, and links between Big Food and policy making. Leda Cooks is professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her teaching and research address the ways identity, morality, power, relationships, community, culture, and citizenship are communicated through food. Her recent work looks at food, waste, relationality, and embodiment. She also participates in community efforts to address food waste and food system sustainability, and runs a community bread house where people of all ages gather to make bread, discuss food issues, and tell stories.  Rohit Chopra is professor of Communication at Santa Clara University. His research centers on the relationship between media and culture. His current projects examine the media memory of the 1992–93 sectarian riots in India, the notion of the city as media archive, and the reframing of the past in the time of the internet. Isabelle de Solier is a senior research fellow in anthropology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of Food and the Self: Consumption, Production and Material Culture and coeditor of Food Cultures, a special issue of Cultural Studies Review. Her research on food has also been published in the European Journal of Cultural Studies, Continuum and Exposing Lifestyle Television. Her current research on community gardening is funded by a Discovery Early Career Research Fellowship from the Australian Research Council. Shayne L. Figueroa is a PhD candidate in food studies at New York University (NYU). She also holds an MA in humanities and social thought from NYU. Her research focuses on the history of food and families in America. Shayne is currently completing her dissertation: a social history of the school lunch program in New York City during the postwar period.   Josée Johnston is professor of sociology at the University of Toronto. She is the coauthor of Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape (Routledge2nd edition, 2015) with Shyon Baumann, as well as Food and Femininity (Bloomsbury, 2015) with Kate Cairns. She has published articles in venues including American Journal of Sociology, Journal of Consumer Culture, Signs, Theory and Society, and Gender and Society. Her

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORSix

major substantive interest is the sociological study of food, which is a lens for investigating questions relating to consumer culture, gender, sustainability, and inequality.  Shelley Koch is associate professor of sociology and a member of the Women and Gender Studies collective at Emory & Henry College in Emory, VA. Her research and teaching interests include the sociology of gender and inequality, food and food systems, the intersection of the economy and consumption, and the environment. She is author of A Theory of Grocery Shopping: Food, Choice and Conflict (Berg, 2012) and co-editor with Michelle Szabo of Food, Masculinities, and Home: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Bloomsbury, 2017). She has published articles on gender, food retail, and consumption in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology and Social Currents. Kathleen LeBesco is senior associate dean for Academic Affairs at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City. She is author of Revolting Bodies: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), coauthor of Culinary Capital (Bloomsbury, 2012), and coeditor of Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression (University of California Press, 2001), Edible Ideologies: Representing Food and Meaning (SUNY Press, 2008), The Drag King Anthology (Harrington Park Press, 2003), and several journal special issues. Her work concerns food and popular culture, fat activism, disability and representation, working-class identity, and queer politics. Jonatan Leer is currently on a postdoc at the University of Århus in Denmark under the research project Smag for Livet. Jonatan has a particular interest in food and masculinity, New Nordic Cuisine, and food education. He has published several books and articles in journals, including Food, Culture and Society, Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, and Feminist Review. He is coeditor of the volume Food and Media: Practices, Distinctions and Heterotopias (Routledge, 2016) and has contributed to the anthology Food, Masculinities and Home (Bloomsbury, 2017).   Laura Lindenfeld is director of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science and professor at the School of Journalism at Stony Brook University. Her work has appeared in Text & Performance Quarterly, Food & Foodways and the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication. She and Fabio Parasecoli coauthored the book Feasting Our Eyes: Food Films and Cultural Identity in the United States (Columbia University Press, 2016). Deborah Lupton is centenary research professor in the News & Media Research Centre, Faculty of Arts & Design at the University of Canberra. She is the co-leader of the Digital Data & Society Consortium. Her latest books are Medicine as Culture, 3rd edition (Sage, 2012), Fat (Routledge, 2013), Risk, 2nd edition (Routledge, 2013), The Social Worlds of the Unborn (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Digital Sociology (Routledge, 2015), The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking (Polity, 2016), and Digital Health: Critical Perspectives (2018, Routledge). Her current research interests all involve aspects of digital sociology: big data cultures, self-tracking practices, digital food cultures, the digital surveillance of children, digitized academia, and digital health technologies. Irina D. Mihalache is assistant professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto and her work focuses on food and museums, focusing on the culinary history of museums, women’s committees and their culinary work, and eating practices in museum restaurants. She is also interested in postcolonial museums in France, migrants as museum audiences, and the construction of food trends.

x

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Bryan W. Moe is assistant professor of communication studies at Biola University in Southern California. He recently finished his PhD at Louisiana State University and completed a dissertation on the rise of the food truck movement. Currently he is researching and publishing within the interdisciplinary field of food, rhetoric, and communication. Jessica Mudry is an associate professor in the School of Professional Communication at Ryerson University in Toronto.  Her research interests reside in the tension between scientific language and discourses of food.  She has published articles in Mediation et Information, Food, Culture & Society, Social Epistemology, Environmental Communication, and Material Culture Review, as well as authored several book chapters on food and communication. She is the author of Measured Meals: Nutrition in America (SUNY Press, 2009) that examines the role of scientific and quantitative language in crafting the idea of “nutrition” and in American federal food guides.   Peter Naccarato is professor of English and World Literatures at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City. He is coauthor of Culinary Capital (Berg Press, 2012) and coeditor of Representing Italy Through Food (Bloomsbury, 2017) and Edible Ideologies: Representing Food and Meaning (SUNY Press, 2008). His scholarly work is in the area of food studies, focusing on the role of food and food practices in circulating ideologies and sustaining individual and group identities. Jessamyn Neuhaus is a professor of US History and Popular Culture at SUNY Plattsburgh.  In addition to two monographs and several anthology chapters, she is the author of articles in Advertising & Society Review, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Journal of Popular Culture, Journal of Women’s History, and Studies in Popular Culture, among others. A recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, Jessamyn has given presentations on pedagogy at numerous conferences, authored articles in Teaching History and The History Teacher, and coauthored an article on student learning assessment for Journal of American History.    Merin Oleschuk is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her interests involve how intersecting inequalities shape family food habits, and the ways that disparate methodological tools can be applied to understand them. Her dissertation examines the relationship between cooking values and practices and their implications for the health behaviors of families. Fabio Parasecoli is associate professor and director of Food Studies Initiatives at the New School in New York City. His research explores the intersections among food, popular culture, and politics, particularly in food design. Recent books include Al Dente: A History of Food in Italy (Reaktion Books2014), Feasting Our Eyes: Food, Film, and Cultural Citizenship in the US (Columbia University Press, 2016), coauthored with Laura Lindenfeld, and Knowing Where It Comes From: Labeling Traditional Foods to Compete in a Global Market (University of Iowa Press, 2017). He is a contributor to the Huffington Post. Yael Raviv is the director of Umami Food and Art Festival and director of Business Development at Splacer Inc. She is the author of Falafel Nation: Cuisine and the Making of National Identity in Israel (University of Nebraska Press, 2015). Yael received her PhD from New York University’s Performance Studies Department and her research and writing focus on food and national identity and food and art.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORSxi

Wayne Roberts is one of Canada's leading food practitioners and analysts. From 2000 to 2010, he managed the Toronto Food Policy Council as it became one of the most influential city-based food councils in the world. He has written three books on food policy (Real Food for a Change, No Nonsense Guide to World Food and Food for City Building). He now works as a consultant and speaker on city food issues across Canada and Europe. Kendall Shurance is a master's candidate at the University of the Pacific's Food Studies Program in San Francisco, California. Her research interests fall toward communication practices in food politics and discovering effective and meaningful discourses for consumers and policy-shapers alike.  Paulette Singley is an internationally known architectural historian whose work expands the disciplinary limits of architecture across diverse subject matter such as food, film, and fashion. She coedited Eating Architecture(MIT Press, 2006) with Jamie Horwitz, the first book to explore the intersections of architecture and the culinary arts.  She also coedited Architecture: In Fashion(Princeton Architectural Press, 1998) and has published chapters in several anthologies as well as essays in architecture journals such as Log and Assemblage. She is a professor of architecture at Woodbury University.  She received a PhD from Princeton University, an MA from Cornell University, and a B.Arch. from the University of Southern California. Lori Stahlbrand is a health policy specialist with the City of Toronto’s Food Strategy, where she is responsible for the Toronto Food Policy Council. She has a PhD in geography, and was the coordinator of the Global Food Equity Initiative at New College, University of Toronto, before joining the city. Her academic work is focused on growing food systems that celebrate community and sustainability, using public procurement as a tool. David Szanto is a researcher, artist, and teacher, taking an experimental approach to food through design, ecosophy, and performativity. Past projects include installations with digital and robotics artists to examine socio-technical food hybrids, curatorial work at the intersection of academia, art, and activism, and food performances that explore belonging, representation, and human-microbial dynamics. Published works include articles and chapters on research-creation, collaboration in systems visualization, emotionality in academia, and the human-material-discursive entanglements of food milieus. He lives in Montreal, Québec, Canada. André Viljoen is professor of architecture at the University of Brighton, where he is responsible for research leadership within the architecture and urban design programs. Since the late 1990s, with Katrin Bohn, he has jointly been conducting research investigating the relationships between urban design, landscape, architecture, and sustainable food systems. This resulted in the definition of the Continuous Productive Urban Landscape Concept (CPUL) and CPUL City concepts. In 2015, this work was recognized by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) when he and Bohn received the international RIBA President's Award for Outstanding University-located Research. Rebecca Wells is currently a teaching fellow at the Centre for Food Policy, City, University of London. Previously a food journalist working at the BBC, Rebecca’s research focuses on how food and food issues are portrayed in the UK media. Research interests within this field include food banks; government nutrition policy; marketing and advertising; and food taxation.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

3.1 3.2

Deconstructed Gianduja Chocolate Mousse with Chilli Ice Cream at The Tasting Room, Mumbai (photo credit: Rohit Chopra)

42

Butterscotch truffles (top left) among Indian sweets in Dadu’s Studio, Pune (photo credit: Rohit Chopra)

48

14.1 Emilie Clark “My Family’s Food Waste, A Month for Every Season,” 2012. From Sweet Corruptions, Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York. (Courtesy of the artist)

205

14.2 Yamini leading an Indian cooking workshop in her home, 2014. (Courtesy of The League of Kitchens)

207

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank Fabio Parasecoli and Signe Rousseau for recommending us to Bloomsbury for this project. We thank our contributors for the time and energy they devoted to their chapters; we worked on a tight timeline and we appreciate their efforts and efficiency. At Bloomsbury, we are grateful to Jennifer Schmidt, Miriam Cantwell, and Clara Herberg for their guidance throughout the project. And we also thank our colleagues at Marymount Manhattan College for their ongoing support of our scholarly work. Katie would like to thank John and Molly Shields for their good cheer, flexibility, and care. Peter would like to thank Zach Jensen for his love and support.

xiv

INTRODUCTION

Where Popular Culture Meets Food Studies KATHLEEN LEBESCO AND PETER NACCARATO

A Time magazine online photo gallery titled “Bam! How Culinary Culture Became a Pop Phenomenon” offers viewers a “timeline of food as popular culture.” As it identifies significant moments in this contemporary history (ranging from 1982 to 2010), it provides a context for understanding how and why food and foodways have gained increased visibility across the cultural landscape. At the same time, it offers a useful framework for approaching the topic of this book: food in popular culture. Specifically, the eighteen moments selected for this photo gallery illustrate the social, economic, political, and ideological role of popular food culture. Its social impact is evidenced by the growing intersection of cooking and celebrity culture—for example the opening of Wolfgang Puck’s Los Angeles restaurant Spago in 1982, the launching of the Food Network in 1992, and celebrity chef Rocco DiSpirito’s appearances on Dancing with the Stars and The Biggest Loser in 2008. As chefs have become celebrities and cooking has extended its reach across the media landscape from its traditional place among how-to programming on public television, food and foodways have had increasing influence on popular culture. Intertwined with this social aspect of popular food culture is its economic influence, particularly its expanding value within capitalist, commodity culture. Three moments from the photo gallery that capture this economic role are in 2004, when more than one million people tried to get reservations at Ferran Adria’s fifty-seat restaurant El Bulli; in 2003, when Emeril Lagasse appeared in ads for Crest toothpaste; and in 2007, when Mario Batali became a spokesperson for Crocs. The photo gallery also illustrates the political and ideological intersection of food and popular culture. From Jamie Oliver collecting signatures to push Britain to improve school meals in 2005 to Blue Hill chef Dan Barber speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2010, popular food culture has had a consistent influence on public policy and has also proven to be an effective vehicle for circulating cultural values and ideologies. This Time magazine list is by no means exhaustive; rather, it demonstrates one of the central tenets of this book: while the importance of food across the cultural landscape has a long and rich history, over the last thirty years, with renewed media attention, we have witnessed a remarkable extension of food’s influence as it has become intertwined with various facets of popular culture. Thus, the purpose of this book is to critically examine the role that food and foodways play across contemporary popular culture and, in doing so, to frame this analysis within the historical context that necessarily informs it. Although there are numerous scholarly works focused on different manifestations of food in popular

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF FOOD AND POPULAR CULTURE

culture (food in television and film; food and social media; celebrity chefs; cultures of eating), this handbook provides a comprehensive collection that brings together original essays from leading international scholars from a range of disciplines and theoretical perspectives. And while each chapter offers a depth of analysis of its particular topic, considered collectively, the various chapters provide a breadth of coverage that takes into account the numerous intersections that make up what we understand as popular culture and the role of food across that diverse landscape.

WHAT IS POPULAR CULTURE? The first step in tracing the relationship between popular culture and food studies is to ask, “What is Popular Culture?” But even as we tackle this complex question, we heed the warning of Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc that “an honest history of popular culture is fraught with contradictions concerning economics, class power, theory and criticism, and critical enjoyment” (2003, 27). While we attempt to attend to these contradictions in the pages that follow, we also recognize that there is no comprehensive way to answer the seemingly simple question, “What is Popular Culture?” Understanding the history of the term is an important first step for using it to frame our engagement with food and foodways. Raymond Williams traces the etymology of both “popular” and “culture,” noting that while “popular” was originally a legal and political term, it gradually became associated with that which is well-liked (1983, 236). In fleshing out this transition, Williams notes that by the nineteenth century, the point of view on what was deemed “popular” was shifting and that the modern term “popular culture” bridges an older sense of “popular,” namely “inferior kinds of work . . . and work deliberately setting out to win favour” with a more modern inflection, “well-liked by many people” (237). At the same time, he emphasizes that another sense of popular culture emerges from its association with “folk” culture, namely those cultural products that are made by the people for themselves (237). The sense of popular culture as that which is liked by many people highlights its common distinction from more elitist forms of cultural production and opens up an important avenue for connecting it to the study of food and foodways. This inflection is heard in Ray Browne’s foundational essay, “Popular Culture: Notes Toward a Definition,” in which he defines Popular Culture as all those elements of life which are not narrowly intellectual or creatively elitist and which are generally though not necessarily disseminated through the mass media. Popular Culture consists of the spoken and printed word, sounds, pictures, objects and artifacts. “Popular Culture” thus embraces all levels of society and culture other than the Elite—the “popular,” “mass,” and “folk.” It includes most of the bewildering aspects of life which hammer us daily. (1973, 22) In this definition, we can identify two separate but related elements: content and mode of dissemination. Regarding content, “Popular” culture is typically differentiated from “Elite” culture insofar as the former is related to the examination of how everyday life is constructed (Turner 1996, 6). Browne traces the roots of this distinction, noting that historically American colleges and universities have neglected the study of popular culture because elitist scholars have not deemed that which they judge to be artistically inferior as worthy of study (1973, 15).

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However, contemporary scholars offer a different perspective, arguing that one reason why popular culture has been marginalized in relation to elite culture is because it is inherently political. As Turner explains, the purpose of studying popular culture is “to examine power relations that constitute this form of everyday life and thus reveal the configurations of interests its construction serves” (1996, 6). Such work, Russel Nye argues, is important insofar as it challenges older concepts of society that relegate the masses to an easily manipulated group who are at the mercy of the cultured elite (2006, 24). From this perspective, popular culture is understood to empower the “masses” by giving them voice in a society that privileges elites, both aesthetically and politically. This perspective is reinforced by John Fiske, who argues that culture is inherently political because it involves a set of social practices that are related to the distribution and possible redistribution of power (2006, 119). In the specific case of popular culture, Fiske notes an important contradiction: “Popular culture is made by subordinated peoples in their own interests and out of resources that also, contradictorily, serve the economic interests of the dominant” (2006, 119). Thus, as we unpack definitions of popular culture, we must be mindful of this double-edged sword; on the one hand, it serves to empower the mass majority against an elite minority but even as it does so, it may simultaneously advance the economic interests of that very minority. Fiske’s definition of culture is especially useful because it provides a framework for challenging elitist assumptions about the specific types of practices that constitute its production. While “high” culture is distinguished by a limited set of intellectual or creative practices (Nelson 1973, 22), popular culture expands this list to include everyday practices and the material conditions in which they occur. As such, scholars of popular culture attend to “agency in everyday life,” recognizing it as “a form of craftwork involving intimate collaborations among embodied humans and material objects” (Farquhar 2006, 146). This focus on the agency of those who participate in the work of producing popular culture leads to “a more participatory model of culture, one which sees the public not as simply consumers of preconstructed messages but as people who are shaping, sharing, reframing, and remixing media content in ways which might not have been previously imagined” (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013, 36). Thus, in addition to expanding the types of media studied, popular culture scholars also turn their attention to material practices and objects—“any form of cultural phenomenon, material item, practice, social relation, and even idea that is conceived, produced, distributed, and consumed within a marketdriven environment” (Parasecoli 2008, 4). In doing so, they recognize the links between individuals, societies, and the material objects that they produce (Dant 1999, 2). This overarching definition of popular culture comes into greater focus as we consider its relationship to the kinds of scholarly work produced in the interdisciplinary field of food studies. As each chapter in this book demonstrates, food and foodways intersect with popular culture in myriad ways, including through cultural representations of food (Part I), material cultures of eating (Part II), aesthetics and design (Part III), and sociopolitical debates (Part IV). In fact, food proves to be an especially productive vehicle for studying popular culture. Peter Atkins and Ian Bowler metaphorically identify the study of food as a “‘barium meal’ for X-raying social, political, economic and cultural issues, a kind of marker dye for broad structures and processes” (2016, vii). In addition to viewing food as the material object that fulfills the quotidian need for nourishment, food studies scholars expand their focus toward an understanding of consumption in “the metaphorical sense of symbolic and economic appropriation” (de Solier 2013, 4).

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF FOOD AND POPULAR CULTURE

THE BOOK’S STRUCTURE The Handbook of Food and Popular Culture is organized in four sections that progress in specific and intentional ways. While every contributor brings their individual expertise to the topics at hand, each chapter also explains key theories, paradigms, and/or areas of research related to its topic, and contextualizes current phenomena historically, including a consideration of possible future developments. The book is international in scope, addressing both global and national issues; in addition, contributors themselves span half a dozen countries and three continents. Part I, Vicarious Consumption: Media and Communication, focuses on the relationship between traditionally recognized forms of popular culture—including film, television, print media, the internet, and emerging media—and food. Recognizing that scholars of popular culture have thoroughly studied the influence of such media across the cultural landscape, the chapters in this section bring this scholarship to bear on their analyses of these media in relation to the evolution of food as both a subject of media representation and a growing source of cultural capital. And even as these chapters move from “older” to “newer” forms of media, they underscore the importance of attending to each of them and putting them in dialogue with each other. In fact, it is at the intersections between these forms of media that we encounter what Henry Jenkins identifies as “convergence culture,” a notion that he argues helps us rethink our relationship to media (Jenkins 2006, 23). For Jenkins, the crucial yet unpredictable convergences are between old and new media, grassroots and corporate media, and media producers and consumers (2). As new forms of media develop, producers and consumers acquire skills that “may have implications for how we learn, work, participate in the political process, and connect with other people around the world” (23). The chapters in this section explore how such convergences most certainly have and continue to occur across the culinary media landscape. In Chapter 1, Jonatan Leer reviews the history of American and European food television with a specific focus on how it has reinforced and/or subverted normative codes of gender. Leer argues that while the majority of food-related television programming from its earliest inception through the 1990s sustained the dichotomy between traditional masculine and feminine gender roles, in recent decades, a number of shows have functioned to transgress these boundaries. Leer’s analysis traces this evolution in food television while positioning his discussion of gender in relation to ethnicity and economic class. In Chapter 2, Laura Lindenfeld and Fabio Parasecoli explore the history of representations of food in film, from early cinema to the emergence of the food film genre beginning in the 1980s. Taking a global perspective, they reveal how representations of food in film both sustain and undermine society’s normative values and ideologies. Such analysis is extended in Chapter 3, as Rohit Chopra focuses on the role of media representations of Indian cuisine in shaping both local and global perceptions of India and Indian culture. His analysis includes televisual, digital, and online media, revealing how the affluent segments of Indian society adopt contemporary global food trends to assert their international cosmopolitanism and, in doing so, define what he terms “new Indian cuisine.” The focus on digital media continues in the remaining two chapters in this section. In Chapter 4, Isabelle de Solier analyses the role of new food media in circulating specific messages about production and consumption. Focusing specifically on food blogs, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and YouTube, de Solier frames her analysis through concepts of culinary capital, food porn, and digital creative production. In the second part of the chapter, she offers a case study of an edible

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community garden, the Pop Up Patch, to show how its supporters utilize various digital media platforms to shape the messages about food that it circulates. The focus on digital media continues in Chapter 5, as Deborah Lupton traces the contemporary fascination with documenting and representing cooking and eating practices through digital media and technologies. Lupton analyzes various digital media, including websites, blogs, social media, and mobile apps, focusing specifically on their role in creating a participatory food culture that is sustained by an ethos of sharing. At the same time, Lupton considers how digital media and technologies also contribute to a culture of surveillance as consumer food practices and choices are tracked in ways that serve the economic interests of the transnational food industry. Following these analyses of how food is represented across the media landscape, Part II, Visceral Practices: Material Cultures of Eating, shifts the focus on the materiality of food, including consideration of specific food-related activities and practices (eating across the lifespan, home cooking, food retail, restaurants, and street food). In making this shift, the five chapters in this section consider the historical evolution of food and foodrelated practices in relation to relevant cultural, political, and economic developments. In doing so, they tease out the connections between how society engages with food and the broader cultural landscape upon which it does so. This evaluation of material practices is an essential step for validating scholarly engagements with food and foodways. Too easily taken for granted, material culture is a constituent element of our social lives that impacts our actions and values (Dant 1999, 2). For Isabelle de Solier, the study of material culture is essential for understanding how people create a meaningful and moral individual self (2013, 2). As she argues, it is not the objects, themselves, that are most significant but rather, the relationship between these objects and the people who use them given how material objects impact identity formation (1999, 2). De Solier’s concept of material media—“forms of media dedicated to material objects” (1999, 3)—provides a useful framework for understanding the chapters in this section and linking them to the previous section. As she explains, the study of such material media is essential because rather than seeing the material world as existing in isolation, we need to recognize how the media influences the relationship between people and things (1999, 3). Specifically, de Solier argues, these material media educate us as to how to consume and produce material objects as part of the work of identity formation (1999, 4). Through their various explorations, the chapters in this section highlight the role of material practices around food in creating and sustaining certain types of identities. This section begins with Chapter 6, in which Amy Bentley and Shayne Leslie Figueroa offer a broad overview of food practices across the lifespan, from infancy and childhood through adulthood and old age. They focus on specific foods and food programs in each of these phases, reading them in relation to prevailing discourses of health, the food industry, and the role of the consumer. Following this overview, Jessamyn Neuhaus in Chapter 7, looks specifically at the evolution of cooking practices within the home. She provides a comprehensive review of scholarship on “home cooking” and its symbolic function across US popular culture. Additionally, the chapter considers how the practice of cooking at home relates to prevailing ideologies of gender, race, class, and ethnicity and how this connection circulates across a range of texts, from cookbooks, consumer products, and government propaganda to advertising, websites, and social media. In Chapter 8, Shelley Koch shifts focus from cooking to buying food, tracing how consumer choices are made in relation to historically specific economic and social structures. Koch considers the ideological implications of certain consumer choices, from those

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that reinforce the power of the modern supermarket and the industrial food system to those that challenge it by promoting alternative networks of Fair Trade stores, small producers, and local purveyors. The chapter concludes by considering the current and future impact of online food shopping on the fundamental act of shopping for food. After considering how consumers buy food and cook it at home, in Chapter 9, David Beriss offers an historical analysis of the rise of restaurants and its impact on popular culture. Beyond serving as a place to eat, Beriss argues that from their inception, restaurants have served as spaces in which individuals can perform various social roles in ways that can reinforce or critique social hierarchies. From their ability to confer status on the social elite to their contribution to the rise of the middle class, restaurants across the global landscape are intimately connected with prevailing ideas about class, gender, race, and ethnicity. Beriss concludes by considering the rise of fast food in relation to globalization and concerns about cultural homogenization. And in Chapter 10, Bryan Moe and Kendall Shurance extend this analysis from restaurants to street food. Tracing the contemporary fascination with street food across popular culture back to its historical roots, this chapter maps out a trajectory in which street food vendors have been both celebrated and chastised, arguing that the current popularity of street food must be read in relation to the internet and social media. At the same time, it considers how street food has evolved in relation to globalization, suggesting that to some extent, it has shifted from a localized means of sustaining communities and their unique culinary practices and traditions to an unlikely source of culinary and cultural imperialism. Following this focus on the material practices of cooking and eating, Part III, The Aesthetics of Food, offers six chapters that consider design and the arts (including urban landscapes, museums, and visual and performance arts) and their relationship to food. Recent scholarship on food design focuses on how food-related products, practices, and spaces impact individuals and communities. Founding editor of the International Journal of Food Design Francesca Zampollo defines this field as follows: “Food Design is the design process that leads to innovation on products, services or systems for food and eating: from production, procurement, preservation, and transportation, to preparation, presentation, consumption, and disposal” (“Food Design Definitions”). This field of inquiry has emerged as an especially productive space for bringing together scholars, researchers, professionals, and practitioners to explore the connections between the physical spaces in which food is produced and consumed and how these lived experiences impact those who engage in them. In approaching food and food-related practices from a design perspective, scholars and practitioners are interested in all aspects of the eating experience. As the editors of the International Journal of Food Design explain: The eating experience is the process that transforms stimuli of an eating situation into emotions, knowledge and ultimately memories. The stimuli are many, and analysing them is a complex issue. Here we are interested in looking at how Design can be applied to the control of such stimuli, and therefore, to the control of the different aspects influencing the eating experience. (International Journal of Food and Design) While scholars and researchers in Food Design look holistically at the eating experience, they also identify several ways of breaking it down into its constituent parts. In doing so, they ask separate but related questions: How are specific food products designed and packaged? How does this impact how they are marketed, purchased, and consumed? How are objects (pots and pans, utensils, cutlery, dishware, and appliances) used in the production and consumption of food designed and how does this impact how individuals

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interact with food and process these experiences? How do cutting-edge chefs and artists design with food and in doing so, how do they push boundaries between food and art? How do such creative enterprises use design to raise fundamental questions about food and our relationship with it? How are the spaces in which we procure, prepare, and consume food designed and how does this design influence our thinking about production and consumption? And finally, how do design decisions across the culinary landscape impact individual cooking and eating experiences as well as the broader values and ideologies that are circulated by them? (“Food Design sub-disciplines”) These are some of the overarching questions that inform the chapters in this section. In Chapter 11, Fabio Parasecoli surveys the landscape of food design, focusing on how scholars and practitioners in this field seek to improve our relationship with food. Parasecoli outlines the diversity of expressions of food design, from design of the food itself to design of the tools, technologies, and environments used to produce, distribute, and consume it. Katrin Bohn and André Viljoen continue the investigation of aesthetics in Chapter 12, zeroing in on the link between food and urban design. They explore how discourses of urban agriculture are animated by popular desires about food production and food culture, and offer the concept of “Second Nature” as a framework for better supporting productive landscapes within cities. Chapter 13, by Paulette Singley, considers the history of the abattoir, emphasizing architecture’s role in food production. Singley notes the separation of sites of food production from those of consumption, and appraises alternative architectural design solutions that revolutionize the slaughterhouse. Chapter 14, by Yael Raviv, examines how changing definitions of art, as opposed to popular culture, have excluded food until recently. From the 1930s avant-garde movements in Europe to the modernist cuisine phenomenon of the present day, Raviv showcases the evolving role of food as a creative, conceptual medium. Irina Mihalache, in Chapter 15, comes at art from a different direction—not what would be considered worthy of installing in a museum gallery, but rather the experience of dining in an art museum restaurant. Looking at their history, Mihalache explores these restaurants as spaces of interpretation and display where the museological experience is applied to food and eating. Finally, in Chapter 16, David Szanto presents three frameworks for understanding performance as it intersects with food systems and food scholarship. Examining the production of food performance outcomes, the elevation of performativity over causality-based outcomes, and structures of power, authority, and positionality, Szanto proposes speculative scenarios for performance as a foundation for future forms of food scholarship. Finally, the seven chapters in Part IV, Sociopolitical Considerations: Contemporary Debates and Trends, examine contemporary sociopolitical concerns, including popular discourses around food science, waste, nutrition, ethical eating, and food advocacy. Tim Lang and Michael Heasman note a number of dichotomies in the foodscape: “overand under-consumption; over- and underproduction; over- and under-availability; intensification versus extensification; sustainable and unsustainable food systems; and hitech solutions versus traditional, culturally based ones, knowledge- and skill-rich food systems versus de-skilled and knowledge-poor ones; affluent world modes of eating versus simpler dietary patterns” (2015, 6). Food is contested terrain, and this section looks at a number of those sites of contested meaning from a critical cultural studies perspective; analyzing popular discourses sheds light on the ideological underpinnings of vital public conversations. Following Gary Harmon, popular culture—“what people are willing to share and consume”—“is a key to their views and values, and to their unconsciously held beliefs and tensions” (2006, 62–63). Examining how people participate in popular

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culture publicly and privately reveals cultural anxieties characteristic of particular historical and economic conditions. The chapters in this section on contemporary debates and trends situate their subject matter within political economies, historical moments, and technological states, remedying what Jim McGuigan has critiqued as “an uncritical populist drift in the study of popular culture” (1992, 5). In Chapter 17, Rebecca Wells and Martin Caraher discuss the interplay between mediated food promotion and public health, specifically highlighting the corporate capture of food and food culture, advertising and marketing food to youth, and the influence of emerging forms of media. Rachel Ankeny and Heather Bray present an analysis of the complicated relationship between food and science in Chapter 18. Observing that scientific interventions in the food system have been either considered unnatural and thus frightening, or rendered entirely invisible, Ankeny and Bray advocate for alternative approaches to foods made with science and technology that do not simply reinforce neoliberal ideologies. Jessica Mudry, in Chapter 19, argues that popular food culture is nutrition because of the imperative to manage our bodies through scientific eating. Mudry details the historical path to the conflation of popular food culture and science, pointing to the impact of this framework on understanding the body, food, exercise, and diet. Following suit, in Chapter 20, Josée Johnston, Kate Cairns, and Merin Oleschuk appraise scholarship on ethical consumption, documenting its function as not only a questionable version of consumer politics but also a basis for status and a way to perform femininity. Their close analysis of The Kind Diet books leads Johnston, Cairns, and Oleschuk to advocate for scholarship that links ethical eating discourse and gendered care-work. Chapter 21, by Elisa Ascione, looks at the processes through which heritage is assembled and asserted. Ascione explores how food is used to create identity claims about cultural heritage and how claims of typicality often result in the standardization of food products. Chapter 22, by Lori Stahlbrand and Wayne Roberts, investigates the decoupling of eating and agriculture from popular culture. Stahlbrand and Roberts review key themes in the major discourses of food advocates—human rights, public health, food security, and sustainability—and argue for the reclamation of the cultural dimension of food. Finally, in Chapter 23, Leda Cooks surveys popular media stories and activist efforts regarding food waste and interrogates the discursive framing of both the problem and its solutions. Each chapter in this book offers an historical overview of a specific theme or topic under the broad category of food and popular culture, summarizes cultural trends and activities in relation to it, reviews relevant scholarship, and points to possible future directions for researchers, practitioners, and consumers. While each chapter can stand individually as a comprehensive review of its particular topic, taken together, the chapters combine to form what we hope is an indispensable precis on food and popular culture. Overall, we hope that this book situates its engagement with food and popular culture at what Peter Atkins and Ian Bowler have described as “diverse sites of activity” (2016, 8), including patterns of language and conversation, well-known and widely available texts, and individual accounts. Both individually and collectively, the chapters reflect a critical approach to food and popular culture that recognizes its sociopolitical context and drivers. As such, this book aims to participate in a lively conversation about where food and popular culture intersect and how a critical understanding of these sites of intersection is crucial for guiding future scholarship as well as effecting positive social change.

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REFERENCES Atkins, Peter and Ian Bowler. 2016. Food in Society: Economy, Culture, Geography. New York: Routledge. “Bam! How Culinary Culture Became a Pop Phenomenon.” Accessed October 22, 2016. http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1995893,00.html. Browne, Ray. 1973. “Popular Culture: Notes Toward a Definition.” In Popular Culture and the Expanding Consciousness, edited by Ray Browne, 14–22. New York: Wiley. Originally published in Popular Culture and Curricula by Ray Browne and Ronald Ambrosetti. Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1970. Dant, Tim. 1999. Material Culture in the Social World: Values, Activities, Lifestyles. Philadelphia: Open University Press. de Solier, Isabelle. 2013. Food and the Self: Consumption, Production and Material Culture. London: Bloomsbury. Farquhar, Judith. 2006. “Food, Eating, and the Good Life.” In Handbook of Material Culture, edited by Chris Tiller, Webb Keane, Susanne Kuechler, Mike Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer, 145-160. London: Sage Publications Ltd. Fiske, John. 2006. “Understanding Popular Culture.” In Popular Culture Theory and Methodology: A Basic Introduction, edited by Harold E. Hinds Jr., Marilyn Motz, and Angela M. S. Nelson, 118-126. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. “Food Design Definitions.” Ifooddesign. Accessed March 20, 2017. http://ifooddesign.org/ definitions/. “Food Design sub-disciplines.” Ifooddesign. Accessed March 20, 2017. http://ifooddesign.org/ categories/ Harmon, Gary. 2006. “On the Nature and Functions of Popular Culture.” In Popular Culture Theory and Methodology: A Basic Introduction, edited by Harold E. Hinds Jr., Marilyn Motz, and Angela M. S. Nelson, 62-74. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. International Journal of Food Design 1, no. 1 (January 1, 2016). Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU Press. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford and Joshua Green. 2013. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: NYU Press. Jenkins, Henry, Tara McPherson and Jane Shattuc. 2003. “Defining Popular Culture.” In Hop on Pop: the Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, edited by Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc, 26–42. Durham: Duke University Press. Lang, Tim and Michael Heasman. 2015. Food Wars: The Global Battle for Mouths, Minds and Markets. Second Edition. New York: Routledge. McGuigan, Jim. 1992. Cultural Populism. London: Routledge. Nye, Russel B. 2006. “Notes for an Introduction to a Discussion of Popular Culture.” In Popular Culture Theory and Methodology: A Basic Introduction, edited by Harold E. Hinds Jr., Marilyn Motz, and Angela M. S. Nelson, 23–29. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Parasecoli, Fabio. 2008. Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture. New York: Berg. Turner, Graeme. 1996. British Cultural Studies: An Introduction, Second Edition. London: Routledge. Williams, Raymond. 1983. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (revised edition). New York: Oxford University Press.

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PART ONE

Vicarious Consumption: Media and Communication

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CHAPTER ONE

Gender and Food Television: A Transnational Perspective on the Gendered Identities of Televised Celebrity Chefs JONATAN LEER

Food and media are closely interwoven in contemporary everyday practices, from cookbook reading in bed, to online recipe searches and posting food images on social media. However, food media have been important for centuries and a part of a “fantasy industry” that saw a continued rise in the last part of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first century (Rousseau 2012). Media representations of food have been an inexhaustible source for real and vicarious consumption, and, as such, they could easily be integrated into the logics of consumer society (Adema 2000). Food television has been an important part of this development and produced countless celebrity chefs, food shows, and even channels solely dedicated to food television. Each televised celebrity chef offers the viewer recipes for food, and recipes for “the good life.” The cooking show mediates normative discourses on food and lifestyles, and negotiations of the dilemmas related to food (Warde 1997). By offering distinct versions of the good life, television celebrity chefs position themselves to each other, and echo larger societal debates on identity and lifestyle in post-traditional societies (Giddens 1991). As such, food television may be understood as “a battlefield of competing identity discourses, discourses that seek legitimate ground to claim hegemony by or through food” (Leer and Povlsen 2016, 10). Gender discourses play a central role in this battlefield. This chapter examines the importance of gender in the history of food television in an American/ European context, by discussing the scientific literature on the topic. The analysis covers a period from the very first shows in the 1930s and 1940s, until 2016. It will be argued that despite the apparent plurality of the genre, it reproduces—especially until the late 1990s—a gendered dichotomy between men’s and women’s cooking. In programs hosted by men, cooking expresses authority and connoisseurship, whereas cooking in shows hosted by women is portrayed as a way to embrace “traditional

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feminine values” of nurturing and home management. However, this chapter brings out a series of examples in which these gendered models are negotiated and transgressed. This chapter, which draws on examples from the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, argues that the gendering of cooking shows should be understood in relation to other social categories, notably ethnicity and class. With this in mind, I conclude that food television reproduces hierarchies not only between men and women, but also between various kinds of masculinity and femininity.

GENDER AND FOOD: DISTINCTIONS AND HIERARCHIES From the birth of food studies, scholars have pointed out that gender is a central marker with regard to food practices in most cultures (Barthes 1957). Different foods are coded as feminine or masculine (for instance, steak vs. white meat), different ways of cooking are considered “proper” expressions of manhood and womanhood (for instance, barbecuing ribs vs. packing lunch boxes), certain ways of eating are seen as more appropriate for men than for women (eating a juicy piece of meat on the bone with your hands), and so on. However, rather than expressing a male/female “essence,” within the social sciences these differences are considered expressions of cultural constructions defined by social and historic contexts. As such, the gendering of food practices is dynamic, and should always be understood in context. Several studies emphasize that gendered distinctions have been used to accentuate a gendered hierarchy and reproduce inequality between men and women in their everyday lives (Murcott 1995). An ethnographic study on home cooking, reflecting the situation in the United States in the 1990s, concluded that women still do most of the labor of “feeding the family,” and that this work is unrecognized and invisible (DeVault 1991). Men’s participation in kitchen work is solely voluntary, for special occasions, and their efforts are applauded. Thus, the study demonstrates that culinary practices perpetually reconstitute a social organization that privileges men and burdens women, and thus helps to (invisibly) reproduce a patriarchal gender order in daily life. A somewhat similar argument is put forward by Deborah Lupton, who argues that women’s cooking is oriented toward others and giving pleasure to others, whereas men’s cooking is, to a much larger degree, a care-for-self project (Lupton 1996, 136). Several more recent studies from Sweden (Neuman, Gottzén and Fjellström 2015) and Canada (Szabo 2014) suggest that things may be changing, and that men are participating in food preparation, creating greater equality between men and women. In an analysis of meat and gender, food scholar Jovian Parry notes a tendency to regard “women relishing red meat” as “revolutionary and subversive,” due to the fact that meat has traditionally been seen as being associated with masculinity and strongly related to virility (Parry 2010). Parry quotes an article encouraging girls to order red meat on their first dates. This is understood as a strategy for subversion of “the gendered stereotype of the finicky, salad-eating woman” (ibid., 292). However, despite these gender dynamics, to a large extent culinary practices remain a “gendered and gendering field” (Neuman and Fjellström 2014). In this chapter, I want to understand and discuss how food television in the Global North has been a gendered and gendering “sub-scape” of the larger cultural “foodscape” and a sub-scape with huge audiences, major exposure, and many celebrity chefs of both sexes.

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THE BIRTH AND REBIRTH OF THE COOKING SHOW Media scholar Lori Brost notes, “Cooking shows date back to the advent of television broadcast itself” (Brost 2000, 14). The first shows were aired in the 1930s, with the first BBC show in 1936, and the first American broadcast in 1938 (Rousseau 2012, 12). However, the first big stars appeared in the postwar period. American TV chef James Beard was one of the first celebrity chefs, with an animated style that combined acting and cooking (ibid., 17). In the UK, home economist Marguerite Patten became a national icon with home-oriented shows such as Designed for Women in 1947. In France, the show Art et Magie de la Cuisine gained popularity with a duo consisting of Michelin chef Raymond Oliver and the “speakerinne” Catherine Langeais, who functioned as a medium between the chef de cuisine and the audience (Cohen 2015). These different personas also accentuated different attitudes toward what a cooking show should and could be. Niki Strange has emphasized three main objectives of the cooking show: to inform, to educate, to entertain (Strange 1999). These have frequently coexisted, but public service channels have often favored education and information, whereas commercial channels have focused more on entertainment. This was also evident if you compare Marguerite Patten with James Beard. Patten’s often practical and objective knowledge was delivered in a sober tone, in the tradition of classic British public television broadcasting. On the other hand, Beard made sponsored programs that sought to offer “a charming blend of instruction and fun” (Stern and Stern 1991, 102 quoted in Brost 2000). So, the instructive potential and strategies of the cooking show have differed over time and context, but it is remarkable how relatively stable the genre was from its postwar birth, and throughout most of the twentieth century (Guiliani 2003). A host demonstrating the preparation of the dishes in a kitchen studio was the formula. In the 1990s there was a general boom in lifestyle television across the Western world, with many new formats concerning home, gardening, cooking, and so on. The development was particularly strong in Europe, notably in the UK (Brunsdon 2001, 2003). In the United States, the TV Food Network channel was launched in 1993. Since then, the success of the cooking show has not abated and a multitude of series, formats, and concepts have been introduced; lately, several new competitive formats have been introduced globally, such as Masterchef and The Great English Bake Off. There are so many cooking shows that this chapter could not possibly discuss even half of them. I want to focus on the formats that the academic literature have considered and found significant, and, for the most part, these shows have the strong signature of a culinary star and are built up around the host’s personality. I argue that these personalities seem to be largely limited by modern Western gender norms. Media scholar Rachel Moseley even argues that the genre could be understood as a hegemonic technology of gender in the case of Patten, who promotes a traditional ideal of legitimate womanhood (Moseley 2009). Others have insisted that the genre also allows for the public transgression of gender norms (Hollows 2003b). In the academic literature on food television, several approaches can be identified. First, a series of historic studies (e.g., Rousseau 2012; Brost 2000; Miller 2005; Cohen 2015) either trying to outline historic developments of the genre or trying to understand particular TV celebrity chefs in their historic context—for example, Moseley’s (2009) analysis of Marguerite Patten. Second, we find several overview studies particularly in an American context with readings of the gendering of an entire platform across a series of examples, notably analyses of the Food Network (e.g., Swenson 2009; Chao 1998;

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Ray 2007). Third, we see numerous case studies, particularly in the British context, in which a particular show is read into a broader tendency that goes beyond food culture (e.g., Hollows 2003a; Moseley 2001; Nilsson 2012), such as Hollows’ (2003b) reading of Nigella Lawson in which Nigella is framed within a larger debate about postfeminism and domesticity in UK popular culture. Fourth, lately, we see an increased interest in intersectional readings combining analysis of gender in food television with class and race (e.g., Hollows 2016; Leer and Kjær 2015; LeBesco and Naccarato 2008)—for instance, in examinations of nonwhite hosts in food television (Cruz 2013). In my analysis, I first focus on how the cooking show genre has reproduced the gender hegemony by focusing on the female narrative of the housewife, which exists in a multitude of variants, and on authoritative male figures (chefs and connoisseurs). These two figures articulate the gendered hierarchy in food culture described by DeVault and Lupton. Second, I focus on the examples of celebrity chefs negotiating, or even challenging, these norms. Finally, I discuss how class and ethnicity have also accentuated a gendered hierarchy.

THE COOKING HOUSEWIFE One of the dominant tropes among female television chefs is the home. In this space, the woman essentially assumes the housewife’s role and the mission to care for this space and its inhabitants by cooking for them. A case in point is Marguerite Patten, who saw it as her mission “to help the wife at home cook properly” (quoted in Moseley 2009, 18). Patten was an important figure in The Ministry of Food’s nutritional information campaign during the Second World War, which sought to help the British people eat appropriately in a time of rationing. She participated in various radio programs, helping the nation’s women to secure the home front in those difficult times. In the postwar period, she moved to television. On television, ideals of what a woman should be and should not be were served, along with advice on cooking and household management: “In these programmes, the postwar British woman is both producer and produced, her expertise simultaneously acknowledged, valued and publicly corrected and delimited by television” (Moseley 2009, 39). We find several similar versions of the homemaker figure in British food television after Patten. Delia Smith is one of the most significant, and her popularity has led to her name becoming a noun; “doing a Delia” is a common expression in the UK, which means cooking one of her reliable recipes. In many ways, Delia is a very neutral and plain version of the housewife, and with her solid recipes and motherly mode of addressing the viewer, she could be seen as “the ultimate instance of a public-service-oriented television chef” (Moseley 2001, 33). According to British food writer Matthew Fort, her lack of charisma is balanced by her reassuring, middle-class presence: “Having Delia at our side is very comforting” (quoted in Strange 1999, 305). In an American context, a prominent version of the homemaker is the more aristocratic Martha Stewart, who has built a lifestyle empire, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (founded in 1997). Following a career as a model, she started her own catering business in 1976. This was followed by a series of cookbooks in the 1980s, and the magazine Martha Stewart Living (1990), which sold millions of copies. In 1993 she hosted a television show of the same name. The magazine and the cooking show revolved around various aspects of homemaking, but cooking was a central part of the concept, and the cooking demonstration was shot in her enormous kitchen in a perfectly restored

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Connecticut farmhouse. Both Delia Smith and Martha Stewart convey complete control over their food preparation, homes, and physical presence. However, they differ in the sense that they belong to different classes and milieu. In Delia’s shows, cooking and life are closely integrated with suburban middle-class life. Martha Stewart appears much more aristocratic, particularly because of her impressive house, associating her with the traditional white élite. Her upper-class affiliations are also evident in her very ambitious way of presenting cooking and decorating as art forms, and not just as ways to make ends meet in a busy and repetitive everyday life. In a study of Martha Stewart and the reception of her universe, Mason and Meyers argue that “Stewart offers a different type of domesticity than that of previous generations . . . . She represents a liberated, chosen domesticity . . . giving [women] permission to be interested in the domestic arena” (2001, 818). By separating domestic work from all the things that second-wave feminism saw as everyday practices of patriarchy (the invisible, unpaid, boring, and repetitive work behind the stove), “the Martha world is a sublime reversal of the feminist domestic labour debate of the 1970’s” (Brunsdon 2006, 49). Julia Child represents a less graceful version of the housewife. Child is famous for her long-running show, The French Chef (1963–73), which popularized French cuisine for the American masses. The show was a great success, and the first cooking show to win an Emmy Award, in 1966 (Rousseau 2012, 35). Despite the rather elitist project of making Americans cook renowned French cuisine, Child appeared much less perfect than Stewart and Delia: “She is not a particularly polished television figure (at least in these early episodes), frequently appearing to forget her lines, and walk out of the frame of the camera rather unexpectedly. Child’s haphazard manner in the kitchen and on the screen helps to drive home the accessibility of what she has accomplished” (LeBesco and Naccarato 2008, 227). However, this imperfect version of femininity still plays out around the domestic sphere, and guides women toward traditional ideals of pleasant, feminine home-makers and “accomplished hostesses” (Miller 2007, 126). Despite all the differences among the four “housewife” celebrity chefs in terms of accessibility, class, and ideals of homemaking, their roles may all be read as ways of valuing “women’s work,” but at the same time, the shows confine the role of a woman to that of a homemaker (Moseley 2009). It is interesting and slightly contradictory that these women grew rich and famous, and consequently became independent and modern businesswomen, on glamorizing the traditional role of the dependent and homecentered housewife.

MALE PROFESSIONALISM AND CONNOISSEURSHIP In Western culture, cooking—especially domestic cooking—has been a predominantly female occupation, but cooking by men has been acceptable in certain contexts and situations, notably through two personas: the professional chef and the connoisseur (Leer 2016). The professional chef is distinct from the housewife in that he is paid for his work in the kitchen, but also in that he primarily deals with more sophisticated food than the everyday food that is the main focus of the housewife. The connoisseur is also distinct from the housewife in his sophisticated relationship to food, and his significant culinary capital (Naccarato and LeBesco 2012). In cooking shows, the foregoing distinctions are still present in more or less explicit ways. In the above-mentioned French show, Art et Magie de la Cuisine, from the 1950s, the housewife was represented by the naïve “speakerinne” Catherine Langeais, who

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assumed the role of the student of the great chef Raymond Oliver, in his chef uniform. He is the authoritative voice, and she functions as eye candy and the voice of the public, asking questions when ordinary people might need clarification on a recipe or mode of cooking (Guiliani 2003). In an analysis of the Food Network, Swenson points out, “Channel programming carefully protects White masculinity by separating it from feminine, family-centered domestic labor in subtle and nuanced ways” (2009, 38). She emphasizes that an important way of establishing this separation is for the male host to emphasize his professional connection to cooking. This may be done by referring to his studies at a culinary institute, by using restaurant kitchen slang, or by wearing a professional uniform. For instance, chef Mario Batali wears a chef’s jacket on his show, Molto Mario, and the name of his restaurant appears on screen at the end of the show (ibid., 42). It is clear that Mario is not another housewife, but a paid, respected, and highly experienced professional chef. Emeril Lagasse is another example of a professional chef who, to a large extent, combines professionalism with the role of entertainer, and in this combination the uniform also plays a role: “Some episodes open with Lagasse coming into the studio in street clothes and waiting while two assistants help him into professional garb. Like a president, athlete or actor, Lagasse jogs into the studio amidst cheers . . . . This works to position Emeril as an expert who is on stage ready to entertain fans” (ibid., 43). This certainly also positions the white male chef as a person worthy of celebration. Several Michelin chefs have also ventured to become involved in cooking shows— for instance, the celebrated molecular gastronomist Heston Blumenthal, who has earned three stars for the now legendary London restaurant, The Fat Duck. He has made a series of shows featuring extremely complicated and skill-intensive cooking, such as Heston’s Feast. In an analysis of these shows, Hollows and Jones argue that the genre is redefined, so that rather than democratizing knowledge about food and taste, the shows “work to democratise knowledge about the chef’s brand image,” and to cement his image as an “autonomous artist rather than a TV chef” (Hollows and Jones 2010, 523). One of the more prominent examples of a Michelin chef who has gone on to become a television star is Gordon Ramsay. Ramsay’s success has been closely related to his role as a judge and chef de cuisine in the cooking talent show Hell’s Kitchen, in which his ideas about culinary talent were closely associated with “manliness” (Nilsson, 2012), and with accepting the traditional masculinity that remains central to restaurant kitchen culture (Steno and Friche 2015). Some have even described Hell’s Kitchen as part of a new wave of “belligerent broadcasting”: “a move in recent years to stage increasingly aggressive, and sometimes violent, forms of verbal confrontation” (Higgins et al. 2011). Ramsay represents a tradition of food shows with male hosts in which archaism and aggression promote hypermasculinity (Leer 2016). In the history of food television, the figure of the connoisseur has been one way to legitimize cooking as a masculine practice. This tradition goes back to the hedonistic tradition of the eighteenth century, which, in relation to food, has been described in depth by epicurean writer Brillat-Savarin in his legendary La Physiologie du Goût (1826), in which he described the pleasures of food from a distinctly male perspective, often through highly sexual metaphors. The hedonist is not a professional, but a connoisseur who has a great interest in food, and takes this hobby very seriously. Also, he often emphasizes that food is a source of pleasure, and that he seeks sophisticated satisfaction of his culinary needs.

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In reading Brillat-Savarin’s work, we do not get the impression that the author cooks, but rather that he tastes and analyzes the work of others. Twentieth-century connoisseurs clearly know how to cook. This is evident in the most blatant postwar hedonist, the playboy. In Playboy magazine, cooking was a central element of the new, urbane bachelor masculinity that the magazine idealized. This identity also involved reframing the home as a masculine space, and cooking was a central part of this reframing. Joanne Hollows notes, “Playboy’s construction of cooking practices as a sign of a hip, pleasurable and distinguished lifestyle could only be accomplished through the rejection of the associations between femininity, domesticity and cooking in the 1950s America” (Hollows 2002, 143). This new male domesticity was conveyed in the cooking show The Galloping Gourmet, hosted by British television chef Graham Kerr between 1969 and 1971. It was originally produced for Canadian television, but diffused around the world. The show was shot in front of a live audience. Kerr always entered with a drink in his hand, and the stage was partly the living room of a bachelor apartment, with guns on the wall and an open bar, which was partly a kitchen in which Kerr, in a fashionable and colorful jacket and tie, demonstrated his cooking skills, accompanied by his vivid and ironic language. His motto was “hedonism in a hurry” (quoted in Negra 2002, 74), and his energetic cooking was always tested by a female member of the audience (Bonner 2005, 41). Thus, the heterosexual seduction that was also a part of the playboy’s cooking was sustained in Kerr’s show. The idea of constructing masculine home cooking as something different from feminine home cooking continues today. In her analysis of the gendering of the Food Network, Swenson argues that in programs such as Easy Entertainment with Michael Chiarello, Good Deal With Lieberman and Guy’s Big Bite, the décor “closely resemble feminine, domestic, and family-centered frame yet [the shows] are careful to position cooking as a fun, temporary, and voluntary leisure activity. These male hosts do not discuss the challenges of routinely cooking for a family but do show how easy and enjoyable it is to prepare meals for friends on occasion” (Swenson 2009, 45). For instance, Michael Chiarello “owns a vineyard and often strolls among grapevines with a glass of wine as pots simmer on the range” (ibid.). You do not see Martha Stewart sipping martinis as she explains how to organize family meals. Furthermore, all these domestic male gourmets emphasize their significant culinary capital. They know French cuisine and have traveled around the world, so their expertise puts them in a superior position. What distinguishes their culinary capital from that of a housewife, such as Delia, is that they are connoisseurs of pleasure. Both the male professional and the hedonistic connoisseur work carefully to make it apparent that their cooking is distinct from traditional women’s cooking. As described above, this is done in more or less subtle ways. I suggest that gender has been a crucial element of male and female celebrity chefs’ identities, and to a very large extent, these identities have been constructed around two figures: the housewife and the chef/connoisseur. Also, there seems to be a certain hierarchy to these figures, in which the male model has been the most prestigious one. However, I have also addressed how these figures have been negotiated in various ways, without however really challenging the gendered order they represent. Now, I turn to some examples of readings of television chefs that turn these gendered models around.

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POSTFEMINIST CELEBRITY CHEFS AND NEW CULINARY MASCULINITIES Around 2000, several scholars started to write about postfeminism in relation to the representation of women in the media (McRobbie 2004; Whelehan 1996; Moseley and Read 2002). The new icons were incarnated by Ally McBeal in Ally, Carrie Bradshaw and her girlfriends in Sex and the City, and, in a European context, by Bridget Jones in the eponymous book and movie. All these women were well-educated, had great jobs, were sexually liberated, and, as such, they were independent and economically and financially empowered when compared with previous heroines. Whereas some saw this as progress and as a new wave of acceptance of the independence of women in popular media, others were more critical, and saw it as a kind of “faux-feminism” in which neoliberal discourse had overtaken the feminist discourse, and framed feminism as an individualistic enterprise closely connected to consumption, notably among young, white, middle-class women (McRobbie 2009). In relation to cooking, a new wave of studies has discussed how the home—and women’s roles in the home—was reframed in new, contradictory ways, especially in its marriage to women’s new dominance in the public sphere. American celebrity chef Rachael Ray has been read as an example of a postfeminist. Ray has had tremendous success on the Food Network with her thirty-minute-meals concept, in which she cooks a meal in “real time,” and she promises accessible and healthy everyday food that anyone can make. According to Elisabeth Nathanson, Ray’s success is due to her unpretentious personality which is in stark contrast to the cold, prim, conservative demands of Martha Stewart’s iconic perfectionism (Nathanson 2009, 317). Nathanson also identifies a negotiation of the modern woman and the housewife that is especially present in the show, particularly in the various temporal logics of the narrative. On the one hand, the show promotes a kind of domestic Taylorism by demonstrating how to achieve efficiency in everyday cooking; on the other hand, the show also valorizes the joy of cooking and the nostalgic feeling of domestic work. As Nathanson concludes her reflection on the show: “Although television and retail kitchens often promote traditional gender roles and gendered patterns of time and space in which women are the primary domestic caretakers, they also demonstrate the possibilities for interrogating the contemporary status of the ideology of separate spheres and the relationship between femininity and domesticity” (ibid., 328). A more subversive postfeminist female celebrity chef is Nigella Lawson. Nigella worked as a journalist before she published her first cookbooks How to Eat (1998), and How to Be a Domestic Goddess (2000), which were followed by the television series, Nigella Bites. These first publications and shows made her an instant food celebrity in the UK and, soon after, around the world. In Nigella Bites, Nigella is portrayed as a successful and good-looking businesswoman who also has time to pick up the kids and do the cooking in her household—both the everyday cooking, and the cooking for special occasions. Her cooking is both sensual and efficient, and follows the motto: “Minimum effort for maximum pleasure in both the eating and the cooking.” Nigella has been criticized for her celebration of the domestic goddess, which has been seen as a return to prefeminist housewife (Hollows 2003b, 180). However, several scholars argue that what Nigella offers is something different than patriarchal enslavement in the kitchen. Her focus on sensual pleasure particularly distinguishes her from other female celebrity chefs. She “rejects the patriarchal oppression of the kitchen while embracing domestic comforts in the same way that one may embrace the pleasures

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of sex while turning away from the falsity and potential oppression of pornography” (Magee 2007, no page). Similarly, media scholar Joanne Hollows emphasizes that Nigella inverts the traditional opposition between feminine domestic cooking as care-for-others, and masculine domestic cooking as care-for-self, as described by Lupton in 1996, and in Murcott’s work on meals among the Welsh working class, with the telling title, “It’s a pleasure to cook for him.” In Nigella Bites, the husband is absent (she is a widow at the beginning of the series), and the cooking is primarily a way of satisfying her own pleasure: “Lawson not only represents a feminine self that eats, but one that is very aware of what it wants to eat, rather than deferring to the preferences of others” (Hollows 2003b, 184). This may be most explicit in an episode called Home Alone, in which Nigella cooks exclusively for herself, and we see her eating pudding in bed while watching television. Here, as in other episodes, her needs and wants are in focus. Although there may be evident elements of the subversion of classic gender roles in Nigella’s shows and cookbooks, she still represents a privileged, white, middle-class woman who also lives up to the cultural and aesthetic ideals of being attractive and a great homemaker. Another show that seems to challenge these ideals to a much greater degree is Two Fat Ladies (1996–99), with Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright. In this show, the two self-proclaimed fat ladies drive around Great Britain on a motorcycle with a sidecar. They cook heavy food and pay no attention to health or political correctness, and they often proclaim their disdain for vegetarians. Patterson always ends the show with a large whiskey, and Wright talks openly about having gone to Alcoholics Anonymous, and in nostalgic moments, even recalls the “days when I used to have hangovers.” It is no understatement to describe these “unruly” women with their explicit lust for food and sex, their “bawdy one-liners,” as gender transgressors performing a carnivalesque version of femininity (Chao 1998). An important element of this transgressive gender performance is that they appear to be homeless; they are always on the move, going from one place to another in search of new adventures. These female nomads do not have a home or a nuclear family; they are defined by their mobility and their constant transgressions. Therefore, their gendered performance may be seen as much more subversive than Nigella’s. If the latter is negotiating culinary, domestic femininity, Jennifer and Clarissa turn this femininity upside down (Leer 2013). Although the literature seems to identify very few subversive female celebrity chefs, there seem to be even fewer male figures subverting the traditional positions taken with regard to “masculine cooking.” One of the few examples is Jamie Oliver’s first show, The Naked Chef (1999–2001). In this show, we follow the young London chef in his apartment as he cooks an easy and stripped-down recipe that “anyone can do.” The show challenges the cooking show genre in various respects, particularly through its intimate, soap-opera-like portrait of the young Brit in and outside of the kitchen (Moseley 2001). Also, in relation to his performance of masculinity, Jamie appears to redefine how masculinity and cooking may be combined (Hollows 2003; Moseley 2001; de Solier 2005; Feasey 2008; Milestone and Meyer, 2012). First, it is striking how Jamie distances himself from the traditional masculine figure of the professional chef (Hollows 2003a), as in the first scenes, he leaves the restaurant kitchen and his chef’s uniform, and goes home to cook, and it is the domestic cooking that is center stage during the rest of the show. This distance from the likes of Gordon Ramsay may be described as a “dechefization” (Leer 2016). With his energetic and anti-bourgeois home cooking for friends and family, Oliver seems to make domestic cooking cool for the young, but this also allows him to present a “bricolage masculinity” (ibid.), in which he combines his apparent laddishness with softer and more caring expressions of

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masculinity (Hollows 2003a). Thus, the relationship between masculinity and the home is also renegotiated in The Naked Chef (Brownlie and Hewer, 2008). However, rather than openly embracing this “traditionally feminine space,” the negotiation seems to be—as in the case of Playboy magazine (Hollows 2002)—a clear masculinization of the domestic kitchen. Moseley notes that “while both Jamie and often Delia are shown cooking in their own domestic spaces, Delia’s relative stasis in that space is in direct contrast with the energy with which Jamie engages with his domestic space” (2001, 36). Jamie’s energetic corporeal style works to go against the potential emasculation of home cooking.

GENDER, CLASS, AND ETHNICITY IN COOKING SHOWS As several intersectional studies have demonstrated, it is often difficult to separate gender from other social categories such as class, ethnicity, race, and age. Televised cooking shows are no exception. I have already noted some differences with relation to class. Also, I have mentioned Swenson’s argument about how white masculinity is carefully protected from other, subordinate identities on the Food Network. However, I now wish to elaborate on how class, race, and ethnicity demarcate hierarchies of different kinds of masculinities and femininities in cooking shows, by focusing on some striking examples from the literature. First, let us consider race and ethnicity, which seem to be particularly important issues in travelogue shows in which a white host explores “darker” food culture, or when the host is framed as “other.” In the first category, British chef Keith Floyd was a kind of founding father, as he “famously took the cameras out of the kitchen studio and into whichever exotic location he (iconic wine glass in hand) happened to be cooking in” (Rousseau 2012, xvi). In his voyages to Vietnam, South Africa, and Greenland, he always presented “civilized” (i.e. French-inspired) versions of the local cuisine, which meant that the cooking very often included a flambé of brandy and a creamy sauce. It is difficult to not see Floyd as a “male adventurer” (Strange 1999) engaging in a kind of culinary colonialism (Johnston and Baumann 2010) that also reaffirms the old colonial hierarchy of Western and non-Western cultures. As noted by philosopher Lisa Heldke: “For Floyd, the food of the Other remains exotic, its exoticism often standing as evidence not of the fascination of other cultures, but of their inferiority” (Heldke 2003, 129). It also seems to be the case in more recent travelogue cooking shows as pointed out by Leer and Kjær (2015) in an analysis of Gordon Ramsay’s journey to India and Jamie’s Italian escape. In both shows, the hosts are not only fascinated by the “authentic” food cultures they explore, but also emphasize the primitivism of India and Italy, and the modernity of their home countries, so they “can return home with sense of renewed national pride” (Leer and Kjær 2015, 325). Provocateur Anthony Bourdain is another example of a chef who has become a television celebrity specializing in the travelogue genre. Although great amounts of irony and satire are used, his show still reproduces the image of the male adventurer who satisfies his “manly appetite” in “exotic escapades” (Swenson 2009, 49). Despite the dominance of white hosts among celebrity chefs, some nonwhite personalities have had their own shows. However, several studies emphasize that these figures are not assigned the same authoritative positions as their white peers. In an analysis of the show Yan Can Cook, Chao (1998) underlines that the Chinese host is expected to live up to American stereotypes of the Chinese, and describes his behavior as “self-

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orientalizing.” Similarly, Cruz underlines that non-Western chefs on the Food Network have to live up to “a white hegemonic fantasy of authenticity anchored in gender, racial, ethnic, and sexual exoticism” (2013, 324). In a study of the show Down Home with the Neelys, Cruz emphasizes how sexuality is a central construction of the darker Other in the connection between race and cooking, as the show “depicts a nouveau gastro-porn anchored in the perceived pornographic level of blackness itself,” and “elucidates the ways that race continues to be rendered in audiovisual terms and the enduring edibility of blackness” (339). Class has been a central part of gendered identity in food culture, which is reproduced in cooking shows, for instance, in the comparison between Martha Stewart and Delia Smith. Recent studies have described how food-related-makeover shows problematize gendered working-class identities, and highlight the value of middle-class identities. In an analysis of what she refers to as the “campaigning culinary documentary,” Joanne Hollows critically examines a tendency in UK television programs in which male celebrity chefs engage in various kinds of food interventions to improve Britons’ food habits. In the food documentaries, workingclass mothers are often defined as a particularly difficult social group. Hollows argues more generally that the cooking show genre seems to reproduce and reinforce class distinctions: “If primetime cookery shows have contributed to the lifestylization of cooking in ways that privilege new middle-class dispositions and open up the potential of masculinizing domestic cookery, campaigning culinary documentaries work to highlight ‘bad’ feeding practices and associate them with working-class women” (Hollows 2016, 91). We find a similar structure in a study of the French chef Cyril Lignac and his makeover show, Le Chef Contre-Attaque. In this case, the metrosexual media darling Cyril Lignac living in Paris is on a mission to make French working-class men who think cooking is a woman’s job participate in home cooking and adopt a modern understanding of gender. A central part of their transformation is to adopt middle-class norms concerning food and eating. So despite the noble ambition, the show “can be seen as a part of a discourse affirming male home cooking as a middle-class tool of distinction; a tool that demarcates the boundaries between middle-class masculinity and working-class masculinity, as well as the moral inferiority of the latter” (Leer 2017). Cooking shows reproduce not only hierarchies of men and women, but also hierarchies of different kinds of classed and racialized versions of male and female bodies; it is no surprise that white, middle-class masculinity incarnates the hegemonic position in this hierarchy. In makeover formats, the deviant, non-hegemonic subjects are pushed through the neoliberal machinery to strive toward the norms and codes of the hegemonic position, but without being deemed worthy to inhabit that position.

CONCLUSION The cooking show has a long tradition of providing gendered narratives about legitimate and illegitimate ways for men and women to cook and eat. As the literature review has shown, stereotypical gendering, with male hosts as professional chefs or connoisseurs and female hosts hanging on to the housewife’s role, seems to dominate, despite the variety of televised celebrity chefs. There are a few examples of cooking show hosts who seem to transgress these stereotypes, with Two Fat Ladies as the most extreme example of gender subversion, but these cases are few, and the most notable examples are from the recent turn of the century. The gender negotiations presented in Two Fat Ladies, Nigella Bites, and The Naked Chef—all from the 1990s—have not led to more transgressive

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gender performances in twenty-first-century food television. Actually, gender roles seem to have reverted to more distinct and explicit gendering. This is also noticeable in the “mainstreaming” of Jamie and Nigella, their novelty and their reframing of the gender roles has evaporated. Nigella has gone into a more and more pinkish, cupcakish, “Nigelissima Universe,” and Jamie, now the father of four and the head of jamieoliver. inc, seems to take a more and more patriarchal position in each culinary campaigning documentary in which he participates. In the last few years, the traditional, personality-driven cooking show format seems to have been challenged by various competing formats. These often-global formats, such as those of Masterchefs, Iron Chef, and Hell’s Kitchen, have huge audiences across the planet. This does not mean that the classic format is dead, but that celebrity chefs work across media platforms, often using personal web pages and social media as their primary platforms, where they also release instructional food videos that traditionally were accessible only on television. Although most of the current “food nobility” were born and made famous by and through food television, many new media platforms, such as YouTube, offer everyone—at least theoretically—the possibility of making their own cooking show, and becoming famous outside the machinery of big private or public institutions. Many have advanced such projects, but so far this has not led to new Jamie Olivers. We are still waiting for the first culinary Justin Bieber. It will be interesting to see whether the seeming democratization of the cooking-show genre will lead to greater diversity and more subversive gender roles, and whether the cooking-show genre will go from being a “hegemonic technology of gender” to becoming a laboratory for regendering culinary practices.

REFERENCES Aarseth, Helene, and Bente Olsen. 2008. “Food and Masculinity in Dual-career Couples.” Journal of Gender Studies 4: 277–87. Adema, Paulina. 2000. “Vicarious consumption: Food, Television and the Ambiguity of Modernity.” Journal of American & Comparative Cultures 3: 113–24. Attwood, Feona. 2005. “Inside Out Men on the ‘Home Front’.” Journal of Consumer Culture 5: 87–107. Barthes, Roland. 2002. Mythologies (Oeuvres Complètes I). Paris: Editions du Seuils. Beynon, John. 2002. Masculinities and Culture. Buckingham: Open University Press. Bonner, Francis. 2005. “Whose lifestyle is it anyway?” Ordinary Lifestyles: Popular Media, Consumption and Taste, edited by David Bell and Joanne Hollows, 35–54. Berkshire: Open University Press. Brownlie, David, and Hewer Paul. 2006. “Prime Beef Cuts: Culinary Images For Thinking Men.” Consumption, Markets & Culture 10: 229–50. Brost, Lori. 2000. Television Cooking Shows: Defining the Genre. Indiana: Indiana University. Brunsdon, Charlotte. 2005. “The Feminist in the Kitchen: Martha, Martha and Nigella.” In Feminism and Popular Culture, edited by Joanne Hollows and Rachel Moseley, 41–56. New York: Berg. Chao, Phoe 1998. “TV Cook Shows–Gendered Cooking.” Jump Cut 42: 19–27. Cruz, Ariane. 2013. “Gettin’Down Home With the Neelys: Gastro-porn and Televisual Performances of Gender, Race, and Sexuality.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 23: 323–49.

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DeSolier, Isabelle. 2005. “TV Dinners: Culinary Television, Education and Distinction.” Continuum 4: 465–81. DeVault, Majorie. 1991. Feeding the Family. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Feasey, Rebecca. 2008. Masculinity and Popular Television. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-identity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Guiliani, Emanuelle. 2003. “Quand la télé passé à table.” Télévision 398: 541–43. Heldke, Lisa. 2003. Exotic Appetites. Ruminations of a Food Adventurer. New York: Routledge. Higgins, Michael et al. 2012. “Belligerent Broadcasting and Makeover Television: Professional Incivility in Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 15: 501–18. Hollows, Joanne. 2002. “The Bachelor Dinner: Masculinity, Class and Cooking in Playboy, 1953-1961.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 16: 143–55. Hollows, Joanne. 2003a. “Oliver’s Twist: Leisure, Labour and Domestic Masculinity in The Naked Chef.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6: 229–48. Hollows, Joanne. 2003b. “Feeling Like a Domestic Goddess Postfeminism and Cooking.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 6: 179–202. Hollows, Joanne. 2016. “The Worst Mum in Britain.” In Food and Media: Practices, Distinctions and Heterotopias, edited by Jonatan Leer and Karen Klitgaard Povlsen, 79–94, London: Routledge. Hollows, Joanne, and Steve Jones. 2010. “‘At least He’s Doing Something’: Moral Entrepreneurship and Individual Responsibility in Jamie’s Ministry of Food.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 3: 307–22. Johnston, J., and S. Baumann. 2010. Foodies. New York: Routledge. Lupton, Deborah. 1996. Food, the Body and the Self. London: Sage Publications. LeBesco, K., and Peter Naccarato. 2008. Edible Ideologies. New York: SUNY Press Leer, Jonatan, and Karen Klitgaard Povlsen. 2016. Food and Media: Practices, Distinctions and Heterotopias. London: Routledge. Leer, Jonatan, and Katrine M. Kjær. 2015. “Strange Culinary Encounters.” Food, Culture and Society 2: 309–27. Leer, Jonatan. 2013. “Gastronomiske Drags: En Diskussion af Kønspositionering og Subversion i Madprogrammer via tv-serien Two Fat Ladies.” Tidsskrift for Kjoennsforskning 37: 143–60. Leer, Jonatan. 2016. “What’s Cooking, Man? Masculinity in European Cooking Shows after The Naked Chef.” Feminist Review 6. Leer, Jonatan. 2017. “‘If you want to, you can do it!’: Home Cooking and Masculinity Makeover in Le Chef Contre-Attaque.” In Food, Masculinities and Home, edited by Michelle Szabo and Shelley Koch. New York: Bloomsberg Academic. Magee, Rebecca. 2007. “Food Puritanism and Food Pornography: The Gourmet Semiotics of Martha and Nigella.” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, 1900 to Present 6. Mason, Ann, and Marian Meyers. 2001. “Living with Martha Stewart Media: Chosen Domesticity in the Experience of Fans.” Journal of Communication 4: 801–23. McRobbie, Angela. 2004. “Post-feminism and Popular Culture.” Feminist Media Studies 4: 255–64. McRobbie, Angela. 2009. The Aftermath of Feminism. London: Sage. Milestone, Katie, and Anneke Meyer. 2012 Gender and Popular Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Miller, Toby. 2007. Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and Television in a Neoliberal Age. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Moseley, Rachel. 2001. “Real Lads Do Cook... But Some Things are Still Hard to Talk About: The gendering 8–9.” European Journal of Cultural Studies48: 32–40. Moseley, Rachel. 2009. “Marguerite Patten, Television Cookery and Postwar British Femininity.” In Feminism, Domesticity and Popular Culture, edited by Stacey Gillis and Joanne Hollows, 17–32. London: Routledge. Moseley, Rachel, and Jacinda Read. 2002. “‘Having it Ally’: Popular Television (Post-) Feminism.” Feminist Media Studies 2: 231–49. Murcott, Anne. 1995. “‘It’s a Pleasure to Cook for Him’: Food, Mealtimes and Gender in some South Wales Households.” In The Politics of Domestic Consumption, edited by S. Jackson and S. Moores, 89–99. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Naccarato, Peter, and Kathleen LeBesco. 2012. Culinary Capital. New York: Berg. Nathanson, Elisabeth. 2009. “As Easy as Pie Cooking Shows, Domestic Efficiency, and Postfeminist Temporality.” Television & New Media 4: 311–30. Neuman, Nicklas, and Christina Fjellström. 2014. “Gendered and Gendering Practices of Food and Cooking: An Inquiry into Authorisation, Legitimisation and Androcentric Dividends in Three Social Fields.” NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies 9: 269–85. Neuman, Nicklas, Lucas Gottzén, and Christina Fjellström. 2015. “Narratives of Progress: Cooking and Gender Equality Among Swedish Men.” Journal of Gender Studies 1: 1–13. Nilsson, Gabriella. 2012. “Ball’s Enough: Manliness and Legitimate Violence in Hell’s Kitchen.” Gender, Work, and Organization 6: 1–17. Parry, Jovian. 2010. “Gender and Slaughter in Popular Gastronomy.” Feminism & Psychology 3: 381–96. Ray, Krishnendu. 2007. “Domesticating Cuisine: Food and Aesthetics on American Television.” Gastronomica 7: 50–63. Rousseau, Signe. 2012. Food Media. New York: Berg. Strange, Niki. 1999. “Perform, Educate, Entertain: Ingredients of the Cookery Programme Genre.” In The Television Studies Book, edited by Christine Geragthy and David Lusted, 301–14. London: Arnold. Spies, Virginie. 2010. “Cuisine et Télévision, une relation presque parfaite?” Communication & Languages 164: 87–98. Steno, Anne, and Nanna Friche. 2015. “Celebrity Chefs and Masculinities Among Male Cookery Trainees in Vocational Education.” Journal of Vocational Education & Training 1: 47–61. Swenson, Rebecca. 2009. “Domestic Divo? Televised Treatments of Masculinity, Femininity and Food.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 1: 36–53. Szabo, Michelle. 2014. “Men Nurturing Through Food: Challenging Gender Dichotomies Around Domestic Cooking.” Journal of Gender Studies 1: 18–31. Warde, Alan. 1997. Consumption, Food, and Taste. London: Sage. Whelehan, Imelda. 1995. Modern Feminist Thought: From the Second Wave to\Post-Feminism\. New York: New York University Press.

CHAPTER TWO

Food and Cinema: An Evolving Relationship LAURA LINDENFELD AND FABIO PARASECOLI

Film has been a crucial component of popular culture from the first occurrences in which moving images appeared before audiences. Simple spectacles expanded over time into cohesive storytelling, beginning with short films that expanded into full-length feature films. Across the last century, technical and social innovations enabled film to evolve rapidly from short silent pictures to talkie pictures, to current high-tech sensurround and Dolby. Black and white celluloid film, edited in the cutting room by hand, transitioned to color, 3D, and CGI, redefining what the concept of “film” even means. Technological evolutions in the medium increased film’s appeal to broad, diverse audiences, and distribution channels changed radically from consumption of film in theaters. Films are now designed to be consumed in theaters, at home, and on the go, thanks to VCR, DVD, DVRs and ever-shifting platforms like PlayStations, iPads, and even iPhones that allow us to watch movies on demand while waiting for a train or riding a subway. The impact of this barrage of media communication on how we experience and represent ourselves as individuals and as members of social groups is profound. This change also affects how food appears in cinema. Cinema takes inspiration from life—both reality and fantasy. With its central connection to all aspects of life, from the social, to economic, political, biological, and ecological domains, it was inevitable that food would appear on screen. In its everyday appearance in our lives, food provides a fascinating lens through which we can understand how established cultural and societal norms are indeed shaped by specific historical contexts and ideologies. In their seeming normalcy, representations of food on film help establish, question, reinforce, reproduce, or destroy cultural and political assumptions about society. Changes in how we see food on the screen help us chart societal changes. Food representations participate in larger debates on national and international scales about identities, communal life, and politics, as films are increasingly distributed globally. While food may not necessarily appear as the main theme of a particular film and may remain in the background, exploring food in film invites us to think through and digest the relationship among history, identity, and culture in ways that help us understand how we shape images of food and they, in turn, shape us. Precisely because scriptwriters, filmmakers, and actors often feel freer to explore elements that do not stand in the spotlight, images of food that appear as neutral elements of everyday life within film invite us to unpack social dynamics and power relations that we might not otherwise notice. In this chapter, we map some of the major shifts in how food appears on the screen over

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time. As ingestion constitutes a critical component of our connection with reality and the world outside our body, food influences our lives as a marker of power, cultural capital, class, and ethnic and religious identities. We argue that food’s presence on the silver screen shapes and is shaped by global exchanges and fluxes of communication, media material, visual elements, concepts, values, and practices that constitute contemporary pop culture.

BANANA PEELS, WHEAT, AND LEATHER SHOES: FROM EARLY CINEMA TO THE SECOND WORLD WAR Food has played an important role in cinema since its inception. Long before the release of seminal works like Tampopo (Itami 1985) and Babette’s Feast (Axel 1987) that are hailed as the first “food films,” food appeared—often in instrumental ways—in early cinema. More recently, cinema began to embrace food as a legitimate and lucrative theme. Beginning in the mid-1980s, cooking and eating acquired unprecedented visibility in cinema, in works as varied as mainstream and independent narrative films, documentaries, and docufictions, reflecting a growing interest among moviegoers and in the film industry. Important questions about social shifts emerge when we consider the evolution of food films as part and parcel of changes in society. What transformations in audiences, the media, and the film industry have made the cinematic and narrative focus on food viable and successful? How do these changes reflect deeper trends in culture and society? Why do viewers long for food on the silver screen, and what does that say about globalization and society? One of the first films, the 1895 Le Repas du Bebé by the brothers Lumière, focused on the meal of a baby, whom we see surrounded by attentive parents. From the start, food provided important commentary on social customs, as the 1906 film Dream of the Rarebit Fiend by Edward Stanton Porter, based on the comic strip of the same name by Winsor McKay, indicates. We see a man eating and drinking copiously, to the point where he has nightmares once he manages to stumble home. D.W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat, produced in 1909, focused on how stock market control over wheat led to the exploitation of farmers and the destruction of the social fabric in rural US areas. The production, sale, and consumption of food connect the six tableaux that form the 15-minute silent film, offering a political commentary about social inequalities. In an unforgettable scene, a ruthless finance tycoon falls into a wheat chute and is suffocated by the very goods on which he built his financial empire. In silent movies, food often served as a pretext for physical action: characters throwing whipped cream pies at each other or slipping on banana peels offered opportunities for visual comedy at a time when audiences were not yet entertained by actors’ voices. In Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 Gold Rush, the main character famously cooks and eats a shoe, establishing an iconic image that still reverberates today. From the late 1920s, talkies became the rage. Food remained in the spotlight, where it provided fodder for context, action, and performances. Animated shorts, originally produced as adult entertainment and shown before feature films, often maintained some of the slapstick approach of the old silent movies, featuring food in physical and increasingly surreal gags. Comedy could be coopted for light-hearted, but nevertheless effective, social criticism. In Modern Times (1936), Chaplin made audiences laugh and think by showing a worker disastrously force-fed by a machine meant to save time and increase efficiency but

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in reality stripping a blue-collar citizen of his agency and autonomy. Food representations could also reflect more somber contemporary issues. In the United States, the theme of the banana and other tropical fruit produced by American companies in Central and South America that exploited local communities surfaced as ornament and metonymical invitation to consume exotic Latino women. Scholars have recognized this trend in analysis of the performances of Carmen Miranda, the Portuguese-born actress famous as the “Brazilian Bombshell,” whom Franklin Delano Roosevelt coopted as the public relations face for the Good Neighbor policy to reinforce US relations with Latin-American countries. Following her success, in 1944 United Fruit introduced the character Miss Chiquita, a feminized cartoon banana character garbed in exaggerated tropical dress and a fruit hat that had become Miranda’s trademark. Representations like this one cemented links in the United States between the exoticization of bananas and other fruit and the racialization of Latina women’s bodies (Parasecoli 2014). The use of food as a political tool became evident as the world inched closer to the disaster of the Second World War, which appeared to audiences across the United States and in parts of Europe in newsreels and documentaries. In France, the governmentfunded films meant to teach farmers about new agricultural techniques and tools, as well as to stop mass migration from the countryside to the cities (Levine 2004). In Italy, for instance, recognizing the relevance of film in the propaganda machine of the Fascist Party, Mussolini promoted representations of the abundance of crops produced in Italy and the dedication of farmers to convince his countrymen to support his “battle for wheat” first and self-sufficiency later, when the Society of Nations decreed the embargo in reaction to the invasion of Ethiopia. In fact, Mussolini was often featured working among the laborers during the harvest, at times appearing shirtless to display his physique. It is not surprising that after the Second World War, the young Italian filmmakers who originated the neorealist style embraced food—and above all lack thereof—as a conduit for their critique of the stark inequalities that marked postwar transformations (Parasecoli 2015). Although filmmakers were aware of its dramatic potential as symbol or metaphor, food was seldom used as more than a prop, in part due to cost and logistical complications. Commensality—from dinners to drinks at a bar—offered filmmakers and screenwriters the opportunity to have characters express themselves and push the plot ahead. Representations of food objects and practices from recognizable historical periods and geographical locations allowed viewers to better situate the film’s action, while providing elements of realism. Expensive and tedious to prepare, food seldom functioned as the protagonist. Besides, actors loathed eating the same stuff again and again during the many takes required to shoot a scene. In fact, actors were rarely shown while actually eating.

FROM SOCIAL CRITICISM TO FOOD PORN: THE EMERGENCE OF THE FOOD FILM GENRE Some notable exceptions appeared before the emergence of food films in the late 1980s, mostly outside the United States. In Tom Jones (Richardson 1962), the male protagonist engages in an excessive meal as a sensual form of courtship that signifies carnal pleasures beyond eating, in what has been hailed as the first foodie film scene. In the 1970s, food appeared in European movies as a symbol critical of the middle class. In his 1973 La Grande Bouffe, Marco Ferreri depicted eating among wealthy socialites as morally

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bankrupt overindulgence that would necessarily lead to self-destruction. In Sweet Movie (Makavejev 1974), the female protagonist makes candy in her boat while sailing through the canals of Amsterdam and uses her confections to seduce and kill young boys. Food and eating appear in black comedies such as Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe (Kotchett 1978), in which chefs are murdered in ways inspired by their most famous dishes. Restaurants and food critics also became the target of the French comedy L’aile ou la Cuisse (The Wing or the Thigh, Zidi 1976), which embraced surreal irony to point out the excesses in the haute cuisine culture. In the United States food appeared as a countercultural critique of bourgeois society. In the 1975 experimental video Semiotics of the Kitchen, artist Martha Rosler pretends to be a cooking show host to draw attention to how kitchen tools are actually instruments of women’s exploitation. A few years later, the black comedy Eating Raoul told the story of two married entrepreneurs who do not hesitate to murder rich victims, whom they attract with sexual promises, to finance their restaurants, and end up eating one accomplice. In 1980, the film Fatso (Bancroft), depicted both with humor and warmth the struggles of a fat man, Dominic DeNapoli (Dom DeLuise), who tries relentlessly to lose weight. From the mid-1980s, food started appearing as a central feature in films, both from narrative and the visual points of view. The 1980s films that focus on cooking and eating tended to treat food with a more ambivalent display, especially when compared with food films that emerge starting in the 1990s that glorify food and tend to take a utopian approach to food. In 1985, Tampopo brought to the screen an unforgettable ensemble of picaresque characters who gravitate toward a young single mother and her dream to produce a perfect bowl of ramen. In the film, Jûzô Itami uses food and irony to explore the complexities and contradictions of Japanese society, introducing viewers to yakuza gangsters and homeless gourmets, stuck-up etiquette teachers, and insensitive family men. Food invites the films’ viewers to reflect on pleasure in general and sexuality in particular. In 1987, Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast told the story of a famous and revered female French chef who, after losing everything during the bloody events of the Paris commune, hides in a strict religious community on the coast of Denmark. She decides to express her gratitude for the two women who took her in with a sumptuous dinner on which she spends all the money she had won in a lottery, bringing the community together despite their decision to ignore the pleasurable aspects of the meal. In addition to the glorious scenes featuring cooking and eating, the story also lets viewers reflect on themes such as religion, sacrifice, and the saving value of earthly sensuality. This work marked a major shift in the United States, as critics begin to use the term “food film” when discussing it. Two years later, Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, Her Lover focused on food as both an expression of erotic pleasure and an instrument of debasement and emotional cruelty. The stunning beauty of the restaurant kitchen and of the cooking scene is counterbalanced by disgust for ingested and vomited food, which culminates with a cannibalistic meal. Greenaway’s film reminds us of some of the critical themes of the 1970s European films, featuring food as an expression of the excesses of conspicuous consumption. The early 1990s saw two more releases that are usually indicated as generative for the budding “food film” genre. Fernando Arau’s 1992 Como Agua Para Chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate) associated food, passion, and sensuality in sumptuous cooking and eating scenes that activated nostalgia to bring the viewers through the tumultuous events of Mexican history. Arau brought to the screen the magic realism that had heavily influenced Latin-American literature and film. Some of the film’s themes echo Jorge Amado’s novel Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos (Dona Flor and Her

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Two Husbands), adapted to the screen in 1976 by Bruno Barreto. Lee’s 1994 Yin Shi Nan Nü (Eat Drink Man Woman, later remade in the United States as Tortilla Soup) focuses instead on the vicissitudes of an aging chef in Taiwan who has lost his sense of taste and struggles to understand his three daughters. Through a sexualized, sensual visual style, the film solidifies the basis for the now popular visual style—often referred to as “food porn”—that dominates food-related cinema, TV, and advertising (McBride 2003). These early members of the “food film” family, a genre that emerged in the discourse of critics and consumers, tended to be produced outside the United States and circulated primarily through art house and foreign film crowds, often playing at small theaters in metropolitan centers. Increasingly, these films gained favor among broader American audiences, to the point that restaurants began offering meals to “recreate” notable food scenes. The success of these foreign films stimulated US filmmakers to adopt a different approach toward food, moving it from the periphery to the core of their work. In 1996, Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci’s Big Night exploded onto the independent film scene in the United States, eventually making its way to mainstream theaters across the country with growing acclaim. As the genre gained popularity, the presence of food in commercially successful films has been far from an exclusively US phenomenon: Hollywood participates in a wellestablished trend that is visible at the global level. Food films have emerged in diverse production contexts across the globe. From the Brazilian film Estomago (Estomago: A Gastronomic Story, Jorge 2007) to the Italian Lezioni di Cioccolato (Chocolate Classes, Cupellini 2007), and then to the Spanish Mediterranean Food (Dieta Mediterránea, Oristrell 2009), food films featuring traditional and new cuisines and linking food to identity have garnered the attention of international audiences. The French Haute Cuisine (Les Saveurs du Palais, Vincent 2012), the Japanese The Chef of South Polar (Nankyoku Ryôrinin, Okita 2009), and the Indian The Lunchbox (Dabba, Batra 2013) represent further examples of this trend. The themes of these films vary from the culinary world of a prison inmate to the relationship that an entrepreneur builds with an exploited employee by taking classes on chocolate, the struggle of a female chef to assert herself both in her business and in her private life, the story of the female chef for a French president, the adventures of the cook in an all-male scientific research base in the South Pole, and the lonely existence of a widower who gets food delivered at his office desk. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, food had taken center stage on screens across the globe, with food itself taking on new, important roles within films. The success of food film in the United States and in the rest of world cannot be isolated from the increasing visibility of food in global media, from magazines to TV, Jonatan Leer and Rohit Chopra (Chapter 1 and Chapter 3) demonstrate. From the late 1990s, food also colonized the internet through a plethora of specialized websites, videos, blogs, photos, and, more recently, social media. At the same time, as we discuss later, food appeared in academic conversations as a legitimate object of study and research, as the development of food studies programs across the country indicates. Food has emerged as a focal narrative and visual point not only in films with actors, but also in feature-length animated movies, such as box-office smashes like Ratatouille (Bird and Pinkava 2007), Bee Movie (Smitch and Hickner 2007), Kung Fu Panda (Osborne and Stevenson 2008), The Tale of Despereaux (Fell and Stevenhagen 2008), The Princess and the Frog (Clements and Musker 2009), and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Lord and Miller 2009). Although Kung Fu Panda and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs were successful enough to deserve sequels, the most popular film in this group was Ratatouille, which

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became a worldwide box-office smash. Building on the old tradition of cartoon shorts but moving cooking and eating toward the center of the plot and of the character arcs, animators have refined their drawing techniques to provide realistic representations that dialogue with the visual style of fiction films. To a certain extent, these cartoons embrace many aspects of “food porn” with its use of extreme close-ups, amplified sounds, and attention to gleaming and textured ingredients. Accuracy in the images indicates the importance of food in the narratives, while downplaying the more complex cultural and social aspects of food and consumption. These animated films train young audiences to adopt viewing strategies that prime them for their future as consumers of food and food media. The cartoons also target adults through tongue-in-cheek puns, making sure to captivate an audience that is able to consume both the messages in the film and the marketing tie-ins.

DOCUMENTING FOOD: TRENDS IN NON-FICTION FOOD FILMS The growing relevance of food as a crucial arena for cultural and political debates in postindustrial society is indicated also by the multiplication of nonfiction films that have food as their main theme. In most fiction films, the positive appreciation for food as an expression of love, community, and tradition remains prevalent, even when characters go through difficult events to achieve a final positive resolution. A growing number of documentaries adopt this approach, in which filmmakers reflect and feed audiences’ fascination with celebrity chefdom, and, more generally, the aesthetics and artistry of the world of fine dining. Three Stars (Drei Sterne—Die Köche und die Sterne, Hachmeister 2010), A Matter of Taste: Serving Up Paul Liebrandt (Rowe 2011), El Bulli: Cooking in Progress (Wetzel 2011), Jiro Dreams of Sushi (Gelb 2011), and Step up to the Plate (Entre les Bras, Lacoste 2012), to mention a few, have enjoyed success among viewers all over the world and shown the potential of the genre. In these works, filmmakers also employ standard documentary techniques, along with the trappings of the popular “food porn” visual style, which serves to highlight the exceptionality of the chefs’ skills, honed by dedication, creativity, and professionalism. These documentaries contribute to the formation of a cosmopolitan canon of practices, norms, and values that naturalize the knowledgeable chef trained in a prestigious culinary tradition as the professional ideal. What these narrative films collectively fail to represent are the failures of the food system, its environmental impact, its political implications, and its power over individuals and communities not only in the United States, but also all over the world, as flows of goods, people, ideas, information, and money become increasingly globalized. Some fiction films have tried to take a different approach to food, providing an interesting counterpoint to the purely aesthetic, utopian perspective. In Fast Food Nation (Linklater 2006), loosely inspired by Eric Schlosser’s 2001 bestseller of the same title, the issue of the presence of manure in the burgers becomes the entry point to examine the horrors of the whole industry from structural and social points of view. The theme of rural production and its injustices provides the background for the sport film McFarland, USA (Caro 2015), which takes place in a California town where Mexican immigrants grow fruit and vegetables, struggling to make a better life for themselves but often isolated from their Anglo neighbors, both culturally and socially. The satiric comedy Butter (Field Smith 2011) develops around the butter-sculpting competition at the Iowa State Fair to provide a satirical critique of small-town America and its limitations.

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The past two decades have also witnessed the emergence and growth of a body of documentary films that collectively addresses a variety of topics that are often invisible in their fictional counterparts while embracing activism and social critique. A significant body of documentary films has emerged that provides a counter-narrative to the idealized utopian images that appeared starting in the latter part of the twentieth century (Lindenfeld 2010). The Future of Food (Koons 2004), Super Size Me (Spurlock 2004), Our Daily Bread (Unser Täglich Brot, Geyrhalter 2007), Food Inc. (Kenner 2009), and Fed Up (Soechtig 2014) point out the impact of production issues and corporate power on consumers’ choices and well-being. Some documentaries focus on the production and consumption of specific commodities, such as Black Gold about coffee (Francis 2006) and King Corn about corn (Woolf 2007). Others, like The Gleaners and I (Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse, Varda 2000), The Garden (Kennedy 2008), Food Stamped (Potash 2010), and A Place at the Table (Jacobson and Silverbush 2012) deal with issues of equity, power, and food. Documentary films face significant challenges in reaching broad audiences through mainstream media channels, as they often suffer from limited distribution. Their sales in terms of DVDs, pay-per-view, and streaming are weaker than for fictional food films. As Cynthia Baron observes, since documentaries express critical points of view about the food system, they are challenged by “the film industry’s deep-rooted policy to work with, rather than against, other industries” (Baron, Carson, and Bernard 2014, 202). Most documentaries aim to influence viewers’ values and behaviors, prompt reflection, and stimulate action that embraces the principle that individual consumption choices can influence macroeconomic dynamics. The “vote with your dollar” ethos, while compelling in some regards, has been criticized for allowing audiences to imagine their involvement in the public sphere as significant, even though it does not inevitably require engaging in traditional politics. Scholars have pointed out that this trope unintentionally naturalizes neoliberal approaches that consider markets as the most efficient instrument to bring change in today’s globalized world.

SCHOLARSHIP ON FOOD IN FILM A growing corpus of scholarly work has focused specifically on the presence and role of food in movies, partly following similar reflections in the field of literary criticism. In this section we provide a brief overview of this body of work, while in the following ones we focus on two specific critical topics: the debate on the existence of a distinct “food film” genre and the role of the spectator’s body in the food film experience. The first full-length book to address food in cinema was arguably Reel Meals—Set Meals: Food in Film and Theatre (Poole 1999). Gaye Poole analyzed food as a physical matter that passed between characters on the stage and on screen; as a catalyst that brings people together, food is able to convey symbolic meaning and provide dramatic focus in performance. Poole also examined the connection between public consumption and issues of power and class, exploring not only films that would fall under the “food film” genre but also others that, without necessarily focusing on food as a narrative core, include eating and food preparation in crucial scenes, from Witness (1985) to Schindler’s List (1993) and Pulp Fiction (1994). In Food in Film: A Culinary Performance of Communication, Jane Ferry looked closely at representations of food within the larger framework of film narratives to uncover

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its role in cultural meanings and social interactions (Ferry 2003). Her work showed “how film provides clues as to the power and meaning that food imposes both externally (social, economic, political environment) and internally (intrapersonal environment of an individual and interpersonal environment within a social group)” (Ferry 2003, 1). Ferry drew on three non-“food films,” Mystic Pizza (1988), Ordinary People (1980), and Better Off Dead (1985), to explore concepts of pollution and purity. Much analysis, including the essays in Anne Bower’s collection Reel Food, focuses on single movies, using methodologies from cultural studies, film studies, and literary criticism to examine food’s role in determining narrative style, plot, characters, and cultural and symbolic elements and to understand how these interact with personal identities and social dynamics (Lyons 2004). Zimmermann and Weiss, in their aptly titled Food in the Movies, focus instead on how edible matter, eating, and ingestion are used in all kinds of cinema as a prop, “something that’s there while people do other things, like talk about love, family problems or matters more sinister”; something the plot revolves around; a symbol or metaphorical object; or a transitional device for “something to get from one point in time to another,” like when we see somebody starting to eat and then the camera cuts to an empty plate (Zimmerman and Weiss 2005, 2). In the context of cultural, media, and film studies on audience and spectatorship, the connection between eating and film viewing has elicited particular interest, especially with regard to movie theater concessions, marketing campaigns involving movies and fast food, and snacking at home (Cooper 1987; Stenger 1997; Lyons 2004; Hastie 2007). Cynthia Baron argues that little scholarship on food actually deals with cinema because “most scholarship on food as a cultural construct has often been concerned with questions of personal expression, a realm that is ostensibly at odds with the realm of modern mass media forms like film” ( 2006, 98–99). Furthermore, she questions the common inclination among food scholars to deal with films as texts to be analyzed, instead of focusing on spectatorship as an activity that may reveal many connections to food behaviors (Baron 2006).

FOOD FILM AS GENRE Keeping within the theoretical framework of film studies and film criticism, it is important to examine the debate about the existence of a “food film” genre. Theorists have debated about the definition of genres, oscillating between considering them as social conventions based on the accepted cultural consensus within audiences, or identifying them by using elements that are specified in advance (Grant 2006). Some critics refer to genre as a group of movies that present a recognizable set of similar narrative elements, images, setting, mood, format and relationship to the audience (Nichols 1976, 1985; Chapman 2003). The genre provides templates for the film industry and filmmakers, while at the same time creating expectations and interpretive grids for viewers (Browne 1998; Neale 2000, 2002). Other authors have used genre analysis to examine the film industry’s response to cultural changes (Langford 2005). In this sense, genres may constitute a powerful ideological weapon to enforce boundaries, proper behaviors in public and private spheres, and even social and political beliefs (Ryan and Kellner 1988). Understanding something about genre theory is important to recognizing the relationship of food and film to society. As early as 2001, Mervyn Nicholson, in his study on food in Kubrick’s movies, distinguished between movies where food is used simply as a prop and movies where food is used as a narrative and symbolic element that plays a central role (Nicholson 2001).

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“Neo-genre” theory, developed by scholars like Rick Altman and Steve Neale, pointed out that audience response and spectatorship shape genre conventions (Altman 1999; Neale 2000, 2002). Helene Shugart recognized in many food films popular with white audiences the “exoticisation, fetishisation, and ultimate consumption of the Other in ways that certainly showcase and reinforce conventional patterns of power and privilege, especially as relevant to race/ethnicity” (Shugart 2008, 71–72). Genres emerge out of previous genres. In the case of food films, their generic conventions build on the legacy of other (sub)genres, especially the romantic comedy. In the 2004 edited volume Reel Food: Essays on Food and Film, Anne Bower identified an emerging genre in the food’s star role in terms of camera attention, the specific settings (kitchen, dining rooms, restaurants etc.), and the film narrative arc, which “consistently depict[s] characters negotiating questions of identity, power, culture, class, spirituality, or relationship through food” (Lyons 2004, 6). Film scholar Cynthia Baron stated: “One hopes that the writing on thematic and iconographic constants will increase attention to narrative and audiovisual detail in filmic representations of food, rather than serving to exclude various films or various filmic strategies from analysis” (Baron 2006, 103). Baron pointed out the relevance of the way food is woven into the plot in terms of order of scenes, time allotted to characters and story elements referring to food, narrative voice, general mood, and cinematic choices (editing, framing choices, camera movements, lighting, mise-en-scène). James Keller insisted on the filmmakers as chef and/or artist and their role as cinematic hunger artists, who “exploit the audience’s visceral response to the imagery of food in a fashion similar to the manipulation of sex on screen” (Keller 2006, 5). However, Keller warned against “the reductive assumption that food in film always signifies desire,” since there are many kinds of appetite (Keller 2006, 8). A set of defined elements has led both critics and consumers to consider a movie as a food film. We outline these briefly. First, food tends to function as a driving force in the films’ narrative structures. It connects the characters with each other, and often emerges as a character itself, providing the means through which conflict and resolution transpire. The protagonists are often domestic or professional chefs, or at least individuals with strong connections to food and cooking. The camera spends a great deal of its time focusing on images of strikingly beautiful food, which takes center stage, bolstered by elements in the mise-en-scène. Cooking scenes have developed a clear visual language— at times referred to as “food porn”—with recognizable shots, from the extreme closeup to emphasize ingredients’ material qualities and lusciousness, often with the support of elaborated lighting, to the hand shots that glorify dexterity and skills, moving to larger shots that include tableware, dishes, and table arrangements, as well as the faces of cooking and eating characters, all the way to wide shots that reveal the background and the interactions with other characters. Camera movements and editing vary from meditative, slow takes to frantic and pulsating rhythm, depending on the intention of the camera artist. Cooking (and at times) sounds are heightened, thanks to directional microphones that amplify the impact of sizzling, boiling, or grilling dishes by making up for the impossibility of audiences to experience textures, scents, and smells (at least for now). These techniques, many of which evolved in cinema, magazines, and on TV, help to shape food as a sexualized, desirable object of consumption. Contemporary food films have increasingly locked arms with representations of food on TV to intertwine food with desire and treat it as a pathway for achieving a utopian status of pleasure and happiness. The idea of the food film as a genre also emerges when we consider how this body of films self-references. This kind of intertextuality, where films “quote” previous films

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in terms of narrative and visual elements, helps to solidify the concept that a food film genre has emerged. This connection is particularly evident in US remakes of foreign movies, for example No Reservations (2007)—the remake of Mostly Martha (2001)—and Tortilla Soup (2001)—remake of Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman (1994). A number of movies like Simply Irresistible (Tarlov 1999), Woman on Top, and Chocolat build on earlier films, including Babette’s Feast and Like Water for Chocolate, referencing them in a variety of ways and placing already existing narrative and visual elements in new plots. These connections reveal themselves in the films’ reception and in the context of their production and distribution. Video/DVD covers, inserts, trailers, and publicity campaigns frequently reference earlier food films, reaffirming themselves as part of a genre, which clearly helps advance the marketing and distribution of new films to a crowd of viewers who are hungry for more. Moreover, the diffusion of digital media has allowed an even more global diffusion of films, often through piracy and illegal downloading. This phenomenon begs the question of how viewers from diverse geographical locations and cultural background may interpret and react to food films from different countries, taking into consideration the development of a cosmopolitan community of “foodies” who exchange information and ideas through travel and social media.

FOOD, FILM, AND THE VIEWER’S BODY The specific processes of cinematic signification and identification involving food in film need to be further explored. While some research has focused on this area, what still remain undertheorized are questions about how processes of identification with characters and objects are activated in the viewer when food is involved in cinematic action. Does the recognition of food, and actions related to it, help viewers identify with the characters and events they see on the screen, making the movie experience more intense? How does food mediate between the silver screen and viewers’ bodies? Since the 1960s, under the influence of structuralism, semiotics, and psychoanalysis, film theory demonstrated scarce interest in the spectator’s body and its reactions, often writing them off as a metaphorical expression and focusing rather on their cognitive aspects. The interest in visual pleasures as a result of the voyeuristic gaze implied the distance between the film and the viewer. The feminist critique of Lacanian theory generated initially by Laura Mulvey pulled attention back into the conversation about film (Mulvey 1990). In 1981, Linda Williams defined horror, porn, and melodrama as “body genres,” focusing on violence, sex, and emotion, which provide physical jolts and “sensations that are on the verge of respectable” (Williams 1981, 71). Williams wondered whether the body of the spectator is caught in an involuntary type of mimicry of the emotions and sensations shown by the body on the screen, when exposed to these “body genres” (Williams 1981, 71). Since the early 1990s, film and media theory developed insightful reflections into the body’s participation in the movie-watching experience, reinforcing academia’s growing interest in embodiment. Among others, Vivian Sobchack has offered a very stimulating new approach to the issue, analyzing the experience of what she refers to as “the kinesthetic subject,” whose senses are blurred and whose body “grounds and mediates experience and language, subjective vision and objective image— both differentiating and unifying them in reversible (or chiasmatic) process of perception and expression” (Sobchack 2004, 60). Sobchack refers to “food movies” like Tampopo, Babette’s Feast, and Like Water for Chocolate.

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Other scholars have grappled with the spectator’s body and food on film. In his 2006 book Food, Film, and Culture, James Keller argued that food movies invoke “the gustatory appetite in a fashion similar to the arousal of the libido through romantic and sexual imagery, accessing the full sensory experience of the actor and, subsequently and vicariously, of the audience” (Keller 2006, 1). What Keller does not account for is the possibility that food can actually be consumed visually and that this constitutes an act of ingestion that shapes and conditions our sense of taste alongside the actual food we consume. Our own perspective reflects the idea that we can no longer consider the virtual and actual consumption of food as distinct from each other. When we enjoy food images on film, they make us hungry for “real food,” just as “real food” makes us hunger for images of food on the screen. When we feast our eyes on food films, we genuinely feast (Lindenfeld and Parasecoli 2016).

CONCLUSION From the early era of silent screen to mass-produced spectacle films, complete with marketing tie-ins, food has always had a role in film. The changes in this role chart social, historical, and technological shifts and help us understand cultural evolution through the lens of film. The way we produce, distribute, and consume food has changed drastically over the past century. Food has become a form of entertainment at the same time as many are undernourished or even starve. Food embodies many of the discrepancies we craft within our respective communities. As an object of everyday life that each person must consume to sustain life, food is easy to take for granted. Yet, in its seemingly everyday nature, food invites us to think through societal complexities. We view food films as an emergent genre. Looking to the future, we imagine that this genre will evolve as other genres have. As we consider the evolution of food in cinema, we can anticipate that more films focused on food will emerge, and we imagine that this evolution will include films that continue to grapple with key social issues. Because food is so central to culture, food films (and other forms of food media) are likely to continue to engage in dialogue about issues that matter to US society. With increasing conversations about food sourcing and sustainability, it would not be surprising to see a new body of fictional films emerge that engage in this discourse. As we have discussed, documentary films have already taken on this topic, and we see themes about local, sustainable food emerging on food television. At the same time, a certain saturation effect among viewers is already detectable, as growing numbers of food-related fictional films are released, often offering little or no originality. While it can be expected that the theme will not disappear any time soon, we may witness efforts to bring these films back to the creativeness and effectiveness of their forefathers. At the same time, we are likely to see increasing attention to food in the scholarship that emerges in tandem with the growing number of food films. Attending to the intersection of food and film enables us to gain powerful insights into the formation of identity and cultural politics in the age of globalization. We hope that studies focusing on national and regional film industries, and the role food plays in them, will emerge, together with comparative approaches that could shed light both on cultural differences and cultural communication. Certainly, the conversation about film and its relationship to other media in the context of food and the relationship of food films to globalization deserve increasing attention as do a range of other important issues.

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REFERENCES Altman, Rick. 1999. Film/genre. Edited by British Film Institute. London: BFI Publishing. Baron, Cynthia. 2006. “Dinner and a Movie: Analyzing Food and Film.” Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research 9 (1): 93-177. Baron, Cynthia, Diane Carson, and Mark Bernard. 2014. Appetites and Anxieties: Food, Film, and the Politics of Representation, Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Benjamin, Walter, and Peter Demetz. 1978. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Browne, Nick. 1998. Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chapman, James. 2003. Cinemas of the World. London: Reaktion Books. Cooper, Marc. 1987. “Concession Stand.” American Film 13 (December): 33–39. Ferry, Jane. 2003. Food in Film: A Culinary Performance of Communication, American Popular History and Culture. New York: Routledge. Grant, Barry Keith. 2006. Film genre: From Iconography to Ideology (Short Cuts). London: Wallflower Press. Hastie, Amelie. 2007. “Easting in the Dark: A Theoretical Concession.” Journal of Visual Culture 6 (2): 283–302. Keller, James R. 2006. Food, Film and Culture: A Genre Study. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. Langford, Barry. 2005. Film genre: Hollywood and Beyond. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Levine, Alison Murray. 2004. “Projections of Rural Life: The Agricultural Film Initiative in France, 1919–39.” Cinema Journal 43 (4, Summer): 76–95. Lindenfeld, Laura. 2010. “Can Documentary Food Films Like Food Inc. Achieve their Promise?” Environmental Communication 4 (3): 378– 86. doi:10.1080/17524032.2010.500449. Lindenfeld, Laura, and Fabio Parasecoli. 2016. Feasting Our Eyes: Food Films and Cultural Identity in the U.S. New York: Columbia University Press. Lyons, James. 2004. “What about the Popcorn? Food and the Film-viewing Experience.” In Reel Food: Essays on Food and Film, edited by Anne Bower, 311–33. New York: Routledge. McBride, Anne E. 2003. “Food Porn.” 10: 38–46. Mulvey, Laura. 1990. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, edited by Patricia Erens, 28–40. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Neale, Stephen. 2000. Genre and Hollywood, Sightlines. London and New York: Routledge. Neale, Stephen. 2002. Genre and Contemporary Hollywood. London: British Film Institute. Nichols, Bill. 1976. Movies and Methods: An Anthology. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nichols, Bill. 1985. Movies and Methods: An Anthology. Volume II. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nicholson, Mervyn. 2001. “My Dinner with Stanley: Kubrick, Food, and the Logic of Images.” Literature Film Quarterly 29 (4): 279. Parasecoli, Fabio. 2014. “Representations of Caribbean Food in US Popular Culture.” In Caribbean Food Cultures: Representations and Performances of Eating, Drinking and Consumption in the Caribbean and Its Diasporas, edited by Anne Brüske Wiebke

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Beushausen, Ana-Sofia Commichau, Patrick Helber, and Sinah Kloss, 133-150. Bielefeld: Transcript. Parasecoli, Fabio. 2015. “Tasting a New Home: Food Representations in Italian Neorealism Cinema.” Food & Foodways: History & Culture of Human Nourishment 23: 36–56. Poole, Gaye. 1999. Reel Meals, Set Meals: Food in Film and Theatre. Sydney: Currency Press. Ryan, Michael, and Douglas Kellner. 1988. Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Shugart, Helene A. 2008. “Sumptuous Texts: Consuming ‘Otherness’ in the Food Film Genre.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 25 (1): 68–90. Sobchack, Vivian Carol. 2004. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stenger, Josh. 1997. “Consuming the Planet: Planet Hollywood, Stars, and the Global Consumer Culture.” The Velvet Light Trap 40 (Fall): 42–55. Williams, Linda. 1981. “Film Body: An Implantation of Perversions.” Ciné-Tracts 3 (4): 19–35. Zimmerman, Steve, and Ken Weiss. 2005. Food in the Movies. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

CHAPTER THREE

Global Food, Global Media, Global Culture: Representations of the New Indian Cuisine in Indian Media ROHIT CHOPRA

INTRODUCTION: THE FOOD REVOLUTION AND ITS MEDIA REPRESENTATION IN INDIA I began and finished writing this chapter in San Francisco, a hub of the global media and technology economy and one of the prominent food cities of the world. Most of the chapter, though, was written a continent away in another great global center and food city, Mumbai, in the old historic quarter of the city covering the areas of Kala Ghoda and Colaba. These neighborhoods have recently undergone a restoration of their colonial-era heritage buildings and are witnessing processes of gentrification not dissimilar to those in San Francisco. The transformations of Kala Ghoda and Colaba are emblematic of the profound economic and cultural impact of globalization on urban India, a snapshot of the considerable force of such global trends to shape local culture. They also provide a picture of the complex amalgam of strategies of response, adaptation, and pushback of local culture to these trends. In these neighborhoods— Colaba is both residential and commercial and Kala Ghoda primarily commercial—new luxury stores catering to audiences with clearly international and cosmopolitan tastes sit adjacent to family businesses that continue to thrive decades after they were set up. Stores with Nike and Reebok logos open on to sidewalks with vendors that sell everything from footwear to jewelry at a fraction of what global brands charge for their products. Colaba offers highly prized real estate, affordable only to those with traditional wealth or the newly very wealthy in an India that has experienced an economic boom in the last two decades. The networks of immigrants who settled here after the Partition of India in 1947 still flourish, even as later generations of these oncerefugee families have dispersed across the globe.

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Many old establishments in the areas have also shut shop, from the iconic music store Rhythm House and famed Samovar Café at the Jahangir Art Gallery to a modest, unnamed library that circulated paperbacks on Colaba Causeway. They have been replaced by cafes serving mocha lattes and shops that specialize in ethnic and hipster chic. The historic Regal Cinema, with its art deco architecture, seems tired and shabby, as crowds prefer to throng the US-style multiplexes that offer them more cinematic options and a better range of food choices. To point these facts out, however, is not to lament the onset of globalization as a homogenizing or imperialistic cultural force. Indeed, in Colaba and Kala Ghoda, the old continues to coexist with the new and adapt to it, even as there are antagonisms between the two. And nowhere is this ambivalent, multilayered relationship more clearly visible than in the social domain of food, as well as in the media representation of food. Food, as the historian Massimo Montanari argues, for all its seeming naturalness, is “culture,” regardless of whether it is produced, created, and eaten (Montanari 2006, xi). Changes in food tastes, forms, and presentation as well as new forms and idioms of representation due to a changed political economy of media reflect not one but two ways, then, in which the current media discourse on food allows us to understand the complex impact of globalization on contemporary Indian society. “Liberalization,” or the set of economic reforms initiated in 1991 aimed at integrating India into the global economy, transformed the Indian media landscape. Foreign satellite broadcasting and commercial cable were introduced in India at the time of the 1991 Gulf War (Naregal 2000, 1817). Since liberalization, ceilings of foreign direct investment (or FDI) in various media sectors have gradually been raised, standing currently at 26 percent for print, 49 percent for news channels and FM radio, and 100 percent in Direct-toHome broadcast platforms and digital cable networks (Bansal and Chaudhury 2015). The website of the Make in India initiative, launched by the coalition National Democratic Alliance government elected in 2014, provides a snapshot of the reach of the media and entertainment sector across the nation, which now includes 800 television channels, 168 million television households, 99,7000 newspapers, nearly 2,000 multiplexes, almost 300 million internet users, and is projected to be nearly a Rs. 2000 billion industry by 2019 (“Statistics,” “Summary”). The impact of economic liberalization and globalization has not just been restricted to the economy, of course, but has resulted in broader social, cultural, and political changes. These include a distinctly visible consumerism that is both vibrant and conspicuous, greater social mobility and aspiration among India’s growing middle class, a communications revolution symbolized by over a billion mobile subscriptions, as well as increased inequality, social conflict over resources, and greater political assertion by subaltern groups like Dalits (Hiro 2016; Rai 2016). With regard to food practices, specifically, Pingali and Khwaja note that globalization has had a significant impact on diets and consumption through an altered structure of access to food among various social groups, changes in income, and expansion of tastes (2004). “Diet globalization,” as they call it, has also been aided by the impact of globalization on various media, including television, cinema, advertising, and the internet (2004, 5). Yet, even as a greater share of the population now has disposable income to spend on eating out, clothes, and electronics, poverty and hunger continue to pose serious social and political challenges for the Indian state. With 194 million hungry people, India has the dubious distinction of leading the world on this score (“India Tops World Hunger” 2015). Many of these deep economic and cultural changes can be seen in the area that runs from Kala Ghoda to Colaba, a slice of the city that serves well as a synecdoche for

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“Bombay.” Bombay—the older name of Mumbai—has always figured in the national imagination as a symbol of an Indian cultural cosmopolitanism and dynamism. Not surprisingly, this area also happens to be one of the great food stretches of the world. Here, the world of food has been subject to the same kinds of transformation as fashion, home décor, or personal care items. Along with the staples of Indian street food, such as bhel puri and pav bhaji, and countless regional cuisines, one can find in this food stretch the same kinds of cocktails as in Manhattan, London, or Paris, the influence of molecular gastronomy, and an ongoing reinvention of Indian cuisine. With beloved fixtures such as Café Churchill, famed for its burgers, the New Martin Hotel, renowned for Goan cuisine, and Trishna, the iconic seafood restaurant, these neighborhoods now also boast of new places like Café Basilico, Indigo Restaurant, and the Kala Ghoda Café. Across the city, along with thalis, vada pavs, pepper crab, and biryani, one can now also find exotic variants of Mac and Cheese and Cajun sandwiches with avant-garde slaws in Churchgate area, deconstructed desserts in restaurants in the reclaimed space of the abandoned mills of Lower Parel, and assorted bagels in the suburban Bandra neighborhood. Paralleling these developments and as central to the creation of an Indian, predominantly urban, “foodie” culture, is a veritable explosion of media about the current Indian food scene. There are many fine recent publications among the collections of recipes, histories of Indian food, and books on nutrition churned out by publishers that complement classics like Madhur Jaffrey’s An Invitation to Indian Cooking (1973) and Tarla Dalal’s The Pleasures of Vegetarian Cooking (1974). These newer publications include food critic

FIGURE 3.1  Deconstructed Gianduja Chocolate Mousse with Chilli Ice Cream at The Tasting Room, Mumbai (photo credit: Rohit Chopra)

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and historian Pushpesh Pant’s monumental India: The Cookbook (2010), Pamela Timms’ exploration of the Mughal food traditions of Delhi in Korma, Kheer and Kismet: Five Seasons in Old Delhi (2014), and Colleen Taylor Sen’s Feasts and Fasts: A History of Food in India (2016). In cinema, food itself is one of the protagonists in the charming film The Lunchbox as well as in Dawaat-e-Ishq, the blurb on the DVD of the latter describing it dramatically as “the clash of diametrically opposite but equally spicy cultures of Hyderabad and Lucknow” (Dawaat-e-Ishq). Indian television, radically transformed by the progressive, if gradual and uneven, integration of Indian media into a global media system, includes the FOODFOOD channel, a joint venture between well-known Indian chef Sanjeev Kapoor with Indian and Malaysian corporate business partners, the Living Foodz “food and lifestyle” channel that is part of the Essel Group, and NDTV Group’s Good Times channel, which is a lifestyle channel that also covers food. Kapoor, a rock star chef, entrepreneur, and media personality, can be credited with having significantly transformed the food and media landscape in India over the last two decades. Host of Khana Khazana (or “Food Treasure”), which ran for seventeen years in India, Kapoor also owns a restaurant and has served as judge on Masterchef India (Walial 2015). Zee Khana Khazana, presumably drawing on the popularity of the program, is also the name of India’s first 24-hour food and cooking channel. The Epic channel, which focuses on history and mythology, has a food and travel show, Raja, Rasoi Aur Anya Kahaniyan, which translates as “Kings, Kitchens and Other Stories,” while BBC India is currently running a 15-part series titled “India on a Plate” about Indian food. Each of these television channels also has a sophisticated web presence, featuring content related to television programming. Most major Indian print and online publications allocate space to food coverage, whether in the form of columns, recipes, or general articles. Among the most well-known of food columns is the “Rude Food” column featured in the Hindustan Times, which is penned by Vir Sanghvi, the former editor of the newspaper, and is archived on his personal website. The Indian Express media group has recently launched a dedicated food-centered web-based initiative titled Express Foodie. Prominent magazines that have covered and fed the interest in food include Upper Crust India and the now-defunct BBC Good Food India, which wrapped up publication in 2015.1 Beyond affiliation with media houses and publications, there is a feast of riches in terms of individual websites and blogs about Indian food. Pioneer Tarla Dalal’s recipes are organized and available online just as leading Indian food critic Rashmi Uday Singh boasts her own site. Blogs and sites like Saffron Trail, Veg Recipes of India, Finely Chopped, and My Tasty Curry enrich the online food landscape. The vocation of “food blogger” now carries significant legitimacy, a remarkable fact for a country in which even two decades ago a career in the food industry was stigmatized as fit for only those who could not cut it as chartered accountants or doctors. Finally—if we treat the technological space as contiguous with or related to the media space—Indian metros have seen the emergence of a number of start-ups related to food delivery, including, for example, India Travel Khana, which delivers food to passengers on trains, although recently the sector appears to be in some financial trouble2 (Bhattacharya 2016). My argument in this chapter is that the transformations in Indian cuisine, while also no doubt influenced by a wide range of social, political, and cultural changes fostered by globalization, are fundamentally indebted to media, especially televisual, digital, and online media. By globalization, I refer collectively to those developments and changes that have enabled unprecedented movements of capital, technology, and culture across

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borders beginning with the second half of the twentieth century, in contrast to longer histories of global exchange of materials and forms of knowledge (Lechner and Boli 2008, 2). I understand globalization as a “political, technological and cultural, as well as economic” phenomenon that “has been influenced above all by developments in systems of communication, dating back only to the late 1960s” (Giddens 1999). I also use the term “new Indian cuisine” (and not something akin to “global Indian cuisine”) in this chapter because Indian cuisine has always been global in the broader and longer sense of the term, embodying the Indian subcontinent’s history of incorporating, assimilating, and adapting diverse cultural influences. Sen’s recent book on the history of food in India locates the first wave of global Indian cuisine as early as 300–500 BCE, noting that during this period, “India was part of a world economy, exchanging goods with Africa, the Middle East and China” and that this relationship led to an expanded repertoire of ingredients and new food practices within India (2016, 72). What marks the new Indian cuisine as global, or globalized in the sense of the term used in this chapter, is its highly visible and self-conscious global cosmopolitanism that is fundamentally related to its presence in televisual and digital media. The “new Indian cuisine”—a form of cuisine that resolutely and self-consciously identifies itself as global—owes its identity as much to a globalized media as to the adoption of global culinary trends. Or, to frame it another way, one might say that the globalization of food and the globalization of media are themselves intertwined, reflective of deeper underlying cultural, social, and economic forces unleashed by globalization that affect both domains of social life. I also argue that the mediated incarnation of global Indian cuisine reflects a new style of imagining of Indian food as a symbol of national identity, one that builds on but also departs in crucial ways from earlier imaginings. The media representation and the new imagining of nationalglobal identity embody a deeply contradictory response about the impact of globalization, combining aspirations of global relevance with worries about the authenticity of one’s cosmopolitanism and the fear of the loss of cultural identity. In what follows, I offer a reading of the current landscape of the representation of food across different media forms in the Indian context. Each medium has its limits and license and the differences across media in terms of the representation of food are indeed instructive. With due acknowledgment of these differences, I am more concerned with describing general patterns and forms across media discourses about food and identifying what they illuminate about a broader cultural and political change in present-day Indian society. I undertake this reading through an engagement with relevant scholarship across disciplines that threads together the relationship between media, culture, and the representation of food.

COSMOPOLITAN ASPIRATIONS AND ANXIETIES IN THE MEDIA REPRESENTATION OF INDIAN FOOD Sen points out that “in India, more than in any other part of the world, food has been invested with meaning as a marker of identity” (2014, 8). While the significance of food in Indian culture has been well-studied in terms of its historical, anthropological, medical, and religious significance, the representation of food in media does not seem to have received as much scholarly attention as a distinct topic.3 Rather, the issue of the representation of food has largely been addressed in the context of broader assessments of portrayals of Indian culture, cross-cultural encounters, and examinations of diasporic

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identity. An expansive view of media as encompassing diverse forms including literary works, recipes, and cookbooks, however, allows one to chart a representative genealogy of the examination of Indian food in India media. In an important essay, Appadurai (1988) has analyzed Indian cookbooks that circulated in middle-class Indian postcolonial domestic economies as the site for negotiations between regional and national identity, as well as between traditional expectations of gender roles and the pressures of modernity. A recent pioneering collective effort in the field, guided by noted scholar Sharmila Rege, documents the significance of the food practices of Dalits, that is, subaltern ex-“untouchable” castes whose experiences have been marginalized and rendered near-invisible in most arenas of Indian social existence (2009). Drawing on the early modern archive, Shahani has examined the impact and ambivalent reception of Indian ingredients in British cookbooks in the sixteenth century. Shahani illustrates how spices from India were viewed as subversive of English character and nationality even as they were sought to be domesticated by incorporation in English recipes (2014). Other works in the literary realm include Roy’s (2004) anthology of Indian writing on food, excerpted from works by writers such as Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and V. S. Naipaul. Mannur’s (2009) monograph takes as its object of inquiry the complex relationship of food and identity in South Asian diasporic contexts. It is based on a reading of the work of diasporic novelists and short-story writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and Chitra Divakurni Banerjee as well as cookbooks by Tarla Dalal and Padma Lakshmi. An especially significant work is Roy’s (2010) analysis of the transformations of notions of consumption, disgust, appetite, and fasting in the Indian colonial and postcolonial periods. Roy’s wideranging and fine-grained analysis includes an interrogation of the discourse of food or the “gastropolitical imaginary” of the Indian anticolonial rebellion of 1857, Gandhi’s ideas about fasting and vegetarianism as reflected in his autobiography, and the “masala” film, the term “masala” here signifying both spices and the staple commercialized potboiler genre of the Hindi film industry (2010, 31, 183, 188). This chapter, which is mostly focused on the representation of food in televisual and digital global media forms, may be viewed as another contribution to this growing cross-disciplinary thread of scholarship. For reasons of scope and space, my examination centers primarily on the Englishlanguage media in India, though it is worth noting that the pioneering television program Khana Khazana mentioned above was a Hindi-language show as is the popular Raja, Rasoi Aur Anya Kahaniyan. But this is not simply a matter of convenience, for, at least since the era of British rule, the English language has been a powerful, if ambivalent, symbol of status and cosmopolitan aspiration in India. If English was synonymous with the colonial British culture that dominated India, it was also the language in which an anticolonial nationalist project opposed to colonial rule was publicly articulated. While the Constitution of India after independence does not designate a national language, English, along with Hindi, holds the status of an “official” language. As in the colonial period, fluency in English, along with the right accent, has continued to be a marker of status in postcolonial India, though the Oxbridge accent cherished by postcolonial elites has now ceded pride of place to a wider array of high-status accents, which are often peppered with Americanisms as well as elite homegrown idioms. Media celebrities, especially on television, who hail from a more broadly diverse range of social backgrounds—though still mostly from an Indian elite in the context of a national population of over 1.2 billion—have played an important role in this paradoxical process of democraticizing elitism. In the visual realm, particularly in television shows on food or lifestyle, the websites associated with these shows, the websites of the bounty of new restaurants that urban India has seen in the last few years, and blogs,

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cosmopolitan aspirations and anxieties are communicated and represented in and around Indian cuisine in several distinct ways. The first is a self-conscious identification with the international or global, which is often marked as contingent upon a certain standard of living or level of income. Café Bistro, for example, describes itself as “Mumbai’s first European style bistro” (http://www.cafebasilico.com/about/). NDTV’s Good Times channel’s website describes its target audience as “socially upbeat, well-travelled, cosmopolitan viewers who want to live in style, admire fashion, are adventurous about food and travel and want more out of every moment in life with both back-packing and high flying budgets” (“About Us– Syndication”). Its motto consists of two hashtags “#LIVEYOUNG #LIVEINDIAN” (ibid.). And a magazine that titles itself Upper Crust India clearly appeals to the same demographic. In terms of Pierre Bourdieu’s distinction between “the tastes of luxury and the tastes of necessity,” the English-language media discourse on Indian food skews toward the first (Bourdieu 1979, 183). Bourdieu’s famous food chart (1979, 186) mapped the relationship between wealth, leisure, status, and food taste, showing that certain food preferences indicated both the possession of wealth, that is economic capital, and class or status, that is cultural capital. Similarly, in the Indian context, the English-language media discourse on food in India reveals a certain relationship between economic and cultural capital, on the one hand, and food tastes and habits, on the other. Foods that are luxuries for those lower on the income and status ladder—say, strawberries or nouvelle cuisines—have now become staples for those higher in the social hierarchy. The second mode through which cosmopolitan aspiration and anxiety are reflected in media discourse is in the middle- and upper-middle-class social background of those who speak about Indian cuisine in televisual and digital media. Class background itself is signaled in a number of ways, such as through a particular kind of English accent that dominates English-language television shows on food, travel, and lifestyle. This use of English, however, is woven with Hindi terms and phrases or other languages, as seen, for instance, in Ranveer’s Café, a show by chef Ranveer Brar. Episodes of the twice-a-week program feature Brar demonstrating his culinary skills, along with performances by and conversations with live musicians who are invited as guests on the show. The promotional video for the show reveals this code switching, for example, in the phrase “great food aur great music ki aisi jugalbandhi jo aapne na kahbi dekhi hogi na suni hogi” (“a partnership of great food and music like you would have never seen or heard”) (“Ranveer’s Café”). Yet the code switching clearly assumes fluency in the English language, even if it treats other languages like Hindi on par with it. At the risk of some overgeneralization, based on extensive viewing of English-language Indian television channels on a variety of themes, the same overt cosmopolitanism or signaling of class does not seem to be needed to signal expertise on, say, the stock market on Indian business channels like ET Now [Economic Times Now]. The third mode has to do with the use of international ingredients and recipes, which did not find their way into either the repertoire of home-cooked food or on restaurant menus until around the mid-to-late 1990s, in the wake of liberalization. The use of these ingredients is complemented by an international vocabulary of cooking. Ingredients such as broccoli or kaffir limes, dishes such as poached chicken with olives or tomato chutney bruschettas, cooking equipment like wood-fired ovens, and techniques and practices like julienning and plating are now part and parcel of performances about cuisine on television food shows. The discourse of food in India has also begun to resemble that in wealthy, postindustrial nations in one other crucial aspect: in its emphasis on health. The discussions on

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healthy foods that are good for the heart or for lowering cholesterol, nutrition, diets, or carbohydrate intake, for example, quite closely resemble those in American media and culture even if they are not quite as prominent in the Indian case. While there are numerous factors for changes in health patterns in developing countries such as India, at least one reason for the new focus on health is the set of lifestyle changes associated with increasing affluence, including obesity, greater availability and consumption of processed foods, popularity of fast food among younger generations, as well as overall greater awareness of the link between food and health (“The Maladies of Affluence” 2007). Similarly, the idea of either the Indian or foreign twist on an international dish or local street food favorite can be seen in shows like Style Chef on the FOODFOOD channel or Snack Attack on the Zee Khana Khazana channel. The Khana Khazana channel in fact has a show titled Snack Attack-Firangi Twist, “firangi” being a colloquialism for the foreign. One of chef Ripudaman Handa’s recipes on the program, also featured on the channel’s official YouTube avatar, transforms the popular North Indian dish of rajma masala (curried pinto beans) that is typically eaten with rice or rotis (unleavened bread) into the basis for a tortilla (“Rajma Masala Tortillas,” 2014). The trend can also be seen in prominent food blogs, which make very effective use of the range of tools offered by the Web 2.0 ecosystem, including YouTube and social media platforms such as Twitter. We find the same logic of internationalism at work in the blog Saffrontrail and its accompanying YouTube channel, in recipes such as vegan lettuce wraps with tofu and mango, a “no pectin” cherry jam, or a creative reinvention of the Indian dish, upma. This conspicuous internationalism and globality in Indian media discourse about food can be attributed to many sources. These include the influence of internationally popular food and travel shows like Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations and Andrew Zimmern’s Bizarre Foods, the adaptation of international shows like MasterChef for Indian audiences, and the fundamental border-crossing character of the internet. No less important are the international visibility and stardom of Indian chefs like Suvir Saran and Floyd Cardoz, who, like their French, American, or British counterparts have opened restaurants in the great metropolitan cities of the Western world. Media constitutes a kind of “contact zone,” in Mary Louise Pratt’s term, analogous to “social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (1991, 34). I use the term “contact zone” somewhat broadly here to primarily indicate an area of cultural exchange and encounter without stressing the question of unequal power, because the Indian voices involved in these forms of contact are both nationally and globally privileged. But it is the particular form in which Indianness manifests itself in the media discourse about food that reveals something distinctive about the reimagining of national identity in the media representation of food in the Indian context. What is new about this manifestation of the foreign? Who do those who speak about Indian cuisine in media speak for? What shifts in cultural authority can we discern as the conversation about Indian food has shifted from a national stage to a global one?

THE REIMAGINING OF INDIAN IDENTITY IN THE MEDIA REPRESENTATION OF FOOD In the media discourse about food analyzed above, foreignness is clearly identified as such, while also being tamed as just one other aspect of Indianness through a demonstration of the fact that the Indian itself is global and international. This is as true of the world

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FIGURE 3.2  Butterscotch truffles (top left) among Indian sweets in Dadu’s Studio, Pune (photo credit: Rohit Chopra)

of Indian food in the present as of its representation. And so, in Dadu’s Studio, a shopcum-restaurant in Pune that offers traditional snacks and sweets, butterscotch truffles are provincialized as just another kind of Indian mithai or traditional sweet. The assimilation of the foreign as a dimension of the Indian is not an entirely new cultural phenomenon, of course. In his influential reflection on colonialism, Ashis Nandy famously argued that Indians under colonial rule had absorbed and negotiated the West psychologically by reducing it to simply another layer of Indian cultural consciousness (2009). What is arguably new in the present historical moment is the public, highly visible, and televisually and digitally mediated performance of this overarching global Indianness, which aims to preserve and transform a national tradition while also, in Bakhtinian terms, incorporating the world within itself (Bakhtin 1984, 281). But the burden of performance, of course, is that the claims articulated through performance must necessarily be constant, or, at the very least, somewhat consistent. And the public performance of identity—of any performance of identity, really, I would argue—is always haunted by a worry about authenticity. While by no means can Indian cuisine be described as timid or insular at any point in time, it appears remarkably free of anxieties about origin or influence in the preglobalization context when televisual media was restricted to the state-run television channel. “Foreign” food or dishes like Chicken a la Kiev were treated under the generic category of “continental food,” with certain restaurants being renowned for specializing in this genre. The genre of continental food itself, one could argue, is quintessentially

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Indian, in the same way that “curry,” that imaginary Indian dish, is essentially British. But in the era preceding economic and cultural globalization, the age of the closed, socialist, or “mixed” economy, as it is variously described, India’s reflection of itself was limited to the programming ordained by the state. In the age of globalized media in India, India sees itself and the world, and imagines its place in the world, quite differently. This may explain the very strong emphasis on both preserving the authentic indigenous— seen in programs such as the weekly food and travel show Highway On My Plate—and the desire to prove that Indian cuisine and Indian chefs are as innovative and creatively adaptive as their Western or global counterparts. For all the levity of the protagonists, Rocky and Mayur, Highway On My Plate sees itself as a serious show that fulfils a socially responsible function, that is at once archival and political. As an article about the show describes it, the protagonists are engaged in “serious exploration of the multiple cuisines of India, their history, and the threats they face—not just from an onslaught of fast food and foreign cuisines but from a changing society that has less time to put into its cooking the qualities that characterize classic Indian food: time, patience, effort, intricacy, and balance” (Beckett, 2012). This kind of project, I want to suggest, as indeed the showcasing of the abilities of Indian chefs, is about explaining India to Indians and to the world. It is a conscious cultural initiative and endeavor, one that is highly aware of the enormous symbolic significance of food and is equally sophisticated about the mediated representation of that food. At the same time, such a project begs the question whether such shows engage in a problematic anthropologizing of India for an Indian audience with goals such as convincing Indians of the truth of the cliché about their cultural unity in diversity. Earlier constructions of a national cuisine, represented by the growth in the publication of English-language Indian cookbooks in the preceding two decades, reflected the complexities of middle-class social and cultural life in India (Appadurai 1988). The audiences and authors of these cookbooks, as Appadurai points out, were chiefly middleclass urban women (1988, 5). The cookbooks reveal an emergent national cuisine that “does not seek to hide its regional or ethnic roots,” even as it “reflects and reifies an emerging culinary cosmopolitanism in the cities and towns of India” (1988, 5). Appadurai argues that, as with eighteenth century trends in European societies, “the new Indian cookbooks are fueled by the spread of print media, and the cultural rise of the new middle classes” (ibid.). The cookbooks allow us to see the contradictory pressures that their female middle-class authors and readers have to negotiate, that is, the “homogenization of a certain middle-class lifestyle,” which, paradoxically, requires a diversification of “consumption patterns” in various aspects of life, like clothing and home décor (Appadurai 1988, 7). The similarities and differences between the print-media centered-cookbooks in pre-liberalization India and televisual, digital, and online discourse in global Indian media nearly three decades later are telling. The English-language cookbooks that Appadurai describes circulated within a female bourgeois, middle-class national domestic economy. Indian media discourse on cuisine today can be considered a kind of global public stage that is open to, and largely dominated by, Indian men. This is profoundly ironic for at least two crucial reasons. One, until very recently, a career in the culinary arts was considered unworthy for Indian males, who were expected to devote themselves to masculine fields of study like medicine, engineering, or chartered accountancy. And, two, the pioneers in the field of pan-Indian culinary innovation and the ones who communicated that innovation to the world were women. It was Tarla Dalal, for example, who introduced Italian cuisine to India, teaching batches of students (consisting mostly if not entirely of women, in all likelihood) recipes

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for dishes such as cannelloni. That role has now been arrogated by Indian men, resulting in a kind of historical amnesia about the gendered origins of the genealogy of modern Indian mediated culinary history. The consumption of English-language cookbooks, as described by Appadurai, was subject to the economic pressures of Indian middle-class life as well as the fairly conventional demands on Indian middle-class women that endured in the shift to a selfconscious Indian middle-class modernity. In the present moment, the consumption of food and lifestyle television programs and channels that showcase Indian cuisine are subject to what can clearly be seen as global pressures and factors, as I have described above. They are targeted at an audience with a certain degree of affluence, leisure, and access to the internet. They also presume, as noted earlier, a certain kind of educational or cultural capital, associated with the ability to travel abroad and domestically, familiarity with an international vocabulary, and the cultivation of global tastes. Finally, regionality continues to play an important role in how an Indian national culture is imagined with respect to cuisine. However, the global rather than the national now becomes the condition of possibility for each regional cuisine to stake its own distinct claim to Indianness. In this regard, television programs that carefully elaborate the details of regional food and context play a key role. If in an earlier era, the South Indian dosa and North Indian butter chicken stood in for Indian food, more recently, cuisines like Bengali and Maharashtrian food that typically did not migrate beyond a few specialized restaurants serving immigrant communities have gone mainstream. This is also a function of the increase in the mobility of large numbers of Indians from the professional classes as indeed of the expansion of the professional classes themselves in the India of the 2000s and after. Montanari notes that “global” and “local” cuisines can coexist and that “one in some way [is] engendered by the other” (2016, 89). Our interests in both, according to him, simply reflect our multiple identities. As such, there is “no contradiction between eating at McDonald’s and, for the next meal, going home for tagliatelle, or for a special dish at the local trattoria” (ibid.). Extending Montanari’s argument to the representation of Indian food in globalized Indian media, we can say that the lines between the local, national, and global are blurred or that the local, national, and global coexist as different aspects of composite Indian identities.

CONCLUSION: THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTING FOOD IN MEDIA The representation of Indian food in globalized Indian media is of a piece with what Sandra Gilbert in The Culinary Imagination describes as the “Virtual Kitchen” (2014, 3) that we all inhabit now in our hypermediated global culture. In this space, we experience “food, foodies, food blogs, food wars, food flicks, food nets, food porn, food for thought, food on the mind, everywhere” (3). But the representation of food, in its audiovisual incarnation, also represents a paradox in that the senses most strongly associated with food, that is, taste, touch, and smell, are subordinated to the senses of sight and sound, that is, those senses that televisual, digital, and online media demand of us. Food in the representational realm, thus, is both proximate and distant, all around us, but also inaccessible. The glut of media about food is, in part, a result of technology, of the explosion of digital photographs about every subject, of the pressures to constantly “curate” one’s

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existence on social media, and of the massive flows of information and data that define current-day global culture. It is also an exemplar of the Baudrillardian simulacra, in which the representation of the object is prior to the object and shapes the social reception of the object that follows (1988, 166–84). And perhaps in this schism between the object and the symbol lies the key to the mysterious allure of the mediated incarnation of food, in India or elsewhere, in this globalized moment. It promises the fantasy of bridging the gap between who we are and who we want to be, persuading us that food is the means to doing that. In this it perhaps stands for the primordial urge, encapsulated in BrillatSavarin’s saying, “Tell me what you eat: I will tell you what you are” (Fisher 1971, 3) and for the capitalist feint of selling us a version of ourselves. Without dismissing or fetishizing the significance of the mediated representation of food in the Indian context—the social complexities of which have been indicated above—it is critical to consider what is entailed by the privileging of those with access to money, leisure, and cultural capital as exemplified by the Indian media discourse on food. These considerations, in turn, bequeath us with a number of key questions and directions for further research. Does the contemporary media discourse on food reflect a utopian, escapist, and romanticized version of Indian culture, at once authentic and traditional, hybrid and global? Is it a highly aestheticized, mediated form of indifference or amnesia to the political economy of the production and consumption of food, with those issues being relegated, for the most part, to political and business channels? Is it another form of silencing the subaltern, even as humble, subaltern forms of food like bajra rotis have now become trendy staples at high-end restaurants? Is it the opposite, in that we can consume the visual presentation of exquisite and exotic foods without the guilt of actually indulging in such excess? In a country with close to 200 million hungry people, is there something politically perverse about the representation of food per se? “The encounter of man with the world, which takes place inside the open, biting, rending, chewing mouth,” Bakhtin tells us, “is one of the most ancient, and most important objects of human thought and imagery. Here man tastes the world” (Bakhtin 1984, 281). The vicarious, visual consumption of global cuisine in globalized Indian media bears within it, like the ingredients of a rich, intricate recipe, many of these contradictions in fine balance.

NOTES 1 No official reason for ceasing publication seems to have been given by the publishers. This may have to do with the general economics of media rather than anything to do with food culture specifically. In India, as elsewhere, the glut of free online content on any and all subjects has put pressure on print and online media publications to develop new revenue models. 2 There is a perception that the Indian startup boom is a bubble that will eventually correct. One criticism of Indian startups is that they are incurring significant losses in the hope of eventually scaling without at the same time investing in meaningful growth (Kumar 2016). 3 Sen provides a useful selection of sources in a select bibliography in her book (2014, 335–39).There is growing corpus of scholarly reflection centered on examining the representation of food in art, literature, cinema, and other imaginative forms in the Western context and, to an extent, in a general global frame, seen, for instance, in works as varied as Varriano’s Tastes and Temptations: Food and Art in Renaissance Italy (2009), Bowers’ Reel Food: Essays on Food and Film (2004), and Parasecoli’s monograph on food in popular culture (2008).

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REFERENCES About. Café Basilico. Accessed June 19, 2016. http://www.cafebasilico.com/about/. “About Us-Syndication.” NDTV Good Times. Accessed June 19, 2016. http://goodtimes.ndtv. com/syndication. Appadurai, Arjun. 1988. “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 30 (1): 3–24. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and the World. Translated by Hélène Iswolosky. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Bansal, Shuchi, and Vidhi Chaudhury. 2015. “FDI Limit Raised for TV Channels.” Livemint, November 11. http://www.livemint.com/Politics/d1a33qhYRYvvS0Rk6i9nTO/ FDI-limit-raised-for-TV-channels.html. Baudrillard, Jean. 1988. Selected Writings. Edited by Mark Poster. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Beckett, Paul. 2012. “Catching Up With Rocky and Mayur.” Wall Street Journal, April 16. http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/04/16/catching-up-with-rocky-and-mayur/. Bhattacharya, Santanu. 2016. “The Leaky Bucket of Indian Food Delivery Start-ups.” FactorDaily, June 8. http://factordaily.com/the-economics-of-food-delivery/. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. Distinction: A Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bowers, Anne, ed. 2004. Reel Food: Essays on Food and Film. New York: Routledge. Dalal. Tarla. 1974. The Pleasures of Vegetarian Cooking. Bombay: Vakils, Feffer And Simons. Dawaat-e-Ishq. 2014. [Film]. Director Habib Faisal. India. Yash Raj Films. Express Foodie. Accessed June 18, 2016, http://www.expressfoodie.com. “Easy, Step-by-Step Recipe for Cherry Jam.” Saffrontrail, http://www.saffrontrail.com/easy-stepby-step-recipe-for-cherry-jam (accessed June 18, 2016). Finely Chopped, http://www.finelychopped.net/ (accessed July 5, 2016). Fisher, M. F. K. 1971. M. F. K. Fisher’s Translation of Brillat- Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste, New York: Knopf. Food, Dudes & Tattoos, http://www.tlcindia.co.in/food-dudes-tattoos/ (accessed June 10, 2016). Fried, Dinah. 2014. Fictitous Dishes: An Album of Literature’s Most Memorable Meals. New York: Harper Design. Giddens, A. 1999. “Lecture 1- Globalisation.” Reith Lectures 1999—Runaway World. Available online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/print/radio4/reith1999/lecture1.shtml?print (accessed June 10, 2016). Gilbert, S. 2014. The Culinary Imagination: From Myth to Modernity. New York: Norton. India Tops World Hunger List with 194 Million People”. (2015). The Hindu, May 29. Available online: http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/india-is-home-to-194-million-hungrypeople-un/article7255937.ece (accessed June 21, 2016). India Travel Khana http://travelkhana.com/travelkhana/jsp/index.jsp) (accessed June 17, 2016). Indigo, http://www.foodindigo.com/ (accessed June 17, 2016). Jaffrey, M. 1973. An Invitation to Indian Cooking, 1st edn. New York: Knopf. Kala Ghoda Café, http://kgcafe.in/ (accessed June 18, 2016). Lechner, F., and J. Boli. 2008. “‘General Introduction.” In The Globalization Reader, 3rd edn, edited by F. Lechner and J. Boli, 1–5, Malden, MA: Blackwell. “Lifestyle,” Vir Sanghvi, http://www.virsanghvi.com/Lifestyle.aspx (accessed July 12, 2016) “Millet Upma—Thinai Recipes,” Saffrontrail, http://www.saffrontrail.com/thinai-recipepanivaragu-upma-millet-upma (accessed June 18, 2016).

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Montanari, M. 2006. Food is Culture. Translated by A. Sonnenfield. New York: Columbia University Press. My Tasty Curry, mytastycurry.com (accessed June 19, 2016). Nandy, A. 2009. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Pant, P. 2010. India: The Cookbook. London: Phaidon Press. Pratt, M. L. 1991. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession: 33–40. Raja, Rasoi Aur Anya Kahaniyan, http://www.epicchannel.com/show/raja-rasoi-aur-anyakahaniyaan-s1 (accessed June 8, 2016). Ranveer’s Café (2016. [TV programme]. June 16. Living Foodz. “Ranveer’s Café.” Living Foodz. Facebook. Accessed August 29, 2016. https://www.facebook. com/LivingFoodz/videos/vb.150128531701775/ 951579858223301/?type=2&theater Roy, Nilanjana S., ed. 2004. A Matter of Taste: The Penguin Book of Indian Writing on Food. New Delhi: Penguin. Roy, Parama. 2010. Alimentary Tracts. Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sanjeev Kapoor. Accessed June 4, 2016. http://www.sanjeevkapoor.com/. Snack Attack–Firangi Twist. 2016. [TV programme], June 16, Zee Khana Khazana. Sen, Colleen Taylor. 2016. Feasts and Fasts: A History of Food in India. New Delhi: Speaking Tiger. Shahani, Gitanjali. 2014. “The Spiced Indian Air in Early Modern England.” Shakespeare Studies Annual 42: 122–37. Singh, Rashmi Uday. Accessed May 12, 2016. https://rashmiudaysingh.com/. Style Chef. 2016. [TV programme]. FOODFOOD. June 16, 2016. “Summary: Media and Entertainment.” n.d. Make in India. Accessed August 20, 2016. http:// www.makeinindia.com/sector/media-and-entertainment. “Statistics: Media and Entertainment.” n.d. Make in India. Accessed August 20, 2016. http:// www.makeinindia.com/sector/media-and-entertainment. The Lunchbox. 2013., [Film]. Director Ritesh Batra, India. Sony Pictures Classics. The Maladies of Affluence.” 2007. The Economist, August 9. http://www.economist.com/ node/9616897 Timms, Pamela. 2014. Korma, Kheer and Kismet: Five Seasons in Old Delhi. New Delhi: Aleph. Trishna. Accessed June 15, 2016. http://trishna.co.in/ Upper Crust India. Accessed June 18, 2016. http://www.uppercrustindia.com/ver2/. Varriano, John L. 2009. Tastes and Temptations: Food and Art in Renaissance Italy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Veg Recipes of India. Accessed June 18, 2016. http://www.vegrecipesofindia.com/. “Vegan Lettuce Wraps with Tofu and Mango Recipe.” Saffrontrail. Accessed June 16, 2016. http://www.saffrontrail.com/vegan-lettuce-wraps-with-tofu-and-mango-recipe. Walial, Rashi. 2015. “Famous Faces of Cookery Shows on Television.” The Times of India, May 22. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tv/news/hindi/Famous-faces-of-cookery-showson-television/articleshow/47173923.cms. WS 10 Class. 2009. Isn’t This Plate Indian? Dalit Histories and Memories of Food. Pune: Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women’s Studies Center, University of Pune. Zee Khana Khazana. Accessed July 15, 2016. http://www.zeekhanakhazana.com/.

CHAPTER FOUR

Tasting the Digital: New Food Media ISABELLE DE SOLIER

On an average night in 2015, around 10,000 people tuned into the P2P live video streaming website Afreeca TV to watch a young Korean man, Lee Chang-hyun, eat his dinner in front of a webcam (Evans 2015). In total, Lee’s nightly dinner videos have over 43 million views. Known as “mukbang,” a mash-up of the Korean words for “broadcasting” and “eating,” this cultural phenomenon is one of the newest popular food practices enabled by the internet. No longer content with simply viewing photos of what people have cooked or eaten on Instagram, many South Koreans now want to watch people actually eating their meal. While for years we have watched TV cooks like Nigella Lawson devouring a midnight snack, this new development brings vicarious consumption into the world of the ultra-ordinary celebrity, as the democratizing technology of Web 2.0 allows regular people to broadcast their everyday food practices. And where the images of Nigella eating chocolate pudding are highly sexualized and much closer to food porn, watching Lee eat noodles is far more ordinary, closer to the experience of eating dinner with a friend. Mukbang has certainly reached the status of a popular practice. Each night, around 45,000 Koreans watch their favorite mukbang “BJ’” (broadcast jockey) eating their evening meal, which is a threefold increase since the phenomenon emerged in 2013 (Hu 2015). Yet it’s not only viewing mukbang that’s become a popular practice, but also broadcasting one’s meals as a BJ. An estimated 3,000 people have become mukbang broadcast jockeys in South Korea (Hu 2015). The most popular is thirty-something Park Seo-yeon, known as “The Diva.” Her evening broadcasts can last up to four hours and are more of a cross between a cooking show and an eating broadcast, as viewers watch her preparing and eating a three-course meal. In addition to fame, the economics of becoming a mukbang star are also an attraction, as viewers pay small tips if they like what they see. Park has turned it into a career, making around US$9,000 a month simply by letting others watch her eat. The popularity of mukbang among viewers has been linked to the dramatic rise in single-person households in South Korea from 7 percent in 1985 to 25 percent in 2012, a figure that is expected to rise to 32 percent by 2030 (Park and Choi 2015, 1178; Rauhala 2014). For people living alone who eat their own dinner while watching BJs eat theirs—which anecdotal evidence suggests is quite common—mukbang may provide a way of alleviating the loneliness some experience by eating alone each night. Indeed, mukbang could even constitute a new digital form of commensality—eating together—in

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an individualized, technologized world. As the Diva puts it, “Many people are eating alone . . . . My show makes them feel like they are eating with a friend” (Rauhala 2014). And with the interactive nature of Web 2.0, this relationship is not one-way: there’s a two-way dialogue between the viewers and BJs throughout the meal, as viewers send written messages online and BJs respond verbally on camera. Welcome to the world of new food media. In this chapter I examine the rise of new food media, and how it has been used to communicate messages not just about consumption, like mukbang, but also production, like cooking and gardening. Taking a material culture studies approach to this digital realm, I begin by mapping the growth of new food media as a form of material media, examining the popularity of food on digital platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and YouTube. I then explore the scholarly literature around new food media, which has largely been developed in relation to food blogs and online restaurant reviews, focusing on the key concepts that have been used to understand these media, including culinary capital, food porn, authenticity, and creative production. In the final section, I show that by examining how users mobilize multiple digital media platforms together we can understand the role that different platforms play in shaping the messages about food that are communicated. I do so by examining the messages about food production and consumption communicated by the Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube accounts of an edible community garden. I conclude the chapter by considering the future of new food media and our research into it as scholars.

NEW FOOD MEDIA: FROM #FOOD TO @JAMIEOLIVER Food media is a genre of what I call material media (de Solier 2013). This refers to forms of media that take material objects as their focus, such as clothes, homes, gardens, and food. The term “material” is used to denote the content of such media, rather than their form. My understanding of food media as a form of material media is a result of the approach I take to studying food, which is informed by the anthropological tradition of material culture studies (Miller 1987). However, this field has tended to concentrate solely on the relationship between people and material objects. In contrast, I include material media alongside objects as the two key elements of my conceptualization of material culture in late modernity, as I argue that these media are central to how objects are used in postindustrial lifestyles and self-formation (de Solier 2013). As I understand it, the material culture of food includes not only food itself but also food media such as cookbooks, television cooking shows, and food blogs. Where print food media like cookbooks have a history that stretches back centuries (Mennell 1996) and television cooking shows have graced our screens for more than half a century (Polan 2011), new food media have only begun to gain momentum over the last decade or two. Yet what they lack in history, they make up for in scale and diversity. Not only can we watch BJs eat their dinner online, we can share pictures of our meals with friends and strangers via Instagram and Snapchat; post our reviews of restaurants on Yelp or Urbanspoon; find recipes via Epicurious and Yummly; and order home-delivered fast food or haute cuisine via UberEATS or foodpanda. The speed of change in the realm of new food media is phenomenal. When I conducted my ethnography of foodies in the late 2000s, the main ways they used the web were to

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search for recipes using Google or Epicurious, discuss food in forums like eGullet, and create blogs documenting their cooking and/or dining experiences (de Solier 2013). Yet in general, foodies’ use of the web was much less interactive than it is for many people today. Social media such as Twitter were just beginning to take hold as a way of interacting with fellow foodies and professional chefs, while Instagramming one’s meals had not yet become common practice. Today, however, taking photos of one’s meals and sharing them via Instagram has become mainstream, done not only by foodies but by most members of Gen Y. In mid2016, there were over 180 million posts tagged “#food” on Instagram and 39 million tagged “#foodie” by the app’s 300 million active daily users, 90 percent of whom are under thirty-five years old (Smith 2016). Millennials are also believed to be driving the huge rise in popularity of food programming on YouTube, which rose by 280 percent in 2013 when the top twenty cooking channels garnered 370 million views worldwide. YouTube cooking channels with massive viewings include Canada’s Epic Meal Time (872 million views), Australia’s How to Cook That (290 million views), America’s Laura in the Kitchen (290 million views), and Britain’s SORTEDfood (174 million views), with amateur cooks’ channels outperforming the channels of TV stars like Jamie Oliver (May 2016; Hernandez 2014). Food-related content is also the number one category on Pinterest, which is particularly popular with women between 25 and 45 years of age. The ten most re-pinned words on the app are recipe, chicken, minutes, bake, cake, cheese, cut, bottle, step, and mix (Honigman 2012; Ray 2015). Food is also a hot topic on Twitter, with millions of foodrelated tweets sent each week. In the UK, two in three Twitter users consider themselves “somewhat of a foodie,” with many following restaurants and celebrity chefs like @ GordonRamsay and @jamieoliver (Macmillan 2014). Food and beverage pages are also among the most-liked on Facebook, yet on this platform it appears to be mass-produced food that has the greatest following. The ten most popular food pages on Facebook are Coca-Cola, Red Bull, Starbucks, Oreo, McDonalds, Pepsi, Pringles, Skittles, Monster Energy, and KitKat (Lafferty 2013). Nevertheless, American food blogger Ree Drummond also has 2.8 million followers on Facebook (Gibbs 2015). Her blog, The Pioneer Woman, is among the most popular in the Anglophone world, along with Britain’s Deliciously Ella and Australia’s Not Quite Nigella. Food blogs have managed to retain their popularity over the past fifteen years, since The Julie/Julia Project broke through in 2002 propelling blogger Julie Powell into stardom.

UNDERSTANDING NEW FOOD MEDIA: CULINARY CAPITAL, FOOD PORN, AND CREATIVE PRODUCTION Despite the popularity of new food media, they have attracted relatively little attention from scholars. The most substantial contribution to date is Signe Rousseau’s book Food and Social Media: You Are What You Tweet (2012). Rousseau argues that digital media platforms such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter have opened up “new spaces to talk about food” (2012, x) and led to the creation of virtual communities based around it. However, she observes that these media have also led to new problems in the food sphere, such as the threat posed by amateur reviewers to the profession of food criticism and copyright debates around the plagiarism of recipes by some bloggers.

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Other scholars have directed their attention to particular kinds of new food media. The form that has been the subject of most research to date, including my own (de Solier 2006, 2010, 2013), is food blogs. One of the key arguments circulating in recent research is that food blogs—in particular, their photographs of food—constitute a form of “food porn” (Dejmanee 2016; Metz McDonnell 2016). The food porn argument is not unique to blogs, but has previously been made in relation to “old” food media such as cookbooks and television cooking shows (Chan 2003; Brownlie, Hewer, and Horne 2005). Most earlier accounts tended to use the term in a pejorative manner, deriding the moral slide of food into a tantalizing image that is only consumed by the eye. In contrast, the recent use of food porn in relation to blogs has been less morally loaded. Erin Metz McDonnell, for example, develops a subtle understanding of food porn as “a set of visual aesthetics and practices that emphasize the pleasurable, sensual dimensions of food,” including techniques such as zoom, framing, orientation, and depth of field (2016, 264). Significantly, where earlier accounts of food porn tended to suggest that the function of the delectable image ended with its visual or vicarious consumption, Metz McDonnell’s analysis of the comments made by blog readers shows how these images often lead to readers cooking and eating the dishes themselves. Her research reinforces my findings in my study of foodies (de Solier 2013), for whom beautiful depictions of food functioned as both aesthetic and practical texts. The foodies in my research rejected what they saw as reductive notions of food porn for not accurately describing their practical and educational use of food media. Tisha Dejmanee also examines blogs through the lens of food porn. Like Metz McDonnell, she argues that digital food porn can be understood as playful and pleasurable, yet she also interprets it politically as a form of “postfeminist media production” (2016, 443). Dejmanee argues that although “food bloggers may not characterize the production of ‘food porn’ as a radical feminist act, their creative, digital labor is often guided by rhetorics of pleasure and entrepreneurialism that serve as a political response in the postfeminist context” (2016, 445). Beyond food porn, another theme emerging in current research on food blogs is authenticity (Karaosmanoğlu 2014; Lopez 2016). In her analysis of Asian American recipe blogs, Lori Kido Lopez argues that bloggers mobilize their cultural heritage as a form of “racial branding” to position them as experts on “authentic” Asian cuisine (2016, 152). However, she argues that “many bloggers simultaneously participate in deconstructing the notion of authenticity through embracing the impossibility of defining its borders or requirements” (160–61). Lopez observes that most Asian American bloggers also create and relish dishes from other cultures and hybrid cuisines which, as I have argued elsewhere, is something that distinguishes foodies from other types of food enthusiasts, such as those whose love of food is primarily confined to their own cultural cuisine (de Solier 2013). The concept of authenticity is also the focus of Defne Karaosmanoğlu’s analysis of food blogs that review Turkish grill restaurants in London. She observes that bloggers construct notions of authenticity through personal narratives of their sensual experiences of the restaurant, arguing that not only ethnicity but class and gender are central to this process because the “‘real’ authenticity of the local lies in its masculine and lower-class associations” (2014, 234). The research on blogs discussed above all focuses on the food blog as a text that is examined using methods of textual, content, or discourse analysis. This is an approach I took in my earlier research on food blogs (de Solier 2006, 2010). In my recent research, however, my approach to investigating this topic differs through my focus on the practice of food blogging and my use of the method of ethnography to understand this practice

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and its meaning in the everyday lives of bloggers (de Solier 2013). More specifically, I take an approach known as “digital ethnography” which has been pioneered in social anthropology in recent years (Horst and Miller 2012; Pink et al. 2016). In taking this approach, I seek to understand what people do with new food media, not just what messages these media communicate. My ethnographic research found that the practice of blogging was experienced by foodies as what I call creative production. This concept emerged from the language my informants used to describe their practices of producing material culture, such as “being creative” and “making something.” It was not only their production of material media— food blogging—that was spoken about in these terms; their production of material objects—cooking—was also understood in this way. But the concept also developed from the ways in which both these forms of production in leisure were distinguished from and contrasted to the modes of production foodies engaged in at their white-collar jobs. The emphasis and value foodies placed on producing something—be it a meal or a blog— and expressing creativity in these leisure activities was opposed to the sense of a lack of opportunity to do so in their professional knowledge work. Food blogging constitutes a particular type of creative production, which differs from cooking not only in terms of the product but also in terms of the creative processes employed and the appeal they hold for foodies. Where cooking is a form of material creative production, the appeal of which lies in making something tangible with one’s own hands, food blogging is a form of digital creative production, whose appeal lies in making something with digital words and images (de Solier 2013). My research found that the reasons why foodies engage in blogging are not only to engage in this process of digital creative production, but also to create products that serve two functions. The first is to document their self-formation through food, which I consider the personal function of the food blog. These blogs function as digital gastronomic memoirs, the creation of which is driven partly by the ephemeral nature of food as a material object: photographing or writing about a culinary experience fixes it in time and gives foodies something concrete to which they can return. The second function of food blogs is to share knowledge and lifestyle advice with others, which I consider a public function of the blog. This latter function is shared in common with professional food media and makes food blogs a form of amateur food media. There are two main genres of entries on food blogs: culinary posts and dining posts. My research found that foodies’ recipe posts and culinary advice were generally well received by the public, who considered them experts and put their recipes and advice into practice. In contrast, food bloggers’ advice on restaurants has been more hotly contested, mostly by professional critics who feel their vocation is under threat. I suggest that the reason the democratization of restaurant media has been greater cause for concern among professionals than the democratization of culinary media is because unlike cooking, there are no formal qualifications in food criticism. One of the fundamental differences between the restaurant reviews on blogs and those in professional media is that in the latter, the judgment of the expert is final; the verdict of the amateur, on the other hand, is open to debate through comments, thus transforming the restaurant review into a more dialogic genre. This is even more the case in the context of websites and apps that aggregate amateur restaurant reviews such as Chowhound, Yelp, and UrbanSpoon. Most research on such sites has focused on the issue of cultural capital, or more specifically, “culinary capital.” My understanding of culinary capital (de Solier 2005), developed in relation to food television, distinguishes between two kinds

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of food-related cultural capital which convey status: aesthetic culinary capital, which relates to food consumption and taste, and practical culinary capital, which relates to food production and skills. Peter Naccarato and Kathleen LeBesco (2012) develop a more expanded understanding of culinary capital, using it to examine not only television but also online food media. In particular, they examine restaurant reviews on the website Chowhound as a site for the construction of identity and the display of taste and culinary capital. Naccarato and LeBesco argue that reviewers on Chowhound construct their identities as omnivores and distinguish themselves from foodies, who they consider to be snobs. Drawing on this work, Camilla Vásquez and Alice Chik examine amateur reviews of one-star Michelin restaurants in Hong Kong and New York on the websites OpenRice and Yelp. By comparing reviews in two countries, they show how “many of the discourse strategies used to claim culinary capital and to construct expertise about fine dining are not specific to a particular language, a unique cultural context, or to a particular website—but are actually shared conventions in the larger global genre of user-generated online restaurant reviews” (2015, 248). Sharon Zukin, Scarlett Lindeman, and Laurie Hurson also examine online reviews of New York restaurants on Yelp, yet they focus on issues of race as well as class. Comparing reviews of restaurants located in predominantly white and black gentrifying neighborhoods in Brooklyn, they found that most reviewers felt positive about the former, describing traditional Polish restaurants as “authentic” and “cozy,” whereas the latter neighborhood was represented negatively, being described as “dark” and “dangerous” with a dearth of dining options (2015, 11). While our understanding of food blogs and restaurant review websites has been enhanced by the research outlined here, there is still much new food media that remains to be investigated by scholars, from the mass practice of sharing photographs of food on Instagram to the growing popularity of YouTube cooking shows. And while most research to date has focused on one digital media platform at a time, there are also benefits to be found in examining multiple platforms side by side.

EXAMINING NEW FOOD MEDIA: THE MEDIUM SHAPES THE MESSAGE Individuals, communities, and businesses increasingly use multiple new media platforms to convey messages about their identities, values, and brands in today’s digital world. By examining how a particular user mobilizes different platforms together—rather than focusing on their use of one platform in isolation—we can uncover the role, if any, that different platforms play in shaping the messages communicated. To demonstrate this idea, I compare how different messages about the production and consumption of food are communicated via the multiple social media platforms used by an edible community garden. The “Pop Up Patch” is an edible community garden located on the roof of a carpark at Fed Square, the main public piazza in Melbourne, Australia. Fed Square’s postmodern geometric buildings, built for the centenary of Australia’s Federation in 2001, are home to stylish restaurants, bars, and a major art museum. A more recent addition, the Pop Up Patch was established in 2012 as a joint venture between Fed Square and the Little Veggie Patch Co., a business founded by bearded-hipster thirty-somethings Fabian Capomolla and Mat Pember “dedicated to helping people grow food” (Little Veggie Patch Co. n.d.) through a retail nursery and best-selling “how-to” book series (Capomolla and Pember

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2011, 2012; Pember and Capomolla 2014; Pember 2015). As the only community garden in the City of Melbourne local council area, the 140 plots in the Patch are the only plots available to the 135,000 residents living in Melbourne’s fifteen inner-most suburbs (City of Melbourne 2016). Leasing a plot to grow your vegetables in the heart of the city does not come cheap, with a twelve-month lease on a one square meter crate costing AU$1,296. This price tag also buys members access to tools, seeds and seedlings, gardening workshops, and professional experts who are present eight hours a day to help gardeners with advice or water plots in their absence, making the Patch more of a fullservice community garden. Nevertheless, one must have significant economic capital to secure the culinary capital that possessing a plot in this edible oasis imparts. A recent news article noted that fifty local residents had made such an investment (Webb 2016). But unlike most community gardens, many of the plots at the Patch are leased by businesses, in particular those that already hold high levels of practical culinary capital—that related to cooking food, rather than growing it—with all the restaurants and cafes at Fed Square being allocated plots and other fine dining restaurants in Melbourne’s city center renting multiple plots. The Pop Up Patch’s social media presence is managed by the Little Veggie Patch Co. and includes the garden’s own Facebook page and Instagram account, along with the Little Veggie Patch Co.’s YouTube channel. Most posts on the Facebook page are of photographs taken in the garden, the majority of which overlap with the images shared on the Instagram account. The Patch uses these two digital platforms in much the same way, primarily sharing the same visual content and representations of the garden. Its Instagram account features some more stylized photographs that are absent from Facebook, such as one showing chillies arranged into three smiley faces (May 5, 2016) and another showing two baby carrots intimately twisted around one another with the caption “and they lived happily ever after” (April 22, 2016), which is the closest the Patch’s photographs come to food porn. But the most noticeable differences between the garden’s Instagram account and Facebook page is that the latter is used to update members and visitors about changes to the Patch’s opening hours due to extreme weather, and that it contains a much longer description of the garden in its “About” section than is possible on Instagram. The Facebook page describes the garden as “a place to share the beginnings, and maybe ends, of your food experience; from the dirt to the seed, seedling to plant, and then perhaps the produce on your plate.” This text constructs the garden as a place dedicated primarily to food production, and possibly, consumption. Gardening, like cooking, can be understood as a form of material creative production, where urban white-collar workers get the opportunity to create something tangible with their hands in their spare time. The Facebook description goes on to emphasize that the garden is not just a site of production, but also education, stating that the Patch is “more than just an opportunity to grow produce, it is a chance to learn along the way.” The Patch’s educational model of community garden differs from most gardens in that knowledge and skills are not just shared among fellow amateur gardeners, but also received from professional experts. It recommends that members think of the Patch’s staff “as your private tutors, on call, when needed.” Gardening, then, is also represented in this description as what I call knowledgebased leisure, that is, pleasurable activities undertaken in one’s spare time in which new knowledge and skills are acquired and deployed (de Solier 2013). But there is a discrepancy between this written description of the Patch, which few people would probably read, and the images it posts on Facebook and Instagram, which are the main messages these sites communicate. These photographs tell a different story

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about the garden, one that’s less about getting your hands dirty learning and growing your own food, and more about the sophisticated enviro-conscious consumer lifestyle that visiting or joining the Patch can bring. While there are plenty of photos of vegetables growing in plots, there are surprisingly few photos of members actually gardening at the Patch. The only direct depiction of members engaging in the practice of gardening is an image of a man and a young girl standing on opposite sides of a plot with their hands in the soil, positioned against a background of skyscrapers (July 3, 2016). Two other images show members with the spoils of their material production, but not engaging in the act; one, taken from behind, shows a man with a backpack overflowing with vegetables which the caption tells us are “from his own crate” (December 15, 2016), while the other shows a chef from a Fed Square restaurant, Taxi Kitchen, standing in his uniform behind a plot smiling with the caption, “Happy members @popuppatch 😉 @taxikitchen uses its own herbs, flowers and greens direct from their Patch” (February 27, 2016). In contrast, most of the photographs of members and visitors on the garden’s Facebook and Instagram pages depict them consuming food, rather than producing it or learning to do so. An early post on Facebook shows four white middle-class urbanites and a baby in a pram sitting under the shade of a large umbrella with a bottle of wine and an antipasto platter, accompanied by the caption “Pop Up Patching on a Saturday” (October 20, 2012). This suggests that “Pop Up Patching” is more about relaxing and consuming than gardening; but the plots behind the group are all full of seedlings so perhaps they are resting after some work under the hot sun. Other posts are more explicitly consumer oriented. For example, one features a photo taken from behind showing five women and a man standing at a bar under a foliage arch with the caption “Cocktails @by_the_glass_ are hot stuff at tonight's #popuppatch event” (March 4, 2016). Other posts feature photos of the hip young business owners who sell their products at the Patch, such as “the girls and smoker from @burncitysmokers” who are pictured holding drinks in their hands with their burner and skyscrapers in the background and a chalkboard sign advertising their “14 hour smoked Cape Grim brisket burger” (March 5, 2016). But it is not just food and drinks that are for sale at the garden; other posts feature a photographic collage of four young white urbanites selling their wares—from artworks to custom-made bicycles and furniture—at a market held at the Patch (December 6, 2015), and a young white woman in leggings doing a stretch advertising her morning yoga classes at the garden (November 17, 2015). It is not only other companies’ products that are for sale, either; the posts on Instagram and Facebook also advertise the Little Veggie Patch Co. products that one can purchase. In 2015, they opened a café and mini-shop called “Mister Patch” at the garden; one post shows a close-up of a cup of coffee held by a staff member wearing a branded Pop Up Patch T-shirt, accompanied by the caption “Our exclusive blend The Premises roasted by Small Batch” (November 17, 2015). Other posts feature close-ups of the Little Veggie Patch Co.-branded books, crates, seeds, and tools. The photographs of the Patch on its Facebook and Instagram feeds, then, are more about the community garden as a place, rather than gardening as a productive practice. Indeed, the Patch is represented as a site where people predominantly acquire aesthetic, rather than practical, culinary capital, the setting for a sophisticated urban lifestyle that is more focused on consumption and other lifestyle activities such as buying hand-crafted goods, eating from hipster food trucks, and doing outdoor yoga. In contrast to Facebook and Instagram, the Patch’s representation on YouTube is much more focused on gardening as a form of material production and knowledge-based leisure. As Capomolla explains in the video “About Little Veggie Patch Co.,” he and

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Pember established the Patch because, in Melbourne, “we’ve got a heap of people who want to grow food but they just don’t know the basics.” He describes the Patch as “an education center” where members and visitors can do workshops that teach them about the fundamentals of edible gardening, such as soil, planting, watering, composting, pest and disease control, and harvesting produce. This constructs the Patch as the site for the acquisition of practical culinary capital in the form of productive gardening skills. Pember stresses the achievability of attaining this form of capital in the video, stating that “growing food is something that we can all do, no matter your skill set.” This is an ideology that he and Capomolla demonstrate by example, as neither possess formal qualifications in horticulture; they both hold business degrees and formerly worked in landscaping and advertising, respectively. As Capomolla declares on his LinkedIn page, “I have no qualifications as a plant nerd, and I am useless with Latin botanical names, however, I do love plants, and more so, I love plants you can eat” (Capomolla 2016). Passion, or affect, is deployed here as a credential to teach others about edible gardening. But the Patch is not simply described as an educational, productive space on YouTube, as it is on Facebook; the other videos on the channel support this claim. As well as running workshops at the Patch, the Little Veggie Patch Co. use YouTube to teach members—and the general public—how to grow food, through videos filmed at the Patch. The majority of the videos focus on teaching the productive skills needed for edible gardening in less than five minutes, including a series of “1 minute skills” videos. Hosted by Capomolla or Pender, the videos include “How to Plant Seeds and Seedlings,” “Best Watering Practices,” “Premium Compost,” “Eggplant Pruning,” “Harvesting Beans,” “Saving Seeds,” and “Making a Mini-Greenhouse.” Through these YouTube videos—and their “old media” books, which I’ve not examined here—Capomolla and Pember take on the role of “mediated lifestyle experts” (Lewis 2008), or more specifically, gastronomes (de Solier 2013). Unlike their photos on Facebook and Instagram, in these YouTube videos Pember and Capomolla address their audiences as producers, not just consumers, and advocate the idea that leisure time should be spent not just consuming material things, but producing them and acquiring the knowledge and skills required to do so. The Patch’s YouTube presence, then, is far more focused on edible gardening as a productive practice and teaching the skills required than its Facebook and Instagram feeds, which focus on the garden as a lifestyle and consumption space. But the difference in these messages about the garden as a space of production or consumption may be due, at least in part, to the nature of the different social media platforms. As a practical activity, edible gardening is much easier to demonstrate and teach through video than photos and writing. And while it is possible to post videos on Instagram and Facebook, most people use these platforms to be inspired by beautiful pictures or to connect with friends and family, respectively (Facebook IQ 2016). In contrast, people increasingly use YouTube to learn new skills, with “how-to” searches on the platform having risen by 70 percent, and more than 100 million hours of how-to videos viewed in North America alone in just five months (Gesenhues 2015). Indeed, YouTube is increasingly being recognized as a valuable educational tool, not just a place to watch cats ride robot vacuums, with some scholars suggesting that it “could well be the most important educational tool of our time” (Antonio and Tuffley 2015). In the case of the Pop Up Patch, then, we can see that the medium plays a central role in the messages communicated about the garden. It is not so much that the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan (1964) famously declared, but rather that the medium shapes the message: different messages about the garden as a space of consumption or

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production are communicated via different platforms due to the nature of the platform. This may or may not be the case for other social media users. What this example highlights, however, is the rich and complex understanding of contemporary food cultures that can be generated by examining multiple social media platforms produced by the same user, be that an individual, community or business.

THE FUTURES OF NEW FOOD MEDIA Given the rapid pace of change in new media it is difficult to predict what the food media landscape will look like in a few years, let alone decades. It is possible, however, to posit some speculations based on recent trends, as I would like to do here by way of conclusion. First, in terms of the future of research in this area, we may increasingly see food scholars not just studying digital media but incorporating these technologies and platforms into their research methodologies. New trends in ethnography, such as digital and sensory ethnography (Pink 2009; Pink et al. 2016), are leading the way in terms of the use of digital photography and video as research tools. These digital photos and videos may be generated by the researcher and/or by informants. As well as generating rich audiovisual data, these techniques provide scholars with more consumable ways of communicating their research to the general public, an important process which is increasingly a requirement of publicly funded research. Second, in terms of the future of food media, we may see the continued rise of the amateur foodie expert and their new food media in relation to old media, as we saw firstly with print—with amateur bloggers versus professional journalists—and more recently with television—with YouTube cooks versus TV chefs. Indeed, YouTube may become the main source of our education in forms of material production like cooking and gardening. It certainly seems to be heading that way, with 67 percent of Millennials saying they can find a YouTube video on anything they want to learn (Gesenhues 2015). But while there has been a rise in the use of YouTube to learn skills in production, this platform is still home to highly popular forms of consumption, such as mukbang. Indeed, while “howto” videos are the second most popular category on YouTube, consumer product reviews are number one (Mediakix 2016). What can be said, with relative certainty, is that new media platforms will remain home to representations of both food consumption and production, with individuals, communities, and businesses using them to document and construct their food-related identities, values, and brands.

REFERENCES Antonio, Amy, and David Tuffley. 2015. “YouTube a valuable educational tool, not just cat videos.” The Conversation , January 16. Accessed September 23, 2016. http:// theconversation.com/youtube-a-valuable-educational-tool-not-just-cat-videos-34863 Brownlie, Douglas, Paul Hewer, and Suzanne Horne. 2005. “Culinary Tourism: An Exploratory Reading of Contemporary Representations of Cooking.” Consumption, Markets and Culture 8 (1): 7–26. Capomolla, Fabian. 2016. “Fabian Capomolla.” LinkedIn. Accessed August 23, 2016. https:// www.linkedin.com/in/capomolla. Capomolla, Fabian, and Mat Pember. 2011. The Little Veggie Patch Co.: How to Grow Food in Small Spaces. Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia.

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Capomolla, Fabian and Mat Pember. 2012. The Little Veggie Patch Co.'s Guide to Backyard Farming. Sydney: Pan Macmillan. Chan, Andrew. 2003. “‘La Grande Bouffe’: Cooking Shows as Pornography.” Gastronomica 3 (4): 47–53. City of Melbourne. 2016. “Daily Population Estimates and Forecasts.” Accessed August 23, 2016. http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/about-melbourne/research-and-statistics/pages/dailypopulation-estimates-and-forecasts.aspx de Solier, Isabelle. 2005. “TV Dinners: Culinary Television, Education and Distinction.” Continuum 19 (4): 465–81. de Solier, Isabelle. 2006. “Foodie Blogs: Cookbooks, Recipes and Gustatory Identities.” Paper presented at the Cookery Books as History Conference, Adelaide, South Australia, July 3–4. de Solier, Isabelle. 2010. “Liquid Nitrogen Pistachios: Molecular Gastronomy, elBulli, and Foodies.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 13 (2): 155–70. de Solier, Isabelle. 2013. Food and the Self: Consumption, Production and Material Culture. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Dejmanee, Tisha. 2016. “‘Food Porn’ as Postfeminist Play: Digital Femininity and the Female Body on Food Blogs.” Television and New Media 17 (5): 429–48. Evans, Stephen. 2015. “The Koreans Who Televise Themselves Eating Dinner.” BBC News, February 5. Accessed July 12, 2016. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31130947 Facebook IQ. 2016. “Facebook and Instagram: A Tale of Two Feeds.” Facebook IQ, July 11. Accessed September 22, 2016. http://insights.fb.com/2016/07/11/facebook-and-instagram-atale-of-two-feeds Gesenhues, Amy. 2015. “YouTube ‘How To’ Video Searches Up 70%, With Over 100 Million Hours Watched In 2015.” Search Engine Land, May 13. Accessed September 22, 2016. http://searchengineland.com/youtube-how-to-searches-up-70-yoy-with-over-100m-hours-ofhow-to-videos-watched-in-2015-220773 Gibbs, Alexandra. 2015. “Food Blogging: How to Cook Your Way to Success.” CNBC, August 14. Accessed July 7, 2016. http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/14/food-blogging-how-to-cookyour-way-to-success.html Hernandez, Peggy. 2014. “Popular YouTube Chefs are Becoming Stars.” Boston Globe , October 14. Accessed July 7, 2016. http://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/fooddining/2014/10/14/popular-youtube-chefs-are-becoming-stars/Pj8bxcJ3nuanlmiOf0RS3I/ story.html Honigman, Brian. 2012. “100 Fascinating Social Media Statistics and Figures from 2012.” The Huffington Post, November 29. Accessed July 7, 2016. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ brian-honigman/100-fascinating-social-me_b_2185281.html Horst, Heather, and Daniel Miller, eds. 2012. Digital Anthropology. London and New York: Berg. Hu, Elise. 2015. “Koreans Have an Insatiable Appetite for Watching Strangers Binge Eat.” NPR, March 24. Accessed July 12, 2016. http://www.npr.org/sections/ thesalt/2015/03/24/392430233/koreans-have-an-insatiable-appetite-for-watching-strangersbinge-eat Karaosmanoğlu, Defne. 2014. “Authenticated Spaces: Blogging Sensual Experiences in Turkish Grill Restaurants in London.” Space and Culture 17 (3): 224–38. Lafferty, Justin. 2013. “Hungry? Here Are the Top 25 Facebook Pages About Food.” AdWeek , November 28. Accessed July 7, 2016. http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/hungry-here-arethe-top-25-facebook-pages-about-food/297048

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Lewis, Tania. 2008. Smart Living: Lifestyle Media and Popular Expertise. New York: Peter Lang. Little Veggie Patch Co. n.d. “About Us.” Accessed July 15, 2016, http://littleveggiepatchco.com. au/pages/about. Lopez, Lori Kido. 2016. “Asian American Food Blogging as Racial Branding: Rewriting the Search for Authenticity.” In Global Asian American Popular Cultures, edited by Shilpa Davé, LeiLani Nishime, and Tasha Oren, 151–164. New York: New York University Press. Macmillan, Gordon. 2014. “Foodie Tweets - 10 Facts About Twitter, Restaurants and Food.” Twitter Blog, June 2. https://blog.twitter.com/en-gb/2014/foodie-tweets-10-facts-abouttwitter-restaurants-and-food May, Gareth. 2016. “The 10 Best Food YouTubers.” The Telegraph, February 2. Accessed July 7, 2016. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/food-and-drink/features/the-10-best-food-youtubers/ McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill. Mediakix. 2016. “The 13 Most Popular Types of YouTube Videos.” Mediakix , February 6. Accessed September 22, 2016. http://mediakix.com/2016/02/most-popular-youtubevideos/#gs.s7wrVA0 Mennell, Stephen. 1996. All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Metz McDonnell, Erin. 2016. “Food Porn: The Conspicuous Consumption of Food in the Age of Digital Reproduction.” In Food, Media and Contemporary Culture: The Edible Image, edited by Peri Bradley, 239–65. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Miller, Daniel. 1987. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell. Naccarato, Peter and Kathleen LeBesco. 2012. Culinary Capital. Oxford: Berg. Park, Hyunjoon, and Jaesung Choi. 2015. “Long-term Trends in Living Alone Among Korean Adults: Age, Gender, and Educational Differences.” Demographic Research 32: 1177–1208. Pember, Mat. 2015. DIY Garden Projects: Step-by-step Activities for Edible Gardening and Backyard Fun. Melbourne: Hardie Grant. Pember, Mat and Fabian Capomolla. 2014. 1-Minute Gardener: The 70 Skills You Need For Growing Food in Small Spaces. Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia. Pink, Sarah. 2009. Doing Sensory Ethnography. Los Angeles and London: Sage. Pink, Sarah, Heather Horst, John Postill, Larissa Hjorth, Tania Lewis, and Jo Tacchi. 2016. Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice. London: Sage. Polan, Dana. 2011. Julia Child’s “The French Chef”. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rauhala, Emily. 2014. “South Korean ‘Diva’ Makes $9000 a Month Eating on Camera.” Time, March 26. Accessed July 12, 2016. http://time.com/38219/south-korea-food-blogger Ray, Mitt. 2015. “19 Pinterest Statistics You Probably Don’t Know, But Should.” Social Marketing Writing, September 16. http://socialmarketingwriting.com/19-pinterest-statisticsyou-probably-dont-know-but-should-infographic Rousseau, Signe. 2012. Food and Social Media: You Are What You Tweet. Lanham: AltaMira Press. Smith, Craig. 2016. “By the Numbers: 180+ Interesting Instagram Statistics (June 2016).” DMR, July 14. http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/important-instagram-stats Vásquez, Camilla and Alice Chik. 2015. “‘I am Not a Foodie . . .’: Culinary Capital in Online Reviews of Michelin Restaurants.” Food and Foodways 23 (4): 231–50. Zukin, Sharon, Scarlett Lindeman, and Laurie Hurson. 2015. “The Omnivore’s Neighborhood? Online Restaurant Reviews, Race, and Gentrification.” Journal of Consumer Culture. Accessed July 9, 2016. doi:10.1177/1469540515611203.

CHAPTER FIVE

Cooking, Eating, Uploading: Digital Food Cultures DEBORAH LUPTON

INTRODUCTION In the increasingly digitized societies of the Global North, food and eating practices are documented and portrayed in a multitude of ways. Digital technologies like search engines facilitate finding information about food and eating. Mobile media such as smartphones and tablet computers allow users to document their food practices, navigate to the best places to eat using geolocational software, and easily share images and comments about their food experiences with other people online. Such digital media as blogs, websites, discussion forums, mobile apps, and social media platforms provide many opportunities for the discussion and visual representation of food and eating that can reach much larger audiences than older forms of media. All of these digital technologies work to represent, locate, and share food-related images, ideas, beliefs, and practices in public forums in novel ways. They serve to “datafy” food and food practices, rendering them into a variety of digital data formats. Despite the prominence of digital technologies in contemporary food and eating practices, very little scholarship has been published on their contribution to popular food cultures. Human-computer interaction studies (a sub-discipline of information and technology research) is one of the few fields that has devoted sustained attention to digital technologies in the context of food. However, researchers in this field tend to be interested more in technological design and the user experience rather than the wider sociocultural aspects of digital food cultures. Medical and public health researchers have undertaken some studies of the representation of food in websites, apps, and social media in the interests of identifying such elements as the relative healthiness of food discussed or portrayed in these media. The lack of interest and awareness of the role and impact of digital technologies in contemporary food studies scholarship was exemplified by a recent article on the future of food studies published in the prominent journal Food, Culture and Society (Hamada et al. 2015). Digital media were mentioned only in the context of food studies scholars using such public engagement outlets as blogs to publish their work and engage in food activism. Nor have many researchers in new media and internet studies turned their attention to digital food cultures. Many features of the digitization and datafication of food cultures remain to be explored by critical food studies scholars. In this chapter, I focus on several important features of contemporary digital food cultures. These include the sharing ethos, convergences, and

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cross-platform affordances of new digital media and the increasing value that is attributed to the data generated by digital interactions and practices and the possibilities for using these data to generate insights into consumer preferences and behaviors. In the wake of these transformations, popular food cultures have attracted unprecedented visibility and contributions from lay publics. Digital data about food and food practices contribute to concepts of selfhood, embodiment, and social relations. At the same time, however, the material that is contributed by users of these new media has become commodified and repurposed well beyond the original intentions of the creators. This content can easily be shared across many forms and genres of media. It can be aggregated and archived and used by a multitude of actors and agencies as part of the digital data economy. These technologies allow for various modes of dataveillance (using digital data to watch or monitor people) (van Dijck 2014; Raley 2013) to be conducted. In some cases, this dataveillance is consensual and voluntary; in others, people do not fully realize who may be watching them and using their personal data. As I demonstrate, these features have important implications for the configurations, experiences, uses, and futures of digital food cultures. I begin the chapter by outlining key issues and concepts concerning digital technologies and their role in popular culture. I then provide an overview of the diverse ways in which food and eating have been digitized from the early years of the internet to the present day. This is followed by a discussion of the growing emphasis on image-based content in digital media and its contribution to portrayals of food and embodiment and consideration of the big data sets that these practices generate, including how these are used in the digital data economy across a diverse range of domains. The chapter ends with some comments about directions for future research into digital food cultures.

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES, DIGITAL DATA, AND POPULAR CULTURE An integral principle underlying my discussion here is the acknowledgment that digital technologies, including both hardware and software, are important contributors to, and embedded within, popular culture. This is particularly the case of digital media such as websites, discussion forums, and social media. These media, accessed via devices such as smartphones, tablet computers, iPods, and desktop and laptop computers, have become important forums for people to engage and communicate with each other, develop and maintain social networks, and share information and experiences (Lupton 2015; van Dijck 2013; Beer 2013; Raley 2013). As Beer observes, “In many ways it has now become almost impossible to think of popular culture outside of its new media infrastructures” (2013, 1). The high rate of use of internet services and apps is demonstrated by the Excelacom company’s infographic, “What happens in an internet minute?” (Leboeuf 2016). The numbers shown include over 701,000 Facebook logins, 2.78 million video views on YouTube, over 527,760 photos shared in Snapchat, over 38,100 posts to Instagram, over 347,000 tweets, and 2.4 million Google Search queries per minute. The use of digital technologies continually generates data about people’s actions, habits, behaviors, and preferences that are transmitted to the computing cloud for storage and retrieval. All of these activities are cultural practices, and the artifacts that they create—images, sounds, words—are cultural objects. They are special types of cultural objects, however, in their

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existence as digitized materials. Not only are these digital cultural objects easily generated via the use of digital technologies, but they can readily be shared across devices and software, archived in digital databases, and used for many purposes. The term “participatory culture” has been used to describe the ways in which digital media offer these opportunities to create and consume content (Beer and Burrows 2010; Beer 2013). While traditional media outlets have enabled participatory culture to a limited extent, contemporary digital technologies allow people to communicate with others easily and share material online. The sharing ethos is a central feature of digital participatory culture (John 2013a; Gehl 2014). This ethos supports the idea that digital participation is highly social, interactive, and collaborative. Users generate material online that can be readily shared with other users, who can then use this material for their own purposes. This is a form of collaborative consumption, in which individual pursuits and motivations are part of social interactions that benefit all participants (John 2013b). The technological capacities of contemporary digital media are also important to digital participation. The growing convergences and cross-platform affordances of digital technologies facilitate content creation, sharing, and interactivity. Many apps, platforms, and devices are now designed to enable the ready movement and sharing of material. Thus, for example, a photograph captured on a smartphone can quickly be shared with other people on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, and Twitter straight from the phone. Once the image is uploaded to these sites, it becomes part of the databases of the developers of these platforms, who can use it in various ways. These developments toward participation, sharing, interactivity, and the technological convergence of digital media generate quantities of digital data (usually referred to as “big data”) in unprecedented volume and rate of production. In response, a digital data economy has developed, in which data about people’s tastes, preferences, and habits have become invested with significant value (Beer 2013; Andrejevic 2013; Kitchin 2014). While digital participation builds on and further facilitates the sharing ethos of internet communication (John 2013a), it has also become harnessed to the motives of commercial endeavors. Many business and industries have recognized the value of digital data about cultural practices for researching consumer behavior and informing the marketing, advertising, and distribution of goods and services. While users who upload content to online platforms and apps do so either for private purposes or because they want to engage in collaborative consumption and participate in the sharing and communal ethos that these platforms and apps promote, their unpaid labor is exploited by the developers and other parties (Gehl 2014; van Dijck 2013). Sometimes users are aware of the ways in which others are exploiting their personal data; in many other cases this happens without their knowledge or consent. The expanding industry of data mining and harvesting has emerged in response to the plethora of big data generated by people’s engagements online and with media such as apps and self-tracking devices. Members of this industry are proficient in accessing, manipulating, and analyzing personal data from diverse datasets and databases to configure and profit from the new forms of knowledge they are able to develop from these sources (Andrejevic, Hearn, and Kennedy 2015; Pasquale 2014). Such processes, as well as those undertaken using algorithmic calculations by companies including many of the internet empires, work to rank, sort, and profile people and their cultural practices and preferences. In this way, internet companies attempt to better target advertising and send notifications to users based on their previous consumption activities (Striphas 2015). These algorithmic strategies have significant implications for popular cultural practices,

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in terms of the kinds of material people are offered by companies when they go online. The personalization and customization of data analytics result in targeted advertising, special offers, and recommendation systems such as those offered by Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Spotify, and Netflix to profile and categorize people’s preferences based on their online interactions, potentially shaping the future tastes and actions of consumers. Algorithms, therefore, can have recursive effects, in documenting, predicting, and manipulating people’s behaviors (Beer 2013; Cheney-Lippold 2011).

DIGITAL FOOD CULTURES: FROM WEB 1.0 TO WEB 2.0 Changes in the affordances of digital devices, the internet, and the World Wide Web since their emergence in the 1980s have led to a proliferation of these practices. The early years of the web (often referred to as “Web 1.0”), spanning the ten years or so from the mid-1990s to the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, were characterized by the development of websites, discussion forums, wikis, and blogs that provided information about food (such as offering recipes and nutritional advice) and some limited facility for users to interact with each other. Search engines like Google Search developed, allowing users to easily search the internet for food-related queries. Consumers were able to shop for their groceries online using several websites devoted to this service, often offered by major supermarket chains as well as niche providers such as organic food purveyors. Websites developed by a wide range of authors, including the restaurant and food industries and food magazines as well as everyday people, special interest groups, and health organizations, have proliferated, presenting many different topics related to food and eating. Websites like Celiac.com (first established in 1995) provide information and support for people with celiac disease and those seeking a gluten-free diet. Discussion forums are offered on websites such as eGullet, a service for the eGullet Society for Culinary Arts & Letters, Restaurant Professionals Forum. Forums such as VeggieBoards, for vegetarians and vegans, also facilitate interactions between like-minded members wanting to exchange information and advice. Food activist efforts are supported by websites like those offered by the Organic Consumers Association, its tagline claiming that it is campaigning for nothing less than “health, justice, sustainability, peace, and democracy” (Organic Consumers Association 2016). Since the emergence of the internet, food blogs have been a particularly popular way for amateurs and professionals alike to write about food and eating, assisted by the introduction of blogging platforms like Blogger and WordPress (Rousseau 2012). By 2013, a list of most common blog categories showed food as the eighth-most common topic, with over 2 million blogs on it (Gaille 2013). These blogs cover an extensive range of food-related topics, including providing recipes and discussions of food preparation techniques, focusing on health-related eating and nutrition and special dietary needs related to allergies, intolerances, or ethical food choices, discussing ways to purchase and prepare food on a limited budget and directing attention to food-related political issues. A list of the most popular and influential American food blogs published online in early September 2016 is illustrative of the diversity of food blogs. The top five blogs are headed by Serious Eats, a blog that combines advice, recipes, and news about sourcing and preparing gourmet food; followed by The Pioneer Woman, a more personal blog

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written by a woman living in a rural area of the United States, combining chatty accounts of her life with recipes; Simply Recipes, which presents recipes for home-cooked family meals; Vegetarian Recipes of India, written by a blogger based in India; and Skinny Taste, focusing on tasty food that is low in calories (American Food Bloggers 2016). With the advent of mobile computing, social media, and apps, new ways of using the web emerged in what is often referred to as “Web 2.0” or “the social web.” Users could more readily connect to the internet at virtually any time and location, and easily generate, share, and comment on digital content. These affordances have promoted the expansion of digital food cultures. Such practices as posting restaurant reviews to platforms like Yelp and TripAdvisor have proliferated. YouTube has allowed amateur and professional cooks alike to upload videos demonstrating cooking techniques, often on dedicated cooking channels. The most successful of these attract tens of millions of views and feature hundreds of videos. An analysis of YouTube (Jarboe 2015) found that by 2015, food content had received nearly 41 billion views, with approximately 14,000 creators uploading their food videos in that year alone. Food topics are the fourth-most popular category on the platform, after gaming, how-to-style, and comedy videos. Views for cakebaking content constitute one-fifth of all food content views. While British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver was the most highly viewed YouTube food content contributor, he was followed by several amateur cooks in attracting the highest number of views. Social media have been central to political and activist endeavors (Shirky 2011; Obar, Zube, and Lampe 2012), and this is true of civic engagement and collective activism related to food issues. Social media like Facebook and Twitter have been taken up by food activists to draw attention to their causes and communicate with interested parties. The Huffington Post published an article on “250 must-follow Twitter feeds for every food activist” in 2015 (Nierenberg 2015), listing Twitter handles for individuals, groups, and organizations working in activism related to such issues as climate change, food waste, food security, safety and sustainability, world hunger, poverty and malnutrition, organic and pesticide-free food production, health promotion, agricultural policy, and fair trade. Newer digital technologies have emerged over the past decade or so. Geolocational software, as enshrined in platforms and apps such as Foursquare, enables users to both readily identify places to eat out in their area and “check in” to show friends where they are eating. Apps related to food and eating abound in the major app stores. When I checked the apps listed under the search term “food” in the Google Play Store in late July 2016, the types of apps included restaurant finders like Zomato (5 to 10 million installs), restaurant review apps (Urban Restaurant Spoon Reviews, 5 to 10 million installs), food-related games for children like Lego Duplo Food (5 to 10 million installs) and Toca Kitchen (10 to 50 million installs) and games for adults (Food Quiz, 5 to 10 million installs, What Food and Food Street, both 1 to 5 million installs), recipe apps (Food Network in the Kitchen, 1 to 5 million installs, Yummly Recipes and Shopping List, 1 to 5 million installs), calorie counters (Calorie Counter—MyFitnessPal, 10 to 50 million installs), apps to enhance photos of food taken with users’ smartphones (Foodie— Delicious Camera, 1 to 5 million installs), and food delivery apps (iFood and Food Panda, both 5 to 10 million installs). As the numbers of downloads recorded by Google Play demonstrate, these apps were all very popular. Their popularity suggests the multiplicity of pleasures and uses that app users find in food apps. Food-related games and quizzes suggest the attraction of the ludification of food, while restaurant review apps and food delivery apps meet people’s desire to seek out the best or most convenient dining experiences. These types of apps

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engage with the interactions between food and entertainment and leisure cultures. Apps for recipes and food preparation techniques attest to the importance of people being able to cook competently, also contributing to the concept of food as pleasurable and performative. In contrast, the extreme popularity of calorie-counting apps represents the ways in which food cultures are permeated by concepts of health and the importance of body weight management.

FOOD IMAGERY AND EMBODIMENT IN NEW DIGITAL MEDIA Digital media platforms offer spaces for heightened visibility of bodily practices and displays, inviting a type of watching from other users that has been dubbed “social” or “participatory” surveillance (Marwick 2012; Albrechtslund and Lauritsen 2013). Visual images, often organized by way of hashtags used to signify their content and audience, are particularly important in the latest digital media. “Food selfies” are photos that people take of the food they have prepared or purchased (with or without inclusion of the phototakers in the photos) and share on social media platforms before or while consuming it. The food selfie trend has become so popular that tips and advice on how best to take this type of image are available online. According to one such blog post, food selfie takers should consider such features as the lighting and the crockery used to display the food, the presentation of the food itself, and the filters used to enhance shots. As I observed earlier, apps for manipulating food images are also commonly downloaded. The image-focused social media platforms Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Snapchat have gathered momentum in the past few years, providing spaces for a proliferation of portrayals of people cooking and eating food and of food itself. The hashtag #foodporn (and related tag #foodgasm) is frequently used on these platforms when users are sharing images of food. “Food porn” is used to describe the attractive qualities that people seek when visually portraying food in media such as cookbooks, television cooking programs, websites, and social media platforms. It suggests the performative dimensions of these images, which are manipulated to incite feelings of desire or envy, and the emphasis on appearance over other qualities (Dejmanee 2016). Some users go further by using #fatfoodporn to post images of and celebrate food that is culturally coded as “fatty” or “fattening.” Images posted using this hashtag on Tumblr, for example, feature French fries, burgers, cakes, bacon, pasta, pancakes, pizza, and cookies. Food selfies and other visual images of food and eating on social media also frequently draw attention to the shapes and sizes of human bodies and their assumed relative health statuses. In contrast to the food porn representations that focus on highlighting the sensory pleasures of food are visual images that focus on celebrating and performing health and fitness. Other common hashtags on social media to tag images of food include #fitness, #fitspo and #thinspo (short for “fitspiration” and “thinspiration”) and #eatclean, #healthylife and #health or #healthy. All of these are used to include images of food or food consumption activities that refer to foods that are culturally coded as “healthy,” “unfattening,” or “clean.” Images of food such as fresh juices, green smoothies, fruit, ancient grains, salads, and muesli are often accompanied by those of the user in workout wear, demonstrating her or his slim (and often very thin) or taut and muscly body and suggesting that this body has been achieved partially through the consumption of these kinds of foods. Even more extreme representations of restricted eating and very

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thin bodies are found on “pro ana” (pro-anorexia) social media. Thus, for example, a search using the #thinspo hashtag on Tumblr and Twitter reveals a plethora of images of emaciated (nearly all female) bodies and images, lists, or advice about containing calorie intake and resisting the temptation to eat. Fat activists, for their part, use hashtags like #obeselifestyle and #notyourgoodfatty to highlight images of themselves eating decadent food as a way of countering fat stigma and challenging assumptions about the kind of diet fat people “should” be consuming (Pausé 2015; Lupton 2017). The convergences and cross-platform affordances of contemporary digital media are evident in websites such as Foodspotting, which encourages users to take photographs of food they enjoy (mostly when dining out) and upload them to the site using geolocation tagging, so that other users can see where they purchased the food. The platform also offers a blog and an app and encourages Instagram users to tag photos with the #foodspotting hashtag. Another example of a platform that combines several different media is the food blog Food Babe, created by American Vani Hari. Hari, a conventionally attractive and slim young woman, publishes material about nutrition, food safety, clean eating, and health, combined with photos of herself with a radiant smile and clad in clingy outfits. She also has Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook profiles and YouTube videos. Hari has embedded one of these videos on her website stating her major claims and showing “before” photos of herself demonstrating the changes she has wrought in her own health and body weight. Hari uses her social media and blog presence to sign members up to health and weight-loss programs and to sell her book The Food Babe Way (which reached the New York Times bestseller list soon after publication). Here fitspiration and thinspiration combine with food activism, health, and wellness discourses in the strategic use of a range of media to maximize attention, achieve celebrity status, and generate sales. Hari boasts that her website receives 3 million unique visitors each month. All of these representations of eating practices related to body size involve people voluntarily displaying their eating practices and bodies. For those who seek to perform and display clean eating, slimness, physical fitness, or extreme thinness of their flesh, the association made between food, health, and embodiment is that of restriction, control, and self-discipline (Lupton 2017). In contrast, food porn aficionados and fat activists concentrate on celebrating excess and the carnivalesque potential of enjoying eating the kinds of food that are culturally coded as fattening, unhealthy, only for special occasions, or junk. They draw on and reproduce the pleasures of transgressing culturally accepted norms of appropriate bodily deportment and food practices. Images of “unclean” “junk” foods are juxtaposed with burgeoning fleshy bodies, drawing attention to and celebrating the direct association that is typically made between fatty foods and fat bodies.

BIG FOOD DATA Another mode of digital surveillance afforded by new media involves dataveillance using big food data. The digital data configured from human-digital technological encounters potentially reveal novel insights into popular food cultures. Analysis of the vast data sets generated by social media content referring to food can identify aspects of the social, cultural, temporal, and geographical patterns and differences in consumption and preferences. Thus, for example, a post published on the Twitter company’s blog reported the findings of the company’s analysis of discussions using the hashtag #coffee in sixty-five languages over a seven-day period (Pigott 2015). A corpus of 3.2 million tweets was used

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for this analysis. The findings revealed interesting differences between countries. While the peak time for mentions of coffee from American tweeters was around the start of the working day (around 9.00 a.m.), in Turkey there were two bumps in coffee tweets: around 2.00 p.m. and also around 7.00 p.m. These data point to cultural differences in coffee consumption norms. While Americans tweeted about drinking coffee as part of preparing for the working day, for Turkish tweeters it is part of social gatherings, following lunch or dinner. Apps provide a major way by which developers elicit personal information from users that they can then use for their own purposes. Although many apps do not directly require users to input personal data, when people sign up to download apps they are frequently asked by the developers to consent to share personal details like their gender, birth date, contact list, or geolocation (Seneviratne et al. 2015). Several food apps do ask for additional information about users. This is particularly true in the case of weight-loss apps, which often require users to input details such as their age, weight and height, diet, health status, food intolerances, and exercise routines. Data uploaded to geolocational platforms and apps can identify other elements of popular food cultures. A study of Foursquare restaurant check-ins sought to identify users’ cultural food preferences across countries, cities, and regions (Silva et al. 2014). The researchers found that people living in countries that are geographically close often share food preferences. In some cases, however, the correlation was stronger with countries further away: for example, the correlation of drinking practices between Brazil and France was stronger than between England and France. Cities in the United States and Brazil demonstrated similar drinking and fast food habits but almost no correlation in Slow Food habits. When the researchers looked at daily and weekly food and drink patterns comparing Brazil, the United States, and England, they found a strong correlation in temporal patterns between the latter two countries (both of which had their main meal in the evening, while Brazilians consumed it in the middle of the day). Changes over time in food trends can also be identified in big food data sets. The most popular search engine by far is Google Search. It offers a tool, Google Trends, which allows for the tracking of searches conducted by users over time. Google uses its own data to generate reports about search trends. One such report focused on the findings revealed by Google Trends about the most popular food-related searches conducted in the United States between 2014 and 2016 (Think with Google 2016). It showed that ramen, rigatoni, bibimbap, linguine, empanada, uncured bacon, and bundt cakes have received sustained and rising searcher attention, while turmeric, jackfruit, cauliflower rice, sourdough bread, funfetti, and vegan donuts have suddenly received a high level of interest. Those foods gradually losing the interest of searchers over this time-period included gluten-free cupcakes, evaporated cane juice, wheat-free bread, bacon cupcakes, and bacon cinnamon rolls, while rainbow bagel, vanilla bean paste, Dutch pancake, mulligan stew, buffalo chicken fries, and chocolate slices suddenly lost searchers’ attention. Google noted that several broader trends are apparent in these data. One is the interest in functional foods. This analysis showed that the term “best foods for . . .” has increased in volume, often followed by such words as “skin,” “energy,” “acid reflux,” “your brain” and “gym workout.” This trend suggests that Google Search users have become more interested in the functional uses of food over the past decade or so. Foods that have become culturally designed as “healthy” or even as “superfoods” have also attracted far more attention—turmeric, apple cider vinegar, avocado oil, bitter melon, and kefir are among the foodstuffs receiving a higher volume of searches. Searchers were also looking

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for ways to consume or prepare these foods. Other trends observed in these data were an interest in exotic foods from non-Western cultures, experimenting with ways of cooking pork and related products such as uncured bacon, looking for interesting and quick-toprepare snack foods in small servings (such as mug cakes), and the comeback of pasta. In the context of the digital data economy, digitized information about food-and eating-related habits and practices is now accorded commercial, managerial, research, political, and government as well as private value. Focus has turned to ways of harvesting or scraping these data to provide insights into populations’ food preferences and practices. Sometimes these data are used for the purposes of medical and public health research. Researchers have viewed social media content and other forms of online interactions as ways of researching how members of the public are engaging in preventive health, health promotion, or self-management activities in relation to their diet. They have conducted investigations into Facebook and Twitter content related to diabetes and weight loss, for example (De la Torre-Díez, Díaz-Pernas, and Antón-Rodríguez 2012; Pagoto et al. 2014; Greene et al. 2011) or the calorie content of Instagram food images (Sharma and De Choudhury 2015). The possibilities of using digital technologies to generate information by crowdsourcing or citizen science projects have also been explored. Some of these projects are attempts to develop better databases for public health or food activist initiatives. The University of Sydney’s The George Institute for Global Health, for example, has developed the FoodSwitch app, which enables users to scan packaged food product barcodes to determine the nutritional content. Users are also able to contribute to the product database by uploading information about products that are not yet present. They are asked to take photos of the front of the product, the nutritional information panel, and the ingredients on its packaging, which are then sent through the app to be validated for inclusion in the database by the research team supporting the app. The app has versions for New Zealand, the UK, South Africa, India, and China, and a US version is in development. People interested in ethical consumption can use apps like Buycott and GoodGuide to crowdsource information about the provenance and nutrition of food products by scanning their barcodes with their phones, again with the ideal of sharing data as a collective move toward promoting and supporting these kinds of practices (Eli et al. 2016). More often, however, big food data analytics are turned to commercial endeavors. The Google Trends analytics report cited earlier, for example, makes a direct link to these results and what they imply for food marketing and branding. The report suggests that the knowledge of which foodstuffs are trending and what related information users are looking for can be employed to direct consumers’ attention to them via marketing strategies. Food industry companies are now urged to exploit the types of information that consumers freely generate on social media sites for competitive analysis, branding, and marketing strategies. Thus, for example, a recent study used text mining to analyze Facebook and Twitter content (or what the researchers described as “hidden knowledge”) on three large American pizza chains (He, Zha, and Li 2013). The researchers sought to identify the emotions expressed by contributors around such features as ordering and the delivery of pizzas, comments about the quality of the pizzas they ordered and consumed and the types of photos that were posted. They conclude that this kind of analysis can help food brands learn more about how their competitors are portrayed as well as about consumer attitudes to their own brand. Marketing companies and food-related industries are attempting to use the digital data generated by online interactions to better target and promote their products. For

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example, the editors of the Taste.com.au website (associated with Taste magazine), which publishes recipes, observed from the search queries generated by visitors to the site that there was a growing interest in quinoa. They responded to this by quickly including more quinoa recipes on the site to fulfill demand, as well as placing a quinoa recipe on the magazine’s front page. This strategy is also evident in McDonald’s Canada effort to research tweets about coffee by Canadians. It found that people tweeted most about coffee on Wednesdays and in the month of March. The company used these data in their promotional tweets, as in the following tweet: “Did you know Canadians tweet most about #coffee on Wednesdays? Grab a #FreeCoffee today and join the conversation!” Market research companies have been at the forefront of developing apps designed to monitor consumer food behavior. Using these apps, they can recruit people to collect information on their shopping habits in real-time or to answer questions on products as they move around a supermarket. In the effort to “earn” public attention, food manufacturers have encouraged consumers to download recipes using their products, cook the food, take a photo of the finished product, and then upload to Instagram as a way of achieving free publicity for their products. The American Bolthouse Farms company, which produces and sells fresh vegetables, juices, and salad dressings, undertook an analysis of food-related hashtags on social media. It found that there was an average of 1.7 million such hashtags used each day, with 37 percent referring to fruit and vegetables and the remainder to other foods (Bolthouse Farms 2015). It used this information as part of a marketing campaign to encourage people to talk more about fruit and vegetables in social media interactions (and at the same time to support and publicize the kinds of products the company produces). In the light of the manifold ways in which dataveillance of people’s food consumption and preparation habits operates, it is important to acknowledge issues of data security and privacy in relation to the reams of details about food cultures that have entered into the digital data economy. Critics have begun to identify the ways in which such information as people’s diets, physical activity, and body weight are used by health and life insurance companies, for example, in determining whether they should be provided coverage and how high their premiums should be (Lupton 2016). Developers often fail to inform users that their data are available to third parties (Ackerman 2013; SarasohnKahn 2014). Sensitive medical conditions can become identifiable by the examination of other datasets, such as supermarket or pharmacy purchasing habits (Rosenblat et al. 2014). Cloud computing provides great opportunities for ease of data storage, sharing, and access from diverse locations. However, it also poses significant data privacy and storage risks. During transmission and storage, many opportunities exist for data leakage, breaches, and hacking to occur (Ali, Khan, and Vasilakos 2015). Geolocation data recorded and emitted by mobile devices and apps can reveal to others the places people have visited and what their patterns of movements are, leaving them open to potential criminal harms. Personal data about people’s consumption habits, health functions, and bodies are a frequent target of cybercriminal activity (Ablon, Libicki, and Golay 2015). Personal data, therefore, have a “capacity for betrayal” (Nafus 2014). They can reveal more about people to others than they may want. Many people have little idea of where the personal data they generate when going online or using apps end up and how they are being used for commercial or other purposes, both legal and illicit (Lupton and Michael 2015). They often express their feelings of powerlessness over how their personal data are used by others and can feel ambivalent about companies or government agencies

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having access to their information (Rainie and Duggan 2016; Rainie 2015). These issues have yet to be acknowledged or discussed in the literatures on digital food data.

CONCLUSION As I have demonstrated in this chapter, contemporary digital food cultures are characterized by several elements that continue the integral role of media in food cultures. The affordances of digital technologies, in datafying phenomena and rendering them into digital formats, generate new ways of representing and discussing food. Such aspects as the visual properties of food and consuming bodies, the geolocation of sites in which food is prepared, purchased, and consumed, and the quantification of food and bodies are brought to the fore in digital food cultures. The proliferation and unceasing generation of digital data about food and eating is also a distinctive feature of new digital food cultures. Via these technologies and practices, more information about food and eating practices, both at the individual and the social level, is produced and stored as digital data than ever before. Digital media directed at representing, documenting, and monitoring people’s food and eating practices can be important contributors to their concepts of selfhood, identity, social relations, and embodiment. Using digital technologies, people are able to monitor and reflect on their habits and preferences and share these with others. They can use digital data to perform aspects of selfhood and social and cultural belonging. They are able to step outside traditional boundaries that delineate who are considered to be the expert voices in food preparation and nutrition and engage in aesthetic practices related to food choice and consumption that previously were the preserve of traditional media outlets. Digital food media also provide a way of developing and contributing to social networks and communities around such aspects as health, fitness, body size, ethical and sustainable food consumption, and food activism. As I have shown, drawing distinctions between how digital material about food should be classified (work or leisure, pleasure or health, private or public, commercial or personal, and so on) has become increasingly difficult, given that this material is created and shared across contexts and repurposed in potentially unlimited ways. I have identified some elements of digital food cultures in this chapter, but many others remain to be researched. The digital data that digital technologies generate pose a number of questions for further scholarship. These data sets provide opportunities for food studies scholars to identify patterns in food consumption, habits, and preferences. The ways in which people, groups, and organizations make use of digital food data also requires analysis, including issues of data privacy and security related to personal information. We know little as yet about how the food industry, government organizations, and food activists access and use big food data, or how individuals generate, respond to, and incorporate these data as part of their everyday lives. The types of communities and networks that are configured via these technologies and the purposes they serve also deserve greater attention. Another key research question is developing understanding of the ways in which the affordances of digital technologies, including digital recommendation systems and notifications encouraging certain kinds of consumption, are both generative and delimiting of food practices. All of these research questions require analyses that are aware of and can identify the social, cultural, and geographical contexts in which people take up, resist, or reinvent digital technologies as part of popular food cultures. Finally, food studies researchers need to be responsive to future developments in digital technologies. On the horizon are innovative technologies such as 3D printers

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for fabricating foods, augmented reality for enhancing the fine dining experience, and “smart” fridges and cooking implements that can track users’ food consumption habits and interact with other devices they are using, such as fitness trackers and calorie counter apps. As new digital technologies continue to be developed and released on the market, ever more research questions and topics for scholars interested in popular food cultures emerge.

REFERENCES “American Food Bloggers.” Last modified 3 September 2016. http://americanfoodbloggers.com/. Ablon, Lillian, Martin Libicki, and Andrea Golay. 2015. Markets for Cybercrime Tools and Stolen Data. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation. Ackerman, Linda. 2013. Mobile Health and Fitness Applications and Information Privacy. San Diego, CA: Privacy Rights Clearing House. Albrechtslund, Anders, and Peter Lauritsen. 2013. “Spaces of Everyday Surveillance: Unfolding an Analytical Concept of Participation.” Geoforum 49:310–16. Ali, Mazhar, Samee U. Khan, and Athanasios V. Vasilakos. 2015. “Security in Cloud Computing: Opportunities and Challenges.” Information Sciences 305:357–83. Andrejevic, Mark. 2013. Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know. New York: Routledge. Andrejevic, Mark, Alison Hearn, and Helen Kennedy. 2015. “Cultural Studies of Data Mining: Introduction.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 18 (4–5):379–94. Beer, David. 2013. Popular Culture and New Media: The Politics of Circulation. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Beer, David, and Roger Burrows. 2010. “Consumption, Prosumption and Participatory Web Cultures: An Introduction.” Journal of Consumer Culture 10 (1):3–12. Bolthouse Farms. 2015. “Bolthouse Farms Challenges America to Get the Internet Healthy”. Bolthouse Farms. Accessed 24 July 2016. http://www.bolthouse.com/blog/u_r_what_u_post. Cheney-Lippold, John. 2011. “A New Algorithmic Identity: Soft Biopolitics and the Modulation of Control.” Theory, Culture & Society 28 (6): 164–81. De la Torre-Díez, Isabel, Francisco Javier Díaz-Pernas, and Míriam Antón-Rodríguez. 2012. “A Content Analysis of Chronic Diseases Social Groups on Facebook and Twitter.” Telemedicine Journal and e-Health 18 (6): 44–408. Dejmanee, Tisha. 2016. “‘Food Porn’ as Postfeminist Play: Digital Femininity and the Female Body on Food Blogs.” Television & New Media 17 (5): 429–48. Eli, Karin, Catherine Dolan, Tanja Schneider, and Stanley Ulijaszek. 2016. “Mobile Activism, Material Imaginings, and the Ethics of the Edible: Framing Political Engagement through the Buycott App.” Geoforum 74: 63–73. Gaille, Brandon. 2013. “43 Most Popular Blog Category Topics”. WP Virtuoso. Accessed 26 July 2016. http://www.wpvirtuoso.com/43-most-popular-blog-category-topics/. Gehl, Robert. 2014. Reverse Engineering Social Media: Revealing the Underside of Our Technology-Laden World. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Greene, Jeremy A, Niteesh K Choudhry, Elaine Kilabuk, and William H Shrank. 2011. “Online Social Networking by Patients with Diabetes: A Qualitative Evaluation of Communication with Facebook.” Journal of General Internal Medicine 26 (3): 287–92. Hamada, Shingo, Richard Wilk, Amanda Logan, Sara Minard, and Amy Trubek. 2015. “The Future of Food Studies.” Food, Culture & Society 18 (1): 167–86.

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He, Wu, Shenghua Zha, and Ling Li. 2013. “Social Media Competitive Analysis and Text Mining: A Case Study in the Pizza Industry.” International Journal of Information Management 33 (3): 464–72. Jarboe, Greg. 2015. “Us Viewers Watch More UK Food Videos on Youtube Than the British”. Tubular Insights. Accessed 27 July 2016. http://www.reelseo.com/food-videos-youtube/. John, Nicholas. 2013a. “Sharing and Web 2.0: The Emergence of a Keyword.” New Media & Society 15 (2): 167–82. John, Nicholas A. 2013b. “The Social Logics of Sharing.” The Communication Review 16 (3): 113–31. Kitchin, Rob. 2014. The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences. London: Sage. Leboeuf, Kelly. 2016. “2016 Update: What Happens in One Internet Minute?”. Excelacom. Accessed 24 July 2016. http://www.excelacom.com/resources/blog/2016-update-whathappens-in-one-internet-minute. Lupton, Deborah. 2015. Digital Sociology. London: Routledge. Lupton, Deborah. 2016. The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lupton, Deborah. 2017. “Digital Media and Body Weight, Shape and Size: An Introduction and Review.” Fat Studies 6(2): 119–34. Lupton, Deborah, and Mike Michael. 2015. “Big Data Seductions and Ambivalences”. Discover Society. Accessed 5 October 2015. http://discoversociety.org/2015/07/30/big-dataseductions-and-ambivalences/. Marwick, Alice. 2012. “The Public Domain: Social Surveillance in Everyday Life.” Surveillance & Society 9 (4): 378–93. Nafus, Dawn. 2014. “Stuck Data, Dead Data, and Disloyal Data: The Stops and Starts in Making Numbers into Social Practices.” Distinktion 15 (2): 208–22. Nierenberg, Danielle. 2015. “250 Must-Follow Twitter Feeds for Every Food Activist”. Huffington Post. Accessed 27 July 2016. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniellenierenberg/250-must-follow-twitter-f_b_7934094.html. Obar, Jonathan A, Paul Zube, and Clifford Lampe. 2012. “Advocacy 2.0: An Analysis of How Advocacy Groups in the United States Perceive and Use Social Media as Tools for Facilitating Civic Engagement and Collective Action.” Journal of Information Policy 2: 1–25. Organic Consumers Association. 2016. Last modified 27 September 2016. https://www. organicconsumers.org/. Pagoto, Sherry, Kristin L Schneider, Martinus Evans, Molly E Waring, Brad Appelhans, Andrew M Busch, Matthew C Whited, Herpreet Thind, and Michelle Ziedonis. 2014. “Tweeting It Off: Characteristics of Adults Who Tweet About a Weight Loss Attempt.” Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 21 (6): 1032–1037. Pasquale, Frank. 2014. “The Dark Market for Personal Data”. The New York Times. Accessed 8 April 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/opinion/the-dark-market-for-personaldata.html. Pausé, Cat. 2015. “Rebel Heart: Performing Fatness Wrong Online”. M/C Journal 18 (3). Accessed 12 January 2016. http://www.journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/ article/viewArticle/977. Pigott, Fiona. 2015. “Analyzing Coffee around the World”. blog.Twitter.com Accessed 22 July 2016. https://blog.twitter.com/2015/twitter-data-coffee.

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Rainie, Lee. 2015. “Americans Conflicted About Sharing Personal Information with Companies”. Accessed 15 January 2016. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/12/30/ americans-conflicted-about-sharing-personal-information-with-companies/. Rainie, Lee, and Maeve Duggan. 2016. “Privacy and Information Sharing”. Accessed 30 January 2016. http://www.pewinternet.org/files/2016/01/PI_2016.01.14_Privacy-and-InfoSharing_FINAL.pdf. Raley, Rita. 2013. “Dataveillance and Countervailance.” In "Raw Data" Is an Oxymoron, edited by Lisa Gitelman, 121–45. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rosenblat, Alex, Kate Wikelius, danah boyd, Seeta Peña Gangadharan, and Corrine Yu. 2014. “Data & Civil Rights: Health Primer”. Data & Society Research Institute. Accessed 16 December 2014. http://www.datacivilrights.org/pubs/2014-1030/Health.pdf. Rousseau, Signe. 2012. Food and Social Media: You Are What You Tweet. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press. Sarasohn-Kahn, Jane. 2014. Here’s Looking at You: How Personal Health Information Is Being Tracked and Used. No place of publication provided: California Healthcare Foundation. Seneviratne, Suranga, Aruna Seneviratne, Prasant Mohapatra, and Anirban Mahanti. 2015. “Your Installed Apps Reveal Your Gender and More!” Mobile Computing and Communications Review 18 (3): 55–61. Sharma, Sanket S, and Munmun De Choudhury. 2015. “Measuring and Characterizing Nutritional Information of Food and Ingestion Content in Instagram.” Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW '15), Florence. Shirky, Clay. 2011. “The Political Power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change.” Foreign Affairs 90 (1): 28–41. Silva, Thiago H., Pedro OS de Melo, Jussara Almeida, Mirco Musolesi, and Antonio Loureiro. 2014. “You Are What You Eat (and Drink): Identifying Cultural Boundaries by Analyzing Food & Drink Habits in Foursquare”. arXiv. Accessed 28 July 2016. http://arxiv.org/ abs/1404.1009. Striphas, Ted. 2015. “Algorithmic Culture.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 18 (4–5): 395–412. Think with Google. 2016. “Food Trends 2016”. Think With Google. Accessed 22 July 2016. https://think.storage.googleapis.com/docs/FoodTrends-2016.pdf. van Dijck, José. 2013. The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. van Dijck, José. 2014. “Datafication, Dataism and Dataveillance: Big Data between Scientific Paradigm and Ideology.” Surveillance & Society 12 (2): 197–208.

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Visceral Practices: Material Cultures of Eating

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CHAPTER SIX

A History of Food in Popular Culture Over the Life Span AMY BENTLEY AND SHAYNE LESLIE FIGUEROA

Jars of Gerber baby food carrots and peas, brightly colored lunch boxes festooned with beloved Scooby-Doo cartoon characters, Atkins low-carb ready-to-eat meals, and Ensure liquid supplements: What do these products have in common and how do they differ? How are they produced and marketed to certain segments of the population, and what do they reveal about those who purchase and use them? The consumption of food is an extraordinarily social activity laden with complex and shifting layers of meaning. Not only what we eat, but how and why we eat, tells us much about society, history, cultural change, and humans’ views of themselves. For example, what we think of as “baby food” as opposed to “food for the elderly” is in part defined by popular media, culture, and common understanding, and also current understandings of nutrition and health, notions of modernity, safety, and availability. This chapter explores the notion of food in popular culture as it is demarcated by age over the life span—products developed for a particular stage of development or marketing niche, whose purpose is to fulfill some nutritional or social need, while selling products and making a profit. Whether regarded as mundane, highly trendy, or somewhere in between, these popular products or food events (as in the case of school lunch) are heavily advertised, mediated, and socially embedded in daily life. To examine food and popular culture over the life span, we have chosen four commonly understood stages, which are illuminated by a particular food product or concept: commercial baby food for infancy, school lunch for childhood, dieting products for adulthood, and food programs and supplements for the elderly. Each food category is an embodiment or representation of culture and its desires or needs in part based on the vicissitudes of corporate capitalism, government policy and practice, or both. Whether haphazardly developed or created deliberately, each in some sense marks the passage of time in human life and can function as a rite of passage. All have become codified by public institutions and are embedded in popular culture.

FOUNDATIONAL CONCEPTS OF FOOD AND AGE We approach the topic of food and popular culture over the life span from a historical perspective, noting the material conditions of their origins as well as change over time

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as these products and institutions are embedded in culture. There is currently little if any scholarship that examines food and popular culture over the life span, though bits and pieces exist in a variety of disciplines. A wealth of scholarly literature on the life span exists in the more established social sciences such as developmental psychology, and some research in popular culture/cultural studies does include attention to age. There is also food studies and material culture scholarship that examines food as it pertains to particular demographics, including age. Yet except for the growing and popular category of food memoirs, there is little food studies/food in popular culture scholarship that takes a developmental approach—research that examines, for example, a popular product or food institution as it is situated in a person’s life from infancy to old age (Belasco 2006; Hine 2007; Poppendieck 2010; Reichl 1998). Important to note is that the very notion of a “life span,” as well as what constitutes significant stages of life, are themselves historical artifacts, having been defined differently in different eras. For example, the current Western notion of “childhood” emerged in the Enlightenment and was further defined in the Victorian nineteenth century. Before then, children were thought of more as mini-adults and were treated as such, including having to work in the fields or factories as adults would, and having few opportunities for extended schooling. Moreover, scholars date the now-common category of “adolescence” as a life stage that gained acceptance in the more modern twentieth century (Aries 1962; Stearns 2011). Further, the food products and events we discuss developed as a result of mass production, marketing, and advertising, and thus most are products of the twentieth century. While industrialization as an economic and material force begins much earlier, it is in the twentieth century that there solidifies the “world of goods” as we have come to know it in the contemporary world, goods that become available to average citizens (not just the wealthy), which when combined with advertising creates both needs and wants (Douglas and Isherwood 1996). By the early twentieth century, for example, goods became coded by gender and were advertised as such. Trade cards, newspapers, and periodicals advertised cleaning supplies and packaged food items as products for the “housewife,” while products for the “man of the house” included cigarettes and aftershave lotion (Marchand 1986). With the rise of mass-produced manufactured goods, advertising takes off as well and the two become inextricably intertwined. Popular culture food products such as Cracker Jack, Lion Bars, Coca-Cola, and McDonald’s become indelibly entrenched in the popular culture imagination. Inexpensive common street foods such as fish and chips, hot dogs, pizza, and more recently kebabs or ramen, are less a part of branded iconography but still become firmly entrenched in everyday popular consumption. Such foods can be produced and consumed in an informal economy or can be part of the mass-produced and mediated industrial food system. In the United States, the post–Second World War birthrate increase created a blip in the population that, combined with increased overall wealth, gave considerable power (purchasing and otherwise) to the particular demographic known in the United States as Baby Boomers—a specific population group that captured marketers’ attention from infancy through adulthood. This increase in available goods and consumption, combined with mediated popular culture, occurs a bit later in Europe and even later in Asia as economies modernize and goods proliferate (Belasco 2006). By the late twentieth century there emerged the rise of niche marketing, the idea of positioning products and ad campaigns to appeal to a particular demographic. This was in part the result of the considerable economic power of the Baby Boomers who as an

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aggregate embraced conspicuous consumption and display of goods as a lifestyle choice. Even though advertisers had been targeting specific groups (i.e., mothers, children, professionals) since the turn of the previous century, in the 1980s corporate firms doubled down to at once create and fulfill consumer needs through niche marketing. A prime example is the development of coffee market segmentation and product development. To bolster sagging coffee consumption, firms began to market coffee as a “lifestyle” choice to Boomers in their 20s, in particular (Roseberry 1996). Of course not all popular food brands are segmented by age. Some iconic popular food brands are class based, while some are more universally marketed and consumed, such as Coca-Cola.

METHODS AND THEORY When analyzing food, popular culture, and the life span, research methods that emphasize qualitative, visual, and historical elements are useful. In addition to a focus on material culture, cultural studies, and political economy, the study of food and age in popular culture also incorporates notions of nutrition and health, and food and sensory studies, among others. A main theoretical and methodological debate is whether mass-produced, mediated food products and programs have negative or positive net value. Those who answer negatively tend to focus on nutrition and health and often view popular culture as suspect, as opium for the masses, with producers targeting the naïve consumer to the detriment of his/her health. They regard mass-produced industrial food more negatively, noting its environmental and health consequences, arguing that products are often produced cheaply, and are less nutritious (Pollan 2006; Nestle 2007). Other scholars are less pessimistic about popular culture, and assume more active agency by the consumer. Focusing more frequently on cultural or historical aspects, they often view these popular food products and institutions from a positive, yet still multifaceted, perspective. They tend to evaluate the mass-produced industrial food system over a longer period of time, and regard it as an improved paradigm when compared to a preindustrial system with greater scarcity and less variety (Lauden 2001; Watson 2006). This approach is less focused on blaming food corporations, and more focused on exploring the complicated relationship between producer and consumer. Of course, research can incorporate both of these perspectives. Through global commodification, Western notions of food use over the lifespan are being absorbed and adapted by international cultures, and becoming part of local environments, and scholars approach and analyze this trend through both of these perspectives. Our focus on both the nutritional and cultural components of food across the lifespan integrates these two perspectives, and emphasizes the importance of food in our consumer-driven popular culture. The products and programs have multiple meanings and uses, and can ultimately be assessed positively or negatively according to the context and questions asked.

FOOD IN INFANCY: INFANT FORMULA AND BABY FOOD Thanks to mass production, by the mid-twentieth century the advertising and marketing of formula and commercial baby food became the rule rather than the exception, a rite

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of passage for many Americans and eventually others in both developed and developing countries. While mothers and health professionals alike welcomed commercially mass-produced baby food as a convenient, affordable way to provide more fruits and vegetables year-round for babies, the creation and marketing of baby food helped spur the introduction of solid foods into babies’ diets at increasingly earlier and earlier ages. Both industrially produced baby food and infant formula became symbols of modernity and plenty in the industrializing world. While they offered an affordable convenience to caretakers, they also functioned to hasten the dramatic decline of breast-feeding in the twentieth century. Mid-nineteenth-century European entrepreneurs were the first to create commercial artificial human milk formulas (Levenstein 1988). Pablum, first produced in 1915 by Mead Johnson, was one of the first patented infant foods to be manufactured in North America. Gerber brand baby food, while not the first mass-produced solid baby food, began quite early, in 1929, and quickly became the leading brand through much of the world. The Gerber Baby icon, a pencil sketch of a winsome baby with large eyes staring straight at viewers, is one of the more universally recognized brand items in the United States, if not globally (Bentley 2014). By the post–Second World War era, formula and massproduced solid baby food emerged as fully naturalized products thanks to widespread availability, persistent marketing campaigns, and strategic alliance with pediatricians and childcare experts. For most parents in postwar America, the mainstream sentiment was not whether to use formula and commercial baby food, but how early, which foods first, and in what quantities. By the mid-1970s, the landscape of infant food and feeding in the United States and much of Europe was in flux. In response to worries about the deficiencies of commercial baby food, there emerged a newfound popularity of homemade baby food. Industry struggled to counter the bad publicity, and after several missteps, gradually began to respond to consumer demand by altering its products: discontinuing desserts, and removing sugar, salt, and fillers. With ever-increasing numbers of women entering and remaining in the workforce, however, combined with the expansion of product lines and the development of organics and alternative baby food companies, commercial baby food became more popular than ever. Part of the overall emerging unease over the strength and reach of the infant food industry included the activities of multinational corporations around the globe. For a decade or more, academics and activists had been warning the public about the illeffects of formula on infants, especially in low-income urban areas and in developing nations. The Swiss-based corporation Nestlé, with its powerful brand recognition, held approximately 70 percent of all formula sales, and moved decidedly into developing countries with a strategy of advertising heavily and providing mothers in hospitals with free samples. But once home, women who had used the formula samples in the hospital subsequently would often neither produce enough milk to feed their infants sufficiently, nor be able to afford the high prices of formula. Further, in trying to stretch the expensive powdered formula mothers would dilute it with extra water, or mix it with contaminated water, which often led to infant malnutrition and death (Mather 1975; Rosenthal 1974). Activists and others placed the marketing of formula in developing countries in the larger context of Western exploitation of former colonies, by which the multinational companies were creating a system where the poorer nations produced food and luxury crops for Western and developed nations while their own diets become more and more

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diminished (Norton-Taylor 1976). In 1973 the British group War on Want published a booklet accusing Nestlé of pushing formula on developing countries, resulting in infant deaths and malnutrition (Cunningham 1974). Nestlé sued the German language publisher (which published the booklet under the title Nestlé: The Baby Killer) for libel. After a two-year trial in Berne, Switzerland, the court found in favor of Nestlé, saying that they could not be held responsible for infant deaths “in terms of criminal law.” Yet when the defendants were only fined a token amount and the judge commented that Nestlé “must modify its publicity methods fundamentally,” War on Want regarded the ruling as a moral victory (Chapman 1975). This led to a widespread boycott of Nestlé, beginning in the United States and spreading to other countries. In 1981 the World Health Organization adopted a resolution, the International Code of Marketing of Breast Milk Substitutes, banning the promotion of breast milk substitutes, and creating labeling requirements. The boycott was suspended officially in 1984, though there are annual accusations of violations of the WHO Code by various companies. The first decade of the twenty-first century became for baby food makers another golden age, second only in growth and development to the original heyday of post– Second World War America. Against the cultural and economic backdrop of a major food revolution occurring in the United States, sales boomed both for the large commercial baby food producers as well as for the spate of small start-up companies, especially in the organic sector. As nutrition studies revealed for infants and toddlers a diet deficient in fruits and vegetables, and high in sugar, fat, and starches, health professionals as well as parents began to question the long-term effects of feeding infants and toddlers a largely industrial diet: industrially processed infant formula, processed white rice cereal, and commercially marketed baby food devoid of texture and imparting a “canned food” taste. The studies provided evidence that a child’s acclimation to industrially processed foods— an industrial palate—was being primed as early as six or seven months of age. Once again, as in the post–Second World War era and again later twentieth century, parents as well as some professionals began to challenge entrenched beliefs and practices regarding infant feeding, even to the point of questioning the existence and use of pureed baby food itself. By the end of the 2010s many were calling for the end of baby food as Americans had come to know it for almost a century. While under contentious debate, one fact remains consistent—infants consume baby food primarily in the home and under the direct supervision of a parent. Modern families may employ caregivers in the home or enroll infants and toddlers in day-care programs, but food choices and provision have traditionally been the responsibility of the parent. This paradigm shifts when children mature and enter the education system. It is at this point that responsibility for one-third of a child’s daily dietary intake shifts to the government, vis-à-vis school lunch programs.

SCHOOL LUNCH: FOOD IN CHILDHOOD School lunches are a universal food experience: almost all children attending school in the United States and abroad experience this midday feeding ritual. As such, school lunches are formative in that they provide cultural context and social cues that provide a normative definition of what constitutes a proper, culturally specific diet. These institutional midday meals, served in American and European schools since the turn of the twentieth century, and begun later in developing countries, functioned to acculturate immigrant populations in particular. As immigrant children in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, for example,

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grew to accept and enjoy school lunch, they became accustomed to and even preferred “American” foods over dishes served at home from their country of origin. Begun as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) program in the Depression 1930s, the US government began to promote free school lunches throughout the first part of the twentieth century. The program transitioned into the National School Lunch Program, which was signed into law in 1946. Since then, the US Department of Agriculture has regulated lunch content at public schools, as do governments in other countries as well (Rutledge 2015). Internationally, lunch programs developed at the same time as in the United States, in response to a variety of social, economic, and political factors. A small handful of countries proceeded with a universal free school meal program: Sweden, Finland, Estonia, and the Czech Republic (Rutledge 2015). The National School Lunch Program served five billion lunches in 2015 (USDA 2016), and the federal government provides per meal monetary reimbursements to schools as well as agricultural commodities to supplement the kitchens. Although a federal program, states and local constituencies are responsible for the organization and management of their own lunch programs. School meal prices vary by state and district, but in the early twenty-first century on average, a full-price US lunch at the high school level costs $2.42. In the early years, lunch contents often included calorie-dense, enriched foods that could provide sustained energy: hot soups and breads. In order to accommodate the postwar population boom of the 1950s, thousands of new schools were built, and the large cafeteria became a necessary element of school design. Sandwiches and soup remained popular in school lunch programs, both for the convenience of preparation and for reasons of taste, though the menu options expanded greatly. With meeting nutrition requirements a priority, a 1965 USDA-issued cookbook advised cafeteria cooks that “vegetable appeal can be added by using spices and herbs, garnishes, and imaginative combinations.” The recipe options skewed toward hearty, quickly prepared fare that could meet the demands of an ever-growing student population. Historian Susan Levine noted that as the postwar population grew, corporations promoted convenience foods as a way to appeal to a forward-thinking audience (Levine 2010). The school cafeteria was no exception, as nutritionists and administrators embraced the practicality of convenience foods with rich, salty flavors that young consumers preferred. By the mid-twentieth century in the United States, school lunch became embedded in Great Society goals and aspirations. New school lunch legislation emphasized the social welfare aspects of US school lunch—providing food to all children, but especially to those who families could not afford to serve such foods at home. President Lyndon B. Johnson and other policy makers saw the expanded school lunch service as a positive tool in the War on Poverty. The results were unexpectedly mixed, however. Those deemed eligible to receive free school lunches bore a stigma. Fellow students teased them about being poor, and their parents also felt guilt over not being able to provide them the more desirable, commercial food products. In mixed-income neighborhoods, cafeterias thus became a marker of shame. At the core of the US school lunch program has always been the question of whether it is a program for all children, or one that prioritizes poor children (Poppendieck 2010). The 1966 Child Nutrition Act arguably pushed it toward the latter, with good intent but negative repercussions felt by generations of children shamed for their free-meal status. The 1970s and 1980s in the United States saw the introduction of mass-produced highly processed name-brand goods available for purchase on school campuses and even in school lunchrooms. In an era of shrinking budgets, these products were introduced as

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a way to supplement the tight budgets. Institutional school lunch faced stiff competition with name-brand choices and its stigma became even more pronounced. Once students could purchase Coca-Cola and Doritos from the vending machine by the gym, for example, or opt for the personal-sized Domino’s pizza over meatloaf, the economic and cultural divide deepened between students from economically stable households and those who could not afford to purchase brand-named items on campus. The result, Marion Nestle argues, is that government and school administrators have prioritized profits over public health, as the highly processed, minimally nutritious foods and sodas within the school environment are a primary cause of malnutrition in children (Nestle 2007). Budget cuts to the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) in 1980 prompted one of the most well-known popular culture moments involving school food: the “ketchup as a vegetable” debate. Proposed legislation would have allowed administrators to credit items not explicitly listed as meeting nutritional requirements, and policy makers used pickle relish as an example. Media outlets such as Newsweek magazine latched on to the idea of condiment use and published stories decrying this idea, but singularly focused on the idea that ketchup—not relish—would also meet the vegetable requirement. Public outcry ensued, 400 schools dropped out of the NSLP, and the policy was never implemented (Pear 1981; Bentley 2009). In the new millennium, the push for school lunch reform gained serious momentum with the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010. Sponsored by First Lady Michelle Obama, the bill revised dietary mandates for reimbursable school lunches. It encouraged the inclusion of whole grains, green vegetables, and moderation in serving sizes. Renewed in 2014, it has been both lauded and critiqued—seen as both a positive step in combating childhood ill-health and as an example of “the nanny state.” Kale harvested from school gardens makes its way into some stomachs, but also frequently ends up in the trash-bin. The ongoing debate reveals the deep ambivalence some American families have about trusting their children’s midday meal to the government. Of course, institutional school lunch only provides one meal a day. Bodies and appetites are shaped by a variety of nutritional and cultural factors, and from the young almost passive recipients of school lunches, adults emerge—adults with specific ideas about what they want to eat and what they should be eating.

DIETS AND DIETING PRODUCTS: ADULTHOOD A significant portion of the global population lives among an abundance of food which can lead to poor health conditions, yet there still exists an almost equal number who do not get enough to eat, making them vulnerable to malnutrition and related diseases. Today, however, the former group (Raj Patel calls them the “stuffed”) outnumber the latter (the “starved”), thanks to a burgeoning global food trade, combined with the plethora of relatively cheap, ultra-processed, highly palatable, minimally nutritious, industrialized foods available worldwide (Patel 2008). Body size is often used as a shorthand to gauge food intake and health, and the Bulletin of the World Health Organization cites that between 1980 and 2013 the proportion of adults globally who were classified as overweight increased. As the global food supply became increasingly interconnected and industrial manufacturing of food products proliferated, food manufacturers also invented and promoted dieting products and created an entire weight-loss industry. In the mid-nineteenth century, Sylvester Graham proposed a vegan diet in order to morally purify his body and

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those of his followers, while William Banting in England preached a low-carbohydrate, low-sugar diet scheme to help people reduce. In the early twentieth century, idealized body profiles changed from round and curvy to slim as fashions changed accordingly. Styles became more form fitting and revealing, especially for women, further accentuating the felt need to reduce one’s body size through dieting. The 1920s became a full-fledged era of dieting regimes, weight-loss doctors, and potions to aid slimming. In 1918, Los Angeles physician Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters published Diet and Health, with a Key to Counting Calories, which drew upon the burgeoning field of nutritional science and introduced the idea of counting calories. Peters urged readers to think of the word “calorie” as a unit of measurement, like a gallon or a pound. She recommended a 1,200-calorie per day limit, with somewhat more after achieving the desired weight goal. Peters sold two million copies of her book, making hers the first bestseller American diet book. Peters promoted the book based on “scientific principles,” that calorie control equaled weight control and therefore people who were unable to control their weight simply had no discipline or self-control. Before this era obesity was not necessarily tied to morality, but Peters’ diet regime firmly promoted the idea that being overweight is a sign of moral weakness. Others entered the weight-loss industry soon afterward. Products proliferated, especially with the creation and popularity of sugar substitutes such as cyclamate, saccharin, and aspartame. Diet fruit cocktail was one of the first products with artificial sweetener marketed specifically to women, and diet soft drinks quickly followed and became ubiquitous (de la Pena 2011). Diet Rite—a soda created by the RC Cola company and originally sweetened with cyclamate and saccharin—debuted in 1958, followed by the Coca-Cola company’s Tab. Advertised to women primarily, such products promised freedom, happiness, and love. Meanwhile the idealized female body was becoming thinner and more unrealistic. The rail-thin bodies of Twiggy in the 1970s, and “heroin-chic” fashion models in the 1990s, replaced the well-rounded figures from earlier generations. In the early decades of the twenty-first century there is no shortage of products, diets, fasting regimes, juicing systems, and high-priced products available for purchase (Bentley 2004). The worth of the weight-loss market worldwide in 2014 was estimated at US$586.3 billion (“Global Market” 2009). Americans spend $40 billion a year on dieting products, and dieting and dieting products are on the rise in both developing and developed countries. Specific dieting programs—the Atkins diet, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, the Paleo diet—come with branded, nutritionally vetted food products for their followers to purchase. Other food corporations market convenience foods with health and diet messages, such as Nestle’s Lean Cuisine line of frozen foods. While still a dominant force in the early twenty-first century, it appears that recently sales of diet foods are declining as Americans focus less on “dieting,” and more on “healthful eating” (Chen 2016). What are we to make of the popular culture of dieting? First we can understand the proliferation of dieting products and services as the response to people’s attempt to control food intake in a world of cheap available food products designed for maximum enjoyment. Studies show that dieting rarely works; only a small percentage of dieters actually maintain weight loss over a longer period of time (Savodnik 2012). In fact, one can regard the dieting industry as a business that sees no need to offer a permanent solution to weight reduction, as it would put itself out of business (Julier 2013). It is an industry that has expanded its reach over time to include male bodies as well. The diet industry perpetuates itself by promoting the idea of a “perfect body” and their products as the best tools to obtain and maintain this desirable figure.

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Yet, no matter what products are used or programs followed, as we age our bodies and nutritional needs change. There is no set age when our physical bodies transition into being considered “elderly,” but there is certainly a specific market of food products aimed at aging adults.

FOOD AND OLDER ADULTS The elderly serve two contradictory cultural functions in the discussion of food and popular culture. First, they are viewed as the keepers of culinary traditions, instructing younger generations in the skills and flavors of family recipes and traditions. Second, they are the subjects of dietary aid and nutritional regulation, passive subjects encouraged to moderate their own food intake at the discretion of doctors and other medical experts. They are at once both sought-after for food knowledge and cautioned to reject these tasty heritage foods in favor of lackluster supplements similar to the bland baby food of infancy. As a growing population, the elderly and their dietary choices play out in a variety of ways in popular culture. Globally, an estimated 524 million people aged 65 and older make up 8 percent of the population, and this number is expected to triple to 1.5 billion by 2050 (NIA 2011). Life expectancy has been consistently on the rise since the early 1900s, due primarily to scientific advances, better understanding of healthy living principles, and expanded access to this knowledge. According to 2012 US Census data, 14.1 percent of the American population is age 65 and older. This accounts for almost 45 million people, with the number projected to rise to 98.2 million by the year 2060. Historically, the elderly were not fed or identified with any different or special foods. As adults aged, their appetites naturally diminished, but they continued to consume traditional foodstuffs, though perhaps those of a softer variety. They also stayed close to their offspring and participated in familial as well as community affairs. Following the Second World War, the dominant American family dynamic became that of the “nuclear family”: two parents and their children living independently and separately from other family members such as grandparents, aunts, or uncles. This standard is also common in Europe, though not necessarily in other parts of the world. In the United States, elderly family members typically live on their own in retirement communities or in assisted living facilities where they are advised on nutrition and/or served in communal dining facilities. Hunger and malnutrition among the elderly is economically and culturally coded. Think of the impoverished grandparents in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: elderly and bed-ridden, but proclaiming full bellies so that Charlie or his parents might have more of their meager meals. Much as the American government does for other at-risk populations such as children, public policies are designed to protect the elderly from economic hardship and provide a minimal level of food security. The Older Americans Act (1965) acknowledged that the elderly are a population group in need of special assistance, and established funding for a variety of services that aid this group. By the late twentieth century, over five million elderly Americans were still food insecure. The overall result of the OAA in the last fifty years has been an increase in funding and facilities providing food for the elderly (Lieberman 1988). There are clear parallels here between federal food assistance for young children and that for the elderly. The Older Americans Act established the Meals on Wheels program and provided federal funding for Congregate Dining Facilities. Congregate Dining Facilities are community centers that offer educational classes and cultural programming

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for seniors, much like schools. Along with the food served, both venues also offer critical time for social interactions within a specific peer-group. Menus in both senior centers and schools must meet specific nutritional guidelines, and there is not a lot of choice when it comes to the offerings. In this environment, the elderly are viewed as passive recipients of food. By contrast, the primary relationship between the elderly and food as understood in the fields of anthropology, sociology, and folklore is that of the wise elder or teacher: a knowledgeable older person who transmits culturally specific culinary knowledge and skills to younger generation. Elderly women in particular are viewed as emblematic instructors of traditional practice and protectors of heritage. Alongside their male counterpart, the Shaman, older females are seen as essential to the physical and spiritual well-being of communities. Scholars such as David Sutton (2001) and Carole Counihan (2008) have explored the impact of modernization and Western culture on food in traditionally matriarchal societies. In some cases, food can be fetishized and consumed in excess by older adults. Liquid nutritional supplements such as Ensure or Boost are a prime example of this situation. While there is a mass-consumer market for nutritional drinks and shakes, these particular brands are marketed exclusively to the elderly and their caretakers. Much like Gerber baby food or Atkins-approved products, Boost and Ensure are name-brand niche products that bring in a lot of money while promoting an image of health and nutrition for their targeted demographic. Loss of appetite and improper nutrition in elderly populations in the 1960s led pharmaceutical companies to create and market these beverages. Similar to the marked uptick in dieting products at this time, the postwar period looked to science for solutions to the “problems” created by both fat bodies and aging ones. Abbott Laboratories introduced Ensure to the market in 1973 and today it claims to be the “#1 Dr. Recommended Brand” (Ensure 2015). Such beverages are convenient and promoted as a critical part of a modern, active lifestyle. Yet, a 2014 report by the American Geriatrics Society cautioned against over-use of the beverages, noting that their sugar content per serving outstrips that of sugared breakfast cereals Froot Loops and Lucky Charms (Span 2014). Liquid nutritional supplements fill a gap in nutrition for the infirm and hospitalized elderly, those who can’t feed themselves, but for others they are a sweet treat disguised as a health elixir. Not every portrayal of the elderly and their relationship with food in popular culture can be easily slotted into the categories of tradition keeper or passive recipient. From 1985 to 1992, American audiences embraced a comedic television show about older women living in Miami: The Golden Girls. The oldest character—Sophia, portrayed by Estelle Getty, never drank a Boost or Ensure. While the character did traffic in ethnic grandma tropes, she was respected, but not revered, as a proprietor of Italian heritage foods. Sophia was, instead, a jokester and realist. She made tomato sauce for her housemates, even teaching Midwestern native Rose the secret family recipe, but she also worked for a bit at a popular seafood restaurant. Food, then, functioned to unify the women of The Golden Girls, much as it does for younger adults.

FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS This examination of food and popular culture over the life span, as represented in the four stages—infancy, childhood, adulthood, and old age—reveals the cultural, economic, and political power of popular food brands, events, and institutions. Food holds

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a powerful place in the beginning of life just as it does toward the end. The current scholarship on baby food, school lunches, and diet foods is extensive. Most, however, appears within conventional fields of nutrition, policy, and culture, rather than taking an interdisciplinary approach, let alone scholarship that takes a developmental view. More academic discussion and debate that incorporates all these elements is needed. With regard to scholarship focusing on food and the elderly, much work can be done to deepen our academic understanding of this complex, nuanced relationship and its representation in popular culture. There is little existing literature that explores this unique group, a demographic that is far more multifaceted than media portrayals would have us believe. The long-held stereotypes of the elderly and their relationship to food also bear further analysis. Mass-produced food will remain a powerful part of culture, given its importance in the global food supply, which has allowed for and fostered traditions of human commensality and conviviality, even as it can lead to poor health. For those attempting to assess the power and value of mass-produced popular food items, we advocate research that incorporates multiple methods and perspectives—for example, more integration between nutrition research and cultural uses and meanings, including studies that allow for analysis of nutrition and health as well as cultural constructs of food throughout the life cycle.

REFERENCES Ariès, Philippe. 1965. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. New York: Vintage. Belasco, Warren. 2006. Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Bentley, Amy. 2004. “The Other Atkins Revolution: Atkins and the Shifting Culture of Dieting.” Gastronomica. 4: 34-45. Bentley, Amy. 2009. “Ketchup as a Vegetable: Condiments, Culture, and the Politics of School Lunch.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, New York City, New York, January 2–5. Bentley, Amy. 2014. Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health and the Industrialization of the American Diet. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bulletin of the World Health Organization. 2015. “Epidemic of obesity, overweight linked to increased food energy supply: Food energy supply and global obesity.” ScienceDaily, June 30. Chapman, Rod. 1975. “‘Baby Killer’ Libel Action Deferred,” The Guardian, November 28. Chen, Angus. 2016. “Diet Foods are Tanking. So the Diet Industry is Now Selling Health.” The Salt. National Public Radio. January 20. Counihan, Carole. 2008. “Mexicanas’ Food Voice and Differential Consciousness in the San Luis Valley of Colorado. ” In Food and Culture: A Reader. 2 edition, edited by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, 354–68. New York: Routledge. Cunningham, John. 1974. “Baby Food ‘Can be a Killer.’” The Guardian, March 12. de la Pena, Carolyn Thomas. 2011. Empty Pleasures: The Story of Artificial Sweeteners from Saccharin to Splenda. Chapel Hill: UNC Press. Dettwyler, Katherine A. 1989. “Styles of Infant Feeding: Parental/Caretaker Control of Food Consumption in Young Children.” American Anthropologist 91: 696–703. Douglas, Mary, and Baron C. Isherwood. 1996. The World of Goods: An Anthropology of Consumption. New York: Psychology Press. Ensure. 2016. “The Ensure Story.” Accessed July 19. https://ensure.com/ensure-story.

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Gritsai, Olga. 2001. “Haute Cuisine Versus Healthy Nutrition: Cultural Gradients in Europe and the Geography of Baby Food.” GeoJournal 53: 71–80. Hervada, M. D., R. Arturo, and Debra R. Newman, MPH. 1992. “Weaning: Historical Perspectives, Practical Recommendations, and Current Controversies.” Current Problems in Pediatrics May/June 1992: 223–240. Hine, Thomas. 1986. Populuxe: The Look and Life of America in the ‘50s and ‘60s, from Tailfins and TV Dinners to Barbie Dolls and Fallout Shelters. New York: Knopf. Kaler, Anne K. 1990. “Golden Girls: Feminine Archetypal Patterns of the Complete Woman.” Journal Of Popular Culture 24: 49–60. Julier, Alice. 2013. “The Political Economy of Obesity: The Fat Pay All.” In Food and Culture: A Reader. Edited by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. New York: Routledge. Laudan, Rachel. 2001. “A Plea for Culinary Modernism: Why We Should Love the New, Fast, Processed Food.” Gastronomica 1: 36–44. Levenstein, Harvey. 1988. Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet. New York: Oxford University Press. Levine, Susan. 2010. School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lieberman, Trudy. 1998. “Hunger in America.” The Nation, March 30. Markets and Markets. 2009. “Global Market for Weight Loss Worth US$586.3 Billion by 2014.” Accessed July 19. http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/PressReleases/global-marketfor-weight-loss-worth-$726-billion-by-2014.asp Mather, Ian. 1975. “Third World Fights Baby Food Battle.” The Observer, November 23. Marchand, Roland. 1986. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920 – 1940. Berkeley: University of California Press. Michaelsen KF, Friis H. 1998. “Complementary Feed: A Global Perspective.” Nutrition 14: 763–66. National Institute on Aging. “Humanity’s Aging.” Accessed July 19. https://www.nia.nih.gov/ research/publication/global-health-and-aging/humanitys-aging Nestle, Marion. 2007. Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. Revised and Expanded Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Norton-Taylor, Richard. 1976. “Rich Man, Poor Menu.” The Guardian, October 30. Patel, Raj. 2008. Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. New York: Melville House. Pear, Robert. 1981. “Many Children Decide Not to Buy More Costly School Lunches.” New York Times, October 21. Peters, Lulu Hunt. 1918. Diet and Health, with a Key to Counting Calories. Baltimore: Reilly and Lee. Pollan, Michael. 2006. Omnivore’s Dilemma. New York: Penguin. Popkin, Barry M., Linda S. Adair, and Shu Wen Ng. 2012. “Now and Then: The Global Nutrition Transition: The Pandemic of Obesity in Developing Countries.” Nutrition Review. 70: 3–21. Poppendieck, Jan. 2010. Free for All: Fixing School Lunch in America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reichl, Ruth. 1998. Tender at the Bone. New York: Random House. Roseberry, William. 1996. “The Rise of Yuppie Coffees and the Reimagination of Class in the United States.” American Anthropologist 98: 762–75. Rosenthal, Ricky. 1974. “Tradition vs. ‘Progress’: Feeding Third-World Babies,” Christian Science Monitor, November 19.

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Rutledge, Jennifer. 2016. Feeding the Future: School Lunch Programs as Global Social Policy. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Saguy, Abigail. 2014. What’s Wrong with Fat? New York: Oxford University Press. Savodnik, Peter. 2012. “Obesity, the Other Gulf War Syndrome.” Bloomberg News, June 21. Accessed March 17, 2016. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-06-21/obesitythe-other-gulf-war-syndrome.html School Nutrition Association. “School Meal Trends and Stats.” Accessed July 19. https:// schoolnutrition.org/AboutSchoolMeals/SchoolMealTrendsStats/ Singh, J. P. 2005. “The Contemporary Indian Family.” In Handbook of World Families, edited by Bert N. Adams and Jan Trost. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Span, Paula. 2014. “Geriatricians: Beware ‘Liquid Candy’.” The New York Times, May 22. Stearns, Peter N. 2011. Childhood in World History. New York: Routledge. Sutton, David E. 2001. Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory. New York: Bloomsbury. United Nations Population Fund. “Ageing.” Accessed July 19. http://www.unfpa.org/ageing United States Census. 2016. “Facts for Features: Older Americans Month May 2015.” Accessed July 19. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/facts-for-features/2015/cb15-ff09.html United States Congress. Senate and House of Representatives. National School Lunch Act of 1946. Public Law 396, 79th Congress, June 4, 1946, 60 Stat. 231. United States Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service. “National School Lunch Program: Participation and Lunches Served.” Accessed July 19. http://www.fns.usda.gov/ sites/default/files/pd/slsummar.pdf United States Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service. “USDA Foods Available 2016, Commodity Supplemental Food Program.” Accessed July 19. http://www.fns.usda. gov/sites/default/files/csfp/CSFP-Foods-Available.pdf United States Department of Agriculture. 1981. “National School Lunch, School Breakfast, and Child Care Food Programs; Meal Pattern Requirements,” Federal Register 46 FR 44452, Food and Nutrition Service. Van Esterik, Penny. 2002. “Contemporary Trends in Infant Feeding Research.” Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 257–78. Watson, James. 2006. Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia Redwood City: Stanford University Press.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Cooking at Home: The Cultural Construction of American “Home Cooking” in Popular Discourse JESSAMYN NEUHAUS

A middle-class married white woman puts a chicken in the oven. A Mexican immigrant heats up a microwave tofu burrito. A Vietnamese American and his Chinese American husband measure fish sauce for a pot of pho. An African American woman places presliced chocolate-chip dough cookies on a baking sheet with her step-grandchildren. A single mother brings home a pizza and a bag of salad greens. A divorced white man boils water for the Kraft macaroni and cheese he picked up at the food bank. A Chinese American woman and her Jewish boyfriend simmer matzo balls in a vegetarian broth and post a photo of it on Instagram. An immigrant from India mixes spices for a chickpea chole to go with the Kentucky Fried Chicken his mom’s bringing for dinner. A transgender biracial man rolls out pie dough. Which of these people is making American home-cooked food? If some of the meal is premade processed food but heated and served at home and/or combined with food made from scratch, is it still homemade? If it’s a culturally specific recipe, does it matter if the cook or the home or the recipe itself conforms to familial and social norms, and does it qualify as “American?” Do brands matter? Marital status, race, sexual identity, or gender expression? Served to others or shared on social media? Rich and plentiful, or not enough to go around? Must it be made with love? Exactly who, or what, defines “home cooking?” Popular culture scholars look to media and food discourses to address these questions. This chapter offers an overview of scholarly work on representations of home cooking in popular discourse from the late 1800s to today, focusing specifically on the ideological and normative connotations in popular prescriptive texts such as household guides, cookery instruction, and government propaganda, as well as popular sources like magazines, television shows, films, and blogs. These representations tell us more about cultural ideals and norms than about what Americans actually cook and eat (Rawlins and Livert 2014). But they do document how depictions of cooking at home constitute a

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powerfully normalizing discourse around gender, class, race, ethnicity, nationalism, and cooking in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; they illuminate the ideological context in which we cook and the broader significance which society assigns to home cooking. Even the earliest cookery advice circulated in the first days of the Republic performed a normative function by helping to define what constituted “American” cuisine by linking cooking to citizenship (Ridley 1999; Vester 2015b). Recipes and cookery instruction in household manuals and popular women’s magazines through the mid-1800s promulgated the ideology of separate spheres—home and workplace—helping to create new domestic and cookery ideals for white, middle-and upper-class married women. Scholars identify the last decades of the 1800s as a pivotal era in terms of both food production and accompanying popular discourses, as this was when the Industrial Revolution dramatically changed how Americans in all economic classes cooked and ate and advances in manufacturing and transportation led directly to increasing availability of packaged and processed foods, particularly in urban areas, paving the way for food in the modern era (Bentley 2016). Some scholars describe how the proliferation of processed foods, the corporatization of food production, and the expansion of consumerism and advertising had a detrimental and homogenizing influence on the preparation and consumption of fresh and nutritious food in the home kitchen (Levenstein 1998, 2003; Vileisis 2008). The emergence of cooking schools and “scientific cookery” played a key role in the dominant popular prescriptive discourses defining home cooking at this time. Exemplifying certain Progressive Era reformer attitudes, these schools and their published cookery instruction in the form of domestic advice manuals, cookbooks, and articles in women’s magazines emphasized the links between “correct” home cooking and a family’s health and financial security. Such texts, created by middle- and upper-class white women, downplayed the innovation and skill of ordinary home cooks, legitimizing bland New England-based cuisine as the most healthful type of “American” home cooking (Shapiro 1986) and consistently framing all food work as expressions of female care. They routinely ignored systems of power, production, and class, such as how working women faced time and financial constraints which contributed to eager utilization of a growing variety of ready-made foods (Turner 2006). Additionally, scientific cookery discourse at the turn of the century reinforced white dominant culture by disparaging immigrant food traditions—a varied, complex, and ever-evolving set of historically situated identity and community practices taking place within dominant American culture (Counihan 2009; Dinotto 2013; Inness 2001d; Ku, Manalansan, and Mannur 2013; Marte 2012; Williams-Forson 2014). But even sources that sharply proscribed the gendered and racialized meanings of American home cooking cannot be viewed solely in terms of their power to create exclusionary domestic ideals, as those studying cookbooks, cookery instruction, and recipes collections have shown. Commercial single-author, advertising, and other types of published cookbooks and cookery instruction are an especially rich source for historical and cultural analysis of popular food discourse, including its normative functions (Ezell 1984; Fisher 2006; Gvion 2009; Haber 2002; Hayford 2012; Inness 2001a; McFeely 2000; Notaker 2012; Phillipov 2014; Tobias 1998). However, scholars also identify ways that cookbooks are complex literary and historical texts that can subtly or even overtly challenge norms, documenting how American women especially negotiated those norms in their real everyday food practices, including affirming their own self-worth and pursuing paid employment (Avakian 1997; Bower 2004b; Floyd and Foster 2003; Gabaccia and Aldrich 2015; Inness 2001a,; Newlyn 1999; Sirkis 2012; Theophano 2002).

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For example, Sarah Walden demonstrates that while often reinforcing patriarchal and racial hierarchies, a nineteenth-century cookbook “can also be read as a site of resistance, in which women harnessed its power to promote a variety of agendas” and that “women used the cookbook as a rhetorical space in which to conduct public discussions of tasteful domestic practice [and ensure] their participation in evolving discussions of American citizenship and virtue” (Walden forthcoming). As Katharina Vester argues, for scholars examining cookery instruction, “The notion of a clear-cut binary of dominance and resistance . . . is in this model futile” (Vester 2015, 4b). She points out that “women authors of domestic advice have endorsed an ideology of separate spheres, but they used their publications for successful careers outside the home. They promoted women’s education and defended women’s intellectual capacity, but commonly thought of their female servants as stupid and incompetent” (4). Similarly, beginning in the early decades of the 1900s, women employed in the emerging field of home economics simultaneously exerted their own professional, economic, and cultural authority while continuing to produce prescriptive texts that sustained an exclusionary definition of home cooking in racial, economic, and gendered terms (Elias 2008; Goldstein 2012; Stage and Vincenti 1997). A lesser known example of the complexity of popular food discourse at the turn of the century and how women utilized it to challenge the boundaries between “home” and “public” is the increase in restaurants and tearooms owned and operated by middle-class white women in the late 1800s and early 1900s (Alexander 2009; Brandimarte 1995). Jan Whitaker argues that these businesswomen drew directly on popular discourse that positioned white middle- and upper-class domesticity and cooking as “the home ideal” not afforded to working class and immigrant-owned taverns and eating establishments in order to succeed in the marketplace. She summarizes the cultural construction of “home cooking” as “not an objective description, but rather, a sumptuary ideal which prescribed how all Americans ought to live” (Whitaker 2005, 92). While mainstream cookery instruction, advertising, household manuals, and recipes and advice published in women’s magazines from the end of the 1800s and continuing through the first decades of the 1900s reinforced a racialized and limiting definition of “home cooking” that disregarded food traditions among nonwhite families and immigrants, another type of published discourse offers an important counterpoint for scholarly analysis: community cookbooks. These texts—recipes collections compiled and published by church and community organizations, often for fundraising purposes— challenge a simplistic distinction between the consumer and the producer of culture, and unlike cookery instruction authored and published by experts and professionals, community cookbooks as published artifacts depict and reflect ordinary people’s food practices, including people not well represented in mainstream popular discourse about food and cooking. They also illuminate ways that a variety of American women at different points in time utilized food discourse and practices to assert their individual agency in the home and beyond—to affirm their ethnic identity or religious affiliation or political participation, for instance (Bower 1997b; Chen 2014; Ferguson 2012; Hartman 2003; Holbrook 2012; Ireland 1981; Ransom and Wright 2013; Trollinger 2007; West 2007; William 2016). Scholarship on Jewish American cookbooks is especially prolific (Bower 1997a; Feinberg and Crosetto 2011; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1987; Pollak 2003; Rabinovitch 2011; Roth 2010; Solomon 2014). Somewhat in contrast to community cookbooks, mainstream cooking advice, and advertising throughout the twentieth century overwhelmingly reiterated gender, racial,

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class, and nationalist norms. Advances in technology such as the increasing availability of electricity and appliances and the steady decline of household servants in the early 1900s in much of the United States changed aspects of home labor but not the amount or the cultural positioning of housework as an expression of women’s love. Anxiety about women’s suffrage and the possible challenge to social norms it posed contributed to this continued gendering of household cooking, as well as fostering explicit criticism of women who failed to fulfill that role. For example, one reoccurring motif in turn-of-the-century food discourse was the condemnation of the careless wife who relied on premade delicatessen food instead of taking the time to make more wholesome meals herself (Neuhaus 2003, 64–65; Peterson and Turner 2014, 830). Modern advertising also overwhelmingly depicted food work as an extension of gendered family care throughout the twentieth century, as shown definitively by Katherine Parkin (2006). Additionally, food advertising reproduced racial hierarchies, demonstrated especially vividly in the creation and circulation of “Aunt Jemima” advertising in the late 1800s and early 1900s (Deck 2001; Manring 1998). In the twentieth century, the US government provided another source of widespread discourse about the meaning and significance of American home cooking. During both the First World War and the Second World War, government propaganda posters about home food production and preparation, as well as cookery advice in published materials and radio programming, repeatedly depicted home cooking as a gendered expression of not only love for the family but love for the country and support for the war (Bentley 1998; Neuhaus 2003; Tunc 2012; Yang 2005). Government-created cookery instruction during the Great Depression, particularly aimed at women in agricultural areas, depicted thrifty home cooking and all its economic and healthful benefits as the responsibility of good wives and mothers (Zieglman and Coe 2016). Camille Bégin details another notable way that government-produced food discourse reinforced racial and gender hierarchies and national identity vis-à-vis home cooking in the 1930s: the Federal Writers’ project titled America Eats. As they chose which types of recipes to include, the creators of America Eats were “deliberating over which and whose regional food would be deemed worthy of integration into the American culinary narrative” (Bégin 2016, 15). Responding to national nostalgia and fear—about hunger, cultural pluralism, and gender roles in an economic crisis—the book “ultimately, put men’s taste and desire at its center, kept white women in their kitchens, and subjugated black Americans to stereotypes as either auxiliaries to white cooking or sources of invigorating, primitive sensory experiences” (47–48). Popular prescriptive food discourse grew exponentially in the post–Second World War era, and consistently reiterated a highly gendered, racialized, and nationalistic home cooking ideal. Anxieties about declining masculinity in the age of the “Organization Man,” fears about communist subversion of the “American way of life,” and the looming shadow of the atomic bomb contributed to the emergence of a highly stringent domestic ideology articulated repeatedly in food discourse. During the Cold War, Americans invested home cooking with nationalist symbolism, most famously when Khrushchev and Nixon met at the National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959 and framed their discussion about the merits of capitalism versus communism in terms of kitchen technology and housewives’ home cooking (May 1988, 1999, 10–14). Civil defense films and instructional materials about how to build a backyard bomb shelter even implied that white, middle-class suburban wives and mothers should continue to provide home cooking—even if that just meant opening stockpiled canned goods—in the aftermath of nuclear war (Lichtman 2006; Tunc 2015).

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Indeed, the 1950s and 1960s saw a major increase in the availability and popularity of canned, frozen, and other processed food products, which led not to a lessening of gendered norms around cooking but rather an intensification: while “home cooking” could increasingly consist of combining premade food items, popular discourse repeatedly constructed this activity solely in terms of women’s care and love for her family (Endrijonas 2001; Horner 2000; Inness 2001b; Neuhaus 1999; Shapiro 2004). In contrast, post Second World War era popular food discourse depicting “the man in the kitchen” built on popular representations in previous decades of cookery gendered as appropriately masculine: special event, as distinguished from daily family meals; naturally adventurous and skilled as opposed to recipe bound; bold and flavorful, unlike pallid cookery school and tearoom fare (Neuhaus 2003; Vester 2015b). Magazine articles and cookery instruction about the backyard “barbecue” craze in the 1950s vividly illustrate how popular-food discourse at this time concertedly reiterated the boundaries between femininity and masculinity, normalizing a racialized, class-based nationalism and gender and familial identity (Matthews 2009; Miller 2010), as did food writing in published sources such as Playboy and Esquire (Fakazis 2011; Hollows 2002). Yet even at the height of postwar domestic ideology, popular discourse articulated some contradictions in and challenges to the home cookery ideal (Weiss 2001), notably Peg Bracken’s 1963 The I Hate to Cook Book (Inness 2006; Neuhaus 2003; Shapiro 2004). Television, the fastest growing medium during this time, offered a new site for prescriptive food discourse. Fictional housewives appeared in numerous TV shows throughout the 1950s through the 1970s, conforming to domestic ideals of femininity, class, and motherhood, including performing food work as loving care for the family. However, while these figures may have appeared in the kitchen or at the table, fictionalized onscreen versions of American home life did not usually include extended depictions of actual cooking work. Like Hollywood films, television shows that include images of food and eating are less likely to be about cooking per se, or home cooking specifically, than about the kitchen or mealtime as a symbol or plot device. A new kind of television programming in the 1950s and 1960—the cooking show— more directly addressed and helped to define home cooking in the second half of the twentieth century (Collins 2009; Polan 2010). Scholars have identified in televised cookery shows the same complexities and contradictions of earlier prescriptive food discourses. Numerous aspects of television cooking shows reinforced a definition of “American home cooking” as gendered, racialized expressions of class-defined family care based in consumerism (including contrasting it with the paid labor of professional male chefs)—a depiction that continues today on the Food Network and through the branding of celebrity chefs (Adema 2000; Bramble 2014; Brownlie and Hewer 2011; Corcoran 2008; de Solier 2005; Johnston, Rodney, and Chong 2014; Ketchum 2005; Mitchell 2010; Nathanson 2009; Packham 2016; Phillipov 2016; Ray 2007; Rousseau 2012a; Scholes 2011; Swenson 2009). At the same time, some televised cooking shows offered women—most famously Julia Child—a way to utilize food discourse to advance their own careers and, sometimes, affirm the cooking expertise and ability of ordinary women viewers watching the shows at home (Collins 2012; LeBesco and Naccarato 2008; Schinto 2011; Shapiro 2007; Wooden 2003). Child’s cookery instruction was one aspect of a broader trend in “gourmet” food discourse in twentieth-century American print and visual media (Strauss 2011). Gourmet magazine, first published in 1941, exemplified this type of food writing, which depicted cooking and eating as a lively adventure. Such depictions, including influential food

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writing and other popular texts by Craig Clairborne and James Beard, subtly or overtly overlapped with and drew on a masculine food ideal deliberately contrasted to women’s home cooking, and contributing to the cultural construction of “American” cuisine (Johnston, Baumann, and Cairns 2010). Much like “foodie,” food reformer, and “slow food” discourses in published and online texts and social media in the first decades of the 2000s, gourmet food writing in the twentieth century was not simply about “good” food, often containing an implicit class bias, problematic depictions of “ethnic food,” and depictions of home cooking framed solely in terms of individual female choice, care, and consumer skill rather than an activity shaped by political and economic systems of power (Allen and Sachs 2012; Bowen, Elliott, and Brenton 2014; Cairns, Johnston, and Buamann, 2010; Johnston and Baumann 2010, 2014; Julier 2005; Lynch, and Giles 2013; Mannur 2013; Peterson and Turner 2014). In fact, although diffuse, diverse, and spread among more media platforms, most significant trends in late twentieth century and early-twenty-first-century food discourse contain some aspect of such normative ideology, particularly in terms of gender, but also ethnicity, class, and nationality. Food advertising, for example, simply replaced “the housewife” with the “housewife mom,” continuing to depict home cooking as primarily an expression of a woman’s love and care for her family, although in the interest of increasing new markets she may be black or vaguely “ethnic” (Neuhaus 2011). Some scholars have shown how other recent visual and social media reinforces class and gender norms via food (Lindenfeld and Parasecoli 2016; Rousseau 2012), while cookbooks also continue to reinforce normative gender ideology in the late twentieth and twenty-first century (Brownlie and Hewer 2007; Nolen 2015; Vester 2014). Scholars identify more generally the emergence of a “new domesticity” in the 2000s, first exemplified by Martha Stewart’s prescriptive texts and branded marketing and now particularly evident online in blogs and social media. Like earlier popular food discourses, home baking and cooking blogs contain contradictory elements, and are used by some women to blur the line between home and work, and for self-expression and personal fulfillment (Bentley 2001; Fraiman 2010; Mason and Meyers 2001; Matchar 2013). However, much of this discourse continues to depict most aspects of home cooking through idealized representations of gender, ethnicity, motherhood, and class (Dejmanee 2016; Salvio 2012; Sandoval 2014). For scholars interested in closely examining such complexities in popular food discourse, one of the most significant areas of research interrogates intersections between cultural representations such as fiction or cookbooks (particularly those depicting and defining “Southern” cooking) and African American subjectivity (Edge 2009; Eves 2005; Hoffman 2015; Kelting 2016; Longone 2001; McMillan 2016; Tipton-Martin 2015; Walden 2014; Witt 1999; Zafar 1999). Some of this research clearly identifies ways that popular representations such as cooking shows continue to perpetuate stereotypes around food, race, and African American women (Walker 2015). Looking at film, for example, Kimberly Nettles-Barcelón identifies “the sassy black cook and the return of the magical negress” (2015) and Fanasell and Cooper discuss how Hollywood depictions of “the hood” disregard and denigrate the food labor of African American women (2015). But this area of research also addresses ways that black women may have used and continue to use cooking and recipe publication as a means for exerting cultural and social authority, even in the face of particularly limiting and demeaning popular representations and erasure of real-life skill and labor and subjectivity (Halloran 2012; Shoma-Sampson 2014; Smith 1991; Vester 2015; Williams-Forson 2006). Furthermore, some scholars convincingly

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argue that in order to fully grasp the ways African American women utilized and navigated food work, race, and power, we must look to additional types of sources beyond the prescriptions and stereotypes in popular discourse (Chatelain 2015; Sharpless 2010). Finally, a small but significant recent area of study investigates how food discourse reinforces and, sometimes, challenges cisgender privilege and heteronormativity (Szabo 2014). These scholars examine fiction, cookbooks, contemporary film, social media/ online videos, and television programs to find evidence of how food discourses and representations of home cooking may also offer opportunities for the assertion of gay, lesbian, and transgender subjectivities (Ehrhardt 2012; Leer 2016; Mannur 2012; Wojcik 2013; Vester 2015b; Vider 2013; Zimmerman 2008). As this work suggests, scholarship that reveals the complex and sometimes contradictory set of interactions between people, popular texts, and media is now also extending to depictions of food and home cooking and exploring the myriad of ways discourse about cooking at home creates, reinforces, and challenges different aspects of American subjectivities. These issues, and the questions posed at the beginning of this chapter, remain highly relevant for scholars today and in the future. Food products in the United States continue to proliferate while at the same time proscriptive ideals around cooking and eating expand. Consumer options for premade foods such as meal kits ordered online for home delivery and to-go options at supermarkets have never been more numerous and will continue to grow. Yet, simultaneously, social and cultural expectations around “home cooking” have never been more complicated and demanding. From Michelle Obama’s highly publicized organic White House garden to widely disseminated and media-stoked food reform rhetoric (GMOs, gluten allergies, community-supported agriculture, childhood obesity, and “slow food” to name but a few examples) to the literally innumerable corporate/ marketing and individual Instagram accounts, YouTube channels, blogs, Twitter feeds, online news sources, lifestyle sites and TV shows devoted to every imaginable aspect of nutrition, cooking, recipes, and “food porn,” Americans are inundated with contradictory, complex, and often highly idealized representations of home cooking. Such representations continue to reinforce normative ideology, particularly around economic class and gender roles, specifically motherhood. Moreover, as social media continues to erode clear distinctions between producers and consumers, increasing numbers of Americans directly create and contribute to food discourses. Far beyond the traditional community cookbooks of the nineteenth and twentieth century, today millions of Americans are engaging with, maintaining, and in some cases overtly challenging normative ideology around home cooking with representations of their own. Future scholarship then must continue to rigorously locate, identify and interrogate the everincreasing popular discourses—everything from best-selling celebrity chef product lines to baking blogs with only a handful of followers—which depict and define “American home cooking.”

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Levenstein, Harvey. 1993, 2003. Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lichtman, Sarah. 2006. “Do-It-Yourself Security: Safety, Gender, and the Home Fallout Shelter in Cold War America.” Journal of Design History 19 (1): 39–55. Lindenfeld, Laura, and Fabio Parasecoli. 2016. Feasting Our Eyes: Food Films and Cultural Identity in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press. Longone, Jan. 2001. “Early Black-Authored Cookbooks.” Gastronomica 1 (1): 96–99. Lynch, Meghan, and Audrey Giles. 2013. “Let Them Eat Organic Cake: Discourses in Sustainable Food Initiatives.” Food, Culture & Society 16 (3): 245–64. Mannur, Anita. 2012. “Feeding Desire: Food, Domesticity, and Challenges to HeteroPatriarchy.” In Taking Food Public: Redefining Foodways in a Changing World, edited by Psyche Williams-Forson and Carole Counihan, 225–238. New York: Routledge. Mannur, Anita. 2013. “Eat, Dwell, Orient: Food Networks and Asian/American Cooking Communities.” Cultural Studies 27 (4): 585–610. Manring, M. M. 1998. Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Marte, Lidia. 2012. “Dominican Migrant Cooking: Food Struggles, Gendered Labor, and Memory-Work in New York City.” Food and Foodways 20: 279–306. Mason, Ann, and Marian Meyers. 2001. “Living With Martha Stewart Media: Chosen Domesticity in the Experience of Fans.” Journal of Communication 51 (4): 801–23. Matchar, Emily. 2013. Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity. New York: Simon and Schuster. Matthews, Kristin. 2009. “One Nation Over Coals: Cold War Nationalism and the Barbecue.” American Studies 50 (3/4): 5–30. May, Elaine Tyler. 1988, 1999. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books. McFeely, Mary Drake. 2000. Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? American Women and the Kitchen in the Twentieth Century. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. McMillan, Krystal. 2016. “From Aunt Jemima to Aunt Marthy: Commodifying the Kitchen Cook and Undermining White Authority in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” In Devouring Cultures: Perspectives on Food, Power, and Identity from the Zombie Apocalypse to Downton Abby, edited by Cammie Sublette and Jennifer Martin, 85–101. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. Miller, Tim. 2010. “The Birth of the Patio Daddy-O: Outdoor Grilling in Postwar America.” The Journal of American Culture 33(1): 5–11. Mitchell, Christine M. 2010. “The Rhetoric of Celebrity Cookbooks.” Journal of Popular Culture 43 (3): 524–39. Nathenson, Elizabeth. 2009. “As Easy as Pie: Cooking Shows, Domestic Efficiency, and Postfeminist Temporality.” Television and New Media 10 (4): 311–30. Nettles-Barcelón, Kimberly. 2015. “The Sassy Black Cook and the Return of the Magic Negress: Popular Representations of Black Women’s Food Work.” In Dethroning the Deceitful Pork Chop: Rethinking African American Foodways from Slavery to Obama, edited by Jennifer Wallach, 107–19. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. Neuhaus, Jessamyn. 1999. “The Way to a Man’s Heart: Gender Roles, Domestic Ideology, and Cookbooks in the 1950s.” Journal of Social History 32 (3): 529–55. Neuhaus, Jessamyn. 2003. Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Neuhaus, Jessamyn. 2011. Housework and Housewives in American Advertising: Married to the Mop. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Newlyn, Andrea. 1999. “Challenging Contemporary Narrative Theory: The Alternative Textual Strategies of Nineteenth-Century Manuscript Cookbooks.” Journal of American Culture 22 (3): 35–47. Nolen, Jason Andrew. 2015. “‘They Will Worship You and Call You the Man:’ Constructions of Masculinity in Men’s Cookbooks.” Conference Papers: American Sociological Association: 1–33. Notaker, Henry. 2012. “Printed Cookbooks: Food History, Book History, and Literature.” Food & History 10 (2): 131–59. Packham, Charley. 2016. “A Woman’s Place Is in the Kitchen? The Relationship Between Gender, Food and Television.” In Food, Media and Contemporary Culture: The Edible Image, edited by Peri Bradley, 83–102. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Parkin, Katherine. 2006. Food is Love: Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Peterson, Tina, and Katherine Leonard Turner. 2014. “‘Extravagance and Folly:’ Versus ‘Proper Food:’ Domestic Scientists, Celebrity Chefs, and the Ongoing Food Reform Movement.” Journal of Popular Culture 47 (4): 817–37. Phllipov, Michelle. 2014. “Hamburgers of Devastation: The Pleasures and Politics of Heavy Metal Cooking.” International Journal of Community Music 7 (2): 259–72. Phillipov, Michelle. 2016. “Escaping to the Country: Media, Nostalgia, and the New Food Industries.” Popular Communication 14 (2): 111–22. Polan, Dana. 2010. “James Beard’s Early TV Work.” Gastronomica 10 (3): 23–33. Pollack, Oliver, and Karen Pollack. 2003. “Gefilte Fish and Jewish Charitable Cookbooks on the Great Plains 1888-.” Western States Jewish History 1: 25–40. Rabinovitch, Lara. 2011. “A Peek Into Their Kitchens: Postwar Jewish Community Cookbooks in the United States.” Food, Culture & Society 14 (1): 91–111. Ransom, Elizabeth, and Wynne Wright. 2013. “Constructing Culinary Knowledge: Reading Rural Community Cookbooks.” Food, Culture & Society 16 (4): 669–89. Rawlins, Roblyn, and David Livert. 2014. “The Dilemma of Dinner: The Practice of Home Cooking in Everyday Life.” In Food and Everyday Life, edited by Thomas Conroy, 185–214. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Ray, Krishnendu. 2007. “Domesticating Cuisine: Food and Aesthetics on American Television.” Gastronomica 7 (1): 50–63. Resor, Cynthia. 2011. “Using Community Cookbooks as Primary Sources.” Social Education 75 (1): 30–5 Ridley, Glynis. 1999. “The First American Cookbook.” Eighteenth-Century Life 23 (2): 114–23. Roth, Laurence. 2010. “Towards a Kashrut Nation in American Jewish Cookbooks, 19902000.” Shofar 28 (2): 65–91. Rousseau, Signe. 2012. Food Media: Celebrity Chefs and the Politics of Everyday Interference. London: Berg. Rousseau, Signe. 2012. Food and Social Media: You Are What You Tweet. United Kingdom: AltaMira Press. Royer, George, Melissa Ocepek, and William Aspray. 2014. “Food Fights for Freedom: A Critical Reading of Food Advertisements from Ladies’ Home Journal during the Second World War.” Advertising & Society Review 15: (4). doi:10.1353/asr.2015.0004

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Salvio, Paula M. 2010. “Dishing it Out: Food Blogs and Post-Feminist Domesticity.” Gastronomica 12 (3): 31–39. Sandoval, Lindsay. 2014. “Icing on the Cupcake: Baking, Blogging and the Promise of New Domesticity.” Food, Media, and Culture, http://www.american.edu/cas/american-studies/ food-media-culture/upload/2014-Lindsay-Sandoval.pdf. Schinto, Jeanne. 2011. “Remembering Dione Lucas.” Gastronomica 11 (4): 34–45. Scholes, Lucy. 2011. “A Slave to the Stove? The TV Celebrity Chef Abandons the Kitchen: Lifestyle TV, Domesticity, and Gender.” Critical Quarterly 53: 44–59. Shapiro, Laura. 1986. Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century. New York: North Point Press. Shapiro, Laura. 2004. Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America. New York: Penguin. Shapiro, Laura. 2007. Julia Child. New York: Viking. Sharpless, Rebecca. 2010. Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Sharpless, Rebecca. 2016. “Cookbooks as Resources for Rural Research.” Agricultural History 90 (1): 195–208. Shoma-Sampson, Tasha. 2014. “Come, Dine at my Table: The Enactment of Safe Spaces in the Cookbooks of Maya Angelou.” CLA Journal 58 (1/2): 105–17. Sirkis, Ruth. 2012. “Cooking Up a Social Change.” HAGAR Studies in Culture, Polity and Identities, 10 (2): 161–69. Smith, Doris. 1991. “In Search of Our Mother’s Cookbooks: Gathering African American Culinary Traditions.” Iris 26: 23–43. Solomon, Eileen. 2014. “More Than Recipes: Kosher Cookbooks as Historical Texts.” Jewish Quarterly Review 104 (1): 25–37. Stage, Sarah, and Virginia B. Vincenti, eds. 1991. Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Strauss, David. 2011. Setting the Table for Julia Child: Gourmet Dining in America, 1934-1961. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Swenson, Rebecca. 2009. “Domestic Divo? Televised Treatment of Masculinity, Femininity, and Food.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 26 (1): 36–53. Szabo, Michelle. 2014. “‘I’m a real catch:’ The Blurring of Alternative and Hegemonic Masculinities in Men’s Talk about Home Cooking.” Women’s Studies International Forum 44: 228–35. Tipton-Martin, Toni. 2015. The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African-American Cookbooks. Austin: University of Texas Press. Theophano, Janet. 2002. Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tobias, Steven M. 1998. “Early American Cookbooks as Cultural Artifacts.” Papers on Language and Literature 34 (1): 3–19. Trollinger, Rebekah. 2007. “Mennonite Cookbooks and the Pleasure of Habit.” Mennonite Quarterly Review 81 (4): 531–48. Tunc, Tanfer Emin. 2012. “Less Sugar, More Warships: Food as American Propaganda in the First World War.” War in History 19 (2): 193–216. Tunc, Tanfer Emin. 2015. “Eating in Survival Town: Food in 1950s Atomic America.” Turner, Katherine Leonard. 2006. “Buying, Not Cooking.” Food, Culture, & Society, 9 (1): 13–39.

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Yang, Mei-Ling. 2005. “Creating the Kitchen Patriot: Media Promotion of Food Rationing and Nutrition Campaigns on the American Home Front During World War II.” American Journalism 22 (3): 55–75. Zafar, Rafia. 1999. “The Signifying Dish: Autobiography and History in Two Black Women’s Cookbooks.” Feminist Studies 25 (2): 449–69. Ziegelman, Jane, and Andrew Coe. 2016. A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression. New York: Harper Collins. Zimmerman, Gus. 2008. “The Queer Dish: Gay Cookbooks After Stonewall.” Food, Media, and Culture, http://www.american.edu/cas/american-studies/food-media-culture/2008-index.cfm. Zimmerman, Steve, and Ken Weiss. 2005. Food in the Movies. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Trends in Food Retail: The Supermarket and Beyond SHELLEY KOCH

Perhaps as closely bound up with the role eating plays in everyday lives is the act of buying food: where, how much, and how often. Food shoppers in industrialized countries have a seemingly endless number of products and stores to choose from when buying food. In the United States shoppers can buy upscale corporate organic products at Whole Foods or private-label versions at Trader Joe’s; shop corporate budget in large and smallscale versions at Walmart or Aldi’s; or they can grocery shop at national retailers like Albertsons or Kroger or regional stores like Food Lion or Hy-Vee. They can also pick up local produce at farmers markets or specialty goods at local health food stores. Shoppers in Europe have similar supermarket options in Tesco and Sainsbury (Britain), Carrefour (France), and Coles and Woolworths (Australia). Increasingly, shoppers can even buy grocery items or whole dinner packages online without even stepping into a physical retail space. For those in developing countries, supermarkets are competing with local food retail; Walmart is making inroads in Latin America and even China, for example. However, what looks like choice may not be as bountiful or democratic as it seems. This chapter will explore current trends in food retail—including the increasing consolidation of corporate retail and the prospects for the supermarket model and the rise of alternative forms of food purchasing such as online shopping, how some scholars approach food retail, and future prospects for how we purchase our food.

BACKGROUND Today, 90 percent of American consumers shop primarily at either a supercenter (which includes mass merchandisers and club stores) or at a supermarket (Morrison and Mancino 2015). Supermarkets range in size (with the largest being the hypermart) but are broadly defined as self-service stores that offer food and household goods arranged and displayed by category. Supermarkets started their ascension in the United States at the turn of the century with the development of the high-volume, low-cost format at A&P (The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company) and a focus on self-service by Piggly Wiggly in Memphis, Tennessee. In 1915 Clarence Saunders, the owner of Piggly Wiggly, introduced the first self-service cash-and-carry grocery store in which the customer could select her

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own merchandise from display counters and pay with cash (Bowlby 1997; Humphery 1998; Zimmerman 1955). Saunders came up with the name as the layout of the store drew the customer on a prearranged path, not unlike a pig run (Humphery 1998, 66). This store also featured the first checkout stands, prices marked on all products, and a full line of nationally advertised brands. By 1960, supermarkets sold nearly 70 percent of all of America’s food (Humphery 1998). Prior to the prominence of the supermarket, food retailing was much more diverse. Grocery stores were small, local businesses with a limited number of products located behind the counter, where the customer would present the list of goods to be boxed by the clerk and often delivered to her house. These stores were not necessarily clean or well-lit, but customers were known by name and credit was often the main source of transaction (Tedlow 1990; Humphery 1998; Deutsch 2012). Butchers and bakers had their own stores or stalls at public markets and peddlers often supplied produce to urban neighborhoods, while rural residents grew much of their food (Deutsch 2012). The self-service store and the supermarket competed alongside the small independents for customers until after the Second World War, when increasing suburbanization, postwar economic prosperity, and the widespread use of the automobile favored the expansion of the supermarkets. The supermarket arrived later in Europe. Due to the war rationing and postwar economic changes, the supermarket model competed with local grocery stores until well into the 1970s. Middle-class customers in England, for example, had a more difficult time giving up the personalized service of grocery stores as they disliked the idea of “serving” themselves (Humphery 1998, 73). The supermarket model took hold, however, and has since replaced the local shop as the main retail market for food. Carrefour established the first hypermarket in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, France in 1963, a model that married the supermarket with the department store and allowed consumers to engage in one-stop shopping for apparel, pharmaceuticals, and liquor in addition to food. In France, by 2012, supermarkets and hypermarkets accounted for more than 60 percent of total sales (Arnaud and Hanne 2014). One of the general historical trends in food retailing is increasingly fewer and larger corporations that control large segments of the retail market.  In the United States, the top four grocery retailers in 2013—Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., Kroger, Safeway, and Publix Super Markets—controlled 39 percent of the market which accounted for $449.3 billion, with the top twenty corporations controlling 63.9 percent of the entire food retailing market (USDA 2015). Consolidation is happening globally as well. In Europe, the top ten retailers accounted for 31 percent of the market in 2011 (Sandberg 2010). In several countries, the concentration is even more severe: Switzerland’s top five grocery retailers represent 92 percent of the market while in Sweden the top three companies, ICA, Axfood, and Coop, represent over 90 percent of the market (ibid.). Just two supermarket chains—Coles and Woolworths—control over 70 percent of the Australia’s food retailing sector (Dixon, 2008). Walmart is, of course, the largest global food retailer. The economic downtown of 2009–10 had immediate and continuing effects on the supermarket and supercenter in the United States and Europe, both of which experienced flat sales vis-à-vis the discount store. Consumers found their budgets squeezed and turned to discount stores, with a limited assortment of food, low prices, and no services, to make ends meet. This trend continued in Europe with discount retailers like Aldi’s and Lidl experiencing the biggest increases in sales in 2014 (Tacket 2014), while in the United States sales at discount stores (Dollar General, for example) also increased after the

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recession (USDA 2015). These trends lead analysts to question the long-term future of the hypermarket model. The supermarket is also globalizing. Starting in Latin America in the 1990s, foreign direct investment (FDI) and Western logistical and distribution strategies, such as efficient consumer response (keeping only minimal inventories on hand) and the use of computers for inventory and the internet for connection with the warehouse, have created supermarket dominance in many urban areas (Reardon et al. 2003). Demand-side pressures have also contributed to the rise of supermarket retailing, including increases in wages, the number of women in the workforce, and use of refrigeration (Reardon et al. 2003). By 2000, supermarkets occupied 50–60 percent of national food retail among the Latin American countries; in South Africa supermarkets now account for 50–60 percent of all food retailing (Neven and Reardon 2004). Major retailers such as Walmart and Tesco have entered South Korean and Chinese markets in the latest iteration of this phase supermarket globalization. In 2001, for example, the supermarket share of Chinese urban food markets was 48 percent, up from 30 percent in 1999 (Reardon et al. 2004). Supermarket diffusion, however, has led to the displacement of local food retailers and local fresh markets, diminishing food access and employment in poorer neighborhoods. In Accra, Ghana, the street food sector employed 60,000 people, with an estimated annual turnover of more than $100 million. As supermarkets become part of urban development strategies, local food vendors and markets are put out of business and low-income groups risk not being able to afford regular meals due to higher prices in the stores (Dixon et al. 2007).

CHALLENGES TO THE SUPERMARKET MODEL The alternative food movement has spurred demand for healthier and local food, culminating in the revival of alternative food markets such as farmers markets, communitysupported agriculture (CSAs), and direct-to-consumer farm sales. Farmer’s markets in the United States grew from 1,755 in 1994 to 4,684 in 2008 (USDA 2015). Alternative food networks have also increased in Europe; in 2003 an estimated 20 percent of farms in Europe were involved in direct selling via road-side stalls, pick your own, farm shops, and so on (Renting et al. 2003). While this increase in alternate food retail outlets is significant, it represents a small slice of the total market. Supermarket retailers have responded by adding more organics, natural, and local foods, as discussed in more detail below. Shifting demographics in the United States and Europe are also challenging the food retail model. Convenience is increasingly more important to consumers as households are getting smaller and are often headed by single parents, populations are aging, and women continue to work outside the home (Sandberg 2010, 43). In 2000, 43.5 percent of all European retail food purchases were for processed products (Gracia and Albisu 2001). Both US and European consumers eat out as much as they cook in their homes (Gracia and Albisu 2001), thus making restaurants a direct competitor for the household’s food budget. Retailers have responded by increasing their ready-to-eat options, especially in upscale stores like Whole Foods. In the mid-2000s, the annual sales of prepared foods sold in supermarkets grew 4 to 4.5 percent annually, compared with 2 to 2.5 percent for other grocery products (USDA 2015). Some stores have added a seating area to challenge fast food outlets for business. For example, Wegmans Food Markets, a Rochester, NY-based operator of eighty-one supermarkets, introduced the Market Café, an in-store foodservice option containing a wide range of prepared and made-to-order foods (ERS 2015).

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Another recent retail strategy tailored toward busy shoppers is drive-through shopping: consumers order by phone or online and store employees assemble the purchase for the shopper to pick up at the store without even getting out of the car. Online shopping is one of the biggest challenges to the brick-and-mortar supermarket. Dedicated online grocery sites, such as Peapod in the United States and Ocado in the UK, sell their products only online while others such as FreshDirect in the United States and Abel & Cole in the UK deliver straight from suppliers. Instacart allows shoppers to purchase items from stores such as Whole Foods, Costco, and Kroger and then packages the items to deliver to the consumer’s house. Amazon Fresh sells fresh and packaged food and has made online shopping even easier with Amazon Dash. This new technology connects with Wi-Fi and an Amazon Fresh account to allow the shopper to either say the name or scan barcodes of products they need or are almost out of, and this information goes directly into their digital shopping cart. When this “shopping” is done, the customer’s order is automatically placed. In addition to general online food shopping, meal kits such as Blue Apron, HelloFresh, and Plated are available nationwide in the United States, with multiple regional offerings. Traditional supermarkets and superstores have responded by developing online retail; Walmart has invested approximately one billion dollars in online grocery retailing. Electronic retail is much more advanced in Europe than in the United States. Online grocery shopping in Europe comprised 14 percent of total sales in 2014 (Desceras 2015), while in the United States online shopping represented around 3 percent of the total grocery market in 2014 and is more developed in metropolitan areas such as New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle (Syndy 2015). However, analysts predict online grocery shopping will account for 12 percent of the US market by 2020, with millennials leading the way in using this retail venue (Benn et al. 2015).

SCHOLARLY PERSPECTIVES While business and management specialists have reams of information on food retail, the grocery store is not often the main focus of academic scholarship. Retailing has been studied as part of agri-food chain, from a historical perspective, or as a site of consumption. In this chapter I will discuss two perspectives—cultural economy and intersectionality— that provide scaffolding to explain the rise and persistence of the supermarket as the main retail organization of the last century, where food retail fits into the consumer culture, and how food retail both reflects and perpetuates inequalities.

Political and Cultural Economy Food regime analysts identify at least two distinct food regimes (Friedmann and McMichael 1989; McMichael 2003). The first regime began with trade between UK and its colonies, whereby indentured and slave labor was used to grow food in the tropics for export back to the UK and thus initiated the global industrial food system. The end of the Second World War ushered in the second regime that intensified the industrial agri-food model of monocultures and synthetic inputs to increase yield that delivered cheap food to an urbanizing world. Some scholars argue that we have entered a third corporate environmental food regime (Lawrence and Burch 2005; McMichael 2003) which includes neoliberal deregulation of the food industry, growing environmental degradation, food scares, and increasing globalization. Lawrence and Burch (2005) argue that this third regime also involves

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a shift in the locus of control over the establishment and management of food chains from the manufacturing sector to the retail sector, which is dominated by large global supermarkets chains such as Walmart, Tesco, and Carrefour. Jane Dixon (2007), using commodity systems analysis, furthers this perspective by developing what she calls a cultural economy approach. She argues that supermarkets have not only increased their market share and thus their economic capital to eliminate competition, but also become a cultural authority in food matters for consumers. She argues that supermarkets are “the archetypal cultural intermediary continuously mobilising and converting between cultural and economic capital” (2007, 46). Food retailing corporations exert authority over both manufacturers and customers (Clarke 2000; Burch and Lawrence 2005) and thus have been afforded the status of de facto policy makers within the food system (Freidberg 2007). Supermarkets exert dominance over producers and manufacturers through vertical integration by using manufacturers to produce private-label products or to contract with farmers to grow food with certain specifications. Walmart, for example, can sell food at lower prices than its competitors, as it controls the standards for farmers and food manufacturers (Lawrence and Burch 2007). In addition, supermarkets can compete directly with manufacturers by developing their own brands. Computerized inventory systems and just-in-time delivery allow retailers to shift the risk of stocking and ordering to the processors and warehouses rather than the retailer (Dixon 2008). Supermarkets promote their authority over consumers in several ways. They position themselves as the consumer’s advocate for health and nutrition information as well as to promote their authority as food safety experts. In both nutrition and food safety, supermarkets attempt to build trust with consumers by responding to the food movement’s critique of the social and environmental costs of the industrial food system as well as health scares from contaminated food through marketing and store layout designed to provide the illusion of authenticity and “naturalness,” what Pollan calls “the supermarket pastoral” (2006). Bridges, Lawrence, and Burch (2011) describe several strategies UK retailers use to manufacture trust in food products and processes, including product packaging and signage featuring individual farmers, bucolic rural farm scenes, food described as “hand-picked” or “hand-made,” and animals in their natural settings. Store design is employed to give the impression of being more “natural.” In the UK Morrisons stores, “Market Street” replicates the traditional high-street layout of independent food retailers such as butchers, bakers, and fishmongers. Some US retailers have reformatted the entire store as a farmers market: Sprouts describes itself as “the grocery shopping experience that makes healthy living easy and affordable. Our bright and cheery neighborhood grocery stores offer fresh, natural, and organic foods and products at incredible prices—and in an approachable setting that feels like an oldfashioned farmers market” (Sprouts 2016). Fresh Market has simulated a farmers market in their retail stores; produce is placed in rounded stacks in the middle of the store to mimic a market stall while signage is simulated barn wood with chalk writing. These stores attempt to inspire trust not only in the food products but in the process of retailing by simulating a closer relationship between the farmer, retailer, and consumer. Connecting with health experts is another way supermarkets cement their cultural authority in the food system. While nutrition labeling is required on processed food items in the United States and the European Union, stores also present themselves as food experts by hiring nutritionists and distributing recipes and other health information. Some stores have also introduced proprietary nutrition labeling programs such as the NuVal

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nutritional scoring system. In this program, each food item is scored on a scale of 1–100, based on Institute of Medicine’s Dietary Reference Intakes and the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (a joint publication by the USDA and Health and Human Services). The higher the score, the better the nutrition; instead of reading each package label the consumer can more easily make nutrition decisions. These nutrition programs position the retailer as a food authority while also contributing to the bottom line, as marketing studies find that this type of program allows consumers to relax their focus on price to focus on nutrition, which often leads to more purchases (Nikolova and Inman 2015). Customer loyalty is a particularly important goal for retailers, as the most loyal customers are significantly more profitable than the least loyal (Clark 1997, 146). Supermarkets attempt to build relationships through discounts, prizes, and co-marketing relationships such as discounts on gas at allied stations (Dixon 2007). Loyalty cards, in particular, allow the customer to purchase products at lower prices—but give the retailer access to the shopper’s personal shopping habits such as time of shopping, the quantity and type of products as well as general buying habits through cross-listing the loyalty card information with zip codes (Worthington and Fear 2010). The smartphone allows shoppers to get in-store coupons, recipes, and other promotions, but again allows retailers even more ability to track consumer movement and sales. Retailers have responded to the alternative food movement by expanding their organic and natural food sections, and often sell organic private-label products. As many organic foods are now mass-produced and distributed, supermarkets use the same processors as name-brand companies but brand the products with their own labels. These products are less expensive for the consumer and more profitable for the retailer, but are also a way to build trust with the consumer. For example, Kroger’s offers its own line of corporate organics (Simple Truth), which reached $1 billion in annual sales in less than two years after launching in 2012 (Kowit 2015). Walmart, Giant Food, and Shaw’s all offer corporate-brand organic or natural products (Naturally Preferred, Nature’s Promise, and Wild Harvest) (ERS 2015). While most private-label foods compete for shelf space with branded foods, Whole Foods is introducing a new store that only sells its private-label foods, called 365 after its private-label name (Kowit 2015).

Retail and Inequality Although changing slowly with the increase in households with single men, most food shoppers are still women. On any given day, 17 percent of American women are shopping, versus 10 percent of men (Goodman, 2008). Grocery shopping for the household is still done by women or administered by women who often send someone to the store with a list (DeVault 1991; Bowen, Elliot, and Brenton 2014; Hamrick et al. 2011; Beagan et al. 2008; Koch 2015). Grocery shopping is one aspect of food provisioning, the necessary but unpaid and often unacknowledged labor performed by women for their households as well as for the grocery store through self-service. As food shoppers are still primarily women and shopping is still coded as feminine, food retail scholarship must include a gendered analysis. As Tracey Deutsch (2012) describes in great detail, food retail has always been highly gendered. The supermarket is no exception—and, in fact, was so successful organizationally because it curtailed women’s power in the food retail environment. As chain stores took over retail space from independents, store policies, and procedures were standardized and controlled by the corporate office. Thus, women’s abilities as household

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provisioners to bargain, receive special treatment, and/or protest policies were reduced. Now, the retail environment—whether the supermarket, a hypermarket, or discount store—is controlled by extra-local relations of ruling (Smith 2005). Grocery shopping, as it is often women’s work, is denigrated as unskilled or viewed as a leisurely activity. But provisioning households requires a balance of knowing what household members like and dislike, determining meals, keeping purchases within a budget, trying to select healthy foods, and scheduling the shopping trip around other activities (DeVault 1991; Koch 2012); it is necessary work on behalf of the household as well as the store. However, the layout of the supermarket is designed to slow consumers down and to make them traverse through the entire store, even if they only need a few items. Lighting, smells, and visuals such as TV or cart screens are designed to disorient shoppers, and managers rearrange shelves and move products at certain intervals to disrupt shoppers’ routines. Specific products are placed at eye-level and on end caps to get shoppers to move faster. Management uses loss-leaders (selling products below cost to draw people to the store) and price-flexing (varying prices in different locations without reference to real costs) to increase the sales of regularly priced products (Lawrence and Burch 2007). Food and nutrition experts advise shoppers to defend against these retail strategies by writing a list, avoiding going to the store hungry, and shopping only once a week, making self-discipline a pre-requisite for this work. Thus, the supermarket is not designed to make this provisioning work easier but rather to increase sales, especially by enticing the shopper to buy more than they intended. “Pester power” (Schor 2005) is another marketing strategy promoted to influence parents’ purchases. This strategy involves marketing to children such as branding food products with cartoon or movie characters or placing ads for food products in computer games. Children recognize these products in the store, and subsequently nag their parents to buy these branded products. Most grocery shopping advice encourages parents to leave their children home when grocery shopping but suggests that if parents must bring them they should use games or incentives to limit their nagging (Koch 2012). However, the supermarket creates a visual environment stocked to sell heavily processed goods and/or junk food. The checkout aisle is designed for impulse purchases, and stores stock items geared at children lower on the shelves. Not surprisingly, Berry and McMullin (2008) found that certain visual cues—namely spokescharacters, themed cereal shapes/colors, and child incentives on cereal boxes—are consistently associated with higher levels of sugar, refined grains, and trans-fats in ready-to-eat breakfast cereals. Thus, the supermarket and other consumer contexts (e.g., television) are linked influences, encouraging children in visual ways from early associative memory generation to point-of-purchase by invoking desirable emotions, recognizable brands, and familiar characters. (344) Marketing and shopping advice are directed toward mothers, who are responsible for the health and economy of their households. In a neoliberal environment in which the state and market have deregulated responsibility for caregiving (Acker 2006), women have assumed primary responsibility for the health of their families (Cairns, Johnston, and MacKendrick 2013; MacKendrick 2014). This has put an added burden on caregivers who shop for food. MacKendrick describes how mothers use “precautionary consumption” as a way to protect their children from perceived and real risk of toxins in the food system. This often entails shopping for organic, natural, and local foods; supermarkets capitalize on these fears by promoting their own private-label organic and natural products or by developing

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their own auditing system. Castellano (2014) found that women who engaged in local food systems (which included shopping at farmers markets, CSAs, or direct farm sales) in Ohio assumed a greater proportion of responsibility for planning meals and shopping than those not engaged in local food systems, while the men’s responsibility for provisioning in these alternative networks decreased. The alternative food movement may entail even more work for shoppers and may not be sustainable from a provisioning perspective. Gender also pervades retail’s corporate organization. Most retail store and corporate managers are men, often with the exception of the bakery. These are the positions that determine the layout and the hiring practices of the store, and are the highest paid. The gendered division of labor is observable in the entry-level positions in the stores, as well. Most cashiers are women who occupy these positions with limited prospects of promotion and whose work is characterized by high levels of emotional labor. Engaging in conversation with the customers for a shift while standing with few breaks is exhausting. Stock clerks, on the other hand, are more likely to be men, a position that entails more autonomy and higher wages (Tolich and Briar 1999; McKie et al. 2009; Center for Popular Democracy 2016). Alternative food retail, at least in the United States, is also organized by race and social class. The consumer who regularly shops at the local farmers market tends to be a white, affluent, well-educated older woman (Rice 2015), and the farmers who are visible in the stalls may be the owners of the land but are not necessarily picking or harvesting the produce. Farmers markets in the United States may obscure exploitative labor practices as well as create “white” spaces that tend to exclude people of color (Alkon and McCullen 2011;Guthman 2008a,b; Guthman et al.2006; Slocum 2008); however, this doesn’t appear as relevant for European markets (Spilková et al. 2013), ). Cairns and Johnston (2015) drew on Bordieu’s concept of habitus to understand gendered and classed dynamics of grocery shopping that shunt shoppers to specific retail or consumer spaces. The consumers they interviewed described discount grocery stores as uninviting spaces with an industrial feel and garish lighting while premium grocery stores such as Whole Foods were characterized as a relaxing and enjoyable experience. Cairns and Johnston argue that the demands of a hegemonic femininity include caring for others and being a skilled consumer; however, this process is also shaped by social class which manifests itself as a habitus that favors certain retail environments over others (Cairns and Johnston 2015, 47). For example, more privileged women not only shop at more premium stores but are emotionally connected to or, alternatively, disgusted by certain retail shops. Conversely, women in disadvantaged class positions are denied not only access to certain retail venues due to finances but also have their femininity challenged by not shopping in proper venues.

Retail and Food Access An average supermarket has approximately 42,000 different products to choose from. For people who cannot access or afford those items, these choices are irrelevant. The concept of food deserts—neighborhoods without access to food retail—has captured the attention of researchers and policy makers since Neil Wrigley identified retail as an important factor in the political economic construction of the food delivery system (Wrigley 2000). A 2009 study by the US Department of Agriculture found that 23.5 million Americans lack access to a supermarket within a mile of their home and 20 percent of rural Americans live more than ten miles from a supermarket or supercenter. Studies also show that low-income

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Americans who qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly food stamps) use supercenters more often than other types of food retail, even when the stores are not in their neighborhoods (Shannon 2014; Ver Ploeg 2010). Creating more access to grocery stores has since become a solution for diet-related diseases; public figures such as Michelle Obama have teamed up with Walmart, Walgreens, and other national and regional chains to open or expand more than 1,500 retail stores in an effort to bring healthier food to underserved areas under a $400 million National Healthy Food Financing Initiative. However, it is unclear whether access is the main issue in underserved communities. Some scholars argue that access may not be a sufficient solution to an agri-food system that produces massive amounts of cheap, unhealthy food using unsustainable environmental and labor processes. Healthy food is more expensive, but those at the bottom and increasingly the middle classes cannot access it because of a hollowing out of the middleclass jobs by corporate labor processes like Walmart’s (Donald 2013; Guthman 2011). Guthman (2008b) also argues that citizens in these communities may not choose what activists or nutritionists consider “healthy” food because they don’t see how it helps them feed their families or that the food offered reflects the interests of outsiders rather than the people in the community. Another potential driver of the use of big-box stores may be the food retail monoculture—the Walmart effect—created when big-box stores drive local and alternative food retail out of business. Some metropolitan areas are piloting retail alternatives to increase food access in low-income neighborhoods, such as the Green Carts initiative in New York City. This program licenses vendors to drive fresh produce trucks in low-income and underserved neighborhoods. Vendors often source their vegetables from local markets and have reported being profitable within the first two years. Seventy-one percent of customers reported increased consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables since shopping at the Green Carts (Fuchs et al. 2014). Grocery stores have complained that these carts are undercutting their business, especially in fruit sales, and are challenging the city to increase permit fees for these trucks. The rural food desert poses more of a challenge. In rural areas, pressures from large chain stores and depopulation due to farming consolidation are forcing small, local retailers out of business. The University of Minnesota published a study reporting that up to 62 percent of rural Minnesota grocery store owners do not plan on owning their stores in ten years, but have no transition plan. The main challenges these grocers identified were competition with large chain grocery stores, high operating costs, and narrow profit margins (Draeger et al. 2016).  National and corporate supermarkets are unlikely to locate in these areas of declining populations; the Whole Foods criteria for potential store locations includes “good road frontage, plenty of parking, and be located in areas with disproportionately high incomes and levels of college education” (cited in Lockie 2009). The online retail options are unlikely to reach these areas anytime soon due to geographical distances for delivery, and those in poverty are unlikely to be able to afford membership fees or mark-ups. Dollar General, for example, is unlikely to have an online presence.

SUPERMARKET FUTURES What can we expect from food retail of the future? Perhaps a drive-through supermarket? A Russian inventor recently filed a patent for a new supermarket design where shoppers drive their cars up to a rotating shelf stocked with food and grocery products. Using a

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scrolling button, the shopper would browse through the vertically loaded shelves like songs on a jukebox, grab what they needed, and place it on a conveyor belt that leads to a cashier. The cashier would scan the items, and the shopper would drive up to pay never having to step foot outside the car. This drive-through model might make sense if most people owned an automobile and municipalities had the population and space to invest in this type of “store.” A more realistic future vision would be the online grocery store, which seems poised to challenge the dominance of supermarket. Some brick-and-mortar stores are already responding to this technological threat by upgrading the traditional store. Whole Foods’ 365 stores cater to millenials by offering iPads throughout the store to allow shoppers to make custom-prepared food orders, check digital price tags, or scan a product for reviews. The focus, however, is still on providing low prices, which could further the dis-embedding of global supply sourcing and intensify the agri-food industrial complex (Dixon 2008). Without a societal commitment to equity in food access, technology may widen the bifurcation between the rich and the poor, between urban and rural shoppers. Globally, the trend toward supermarkets could have a devastating effect on local food vendors and the global poor if corporate retail continues to concentrate and standardize in middleclass urban areas.

REFERENCES Acker, Joan. 2005. Class Questions, Feminist Answers. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Alkon, Alison Hope, and Christie Grace McCullen. 2011. “Whiteness and Farmers Markets: Performances, Perpetuations. Contestations?” Antipode 43 (4): 937–59. Arnaud, Benjamin, and Hugo Hanne. 2014. “An overview of mass food retailing in France.” Economic and Price Monitoring Bureau, Accessed March 15, 2016.http://www.economie. gouv.fr/files/files/directions_services/dgccrf/documentation/dgccrf_eco/english/DGCCRF_ eco_%2325_Mass_Food_Retailing_in_France.pdf Beagan, Brenda, Gwen E. Chapman, Andrea D’Sylva, and B. Raewyn Bassett. 2008. “‘It’s just Easier for me to do it’: Rationalizing the Family Division of Foodwork.” Sociology 42 (4): 653–71. Benn, Y., T. L. Webb, B. P. I. Chang, and J. Reidy. 2015. “What Information do Consumers Consider, and How do They Look for it, When Shopping for Groceries Online?” Appetite 89 (1): 265–73. Berry, Brent, and Taralyn McMullen. 2008. “Visual Communication to Children in the Supermarket Context: Health Protective or Exploitive?” Agriculture and Human Values 25(3): 333–48. Bowen, Sarah, Sinikka Elliott, and Joslyn Brenton. 2014. “The Joy of Cooking?” Contexts 13: 20–25. Bowlby, Rachael. 1997. “Supermarket Futures..” In The Shopping Experience, edited by Pasi Falk and Colin Campbell, 92–110. London: Sage. Burch, David, and Geoffrey Lawrence. 2005. “Supermarket Own Brands, Supply Chains and the Transformation of the Agri-Food System.” International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food. 13 (1): 1–18. Burch, David, and Geoffrey Lawrence. 2007. “Supermarket Own-brands, New Foods and the Reconfiguration of Agri-Food Supply Chains.” In Supermarkets and Agri-Food Supply Chains, edited by D. Burch and G. Lawrence, 100–28. London: Edward Elgar.

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Cairns, Kate, and Josee Johnston. 2015. Food and Femininity. London: Bloomsbury. Cairns, Kate, Josee Johnston, and Norah Mackendrick. 2013. “Feeding the ‘Organic Child’: Mothering through Ethical Consumption.” Journal of Consumer Culture 13(2): 97–118. Clark, Ian. 2000. “Retail Power, Competition and Local Consumer Choice in the UK Grocery Sector.” European Journal of Marketing 34: 975–1002. Data Brief: Retail Jobs Today. Brooklyn: The Center for Popular Democracy, 2016. Desceras, Algirdas. 2015. The State of Online Grocery Retail In Europe. Amsterdam: Syndy, Accessed March 10. http://syndy.com/report-the-state-of-online-grocery-retail-2015/ Deutsch, Tracey. 2012. Building a Housewife's Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,. DeVault, Marjorie. 1991. Feeding the Family. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,. Dixon, Jane. 2007. “Supermarkets as New Food Authorites.” In Supermarkets and Agri-food Supply Chains: Transformations in the Production and Consumption of Food, by D. Burch and G. Lawrence, 20–50. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Dixon, Jane. 2008. “Operating Upstream and Downstream: How Supermarkets Exercise Power in the Food System.” In A Sociology of Food and Nutrition, edited by J. Germov and L. Williams, 100–23. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Dixon, Jane, Abiud M. Omwega, Sharon Friel, Cate Burns, Kelly Donati, and Rachel Carlisle. 2007. “The Health Equity Dimensions of Urban Food Systems.” Journal of Urban Health: Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 84: 118–29. Donald, Betsy. 2013. “Food Retail and Access after the Crash: Rethinking the Food Desert Problem.” Journal of Economic Geography 13: 231–37. Draeger, Kathryn, Karen Lanthier, Caryn Mohr, and Nich Tremper. 2016. Rural Grocery Store Survey: At-a-Glance Business Characteristics and Environment. Study, Minneapolis: Regents of the University of Minnesota. Freidberg, Susanne. 2003. “Cleaning up down South: Supermarkets, Ethical Trade and African Horticulture.” Social & Cultural Geography 4(1): 27–43. Friedmann, H., and A. McNair. 2008. “Whose Rules Rule? Contested Projects to Certify ‘Local Production’ for Distant Consumers.” Journal of Agrarian Change 8, (3): 408–34. Friedmann, H., and P. McMichael. 1989. “Agriculture and the State System: The Rise and Decline of National Agricultures 1870 to the Present.” Sociologia Ruralis 29(2): 93–117. Fuchs, Ester R., Sarah M. Holloway, Kimberly Bayer, and Alexandra Feathers. 2014. Innovative Partnership for Public Health: An Evaluation of The New York City Green. New York: Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs Case Study Series in Global Public Policy. Goodman, Jack. 2008. “Who Does the Grocery Shopping, and When Do They Do It?” Washington, DC: www.timeuseinstitute.org. Gracia, A. , and L. M. Albisu. 2001. “Food Consumption in the European Union: Main Determinants and Country Differences.” Agribusiness 17(4): 469–88. Guthman, Julie. 2008a. “Bringing Good Food to others: Investigating the Subjects of Alternative Food Practice.” Cultural Geographies 15: 431–47. Guthman, Julie. 2008b. “‘If They Only Knew’: Color Blindness and Universalism in California Alternative Food Institutions.” Professional Geographer 60: 387–97 Hamrick, Karen, Margaret Andrews, Joanne Guthrie, David Hopkins, and Ket McCelland. 2011. How Much Time Do Americans Spend on Food? Economic Information Bulletin 86, Washington DC: USDA-ERS. Humphery, Kim. 1998. Shelf Life: Supermarkets and the Changing Cultures of Consumption. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Johansson, Kristina, and Anna Sofia Lundgren. 2015. “Gendering Boundary Work: Exploring Excluded Spaces in Supermarket Job Rotation.” Gender, Place & Culture: 188–204. Koch, Shelley L. 2012. A Theory of Grocery Shopping: Food, Choice and Conflict. London: Berg. Koch, Shelley L. 2015. “‘Leave a Bowl of Fruit on the Kitchen Table’: The Missing Work of Food Provisioning in Food and Nutrition Policy in the United States.” Social Currents 2(3): 231–38. Kowit, Beth. 2015. With new “365” stores, Whole Foods goes on the attack. Accessed April 25. http://fortune.com/2015/06/11/with-new-365-stores-whole-foods-goes-on-the-attack/ Mackendrick, Norah. 2014. “More Work for Mother: Chemical Body Burdens as a Maternal Responsibility.” Gender and Society: 1–24. McKie, Linda, Gill Hogg, Laura Airey, Kathryn Backett-Milburn, and Zoe Rew. 2009. “Autonomy, Control and Job Advancement: The Case of Low Paid Women Working in Food Retail.” Work, Employment & Society: 787–96. McMichael, P. 2003. “The Power of Food.” In Globalization, Localization, and Sustainable Livlihoods, edited by R. Almas and G. Lawrence, 69–85. Aldershot: Ashgate. Morrison, Rosanna Mentzer, and Lisa Mancino. 2015. “Most U.S. Households Do Their Main Grocery Shopping at Supermarkets and Supercenters Regardless of Income.” Amber Waves. Accessed February 5, 2016. http://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2015-august/most-ushouseholds-do-their-main-grocery-shopping-at-supermarkets-and-supercenters-regardless-ofincome.aspx#.V87QMvkrJD8 Nikolova, Hristina Dzhogleva, and J. Jeffrey Inman. 2015. “Healthy Choice: The Effect of Simplified Point-of-Sale Nutritional Information on Consumer Food Choice Behavior.” Journal of Marketing Research 52(6: 817. Ploeg, Michele Ver, Lisa Mancieno, Jessica E. Todd, Dawn Marie Clay, and Benjamin Scharadin. 2015. Where Do Americans Usually Shop for Food and How Do They Travel To Get There? Initial Findings from the National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey. Economic Information Bulletin No. (EIB-138), Washington, DC: USDA. Pollan, Michael. 2006. An Omnivores Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. London : Bloomsbury. Reardon, Thomas, C. Peter Timmer, Christopher B. Barrett, and Julio Berdegue. 2003. “The Rise of Supermarkets in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 85: 1140–46. Renting, H., I. Marsden, and J. Banks. 2003. “Understanding Alternative Food Networks: Exploring tile Role of Short Food Supply Chains in Rural Development.” Environment and Planning A: 393–411. Rice, Julie Steinkopf. 2015. “Privilege and Exclusion at the Farmers Market: Findings from a Survey of Shoppers.” Agriculture and Human Values 10: 21–29. Richards, Carol, Geoffry Lawrence, and David Burch. 2011. “Supermarkets and Agro-industrial Foods: The Strategic Manufacturing of Consumer Trust.” Food, Culture and Society 14(1): 29–47. Sandberg, Erik. 2010. The Retail Industry in Western Europe: Trends, Facts and Logistics Challenges. Linkoping: Linkoping University Electronic Press. Schor, Juliet. 2005. Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture. New York: Scribner. Shannon, Jerry. 2014. “What does SNAP Benefit usage tell us about Food Access in Lowincome Neighborhoods?” Social Science and Medicine 107: 89–99. Slocum, Rachel. 2008. “Thinking Race through Corporeal Feminist Theory: Divisions and Intimacies at the Minneapolis Farmer’s Market.” Social & Cultural Geography 9: 849–69.

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Smith, Dorothy. 2005. Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology For People. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Spilková, Jana, Lenka Fendrychová, and Marie Syrovátková. 2013. “Farmers’ Markets in Prague: A New Challenge within the Urban Shoppingscape.” Agriculture and Human Values 30: 179–91. Som Castellano, Rebecca L. 2015. “Alternative Food Networks and Food Provisioning as a Gendered Act.” Agriculture and Human Values 32(3): 461–74. Sprouts. 2016. “About Sprouts.” Accessed May 10, 2016. www.sprouts.com/about-us. Stewart, Lockie.2009. “‘Responsibility and Agency Within Alternative Food Networks: Assembling the ‘Citizen Consumer’’.” Agriculture and Human Values 26(3): 193–201. Tackett, Kelly. 2014. European Grocery Retailing. London: Planet Retail. Tandon, Sharad, Maurice Landes, and Andrea Woolverton. 2011. “The Expansion of Modern Grocery Retailing and Trade in Developing Countries.” United States Department of Agriculture. Accessed November 15, 2015. http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/118890/err122.pdf Tedlow, R.S. 1990. New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America. New York: Basic Books,. Tolich, Martin, and Celia Briar. 1999. “Just Checking It Out: Exploring the Significance of Iinformal Gender Divisions Amongst American Supermarket Employees.” Gender, Work and Organization: 129–33. United States Department of Agriculture. 2015. "Retail Trends". Economic Research Service. Accessed January 15, 2016. http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-markets-prices/retailingwholesaling/retail-trends.aspx Worthington, S., and J. Fear. 2010. “Information is Useful but Knowledge is Power: Loyalty Programmes and How they Can Benefit Retailers.” European Retail Research 24: 69–91. Wrigley, Neil. 2002. “‘Food deserts’ in British Cities: Policy Context and Research Priorities. Urban.” Urban Studies 30: 2029–40.

CHAPTER NINE

Haute, Fast, and Historic: Restaurants and the Rise of Popular Culture DAVID BERISS

In 2002, the management of Galatoire’s, a venerable Creole restaurant in New Orleans, fired a waiter and triggered what was probably the most interesting scandal of the year in that city. The waiter was fired after being accused of sexual harassment. He had worked at the restaurant for over twenty years and had a substantial base of regular customers who were not happy that he had been let go. Galatoire’s has long been a favorite destination among the city’s elites and the waiter’s regular customers were an illustrious, wealthy, and influential group. Many of them wrote angry letters to the restaurant’s owners. The letters were, in turn, collected and put on a website, established to help coordinate the protest. Reading the letters revealed that the protest concerned far more than the fate of the waiter. His supporters objected to changes in the restaurant, including the purchase of an ice machine, the opening of an upstairs dining room that took reservations, the relaxation of the dress code, and other reforms that they saw as challenges to the core of the city’s Creole dining traditions. The scandal was, in turn, covered in the press and widely ridiculed by local pundits, who saw the complaints as the whining of a privileged elite, out of touch with the majority of the city’s population. When a journalist organized a series of satirical readings of the letters at a local cabaret, the event sold out and had to be extended for many performances. As I have indicated elsewhere (Beriss 2007), this controversy became the framework for an extended public discussion of what constituted the distinct culture of the city of New Orleans. From questions about the proper gender of waiters, to questions of class and privilege, and discussions of who might be a legitimate spokesperson for the city’s culture, the debate raged for months. While the city has since moved on, the incident demonstrates some of the more interesting characteristics of restaurants in popular culture. At first glance, restaurants are clearly businesses, where the exchange of goods and services can be thought of in terms of market exchange. Yet in the context of the controversy around Galatoire’s, that description seems extraordinarily thin. In their letters, the protestors suggested that the preservation of an historic culture was at stake, while those who ridiculed them argued that the protestors were themselves misrepresenting that culture. Restaurants provide a context in which questions of popular culture can be especially well focused. Restaurants are more than just sites for capitalist exchange. They are, as David Sutton and I have

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argued (Beriss and Sutton 2007), total social phenomena, where many of the issues of the day are crystallized in one place. Restaurants are also sites where questions like the distinction between public and private spheres are blurred, where rules governing relations among kin and questions of hospitality are worked out. Restaurants can be sites for enacting religious, ethnic, or national identities. They are often the framework for politics or business. And all of this happens more or less in public. When I first looked into the incident at Galatoire’s, I thought that it might be indicative of a distinct New Orleans food culture. Yet even a cursory glance at the food news in other cities (and not just in the United States), reveals that restaurants have become part of the popular culture landscape. Openings, closings, trends in food and décor, the activities of star chefs, investments by celebrities, scathing reviews, and even the firing of waiters all seem to be of great public interest. This chapter explores the relationship between restaurants and popular culture. In popular culture, restaurants provide a lens through which we can think about society, as it is and as we would like it to be. They provide a stage on which people can perform various social roles, reaffirming or critiquing existing social hierarchies. Restaurants are also objects through which we can sort out critical ideas about social class, gender, race, and ethnicity. I show how restaurants went from sites that mostly confirmed the status of society’s elites, to a more democratized setting for confirming the rise of the middle class and of consumerism. The rise of consumer society was accompanied by a rethinking of race and ethnicity in society, with restaurants often at the center of the process. Civil rights battles over the integration of restaurants and the spread and diversification of immigrant or “ethnic” restaurants provide an additional way in which restaurants have been at the center of popular debates about society. Finally, the rise of fast food restaurants, while furthering the democratization of dining out, has also provided a framework for discussions of issues ranging from workplace inequalities to globalization and threats to cultural identities.

FROM FINE DINING FOR THE ELITE TO MIDDLE CLASS CONSUMERS Sometime in the early 1820s, a young man from the French provincial town of Angoulême comes to Paris in search of fame, fortune, and acceptance among the French aristocracy. In his efforts to understand the customs of the French upper classes, Lucien de Rubempré takes himself to dinner at Restaurant Véry, one of the best-known Parisian restaurants of the time. After a multicourse meal designed to initiate himself into the pleasures of Paris life—pleasures he expects to enjoy regularly—he is shocked by the bill. At 50 francs, the meal costs him as much as a month of living in Angoulême. The young man eventually learns quite a bit more about what it would take for an aspiring provincial poet to gain acceptance among the Parisian elite. The gulf separating his experiences in cheap student restaurants and his dreams of eating again chez Véry turns out to be vast. Roughly 170 years later, in Los Angeles, Harris K. Telemacher, a television weatherman, attempts to secure a dinner reservation at the trendy restaurant L’Idiot. On the phone, he is quizzed about his job, his credit cards, whether or not he owns his home, as well as other personal matters. Required to visit the restaurant for a deeper interview, Harris is interrogated about his tastes and about how much he can afford. The restaurant’s maître d’, backed by the chef, asks what he might order if they were to allow him to dine there. Harris suggests that he might like the duck. He is promptly told that with his finances,

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he can have the chicken. Entry into the world of elite dining in Los Angeles would seem, in 1991, to require both financial and cultural capital beyond the capacity of a middleclass weatherman. Readers will recognize the first young man from Balzac’s Lost Illusions (1971) and the second from Steve Martin’s movie, L.A. Story (1991). Very little, it might seem, has changed in the last two centuries, at least as far as the role restaurants can play in affirming (or denying) elite status for their customers. For Balzac’s character in Lost Illusions as well as for Steve Martin’s character in L.A. Story, restaurants would seem to represent something quite similar, despite the vast differences in time and geography. Whether in fiction or in observations of real restaurants, the restaurants themselves represent the way of life of an elite. Dining in them is out of the question for most of the population, but reading about them is open to all. Rebecca Spang notes, for instance, that only a lucky few Parisians were likely to have dined at the non-fictional Restaurant Véry in the 1820s, but that that restaurant and a few others were “potent symbols” (2000, 178) for an opulent lifestyle. It is in that guise that they appear in the writings of authors like Balzac. By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, however, this vision of an opulent lifestyle was subject to a consumer-oriented middle-class critique. Whether in France or, a little later, in the United States, nineteenth-century restaurants were a significant site for the assertion of social status, as well as for contesting the criteria for membership among the elites (Mennell 1996; Ferguson 2001). Andrew Haley has analyzed the ways French restaurants became, in many parts of the United States, sites in which elites could display their status in public. Haley argues that the national standard for such restaurants was set by Delmonico’s, in New York. With few exceptions (New Orleans and San Francisco), similar restaurants would not be established in the rest of the country until the 1870s (Haley 2011, 25; see also Shields 2015; Freedman 2016). To confirm their seriousness, the menus were in French and the chefs were themselves either French or trained in France. Eating in these establishments required sufficient money, but other cultural skills were also necessary for anyone wishing to demonstrate in public that they were part of the social elite. Diners would be most successful if they understood French, but understanding the particular French of the restaurant world was essential for anyone wishing to appear as if they belonged (32). In addition, knowing how to work with the waiters—being recognized by them as someone who belonged—played an important role as well. Being capable of successfully eating in restaurants was, then, one way of demonstrating in public that a person belonged in high society. If young men like Lucien de Rubempré were primarily concerned with demonstrating their ability to fit within high society, for others, the goings-on in restaurants proved to be a popular spectacle. Spang notes that nineteenth-century Parisian restaurants often had cabinets particuliers, private rooms that could be used for more than just dining. Scandalous behavior associated with these private rooms was the subject of satirical plays, newspaper articles, and cartoons, providing a broad public for the antics of the elite. Restaurants were also targets of “dine and dash” customers, people who appeared and acted as if they belonged in the world of elite dining, but who, at the end of the meal, left without paying (2000, 222, cf. Ross 2015). Such goings-on in the restaurant world provided the public with both entertainment and with some of the tools with which to build a critique of elite dining. Haley (2011) shows how in the United States, the inability of the rising American middle class to master the cultural tools for elite dining resulted in the creation of restaurants that spurned French menus and high-status dining skills in favor of a more middle class and putatively

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American approach to food. Similarly, as Paul Freedman (2014) has argued, pressures to accommodate women who wished to dine in public with men in the United States (something that was not as much of a concern in France) also contributed to the demise of French hegemony, although not before a certain amount of public scandal and debate (3). By the mid-twentieth century, the American restaurant landscape included both fine dining, for the elites, and many more affordable middle-class restaurants, where men, women, and, indeed, entire families could dine out together. Haley (2011) ends his history of the relationship between restaurants and the rise of the American middle class in the mid-twentieth century with a rejection of elite French dining and a growing dominance of what he calls “cosmopolitan” dining. Rather than French food, Americans developed a taste for the varied ethnic cuisines available in the country, a point I return to below. But the growth of consumer society in the second half of the twentieth century was also accompanied by a renewed interest in restaurants of all sorts. The development of restaurant criticism, pioneered by Craig Claiborne at the New York Times, is central to this development. More than just a guide to restaurant quality, Claiborne and his successors—at both the New York Times and in the rest of the media that followed his model—provided explanations of food and restaurant trends, instruction on what to eat and on how to eat it in different kinds of restaurants (McNamee 2012; Davis 2004). In this way, restaurant reviewers helped democratize access to all kinds of restaurants and, at the same time, provided useful insights and criticism into the world of fine dining. Although there are many examples of such insights, one of the most well-known was written by New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl, in a fascinating dual review of Le Cirque, a temple of haute cuisine that had previously received many accolades in the press. In the first part of the review Reichl (1993) described eating in the restaurant anonymously and being treated rather poorly by the restaurant staff. In the second part, she dines as herself. Arriving well in advance of her reservation, she is greeted by the owner who whisks her past waiting customers with the comment, “The King of Spain is waiting in the bar, but your table is ready” (Reichl 2005, 40). The meal that follows is spectacular. Reichl’s review in the Times received a great deal of attention and was seen as more than a critique of the treatment received by ordinary diners at famous restaurants. It was seen as a scathing commentary on the pretensions of the elite in general (Reichl 2005, 52).

RACE AND ETHNICITY: PURITY AND THE EXOTIC Along with social class, other social fractures are also frequently represented through and in restaurants, perhaps most notably, race and ethnicity. In the United States, the desegregation of public accommodations—most notably restaurants—was one of the central issues during the civil rights movement. Although more than fifty years have passed since the legal desegregation of restaurants in the United States, they remain frequent objects of debate about race and racism. These debates go beyond American concerns about race, however. Immigration in North America and Europe has often been accompanied by the growth of “ethnic” restaurants. From questions of cleanliness and location, to authenticity and cultural appropriation, restaurants featuring the foods of immigrants have framed questions of identity and difference in many places. In 2013, Georgia restaurateur and television personality Paula Deen was accused of using racial epithets in her restaurants. A leaked transcript from a court deposition revealed not only that she admitted to using a variety of racist terms in the workplace,

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but that she considered doing so to be a normal part of life. As with many eruptions of racism by public figures in the United States (Hartigan 2010), this incident was debated and discussed at length in both social and traditional media. At the core of these debates seemed to be the question of whether or not Deen’s casual racism was a sign of a deeper problem, or simply an unpleasant, but harmless, survival of the South’s past. In their coverage of the incident, the New York Times included a video of an interview with Deen conducted a few years before the incident, in which the interviewer raised a question about racism in the South. Deen responded by saying that she thought racism was worse in the North. In the South, she said, “black folks played such an integral part in our lives, they were like our family, and we didn’t see ourselves as being prejudiced” (New York Times Video). In the video, Deen goes on to bring her black driver on stage and demonstrate her affection for him. The kind of racism that Deen demonstrated in that interview and, later, in her court deposition, resulted in her losing her show with the Food Network (Moskin 2013, B1). Her restaurants, however, continue to thrive. The language Deen used in her interview closely mirrors language used fifty years earlier, when white southerners tried to defend racial segregation in restaurants. In the 1966 documentary Mississippi: A Self-Portrait, white residents of Greenwood, Mississippi, described having friendly relations with the black people in the town. The mayor is quoted as saying, “What we have in Greenwood, I think, we have wonderful relations with our colored people.” In the same documentary, Booker Wright, a black man who works as a waiter at Lusco’s, a white-owned segregated restaurant in Greenwood, then contradicts this version of things with a bitter commentary on the racist behavior he has been subject to as a waiter there. Wright paid severely for this public dissent from public representations about race relations in the South, losing his position at Lusco’s, suffering a beating from a local police officer, and having his own bar firebombed (Young 2015, 64). Separated by five decades, both of these events point to a sharp contrast between the way white and black people experienced segregation. Angela Jill Cooley has argued that segregation in restaurants—in eating in general—was a tool for maintaining an idea of white purity. While white people could eat in restaurants in the Jim Crow South, black people were either refused service or were only allowed to order food for take-out, often from a separate window outside the restaurant. Cooley shows that whites were socialized to believe that dining with black people put them at risk in terms of health (because black people were represented as dirty and diseased) and in terms of social status (2015a, 73). Ironically, this prohibition on sharing food together did not prevent white restaurant owners from hiring black cooks, waiters, and busboys. Segregationist ideology served not only to assert white purity, but also as a way of reinforcing racial hierarchies. The refusal to break bread together became a major part of the white supremacist ideology of the South. Breaking down that barrier and integrating restaurants became a central objective of the civil rights movement. Cooley (2015b) argues that one reason for this was that African American people wanted full access to the growing American consumer culture. Being able to eat in restaurants and lunch counters in downtown shopping areas became a significant symbol of the struggle for equality. When four black college students chose to stage a sit-in in a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, the choice was not random. Woolworth’s represented a key part of the middle-class consumer culture and being able to eat there was an important part of the rise of that middle class. The segregation practiced in the South (and not only in the South, see, for example, Jou 2014) did force African Americans to create their own restaurants, many of which

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became important institutions in black communities throughout the country (WilliamsForson 2006; Cooley 2015b). Indeed, restaurants like Dooky Chase in New Orleans and Paschal’s in Atlanta, along with many others, contributed to the civil rights movement by providing food to activists. Along with becoming important institutions in African American communities, at least some were “discovered” by white restaurant critics and, in the process, gained fame beyond those communities. In New Orleans, the restaurant Chez Helene became popular enough that a television sit-com, Frank’s Place, was based on it in the 1980s. Today, the surviving restaurateurs, like Leah Chase, are celebrated for their cuisine and their achievements and for their contributions in the fight against racism in the United States (Roahen 2008). The development of these African American restaurants, in which black people made and served food mostly to other African Americans, provided an important setting for the development of “soul food,” a style of food that can be thought of as African American ethnic cuisine. This history parallels that of the ongoing development and debates about the foods of immigrants to both the United States and to other countries. On the one hand, immigrant food and immigrant restaurants are often condemned as dirty, bad smelling, and dangerous to the health and cultural coherence of native communities. On the other hand, knowledge of and experience with “ethnic” cuisines sometimes become signs of distinction for adventurous eaters and, eventually, those foods can become popular and trendy with people outside of the original communities. Struggles over what constitutes authentic ethnic food and, sometimes, controversy over accusations over “cultural appropriation” by majority communities can follow. Since 2009, a number of Italian towns and regions have attempted to pass laws restricting or even banning restaurants that sell foreign foods from their historic town centers. The laws have proven quite controversial. Proponents argue that they are aimed at preserving the culinary and architectural heritage of the cities. Yet critics note that the proponents come mostly from the right wing Northern League and that the targets of the laws are more frequently kebab shops run by Muslim immigrants than fast food restaurants such as McDonald’s. In Italy and, more broadly, in Europe, these restrictions have generated intense debate. The slogan “Yes to Polenta, No to Couscous” echoed in both traditional and social media and, as Jillian Cavanaugh (2013) has shown, antiMuslim sentiments were frequently part of the discussions (see also Capello 2009). The idea that restaurants run by and featuring the foods of immigrant groups threaten the health and culture of the host country is of course far from new. Warren Belasco notes that the foods of Chinese immigrants in the United States in the nineteenth century were seen as insubstantial, dangerous, and dirty: “People joked that Chinese food was just ‘cooked grass and noodles’ and that it was so insubstantial that you always felt hungry an hour later. Worse, rumors circulated that the residents of congested Chinatown . . . routinely consumed rats, dogs, and other ‘offal’” (2006, 14). Haley (2011, 96) cites several cases from the nineteenth century in which restaurants run by immigrants—Germans, Swedes, Chinese, and Italians—were characterized as having dubious health standards and foods that Americans could not digest. The foods served in these “ethnic” restaurants were viewed as best reserved for fellow ethnics. For Americans to eat such things would threaten digestive distress, at best, and moral turpitude, at worst, as Samantha Barbas (2003) has pointed out. Similarly, Ruth Mandel (2008) documents the ways in which Germans have, for centuries, used food to frame prejudice against Jews, comparing them to pigs and accusing them of stinking from eating garlic. The same food tropes have been deployed in recent decades in anti-Turkish and anti-Muslim commentaries, suggesting

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that any German who eats in a Turkish restaurant will stink of garlic for days (Mandel 2008, 135). Rocco Marinaccio reviews similar accusations made against Italians in the United States since the nineteenth century (2012). Elizabeth Buettner points out that in Britain, food from the Indian subcontinent was not generally consumed by whites until at least the 1970s. She writes that “for whites living in cities with high rates of immigration, Asian food was not what they consumed themselves; rather it served as a key indicator of the newcomers’ presence and cultural distinctiveness” (2008, 875). Despite the frequent use of food to frame racist sentiments against immigrants, the foods of immigrant communities have often become desirable and restaurants serving them have become common in many countries. Ethnic restaurants are often represented in popular culture as signs of the success stories of hardworking immigrants. Movies like My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), The Hundred Foot Journey (2014), and Today’s Special (2009) all portray ethnic restaurateurs bringing a combination of innate cultural knowledge, talent, and hard work to succeed in a society that often misunderstands their foods and culture. Donna Gabaccia (1998) and Krishnendu Ray (2016) have analyzed the reality of ethnic restaurant entrepreneurs and their efforts, in the United States, to build businesses that appealed to people beyond ethnic enclaves. Buettner (2008) has shown how South Asian restaurateurs were able to help create a desire for Indian food beyond the immigrant population in the UK, while Sylvie Durmelat (2015) has explored the ambiguous representations of couscous in French film and society. Even while groups continue to experience prejudice and racism, ethnic foods and restaurants may gain acceptance within society. In his popular history of the American obsession with Mexican food, journalist Gustavo Arellano recounts his experience participating in a public debate with former Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo, known for his strong views opposing Mexican immigration and an enthusiastic fondness for Mexican food (2012, 6). Certainly not everyone (outside the ethnic community) who dines in an ethnic restaurant brings such deep contradictions to eating there. Yet dining in such restaurants has long served as a way of demonstrating one’s cultural credentials. Haley (2011) shows how immigrant restaurants became a kind of affordable alternative to upper class fine dining for the growing American middle class in the early twentieth century. Laurier Turgeon and Madeleine Pastinelli (2002) argue that eating in ethnic restaurants provides members of the majority in places like Quebec an opportunity to experience difference and globalization without having to travel (cf. Long 1998). Knowledge of where to find the best hummus is, for Israelis, tied up in exoticizing ideas about Palestinian cooks (Hirsch 2011). For the restaurateurs, finding ways to appeal to a public beyond the immigrant community is an important element of success, so their interests may meet those of the diners seeking an approachable form of exoticism (Lu and Fine 1995; Buettner 2008; Barbas 2003; Ray 2016; Gvion and Trostler 2008). For immigrant communities and for non-immigrant diners, there is a kind of twodirectional process. Immigrant restaurateurs work to create a sense of culinary authenticity that will attract diners outside of their community while, at the same time, providing foods that are acceptable to local tastes (Lu and Fine 1995; Buettner 2008; Gottlieb 2015). For diners outside the ethnic community, eating in these restaurants is a way of exploring the exotic or of demonstrating a kind of low-risk multiculturalism (Heldke 2001). These encounters often provide a framework for public debates about cultural authenticity and about who speaks for immigrant communities. In April 2016, for instance, The New Yorker magazine ran a poem by food writer and satirical poet Calvin Trillin entitled “Have They Run Out Of Provinces Yet?” In the poem, Trillin (2016) seems to lament the need for

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foodies (such as himself and the people he presumably writes for) to stay constantly upto-date with the latest exotic region of China represented by new restaurants appearing in the United States. While the poem seems to make fun of the constant search for the exotic and the engagement in low-risk multiculturalism characteristic of many “foodies” (Johnston and Baumann 2015), it elicited harsh reactions from many food activists, who interpreted it as the whining of a privileged and possibly racist white food writer with a reductionist understanding of Chinese foods. In the late 1990s, McDonald’s introduced Indian food to its menus in Britain and produced ads (https://youtu.be/Y8sMb4jg7Cs for an example) that satirized the lowproduction-value advertisements for local Indian restaurants familiar to Londoners from the 1970s. More recently, the idea that there might be a shortage of cooks for Indian restaurants in Britain raised questions about both immigration policy and about the centrality of Indian food to British identity (Freytas-Tamura 2015). Contrasted with the Italian municipal efforts to ban ethnic foods from historic city centers, popular representations and discussions of ethnic restaurants provide a kind of index of the ways in which immigrants have become part of the receiving society. Ray (2016) has pointed to the manner in which some groups move from being racialized others to becoming white ethnics in the United States, a change of status that can also change the role of their foods in society. Having won the civil rights struggle for access to public accommodations, African Americans now sometimes find themselves in positions analogous to those of immigrant ethnics, working to control the discourses that define culinary authenticity and that legitimize who speaks on behalf of their foods. Similarly, the increasingly frequent public debates about who is an authorized speaker about and for ethnic restaurants in the United States has become an important part of broader American debates about immigration and ethnicity in general (cf. Chez 2011).

GLOBAL FAST FOOD Restaurants began as a French invention and for a very long time, as noted above, they were represented in public as extensions of French culture (Spang 2000; Ferguson 2004). By the end of the twentieth century, however, the French domination of restaurant culture was in decline (Johnston and Baumann 2015; Kuh 2001). In the United States, part of that decline, as Haley (2011) argues, was due to resistance on the part of the middle classes, whose aspirations for social recognition, blocked by elite dining practices in French dining temples, moved toward both Americanized restaurants and ethnic dining. As a part of popular culture, however, the development of fast food restaurants in the United States may have had an even more significant impact on ideas about restaurants. As a model for dining out, fast food provided a democratized and much more affordable kind of restaurant. This American restaurant model has, like the French model before it, spread around the world, generating both enthusiasm and resistance along the way. The spread of this American model has generated controversy both at home and abroad. The 1993 science fiction film Demolition Man provides a telling example. Set in California in a peaceful but suspiciously homogenous 2032, the conflict revolves around two characters from the 1990s who are revived after spending the intervening decades frozen in a cryogenic prison. One of the characters, a police officer played by Sylvester Stallone, is invited to a celebratory dinner at Taco Bell. When he expresses surprise at the choice of restaurant, one of the other characters remarks that “Taco Bell was the only restaurant to survive the franchise wars. . . . Now all restaurants are Taco Bell.”

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The surprised reaction to this news from the Stallone character indicates that this points to an underlying dystopian element in the otherwise peaceful future. The question of whether or not cultural homogenization—a future in which all restaurants are Taco Bell, for instance—is a worthwhile price for peace and security is central to the film’s plot. The threat of cultural homogenization through the spread of fast food has hardly been limited to popular fiction. In 1999, French farmer and activist José Bové used a bulldozer to destroy a McDonald’s restaurant in the French town of Millau. The immediate cause of Bové’s act was a tariff battle between the United States and the European Union over the latter’s prohibition on importing beef raised with hormones from the former. Bové, along with other farmers, was protesting the idea that all agricultural products could be thought of as “mere commodities,” asserting instead the importance of agriculture to national and regional cultures (Northcutt 2003; Rogers 2000). At a deeper level, his choice of a McDonald’s reflected a critique of an American model of food production and consumption, referred to by Bové and others as la malbouffe (bad food) because the food is industrial and, consequently, lacks ties to the land and carries risks for consumers (Heller 2007). Although Bové did serve time in prison for destroying the McDonald’s, he became a French national hero for his action. And yet, McDonald’s, specifically, and fast food in general also remain widely available and popular in France. The global spread of fast food is often referred to as “McDonaldization,” most notably by George Ritzer (1993), a term that refers to both a standardization of processes in the production and distribution of food and to a homogenization of taste and culture in its consumption. The ultimate end to this process could indeed be a world in which all restaurants are Taco Bell. Whether or not this is in fact the direction of the world is unclear, as I will show below. However, the perception that it is has resulted in many forms of resistance, including the work of José Bové and his colleagues in France. Fear of “McDonaldization” has served to inspire the development of a self-styled global resistance movement, led by Slow Food, an organization based in Italy. Carlo Petrini, the Italian writer who founded Slow Food, has said that he was inspired by the opening of a McDonald’s in Rome. Seeing fast food as leading toward the homogenization of food cultures, Petrini worked to create a movement that would assert an alternative way of thinking about food, emphasizing food that is rooted in local traditions and practices (Leitch 2003). It would be easy to frame the global spread of American-style fast food in terms of a stark contrast between a homogenizing wave of American culture and efforts to preserve local culinary traditions. This perspective would, however, oversimplify the ways in which people around the world think about and experience fast food. For instance, for many people in East Asia, dining in American fast food restaurants provides an opportunity to experience American culture, in the same way that Americans engage in a mild form of multiculturalism when dining in ethnic restaurants (Watson 2006; Stillman 2003). Eating in these American-style restaurants is also often a way of accessing modernity; to eat in them is to be modern. In Nigeria, consumption of fast food in urban areas is considered by many to be an expensive, elegant, and desirable activity (Olutayo and Akanle 2009, 222). Similarly, in Bangladesh, young people eat in fast food restaurants because doing so is a “marker of modern identity” (Zaman, Selim, and Joarder 2013, 564). Although fast food often includes actual American restaurant chains like KFC, Pizza Hut, Subway, Taco Bell, or McDonald’s, in many countries national chains that follow the model of American fast food are equally or even more popular. People who eat in them are seeking the same standards of cleanliness, identical

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menus, and quick service that represent the system invented by McDonald’s. This is clearly the case in the Philippines, where the most successful brands of fast food are Philippines-based chains (Matejowsky 2009). The dramatic growth of both global and local restaurant chains around the world that draw on the model of American fast food points to the problem with any simple claim that the spread of fast food necessarily leads to homogenization. As the authors of Golden Arches East (Watson 2006) point out, the manner in which people in a variety of East Asian countries have consumed American fast food reflects their own cultural and political concerns more than simply reflecting any imposed American ideals. In fact, American-style fast food restaurants have provided the setting for working out extremely local cultural concerns in surprising ways. Sangmee Bak (2006), for example, shows how South Koreans work out issues around nationalism through the manner in which they dine at McDonald’s. Bak’s research was conducted in the early 1990s and, as Sangyoub Park’s (2016) more recent observations at the opening of Shake Shack in Seoul show, Koreans are, in 2016, more likely to be concerned with demonstrating their savvy as consumers than with framing nationalism when eating American fast food today. Melissa Caldwell (2004) has shown how Russians use the local sourcing of potatoes to transform McDonald’s into a local restaurant, rather than an outpost of American culture. In one of the more remarkable examples of the localization of a global food, Matejowsky (2007) describes the growth in the Philippines of a local fast food chain with a menu entirely devoted to Spam, the potted meat product. Of course, Spam is itself an American product, but as Matejowsky (2007, 28) points out, it plays a very different role in Philippine cuisine than in the United States. Even in the context of an American-style fast food restaurant devoted to serving dishes built around a quintessentially American processed food, the Spamjam Café chain is deeply tied to the Philippines and would be unlikely to succeed in the United States, where the status of and popular interest in consuming Spam is very different from the Philippines. Even in France, fast food has provided a somewhat ironic context for sorting out nationalist sentiment. In 2010, the French hamburger chain Quick decided to take nonhalal items off its menu in cities where there was a large local Muslim population. The result was a national controversy in which municipal officials argued that the removal of items like the bacon cheeseburger was a form of discrimination against non-Muslims. In a secular society like France, they argued, to remove those foods in order to serve one community would be discriminatory against others. The result, then, was that in the country where José Bové went to jail as a result of his efforts to eliminate la malbouffe, his countrymen are demanding access to bacon cheeseburgers as a way of asserting their Frenchness (Janes 2016). Recent analyses have suggested that the fast food model may be in decline or undergoing a significant transformation. Todd Stillman (2003) has argued that in the United States, McDonald’s has seen its growth slowed because Americans are increasingly interested in foods that are perceived as natural, artisanal, and local, rather than mass produced. In the years since he wrote about this shift, it has only intensified and chains like Panera, Five Guys, Chipotle, and Shake Shack have come to redefine the way many people experience fast food (Surowiecki 2015). The earlier generation reflected a sense of modernity defined by a streamlined, speeded up, industrial ideal. Similarly, the newer generation reflects a new ideal, one that is supposedly more natural and artisanal. In this way, fast food restaurants continue to reflect some of the central cultural concerns of the day.

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CONCLUSION From their earliest days in eighteenth and nineteenth-century France, restaurants have been used in popular culture to help work through and think about some of the primary social concerns of the time. Social distinction strategies, especially the display of social class, were from the very start central to restaurants and remain a central concern today, even as those strategies play out in social media as well as in the columns of professional critics. Dining out has become a central part of the consumer freedoms that come with being a full member of society. This fact was a central reason why ending segregation in restaurants and lunch counters played an important role in the civil rights movement. Equal access to public dining remains a key symbol of progress in racial relations in the United States today. Similarly, the acceptance or rejection of the foods of immigrant groups serves as an index of the social relations between minorities and dominant communities in the United States and in other countries. Finally, the spread of the American fast food model across the planet has provided both access to a particular vision of modernity as well as a focal point for debates about cultural homogenization and identity. The growing importance of consumer societies globally suggests that more people around the planet will be eating out in the future. Restaurants have been central to popular culture since the concept was, like modernity itself, born. Precisely because eating in restaurants involves public behavior, the deep ties between restaurants and public culture seem likely to continue. Whether it is the sharp takedown of a celebrity television chef by a powerful restaurant critic (Wells 2012) or the fictional takedown of a harsh restaurant critic by a culinary genius rat (Ratatouille 2007), the central social questions of the day will continue to be debated in the context of restaurants. From the social status of low-wage and tipped workers, to the role of gender in professional kitchens, the shift in dining away from homes, to questions of public health related to frequent dining out, the tensions between corporate and local restaurants, and even the representation of restaurants in popular media, much about the relationship between restaurants and popular culture remains to be explored.

REFERENCES Arellano, Gustavo. 2012. Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America. New York: Scribner. Bak, Sangmee. 2006. “McDonald’s in Seoul: Food Choices, Identity, and Nationalism.” In Golden Arches East, 2nd ed., edited by James Watson, 136–160. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Balzac, Honoré de. 1971 (1837–43). Lost Illusions. London: Penguin. Barbas, Samantha. 2003. “‘I’ll Take Chop Suey’: Restaurants as Agents of Culinary and Cultural Change.” Journal of Popular Culture 36(4): 669–86. Belasco, Warren. 2006. Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food. Berkeley: University of California Press. Beriss, David. 2007. “Authentic Creole: Tourism, Style and Calamity in New Orleans Restaurants.” In The Restaurants Book: Ethnographies of Where We Eat, edited by David Beriss and David Sutton, 151–66. London: Berg. Beriss, David and David Sutton. 2007. “Starter: Restaurants, Ideal Postmodern Institutions.” In The Restaurants Book: Ethnographies of Where We Eat, edited by David Beriss and David Sutton, 1–13. London: Berg.

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Buettner, Elizabeth. 2008. “‘Going for an Indian’: South Asian Restaurants and the Limits of Multiculturalism in Britain.” The Journal of Modern History. 80(4): 865–901. Caldwell, Melissa. 2004. “Domesticating the French Fry: McDonald’s and Consumerism in Moscow.” Journal of Consumer Culture 4(1): 5–26. Capello, Francesco. 2009. “Food, Politics, and the Discourse of Fear in Italy.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies 9(1): 5–6. Cavanaugh, Jillian. 2013. “Il y a Kébab et Kébab: Conflit Local et Alimentation Globale en Italie du Nord.” Anthropologie et Sociétés 37(2): 193–212. Chez, Keridiana. 2011. “Popular Ethnic Food Guides as Auto/Ethnographic Project: The Multicultural and Gender Politics of Urban Culinary Tourism.” The Journal of American Culture. 34(3): 234–46. Cooley, Angela Jill. 2015a. “‘Eating with Negroes’: Food and Racial Taboo in the TwentiethCentury South.” Southern Quarterly 52(2): 69–89. Cooley, Angela Jill. 2015b. To Live and Dine in Dixie: The Evolution of Urban Food Culture in the Jim Crow South. Athens: The University of Georgia Press. Davis, Mitchell. 2004. “Power Meal: Craig Claiborne’s Last Supper for the New York Times.” Gastronomica-The Journal of Food and Culture 4(3): 60–72. Demolition Man (1993), [Film] Dir. Marco Brambilla, USA: Warner Brothers. Durmelat, Sylvie. 2015. “Tasting Displacement: Couscous and Culinary Citizenship in Maghrebi-French Diasporic Cinema.” Food and Foodways 23(1–2): 104–26. Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst. 2001. “A Cultural Field in the Making: Gastronomy in Nineteenth-Century France.” In French Food: On the Table, On the Page, and in French Culture, edited by Lawrence R. Schehr and Allen S. Weiss, 5–50. New York: Routledge. Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst. 2004. Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Freedman, Paul. 2014. “Women and Restaurants in the Nineteenth-Century United States.” Journal of Social History 48(1):1–19. Freedman, Paul. 2016. Ten Restaurants That Changed America. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation. Freytas-Tamura, Kimiko. 2015. Britons Perturbed by a Troubling Shortage of Curry Chefs. The New York Times. November 4, http://nyti.ms/1XPPF6T. Gabaccia, Donna. 1998. We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gottlieb, Dylan. 2015. “‘Dirty, Authentic . . . Delicious’: Yelp, Mexican Restaurants, and the Appetites of Philadelphia’s New Middle Class.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies. 15(2): 39–48. Gvion, Liora, and Naomi Trostler. 2008. “From Spaghetti and Meatballs through Hawaiian Pizza to Sushi: The Changing Nature of Ethnicity in American Restaurants.” The Journal of Popular Culture. 41(6): 950–74. Haley, Andrew P. 2011. Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1880-1920. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Hartigan, John. 2010. What Can You Say? America’s National Conversation on Race. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Heldke, Lisa. 2001. “‘Let's Eat Chinese!’: Reflections on Cultural Food Colonialism.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies 1(2): 76–79. Heller, Chaia. 2007. “Techne versus Technoscience: Divergent (and Ambiguous) Notions of Food ‘Quality’ in the French Debate over GM Crops.” American Anthropologist 109(4): 603–15.

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Hirsch, Dafna. 2011. “‘Hummus is best when it is Fresh and Made by Arabs’: The Gourmetization of Hummus in Israel and the Return of the Repressed Arab.” American Ethnologist 38(4): 617–30. Hundred Foot Journey (2014). [Film] Dir. Lasse Hallström, USA: Amblin Entertainment. Janes, Lauren. 2016. Colonial Food in Interwar Paris: The Taste of Empire. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Johnston, Josée, and Shyon Baumann. 2015. Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape. New York: Routledge. Jou, Chin. 2014. “Neither Welcomed, Nor Refused: Race and Restaurants in Postwar New York City.” Journal of Urban History 40(2): 232–51. Kuh, Patric. 2001. The Last Days of Haute Cuisine: The Coming of Age of American Restaurants. New York: Penguin Books. L. A. Story (1991). [Film] Dir. Mike Jackson, USA: Carolco Pictures. Leitch, Alison. 2003. “Slow Food and the Politics of Pork Fat: Italian Food and European Identity.” Ethnos. 68(4): 437–62. Long, Lucy M. 1998. “Culinary Tourism: A Folkloristic Perspective on Eating and Otherness.” Southern Folklore 55(3): 181–205. Lu, Shun, and Gary Allen Fine. 1995. “The Presentation of Ethnic Authenticity: Chinese Food as a Social Accomplishment.” The Sociological Quarterly 36(3): 535–53. Mandel, Ruth. 2008. Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Marinaccio, Rocco. 2012. “‘Garlic Eaters’: Reform and Resistance a Tavola.” Italian American Review 2(1): 3–22. Matejowsky, Ty. 2007. “SPAM and Fast Food: ‘Glocalization’ in the Philippines.” Food, Culture & Society 10(1): 23–41. Matejowsky, Ty. 2009. “Fast Food and Nutritional Perceptions in the Age of ‘Globesity’: Perspectives from the Provincial Philippines.” Food and Foodways 17(1): 29–49. McNamee, Thomas. 2012. The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat: Craig Claiborne and the American Food Renaissance. New York: Free Press. Mennell, Stephen. 1996. All Manners Of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Mississippi, A Self Portrait 1966. [TV Program] NBC. http://www.nbcnews.com/video/ dateline/48178080#48178080 Moskin, Julia. 2013. Food Network Drops Paula Deen. The New York Times. June 21. http:// nyti.ms/1foiJlh. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2002. [Film] Dir. Joel Zwick, USA: Gold Circle Films. New York Times Video 2013. Paula Deen on Race in 2012 TimesTalk, http://nyti. ms/11G6mmF. Northcutt, Wayne. 2003. “José Bové vs. McDonald’s: The Making of a National Hero in the French Anti-Globalization Movement.” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 31: 326–45. Olutayo, A. O., and O. Akanle. 2009. “Fast Food in Ibadan: An Emerging Consumption Pattern.” Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute 79(2): 207–27. Park, Sangyoub. 2016. Shake Shack Burger Fever in Korea. FoodAnthropology, The Blog of the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition. August 31, https://foodanthro. com/2016/08/31/shake-shack-burger-fever-in-korea/. Ratatouille 2007. [Film] Dir. Brad Bird, Jan Pinkava, USA: Pixar Animation Studios. Ray, Krishnendu. 2016. The Ethnic Restaurateur. London: Bloomsbury.

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Reichl, Ruth. 1993. Restaurants. The New York Times. October 29. http://www.nytimes. com/1993/10/29/arts/restaurants-065093.html. Reichl, Ruth. 2005. Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise. New York: The Penguin Press. Ritzer, G. 1993. The McDonaldization of Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge. Roahen, Sara. 2008. Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table. New York: W. W. Norton. Rogers, Susan Carol. 2000. “Farming Visions: Agriculture in French Culture.” French Politics, Culture & Society 18(1): 50–70. Ross, Andrew Israel. 2015. “Serving Sex: Playing With Prostitution in the Brasseries à Femmes of Late Nineteenth-Century Paris.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 24(2): 288–313. Shields, David S. 2015. Southern Provisions: The Creation and Revival of a Cuisine. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Spang, Rebecca L. 2000. The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Stillman, Todd. 2003. “McDonald’s in Question: The Limits of the Mass Market.” American Behavioral Scientist 47(2): 107–18. Surowiecki, James. 2015. The Shake Shack Economy. The New Yorker January 26: 26. Today’s Special 2009. [Film] Dir. David Kaplan, USA: Inimitable Pictures. Trillin, Calvin. 2016. Have They Run Out Of Provinces Yet? The New Yorker. April 4. (http:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/04/have-they-run-out-of-provinces-yet-by-calvintrillin) Turgeon, Laurier, and Madeleine Pastinelli. 2002. “‘Eat the World’: Postcolonial Encounters in Quebec City’s Ethnic Restaurants.” Journal of American Folklore 115(456): 247–68. Watson, James, editor. 2006. Golden Arches East, 2nd ed. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Wells, Pete. 2012. As Not Seen On TV. Restaurant Review: Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar in Times Square. The New York Times. November 13. http://nyti.ms/17ONwmU. Williams-Forson, Psyche A. 2006. Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, & Power. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Young, Kevin. 2015. “Repast: An Oratorio for Booker Wright.” Virginia Quarterly Review 91(2):62–65. Zaman, Shahaduz, Nasima Selim, and Taufique Joarder. 2013. “McDonaldization without a McDonald’s: Globalization and Food Culture as Social Determinants of Health in Urban Bangladesh.” Food, Culture, & Society 16(4): 551–68.

CHAPTER TEN

No Longer Tied to the Local: Street Food’s Technological Revolution BRYAN W. MOE AND KENDALL R. SHURANCE

Street food no longer exists only on the margins of culture; it increasingly reaches a wider and more diverse audience. Globally, over two billion people engage with street food daily, according to The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (Fellows and Himli 2011, 7). From Saigon to Delhi to Mexico City, one can witness street food thriving by physically walking those historic city streets. But increasingly street food is being romanticized throughout popular culture as a site of experimentalism, adventure, and multiculturalism. Bruce Kraig and Colleen Taylor Sen, editors of Street Food Around the World: An Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, write that the street has become a culinary hotbed that showcases “street-food super-stars” of open-air vending and hawking who are worthy of admiration (2013, xvii). In fact, an entire industry of culinary tourism has been created to capitalize on tourists wanting to experience the chaos, complexity, and wonder of the array of familiar and exotic foods and culinary traditions from the most cutting edge to those that date back to the Neolithic period (Mitchell and Scott 2014). Nonetheless, the reason for investigating street food globally goes beyond the wider expansion of the culinary tourism industry. On a global scale, street food is undergoing a massive reorganization due to the transformative, and at times disruptive, character of technologies, not the least of which includes social media. These changes in the street food economy and culture have highlighted the fact that there exists an historical love/hate relationship between street food and the communities it serves. This chapter explores the dynamic nature of this relationship. Prior to the 2000s, the United States lacked diversity and abundance of street food after decades of city planning, political intervention, propaganda, and physical force effectively purged major metropolitan areas of street vending (Morales 2000; Burnett and Newman 2014). For example, starting in the 1980s and continuing through the mid-2000s, Los Angeles, California, tried many times to regulate its vast array of iconic taco trucks or loncheras (Pilcher 2012). One proposed regulation would have prohibited mobile vending vehicles from parking in any spot for more than thirty minutes, leaving little time for the vendors to park at a location and set up their cooking stations before they would be forced to move to another spot (Linnekin, Dermer, and Geller 2012). To this day, New York City street food vendors are battling with city officials and brick-

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and-mortar restaurants over the right to sell food in public. The homepage of the Street Vendor Project, a nonprofit organization studying and advocating for vendors’ rights, claims that street food vendors are still victims of New York’s aggressive “quality of life” crackdown. . . . Many streets have been closed to them at the urging of powerful business groups. They receive exorbitant tickets for minor violations like vending too close to a crosswalk—more than any big businesses are required to pay for similar violations. (Street Vendors Project 2016) But a national movement emerged in the mid-2000s to revitalize street food as an important and rich area of urban foodways. Through technologies like the internet, GPS, social media, and smartphones, street food vendors raised their level of public influence and relevance from a strictly local context to a global movement (Burnett and Newman 2014). Early in the street food movement a new mobile food medium, the food truck, went “viral,” catching national attention by combining these technologies in innovative ways that offered the public new possibilities for exploring local foodways. As a result, large numbers of entrepreneurs, many of whom were affected by the economic recession, hopped onto the hybrid lonchera trend and started a street food business (Pill 2014). As of 2015, the industry was estimated to be worth 857 million dollars annually, and has shown continued revenue growth of almost 10 percent since 2010 (Ibisworld 2015). Mobile street food kitchens quickly became common and even welcome sights on street corners across the country, offering individuals opportunities to reengage with their communities and experience food in diverse and entertaining ways. Furthermore, they were showcased in many facets of media, ranging from personal blogs to global news. For example, the Food Network created a television series The Great Food Truck Race in 2010, which just (as of this writing) completed its sixth season, to capitalize on this growing area of public interest. In this series, the food trucks and their crews become the center of drama. Each episode has the food truck crews compete in a series of unique street food-related challenges having to move the mobile kitchen quickly from location to location or creating a unique festive atmosphere in unsuspecting or usual environments. However, this transformation in the street food industry has not been easy. Its rapid changes have greatly disturbed traditional patterns of urban foodways, further complicating what defines street food as it moves from the urban sidewalk to more diverse and suburban environments. Therefore, to provide insight into street food, this chapter is divided into three sections. The first section reviews food studies literature to provide a global and historical context for its role in human foodways, beginning as far back as the urbanization during the Neolithic period, and showing the radical changes that occurred during the European industrial revolution. This section concludes with research from the 1980s that established a standard definition of street food in order to better address its utility during periods of urban transformation. The second section deals with the consequences, particularly in the United States, of recent technological innovations in street food, particularly gourmet food trucks, on popular culture, public opinions, and governmental policies. The third section examines the food truck as the first mobile food vendor that used and embraced technology to cultivate a new street food persona, create a new business model, and provide a platform from which other vendors could advocate for street food. This section also examines the food truck and North American street food as another means of cultural appropriation, with special emphasis on the gentrification of street food that is represented by the gourmet food truck. We then conclude with a few remarks about the future research of street food and popular culture.

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WHAT IS STREET FOOD? A HISTORY OF URBANIZATION AND UTILITY “Street food,” broadly considered, encompasses a plethora of practices and traditions that cannot all fit into a single conceptual tortilla. Chief editor of Lucky Peach Magazine Chris Ying echoes this sentiment, stating, “Street food prevails everywhere. No other descriptor encompasses so many different cuisines and experiences” (2014, 3). Similarly, scholar Ray Bromley points out, “Street vending is an ancient and important occupation found in virtually every country and major city around the world” (2000, 1). So how does one answer the question “what is street food?” This section provides an historical perspective on street food by looking at early formations of cities starting with the Neolithic period, then exploring the prominent role that street food played during the rise of urbanization and industrialism in the nineteenth century. Lastly, it examines the more modern history of street food as it emerges from several case studies by researchers, community leaders, and governments. Historical records of human foodways show that street food has been directly tied to periods of social transformation. The first of these was the movement of humans into concentrated areas. In particular, during the Neolithic period, places like Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica were major flashpoints during which Neolithic people cultivated food, lived with domesticated livestock, and managed other resources in forced cooperation (Albala 2014; Bryant, Bush, and Wilks 2014). Street food was a product of this Neolithic revolution in that the need to constantly provide for growing populations led to the construction of dedicated spaces through which foodstuffs and other public goods could pass. These open-air pathways or waterways also doubled as physical spaces separated from the home dwelling, where informal and semi-permanent merchants could make a living selling an array of goods. For example, Carolyn Eastwood notes in The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink that Egyptian artifacts reveal depictions of fourthousand-year-old markets “with vendors selling fruits, vegetables, and fish” in the open and along roads (2007, 567). Food historian Ken Albala states that commerce was not the only function of these locations in that Egyptians would commonly “eat their food out of doors in the streets” but “retire for private purposes to their houses,” suggesting a cultural understanding of food being a public good and not a private privilege (2014, 15). The role of street food during this period was to act as a hub for the community to distribute food quickly to as many people as possible, using the most efficient method available (Bromley 2000). Such foodways were a valuable resource to growing urban populations because “when members are taken away from their residence by virtue of necessity of work or other duties,” they have to alter their means of feeding themselves (Zubaida 1991, 1). In fact, utility was considered a “bedrock of public eating in our world” because of its role in feeding a changing population’s work habits and living spaces (1991, 1). Until the Industrial Revolution, the basic structure of street food remained amazingly constant, and in many places still endures. Starting in the seventeenth century and intensifying during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Europe went through a massive acceleration of urbanization that forced street food to evolve, becoming both a needed utility and an object of stigmatization. The rise of industrial methods of food production, such as chemical fertilizers and mechanical harvesters, allowed societies to grow more food faster and to distribute it further (Albala 2014). However, the rising urban populations created massive problems in cities like Paris and London. These urban

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centers struggled to provide basic foodstuffs despite this rise in production capability and ability to draw from their rich farm lands (Scholliers and Van Den Eeckhout 2014). This pressing situation pushed individuals to rely further on street food to provide sustenance for themselves and their communities. For example, “eating out” became a necessity for many individuals living in cities whose living quarters were without kitchens, creating a new market for individuals with resources and skills to serve food (Julier 2014). Street food became a staple utility in these cities, since it was one of the primary ways individuals could acquire cheap meals and foodstuffs like “bread, cheese, cold meats, or soup” (Scholliers and Van Den Eeckhout 2014, 80). Although street food served a vital function in the rapidly expanding urban centers around Europe, it gradually acquired a stigma as a public health risk. As described by Ken Albala, there was very little regulation or oversight of street food, leading to “a whole variety of additives and poisons [that] found their way into the food supply” (2014, 391). Cases of tainted food caused fear in the public and pushed already malnourished communities to further restrict their diets, sometimes to just “bread and tea, or simply potatoes” (Albala 2014, 391). In response, street food became a major target for governmental regulation. According to Scholliers and Van Den Eeckhout, across Western Europe, cities began controlling street food by adding restrictions to the butchering of meat and segmenting different produce items to different parts of the city. For example, meat was no longer allowed to be butchered in the streets, “vegetables and fruit were sold on particular squares, dairy products and fish in other marketplaces” while street vendors sold “diverse food products” (2014, 73). The segmentation of vendors ultimately helps to regulate vendors while providing more easily identifiable sections of goods for customers. As Ray Bromley notes, in the years since industrialization and the problems it creates in the food chain, street food continues to be accused of corrupting youth, poisoning healthy bodies, and trashing the cityscape (2000). Some critics claim that street vending has exposed the public to “pollution, noise, road accidents, and threats of violence, vice, or abduction” (2000, 8–9). They cite as examples street vendors who intermixed with pimps and illicit drug dealers, who evaded taxes, and who contributed to a visible yet underground economy, unfairly impacting lawful brick-and-mortar establishments. In short, in the modern era governmental authorities and public commentary have repeatedly identified street vending as a “prominent element of ‘disorder’” for urban society (Bromley 2000, 9). Historically, periods of heavy regulation of street vending are relatively limited according to Bromley (2000). Nonetheless, the perspective that street food poses a public risk still lingers. During the 1970s and 1980s, community leaders, government officials, and researchers led a more concerted effort to fight these stigmas. They shared growing concern over the state-increased urban population growth and food security issues. For example, since the mid-1980s the United Nations’ World Health Organization (WHO), in conjunction with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), has advocated for better street food conditions. Together, they have documented how street food has shown “significant growth” and that “urbanization and population growth, especially in developing countries, are expected to continue into the next century and street-vended foods . . . will expand accordingly” (Food Safety Unit 1996, 2). In her book Food: Urban Food and Employment in Developing Countries, Irene Tinker traces efforts during the 1980s to shift civic resources to support street food. Tinker provides a collection of international case studies of street food conducted in the 1980s by the Equity Policy Center’s (EPOC) Street Food Project. According to Tinker,

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the EPOC’s Street Food Project set out to document the impact of urban development on gender equality (1997). Street food presented itself as a rich and necessary area to investigate, but there was a “lack of previous data” and “since no data existed on street food vendors, the sector had to be studied” before the roles of men and women could be properly researched further. Therefore, EPOC researchers designed an “action research project” and conducted in-depth studies of street food vendors, identified problems, and supplied data that could “be utilized by members on local advising committees for the benefit of the street food vendors” (1997, 6). Tinker’s book is valuable because it developed a definition for street food and articulated its key subcategories. The creation and subsequent refinement of this definition was significant because it set a standard that researchers across the globe could utilize to study this phenomenon more accurately. At its most rudimentary level, researchers viewed street food as “any minimally processed food sold on the street for immediate consumption” and “from a structure that does not have four walls” (Tinker 1997, 15, 162). While the basic definition is informative, researchers quickly recognized its limits, finding that “the plethora of foods, and the complexity of the street food trade” made it difficult to make any strong distinctions (1997, 14). The text further expands on three major points that clarified and expanded these distinctions. First, researchers pointed out that the “food” in “street food” should have a positive nutritional value, connecting it to the idea of utility and survival. For them, foods that were “not nutritious and not meant to be swallowed, like chewing gum, pan (betel nut with lime and spices),” while sold by street vendors, were not considered street food (Tinker 1997, 15). Also, researchers believed street food to be most often eaten on the spot; however, “food that could be eaten on the spot but that was carried home or to the office was [also] classified as street food” (1997, 15). Finally, what was considered a “street food enterprise” was broken down into three categories: first, street food vendors can have permanent structures but must be limited to stalls and free-standing kiosks; second, mobile food vendors include walking peddlers, push or pedal carts, or vendors set up behind moveable tables; and lastly, street food encompasses semi-mobile vendors who use carts that remained fixed but can leave the area quickly (1997, 16–17). These early street food definitions paved the way for other researchers to study street food. For example, in 2000, the journal World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics published a special issue on street food edited by Artemis Simopoulos and Ramesh Bhat, who used a version of these categories to direct their eight global case studies. The authors’ specific intent was to bring the very complex nature of street food into a more organized field of study—specifically investigating the intersection of governance, health, and bio-chemistry. This text stands out because it examines the nutritional content and health risks associated with particular foods and styles of preparation. In other words, it explores street food’s contribution and relationship to the emergence of agribusiness and the adverse environmental and nutritional consequences of industrialized food production just prior to the complete proliferation of the internet and the advent of social media.

NEW TECHNOLOGY, SOCIAL MEDIA, AND TELEVISION: STREET FOOD IN THE UNITED STATES Prior to street food vendors’ adoption of modern electronic technologies, their relationship with the urban centers of the United States had been strained by the consequences of

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massive growth during the Industrial Revolution. During those early years, street food in the United States, following a pattern similar to its European cousins, had a “love-hate relationship” with its communities and governing authorities (Taylor et al. 2000, 25). Street food was loved as a major utility for expanding urban centers along the eastern seaboard, with their increasing “demand for relatively inexpensive, ready-to-eat food” that stimulated “the emergence and spread of both fast food and street food” (Corvo 2014, 132). The first vendors to hit the streets were push carts and lunch wagon operators serving food to late-shift workers when nothing else was open (Gutman 1993). But street food was hated by many traditional businesses and by city planners, who felt that street food was a disruptive influence. The expansion of street food vending created tension between the street vendors, the city’s authorities, and its traditional brick-and-mortar establishments (Morales 2000; Taylor et al. 2000). For example, vendors were accused of being a negative influence on the cityscape, adding to the crowded streets, “stealing business from local stores, and stigmatizing neighborhoods, thereby reducing real estate values” (Taylor et al. 2000, 26). In some cases, vendors were forced to drop the wheels of the business and become more traditional food establishments to avoid new regulations, like the LaGuardia laws, which completely abolished street food vendors from New York City in late 1930s (Gutman 1993; Taylor et al. 2000). These radical laws in high-profile cities greatly informed the negative stigma of street food that operators still face today (Morales 2000; Burnett and Newman 2014; Street Food Project 2016). However, the negative stigma has lessened (and in some cases has been entirely replaced by positive associations) through increased exposure within popular culture. With improvements and implementation of modern technology, local street food vendors in the mid-2000s were finally able to leave their native street corners and reach out globally to explore new possibilities for contributing to public space and foodways. The mobile food medium called the gourmet food truck is recognized as a key actor responsible for ushering in a new era for street food in the United States by awakening the nation to street food as something new, exciting, and valuable (Kraig and Taylor 2013; Moe 2015). Gourmet food trucks, unlike so-called “grease trucks” or “roach coaches,” capitalize on technology to improve their chances of survival in urban centers. According to Anenberg and Kung, strong empirical evidence links the increasing public attention in smartphones and social media “to growing interest in food trucks at the city level, even when controlling for national trends and city heterogeneity” (2014, 32). Their data suggest “that the relationship between food trucks and mobile technology is not reflecting an underlying trend in the food service industry, but rather something unique about food trucks” (2014, 15–16). A Newsweek report also recognized this trend and named the food truck “America's first viral restaurant,” comparing its rise to that of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama, who capitalized on being “youthful, urban, multiethnic, wired and communal” (Romano 2009, 2). One catalyst for rethinking street food in the United States is chef Roy Choi, a KoreanAmerican from Los Angeles and cofounder of the Kogi BBQ truck. In 2016, Time magazine recognized him as one of the “100 Most Influential People” for his involvement in elevating “the food-truck concept from ‘roach coach’ to highly sought-after, ultra-hotyet-democratic rolling restaurant” (Bourdain 2016, 1). A more recent film, Chef (2014), which stars actor Jon Favreau, is loosely based on the story of Choi (Eater 2014). CNN has also participated in the street food movement by hiring Choi to host a show titled Street Food. While all of these accomplishments are noteworthy, Choi is not the only

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voice for the food truck and street food revival; rather he is “one of the loudest, one of the first, the most controversial, and charismatic” (Moe 2015, 197). Choi’s success came through two key distinctions made to his mobile street food business that set a new standard of operation for new entrepreneurs and traditional street food vendors. First, Kogi rebranded their street food cuisine as gourmet-meetstraditional-street-food. Second, his team used new technologies to successfully expose their branding to the public and to advocate for street food reform where others had not yet found success. The branding of Kogi and the recent shift in the public image of the street food movement started with Choi’s blending of traditional street food cuisine with his training at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), as well as his experience working at top brick-and-mortar restaurants. This blend was seen as novel (and often delicious), but it was also seen as being disruptive to old assumptions about street food being a simple working class, cheap, and efficient cuisine. Kogi’s menu is filled with fusion food based on classic Los Angeles street food. For example, Kogi serves kalbi short rib tacos with house-made salsa verde which use Korean-prepared proteins, combined with a gourmetinspired salsa, wrapped together in either a small corn tortilla or large flour tortilla in the traditional taco truck fashion. Furthermore, Choi revamped the traditional methods of preparation and cooking within the food truck’s galley kitchen based on his knowledge of the French brigade system and his experience working in small Japanese kitchens. Both the adaptations made to the menu and to cooking within a small kitchen made great strides in altering preconceived notions of street food as crude and unhealthy. Suddenly, street food was itself a culinary enterprise. But Choi resisted the notion that his brand of street food was something elitist—a result only of his gourmet training; for him, it was a reflection of his time eating street food in Los Angeles. He states that Kogi is Los Angeles on a plate . . . . It was Koreatown to Melrose to Alvarado to Venice to Crenshaw crumpled into one flavor and bundled up like a gift. The elements looked like city blocks. The flavor tasted like the streets. And the look said home. (Choi, Nguyen, and Phan 2013, 296) Choi’s qualification of the food as being of the streets helps to combat the reputation of gourmet food being only for elite audiences with refined taste. However, it was his use of social media that was truly innovative. Although Choi was undoubtedly successful in bringing gourmet food to the streets, he did not invent the idea. The strategy of using gourmet cooking techniques in a mobile kitchen was used in the early 1900s on the first wave of lunch wagons on the east coast. Some of these vendors would create elegant lunch wagons in which customers could enjoy a full fine-dining service (Gutman 1993). It was Kogi’s use of Twitter instead of more traditional media that gave him a new means of communication to connect with his audience in a meaningful and expansive way (Gelt 2009; Moe 2015). Pragmatically, by using Twitter, Choi gave consumers directions to current and future locations of the Kogi BBQ truck. This allowed Kogi to efficiently direct customers to his location and provide real-time updates about delays, menu changes, or even wait times. As Anenberg and Kung note, food truck proprietors recognize that there is “a significant amount of locational uncertainty and they communicate the realization of this uncertainty in real-time through smartphones and social media” (2014, 32). In short, the technology closed a communication gap between the vendor and audience by providing reliable information that had otherwise been lacking.

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With the aid of social media, Kogi BBQ was also able to persuade customers to venture to unique locations. Caroline McCarthy states, “Both Twitter and the food truck craze [were], in a sense, testaments to the mobility and spontaneity enabled by the Digital Age” (2009, 1). For example, food trucks could take their setup to trendy locations before these locations lost their appeal or other traditional street food or brick-and-mortar establishments could move in. They could also drive audiences to different locations across the urban center, giving the vendor greater freedom to craft the aesthetics of the street food experience (Moe 2015). Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and food critic Jonathan Gold posits that this is one of the unique qualities of street food: “The promise of street food lies in this kind of strong, unmediated sense of place, of time, of situation . . . . A regular restaurant cannot duplicate the romance of the experience. A sensible restaurant will not even try” (2014, 11). A single food truck event could instantly diversify the foodscape by rolling into an empty parking lot and within the span of a few hours creating the conditions needed for a pop-up food festival and/or community gathering. Part of the aesthetic Choi has branded to the mobile food medium is making street food fun and diverse in the way Gold romanticizes its uniqueness. For example, food trucks are often wrapped or painted in bright colors, covered in stickers or street art, lit up with bright lights, and blaring popular music, making them highly recognizable to their customers and surrounding communities. But the aesthetic of street food created by food trucks is one that requires active participation and imagination in ways that other culinary spaces do not. Turning a curbside into a dining area or finding ways to entertain long lines of customers is difficult to accomplish. But successful attempts have been made to direct and increase participation. Kogi and other food trucks have constructed different virtual reward systems for things like finding the truck, wearing a costume, or taking pictures of the food or chef and posting them on social media. For example, Alice Shin, Kogi BBQ food truck in-house blogger and Tweeter, noticed that people were using Kogi to act out a “treasure hunt” and incentivized the hunt with digital trophies and/or discounts on their food order (McCarthy 2009, 1). In New York City, founder of the Wafels and Dinges food truck, Thomas DeGeest, stated, “Sometimes we have a secret password, or sometimes we have a challenge. One of my guys came up with a challenge earlier this week to come and do an impersonation of a peacock” (cited in McCarthy 2009, 1). The other major advantage of new technology is that the use of social media gives food truckers an effective communication medium to dialogue with their customers about their experiences and concerns, in effect building a closer relationship (Moe 2015). With an audience routinely checking Twitter and other social media feeds to get an update on a street food truck, vendors are afforded a valuable space to interact with their customers. Regarding these social media spaces, food scholar Signe Rousseau finds that they are beneficial because “a great number of people find some sort of validation and appreciation through sharing stories about food, and . . . often the communities that grow out of that shared space come to rest on pillars that are stronger than just food” (2012, 36). This suggests that the process of relationship building between street food vendors and customers requires both technological skills and interpersonal skills that often exceed those used regularly by cooks and other back-of-the-house staff at brickand-mortar restaurants (Moe 2015). For example, Dan Weber, author of The Food Truck Handbook: Start, Grow, and Succeed in the Mobile Food Business (2012), argues that successful mobile street food vendors must have a presence in virtual spaces by constantly promoting, building, and maintaining interactive online personas and social networks.

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This caters to the consumers’ desire to experience the act of cooking and selling food “without walls.” Eventually, regulatory changes began to catch up with the changes in street food practices. The media attention generated by entrepreneurs like Choi helped promote street food organizations already up and running, while at the same time pushing newcomers to create organizations that supported street food. In recent years, collaborative efforts of vendors, street food vending organizations, policy makers, and community leaders have brought change to many of the struggles street vendors have faced across the United States. Cities like Portland, Oregon stand out for their improving conditions. In the years prior to alterations, the city had a large population of informal street food vendors who were generally tolerated or lightly regulated, but not supported by local authorities (Southworth 2014). This limited the vendors’ legal protections and subjected them to great abuse or discrimination. Yet, in the National League of Cities report in 2013, Portland was named “food truck capital of the world,” beating out places like Los Angeles, where the food truck got its first bit of fame, and New York City, where street food vending is iconic (27). The formalization of street food in Portland started in the mid-2000s when both vendors and consumers attempted, via both social media and patronage, to capitalize on the improved ethos of street food to “progress policies on food vending” that soon turned “dead urban spaces into gastronomic magnets that attract crowds” (Southworth 2014, 37). The general lesson learned from Portland is that public support for this new brand of street food was the catalyst for authorities to start the process of lifting outdated restrictions and/or supporting improved street food as a legal activity. The cutting edge of developments in technology promises to increase the ability for the consumer to access relevant information about this normally mercurial set of food purveyors. Pre-designed vehicle solutions for the food truck niche offer to increase efficiency and operational capability. For example, food trucks are equipping live webcam feeds to create greater opportunities to interact and provide the customer with greater— or the illusion of greater—transparency. Elsewhere, the trucks and other motorized kitchens are being upgraded and more sophisticated toward the needs of this underserved community of vendors. State-of-the-art design is going into these mobile kitchens from the way they consume power, the type of fuel they consume, the ability to store and hold more supplies, all the way to their general aesthetic appeal of the “modern” and “new.” This follows a trend in the United States of “going small” or “tiny” in their desired living space, as seen in popular shows like Tiny House Nation on the FYI network or Tiny House, Big Living on the DIY network.

STREET FOOD, APPROPRIATION, AND CULTURAL IMPERIALISM While there have been many changes in the public conception and regulation of street food in the United States, there has also been significant criticism over the movement’s exploitation of more traditional street food vendors. In his book Planet Taco: The Battle of the Taco Trucks, Jeffrey Pilcher indicates that the recent popularity of mobile street vending has “revealed how the pursuit of culinary authenticity is embedded within complicated relations of race and class” (2012, 222). He gives the example of a taco truck in Los Angeles serving “a predominantly Latino, working class clientele,” but says that

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trend was altered when Mexican cuisine and street food both became sites for “culinary tourism for Anglos searching for ethnic exoticism” (222). The gourmet food truck made street food and the taco truck more familiar to audiences of white, middle- and upper-class consumers. Instead of taco trucks being set up “near factories, plazas, and soccer fields,” a “gentrified taco truck” would also join them in “upscale neighborhoods and corporate centers,” locations from which traditional taco trucks had been banned because of the their “otherness” (222). Philosopher and food scholar Lisa Heldke explains that many of us “like our exoticism somewhat familiar, recognizable controllable,” but this requires the removal of a cultural item from its perceived cultural origins and/or symbolic context (2003, 19). This makes those cultures of origin, often less dominant cultures, the material for financial profit, inspiration, or social capital by more dominant cultures. In the case of the taco truck and gourmet food truck, “new forms of distinction” were created as to what is considered authentic Mexican cuisine, according to Pilcher (2012, 222). The distinction in this case, as with many others throughout the history of Mexican cuisine in the United States, is problematized because “authentic” cuisine is often defined by outside groups that impose their value systems upon a traditional practice. In Los Angeles, the changing standards of what makes a food “authentic” forces taco truck vendors to adopt an imposed standard in terms of the cuisine, styles of service, and aesthetic presentation if they want to succeed. This style of standardization then erodes the diversity of vendors and cuisines while further marginalizing those who do not conform to that standard. Interestingly, there is very little public hostility between the taco truck and food truck communities. In fact, many taco trucks or gourmet food trucks tend to work well together or to serve completely different audiences, eliminating crossover competition. This market separation serves as a living reminder of the two-tiered governance controlling and sanitizing exoticism, destined to clash continuously at the geographical borders of the communities. However, both mobile vendors and large numbers of their customers have criticized industrial food companies for partaking in the street food revival. For example, industrial food companies such as Applebee’s, Taco Bell, and Sizzler have attempted to become street food vendors after Kogi’s model showed financial success. These companies made major efforts to mimic the gourmet food truck aesthetic in terms of looks, sounds, and taste. Nonetheless, these industrial mobile vendors did not have a motive other than sheer profit (Huffington Post 2011). Food truck owner Raul Ortega claims, “They [new mobile kitchen owners] don't understand this kind of business. It takes a lot, a lot of work. A lot of patience, too” (cited in Del Barco 2011, 1). According to Moe, Many believe corporate food trucks do not have the mindset to wait on an idea to mature but will mine whatever they can until things go downhill. This belief is anchored in the perception that at the end of each fiscal quarter, the bottom line of the business needs to show growth—leaving little room for patience to find the right unique location, develop new and interesting culinary flavors, or create large-scale social change. Because their singular goal is to make the most money without having to change the corporate model, the mobile food mediums tend to mimic the ethics, values, and style of food trucks like Roy Choi’s. (2015, 212) The corporate frame, in this regard, is what Pilcher sees as the “high economic stakes” of appropriation (2012, 5). Large food corporations can alter agricultural production for entire nations by co-opting food-related trends by having the resources to lobby authorities for advantageous regulation or models of production that traditional street food vendors and smaller “mom-and-pop” restaurants cannot accomplish, such as Taco

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Bell using the taco and selling it back to Americans as distinctly Hispanic. As Pilcher notes, the taco stereotype brought on by Taco Bell “confounded efforts by Mexican tourism and agriculture to gain international distinction and raise the value of their exports” (5). Another concern about gourmet food trucks and their corporate food imposters is that they are being exported to other countries. The criticism claims that the exporting will lead to further disruption of more traditional forms of street food, thus acting as another form of what Heldke refers to as cultural food colonialism (2003). For example, what does it mean when Italians start transitioning from the common language spelling cibo di strada for street food to the English spelling street food? Events like the “Street Food a Milano: International Street Food Parade all’Acquatica Park” or “PARMA STREET FOOD FESTIVAL” are recent examples of Italians advertising these food gatherings with the English spelling and even adapting to the American/Kogi style gourmet food truck. It is far too early to understand the rationale behind these alterations and their potential outcomes, but it does suggest the diffusion of street food from the United States to global audiences and the progressive “Americanization” of this unique cultural foodway. It could be explained by the fact that English is the default language of the internet, and that achieving maximum potential reach for searches and syndication means including keywords in English in the festival title. Alternatively, these festivals could be part of tourism outreach programs or just another form of corporate white-labeling.

CONCLUSION Playfully, travel writer Graham Holliday compares Vietnamese street food to smoking cigarettes, stating, “It can seem somewhat disgusting at first, it takes a little time to get into it, but before long, you’re addicted” (2015, 154). Within the humor lies a nugget of truth that street food has been praised for providing the fuel for workers and, more currently, acting as a magnet for culinary tourists, but at the same time has been criticized as a destructive element of the modern cityscape. There exists a long-standing love-hate relationship with street food historically and globally. However, that relationship is being transformed through the adoption of new technologies by street food vendors. In the United States in particular, chef Roy Choi and the Kogi BBQ food truck helped rebrand street food for consumers as gourmet, hip, and personable through Twitter and other social media outlets. This rebranding went viral, persuading many individuals to rediscover street food in America and others to start their own street food business. But in the expansion of street food, the gourmet food trucks received criticism as vehicles for cultural appropriation and even cultural imperialism. Despite its ancient history, street food is a rapidly expanding into new markets thanks to the increased use of technology to promote it. Whether used to share information about a truck’s location, menu, or marketing, social media and other technological developments are relatively cheap and effective alternatives to traditional marketing that add to the casual ambiance of street food. While there are still some problematic aspects of food trucks, their unique foods, spontaneous quality, and friendly atmosphere are amplified by the personal nature of social media and other new direct-communication technologies, suggesting that the food truck craze will continue for years to come. In any case, the true reasoning for the massive spread of street food and the food truck throughout the United States and increasingly European urban centers is only partially understood at this time, and still represents a needed area of future research. Research is needed to shed light on how the downstream effects of the food truck revolution

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aggravate the cultural and class divisions within society. Or will the technological and social developments empower a new age of integrity and creativity of street food? Furthermore, the use of these kitchens on wheels has not been fully explored as to their practical application of serving their communities during national disasters. For example, after Hurricane Sandy, food trucks were called in by local officials and community members to provide hot meals, water, and other supplies to areas without power and where other social services were out of reach (Allen 2012; Berfield 2012). The outcome seemed positive from news reports, but how effective it ultimately was in rendering aid to communities in distress is unknown. Nonetheless, the evolution of public discussion on the topic will most likely serve to empower consumer and citizen decisions collectively toward higher public safety standards, more delicious culinary output, and increasingly inspiring public food institutions.

REFERENCES Albala, Ken. 2014. The History of Reader: Primary Sources. London: Bloomsbury. Allen, Bob. 2012. “Food Trucks Lure Sandy Relief Effort to Downtown Towson.” The Baltimore Sun. Nov 14. http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-county/ towson/ph-tt-food-truck-rally-1114-20121113,0,3967136.story Anenberg, Elliot and Edward Kung. 2014. How Smartphones and Social Media Dialed Up the Food Truck Boom and Increased Access to Food Variety. https://economics.columbian. gwu.edu/sites/economics.columbian.gwu.edu/files/downloads/Micro%20-%20ak_ foodtruck_2014_mar_submit.pdf. Berfield, Susan. 2012. “New York’s Food Trucks to the Rescue.” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, November 1. http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-01/new-yorks-food-trucks-tothe-rescue Bromley, Ray. 2000. “Street Vending and Public Policy: A Global Review.” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 20(½): 1–28. Bryant, Adrianne, Leigh Bush, and Richard Wilks. 2014. “The History of Globalization and the Food Supply.” In The Handbook of Food Research edited by Anne Murcott, Warren Belasco, and Peter Jackson, 34–49. London: Bloomsbury. Bourdain, Anthony. 2016. “Roy Choi.” Time magazine, April 21. http://time.com/4301775/ roy-choi-2016-time-100/. Cardoso, Ryzia C.V., Michele Companion, and Stefano R. Marras 2014. Street Food: Culture, Economy, Health, and Governance. London: Routledge. Choi, Roy, Tien Nguyen, and Natasha Phan. 2013. L.A. Son: My Life, My City, My Food. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Corvo, Paolo. 2014. “Food Trucks in the USA: Sustainability, Young Entrepreneurship, and Urban Revitalization.” In Street Food: Culture, Economy, Health, and Governance edited by Ryzia C. V., Michele Companion, and Stefano. R. Marras, 133–45. London: Routledge. Del Barco, Mandalit. 2011. “Is the L.A. Food Truck Bubble Ready to Burst?” NPR, May 18. http://www.npr.org/2011/05/18/136273993/is-the-l-a-food-truck-bubble-ready-to-burst. Eastwood, Carolyn. 2007. “Street Vendors.” In Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink edited by Andrew F. Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eater.com. 2014. “Jon Favreau on How Roy Choi Shaped Chef.” May 9. http://la.eater. com/2014/5/9/6226883/jon-favreau-on-how-roy-choi-shaped-chef

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Fellows, Peter, and Martin Hilmi. 2011. “Selling Street and Snack Foods.” FAO Diversification Booklet #18. http://www.fao.org/3/a-i2474e.pdf. Food Safety Unit Division of Food and Nutrition World Health Organization. 1996. “Essential Requirements of Street-Vended Foods.” http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/63265/1/ WHO_FNU_FOS_96.7.pdf. Gelt, Jessica. 2009. “Kogi Korean BBQ, a Taco Truck Brought to you by Twitter.” Los Angeles Times, February 11. http://www.latimes.com/style/la-fo-kogi11-2009feb11-story. html#page=1 Gold, Jonathan. 2014. “This Must Be the Place.” Lucky Peach Magazine, Winter: 10–11. Gutman, Richard J. S. 1993. American Diner: Then and Now. New York City: Harper Perennial. Heldke, Lisa. 2003. Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer. New York City: Routledge. Holliday, Graham. 2015. Eating Viet Nam. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Huffington Post. 2011. “Applebee’s Food Truck Kills Mobile Dining’s Street Cred for Good.” August 5. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/05/applebees-food-truck_n_919533. html. Ibisworld. 2015. “Food Trucks in the US: Market Research Report.” http://www.ibisworld. com/industry/food-trucks.html. Julier, Alice P. 2014. “Meals: ‘Eating In’ and ‘Eating Out’.” In The Handbook of Food Research edited by Anne Murcott, Warren Belasco, and Peter Jackson, 338–97. London: Bloomsbury. Kraig, Bruce, and Colleen, T. Sen. 2013. Street Food from Around the World: An Encyclopedia of Food and Culture. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Linnekin, Baylen, Jeffrey Dermer, and Matthew Geller. 2012. “The New Food Truck Advocacy: Social Media, Mobile Food Vending Associations, Truck Lots, & Litigation in California & Beyond.” 17 Nexus: Chapman Journal of Law & Policy 35: 1–58. McCarthy, C. 2009. “When Twitter Met Food Trucks.” Cnet.com, May 18. http://www.cnet. com/news/when-twitter-met-food-trucks/. Mitchell, Richard and David Scott. 2014. “A Critical Turn in Hospitality and Tourism Research?” In The Handbook of Food Research edited by Anne Murcott, Warren Belasco, and Peter Jackson, 229–49. London: Bloomsbury. Moe, Bryan, W. 2015. “Rhetoric and Food: The Rise of the Food Truck Movement.” PhD diss., Louisiana State University A&M, 2015. Morales, Alfonso. 2000. “Peddling Policy: Street Vending in Historical and Contemporary Context.” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 20(½): 76–98. National League of Cities. 2013. “Food on Wheels: Mobile Vending Goes Mainstream.” http:// www.nlc.org/Documents/FoodTruckReport.pdf. Pilcher, Jeffrey, M. 2012. Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pill, Alexandra. 2014. “Changing Food Landscapes: Understanding the Food Truck Movement in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.” In Street Food: Culture, Economy, Health, and Governance edited by Ryzia C. V., Michele Companion, and Stefano. R. Marras, 119–32. London: Routledge. Romano, A. 2009. “Thanks to Twitter, America’s First Viral Restaurant.” News Week, February 27. http://www.newsweek.com/thanks-twitter-americas-first-viral-eatery-82325. Rousseau, Signe. 2012. Social Media: You are What You Tweet. London: Berg. Scholliers, Peter, and Patricia Van Den Eeckhout. 2014. “Feeding Growing Cities in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Problems, innovations, and reputations.” In The

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Handbook of Food Research edited by Anne Murcott, Warren Belasco, and Peter Jackson, 69–81. London: Bloomsbury. Simopoulos, Artemis P., and Ramesh V. Bhat 2000. “Preface.” World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics: Street Food 86: vii–x. Street Vendors Project. 2016. “Home page.” http://streetvendor.org/. Taylor, Denise S., Valerie K. Fishell, Jessica L. Derstine, Rebecca L. Hargrove, Natalie R. Patterson, K. W. Moriarty, Beverly A. Battista, Hope E. Ratcliffe, Amy E. Binkoski, and Penny M. Kris-Etherton. 2000. “Street Food in America: A True Melting Pot.” World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics: Street Food 86: 25–44. Tinker, Irene. 1997. Street Foods: Urban Food and Employment in Developing Countries. New York: Oxford University Press. Weber, David. 2012. The Food Truck Handbook: Start, Grow, and Succeed in the Mobile Food Business. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Ying, Chris. 2014. “Editor’s Notes.” Lucky Peach Magazine, Winter: 3. Zubaida, Sami. 1991. “Utility and Symbol in Public Eating.” In Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery: Public Eating, edited by Harlan Walker, 1–5. London: Prospect Books.

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PART THREE

Aesthetics of Food

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Food, Design, and Innovation: From Professional Specialization to Citizen Involvement FABIO PARASECOLI

In the past two decades, as large portions of humanity still struggle to secure enough to eat on a daily basis, in postindustrial societies, food has become a highly contested site for the formation of individual and collective identities. As with other kinds of consumption, when the priority is not survival, food plays an increasingly relevant role in shaping the cultural outlook, social status, and political worldviews of citizens from all walks of life. Food production and consumption have turned into an arena for forms of activism that in some quarters have been hailed as the beginning of a “food movement.” Food and the socioeconomic matters that surround it are increasingly relevant in environmental, political, and trade debates at the global level, made more urgent by the undeniable (but nevertheless often denied) impact of climate change. Such issues do not only involve authorities and institutions, but also civil society at large, so that citizens from all backgrounds have become stakeholders with specific interests and goals that may or may not coincide with existing power structures. A widespread sense of rupture and crisis in the food system suggests greatly diverging worldviews, each reflecting the positions of the actors involved. Proposed solutions point to different causes, ranging from decrying insufficient productivity and industrial interventions, to calling for more environment-friendly approaches that may include a greater role for traditional and indigenous knowledge. The establishment of alternative networks—from community-sustained agriculture to consumers’ cooperatives—reflects a desire for greater equality, justice, and sustainability in the food system. The increasing relevance and visibility of food as a social and political area are reflected in the growing participation of concerned citizens, often trying to overcome enduring forms of disenfranchisement through engagement with tangible issues. Due to the tendency toward industrialization and mechanization of the global food system, diverging attitudes toward science and technology have developed. On the one hand, some are convinced that the food system can only gain from the introduction of scientific innovations, ranging from laboratory experimentation on genetically modified

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organisms to replacement meats and the extraction of compounds and nutrients. On the other hand, others fear a total dehumanization of the food system, supporting communal engagement as an antidote to mass production, while highlighting the skills of those who grow, manufacture, and cook food. This approach and the political choices it entails have been criticized as elitist and ineffective in tackling the enormous scale of the problems in the global food system. Taken to the extreme, these visions can turn, respectively, into a technocratic dystopia or into pastoral nostalgia. In recent years, design has turned its attention to these issues, often mediating between the two approaches and showing how science and innovation can generate new opportunities in all aspects of the food system. New technologies can be applied, for instance, to design vertical farming, sustainable fisheries, humane animal pens, and better use of cellphone communication to support farmers. In all these cases, what counts is who controls the technology, how accessible it is, and whether it favors or hinders the democratic participation of all actors involved in the food system. Otherwise, technology can easily be co-opted to enhance production efficiency, increase outputs, and sell more objects to buy and consume, with no impact on the welfare of society as a whole. Food designers increasingly find themselves mediating among divergent worldviews and practices concerning the production and consumption of food, the individual and communal experiences that emerge from them, as well as their impact on larger issues such as sustainability, social justice, and public health. It is within this context that this chapter aims to answer several key questions: What is the goal of innovation? How does design contribute to current and future innovation? How can citizens participate in and shape the design process?

DESIGN AND FOOD The desire to improve the contemporary food system is the main motivation behind the ongoing development of the new and inherently transdisciplinary field of food design. Design, with methodologies and theoretical approaches that connect analysis with the generation of insights that can guide practical interventions, can strategically operate in many aspects of food systems at different scales, from the shape of a fork to the visual arrangement of a dining room, from the packaging of an industrial product to the structure and organization of a famers’ market. Under the food-design umbrella, we find work ranging from culinary design and the study of the physical properties of food to the design of kitchen objects and appliances; technological innovations applied to growing, cooking, consuming, and disposing food; the reduction of kitchen and distribution waste; the organization of events and performances; the construction of permanent and temporary environments for food production, distribution, and consumption (artisan workshops, markets, restaurants, etc.); the management of services in hospitality and tourism; and food system strategies such as the organization of sustainable purveyor networks and the broadening of citizens’ involvement in relevant food-related issues. The bourgeoning interest of designers in food and food systems is the reflection of changes that have been taking place in the past few decades, which have seen a shift from prevalently productive interests, expressed for instance in graphic and industrial design, interior design, and architecture, to a growing focus on processes, services, and systems. Besides their long-established involvement with the production of objects and spaces, designers have been exploring new roles and directions in both their theoretical reflection

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and their applied practice, trying to bridge them and operate focused interventions that can introduce positive change. As Todd Johnston explained in an interview on Forbes, “Design comes from the Latin word dēsignāre, ‘to mark out.’ To design is to mark out a pattern as a means of making meaning of an experience. A design marks out a vision for what can be; the act of designing is to move with intent to close the gap between existing conditions and that vision” (Hwang 2014). In fact, innovation happens in the present, but embraces the future as its overarching horizon. Susan Yelavich argues that “design is always future making” (Yelavich 2014, 12). At the end of the twentieth century, Tony Fry already considered design as a tool against “de-futuring,” which he defined as the “condition of undermining viable human futures through our contemporary modes of habitation” (Fry 1999, 12). When positive social change becomes the focus, reflections about motivations and goals inevitably emerge. In Change by Design, Tim Brown mused: “As designers we focused our skills on the object in question and ignored the rest of the system: Who will use it, how, and under what circumstances? How will it be manufactured, distributed, and maintained? Will it support cultural traditions or disrupt them?” (Brown 2009, 204) In the same book, Tim Brown states: “What we need are new choices—new products that balance the needs of individuals and of society as a whole; new ideas that tackle the global challenges of health, poverty, and education; new strategies that result in differences that matter and a sense of purpose that engages everyone affected by them” (Brown 2009, 3). Building on these premises, many designers now embrace what is often referred to as “design thinking,” an iterative, practice-based method to look for better future situations, rather than just for solutions to particular problems. After defining and researching the issue at hand, practitioners are supposed to generate and consider many possible ideas and strategies that should then be prototyped and put to the test. The process can be iterated in order to refine the various solutions and to select the best one for implementation, a phase that allows for further learning (Cross 2011). Embracing this new disciplinary perspective, designers who turn to food as a crucial issue in contemporary society are called not only to reflect on consumption as user experience, but also to introduce improvements to make production and distribution systems more equitable, efficient, and sustainable, balancing technological innovation with community needs and cultural priorities. To do so, greater participation by all stakeholders involved is not only desirable but necessary. However, the inclusion of citizens in decisional processes inevitably leads designers to question their own role: What is their specific professional contribution when diffused co-design becomes prevalent? Are they just facilitators or can they still introduce disruption and innovation that otherwise would not take place? What kinds of dynamics develop when clients become collaborators or partners? Such reflections have shaped both theoretical analysis and developments in food-design practices.

DIVERGING DEFINITIONS AND ACADEMIC PERSPECTIVES What is food design? How do scholars and practitioners involved in it characterize and describe it? In the definition outlined by Pedro Reissig and the Food Design North America association, the goal of food design is to “improve our relationship with food,

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individually or collectively, in the most diverse ways and instances. Its actions can relate to the design of food products, materials, practices, environments, systems, processes and experiences” (Food Design North America 2014). As we will see, this is just one among several interpretations, each entailing different practical attitudes and kinds of engagement. This section will explore the evolution of academic and theoretical reflection on food design, as conducted by both scholars and practitioners, while the following ones will focus on praxis and its evolution. The first theoretical explorations of food design took place in the late 1990s, when practitioners and academics started recognizing it as a separate endeavor from other forms of design (Catterall 1999; Guixé 2003). Italian designer Paolo Barichella registered the website domain www.fooddesign.it as early as 2002, while Marc Bretillot started a culinary design atelier at the ESAD School of Design at Reims and in 2004 published Design Culinaire: Le Manifeste (Bretillot 2004). As the field is still in its initial stages, different actors give food design disparate meanings and variously interpret their practice and research, conceptualizing what they do, their methodologies, and their theoretical approaches in vastly distinctive ways. The definitions of this new field reflect diverse geographical backgrounds, professional and theoretical perspectives, as well as goals and priorities. Francesca Zampollo, founder of the International Food Design Society, asked well-known scholars and practitioners in the food-design community to provide their thoughts on the nature of food design in the first issue of the International Journal of Food Design (Zampollo 2016). To date, it is the most complete available compendium of definitions, which reflect the richness and vitality of the field, as well as its shifting nature. In Zampollo’s compilation, we can notice a spectrum that ranges from a focus on the material aspects of food design to an emphasis on immaterial aspects such as experience, service, and systems. At one end, Catalan designer Martí Guixé emphasizes the attention to materiality and object, describing food design as “design of food, which is thought, perceived, contextualized, ritualized, implemented and consumed as an object” (Zampollo 2016, 4). Design historian Victor Margolin confines the field to “two aspects. One is the aesthetic presentation of food and the other is the invention of new foods. The first is what characterizes high-end restaurants and cook books and the second is populist, characterizing such foods we now take for granted like potato chips, granola and hot dogs” (Zampollo 2016, 6). Embracing this approach, food designers have created dishes, objects, and spaces connected with the material aspects of food (Design Vlaanderen and Npo Vol-au-vent 2013). Midway along the spectrum, architects and food designers Sonja Stummerer and Martin Hablesreiter (known as Honey & Bunny) embrace an experience-centered approach, while taking into consideration object-related processes of production and consumption. Anna Cerrocchi (who launched the first Food Design competition in 2001) highlights the experiential elements, defining food design as “a design process based on users’ needs, that modify one or more features of the food and/or of the objects, tools, and ways linked to its consumption, in order to improve the physical and mental fruition of food itself” (Zampollo 2016, 5). At the other end of the spectrum, design educator Sonia Massari expands food design to include “designing human experiences and enhancing food cultures, or better, knowing how to use sensorial and intentional affordances to design new food experiences and cultures. This seems to be an extremely interesting objective both for the expert of food and the cognitive scientist as well as the food designer” (Zampollo 2016, 8). For

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Marije Vogelzang, food design, the “actual and literal design of food,” is part of a larger discipline, Eating Design, “the practice of designers working on the subject of food” (Zampollo 2016, 5). Other perspectives were not included in the compendium, such as the systemic approach embraced by the group led by Luigi Bistagnino at the Torino Politecnico school (Bistagnino 2011). To make sense of such diversity, Zampollo herself has proposed a mapping of food design that identifies six subcategories: Design With Food (focusing on “food as a raw material”), Design For Food (“design of all the products useful to cut, chop, mix, contain, preserve, store, cook and present food”), Food Space Design or Interior Design For Food, Food Product Design (“design of food to be mass produced”), Design About Food (“design of objects inspired by food,” which highlights symbolic meanings of products), and Eating Design (“design process for any eating situation where there are people interacting with food”) (Zampollo n.d.). Of course, there are both practitioners and theorists who would not easily fit in this taxonomy, especially as the field is in full development. This variety of interests and attitudes is also reflected in literature where food design is linked to cultural and social issues, production and consumption modalities, use of objects and space, communal well-being, and musings about the future and the impact of technology (Catteral 1999; Fuster and Peña 2015; Stummerer and Hablesreiter 2010 and 2013; Vogelzang 2008). From its inception, thanks to technology, social media, and websites that facilitate communication among all stakeholders involved, food design has developed as a global field of practice and research; quite often food designers know what others are doing in other parts of the world, while ideas and strategies circulate easily and rapidly. At the same time, regional networks and associations are emerging to respond to the specific approaches, needs, and issues in various parts of the world. Food Design North America and the Red Latinoamericana de Food Design are already active, and at the very moment of writing this chapter European food designers are starting to network in the same way. Each regional association arranges meetings and conferences, allowing for its members to interact and develop a common language and shared values. At the same time, the International Food Design Society and other cultural and design institutions have organized national and international conferences, publishing proceedings and documents (Ozcan et al. 2012; Peillod 2011; Parasecoli, Reissig, and Zampollo 2016). The growing academic relevance of the field is reflected in the launch of the International Journal of Food Design in 2015. The diversity within the journal’s board, which includes both designers and non-designers, points to the inherent and necessary multidisciplinarity of the field. The emergent interest among students is reflected in a number of food-design undergraduate and graduate programs, in both private and public institutions around the world. As more students enroll in food-design courses, the issue of a specific pedagogy is emerging. Does food design give students something that other design disciplines do not? What are its specific tools and methods? What jobs are available for those who study and practice food design? What is the relationship between food design, food studies, and food science, the latter being more established academic fields? FDxE is an international initiative whose goal is to allow discussion and exchange among practitioners and scholars who are teaching food design (FDxE2015). Although it is inevitable that pedagogical reflections will influence the very conceptualization of food design as a discipline, its geographical dispersion and continuous evolution suggest that no final definition will emerge any time soon, and diverging approaches will find at least a temporary home in it.

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PRACTICE: PRODUCTS, INNOVATION, AND TECHNOLOGY Such theoretical diversity is a direct reflection of food design as a praxis, which evolved in close connection with different domains of production and technological innovation. The diversity and large number of practices that the designers themselves conceptualize as food design may come across as confusing, but such complexity is the inevitable reflection of an ebullient and evolving new field that so far has demonstrated an admirable level of inclusivity. This section and the following ones will explore various aspects of the practice of food designers, observing the shift from a prevalent involvement with objects, spaces, and technology, often reflecting the priorities and demands of various industries, to a greater attention to the experiences of individuals and communities, as well as a growing focus on processes, services, and systems. After the Second World War, as mass and industrial production of food, which was slowly but inexorably replacing local and artisanal manufacture worldwide, was saluted as an expression of modernity and economic development, designers often worked on the graphic aspects of food manufacturing to advertise goods or create packaging, the design of food-related objects, tableware, and cooking implements, as well as the innovation of industrial food products in terms of both forms and functions. They often worked together with scientists who studied the physical and chemical property of foods to ensure better texture, shelf life, and transportability of products, and with flavor and aroma experts who focused on the sensory aspects. These collaborations are still enormously relevant for the food industry, which constantly interacts with designers to improve on products and their communication (Asensio 2005; Bassi 2015; Guixé 2010). This aspect of food design is widely known to consumers all over the world, who are primed and attuned to recognize and appreciate innovation in products. Moreover, the publishing industry has embraced this perspective with a growing number of beautifully illustrated and lavishly produced volumes on the topic (Hargreaves 2004; Jump/ Gardoni 2002; Lin 2013; Sandu Publishing 2013; Victrion 2011). The success of such books may be explained by consumers’ desire to better understand their own behaviors and the world they operate in, but also by the sheer pleasure of recognizing familiar objects and foods that are highlighted as unique and interesting. The growing influence of graphic, product, and industrial design on food has emerged also in the domain of fine dining, spearheaded by the success of Catalan chef Ferran Adrià, an economist who turned to cuisine and made his now-closed restaurant elBulli into the most renowned symbol of culinary innovation worldwide (Adrià, Soler, and Adrià 2005, 2006a,b, 2014; Opazo 2016). Although he never referred to himself as a designer, his approach based on analysis, ideation, tests, reiteration, and prototyping, and the accurate recording of all the phases in the ideation and execution of a dish, earned him the respect of the design community. Even before he closed his restaurant, he had founded a workshop (El Taller), dedicated to research, and now he collaborates with Elisava, a school of engineering and design in Barcelona, to study the creative process in itself and in its applications to food. His work is often identified as the beginning of “modernist cuisine” and of the application of “molecular gastronomy” to fine dining. The expression “modernist cuisine” is often used to refer to a scientific approach to the production, preparation, and cooking of food both in professional and domestic kitchens, apart from industrial settings. This

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approach values experimentation, innovation, and technology, while studying traditional processes to better understand their underpinnings from a scientific point of view (Myhrvold, Young, and Bilet 2011). This perspective is close to what is widely known as “molecular gastronomy,” which consists of the scientific analysis and explanation of what happens when food is processed and cooked (This 2006; Vega, Ubbink, and van der Linden 2012). Although much of this material was well-known to food scientists working for industries, it had not been absorbed and applied to professional and domestic cooking. The information produced in these two contemporary approaches to food has profoundly changed the way many fine-dining restaurants conceptualize food and create new dishes. Noma in Copenhagen, for instance, often identified as one of the best restaurants in the world, launched its own research branch, the Nordic Food Lab, which is now part of the University of Copenhagen, allowing chefs to work with food scientists. The culinary innovations connected with modernist cuisine and molecular gastronomy frequently require newfangled kitchen tools and tableware, on which chefs collaborate with designers. The results of such partnerships may just be used in an individual restaurant, as limited-production pieces, or can be transferred to industrial production, either as inspirations or actual prototypes. Some, like the siphon that Adrià used in the early 1990s to produce his famous foams, have become so ubiquitous that many chefs and connoisseurs consider them trite and unoriginal. Although the boundaries between creativity and gimmick may be tenuous, design can support the aesthetic research and the efforts of chefs to challenge eaters in their habits and behaviors, making them reflect on food consumption in general and on their experiences in particular. The complex relationship with technology plays an important role in food design, ranging from the development of new cooking tools and appliances to the construction of more efficient and sustainable kitchens, both for private homes and communal facilities, with a smaller carbon footprint and better usability. Emphasis is being put on creating simple, cheap, and portable technology to improve living conditions in developing countries, from affordable water filters to efficient and easy-to-build water pumps, to cooking stoves that avoid danger of excessive smoke inhalation in enclosed environments. The role of designers is to develop human-centered projects that recognize the priorities, preferences, and needs of all actors involved, especially those whose voices are less heard, and take into consideration complex contexts and situations to test prototypes that can be enhanced by the feedback of users and local communities. In the words of designer Ezio Manzini, designers “find themselves in a world where everybody designs and where . . . their task tends to be to use their own initiatives to help a variegated array of social actors to design better” (Manzini 2012, 2). Many experiments are taking place in information and communication technology, as kitchen appliances are being connected in networks (like a fridge that can order food as you run out of it or makes sure that you consume food close to the “best by” date). While at times these innovations may appear gratuitous and easy to categorize as gadgets, they frequently have important applications aimed at improving the quality of life for individuals and communities. Food designers can contribute useful solutions for urgent issues, as in case of disabilities and accessibility (Renda and Kuys 2013). This is the case, for instance, of tableware that can help the visually impaired to better enjoy their meals, or fridges that can remind the elderly or patients affected with Alzheimer’s or similar diseases to shop when they run out of food. In urban environments, foodrelated applications are launched daily, providing services such as home deliveries of groceries and ready-made meals, connection with other like-minded “foodies” who may

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be interested in cooking together, or giving cooking classes, or offering meals at home for a fee. Software is being tested to reduce waste in the food system by introducing better and more efficient distribution and storage management for perishable products, providing connections between supermarkets and charities such as soup kitchens, and linking small rural producers with local hubs in order to be able to meet the needs of large institutional clients. Information and communication technologies are increasingly relevant in agriculture, not only in developed countries but also in the Global South. Hand-held devices, now widespread among farmers all over the world, are being used to ensure better connections with markets, to acquire more updated information about crop pricing and available inputs, to be warned about weather, droughts or pests. However, designers face the challenge of providing farmers with technology that not only distributes information, but also does it in a way that makes sense to them and their needs, rather than the cultural outlooks of the designers themselves and the priorities of governments and other administrative bodies. In fact, information tends to be distributed in forms that are determined and decided by “science,” that is to say, by a certain way of understanding the legitimacy and validity of knowledge and technology that may or may not respond to the actual experience and the worldview of the farmers, often considered irrelevant at best and negative at worst, as research in ethnobotany and ethnopedology is suggesting. As citizens’ participation becomes central in design practice and ideation processes, designers will increasingly find themselves mediating different epistemologies about food, its production, and its consumption. Food designers also intervene to explore users’ actual desires and preferences in order to mediate them with the engineering and technological aspects of innovation, not only through the creation of easy and pleasurable interfaces, but also by imagining new possible behaviors and experiences (Choi, Foth, and Hearn 2014). For example, technological advancements are playing a crucial role in the diffusion and success of hydroponic and aquaponic systems, meant to produce food such as vegetables and fish in closed environments in commercial enterprises and in large scale. Designers are adapting the same technologies at smaller scales to allow individuals to grow food in their own domiciles. In all these initiatives, both at the macro and micro levels, important concerns ranging from sustainability to the use of energy, from access to affordability, need to be negotiated among stakeholders. Food designers often find themselves dealing not only with technical issues, but also with their social impact and their long-term implications. Architecture also becomes an expression of food design when projects for restaurants, stores, markets, or any place in which food is produced, distributed, or consumed (both permanent and temporary), consider aesthetics and technical features together with cultural and social aspects of food-related behaviors, in order to put users at the center of the experience of the constructed environment (Collins Cromley 2010; Gagen Hodgson, and Toyka 2007; Horwitz and Singley; Olsen Tvederbink, Fisker, and Henning Kirkegaard 2013). The scale of this reflection ranges from individual locations to larger space units, such as a neighborhood (Mand and Cilliers 2013). Architects increasingly interact not only with the designers in charge of furniture and tableware, but also with chefs and maître d’s, trying to reflect their ideas and concepts in the space they are responsible for in terms of visible elements, user experience, and underlying infrastructure, often with the goal of greater sustainability and the reduction of carbon footprint. From this point of view, the efforts of architects and interior designers to salvage and repurpose old materials are particularly interesting. These attempts have generated

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a full-formed aesthetics that in the 2010s has become visible in coffee shops, farmers’ markets, and restaurants that want to highlight their connection with the origin of the products they use and their commitment to sustainability, such as in farm-to-table or fair trade establishments. Furthermore, architects, interior designers, and food designers find themselves collaborating in creating new uses for old spaces, so that dismissed factories can become vertical farming hubs and abandoned urban lots and building roofs turn into farms and gardens. These spaces are meant to not only provide fresh food in communities where that may not be available, but also facilitate and support stronger social networks among participants in food production and consumption activities, often providing an indirect critique of the relationship between citizens in postindustrial societies, commodities, and the market (Reynolds and Cohen 2016). In these cases, the efforts of designers and architects often align with the activities of urban planners, activists, and community organizers (Ilieva 2016). Designers also find themselves collaborating with environmental experts to check the quality of soil, air quality, and overall impact, while mediating with producers and consumers about usability and experience quality. After catastrophic events such as Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, reflections have emerged on how to ensure the resiliency of cities and whole food systems, especially as many worry about the impact of climate change on food production. For instance, could artificial islands floating offshore both dampen the effect of high tides and coastal flooding and be used to grow food for human consumption, with plants on the top and seafood such as oysters and mussels at the bottom? Could self-sustaining hydroponic systems be built so that all the necessary energy comes from renewable resources such as solar energy, wind, and gas from composting and they could overcome temporary disruptions of electric grids or of fuel deliveries? While many designers argue that technology and resilience interventions can work together to support local systems, people who most care about local foods are often suspicious about technology. While some consumers may be lured by pastoral fantasies that identify local food exclusively with bucolic farms, others are sensitive to the role of urban agriculture and community garden in terms of social and political opportunities. However, these more engaged stakeholders often express doubts in terms of access and affordability of new technologies. Who owns them? Are there patents involved? Would these resiliency systems be available and affordable for underprivileged communities, or would they be limited to the most affluent sectors of society? Operating at the nexus of technology, innovation, and local food systems, food designers inevitably have to deal with issues of food justice and environmental justice.

PRACTICE: EXPERIENCE, PERFORMANCE, AND SERVICE Food designers’ praxis has been expanding to include aspects of the experiences of individuals and communities beyond their interactions with material objects, media, and technology. This is reflected in a shift from considering users just as receivers of designers’ professional interventions, to viewing them as co-designers and participants. The centrality of such approaches increases as food moves to the center of important social and political debates and acquires visibility with citizens from all walks of life. The interest of the public in food in general is reflected in shows and exhibitions that have taken places in galleries and museums. Food-related exhibitions are becoming increasingly common,

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attracting large audiences and constituting opportunities for reflection and discussion. These events allow for specialists from different disciplines to come together and reflect on current issues, accompanied by extensive and informative catalogues that solidify the visibility of food as a topic worthy of serious attention and study. Museums, galleries, and other exposition spaces, such as fair pavilions and other temporary structures, sit at the intersection of architecture and interior design, experience and service design, and larger cultural and social issues hinging on food and eating. It is now not unusual to have permanent museums dedicated to specific categories of food and drink (bread, wine, and spirits, for instance) or to host rotating exhibitions dealing with different aspects of the topic. Art and design museums are increasingly open to showcase food-related exhibitions (Beaux-Arts de Paris 2013; Celant 2015; Ciorra and Rosati 2015; Coffin, Lupton, and Goldstein 2006; Gross 2010; Science Gallery 2012). These venues provide designers with opportunities to not only explore the design aspect of food production and consumption, as well as food-related objects, but also reflect on how to turn intangible practices and decaying material into museum experiences, without curtailing the embodied aspects and audiences’ connection with them. The performative aspects of food preparation and consumption are also at the center of another major interest for food designers—and often an important source of income: food events. It is not unusual for corporate businesses or private clients to ask designers to create unique experiences to launch a specific product, to communicate a brand, or just to mark a special occasion. In these occurrences, food designers can reflect on aspects as diverse as what is actually eaten, how it is eaten, in which context, for what reason, the way participants experience space, food, and the occasion itself, and the connection of the event to larger systemic issues, from production to waste. This is particularly relevant for large food-focused events, like industry gatherings, exhibition fairs, or activist gatherings, such as Slow Food’s Terra Madre (Bistagnino 2011, 164–81). The imposing crowds of visitors and participants, the great number of program events, booths, and products, as well as the use of locations that were not originally designed as event spaces have stimulated designers to think in terms of sensory sustainability, which also considers flows, services, and even sound. Furthermore, issues of environmental sustainability assume urgency in those occurrences, as large gatherings tend to consume electricity and water, to produce much waste, and overall have a considerable carbon footprint (Fassio 2008). The focus on experiences has led renowned food designers to find a favorite venue in performance art, often in connection with events that range from cultural festivals to the launch of new products. This is the domain where food design most closely aligns with the arts, allowing designers to create unique events meant to elicit reflections in the participants and in audiences at large. In these contexts, the boundaries between designer and artist can be blurred, but overall designers approach their work with a strong sense of project, often conducting research, prototyping, and testing ideas and their execution on potential audiences to assess their impact. The designer relies on the symbolic value of food to set up experiences with users at their core, both when audiences are only spectators and when they are involved as participants. When taking place outside of commercial contexts, the performances are often purposely provocative, in order to generate a sense of estrangement aimed at supporting a cultural and social critique of larger issues in the contemporary food system, from sustainability to waste and hunger. Moving from punctual experiences and shifting emphasis on processes and fluxes, food designers have been integrating insights from the field of service design to intervene in

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sectors such as hospitality and tourism (Zampollo 2013). Designers can play an important role in improving the overall experience of a hotel, a guided tour, a store, a restaurant, or a tourist resort by improving the flows of people and objects, providing better services, ensuring flawless billing, and allowing users to better connect with initiatives and brands. From this point of view, food design reflects a larger shift toward what is often referred to as “experience economy.” Consumers do not just want to buy or eat something; they want to enjoy whole experiences and narratives (especially the stories of those producing and preparing food) through that act of consumption. They may want to know where their food comes from, who grew it, and how it relates to their personal contexts. Culinary tourism is one of the fastest growing segments in the travel industry, especially among more affluent consumers who want food to become a central part of their leisure time, experiencing different cuisine cultures. Looking at systems in their entirety, designers can increase the coherence and interconnection between objects, spaces, experiences, and people. Furthermore, designers can also assess the entanglements between a specific initiative and its surrounding context. For instance, they can improve the social, economic, and environmental sustainability of tourist activities by evaluating their carbon footprint, their waste production, their effect as multiplier and stimulus for local economies, as well as their impact on the social and cultural settings in which they take place. However, a better management of culinary tourism can have noticeable windfall on local communities by providing jobs, by acquiring locally grown foods, and by diminishing the isolation in which tourists often find themselves, especially when in resorts in developing countries. Food designers can not only provide contributions in the recreation sector, but also analyze and improve the quality of food-related aspects in large communal settings such as schools, universities, hospitals, and prisons, ensuring not only a better experience for the users and those involved in the preparation and distribution of food, but also better connections with growers, producers, and the local environment. In fact, due to their sheer dimensions, large institutions can play a crucial role in fostering the development of networks that can enhance the overall efficacy of the system, while also guaranteeing more secure income flows for producers and improving the overall impact in terms of environmental sustainability.

TOWARDS PROCESSES AND SYSTEMS Exploring the practices of food designers, we have observed that over the past few decades, they have expanded their reach from a focus on objects and spaces to include processes, fluxes, and systems as crucial elements to generate and implement innovation. Food designers not only operate to create new products, packaging, technological applications, and places for production and consumption, but they also conceptualize them as parts of larger phenomena that have an impact on the quality of life and the longterm sustainability of individuals and communities. Food designers strive to understand how people make sense of what they produce, eat, or throw away, and how they interact with systems as a whole. At the same time, the more socially conscious food designers actively try to make people fully aware of food systems, so they can become more engaged members of society not only by choosing what to purchase but also by understanding what policy interventions may be necessary and where they can exert their rights (and duties) as citizens. In these cases, one of the main challenges is how to scale up or scale down successful initiatives, and how to transfer and adapt them to different contexts.

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When design becomes co-designing and clients become collaborators and partners, all the actors in the system are viewed as stakeholders, rather than just targets for marketing. Complex connections need to be examined, diverging interests mediated, and shared solutions hammered out. These very tensions are forcing food designers to reflect on their professional position and their roles in society, especially when they are also educators or are involved in cultural initiatives that force them to conceptualize and explain their thinking and practice either to students or to the general public. As a consequence of these emerging dynamics, food designers frequently are motivated to go beyond simply devising new products, places, and experiences that do not contribute anything to improve our relationship with food and may even generate more unsustainable behaviors, increase inequality, and negatively impact personal, social, and environmental well-being. As these concerns are not universally shared, and the food industry still plays a crucial role as a major source of employment and financial support for projects, disagreements within the field in terms of values and goals inevitably emerge. Interactions with food science to launch new products on the market are not going to become less frequent. However, large food businesses, especially if globally visible and vulnerable to criticism, are increasingly collaborating with food designers to rethink not only products, but also their approach in terms of overall philosophy, sustainability, and involvement with the public. These collaborations are likely to have a long-term impact on the field by providing professional opportunities for both designers and students. Food design programs graduate growing numbers of professionals that identify themselves as food designers, while validating their claims to status and visibility. A larger presence in academia will allow food designers to interact with specialists and researchers in other disciplines, including ethnography, social studies, media and communication studies, visual arts, food science, the culinary arts, agronomy, system engineering, data analysis, and economics. Synergies are particularly promising with food studies, which promote and practice the analysis of cultural, social, and political issues concerning the production, distribution, and consumption of food in its material and cultural aspects, as well as in its social and political implications. The analytical tools developed in food studies have the potential to inform and integrate the practical applications that food design focuses on, while food-design methods can help food studies scholars to integrate applied approaches in their work. The range of food-design engagement is expanding. Information and communication technologies, 3D printing, food science, urban agriculture, public health, policy, activism, and food justice, just to mention a few, can be better coordinated and made more participative through the application of food-design methods and practices. Hopefully such integration will aim not only to achieve better productive efficiency and more consumption, but also to limit waste and improve sustainability in the food system. Much is at stake, above all in terms of the social function of food design: Will it limit itself to being a useful and creative tool in the experience economy, or will it also contribute to increase citizens’ involvement in crucial decisions about what and how they eat?

REFERENCES Adrià, Ferran, Juli Soler, and Albert Adrià. 2005. El Bulli 1998–2002. New York City: Ecco. Adrià, Ferran, Juli Soler, and Albert Adrià. 2006a. El Bulli 1994–1997. Barcelona: RBA. Adrià, Ferran, Juli Soler, and Albert Adrià. 2006b. El Bulli 2003–2004. New York City: Ecco. Adrià, Ferran, Juli Soler, and Albert Adrià. 2014. El Bulli 2005–2021. New York City: Phaidon.

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Asensio, Paco. 2005. Food Design. New York: TeNeues. Bassi, Alberto. 2015. Food design in Italia. Progetto e comunicazione del prodotto alimentare. Milano: Electa. Beaux-Arts de Paris. 2013. Cook book: l’art et le processus culinaire (exhibition catalog). Paris: Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts. Bistagnino, Luigi. 2011. Systemic Design. Bra: Slow Food Editore. Bretillot, Marc. 2004. Design Culinaire: Le Manifeste. Reims: ESAD. Brown, Tim. 2009. Change by Design: How Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. New York: Harper Business Catterall, Claire. 1999. Food: Design and Culture. London: Lawrence King Publishing. Celant, Germano. 2015. Arts & foods. Rituali dal 1851 (exhibition catalog). Milano: Mondadori Electa. Choi, Jaz Hee-jeong, Marcus Foth, and Greg Hearn. 2014. Eat, Cook, Grow: Mixing HumanComputer Interactions with Human-Food Interactions. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Ciorra, Pippo, and Alessio Rosati. 2015. Food dal cucchiaio al mondo (exhibition catalog). Roma: Quodlibet. Coffin, Sarah, Ellen Lupton, and Darra Goldstein. 2006. Feeding Desire: Design and the Tools of the Table, 1500-2005. Paris: Assouline. Collins Cromley, Elizabeth. 2010. The Food Axis: Cooking, Eating, and the Architecture of American Houses. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. Cross, Nigel. 2011. Design Thinking: Understanding How Designers Think and Work. Oxford and New York: Berg. Design Vlaanderen and Npo Vol-au-vent. 2013. Grandma’s Design: Food Inspires Design. Oostkamp: Stichting Kunstboek. Fassio, Franco. 2008. “Un modello esportabile di manifestazione fieristica a ridotto impatto ambientale.” Slow Food 35: 46-51. FDxE. 2015. Food Design x Education. http://www.fdxe.org/ Accessed on May 6, 2016. Food Design North America. 2014. FDNA Founding Document. http://www.fdna.org/. Accessed June 3, 2016. Fry, Tony. 1999. A New Design Philosophy: An Introduction to Defuturing. Sidney: University of New South Wales Press Fuster, Albert, and Javier Peña. 2015. Food, Design, and Well-Being. Elisava Temes de Disseny 31. Barcelona: Elisava. Gagen Hodgson, Petra, and Rolf Toyka. 2007. The Architect, the Cook and Good Taste. Basel, Boston and Berlin: Birkhäuer Verlag. Groos, Ulricke. 2010. Eating the Universe: Vom Essen in der Kunst (exhibition catalog). Köln: DuMont Verlag. Guixé, Martí. 2003. Food Design: A Paint Food Book. Barcelona: Galeria H2O Barcelona. Guixé, Martí. 2010. Food Designing. Mantova: Corraini Edizioni. Hargreaves, Ben. 2004. Eat Me: Delicious, Desirable, Successful Food Packaging Design. Mies: Rotovision. Horwitz, Jamie and Paulette Singley, eds. 2004. Eating Architecture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Hwang, Victor. 2014. “What Is Design? Unlocking The Genius Within.” Forbes, February 11, 2014. http://www.forbes.com/sites/victorhwang/2014/02/11/what-is-design-unlocking-thegenius-within-says-expert/#db579ca53939 accessed on May 20, 2016. Ilieva, Rositsa. 2016. Urban Food Planning: Seeds of Transition in the Global North. New York, NY: Routledge.

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Jump/Antonio G. Gardoni. 2002. Food by Design. London: Booth-Clibborn. Lin Shijian, ed. 2013. Delicious Branding: From Graphic Design to Space Design. Guangzhou: SendPoints Publishing. Mand, Harpreet, and Steani Cilliers. 2013. “Hospitable urban spaces and diversity.” Hospitality & Society 3 (3): 211–28. Mangano, Dario. 2014. Che cos’è il Food Design. Roma: Carrocci Editore. Manzini, Ezio. 2012. Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design as Social Innovation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Myhrvold, Nathan, Chris Young, and Maxime Bilet. 2011. Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. Bellevue, WA: The Cooking Lab. Olsen Tvederbink, Tenna, Anna Marie Fisker, and Paul Henning Kirkegaard. 2013. “Architectural theatricality: a food design perspective in hospitality studies.” Hospitality and Society 3 (3): 189–210. Opazo, M. Pilar. 2016. Appetite for Innovation : Creativity & Change at elBulli. New York : Columbia University Press. Ozcan, A. Can et al., eds. 2012. Agrindustrial Design: 2nd international Product and Service Design Congress and Exhibition of Agricultural Industries—Mediterranean/Food/Design Proceedings, 19–32. Izmir: Izmir University of Economics. Peillod, Claire. 2011. Les 400 goûts: Design, Cuisine et Geste. Actes du colloque Cuisine et Design: La question du gest, du corps et de la representation. Reims: ESAD. Renda, Gianni, and Blair Kuys. 2013. “Design for disability: industrial design-led interventions for assistive cutlery.” Hospitality and Society 3 (3): 229–37. Reynolds, Kristin and Nevin Cohen. 2016. Beyond the Kale: Urban Agriculture and Social Justice Activism in New York City. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Sandu Publishing. 2013. Whet my Appetite: Culinary Graphic Design. Berkeley: Ginko Press. Science Gallery. 2012. Edible: The Taste of Things to Come. Dublin: Trinity College. Stummerer, Sonja, and Martin Hablesreiter. 2010. Food Design XL. Vienna: Springer Verlag. Stummerer, Sonja, and Martin Hablesreiter. 2013. Eat Design. Vienna: Metroverlag. The Future Laboratory. 2008. Create. Eating, Design and Future Food. Berlin: Gestalten. Parasecoli, Fabio, Pedro Reissig, and Francesca Zampollo. 2016. Proceedings of the Second International Food Design Conference. New York: The New School. This, Hervé. 2006. Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor. New York: Columbia University Press. Vega César, Job Ubbink, and Erik van der Linden, eds. 2012. The Kitchen as Laboratory: reflections on the Science of Food and Cooking. New York: Columbia University Press. Victrion: Workshop. 2011. Eat Me: Appetite for Design: Product. Packaging. Art. Branding. Interiors. Hong Kong: Victionary. Vogelzang, Marije. 2008. Eat Love: Food Concepts by Eating-Designer Marije Vogelzang. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers. Yelavich, Susan. 2014. “Introduction.” In Susan Yelavich, and Barbara Adams, eds. Design as Future-Making, (12–17). London: Bloomsbury. Zampollo, Francesca, n.d. “Food Design Categories.” ifooddesign.com. http://ifooddesign.org/ categories/. Accessed May 6, 2016. Zampollo, Francesca. 2013. “Food and design: space, place and experience.” Hospitality and Society 3 (3): 181–87. Zampollo, Francesca. 2016. “Welcome to Food Design.” International Journal of Food Design 1 (1): 3–9.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Food and Urban Design: Urban Agriculture as Second Nature? KATRIN BOHN AND ANDRÉ VILJOEN

It is generally accepted that the establishment of settled agriculture enabled the formation of cities; the relationship between the two is intimate and very old. Until the nineteenth century, cities like Berlin and London had extensive areas of market garden within and around their urban centers. And today in China, for example, food is still grown within older cities. However, what was once everyday practice has become a stranger to many cities, to the extent that urban design and planning researchers have fairly recently defined a new term for food-growing practices linked to city space: urban agriculture. Undeniably, during the last twenty or so years, urban agriculture (also called “urban farming”) has once again become an increasingly common feature of many urban areas in the Global North—responding to social, environmental, and economic concerns—and has long been practiced in the Global South. The practice of urban agriculture during these past decades is remarkable and, across the world, has entered the open spaces of many cities or attached itself to their buildings. The vast majority of urban farmers produce fruit, herbs, mushrooms and vegetables, and often farm using organic principles. There is also an international upsurge of interest in water-based systems, for example, “aquaponics,” combining traditional fish farming with contemporary hydroponics. Urban agriculture is now widely understood as a movement and as an urban space-use typology. But there is a paradox: while China, to stay with the example, modernizes and urbanizes, eliminating its urban food growing, in New York, at the same time, space is being sought to reestablish urban agriculture. In both situations, the proponents of change believe they are creating desirable cities for the future in response to the needs of their respective populations. Often they polarize public opinion on the subject of urban food provision instead of leading to a common understanding of what urban design and development should and could do to cities around the world. Both situations exist in their own concrete local reality, but the big, common reality may be that we are witnessing a rebalancing of the relationships between cities and agriculture, between the urban and the rural. Boundaries blur, not only spatially, but also in terms of popular perceptions of urban culture and individual habit and of concepts regarding the possibilities from food production to its consumption.

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What is motivating the appearance of urban agriculture? Is it a response to crisis? To an extent, it is: in modernizing/developing societies, urban agriculture has often been seen as a response to food scarcity and emergency as evidenced by Cuba’s pioneering introduction of intensive urban food growing after the collapse of its economy during the late 1980s. However, more recently urban agriculture is also being recognized as a way of preventing scarcity, for example, by introducing closed-loop no-waste cultivation systems into cities, while reducing food miles and providing heat island mitigation, visual amenity, public health, and educational benefits—all in all, environmental motives supporting sustainable urban development. Another interesting notion is the relation of individuals to foodstuffs, be they fresh plants or processed products, evidenced in the ever-rising appetite for “the homegrown” and “the home-made.” With its often stated intention to render urban lives more meaningful and connected, urban agriculture does purport to address another type of “scarcity” connected to urban lifestyles, desires, and food cultures. Here, urban agriculture can help to create abundance—physical, such as in terms of yield and space, as well as social, for example in terms of employment and access to quality food. On the other hand, many of the food-producing examples we may refer to are used as tools for urban regeneration or connected to privileged markets, either selling expensive products to a few or being thought up by affluent urbanites to “better” less-lucky neighborhoods, or both. In this complex web of environmental, social, economic, and cultural conditions, what role does design play? How do urban and architectural design influence urban food production and the other way around? And what role plays popular culture in shaping this popular subject, or is the subject being shaped by popular culture? Or both?

WHAT IS URBAN AGRICULTURE? It was probably simply the stark contrast between the words “urban” and “agriculture” that triggered the imagination of those who created the term “urban agriculture” twenty years ago and sent it out to the world with both a question mark and an exclamation mark. Since that time, stakeholders in many countries have appropriated “urban agriculture” for use in their own specific contexts. However, what is common to all these understandings is the recognition that “urban agriculture” expresses the duality of a spatial adjacency— the urban and the field (“agri”)—and of a direct action, to grow (“culture”). Because of its rapid development, several interpretations of the term “urban agriculture” exist, capturing nuances within different local contexts. Among those, two definitions stand out: one, from the influential publication Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs and Sustainable Cities authored and edited in 1996 for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) by Jac Smit with Annu Ratta and Joe Nasr; and the other, by Luc Mougeot in 2001, which provides an extension of the former, stressing that it is “its integration into the urban economic and ecological system” (Mougeot 2001, 9) that distinguishes urban from rural agriculture rather than its urban location only: Urban agriculture is an industry that produces, processes and markets food and fuel, largely in response to the daily demand of consumers within a town, city or metropolis, on land and water dispersed throughout the urban and peri-urban area, applying intensive production methods, using and reusing natural resources and urban wastes, to yield a diversity of crops and livestock. (Smit et al. 1996, 1)

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Urban agriculture is an industry located within (intra-urban) or on the fringe (periurban) of a town, a city or a metropolis, which grows and raises, processes and distributes a diversity of food and nonfood products, (re-) using largely human and material resources, products and services found in and around that urban area, and in turn supplying human and material resources, products and services largely to that urban area. (Mougeot 2001, 10) Smit’s and Mougeot’s definitions are nowadays the most commonly used ones, and we value them for their simplicity, openness, and implicit inclusion of a cradle-to-cradle approach. It is a sign for the emergence of a new systemic thinking in many disciplines and around the world that the cradle-to-cradle concept, which argues for closed-loop systems according to the principle that “nature doesn't know waste,” was published around the same time (Braungart and McDonough 2002). The boundaries of both definitions for “urban agriculture”—as a primarily outputdriven and ecological approach to urban food growing—have nonetheless raised their own challenges as more people from diverse backgrounds engage with the practice. New practitioners have magnified the range of actual locations, qualitative and quantitative goals, economic models, activities, and produce types included in urban food-growing projects. This has, in turn, increased the need to design spaces, objects, and processes that enable the integration of urban agriculture into the urban fabric. The question of physical and social location opens another subject area where design tasks lie: in place making and in the creation of stakeholder networks concerned with food issues.

WICKED PROBLEMS REQUIRE WICKED SOLUTIONS It is neither possible nor desirable to feed a city solely through urban agriculture. However, coordinated and well-managed relationships between urban, rural, and international agriculture can lead to an environmentally optimal and equitable urban food system. The process of shifting to a more equitable and sustainable food system has rightly been characterized as a “super wicked problem” (Gorgolewski, Komisar, and Nasr 2016). The wicked problems related to food, such as one-way resource flows, income discrepancies between producers and consumers and embedded public health consequences, will require wicked solutions, including appropriate urban design, if change is to be managed, beneficial and evolutionary. In pessimistic future scenarios of extreme resource shortages and a possible return to a society that looks something like “neo-liberal feudalism,” the prospects for urban agriculture may be fairly straightforward. In these scenarios of real scarcity with extremes of wealth and poverty, urban agriculture is likely to become established out of necessity, as a survival strategy for most, while alongside it, another “luxury” version may coexist, serving a privileged niche community. To an extent and with regionally differing characteristics, this division can already be found in the more affluent cities of the Global North and South. It is “wickedly” intertwined with our society’s omnipotent economic system whose uppermost aim to maximize commercial viability for an individual or a neighborhood still rules out the large-scale success of alternative food systems. Contrary and in parallel to the above, a deeper investigation of many urban agriculture projects trying to operate commercially has, in our experience, revealed motivations that are not primarily driven by the aim to maximize profits. Rather the desire is to provide for

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better, more ecologically sound and health-enabling urban food systems supplying tastier and more varied foods (TUB AM 2011). The reality of most small-scale producers is that, in order to survive, they rely on niche markets for basic income, and this fact comments more on how poorly we value food production than evidences a desire to “cash in.” In any respect, urban—as much as other non-highly industrialized—farming requires too much hard work to make it an easy option for income generation. Most economically viable urban agriculture projects experiment at the same time with wider questions of urban space production, food sovereignty, biodiversity, and ecological literacy clearly confronting the current urban food system. Additionally, urban agriculture may also have other durable benefits. Recent research by Mikey Tomkins has shown how for many people in London community food gardening is about (re)claiming the public realm and public space and about realizing that urban space is made, and not (a) given (Tomkins 2013). Although community food gardening is not intended to feed cities, it may raise awareness and generate a desire for more resilient urban food systems run by professional urban farmers. The key question in a time with fundamental environmental and social problems, as known to all of us and described widely, seems now to be how to transition to a food system that is reliable, equitable, and attractive to both producers and consumers. If resilient cities that include food-productive landscapes are the wicked solution in strategic terms, how do we move toward them in practice? Rationally, it is possible to see how urban agriculture can close resource loops and provide jobs in cities and also contribute positively to urban life qualities. However, while some recent “evolutionary” solutions, such as mobile phones, have spread like wildfire, clearly meeting a new demand, urban agriculture, as part of a solution to the pending food crisis, has not. Its practice and discourse are developing at speed, but do not yet impact in a way that is comparable to, for example, the “virtual world.” While questions of yield and technique drive the applied and technical development of urban agriculture, we argue that an equal emphasis must continue to be placed on uncovering the desires that will drive people to support urban agriculture. The short history of urban agriculture as a conscious movement shows that this “uncovering” has been pursued by mainly two strands of protagonists: by the new urban farmers or gardeners themselves and by international researchers of multidisciplinary backgrounds looking at urban agriculture as a contribution to an optimistic future, rather than only as a response to either food poverty or “dilettante indulgence.” Not seldom, researchers, farmers, and activists were (and are) the same people.

SECOND NATURE AND URBAN AGRICULTURE: A CULTURAL FRAMEWORK Apart from environmental campaigners and urban farmers, for the last one hundred years, several architects, landscape architects, and urbanists have been and are at the forefront of initiatives and concepts advocating urban agriculture (Bohn 2014). Johann von Thünen first defined “sustainability” and devised, around 1830 in Germany, a concept for locating food production around cities so as to minimize the energy needed for bringing the produce to the consumer (Thünen 1826). English town planner Ebenezer Howard's vision of small garden cities embedded in agricultural land able to support them with food dates back to the 1900s (Howard 1902). In the 1920s,

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German landscape architect Leberecht Migge, drawing on garden city ideas developed in Germany, significantly advanced concepts to integrate urban food-growing spaces into housing areas (Haney 2010). Additionally, dating back to the 1930s, US architect Frank Lloyd Wright allowed private and communal plots for food growing in his design concepts for Broadacre City (Wright 1932). However, none of these and other plans for urban food growing did really take off. We suggest that the designers' visions could not maintain or secure a place in cities because none of them fully addressed popular perceptions and popular culture. If people in houses with gardens wanted to grow food, as Migge and Wright encouraged, they could. If people living in smallish cities with immediate access to rural production wanted to trade food directly, as von Thünen and Howard suggested, they could. But without the necessity, everyone is not a farmer. This, on the other hand, does not mean that people would not value being surrounded by a working productive urban landscape. In fact, the continuing urban sprawl evidences the popular wish of many citizens to live close to the countryside. Assuming that nowadays a desire for urban agriculture exists, the challenge is, as it was 80 or 100 years ago, to enthuse citizens sufficiently to create long-term urban spaces for long-term food production. However, the mass self-growing of food in the current cultural and economic climate, even if professionalized and commercially viable, is unlikely to become the primary source of urban food, so, not everyone does need to be a farmer. In the food-productive city of the future, people will be able to choose the level of their involvement. So, to put it simply, the food-productive city, town, or metropolitan region—that is, an entity including urban agriculture similar to those imagined by our selected designers and many others—requires not only two, but three things: it needs not only to boast urban landscapes that produce food (and digest food waste) and purpose-built interventions enabling the produce to reach the table, but also an urban population that likes the food produced and wants to buy it, eat it, and work with it. This has been known to involved planners, practitioners, and researchers for the last twenty or thirty years, and cities are now frequently talking about the need to readjust their current urban food systems. Recent developments in practical implementation have taken the urban agriculture subject beyond the case-study stage into policy consideration with thousands of projects worldwide to show the actual growing, experiment with it, and consume its fresh produce. Still, there is neither widespread implementation, acceptance, nor desire. There is awareness of the necessary elements, but could it be that an overarching theory or philosophy is missing that reached a wider range of citizens better than the existing theories, often driven by environmental or technical concerns? With this is mind, we started a few years ago to investigate the usefulness of the “Second Nature” concept to further the case for urban agriculture and food-productive landscapes (Viljoen and Bohn 2014). From the numerous meanings of the term Second Nature, we have chosen three major ones that seem especially relevant to discussions on the future of urban food production. First, Second Nature can describe “behavior,” embedded, normalized habits and customs—everyday activities—that take place regularly and without a thought (Hegel 1830). In this interpretation, Second Nature is seen as (part of) human nature. Secondly, Second Nature can also refer to “human-made,” especially to human-made space, that is, non-nature. Usually, this space is thought of as urban and surrounding us in a similar way to “first nature,” the natural. Second Nature becomes “antinature” with the urban being defined as “assemblies and encounters” (Lefebvre 1976).

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Third, in some theories, Second Nature proposes a “new wilderness,” the reintroduction into the urban of new landscapes that focus on ecologies and infrastructure (Geuze and Skjonsberg 2010). Second Nature is seen here as designed nature related to and relating ecologies, ecological systems, and infrastructure. Each of the three interpretations of Second Nature, from its specific angle, seems to be able to explain, reflect, and compliment strategies or desires behind the current and projected practices of urban agriculture and their qualitative effects on urban food production as well as on urban space production. This allows us to think and interlink subjects along these lines; the future of urban landscape can be linked to the future of urban food production. Food production happens on cultivated land. Cultivated land is man-made, constructed, be it urban or rural. The constructed has been linked to the second meaning of the concept of Second Nature, described above. Reintroducing foodproductive landscapes into urban sites may allow for new infrastructures and ecologies that can be considered urban sites’ Second Nature, the third meaning described. The production of food—sowing, tending, harvesting, but also processing, preparing— constitutes for many people a very embedded, regular activity, a custom. And even more, that food's consumption as exemplified in people's diverse but distinct food cultures and eating habits can be seen as the person's Second Nature, in the first meaning described above.

THE GROWING PRACTICE OF URBAN AGRICULTURE Irrespective of definitions, desires, and perceptions, over the last ten to twenty years, design research and academic explorations of urban agriculture and its spatial effects have significantly increased in the Global North. From an architectural and urban design point of view, concepts such as Agrarian Urbanism (Waldheim 2010) and Transition Towns (Hopkins 2008), as well as our CPUL City (Viljoen and Bohn 2004), are examples of thinking holistically about the origin, current practice and/or future of spatially integrated urban food production. The contemporary new forms of urban agriculture in the Global North have, in the main, originated in North America and spread to the UK and Europe since the early 2000s. The establishment of economically viable schemes for various types of urban agriculture during the past five to ten years is new on both sides of the Atlantic, complimenting older, more leisure-based and communal practices, such as European allotments or North American community gardens. While urban agriculture fundamentally aims for higher yields and more intrinsic connection into the urban food system than these existing practices, allotments, with their 100 years of experience in (subsistence) urban food growing for individuals, and community gardens, with their 40 years of experimenting with collective management and business models, are invaluable references for urban agriculture theory and practice. In Germany since about 2005, urban food growers have steadily gained ground, especially but not only in more socially oriented urban agriculture activities. The number of community gardens in Berlin has doubled during that time and is now about 120 (Rosol 2006; STADTacker.net n.d.). Leipzig, Munich, and Cologne have also become important food-growing hubs, and, since 2010, the “edible town” Andernach frequently creates headlines in the news (Andernach n.d.). Since 2012, the facilitation of “productive

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landscapes” has been laid down as a development aim in Berlin's open space planning strategy (SenStadt 2012). In 2015, the International Building Exhibition [IBA] in Heidelberg started to support Germany's to date most ambitious (live) urban agriculture project: the Landwirtschaftspark, a citizen-network-based process, aims to stabilize and develop existing commercial farming as well as new farming models within the city boundaries into an integral element of the city's food, spatial, and educational systems (IBA 2016). In the UK, the Capital Growth project gave the London community gardening scene an important boost in 2009 with the goal of creating 2,012 new projects in the three years leading to the 2012 Olympics. Several British cities, such as Brighton (Brighton & Hove Food Partnership 2012), Bristol (Bristol Food Network 2010), Leeds (Leeds Permaculture Network n.d.), and London (Sustain n.d.), have developed strong dedicated food-growing networks and programs since at least 1999, which is when Sustain, the country’s most important food and farming organization, was founded. The first farmers' market was set up in Bath in 1997 (BFM 2009), followed by the nationwide establishment of the National Association of Farmers' Markets in 1998 (Pavitt 2005), and policy interest is evident in several places, for example in London with the Cultivating the Capital report (London Assembly 2010) or in Brighton & Hove where the local council requires a statement about food growing for every new-built planning application (Devereux 2012). In North America, the United States have long pursued urban agriculture practice and research in close cooperation with Canada, where urban agriculture research and dissemination began in the late 1970s, mainly through the Canadian Cityfarmer newsletter (c. 1978) and later website (c. 1994) (City Farmer n.d.; Levenston n.d.). Since the 1970s, the US community gardening scene has steadily and significantly grown in its exploration of alternative space production on a spatially, socially, and politically larger scale. At least two important publications originate from here: Smit et al’s UNDP publication (1996), referred to above, and the American Planning Association’s Policy Guide on Food Planning (2007), referred to below. Since about five years, it is the commercially viable urban agriculture projects in American cities that have set the pace internationally. Using exemplary projects already underway in Milwaukee, London, and Berlin as a reference, allows us to illustrate a variety and richness of economic approaches typical of any movement in the transition between a pioneering phase and the establishment of norms of practice. Currently, the economic models for funding exemplary new urban agriculture projects in these cities are converging toward either social enterprise or straight commercial models, with food markets often providing crucial support for both. A number of common strands for setting up urban agriculture projects become evident when analyzing the business models of these social enterprises. All of them started with access to land. In the case of the organization Growing Power in the United States, this was an existing 0.8 hectare (2 acre) market garden with greenhouses in Milwaukee (Growing Power n.d.). For Growing Communities in the UK, it was a modest space within an existing London park and two small sites nearby which were not ideal, and needed much work to make them productive (Growing Communities n.d.). Agrarbörse Ost in Germany gained access to land because it acted as public agency for several charitable projects, which involved the construction or maintenance of public sites. Compared to conventional enterprises, each organization spent a prolonged time developing and refining its practice. Over more than ten years, Growing Power developed low-impact, intensive growing techniques and established vegetable markets in poor

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neighborhoods as well as a second center in Chicago, thereby extending practice beyond its base in Milwaukee. Site tenure and reliable leases with sympathetic landlords were critical for all enterprises to be able to invest in the necessary infrastructure. Agrarbörse was (and is) lobbying the Berlin municipality for minimum lease times of twelve to fifteen years for urban agricultural uses (TUB FGS&E 2011). Alongside land-use tenure, project initiators have to define and evolve business plans that take account of the realities of the market for fruit and vegetables. At a time when the cost of imported food and the salaries of market gardeners are extremely low, many urban agriculture projects will rely to some extent on grants and volunteering in order to build economically viable business models. It is likely that this situation will change in the future as food prices rise. Growing Communities is clear about their relationship to the status quo when stating that “this approach of getting on with creating a viable alternative to the current food system is in the spirit of Buckminster Fuller who said: ‘You can never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete’” (Growing Communities n.d. b). Unlike in most rural agricultural enterprises, urban agriculture often takes on a role in environmental education, as an economic opportunity on the one hand, and reflecting the desires for alternative urban lifestyles on the other. Agrarbörse is not only training gardeners, but attains a considerable amount of recognition and funding through their work with young people, especially through their project Treibhaus [greenhouse], a youth center for youngsters but not directly related to urban agriculture (Agrarbörse n.d.). Taking all these facts as signs of a public willingness to address urban food provision, the question now is how best to support the development of urban agriculture and productive urban landscapes so that they can become part of integrated urban food systems, consequently gaining spatial significance within the urban fabric. Four main challenges can be identified, and it is important to address all four of them in parallel. Above all, productive urban landscapes are needed in order to coherently embed urban agriculture spatially into urban areas and local contexts, both temporarily and permanently. Research- and planning-led urban design and architectural concepts are thereby critical. Second, appropriate tool kits, or action plans are still needed despite the great accumulated knowledge about urban agriculture. Clear applicable guidance and best practice dissemination are essential to enable and augment the capacity of urban food growers, their projects, and their sites. Furthermore, food policy needs to be devised for individual cities, towns, and regions. Recognized regulations or agreements with public decision makers (e.g., planning, trading, land rights) and other food-related entities (e.g., rural, markets, accreditation bodies) are required to support and safeguard urban agriculture practice and sites. And fourth, urban food systems need to be able to develop and diversify. To become widespread and maximize its associated social, public health, and environmental benefits, urban agriculture must be integrated into the mainstream food production, procurement, and recycling systems.

URBAN AGRICULTURE AND URBAN FOOD SYSTEMS Urban agriculture is always part of something bigger, be it space, system, or human behavior. As a space-use type, it may be part of more strategic concepts, such as CPUL City (which we explain below) or other design and development concepts adopted by a

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municipality. As a food-growing activity of individuals or groups, it is part of a network of processes aiming to sustain urban life, either directly by the produce grown or by the commercial exchanges it generates. However, supportive policy frameworks, especially food policies, generally do not target urban agriculture alone, but wider and often very complex networks of food provision supplying city dwellers, called urban food systems. In the 1990s, a number of North American researchers, including Kenneth A. Dahlberg, Mustafa Koc, Kameshwari Pothukuchi, and Jerome Kaufman, laid the foundations for an understanding of urban food systems that is still used today. Dahlberg's work, for example, aimed at developing food-related policy as a basis to devise specific strategies for food planning in particular urban contexts (Dahlberg et al. 1997) and emphasized the need for understanding food systems as local systems (Dahlberg and Koc 1999). Around the same time, Pothukuchi and Kaufman (1999) began advocating for food systems to be placed on the urban agenda in order to fully address the quality of life in urban localities. Both researchers later lead-authored the foundational 2007 Policy Guide on Food Planning by the American Planning Authority, which crosses the divide between food systems planning and urban spatial design (APA 2007). Urban food systems can helpfully be broken down into smaller components such as household or neighborhood food systems (Dahlberg 2002), which makes it easier to tackle more local challenges, provided that the bigger picture stays in focus. Urban agriculture and productive urban landscapes are, or should be, part of both scales of urban food systems. While the former thereby focuses on the actual food-growing activities, productive landscapes describe frameworks to enable spatially coherent thinking about urban food. At this spatial level, the necessary planner-designer-practitioner dialogue has just begun. In Europe, the Sustainable Food Planning Group within the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP), set up in the city of Almere in the Netherlands in 2008, is at the moment the most active networking and research platform for such dialogues. Since its foundation in 2008, the group has held annual international conferences featuring work on many aspects of the urban food systems and urban agriculture discourse (AESOP n.d.). The publication Sustainable Food Planning: Evolving Theory and Practice (Viljoen and Wiskerke 2012) is a milestone from the group, bringing together selected papers from the 2nd AESOP Sustainable Food Group Conference in Brighton in 2010, demonstrating an overriding aim to get people from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to talk to each other. This brings us back to the key question of why urban agriculture still has not been taken up more fully despite all the popular activity, supportive research, and good will surrounding it. Is it popular culture that restricts (urban) agriculture? Or is urban agriculture just not important enough as a subject? Or the opposite: Is it too important and difficult?

DESIGNING FOR URBAN AGRICULTURE In 2007, just one year prior to the first AESOP conference on sustainable food planning in Almere, the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) in Maastricht held the world's first design-led urban agriculture exhibition, De Eedbare Stad [The Edible City] (NAI 2007). This brought together an international group of leading architects, artists, and designers to test urban food growing within their work. Even though both events happened in the

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Netherlands, their agendas and participants only overlapped at the margins, evidencing the challenge of improving communication between the various practitioners in this subject area. However, while historic models of urban agriculture evolved out of necessity, in the contemporary city, we now have a window of opportunity to plan coherent strategies for their introduction and to design their components and processes. In our 2005 CPUL book, we argued for a mix of open urban space uses around urban agriculture, as well as a mix of foods from various origins for the urban consumer (Viljoen 2005). There, we presented estimates for potential self-sufficiency in fruit and vegetables of up to about 30 percent. Subsequently, similar figures have been calculated by other planners and researchers (Sorkin 2012; Tomkins 2009). While produce quantities are the key challenge when designing for urban food production, we contend that urban agriculture in its spatial sense, as fields, growing surfaces, productive spaces, can contribute positively to cities in a number of different ways. Looking at issues of access as an example, food-productive space can range from publicly accessible, “edible landscapes,” such as those being integrated into cities in the Netherlands by the Social Design Lab for Urban Agriculture (Urbaniahoeve n.d.), to the formative, often larger and private-enterprise organoponicos found in Cuba (Viljoen and Howe 2005). Both types of production contribute to the public realm: the former ones directly, in such a way that participation and harvesting by all is encouraged, and the latter ones by providing a visually shared landscape, much as rural farming landscapes are enjoyed by visitors to the countryside. But more than accommodating visual access by means of a distant “gaze,” commercially viable urban agriculture often gifts a new type of urban place to the city, such as the edges of productive fields that can be used for relaxation or outdoor work, or by providing spaces and venues for celebrations, weddings, and parties. Projects such as New York’s much publicized Brooklyn Grange Rooftop Farm (Brooklyn Grange 2012) do this explicitly, thereby not only engaging in new types of urban place making, but also in new forms of enterprise, generating income to supplement that from crops. Since the wave of literature on urban agriculture from around the turn of the century, much has been discussed and written about the various benefits of (re)accommodating food growing into urban design. As urban agriculture in all its different forms appears and grows within cities, the next critical step is to write planning documents and legislation. In doing so, as cities like New York, Berlin, or London have, a rich public discourse is developing, articulating urban agriculture’s many benefits, from environmental motivation to ornament to behavior change, and challenging the normative view of what constitutes appropriate urban space use. Equally, the interest in productive urban landscapes has spread, and several urban planning reports now explicitly recommend their introduction or support in cities such as Detroit with the Detroit Future City report (Deadline Detroit 2013), Berlin with the aforementioned Strategie Stadtlandschaft (SenStadt 2012) and Leeds through the TRUG/Urbal project (Urbal n.d.). Implicitly, we find productive urban landscapes being applied more widely, such as in the ten European cities, including Bristol, Athens, Göteborg, and Lyon, that participated between 2012 and 2015 in the EU-funded research project URBACT Sustainable Food in Urban Communities (Jégou and Carey 2015). In addition to drafting planning documents and legislation, the other critical step, where architects, planners, and designers have a lot to do, is to knowingly bring forth the design and implementation of processes, landscapes, buildings, and infrastructure that

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new urban farmers and the wider urban population will require. Our own work aims to contribute to these challenges by proposing design strategies and prototypes that can make urban space more food-productive as well as more desirable for its users. We start from our experience of dense European/Western urban areas and attempt to enrich the qualities of urban life while, at the same time, reducing the negative environmental impact of current urban food systems. We have developed the CPUL City concept to address this. CPUL City describes an urban future based on the planned and designed introduction of what we call “Continuous Productive Urban Landscape”—landscapes defined by urban agriculture—into existing and emerging cities (Viljoen 2005). CPUL City has fundamental physical and social implications. It follows a systematic approach and proposes that urban agriculture can contribute to more sustainable and resilient food systems while also adding beneficially to the spatial quality of the urban realm. It is an environmental design strategy and provides a strategic framework for the theoretical and practical exploration of ways to implement such landscapes within contemporary urban design (Bohn and Viljoen 2010a). The CPUL City concept recognizes that each city and each site will present a unique set of conditions and competing pressures informing the final shape and extent of its productive landscapes. It envisages a “mixed economy” of growers practicing urban agriculture: projects for the community and by the community, small-scale and large-scale, commercial and communal, low technology and (appropriate) high technology. Broadly speaking, commercial-scale production will be necessary if urban agriculture is to have a quantifiable impact on food production, while personalized production is very significant from a social- and behavior-change perspective. As said before, urban agriculture will not meet all of a city's food needs, and any in-depth review of urban food systems must consider relationships between a city, its citizens, its local region, and beyond. What we have described as a “wicked solution” to this complex set of relationships will need to act on several fronts, engaging policy makers, food and farming practitioners, spatial designers, and the public. With this in mind, the CPUL City design concept comprises a toolkit of CPUL City Actions to provide a comprehensive and multiscale strategic framework of actions for the practical and planned implementation of productive urban landscapes and urban agriculture (Bohn and Viljoen 2010b). If these actions can be harnessed to produce future infrastructure, then we may soon see urban agriculture take its place within cities as an essential and desired element of urban infrastructure, ultimately providing more experience with less consumption.

CONCLUSION: FROM THE PRESENT TO THE FUTURE OF URBAN AGRICULTURE Urban agriculture, in comparison to other popular trends, such as the above-mentioned adoption of mobile phones, is different, being both new (e.g., in terms of process and ambition), but also familiar with respect to memories of farming and landscape. It reintroduces to cities a positive desire for the rural that, even if it did not ever exist in their realities, probably occupies a place in residents’ imagined past. Developments during the past few years have demonstrated that culturally and economically vibrant cities also have a great popular desire and ability to support ambitious urban agriculture proposals. The array of existing and emerging urban agriculture projects already found across the world shows that there is no shortage of such desires as evidenced by the spectrum of

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fascination, experimentation, and innovation testing solutions for a contemporary mode of urban food production. Two of the most direct and perhaps ideologically neutral areas for exploring desires in this context are food culture and public open space. The media attention given to food culture is one of those areas where shifts in public perception can clearly be witnessed, and, although it can be argued that this still veers more toward “privileged niche markets” than raising consciousness about sustainable urban food systems, there is nonetheless sufficient focus on the origins and qualities of food to enable the urban agriculture movement to creatively and critically capitalize on this growing public awareness. Especially within the design and planning professions, a much discussed consequence of urban agriculture is its impact on public open space, as well as on popular desires for and perceptions of green space around and on buildings in general. The potential contribution of urban agriculture to public and open space as part of a new productive urban landscape is one of the aspects of urban agriculture that has been explored since the late 1990s. However, the spaces envisaged when designing a food-productive city, such as a CPUL City, do not only contain urban agriculture, but strive in their everyday use to be health enabling, equitable, economically stable, and convivial. In the long term, their success will depend on the ability of the urban food system to adapt to popular culture. At the same time, many contemporary food-focused spaces show how they shape popular culture. The “Second Nature” concept might further the development of a societal framework allowing us to understand attitudes to the urban food system more holistically. People’s everyday (food-related) behavior, new food-productive spaces within the built fabric, and a new type of multifunctional urban landscape can then emerge as equally important components of a resilient urban future. In this future, food spaces (to be) created are green and open, and they flow out and into the countryside, and back from there, as do wildlife, air, and, above all, people.

REFERENCES AESOP Association of European Schools of Planning. no date. “Sustainable Food Planning Group.” Accessed October 27, 2016. http://www.aesop-planning.eu/blogs/en_GB/ sustainable-food-planning. Agrarbörse Deutschland Ost e.V. no date. “Agrarbörse Deutschland Ost e.V.” Accessed October 27, 2016. http://www.agrar-boerse-ev.de/agrarboerse.php. Andernach Stadtverwaltung. no date. “Essbare Stadt.” Accessed October 27, 2016. http://www. andernach.de/de/leben_in_andernach/essbare_stadt.html. APA American Planning Association. 2007. “Policy Guide on Community and Regional Food Planning.” Accessed October 27, 2016. https://www.planning.org/policy/guides/adopted/ food.htm. BFM Bath Farmers’ Market. 2009. “Bath Farmers’ Market.” Accessed October 27, 2016. http:// www.bathfarmersmarket.co.uk. Bohn, Katrin, and André Viljoen. 2010a. “Continuous Productive Urban Landscape (CPUL): Designing essential infrastructure.” Landscape Architecture China 9 (1): 24–30. Bohn, Katrin, and André Viljoen. 2010b. “The CPUL City Toolkit: Planning productive urban landscapes for European cities.” In Sustainable Food Planning: Evolving Theory and Practice,

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edited by André Viljoen and Wiskerke Jan, 479–94. Wageningen: Wageningen Academic Press. Bohn, Katrin, and André Viljoen. 2014. “Urban Agriculture on the map: Growth and challenges since 2005.” In Second Nature Urban Agriculture: Designing Productive Cities, edited by André Viljoen and Katrin Bohn, 6–11. London and New York: Routledge. Braungart, Michael, and William McDonough. 2002. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. New York: North Point Press. Brighton & Hove Food Partnership. 2012. “Brighton & Hove Food Partnership.” Accessed October 27, 2016. http://www.bhfood.org.uk/about-us. Bristol Food Network. 2010. “Bristol local food update.” Accessed October 27, 2016. http:// www.bristolfoodnetwork.org/about. Brooklyn Grange. 2012. “Brooklyn Grange Rooftop Farms.” Accessed October 27, 2016. http://www.brooklyngrangefarm.com. City Farmer. no date. “Urban Agriculture Notes.“ Accessed October 27, 2016. http://www. cityfarmer.org. Dahlberg, Kenneth. 2002. “What are Local Food Systems?” Accessed October 27, 2016. http:// homepages.wmich.edu/~dahlberg/F14.pdf. In Strategies, Policy Approaches, and Resources for Local Food System Planning and Organizing: A Resource Guide, edited by K. Clancy, R. L. Wilson and J. O’Donnell, http://homepages.wmich.edu/~dahlberg/Resource-Guide.html. Dahlberg, Kenneth, and Mustafa Koc. 1999. “The restructuring of food systems: Trends, research, and policy issues.” In Agriculture and Human Values 16(2): 109–16. Dahlberg, Kenneth, K. Clancy, R. Wilson and J. O’Donnell 1997. “Strategies, Policy approaches, and Resources for local food system planning and organizing: A Resource Guide.” Accessed October 27, 2016. http://homepages.wmich.edu/~dahlberg/ResourceGuide.html. Deadline Detroit. 2013. “The Entire Detroit Works Project Long-Term Framework Plan.” Accessed October 27, 2016. http://www.deadlinedetroit.com/articles/3305/here_is_the_ entire_detroit_works_project_long-term_framework_plan#.WLH-YDildVE. Devereux, Claire. 2012. “Urban Food Policies.” Keynote speech presented at the 4th AESOP Sustainable Food Planning Conference, Berlin: November 1–3. Geuze, Adrian, and Matthew Skjonsberg. 2010. “Second Nature: New Territories for the Exiled.” In Landscape Infrastructure, edited by G. Aquino. New York: Birkhäuser. Gorgolewski, Mark, June Komisar, and Joe Nasr. 2016. “Resilient City = Carrot City: Urban Agriculture Theories and Design.” In Integrated Urban Agriculture: Precedents, Practices, Prospects, edited by Robert France, 255– . Faringdon: Green Frigate Books. Growing Communities. no date a. “About us.” Accessed October 27, 2016. http://www. growingcommunities.org/about-us. Growing Communities. no date b. “The Start-up Programme.” Accessed October 27, 2016. http://www.growingcommunities.org/start-ups. Growing Power, Inc. no date. “Our history.” Accessed October 27, 2016. http://www. growingpower.org/about/history. Haney, David. 2010. When Modern Was Green: Life and Work of Landscape Architect Leberecht Migge. London and New York: Routledge. Hegel, Georg. [1830] 2013. “Philosophy of Subjective Spirit.” In Habit, Sittlichkeit and Second Nature, by S. Lumsden. In Special Issue of Critical Horizons on “Hegel's Subjective Spirit 2013”, referring to: Petry, M. J. ed. and trans. 1978. Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. Boston: D. Reidel.

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Hopkins, Robert. 2008. The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience. Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing. Howard, Ebenezer. 1902. Garden Cities of To-Morrow. 2nd edition. London: S. Sonnenschein & Co. IBA Internationale Bauausstellung Heidelberg. 2016. “#019 Landwirtschaftspark Heidelberg.” Accessed October 27, 2016. http://www.iba.heidelberg.de/deutsch/projekte/ projektuebersicht/019-landwirtschaftspark-heidelberg.html. Jégou, Francois, and Jack Carey. 2015. “Creating space for sustainable food systems in urban communities: Practical approaches and examples for cities.” Accessed October 27, 2016. http://urbact.eu/sustainable-food-handbook. Leeds Permaculture Network. no date. “Leeds Permaculture Network.” Accessed October 27, 2016. http://www.leedspermaculturenetwork.org. Lefebvre, Henry. 1976. The Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Relations of Production. London: Allison and Busby Ltd. Levenston, Michael. no date. “City Farmer News: New stories from ‘Urban Agriculture Notes’.” Accessed October 27, 2016. http://www.cityfarmer.info/about. The London Assembly. 2010. Cultivating the Capital: Food Growing and the Planning System in London. London: The London Assembly. Mougeot, Luc. 2001. “Urban agriculture: Definitions, Presence, Potentials and Risks.” In Growing Cities, Growing Food: Urban Agriculture on the Policy Agenda: A Reader on Urban Agriculture, edited by Bakker, N. , et al. 1–42. Feldafing GER: German Foundation for International Development. NAI Netherlands Architecture Institute. 2007. “The Edible City.” Accessed October 27, 2016. http://en.nai.nl/museum/exhibitions/exhibition_archive/2007/item/_pid/kolom2-1/_rp_ kolom2-1_elementId/1_35402. Pavitt, James. 2005. “National Association of Farmers’ Markets.” Accessed October 27, 2016. http://www.northernruralnetwork.co.uk/uploads/articles/04janjamespavitt.pdf. Pothukuchi, Kamishwari, and Jerome Kaufman. 1999. “Placing the food system on the urban agenda: The role of municipal institutions in food systems planning.” In Agriculture and Human Values 16 (2): 213–24. Rosol, Marit. 2006. Gemeinschaftsgärten in Berlin: Eine qualitative Untersuchung zu Potenzialen und Risiken bürgerschaftlichen Engagements im Grünflächenbereich vor dem Hintergrund des Wandels von Staat und Planung. Berlin: Mensch & Buch Verlag. SenStadt Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung und Umwelt Berlin. 2012. “Strategie Stadtlandschaft Berlin: natürlich—urban—produktiv.” Accessed October 27, 2016. http:// www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/umwelt/landschaftsplanung/strategie_stadtlandschaft/ download/Strategie-Stadtlandschaft-Berlin.pdf. Smit, Jac. 1996. “Cities that Feed Themselves.” In Urban Agriculture, Food, Jobs and Sustainable Cities, edited by J. Smit, A. Ratta and J. Nasr second edition 2001, 1–29. New York: United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Publication. Sorkin, Michael. 2012. “New York City (Steady) State.” Scarcity: Architecture in an Age of Depleting Resources, Architectural Design Special Issue 82 (4): 102–09. STADTacker.net. no date. “Felder und Gärten: Bundesland: Berlin.” Accessed October 27, 2016. http://www.stadtacker.net/Lists/Projekte/Praxisprojekte.aspx?FilterField1=Bundeslan d&FilterValue1=Berlin. Sustain. no date. “London Food Link.” Accessed October 27, 2016. http://www.sustainweb.org/ londonfoodlink.

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Thünen, Johann von. 1826. Der isoli[e]rte Staat in Beziehung auf Landwirtschaft und Nationalökonomie, oder Untersuchungen über den Einfluß, den die Getreidepreise, der Reichthum des Bodens und die Abgaben auf den Ackerbau ausüben. Hamburg: Perthes. Tomkins, Mikey. 2009. “The Elephant and the Castle: Towards a London Edible Landscape.” The Urban Agriculture Magazine 22: 37–38. TUB AM Technische Universität Berlin, Architekturmuseum. 2011. “Die Produktive Stadt / Carrot City.” Accessed October 27, 2016. http://architekturmuseum.ub.tu-berlin.de/index. php?set=1&p=524. TUB FGS&E Technische Universität Berlin, Fachgebiet Stadt & Ernährung. 2011. Stadtbaue/ r/n. Proceedings of the symposium, unpublished. Urbal. no date. “TRUG: Trans-disciplinary research urbal group.” Accessed October 27, 2016. http://www.urbal.tv. Urbaniahoeve. no date. “Urbaniahoeve Social Design Lab for Urban Agriculture.” Accessed October 27, 2016. http://www.urbaniahoeve.nl/project-locations/?lang=en. Viljoen, André, and Katrin Bohn. eds. 2014. Second Nature Urban Agriculture: Designing productive cities. London and New York: Routledge. Viljoen, André. ed. 2005. Continuous Productive Urban Landscape: Designing Urban Agriculture for Sustainable Cities. Oxford: The Architectural Press. Viljoen, André, and Joe Howe. 2005. “Cuba: Laboratory for Urban Agriculture.” In Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes: Designing urban agriculture for sustainable cities, edited by André Viljoen, 146–91. Oxford: Architectural Press Viljoen, André, and Jan Wiskerke, eds. 2012. Sustainable Food Planning: evolving theory and practice. Wageningen: Wageningen Academic Publishers. Viljoen, André, Katrin Bohn, and Jorge Pena Diaz. 2004. London Thames Gateway: Proposals for implementing CPULs in London Riverside and the Lower Lea Valley. Brighton: University of Brighton publication Waldheim, Charles. 2010. “Notes Toward a History of Agrarian Urbanism.” In On Farming: Bracket 1, edited by M. White and M. Przybylski, 18–24. Barcelona: Actar. Wright, Frank. 1932. The Disappearing City. New York: W. F. Payson.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Procrustean Boxes: Architecture and Slaughter PAULETTE SINGLEY

Architecture acts as a container that either deforms or conforms to its contents or program, those many activities a building facilitates and encloses. As enclosing boxes, buildings maintain the potential to register a comfortable, unnatural, or even destructive alignment with their intended programs by providing a range of fits from too loose to too tight. In the case where the distortion and dismembering of animal bodies performs as more than metaphor, the enclosing cells of architecture operate as boxes with different levels of transparency, opacity, and fit that index a culture’s proximity to slaughter. The architecture of the slaughterhouse, to follow this logic, adopts the strategy of Procrustus’s infamous disciplinary apparatus, a punishing bed onto which guests either were stretched or dismembered to fit. While supermarkets, kitchens, restaurants, urban farms, farmer’s markets, and other sites of food production are logical places to consider architecture’s agency in relation to gastronomy, when considered from the lens of postfordist landscapes the slaughterhouse, indeed, stands as the essential topos for cracking open a series of procrustean boxes—red, black, and transparent—linking ancient ritual with popular culture along the lines of harvesting animals in urban centers. These boxes sequentially place animals in an architecture that leads from ancient Greek temples, to the progressive distantiation of slaughter from sites of meat consumption, to recent proposals to collapse these distances in transparent kill rooms. From the red box of architectural origins, through the black box of nineteenth-century confinement, to the transparent box of recent critiques of industrialized food production, the slaughterhouse impacts the built domain through its symbolic language of ornamentation, its role in constructing public space, and the transformative potential of reconsidering the site of animal harvesting in urban centers. Working as a chef in the early nineteenth century, as Annette Condello reminds us, Antonin Carême developed a style of cooking called grande cuisine that “turned creams and jellies into classical temples and country house follies”(Condello 2008, 199). While Carême may have enunciated the most striking exercise in merging architecture and gastronomy in L'Art de la Cuisine Française (1833–34), scholarship on the mutually instructive research between architecture and the culinary arts is a surprisingly recent occurrence given the logics binding these two fields of inquiry. Filippo Marinetti tempted architects’ palates with The Futurist Cookbook of 1932. In 1986 Marco Frascari established an important benchmark with Semiotica ab Edendo, Taste in Architecture, concluding that taste has important consequences for the “reciprocal acts of constructing and construing

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architecture” (Frascari 1986, 3). The anthology Eating Architecture (Horwitz and Singley 2004) developed a spatial food axis leading from sites of harvest, to spaces of preparation and cooking, to presentation, to the mouth and concepts of taste. Other important publications and research that have followed on this initial book include Food (Knechtel 2008), Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (CockrallKing 2012), Food for the City: A Future for the Metropolis (NAi 2012), Food City (Lim 2014), and Food and Architecture: At The Table (Bloomsbury 2016).

RED BOX A rare paradigmatic confluence between the built environment and architectural theory, between Bernard Tschumi’s design for a public park in Paris and Georges Bataille’s base materialism, emanates from the site of the city’s former national wholesale meat market and slaughterhouses at La Villette. The topographic coincidence between Bataille’s essay “Abattoir,” published in a 1929 issue of the journal Documents, and Tschumi’s 1982–83 winning of an international competition (with over 470 entries including such luminaries as Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, and Jean Nouvel) to transform La Villette into a public park, identifies the slaughterhouse as an essential site for assessing architecture in relation to the food chain. Insofar as ancient temples served both the purpose of prayer and of animal sacrifice, Bataille’s enunciation of the affinity between slaughterhouses and sacred spaces obliquely identifies architecture’s very origins as deriving from food production and consumption. Tschumi’s design of an urban park for the twenty-first century resulted in his gridding La Villette with red pavilions, marking the site’s sanguine history, which purport to disrupt the normative performance of architecture’s authoritative status as a mechanism of spatial control. “The slaughterhouse is linked to religion,” as Bataille writes, “in so far as the temples of bygone eras (not to mention those of the Hindus in our own day) served two purposes: they were used both for prayer and for killing.”(Bataille 1986, 72–73) This trajectory from temple ritual to the slaughterhouse locates the presence of alimentary tropes among the originary language of classical architecture. The classical temple functioned as a red box, a structure that displays the aggregate bits and pieces of ritual sacrifice in its ornamental program as recombinant, dismembered animal parts. The affinity between animal slaughter, altars, and ancient Greek temples instantiates ritual slaughter and feasting in the city, wherein sacrificial exuviate such as bird's beaks, ox skulls, teeth, bones, nets, ropes, claws, and more wend their way into all architecture that deploys a classical language. Assemblages of comestibles and sacred objects resulting from sacrificial practices, ancient architects draped Greek temples with culinary references. Hersey’s research reifies architectural origins as a culinary enterprise colored by sacrifice. Bucrania are bovine skulls often located on Doric entablatures that alternate with paterae, shallow libation dishes with an omphalos (bellybutton) in the center. Doric triglyphs represent broken femur bones and the guttae below them depict, as Georges Hersey explains, the “sacred fluids that were carefully drained into the altar” (Hersey 1988, 31). The coils of Ionic capitals reference curled hair offered in sacrifices. A column base suggests a foot and capital means head. The circular molding known as a torus refers to binding rope. Astragal moldings invoke the idea of knucklebones or vertebrae while the egg and claw motif serves up offerings to the gods. Dentils are “strings of teeth used to ornament horses” and, finally, the triangular space inside the pediment known as a tympanum originated as “a structure of bones covered with animal skins and used as a drum” (Hersey 1988, 36 and 38).

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The Iecur Placentinum, or Piacenza liver, is a bronze artifact dating back to the second century BCE, used for a form of divination known as haruspicy (hepatoscopy), that depicts a life-sized sheep liver. A potential model of the cosmos inscribed with the names and regions of Etruscan deities, the space in front of Etruscan temples corresponded to the Piacenza liver’s topography. The siting of sacred precincts in ancient Rome (as well as the ancient near east) often relied on the inspection of a sacrificial sheep liver (Warden 2016, 168). As Vitruvius Pollio, ancient Roman architectural theorist, writes, when the Romans built a town or military post they would offer a sacrifice, after which they always carefully inspected the livers of those animals fed on that spot whereon the city was to be built, or whereon a stative encampment was intended. If the livers were diseased and livid, they tried others, in order to ascertain whether accident or disease was the cause of the imperfection; but if the greater part of the experiments proved, by the sound and healthy appearance of the livers, that the water and food of the spot were wholesome, they selected it for the garrison. If the reverse, they inferred, as in the case of cattle, so in that of the human body, the water and food of such a place would become pestiferous; and they therefore abandoned it, in search of another, valuing health above all other considerations. (Vitruvius) The ancient Roman and Etruscan practice of examining entrails in order to determine the healthy siting of a city makes sense when one considers that what the animal eats may directly index a location’s toxicity. The projections and lineaments on the Piacenza liver fascinate for their resemblance to urban form with topography, radial streets, and gridded precincts. Indeed, Rome’s mythical founder, Romulus, used a bronze plow pulled by a white ox and cow to delineate the sulcus primigenius, the city’s initial furrow drawn in a sacred ritual that demarcated its external boundary. The ancient Greek Thysia (θυσία), meaning sacrifice, privileged the slaughter and consumption of meat in the temenos (Ekroth 2007, 271). Sacrifice was a form of communion, a group feast wherein meat was parceled out among the citizenry while smoke produced through the burned offering of bones wrapped in fat ascended to the heavens as an offering to the gods. An important example of ancient Roman communal feasting is Saturnalia, a time lasting from 17 to 23 of December during which the social order was inverted, a public banquet called the convivium publicum was held, and, as Seneca lamented, the “whole mob has let itself go in pleasures”(Seneca). Pagan expression of public sacrifice and communal feasting maintained its presence in modern cities through systems of carnival, the subversive potential of which Mikhail Bakhtin sought to explicate through his concept of carnivalesque. Animals are central to this temporary world of festival, anarchy, and inversion: In certain French cities a custom was preserved almost to our time to lead a fatted ox through the streets during carnival season. This was the time when the slaughter of cattle and the eating of meat were still permitted (as well as weddings and sexual intercourse, forbidden during Lent). The ox was led in solemn procession accompanied by the playing of violas, hence its name boeuf violles. Its head was decorated with multicolored ribbons. Unfortunately, we do not know in what the game of boeui violles consisted, but most likely it implied some cuffing. The ox was to be slaughtered, it was to be a carnivalesque victim. It was a king, a procreator, symbolizing the city's fertility; at the same time, it was the sacrificial meat, to be chopped up for sausages and pates. (Bakhtin 1984, 202)

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The parade of the fatted ox lends its name to Shrove Tuesday, while the term carnival may derive from the Latin carne and vale, meaning farewell to meat and leading to practices of hedonistic festivity before abstinence. From serving up communal meals in front of ancient temples to the eventual removal of slaughterhouses from urban centers, the disappearance of the fatted ox from public festival ushered in the literal bidding of farewell to slaughterhouses in cities. In 1979, as part of President François Mitterrand’s Grands Projets—eight monumental building projects that included the Louvre Pyramid, Musee d'Orsay, Arab World Institute, Opéra Bastille, Grande Arche de La Défense, Ministry of Finance, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France—the French Government began to organize a competition to design a national park, music center, and museum of science and technology at the site of La Villette. Tschumi’s red cubes designed for this project contain vestiges of sanctified ritual slaughter in their pigmentation and proffer a carnivalesque subversion of space through the unstable programming of “apparently incompatible activities,” such as a the proposal for a running track passing through a piano bar inside a tropical greenhouse (Tschumi 1987, 4). Having distinguished himself as an influential architectural theorist prior to winning the La Villette competition, Tschumi’s naming of the boxes as folies, meaning madness in French, references both an existing pavilion on the site that generated these forms and Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1964). As Tschumi writes: At its origin in seventeenth-century France, “folie” or folly had a meaning different from the one now assigned to it at La Villette; it indicated an extravagant house of entertainment. In the 21st Century Urban Park, it loses such aristocratic connotations to gain a public image, while enlarging on contemporary psychoanalytic discoveries (in French [sic], la folie means “madness,” “insanity”). The new meaning of folie transforms its original sense by replacing the extravagant display of eclectic styles with the regulated juxtaposition of unprecedented programs. (Tschumi 1987, 6) In order to generate a series of disjunctive spaces, Tschumi developed three layers of points, lines, and planes, with each system articulating different programmatic uses and formal responses, the superimposition of which eroded comprehensive totality with chance encounters of undecidablity. The intersections of an invisible 120 × 120 meter grid at 35 points determined the location of 10 × 10 × 10 meter red cubes, a series of deflected grids that have been transformed through processes of repetition, distortion, fragmentation, and superimposition. Tschumi describes the folies as initiating from an “early principle of combination and transformation of architectural elements from the point grid of folies, developed from an existing figurative element (an 1865 pavillion [sic] on the site) to an abstract cube” (Tschumi 1987, 2). Lines appear as straight allees ( Allée du Belvédère and the Allée du Zénith), intersecting overhead walkways of the Gallerie de la Villette and the Galleri de l’Ourcq, and curvilinear paths such as the Allée du Cercle. And finally, for the layer of planes plays off of the existing structures of the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie (science museum) and the Grande halle de la Villette (Grande Halle aux Boeufs), expansive grass lawns, and open spaces. Jacques Derrida’s influence on Tschumi appears in the twisting of this generative pavilion into distorted and dismembered cubes, La Villette’s metaphorical bones, which later would be referred to as deconstructivist architecture. Tschumi executes architecture’s humanist physiognomy, tearing apart the analogy to a well-built male body that Vitruvius articulated in his Ten Books on Architecture. He reconstitutes its fragmented corpse into a

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project that produces unstable and fluctuating meaning, what he terms la case vide or the empty box. The accumulation and reconstitution of bones onto ancient temples places Tschumi’s folies closer to the former slaughterhouses at La Villette, indeed, than do their saturated red cladding. Similarly, some two hundred years earlier, Claude Nicolas Ledoux designed a series of barrieres (tollbooths), pavilions surrounding Paris whose forms expressed unseemly reconstitutions of architecture’s classical language and whose Barriere la Villette is but a short walk from Tschumi’s park. Tschumi’s design for La Villette evokes Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy’s critique of the barrieres. As Anthony Vidler summarizes, Quatremère understood Ledoux “literally to be dismembering the organic, classical body of architecture—itself founded on the proportions of the human form—and having dispensed with all anthropomorphic relations, to be playing a fantastic game of ‘heads, bodies, and legs’ to give birth to some proto-Frankensteinian monster” (Vidler 2006, 251). As Vidler concludes, Ledoux dismembered “classicism with the delight of a torturer” (Vidler 2006, 251). At La Villette, Tschumi articulates earlier descriptions of torturing space: Such discomforting spatial devices can take any form: the white anechoic chambers of sensory deprivation, the formless spaces leading to psychological destructuring. Steep and dangerous staircases, those corridors consciously made too narrow for crowds, introduce a radical shift from architecture as an object of contemplation to architecture as a perverse instrument of use. (Tschumi, 1994, 124) In order to orchestrate architecture’s role as a “perverse instrument of use” he superimposed a system of points, lines, and surfaces upon each other, the independence of which disrupts any sense of a homogenized totality (Tschumi 1994, 124). While Derrida remains a central influence on Tschumi’s work at La Villette, Bataille’s presence resides in the slaughterhouses that once occupied this site, illustrated by Eli Lotar’s graphic photographs of severed steer parts and kill floors that accompany the “Abbatoir” essay. In another essay from his Critical Dictionary titled “Architecture,” Bataille considers escaping from the straitjacket of control that monumental productions impose upon society (Bataille 1995, 35). In response to Bataille’s larger theoretical apparatus, Denis Hollier approaches La Villette as a labyrinth: Whereas the killing of the Minotaur is usually presented as a humanizing exploit by means of which a hero frees the city from whatever is archaic and monstrous, bringing society out of the labyrinthine age, for Bataille the sacrifice functions in an opposite manner: striking a blow at the organic imago, it opens the labyrinth up again. (Hollier 1989, xii) As Daedalus, architect and inventor, Tschumi builds a conceptual labyrinth to house a series of Minotaurs in the guise of red boxes—hybrid entities that return animal, ritual, and sacrifice back to the site.

BLACK BOX Tschumi argues “there is no architecture without violence” (Tschumi 1994, 121). Such theoretical excess, however, necessarily produces complementary deficiency insofar as the hyperbole of over-determined language, in confrontation with the compromises of built form, promises a trajectory architecture inevitably fails to meet. Perhaps the greatest attack on architecture at La Villette is revealing its inherent representational lack as

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radical theory devolves into commercial rhetoric. In an essay titled “Persistent Breakage,” Robin Evans identifies the fundamental irony of La Villette being that Tschumi’s work on the “cutting edge” of French critical thinking “is far less intensely transgressive than Haussmann’s planned butchery which it replaces” (Evans 1995, 87). Evans is referring to Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s project of carving wide and straight boulevards through Parisian quartiers as a way of rationalizing the city. Counted among the many public projects he completed as Prefect of the Seine under the aegis of Emperor Napoleon III—alongside the building of houses for prostitution, hospitals, and sewers—in 1858 Haussmann launched le marché et les abattoirs at La Villette in order to centralize the 'old abattoirs' Napoleon Bonaparte had constructed. Dorothee Brantz describes late-eighteenth-century Paris as a city where the slaughter of animals in the back of butcher shops resulted in neighborhoods rife with “pestilent stench, disturbing noises, and continuous flow of blood in the streets” (Brantz 2001, unpaginated). As “bystanders increasingly criticized the public display of slaughter,” she continues, “reforms were implemented to protect public hygiene and clean up the streets” (Brantz 2001). Emperor Napoleon’s decree of 1807, ordering the construction of public slaughterhouses, resulted in the building of five abattoirs outside the city walls while his second decree of 1810 required that public slaughterhouses be built outside the city limits of every town in France. Indeed, with the first public slaughterhouses appearing in France at this time, the word abattoir “was introduced to refer to a specific place where animals are slaughtered for human consumption” (Fitzgerald 2010, 60). La Villette’s original fifty-six-hectare site consisted of three market halls, animal stables, administrative buildings, a police station, a post office, and the giant iron and glass Grande Halle aux Boeufs, by Jules de Mérindol and Louis-Adolphe Janvier, enclosing 220,000 square feet of space. Thereby designating it La Cité du Sang (“city of blood”) , the grand hall sheltered a peak daily slaughter of 23,000 sheep and 5,000 oxen. A substantial portion of Georges Franju’s film the Le Sang des bêtes (Blood of the Beasts) documents cattle being slaughtered there when La Villette still contained active slaughterhouses. The film describes the deafening roar of pneumatic winches and depicts live footage of slaughterers and scalders working in “the gray steam of animal blood” (Dialogue from Le Sang des bêtes) Saturated with bovine excretions—blood and urine— as with many postfordist landscapes the site required substantial modification to render it inhabitable (Fitzgerald 2010, 60). As part of his modernization plan Haussmann concentrated the abattoirs and meat markets on the city’s outskirts, next to train access, and adjacent to the Bassin de la Villette and the Canal St. Denis. The bassin originally served as a water reserve, but by the beginning of the nineteenth century it became a station for goods, with docks and a haulage depot, while the canal provided an arm of water dividing the abattoirs from the wholesale markets. At a sanitary distance from the urban center, removed from high public visibility, and under the supervision of state control, the streets of Paris were swept clean of social guilt. Not only did the abattoirs spatialize slaughter on the periphery of the city but they also offered an architectural and economic prototype. As Siegfried Giedion writes, La Villette “became the abattoir, a prototype for the rest of the century, just as the boulevards and public parks of Haussmann’s Paris became models from which every growing metropolis of the Continent took pattern” (Giedion 1948, 210). Giedion identifies La Villette as “the first central slaughterhouse to cater to a population of millions” with lairages, according to Haussmann, that “could accommodate ‘the number of beasts needed for Parisian consumption over a period of several days’” (Giedion 1948,

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209). Giedion appreciates these new abattoirs for “the care with which the individual animal was treated” in a space where “each ox had a stall to itself” (Giedion 1948, 211). The trajectory of this new building type is that the removal of slaughter from public view and placement under state surveillance eventually facilitated its eventual devolution, particularly in the United States, into unsupervised violence hidden from any substantive regulatory observation. In contrast to the Paris abattoirs, which artisanal butchers operated, the Chicago Union Stockyards’ industrial automation allowed for mechanized slaughter that minimized human participation and maximized rational efficiency. Underscoring the distinction between French and American meat processing efficiency, Brantz explains that “La Villette fed Paris, but Chicago supplied the nation” (Brantz 2001, unpaginated). With the arrival of railroads in the early 1860s and the concomitant need for centralized markets, by 1900 the meatpacking industry would help to expand Chicago into the second-largest city in the United States. Along with railroad access and the substantial production of excess livestock, the invention of refrigerated train cars for shipping dressed carcasses farther afield contributed to Chicago’s ascendancy. As Scientific American described them in 1886, the Union Stockyards were a labyrinth of sheds and enormous halls that communicate in various ways by passages, staircases, and suspension bridges, over which pass the workmen and over which runs the railway. Without a guide, one could never find his way in these immense structures. (Scientific American 1886, 120) At their peak levels of production the stockyards processed 200,000 hogs daily. The disassembly line there inspired Henry Ford’s assembly line automotive production with both relying upon the principle of the division of labor. This is the plant Upton Sinclair exposed in The Jungle, where his vivid depiction of dehumanizing and unsanitary working conditions contributed to the public’s pressuring of US Congress and its 1906 passage of the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act. After refrigerated trucks and super highways replaced the need for centralized shipping, the meat industry was able to creep even farther away from the public’s ability to observe the widespread abuses that intensified animal production often facilitates. According to Human Rights Watch, meatpacking is one of “the most dangerous factory jobs in the country,” often exploiting undocumented labor forces who have little political influence to improve their circumstances (Compa and Fellner 2005, unpaginated). Not only do animals suffer from mistreatment behind closed doors but so do workers. In reaction to activists’ efforts to shine more and more light on an industry evidencing severe animal abuse over the past few years, the farm industry and animal-agriculture lobby have been behind the introduction of “ag-gag” bills in more than half of all state legislatures across the country. These dangerous bills are designed to silence whistleblowers revealing animal abuses on industrial farms. Ag-gag type laws have been passed in seven states, criminalizing acts related to investigating the day-to-day activities of industrial farms, including the recording, possession or distribution of photos, video and/or audio at a farm. (ASPCA) Now referred to as Concentrated or Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) instead of slaughterhouses, the contemporary design of these animal kill centers follows a similar strategy of discouraging prying eyes. Located in increasingly rural settings and nondescript, windowless sheds, factories are effacing their imprint on the ground

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in direct proportion to how much they impact the planet (Steel 2008, 67). Animal slaughtering facilities—anonymous, nondescript, and half submerged in the landscape— are constructed outside of city centers in both the United States and Western Europe, as a way to reduce their cultural legibility. Places that really are no-places, as Noélie Vialles describes them, slaughterhouse design camouflages architecture in generic storage sheds clad in off-the-shelf standing seam metal that nonetheless, and despite the generic utilitarian language of this material, fails to shrink the perceptual scale of these vast-sized buildings (Vialles 1994, 15). The architecture is anesthetic. Rather than heightening sensations, slaughterhouses blunt them. Air and water pollution, high intensity water use, and labor exploitation number among the more measurable collateral damages of industrialized meat production. Indeed, small towns located near a meatpacking plant experience other stressors as well. In terms of direct human impact from working in these jobs, besides work-place tragedies, drug-related criminality and spousal abuse increase while housing availability decreases and, according to the Farmer’s Union, so too the livelihood of neighboring farms (Fitzgerald 2010, 63–64). While these facilities have a negative impact on the people who work in them as well as on places where they are located, their innocuous appearance whitewashes what goes on inside these black boxes. In a trajectory that leads from the solidification of a community in front of the sacrificial altar to the inhabitation of marginalized spaces on the edge of civilization, the slaughterhouse has transformed from a red to a black box, a mechanism in which the transformation between informational input and output remains opaque. For Bruno Latour, blackboxing is the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become. (Latour 1999, 304) This term applies to most electronic devices, from computers to cell phones, in which the means of transformation would remain opaque even if the box were to be open for view. Because the contents of black boxes remain obscene, obscaena, or offstage, if we are unable to exactly see what goes on inside, then we might just be able to hear the lowing cows that still resonate from Rome’s founding mythology in Michel Serres’s account of this story. Serres’s black box represents the deepest chambers of a closed system that temporarily stores anything too complex or disturbing to assimilate—information technologies or systems of animal and human exploitation (Serres 1991, passim). To extricate the pernicious and positivistic processes of biotechnology and go beyond the warm and fuzzy promises of urban farming is to open these boxes and the rationalization of death that occurs within. It also is to herd animals back into cities where their presence may remind us of our own humanity when it comes to their consumption. Between the absorptive linings under packaged meat and the disappearance of slaughterhouses from urban centers, the absence of stock animals in the city marks a bio-politics of shame. The sequential boxes of animal harvesting contain traces of forgotten handshakes and secret contracts regarding the enclosure of diverse species whose cages are too small for them to turn around but nonetheless sustain our appetite for complex protein metabolizers. Meat comes to us exsanguinated, shrink wrapped, and garnished. All too often “farm to fork” means that the animal never leaves the box.

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TRANSPARENT BOX As architects and urban designers consider ways to resist industrialized food production, the site of slaughter offers the opportunity to perform as a conceptual glass box that purports to make the proverbial sausage kitchen more transparent to the larger cultural imaginary. A number of contemporary artists similarly have concerned themselves with the status of animal harvesting, producing work that begins to establish critical positions from which to expose carnivorism’s repressed architecture. John O'Shea developed “Meat License Proposal,” a performance that requires an individual to kill an animal under specific and supervised conditions before receiving a license to consume the same species. O'Shea himself travels to various slaughterhouses documenting the spaces of his various kills. Damien Hirst achieved fame and notoriety by preserving sectioned animal parts in class tanks filled with formaldehyde. With “Mother and Child, Divided” (1993) he bisected a cow and calf in half and placed their bodies in four vitrines facing each other across exposed interiors, evoking a disquieting humanity through the lens of divided familial relationships. His use of livestock animals such as cattle, pigs, and sheep references the butchering of animals for human consumption. In a somewhat more subtle critique of farm culture, Mike Kelley turned to live animals when setting up his petting zoo for the Skulptur Projekte Münster 07. Working in collaboration with the architects Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena, Kelley designed and built a chicken coop, goat tower, and animal barn at an abandoned public urban space in the heart of the historic town of Münster, Germany, thereby drawing attention to the lost presence of farm animals in urban contexts. Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr combined human bone and 3T3 mouse cells to grow a semi-living jacket for their project “Victimless Leather.” The display of this miniature apparel in a glass container relies on an artificial environment that provides sustenance for semi-living entities and demonstrates the power of technoscientific bodies to critique the victims of parallel dystopias (Sandhana 2004). In “Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic” (1987), a sculpture that presaged Lady Gaga’s notorious meat dress, Jana Sterbak placed stock animal and human animal flesh in direct contact with each other, illustrating a disturbing proximity between our flesh and that of the animals we eat. Sewn together from sixty pounds of raw, salted, and air-dried flank steak, the dress assumes the mythic status of a reconstituted sacrifice. If artists are willing to sport animal flesh as apparel, then, might not architects build with it? Mitchell Joachim designed “In Vitro Meat Habitat,” as a “victimless shelter” made from real organic material fabricated from 3D prints of extruded pig cells grown around a recycled PET plastic scaffold. Michael Sorkin, who has collaborated with Joachim, proposes greening New York City with “skyscraper farms, meat-production towers and revamped aqueducts” (Sorkin 2014). Sorkin explores the potential to inhabit abandoned spaces in the city with urban farming towers, including a Chicken Meat Production Tower to facilitate humane chicken farming with “free-range” bird terraces, incubation levels, and slaughter machines. Similar to the urban chicken production facility, the architecture firm MVRDV proposed Pig City for Rotterdam, a project composed of towers housing 15.2 million pigs that concentrate swine production in point locations, avoiding unnecessary transportation and distribution and forming a communal and resilient slaughterhouse that recycles animal waste as fertilizer. As architects and urbanists consider ways to resist industrialized production, they propose making the site of slaughter more visible to the public as well as locating animal harvesting in closer proximity to cities.

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CJ Lim has focused a substantial part of his practice to considering the potential of architecture to engage the world’s growing food crisis through utopian proposals that deploy hypernarratives to produce extreme scenarios for a culinary architecture transparent to otherwise unspoken ideologies regarding the consumption of meat and epicurean delights. With the “World of Cow,” published in Sins + Other Spatial Relatives (2000), he proposes an urban farm and banqueting hall in the heart of London where clients may visit the Wagyu calves they have imported from Tokyo and plan to eventually consume as Kobe steak. The calf inhabits a second floor living area, replete with massage parlors and a living room for receiving visitors, suspended above the restaurant where it eventually will be served on a plate. As a response to the cardinal sin of gluttony the “World of Cow” makes clear that sybaritic eating of meat maintains the collateral requirement of rearing it, albeit in an hysterical machine of visual and spatial proximity between living animal and its mastication setting. In a later project dating from 2014 called Food City, Lim proposes a utopian vision of London with a Food Parliament that “can demonstrate spatial phenomenology in the city, stimulating our eyes, ears, noses, minds, and tongues—vision made real, social capital that can be tasted” (Lim 2014, 187). Merging pastoral grazing and industrial processing, Lim’s London features deer pulling zero carbon-carriages and grazing in public parks where they also may be hunted. The heightened sophistication of consumer palates and global conservation initiatives have produced statistical analyses that document the pernicious impact of intensive agriculture on the planet through clear data. It takes 150 gallons of water to produce one-quarter-pound hamburger. During its short, five-year lifespan, a California dairy cow may reach the high yield mark of 100 gallons of milk per day while it is kept in confinement only to be continuously impregnated and milked (One Green Planet). And growing iceberg lettuce, one more example, is labor intensive and requires irrigation that may lead to the leaching of nitrate-nitrogen (NO3-N) fertilizer into the watershed. Whether one subscribes to carnivorism or veganism there is almost no dimension of the natural environment that intensive food production has not modified, from the pernicious byproducts of industrialized animal harvesting, unknown effects of genetically modified organisms, or the presence of hormones and antibiotics in protein sources, to barrels of oil spent in transportation, food security threats, the impact of fast food chains on neighborhood obesity, worker safety, and water contamination caused by vegetable fertilization, herbicides, and pesticides, architects and urban designers are beginning to explore alternative models for designing the infrastructure of our food systems in cities. The abattoir’s displacement from the city merely reminds us that eco-farming and locavore food sourcing are not sufficient practices to stave off world hunger and, rather, heighten the fiction of eating flesh with clean hands. Recent attention to world hunger, animal rights, and food safety are concerns that have drawn attention to the high price we pay for cheap meat. Architecture’s role in this process concerns both the humanity and transparency of slaughterhouses. In response to a world where meat remains a staple, Temple Grandin has developed slaughterhouse reforms to mitigate the “particularly brutal and insensitive means of bringing the cattle to their ultimate slaughter” (Lambert 2014, unpaginated). Grandin, who won a “Proggy” award in 2004 from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), designed systems to reduce animal stress and improve handling efficiency of steer as they walk to their slaughter. She has designed stockyards, lairages, corrals, chutes, and loading ramps that emphasize curved circulation paths to shield the animals from viewing what is ahead and to keep them calm. Where Grandin identifies more humane methods of slaughter, Pollan explores the power of

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transparency. In a chapter in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals titled “Slaughter: In a Glass Abattoir,” Michael Pollan describes the process of working on a small chicken farm that slaughters and butchers fowl outside for onsite consumer sales, the metaphorical glass being the process of completing this work en plein air for anyone to watch (Pollan 2006, 226). From the Greek temple to Temple Grandin, architectural responses to designing a cleaner and gentler food economy most often explore the terrain of urban farming, farmer’s markets, and other user-friendly ways that urban centers may sensitize consumers to food sources, develop horticulture as a way to reclaim abandoned territory, and focus on shrinking the distance between consumer and consumed as a way of producing a heightened locavore culture. Most nascent among these diverse discussions, however, is architecture’s specific place in the culinary topographic economy vis-a-vis its role in framing animal slaughter. Where farmer’s markets and harvesting fallen fruit are appetizing subject matters for cultivating cities, the unpleasant transformation of animals into meals remains at the center of architecture’s origins and urban expansion. “By choosing not to look at how meat is made, a bully culture can take over on the factory line” fostering an environment wherein cattle suffer at the hands of cruel people (Bell 2015, unpaginated). As Paul McCartney writes, “If slaughterhouses had glass walls everyone would be a vegetarian” (McCartney 2012). In this spirit of multiple exposure, Kelly’s “Petting Zoo” makes sense as an essential component of urban farmers markets, as sites where we go to select our live protein sources—along with some beans, apples, and a bouquet of flowers—only to have it slaughtered in a nearby glass abattoir and delivered home in pieces.

REFERENCES Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and his World Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Bataille, Georges. 1995. “Slaughterhouse.” Encyclopaedia Acephalica: comprising the Critical Dictionary and Related Texts, edited by Georges Bataille, 71–74. And translated by Iain White, et al. London, Atlas Press. Originally published as “Abattoir” in Documents 6 (1929). Bell, Ryan. 2015. “Temple Grandin, Killing Them Softly at Slaughterhouses for 30 Years.” National Geographic http://theplate.nationalgeographic.com/2015/08/19/temple-grandinkilling-them-softly-at-slaughterhouses-for-30-years/ Brantz, Dorothee. 2001. “Recollecting the Slaughterhouse,” Cabinet 4 http://www. cabinetmagazine.org/issues/4/slaughterhouse.php Carême, Marie-Antoine. 1833–1847. L'Art de la cuisine française au dix-neuvième siècle. Traité élémentaire et pratique. Compa, Lance, and Jamie Fellner. 2005. “Meatpacking's Human Toll.” Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/news/2005/08/02/meatpackings-human-toll Condello, Annette. 2008. “Architectural Hors d'oeuvres.” In You Are What You Eat: Literary Probes into the Palate, edited by Annette Magid, 190–205. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Eating Architecture. 2004. Edited by Jamie Horwitz and Paulette Singley. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ekroth, Gunnel. 2007. “Meat in ancient Greece: sacrifice, sacred or secular?” Food & History 5 (1): 249–72. 271.

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Evans, Robin. 1995. The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries. Cambridge, MA. Fitzgerald, Amy J. 2010. “A Social History of the Slaughterhouse: From Inception to Contemporary Implications.” Human Ecology Review 17: 58–56. Food. 2008. Edited by John Knechtel. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Food and Architecture: At The Table. 2016. Edited by Samantha L. Martin-McAuliffe. London: Bloomsbury. Food for the City: A future for the Metropolis. 2012. Edited by Brigitte van der Sande. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers. Frascari, Marco. 1986. “Semiotica Ab Edendo, Taste in Architecture.” Journal of Architectural Education 40: 2–7. Giedion, Sigfried. 1948. Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History New York: Oxford UP. Hersey, George. 1988. The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture: Speculations on Ornament from Vitruvius to Venturi. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hollier, Denis. 1989. Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille. Translated by Betsy Wing. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Lambert, Léopold. 2014. “Weaponized Architecture: Temple Grandin’s Humane Slaughterhouses and the Architectural Politics of the Lesser Evil.” The Funambulist http:// thefunambulist.net/2014/03/21/weaponized-architecture-temple-grandins-humaneslaughterhouses-and-the-architectural-politics-of-the-lesser-evil/ Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies Cambridge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lim, CJ. 2014. Food City New York: Routledge. Marinetti, F. T. 1989. The Futurist Cookbook Translated by Suzanne Brill. And Edited by Lesley Chamberlain. San Francisco: Bedford Arts. McCartney, Paul. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4TON3BxTxg N.A., “MVRDV—Pig City.” Stroom Den Haag http://www.stroom.nl/paginas/pagina.php?pa_ id=3767667 N.A., “Chicago.” 1886. Scientific American p. 120, 55. N.A. “Farm Animal Welfare: What Is Ag-Gag Legislation?” http://www.aspca.org/animalcruelty/factory-farms/what-ag-gag-legislation N.A. 2014. “How the Dairy Industry Has Unnaturally Altered the Life of Cows.” One Green Planet http://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/how-the-dairy-industry-hasunnaturally-altered-the-life-of-cows/ Pollan, Michael. 2006. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals New York: Penguin. Sandhana, Lakshmi. 2004. “Jacket Grows From Living Tissue.” Science. http://www.wired. com/2004/10/jacket-grows-from-living-tissue Seneca, Epistles, XVIII.3 http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/calendar/ saturnalia.html. Serres, Michel. 1991. Rome: The Book of Foundations. Translated by Felicia McCarren. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sorkin, Michael. 2014. “Empire State of Mind: Green Living in NYC Need Not Be Simple Living—Think Skyscraper Farms, Meat-production Towers and Revamped Aqueducts.” Aeon https://aeon.co/essays/nyc-can-this-city-state-be-completely-self-reliant. Steel, Carolyn. 2008. Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives London: Chatto & Windus. Tschumi, Bernard. 1987. Cinégramme folie: le Parc de la Villette, Paris, Nineteenth Arrondissement Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press.

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Tschumi, Bernard. 1994. Architecture and Disjunction, 124. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Vialles, Noélie. 1994. Animal to Edible. Translated by J. A. Underwood, 15. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Vidler, Anthony. 2006. Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture and Utopia in the Era of the French Revolution. Basel and Boston: Birkhäuser. Vitruvius, Pollio. The Ten Books on Architecture, 1.4.9, http://lexundria.com/vitr/1.4.9/cf. Warden, P. Gregory. 2016. “Communicating with Gods: Sacred Space in Etruria,” A Companion to the Etruscans, edited by Sinclair Bell and Alexandra A. Carpino, 162–78. Oxford: Wiley.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Food and Art: Changing Perspectives on Food as a Creative Medium YAEL RAVIV

What can be more disarming than ice cream? Miwa Koizumi’s NY Ice Cream Flavors (2007–09) comprised a series of ice cream flavors based on dishes identified with certain ethnic groups and neighborhoods in New York City (like sour cream and borscht for the East Village, or bagel and lox for the Lower East Side). She served the ice cream out of a small cart to each member of her audience. The exchange was intimate and, other than the nod to the immigrant experience embodied in the cart itself, was completely subjective, taking place inside the mouth, wholly focused on taste. For me, it was a revelation. It was not just the fact that taste could be the central focus of an art piece, it was revolutionary to me in its intimacy and implication of trust, in agreeing to take into my mouth and my body such an odd creation: lox ice cream. Koizumi’s project reflects many of the elements most unique to the intersection of food and art: blurred boundaries between art and everyday life and between public and private, a multisensory experience, time based and grounded in process, often intimate and participatory and requiring a great deal of trust. Several chefs today offer culinary creations that prompt a very similar experience: an emotional response sparked by a combination of flavors and textures, experienced intimately by each diner. They offer multisensory, participatory experiences and blur the boundaries between art and everyday life and definitely require a degree of trust. This chapter will focus on exploring food as a medium for art (rather than a subject) and will examine the role of chefs at the intersection of food and art, within the larger narrative of food as a creative medium. Beginning in the 1930s, I explore the role of food as a medium in certain avant-garde movements and proceed to look at their influence on later work in the studio and the kitchen. John Dewey’s theory of aesthetic experience asserts that an aesthetic experience is based on interaction and that ordinary experiences in everyday life could be appreciated as aesthetic experiences, insisting that traditional classifications of “art” hinder our appreciation and understanding of new forms (Dewey 2005). Glenn Kuehn relies on Dewey’s theory to claim that if an aesthetic experience is based on interaction it can be found in everyday life, when making his case for viewing culinary experience as Art (Kuehn 2005). Dewey’s point is particularly useful in this context not only for

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interpreting the work of artists who choose to work with food as a medium precisely because of its ambiguous position between art and everyday life, but also as we examine certain chefs’ creations and other kitchen work as artwork. It is important to note however, as philosopher Carolyn Korsmeyer does, that this prejudice against culinary creations and gustatory pleasure is typical to Western thinking, whereas Chinese, Japanese, and Indian culture have long included the senses of taste and smell and related practices as significant aesthetic experiences (Korsmeyer 2013, 367–71). Indian rasa theory and the Japanese tea ceremony are just two examples of alternative cultural approaches to the integration of food and art that offer different cultural hierarchies of the senses than the Western model. Following these models, this chapter aims to think through the work of professional chefs in the context of art and “high” culture. Moreover, I would like to make a case for thinking about home cooking in certain cases in similar terms.

STUDYING THE EPHEMERAL Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in her seminal piece on food as a performance medium, highlights the importance of food for artists exploring the line between art and life. She reflects on the disassociation of food from eating and eating from nourishment as a key to its transformation into material for art (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1999, 3). KirshenblattGimblett’s insights are applicable to the study of certain chefs’ work, where the notion of food as nourishment is as relevant as it is in Koizumi’s ice cream. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s survey helps make sense of the work by presenting it in a duel context: the art world and the food system. Other examples of food-art scholarship can be seen in recent exhibition catalogues like FEAST: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art (2012) curated by Stephanie Smith at the SMART Museum of Art. The exhibit catalogue examines several influential, historical food performances alongside current artists’ projects, adding interviews with the artists and scholarly pieces contextualizing the work. Both FEAST’s catalogue and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s work highlight one of the central challenges to the study of food and art—the ephemeral nature of the work and the very partial documentation, lacking the tools to capture taste, smell, and texture, let alone the entirety of a complex, subjective experience. Recently, The Drawing Center in NYC presented Notes on Creativity (2014), an exhibit examining chef Ferran Adria’s creative process. The exhibit included sketches for dishes prepared at his renowned restaurant elBulli, diagrams illustrating preparation processes, theoretical deliberations, designs for unique serving dishes, lists, questions, and a film showing all the dishes created at the restaurant since 1987. The exhibit focused on the process of creation rather than on the product. Curator Brett Littman states the intention to employ Adria’s work to achieve a greater understanding of the creative process: What does creativity mean? How do you train for it (Littman 2014)? It is significant that the exhibit searches for answers in a chef’s kitchen, an environment where, much like the artist’s studio, mastering basic techniques and understanding traditions balance the need to always question, always search for a unique voice. These examples share the elements used for the study of food/art work: detailed descriptions and testimonies, artist interviews, sketches, plans, and photographs—all common devices in current scholarship. They are collections of evidence that hint at the original work when examined as a whole and when seen in the context of previous work.

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FOOD AS ART MEDIUM—EARLY INFLUENCES New methodologies in culinary studies owe a debt to developments in art scholarship. Historically, in Western art, a temporary medium could not qualify as Art. The work had to have a lasting presence, allowing its study and appreciation for years to come in order to qualify for this label. Additionally, a work of Art was required to offer an experience for its own sake, with no utilitarian value. Food would obviously be excluded on both counts. Philosopher Noel Carroll critiques these traditional Western notions of aesthetic experience, stressing the importance of how and what we classify as a work of art and the effect of these classifications on how we react to and interpret these works (Caroll 2008). Carroll suggests we position artwork by telling a narrative that places the work in relationship to previously agreed-upon art objects (as a development or as a revolt). He proposes that by narrating the story of the piece in context, rather than defining it, we highlight the importance of the creator’s intentions, positioning art as a social practice (Caroll 1999). I would, therefore, like to begin the narrative of food as art medium by exploring some of the major historical influences that left a lasting mark on modern-day artists and chefs. Several avant-garde movements in particular influenced our thinking at the intersection of food and art and inspired many later works. The historical avant-garde’s artists wished to promote art that was integrated into everyday life and materials, and questioned social or cultural tropes. Futurism generated perhaps the most influential, food-centered work. Though overlooked for a long time by art historians, futurists’ food-centered work had a significant impact on later artists and, with the rise of molecular gastronomy, has become better known publicly in recent years. In the second wave of the movement (from 1930), the futurists devoted serious attention to culinary events, opened the Holy Palate restaurant in Turin (1931), and published The Futurist Cookbook (1932). Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who published the first Futurist Manifesto in 1909, saw art and everyday life as inseparable, so everyday materials, like food and recipes, were a natural progression for futurist work (Chamberlain 1989). Using culinary devices and materials allowed the futurists to engage and comment on traditional Western art practices and values, such as the traditional hierarchy of the senses that prioritizes sight and sound, the concept of an art object as everlasting, and the injunction that art must never be utilitarian and must be confined to the museum and gallery space. The Futurist Cookbook encouraged Italians to abandon traditional culinary practices (pasta-making in particular) in favor of a new and “modern” culinary practice. It included descriptions of several futurist banquets and numerous recipes (called “formulas”) contributed by several artists. It is also an art object in itself. By taking a familiar everyday object such as a cookbook and appropriating it to deliver the futurist artistic message, Marinetti was combining several of the futurist ideals: not only the interest in everyday life as material for art, but also the hybridization of different genres, the importance of the chemical senses (taste and smell), the body as present and participant in the artwork, and the interest in language, technology, scientific discovery, and innovation—all of which play a part in the recipes and banquets the futurists staged (Delville 2008). The futurists had a very strong, unabashed, political, and ideological message, and The Futurist Cookbook expresses some fascist ideals, mostly exemplifying strong nationalist tendencies and a chauvinistic approach, advocating Italian patriotism and condemning bourgeois habits and lifestyle. The book is a poetic text that expresses both an artistic

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agenda and an ethical one. However, the cookbook remains first and foremost an artistic creation, highlighted by the selection of clearly inedible dishes scattered through the text, like The Excited Pig: “A whole salami, skinned, is served upright on a dish containing some very hot black coffee mixed with a good deal of eau de Cologne” (Fillia in Marinetti 1989, 144). This and other inedible recipes serve as reminders that this “cookbook” is in fact an art object and not a kitchen manual. They force the reader to pause and consider each recipe. They call into question the very nature of recipes and instructions and emphasize the need for vigilance and independent thinking. One of the Futurists’ descendants is Fluxus’ a multidisciplinary, international movement that originated in the 1950s in Europe and the United States and continues to some degree to this day. Two central elements in Fluxus artists’ work were the performance event and the Flux kit. Both were based on simple, everyday actions and objects and highlight the notion of experience. Rejecting representational art and focusing on primary experience, Fluxus’s work defies fixed definitions; its central ideology is the rejection of any assigned, permanent meaning (Higgins 2002, 58–59). Thus food, as a temporal medium that offers a wide range of opportunities for social interaction and immediate experience, appears often in Fluxus artists’ work including Alison Knowles (Make a Salad, 1962; Make a Soup, 1962; and Identical Lunch, 1967– 73), George Maciunas (Flux banquets, 1967–78; One Year, 1973), Ben Vautier (Flux Mystery Food, 1963 and 1966–67), and Daniel Spoerri (Twenty-nine Variations on a Meal, 1964), among others. Some Fluxus artists’ work involved a reframing of everyday acts of the artists themselves as art events, like Ben Vautier’s Flux Mystery Food, which entailed purchasing unlabeled cans of identical size and eating whatever was inside them (1963 and 1967), or Alison Knowles’s Identical Lunch (1967–73), in which the artist consumed the exact same lunch every day, over a period of several years, at the same time and at the same place: tuna sandwich on whole-wheat bread with soup or buttermilk at Riss restaurant in Chelsea (Novero 2010). We can see the futurists’ influence in other, current artists’ work such as Meat Poem #6 (Man Becoming Machine Chew to the Future) by Bradley Chriss (2010): in this live performance and video work, Chriss stuffed raw, ground meat into his mouth, chewed it several times, and spit it into a sausage skin. The sound of his breathing and chewing was amplified to provide the score (performed as part “of Anarchy in the Kitchen,” group show, curator Laura McGough, Umami Food and Art Festival, 2010). Another example is Kelly Dobson, an artist and engineer who worked extensively with domestic appliances, literally “giving them a voice.” Dobson’s work embraces technology, transforming household machines like a blender or toaster into partners or playmates. Blendie (2003–04) featured a blender engineered to respond to sound: if a human makes growling, motor-like sounds, Blendie will react and begin grinding in response. Dobson’s sound-focused performance demonstrates a departure from futurist work in its empowerment of women and the domestic sphere. She appropriates similar tools, yet subverts earlier work by focusing on the domestic and creating intimate performances that question our relationship to technology rather than simply exalting in it. Even though these later artists are often interested in taste and smell, many of their works focus on a shared, communal experience, on language and representation, and on classification and organization rather than on gastronomy (Novero 2010). Most Fluxus artists explore eating rituals and mine food for its ability to call into question the Western

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hierarchy of the senses and present art as a total experience, free of fixed definitions. The futurists’ interest in creating innovative work on the plate can be traced instead to the work of certain “Modernist” chefs. Dishes like “Medulla of tuna with soy sauce spaghetti and watermelon” (Adria 2004, 96), or “Rabbit sweetbreads with electric Chinese lanterns and liquorice air” (Adria 2004, 106) read like futurist formulas, though they are all, of course, edible.1

CHEF AS ARTIST At first glance, what is known as modernist cuisine often seems like it was taken directly from the pages of The Futurist Cookbook. Chefs like Ferran Adria, Grant Achatz, or Heston Blumenthal use new technologies in the kitchen to offer creations on the plate that are as surprising, even shocking, as they are aesthetically inspiring. They subvert common expectations by playing with temperatures, textures, and flavors, deconstructing traditional dishes and presenting common ingredients in new and unexpected ways. However, these chefs differ from the futurists in several significant ways: their food, first and foremost, must always be not only edible, but also delicious. It must be consistent, and, significantly, sustainable, that is, profitable. Considering these points, can we still make a case for these chefs as artists? Carolyn Korsmeyer’s work on food demonstrates that the most significant element in appreciating food as an aesthetic category lays in its “meaning bearing qualities that give food its cognitive significance,” positioning the subjective pleasure we derive from food as secondary (Korsmeyer 2008, 128). Her argument is particularly important when considering the culinary creations of chefs who are deliberate about creating “meaningbearing” dishes, offering the diner creations that give them pause and make them think. Their creations are not just playful and surprising, but also thought provoking, or ones that elicit an emotional response. Chef Ferran Adria’s work has been publicly marked as art by his inclusion in the 2006 Documenta art fair in Germany. After considering several options for how to present his “art,” Adria and his team decided that a true experience of elBulli art is dinner at elBulli. During the 100 days of Documenta, two visitors a day came and dined at elBulli. Rather than justify Adria’s work as art (that has already been established by the fact of the invitation to participate), he would show “that cooking is cooking,” that he is not a sculptor or a performer. Adria’s Documenta team asserts that cooking is a unique medium governed by its own strict set of rules (Hamilton and Todoli 2009). Central among these rules is that the food needs to be delicious (a restriction that does not apply to artists working in this medium as many of the futurist “formulas” demonstrate). Furthermore, cooking is multisensory and dishes must engage all five senses. It is also tied to a particular location and the dining experience is a total one, including all aspects of the restaurant. Finally, it is important to note that a restaurant is a business; unlike other artists, chefs need to run a sustainable business (worth to note here that Adria closed elBulli in 2011 citing economic reasons as a central consideration). In 2004, Adria and his team defined their cuisine as “most modern,” “one which opens up new horizons,” as well as “technique-concept cuisine”: “A type of creative cuisine in which the chef aims not only to make a new recipe, but also to create a new concept or invent a new technique that will open up new horizons for his own style and for cooking in general” (Adria, Soler, and Adria 2005, 176–77). In 2008, Adria preferred the label

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“techno-emotional cuisine” (Myhrvold 2011, 13–23). Significantly, Adria and his team think through these terms and engage in an ongoing process to classify and frame their work, relying on tools from both the sciences and the arts. Nathan Myhrvold makes a case for defining Adria’s cooking as the first true modernist cuisine, claiming that the key to the modernist project in the arts is in the dialog between artist and audience, a dialog that Adria created at elBulli. Myhrvold demonstrates that among Adria’s goals are the impact of questions like “did the food make people think?” Did it engage them emotionally (Myhrvold 2011, 17–18)? Adria, as well as several other new or modernist chefs, is conscious of Korsmeyer’s “meaning-bearing” properties and employs them deliberately in his creations to give the diner a pause and make her think. Heston Blumenthal writes in The Fat Duck Cookbook, “A multisensory approach to food [,i]f it’s done sensitively, it’s not about turning the restaurant into a lab and the diners into guinea pigs. It’s about creating a framework and canvas upon which each person paints their own images, memories and emotions” (Blumenthal 2008, 212). Adria in particular has systematically examined, documented, and analyzed his work over the years at elBulli. In a reflection on deconstruction he says: “This deconstructed dish will keep its essence and will still be linked to a culinary tradition, but its appearance will be radically different from the original. For this game to be successful, it is essential that the diner has a gastronomic memory, since the absence of references turns the concept of deconstruction into new ‘construction’ based on nothing” (Adria in Myhrvold 2011). In this, Adria is like the artists described above; his work has meaning in the context of previous work in the field. He reacts against it or pays homage to it, but in order to fully understand his creation, the diner must have a prior knowledge and “read” the work as part of a historical development, as Dewey suggested we do for all artwork. Questlove, a musician, author, and entrepreneur, interviewed several chefs on the subject of creativity, and a few spoke to the relationship between tradition and innovation. In one conversation, Chef Daniel Humm said “I think for any great artist . . . you have to understand the ground rules so you can decide when to break them” (Questlove 2016, 36). Chef Ryan Roadhouse, who trained in Japanese cuisine, speaks to the importance of working within limitations and the ability to find a unique voice and innovate because of those limitations and not despite them (Questlove 2016, 203). This approach is very reminiscent of artists’ training: the understanding that in order to create something new you need to speak to a tradition and understand the “rules.” The notion of self-imposed limitations as a key to creativity is also a very common device for artists in other fields. Chefs like Heston Blumenthal and Grant Achatz, among others, share with Adria not only the sophisticated methods of preparation and necessary technology—these are but the tools they employ in creating their dishes—but also a way of thinking about their dishes conceptually. They are not only looking for new and pleasing flavor combinations and textures, but also for ways to provoke an emotional and/or intellectual response in the diner, as seen in a poster on the kitchen wall at Achatz’s Alinea: “Capture spring. What is it? New, Fresh, Ice. Sprouts, delicate, gradual” (Max 2008). Other examples include Adria’s Thaw (2004) reflecting on a natural phenomenon, Blumenthal’s Sound of the Sea (2007), presented with a small listening device inside a shell with a specially recorded soundtrack, and Achatz’s Tomato (2008), which makes the diner pause and rethink that particular product. Chefs control and shape the total dining experience, engage all the senses, and create work that surprises. They react against previous traditions and strive to

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make the diner pause and think and to reexamine things they may have taken for granted or disregarded. Chef David Chang recently wrote that the key, in his mind, to a truly successfully dish is in its ability to elicit a strong emotional response by evoking concrete memories. However, Chang does not refer here to Proust’s madeleine, but to the surprise of finding this connection in totally unexpected places, in dishes that speak to other cultures and places through specific flavor combinations, but appear in a completely different form. The emotional response is generated by discovering the flavors of the Korean subji, while eating a chicken and dumpling dish in New York, a very subjective response that will only affect someone with the “right” background (Chang 2016). Recognizing the specific emotion/intention is not the goal, but evoking an emotional response is—or as Myhrvold suggested, framing the dining experience as a dialogue between the chef and the diner is a key to understanding certain chefs’ work as an art and not a craft (Myhrvold 2011, 19).

BEYOND MODERNIST CUISINE Adria’s inclusion in Documenta did not go unopposed. Many dispute the very idea of chefs as artists rather than artisans. Writer Michael Ruhlman, said in response to this controversy: “ Food is not art, and chefs are not artists. And I trust a chef who calls himself an artist about as far as I can throw him. Cooking is a craft . . . only and always” (Ruhlman 2007). Yet, he seems to reconsider after working with chefs like Grant Achatz and Masa Takayama. As Ruhlman describes his experience at Masa, he notes, “Only when a chef changed the way you saw the world, through cooking, did food truly become art,” (Ruhlman 2006, 315). The attempt to distinguish between artisan and artist is not confined to the realm of food of course. The question to ask is can cooking transcend a mastery of technique to offer a transporting experience? Can food be used as a vehicle for an emotional experience or to change the way you see the world? It seems more intuitive for us today to make a case for modernist cuisine as art, but looking at the new Nordic cuisine with such influential chefs as Rene Redzepi (NOMA) or Magnus Nilsson (Fäviken) offers a different approach, similar to the experience at Masa. Mattias Kroon writes of Nilsson’s cooking that it is a “re-invention of his grandmother’s cooking,” not in the sense of reworking traditional recipes, but in the relationship between place, local ingredients, and the dishes he creates, allowing the local flavors and ingredients to inspire him to create dishes that are intimately linked to place (Kroon in Nilsson 2012, 18). Nilsson and Redzepi make the most of the notion of local ingredients, relying on foraging, hunting, fishing, and growing as the foundations for their culinary creations. It is perhaps more striking because Nordic cuisine is created in an environment that seems so inhospitable at first glance. These chefs create total, immersive environments. They tell stories of a particular place and season. Their approach is similar to that of French chef Michel Bras, yet perhaps more striking because of the geographical difference between the two environments and because of the insistence of the Nordic chefs on losing the trappings of fine dining (like white tablecloths or, sometimes, even cutlery), allowing the ingredients to be the center of the experience. The idea of growing/foraging/hunting as integral parts of the dining experience leads us to the recent rise in the status of farmers and growers, mirroring the earlier rise of chefs. Controlling the basic ingredients by finding or growing or developing relationships with trusted, artisanal suppliers shifts the focus from the plate, forcing an expansion of the food and art question to include its

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growing/manufacturing. Can we find deliberate intention in a farmer’s work? Do we see a complex system of communication, investing certain raw ingredients with meaning?

GROWING TO COMPOSTING—EXPLORING THE FOOD CYCLE A recent meal at chef Dan Barber’s Blue Hill at Stone Barns was paused for a moment while we were led by our waiter to an adjacent room, open to the fields beyond, where we would have our next course. The waiter explained that we were dining next to one of the compost bins and went on to tell us a bit about the restaurant composting practice. Whereas once upon a time the best tables where furthest from the kitchen and chefs were invisible, today the most sought-after table is the chef’s table, in the kitchen itself. As the prestige of cooking grew and with it diners’ knowledge and curiosity, we started seeing a developing interest in growing as well as in various preservation methods (like pickling). Now, it seems, the wish to complete the food cycle and follow it throughout permeated the fine-dining space. We see artists and restaurateurs exploring composting and other waste management projects designed to raise awareness and affect real change. A couple of notable examples are the Billion Oyster Project (collecting used oyster shells from restaurants in NYC, thoroughly cleaning them, and returning them to the East River), or Recork, which recycles wine bottle corks. In 2015 Barber helmed a project titled wasteED, transforming his New York restaurant Blue Hill into a three-week pop-up dedicated to food waste and reuse. The project brought together producers, farmers, fishermen, processors, distributors, and guest chefs (like Alain Ducasse, Grant Achatz, Mario Batali, and April Bloomfield) to create daily menus based on byproducts and overlooked ingredients. Bruised vegetables, peels, stale bread, and fish head, skin, and bones among other ingredients, were transformed in the kitchen and served by the staff to diners at the restaurant for $15 a plate (see also Cooks, this book). In an interview Barber stated that his intention was not to criticize American wastefulness—“part of the American experience is waste”—but to preserve the abundance Americans enjoy as well as in “bumping up” these unattractive products, encouraging creativity and a more open-minded approach to the products we use (Goldfield 2015). The project echoes artist work in its clear intention to affect change, draw attention to what is typically disregarded, and make the diner pause and think. Food’s decay and detritus have fascinated artists since the Dutch paintings’ Golden Age, yet more recently we see artists exploring food waste directly as a medium in itself. Emilie Clark’s Sweet Corruptions (2010–12 and 2012–13), for example, inspired by the life of Ellen H. Richards, an American sanitary chemist, is comprised of Clark’s preserved water and air samples and all the waste from her family’s consumption for an entire month of every season for three years. Tattfoo Tan earned a certificate as Master Composter from the City of New York and went on to create related community programs. Tan’s various stewardship projects turn gardens, parks and empty lots, and shopping carts into spaces where art and gardening come together, blurring the line between art and life in the most mundane actions and areas, turning the most lowly products, like compost or weeds, into expressive materials.2 Sourcing, growing, composting, and waste management have become as important as chefs’ work in the kitchen and on the plate in developing a complete narrative around foodwork both in the art world and the restaurant world.

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FIGURE 14.1  Emilie Clark “My Family’s Food Waste, A Month for Every Season,” 2012. From Sweet Corruptions, Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York. (Courtesy of the artist)

KITCHEN SPACE AS ART SPACE Tied to sourcing and waste management in the restaurant space is the issue of labor in the field, factory, and in the unseen back of the house. An underrepresented issue in both the food system and in artists’ work, labor issues are getting more attention in recent years, often linking women’s roles and gender relations to labor issues. A prominent example is Kara Walker’s A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby (2014): a giant sugar-coated sculpture of a sphinx-like African woman, created in Brooklyn’s abandoned Domino Sugar Factory, before its transformation into condominiums. The site-specific project speaks to sugar’s manufacturing history and to race and gender relations implicated in the manufacturing process. The popularity of “behind the scene” stories from the restaurant world, encouraged by authors like Anthony Bourdain or, more recently, Stephanie Danler, draws attention to labor issues in the restaurant space as well. The open-kitchen design, in particular, impacted our perception of chefs’ work. Alison Perlman, in her work on restaurant design, explores the development of open kitchens in fine-dining contexts, beginning in the 1980s in California. Perlman notes the selective view afforded by the open-kitchen, typically showcasing only certain aspects of kitchen work (the sensuous, artistic, intimate) while hiding others (disgusting, tedious) (Perlman 2013, 86). The rise of open kitchen design, supported by an explosion of television cooking shows, contributed to a shift in the perception of kitchen work from menial labor to entertainment and, I believe, constitutes an important step in raising the status of chefs and paving the way to their perception as creative personas.

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Restaurants as Art Spaces Artists have been bringing food and cooking into the gallery space for some time in order to question traditional art institutions and practices. A few notable examples include Rirkrit Tiravanija serving a Thai curry instead of displaying artwork in Untitled (Free) in 1992; Jana Sterbak’s Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic (1987), and Janine Antoni Chocolate Gnaw (1992) and Lard Gnaw (1992), both using food products as the medium for their artwork; Mimi Oka and Doug Fitch’s Edible Still Life in Clay (Tokyo, 1998 and NY, 1999) or Good Taste in Art (1999 and 2000), which were artist-chef collaborations (the later with chef Daniel Boulud); Canadian artist Diane Borsato’s Tea Service (Conservators will wash the dishes) (2013) and Artifacts in my Mouth (2003), which explored museum artifacts through taste and touch. Artists have also gone outside the formal art exhibition spaces and explored the restaurant itself as a space for art, creating complete, immersive experiences and further blurring the boundaries between art and life. Gordon Matta-Clark’s FOOD, opened in SoHo, New York in 1971, is one example, Created with Caroline Goodden, Tina Girouard, Suzanne Harris, and Rachel Lew it was designed to offer artists living in the area an affordable place to eat, a place to work, and a space to display their art. Goodden reflected that the restaurant and much of the food work created there was inspired by an atmosphere of new and experimental changes in the art world at the time and the search for new modes of expression, different spaces, and new materials (Morris 1999). More recent examples of artist-driven restaurants like Conflict Kitchen (Pittsburg 2010), and Michael Rakowitz’s Enemy Kitchen (2003), employ food as part of a public art project to foster dialogue by taking the art out of the gallery space and by using materials and formats that are relatable and accessible. It is interesting to note that artists today seem to gravitate more toward street food (both Enemy Kitchen and Conflict Kitchen) and home cooking (see League of Kitchens below), rather than fine dining, in creating such immersive experiences. As more chefs explore creative approaches in their work, evoking an emotional response or a thoughtprovoking moment, food-centered visual and performance artists are moved to explore other areas.

Domestic Kitchen as Art Space The domestic kitchen played an important role in some early feminist work, often as an instrument of critique of common gender roles or as a way of highlighting the importance of “women’s work.” However, more recently, as more chefs turn to various ethnic domestic kitchens for inspiration and instruction in traditional techniques, more artists have turned to the domestic kitchen as a new space for immersive experience. The League of Kitchens, founded by artist and social entrepreneur Lisa Gross in 2013, is a series of in-depth culinary workshops taught by immigrants to NYC in their own homes. These workshops invert typical power relationships, positioning the immigrants as experts, while the local visitor enters unfamiliar territory. The project was originally conceived as a public art project, but transformed into a wide network of forprofit workshops. It positions the home kitchen as the setting for cultural exchange and discovery and home-cooks as masters of traditional knowledge and creative interpreters of that knowledge. Significantly, several of the instructors who participated in a panel on the subject at the Umami Food and Art Festival (2014) reported that professional chefs often attend their workshops.

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FIGURE 14.2  Yamini leading an Indian cooking workshop in her home, 2014. (Courtesy of The League of Kitchens)

Israeli artists Yael Ravid and Goore Somer created the similarly minded Kitchen Talks (2013), which brings together instructors from African migrant communities with Israeli diners in teaching workshops. African refugees and illegal workers (mostly from The Ivory Coast, Eritrea, Nigeria, and Darfur), the latest wave of immigrants to Israel, remain suspect and separated from mainstream Israeli society. Much like The League of Kitchens, this project positions the instructors as powerful authority figures, and offers a setting for an intimate exchange (Arad 2013). The meal and the entire event are framed as an art experience, an ongoing, participatory project that aims at affecting social change. Both of these projects derive their power from the implication of trust. Receiving food from a stranger, especially one who is typically “suspicious,” opens the door to an exchange because it implies trust and intimacy. In that we are reminded again of modernist cuisine, since in order to accept many of Adria’s or Achatz’s creations as “food” the diner must first offer complete trust.

CONCLUSION “I don’t want to be immortalized, I just want to make dinner!” Julia Sherman’s statement in a recent conversation (May 2016) is a perfect summary for thinking about current food work, whether in the kitchen or the studio. Food creations are in the moment; they are about process and experience rather than about a lasting product. Their continued presence only exists in documentations and descriptions such as this one, experienced indirectly like kisses through a veil. The changes in the food world in recent years have impacted the way artists employ food in their work. As many chefs become more widely acknowledged as artists and

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restaurants as sites for multisensory, aesthetic experiences, artists turn to food with new insights and questions. Growing/manufacturing, on the one hand, and waste, on the other, have grown in importance in both the art and the food world. The power of feeding/ingesting, the trust and intimacy it implies, makes it a powerful tool for change. The very rise in the importance of food as a medium and of taste and smell as aesthetic categories speaks to a growing influence of non-Western cultures and traditions and to the questioning of habitual hierarchies and institutions. With the rise of the status of chefs and that of farmers and makers closely following, will the status of the domestic cook and kitchen rise as well? Do the League of Kitchens’ instructors, women with years of culinary experience, who create traditional dishes with their own individual mark, who regularly create immersive experiences for their guests and tell complex stories of culture, immigration, and integration, not merit the same status as chefs? If the aesthetic experience is not located on the plate and not limited to a visually beautiful presentation, but is rather a whole experience, would not home cooking be as viable a candidate for the definition as Art as the creations of a professional chef? In an interview with filmmaker German Kral, Jorge Louis Borges said, “The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols . . . into something which can last in man’s memory (Borges 1998 in Newton 2010).” Defining “Art” is a complex project beyond the scope of this chapter, but Borges suggests that we shift the focus from the art object to art’s effect—it lasts in man’s memory not necessarily in the world. Looking ahead, can we follow non-Western models in positioning the culinary arts and the chemical senses as culturally significant and their creators as artists and not artisans? The discipline of performance studies has been developing ways to study and discuss time-based artwork, wrestling with the challenges of exploring work based in process and not product. Another challenge is the study of anything related to the chemical senses because of the subjective way we experience taste and smell. But the fact that these experiences are difficult to capture and analyze does not make it impossible, as the language and literature around wine tasting attests. I believe the first steps to developing a body of research around the culinary arts is to expand our vocabulary around taste, smell, and touch experiences, and develop more complex, new ways of thinking about dining. Most often lunch is simply lunch, and a delicious bowl of soup is just that—a meal does not have to qualify as art to be tasty or pleasurable. However, every so often, a chef, a dish, a meal, transports us, offering an experience beyond the plate. If food can be used as a medium for creating an emotional response or an altered perspective, if it can be used to make the diner pause and think, either in the restaurant or the home, then those occasions should be considered complex, aesthetic experiences, worthy of our time and attention.

NOTES 1 The current interest in the Futurist Cookbook and in the connection between food and art inspired TASCHEN to reprint Salvador Dali’s 1973 cookbook Les Dîners de Gala (republished November 2016). It will be interesting to see the impact it will have on chefs and artists alike. 2 Other examples of artists who grow plants or entire gardens as artwork include Christina Kelly, Leah Gauthier, and Julia Sherman.

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REFERENCES Adria, F., J. Soler, and A. Adria. 2005. ElBulli 2004. Cala Montjoi: ellBulli Books. Arad, Dafna. 2013. “African Migrants Help Israelis Acquire a Taste for their Neighbors,” in Haaretz, June 12, 2013. Blumenthal, Heston. 2008. The Fat Duck Cookbook. London: Bloomsbury. Carroll, Noel. 1999. “Identifying Art.” In Philosophy of Art: a Contemporary Introduction, 249–64. London and New York: Routledge. Carroll, Noel. 2008. “Aesthetic Experience, Art and Artists,”. In Aesthetic Experience R. Schsterman and A. Tomlin, edited by 145–65. London and New York: Routledge. Chang, David. 2016. “The Unified Theory of Deliciousness.” WIRED, August 2016. Chamberlain, Leslie. 1989. “Introduction.” In The Futurist Cookbook, edited by F. T. Marinetti, translated by S. Brill. San Francisco: Bedford Arts. Delville, M. 2008. Food, Poetry and the Aesthetics of Consumption. New York and London: Routledge. Dewey, John. 2005. Art as Experience. New York: Perigree. Gilbert, Ame, and Yael Raviv. 2011. “Space to Grow: women, art, and the urban agriculture movement,” Women & Performance 21: 3. Goldfield, Hanna. 2015. “Waste Not, Want Not, Eat Up?” The New Yorker, March 28. Heathfield, Adrian. 1999. “Risk in Intimacy: an Interview with Bobby Baker.” Performance Research 4 (1, Spring): 97–106. Hamilton, R., and V. Todoli. 2009. Food for Thought, Thought for Food. Barcelona and New York: Actar. Higgins, Hannah. 2002. Fluxus Experience. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1999. “Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium.” Performance Research4: (1, Spring) “On Cooking”: 1–30. Korsmeyer, Carolyn. 2008. “Taste, Food, and the Limits of Pleasure.” In Aesthetic Experience, edited by R. Schsterman and A. Tomlin. London and New York: Routledge. Korsmeyer, Carolyn. 2013. “Feasts and Philosophers: Continuity and Change in Theories of Taste.” In FEAST Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art, edited by Stephanie Smith, 367–71, Chicago: SMART Museum of Art, University of Chicago. Kroon, Mattias. 2012. “Forward.” In Fäviken, edited by Magnus Nilsson. New York: Phaidon Press. Kuehn, Glenn. 2005. “How can Food be Art?” In The Aesthetics of Everyday Life, edited by A. Light and J. M. Smith. New York: Columbia University Press. Littman, Brett. 2014. “‘Notes’ on Notes on Creativity: Ferran Adria and Brett Littman in Conversation,” Drawing Papers 110, Ferran Adria Notes on Creativity, 9–19, New York: The Drawing Center. Marinetti, F. T. ed. 1989. The Futurist Cookbook. Translated by S. Brill. San Francisco: Bedford Arts. Morris, Catherine. 1999. Food: An Exhibition by White Columns. New York and Münster: Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte. Myhrvold, Nathan. 2011. “The Art in Gastronomy: A Modernist Perspective.” Gastronomica 1 (1): 13–23. Newton, Maude. 2010. Jorge Louis Borges interview with German Kral 1998. “Jorge Louis Borges on the transformative Power of Art” in maudenewton.com, viewed August 2016.

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Novero, Cecilia. 2010. Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Pearlman, Alison. 2013. Smart Casual: the transformation of gourmet restaurant style in America. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Questlove. 2016. Somethingtofoodabout. New York: Clarkson Potter. Ruhlman, Michael. 2006. The Reach of a Chef: beyond the kitchen. London and New York: Viking Penguin. Ruhlman, Michael. 2007. “Professional Chefs: the chef as artist” in http://blog.ruhlman.com/ author/Michael. June 7, 2007. Viewed August 2016.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A Cultural History of Restaurants in Art Museums: Collaborative Creativities IRINA D. MIHALACHE

In the past couple of years, Bon Appétit, Food and Wine, Travel and Leisure, and even Vogue have started to compile yearly lists of “America’s Best Museum Restaurants” and “Museum Restaurants with Food so Good You Might Want to Skip the Art” (Cushing 2015). Other media outlets are also paying attention to the food served in museums. In a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle, readers learn that “Chef Corey Lee’s SF MOMA restaurant breaks the rules” (Luchessi 2016); Los Angeles Eater comments on Otium, the restaurant at the recently opened Broad museum, pointing out the celebrity status of Chef Timothy Hollingsworth and his spectacular menu (Kang 2015); and the New York Times informs about the reopening of the restaurant in the Brooklyn Museum, renamed The Norm, which offers “a new menu . . . international in scope, with dishes like chicharrones al pastor, curried cauliflower, a burger and tonkatsu-style ramen” (Fabricant 2016). Even a cursory glance at media coverage of food in museums shows a bias toward celebrity chefs cooking in state-of-the-art restaurants in large cultural institutions that already have significant cultural capital. The preference for communicating about such spectacular restaurants is also noticeable in the writings of museum professionals. In May 2015, Museum, the journal of the American Alliance of Museums, published a special issue on “Food in the Museum.” In the introductory article, Jessica B. Harris writes that “we have become a nation of food-obsessed individuals . . . . It is only logical that this national obsession eventually turn up at our museums” (2015, 36). Her examples of museum restaurants come from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC. One full chapter of the special issue is focused on the recently opened Museum of Food and Drink in New York City (Merritt 2015), while another chapter looks at recent “eat and drink trends in museums” (Barranco et al. 2015). None of these chapters establish any connections with the long history of food’s presence in museums, perpetuating a myth of newness regarding eating practices in museums. Considering the current overabundance of information about food, much of which is produced by and for foodies (Furrow 2016; Johnston and Baumann 2015; Naccarato and LeBesco 2012), this communicative preference is not surprising. However, locating

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the contemporary museum restaurant among other recent foodie trends and therefore focusing on the most recent practice in museum restaurants hides the long history of eating in museums, which goes back to the eighteenth century, when private collections were opening up their doors to the public. Writing about sensory engagements in the early public museums of that time, Constance Classen notes that “while it is true that visitors to collections did not customarily go around tasting the exhibits, their visit still might be informed by gustatory associations” (2007, 904). In a recent chapter, Mark Clintberg (2016) writes about the first museum restaurant at the South Kensington Museum (now Victoria and Albert) in London, which opened in 1867 and served steak pudding, jugged hare, and jellies. A 2014 blog article from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin provides a brief history of the different restaurants at The Met, with the first opening in 1905 and serving meals à la carte and table d’hôte (Post 2014). Taking into account the history of restaurants in art museums, particularly in North America, this chapter argues that the recent boom in museum restaurants is the most current phase of a long history of encounters between food and museums. The increase in communication about food, which Charlene Elliott calls “the jumble of food messaging” (2016, 6) resulting from food journalism, food television, and foodrelated social media, complemented by the rising number of spectacular museums (Costello 2009; Ponzini and Nastasi 2011; Alvarez Sainz 2012) and their restaurants and by the multisensorial “turn” in museum practice (Levent and Pascual-Leone 2014) explain the rising visibility of the museum restaurant. However, the emphasis on the contemporary culture of eating in museums makes obvious the absence of historical accounts of eating in museums. This chapter connects the contemporary museum restaurant—modern, creative, focused on local products, and run by a celebrity chef—with its history, suggesting that the current museum restaurants are a result of changes in culinary cultures and shifts in communication about food. This approach can be applied to any other time period not only to reflect on the relation between the restaurant and the museum but also to explore continuities and differences in museum dining. In addition, this chapter also claims that the restaurant has played a significant role in the life of museums since their early days in the eighteenth century, despite its absence from museum studies literature, and that it should be studied with the same intellectual and methodological rigor as any other space in the museum. The chapter will first discuss the many ways in which food and museums intersect in theory and practice, focusing on the history of consuming food in museum restaurants and zooming in on its most recent iteration: the spectacular restaurant, located in large and often newly renovated art museums, helmed by kitchen stars who exercise creativity and artfulness (and are vocal about it). Various models of restaurants can be found in contemporary museums, but even the smaller art museums indicate aspirational desires to catch up to their larger and more spectacular counterparts, by introducing fine-dining experiences, partnering with local producers, or emphasizing the culinary pedigree of their chefs. This is most likely because their visitors have expectations informed by previous visits to other museum restaurants. The museum restaurants mentioned earlier, located in large cities, have the power to establish culinary rules and food cultures due to their visibility and the celebrity status of their chefs. I suggest that this genre of restaurant has in fact produced a new type of dining, with its own practices and audiences. And while they strive within discourses of creativity and uniqueness, they perpetuate a set of standards in terms of food values, aesthetics, and overall dining experience.

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The museum studies literature tends to glance over spaces that have a commercial purpose, such as the restaurant and the gift shop, so the goal of this chapter, which focuses on restaurants, is to bring awareness of their historical significance and make space for restaurants in academic and professional reflections. To do so, I engage with the literature on museum studies, sensory studies, and food studies—with a focus on restaurants, to suggest some avenues for integrating the restaurant into discussions about museums. I draw examples from various restaurants in North American art museums, looking at media coverage, menus, and mission statements. I focus on restaurants in large and wellestablished North American art museums because they display many similarities in terms of restaurant concept, menu development, and restaurant aesthetics. Similar studies can be done in taverns located in historic sites, in food museums and science centers, or in history museums, among many others. Likewise, museum restaurants that operate within different frameworks of culinary value and practice could be compared to the new wave of museum dining. The art museum restaurant has the unique opportunity of co-opting the broader artistic institutional discourse which promises to transform a meal into an artful creation, while borrowing and sharing food practices from the contemporary culinary landscape.

FOOD AND MUSEUMS: MULTIPLE INTERSECTIONS The intersections between food and museums are many and overlap with most areas of practice in a cultural institution, from collections to public programming. Museums of all kinds—art, history, food and agriculture, natural history, science, historic and heritage sites, brand museums, and artist collectives—engage food in their practices, some more directly and formally than others. Historic and heritage sites in North America, for example, have been cooking for their publics and interpreting history through food since the 1930s, building on “raw ingredients,” as Michelle Moon (2016) calls the early history of the preservationist movement, such as pageants, tableaux vivants, and festivals. In many heritage sites and living history museums, the historic kitchen is one of the most popular spaces, primarily because it can activate history through taste and smell (Summers 1988). Another obvious genre of museums that relies on food is the food museum, which can be focused on one ingredient—the Canadian Potato Museum (Prince Edward Island, Canada) and Colman’s Mustard Shop and Museum (Norwich, England); on a dish—the Udon Museum (Kyoto, Japan), the Curryworst Museum (Berlin, Germany), and the SPAM Museum (Austin, Minnesota, USA); and on a region—the Southern Food and Beverage Museum (New Orleans, USA) and National Coffee Park (Montenegro, Colombia). Other food museums are broader in scope, engaging with political and cultural issues through food and educating about agricultural practices, production, and consumption—like Alimentarium (Lausanne, Switzerland), Foodseum (Chicago, USA), and Canada Agriculture and Food Museum (Ottawa, Canada). Most museums have a culinary story to tell, even if their focus is art, history, or science. In museums, which I define as “interdisciplinary spaces deeply interconnected with external contexts—political, social, cultural and economic” (Levent and Mihalache 2016, 3), food exists, often silenced and discreet, in multiple locations, performing different roles. For example, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, one can admire Adriaen Coorte’s 1696 “Still Life with Asparagus and Red Currants,” enjoy “an artsy lunch” (Frederick 2016) at the French-inspired Garden Café, and later cook “arugula, fennel, orange and goat cheese salad” (National Gallery of Art 2016), inspired by Hubert Robert’s paintings, from a recipe

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card that can be downloaded from the Gallery’s website. Those looking for more educational experiences can join the “Food for Thought” series, which invites participants to bring their lunch (or purchase it at one of the museum’s cafés) for a seminar-style discussion on topics related to the Gallery’s collection. While apparently disconnected, these encounters with food in the Gallery shape visitors’ experiences, especially when shifting between different levels of sensorial experience—looking at art, eating in the café, and listening (while tasting food) to the lecture. Museums are rich in culinary gestures, affording encounters with food that range from minimal interventions, such as the display of a Dutch still life, to major revisions of institutional mandates to incorporate food history, as in the case of the National Museum of American History (Johnson 2016). Following the categories proposed by the recent book Food and Museums (Levent and Mihalache 2016), the most common pairings between the culinary and the museological take place in collections and exhibitions, audience engagement strategies, cooking and eating in museums, and food and art. Maybe the most visible recent manifestation of museums’ interest in showcasing their connection with food is the food-centered blockbuster temporary exhibition. Several large museums in North America—the American Museum of Natural History (New York City) (Betley and Sterling 2016), the Art Institute of Chicago (Barter 2016), the “The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals” at the Getty in Los Angeles and “Big Food: Health, Culture and the Evolution of Eating” at Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History in New Haven—have developed spectacular exhibitions, with multiple food-focused public programs and extensive media coverage. These exhibitions and many others that have focused on food show the diversity of food-related objects that have been collected by museums but never displayed in this manner before. Many art collections, for example, are very rich in paintings and mixed media art that portray food and foodways (Barnes and Rose 2002; Malaguzzi 2006; Riley 2015) and house modern and contemporary art installations that use food as a medium (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1999; Celant 2015). Besides the museum collections, storage, and gallery, the most important culinary space in any museum is its restaurant.

EATING IN MUSEUMS: BUILDING UP THE RESTAURANT The existing museum studies literature is extremely poor in reflections about restaurants in museums. The major publications in the field, such as Sheila Watson’s Museum and Their Communities (2007), Bettina Carbonnell’s Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts (2004), or the most recent multivolume International Handbook of Museum Studies (2015), exclude museum dining entirely, with no attention paid to restaurants or other eating opportunities. This “myth of absence” might be explained by David Howes’ commentaries on the hierarchy of senses in the museums, a hierarchy that has been challenged in the past few decades by a reintegration of touch in museums, which “has in turn created a more receptive environment for the (re)introduction of other senses traditionally classified as ‘base’—in contrast to the ‘higher,’ ‘aesthetic,’ ‘distal,’ ‘intellectual’ senses of sight and hearing—such that smell and taste are now being actively solicited instead of censored ” (2014, 260). Since museums are primarily “exhibitionary” spaces (Bennett 1995), with a focus on sight and contemplative observation, taste and the space where taste is activated—the restaurant—have been unfairly overlooked. Evidence of the “myth of absence” comes from many accounts about art museums. For

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instance, Kenneth Hudson writes that, fifty years ago, “very few museums charged for entry and amenities like museum shops, cafés and restaurants were a great rarity” (2015, 138). Andrew McClelland claims that “a time traveler from the 1950s would surely be astonished to discover that it is now possible in our museums to eat (and eat well), shop, see a film, hear a concert, mingle at ‘singles night’, and attend a corporate function or wedding reception” (2008, 193). I would argue that a visitor from the 1950s would be surprised not to find all these social activities in the museum. The 1950s was in fact a very busy decade for museums, due in large part to the many culinary events planned by the volunteer women’s committees that were running the museums’ social lives and education programming (Mihalache 2016a). Despite evidence that food has played a significant role in visitor experience since the early days of museums, much of the museum studies literature has developed a rather distant relation with the museological spaces that fit under the category of “commerce.” In fact, the main argument, when it exists about shops or dining spaces, is framed by the simplistic story of commercialization as a potential threat to the integrity of the institution and its mission. For example, Andrew McClellan writes in The Art Museum: From Boulée to Bilbao that “perhaps no development in the art museum of the last half-century has been more dramatic and controversial than the increase in commercialism, by which I mean the expansion of the museum shops, the rise of the blockbuster exhibition and corporate sponsorship” (2008, 193). The fact that one entire chapter in the book is dedicated to “Commercialism” is unusual; however, the focus remains on the gift shop, an interest that results from the common histories of the museum and the department store, which have been documented and problematized by scholars such as Tony Bennett (1995), Haidee Wasson (2007), and Carol Duncan (2002). The restaurant is mentioned (without even a proper subsection in the chapter) as being one of the signs of the commercialization— and change—of the museum, contributing to the success of museums that capitalize on consumption practices—“many museum restaurants boast fine cuisine and merit culinary reviews” (McClellan 2008, 195). Another framework applied to the museum restaurant is that of distraction from the real purpose of museums, which is to look at art. Carol Duncan contemplates developments at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, stating that “the museum’s opening statement now consists of a large gallery of modern art, three new restaurants, a space for special exhibitions, and a large gift-and-bookstore. It is now possible to visit a museum, see a show, go shopping and eat, and never be reminded of the heritage of Civilization” (1991, 100–01). While her lamentation centers on the increasing lack of interest in ancient art and culture, her brief mentioning of the museum restaurant is not without significance, as it is labeled as a partner in the distraction of visitors from significant cultural artifacts. Along the same lines, Eilean Hooper-Greenhill wrote in The Museum and the Shaping of Knowledge that “shops, restaurants, rest and orientation areas occupy space that in the past would have contained objects and displays. As shops take over gallery spaces, museum exhibits are returned to storage, and items for sale take their place. Objects for looking at are replaced with objects for purchase. Museum visitors as lookers and learners are repositioned as consumers” (1992, 202). The fear that spaces such as shops and restaurants might detract from the pedagogical experience in the museum has alienated scholars from looking into the long history of restaurants in museums but also from considering the possibility that eating in museums could be another method for interpreting museum content.

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The diversity of uses of the museum restaurant—as art performance space (Clintberg 2012), as laboratory for recipes inspired by temporary exhibitions (Mihalache 2014), and as terrain for modernist culinary experimentation (Ho 2016)—speaks to the fact that a museum restaurant is more than just a space for food consumption. Nina Levent writes that “a museum restaurant is not simply an extension for the museum experience, a post-visit stop; a top museum restaurant like any restaurant can provide a complete sensory and dining experience” (2016, 265). In this context, the culinary team in the museum restaurant can explore taste’s potential as an added interpretive lens and make connections between food and museum objects (Mihalache 2016b). The little literature that exists about museum restaurants in the field of hospitality and arts management discusses the benefits of good and high quality food in museums for the overall visitor experience, suggesting that “the modernization of café environments and food offers in museums can be seen to be in tandem with the introduction of multimedia and entertainment aspects and an expectation of a cost-benefit self-sufficiency being applied to the previously funded institutions” (McIntyre 2008, 177). Observed only as a space for consumption or revenue making, praised by management and hospitality professionals, and mistrusted by museum scholars and practitioners, the museum restaurant seems to be caught in an ideological battle which hides the opportunity to explore the restaurant as a “complete sensory and dining experience” (Levent 2016, 265). In addition, bypassing the rich and long history of the museum restaurant unfairly represents it as a recent intruder into museological culture.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF RESTAURANTS IN ART MUSEUMS A look at bulletins from various art museums in North America indicates that restaurants were present as early as the 1900s in these institutions, suggesting that visitors would have been used to eating in museums. A 1929 issue of the Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston mentions the Restaurant, located in the basement of the Japanese Wing and serving food à la carte or table d’hôte (“Back Matter,” 1929, 102). The Bulletin of the Pennsylvania Museum explains that the Belmont House, which is a historical house and part of the museum’s complex, was used as a restaurant and modified accordingly (Kimball 1927, 336). In 1930s, the Art Institute of Chicago had two eating spaces, a cafeteria and a tea room, both serving luncheon and tea service, with the cafeteria open until 8:00 p.m. on Sundays (“The Restaurant” 1930, 15). In the early years of museum restaurants, the eating space was often tucked in a basement, as was the case at the Met and at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. To access the restaurant, the visitor had to pay museum admission (when applicable) and spend some time in the museum, making the act of eating secondary or complementary to the museum visit. When a proper restaurant did not exist in a museum, the volunteer committees would organize temporary eating spaces for special events or regular lunches. The Art Gallery of Toronto, for instance, was well-known for its snack lunches (1950s) and Men Only Lunches (1960s), which were organized by the women’s committees to increase museum membership (Mihalache 2016a). Other art museums that served food regularly in improvised spaces were the Cleveland Art Museum, the Department of Fine Arts at the Carnegie Institute (Pittsburgh), the Seattle Art Museum, and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Oftentimes, formal (restaurants with professional culinary teams) and informal (regular events where food was cooked

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and served by members of the women’s committees) food consumption coexisted in art museums, shaping culinary cultures inside and outside the museum. For example, the women’s committees at the Art Gallery of Ontario (formerly Art Gallery of Toronto), in partnership with Consumers Gas Company and Canada Packers, one of Canada’s largest packaged meat companies, organized culinary classes taught by famous chefs, such as James Beard and Dione Lucas. For many Torontonians, the Art of Cooking classes represented the first encounters with the culinary universe promoted by these chefs. Similar cooking classes were organized by other North American art museums, including the Albright Knox in Buffalo and the Cleveland Museum of Art. From the 1950s until 1980s, many museums in North America underwent major renovations, to add new wings and accommodate the increasing collections, or to reconfigure the space with the visitor in mind. Many of these renovations addressed the need for a larger and more visible restaurant and, often, multiple eating spaces. In many cases, the restaurants started to occupy more central locations in museums, often by the entrance, close to the gift shops. According to Stephanie Post (2014), The Met was constantly improving its eating spaces, culminating with the building of a new restaurant in 1953, to be housed in the Lamont Wing’s Roman courtyard. It was becoming customary at that time to include art from the museum’s collection in the restaurant space and to hire designers to create furniture and other objects specifically for the restaurant. For example, the new restaurant at the Met was designed by the well-known design company Dorothy Draper. At the St. Louis Art Museum, which was modernized by local architects Murphy and Mackey in the 1950s, the museum restaurant was intended to reflect modernist sensibilities through the inclusion of Alvar Aalto stools and Harry Bertoia chairs (Overby 1987, 24). The Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto witnessed a series of major transformations in the 1970s, which resulted, among other changes, in the addition of two eating spaces—the Grange Court restaurant, which was located on the main floor of the gallery, with great views of the art and a full menu, and the Cafeteria, situated in the basement and featuring more casual options, such as soups and sandwiches. Similar stories of restaurant revivals can be told about many art museums in North America, which made more space for cooking and eating, encouraging visitors to feel at ease dining in the gallery. If since the turn of last century, the restaurant slowly made its way from the basement to the main floor of the museum, the post-1980s witnessed a “revolution” in museum dining, which coincided with the increased visibility and interest in food on a global scale. At the same time, in the past thirty years, new museums have been built by celebrity architects showcasing spectacular architecture, collections, and, of course, restaurants. Guido Guerzoni calls this a “global phenomenon” observing that “the development was carefully planned at the national level, where the museum is seen as an accelerator of modernization and the symbolic locus of postmodernity” (2015, 190). A museum restaurant, such as Otium at the newly opened modern art museum The Broad (Los Angeles), designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is the embodiment of this new practice: stand-alone “celebrity” restaurants, run by famous and media-savvy chefs, highly curated, just like the galleries with which they are associated. I argue that this is the newest trend in the long history of museum restaurants, which is very much a product of the current relation individuals and communities are developing with food. Communication about food intensified considerably with the rise of food television in early 1990s, the prominence of the celebrity chef culture, the unavoidable presence of food in all digital spaces, and the public questioning of production, consumption, and promotion of food.

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The art museum is an active participant in political, social, and cultural matters, so it comes as no surprise that museum managers reacted to this global interest in food by making eating in museums a more prominent function. The increased relevance of food to contemporary audiences translates into museums through the diversification of eating spaces—most museums have multiple eating spaces (restaurants, cafes, cafeterias, espresso bars, snack bars, and food carts) and the development of restaurants as destination places unto themselves. The Met, for example, has eight eating spaces, including a Members Dining Room and a Rooftop Bar. The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City), which recently reopened in a new building designed by Renzo Piano, features a new restaurant, Untitled, “helmed” by Chef Michael Anthony of Gramercy Tavern, “the beloved New York City restaurant where Chef Anthony has garnered critical praise for his quintessential American cooking over the past decade” (Untitled 2016). A smaller restaurant, Studio Café, is also located in the museum, offering a lighter fare to museum-goers, with some “sweeping views of the Meatpacking District, the Hudson River, and the High Line” (ibid.). In a museological environment that values visitor experience and multisensorial engagement with museum content, the “new” restaurant—modern, innovative, creative—provides collaborative opportunities for museum professionals that have not been fully explored in the past. For museum-goers, the meal experienced in the museum, perceived as an extension of the museological experience, affords connections between museum objects and food, both constructed as artistic.

TASTING THE (ART) MUSEUM: THE RESTAURANT AS CULTURAL SPACE AND THE CHEF’S CREATIVITY It is quite common for chefs and their teams who cook in museum restaurants to take inspiration for their menus from the art on the museum’s walls. This inspiration goes beyond creating a themed menu—for example, FRANK’s (Art Gallery of Ontario) Frida and Diego menu, including “charred corn soup” and “spiced lamp shank with coffee mole”—or a thematic dish—“deconstructed BLT: Brown sugar and Bourbon-glazed bacon, smoked tomato purée, petit pain de mie crouton on a bed of garden greens” (Exhibition Menu 2015). Merging the restaurant concept, the museum’s identity, and the chef’s authorship and culinary philosophy look more like this: “Opening next door to the Broad presents many exciting opportunities for Otium to identify itself first and foremost as a place for artistic expression in all its forms, and this has given me an amazing blank canvas to craft a very unique and exciting restaurant for Los Angeles,” Hollingsworth said in the announcement. “I’ve always been a great admirer of Damien Hirst’s work, so we were thrilled when we had the opportunity to include a mural of his as part of the restaurant’s design.” (Gelt 2015) Otium adapts museological practices such as curation, interpretation, and exhibition design, becoming itself a space of display. Here, a themed menu would only be redundant, as the entire place is a translation of the museum’s mission, in this case, “the museum enriches, provokes, inspires, and fosters appreciation of art of our time” (Mission Statement 2016). Adding a spectacular modern art piece by Damien Hirst to the restaurant space solidifies the connection between the museum and the restaurant and implies that a visit to the

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restaurant is enough to get a sense of the museum’s collection and ethos. Life & Thyme magazine has called Otium Chef Hollingsworth’s “first solo project,” a nod to the much desired solo show by contemporary artists (Otium: Chapter One 2015). Making sense of this latest phase in the story of museum restaurants requires a look into the changing social and cultural significance of the restaurant in North America. David Beriss and David Sutton argue that “restaurants have become important symbols of postmodern life itself, with chefs transformed into media stars and restaurants increasingly carrying out symbolic work previously reserved for monuments and parades, representing the ethos of cities, regions, ethnic groups and nations” (2007, 1). Looking back at the history of restaurants, starting with its eighteenth-century meaning from the French restaurer and referring to a restorative broth which was served to those who were too ill to consume food in designated spaces, Rebecca Spang writes that “in the past 230 years, the restaurant has changed from a sort of urban spa into a ‘political’ public forum, and then into an explicitly and actively depoliticized refuge” (2000, 3). Looking at the two “definitions” together reveals that, historically, the restaurant had a social (public) function that has changed according to its uses by different communities of consumers and to its internal infrastructure. Amy Trubek notes that “restaurants, and the people who labor behind the scenes to transform the raw into the cooked, have also created new ways to experience and think about food” (2007, 35). The most visible actors “behind the scenes” are the chefs, who, since the 1960s and 1970s, “came out of the kitchen,” making their names and faces recognizable, to a point that “what matters now is who the chef is and where he has worked” (Leschziner 2015, 15). Similarly, Gwen Hyman reflects on the shift in chefs’ visibility, stating that “famous chefs have been around, more or less, for as long as have been restaurants; but there’s something different about the twenty-first century American star” (2008, 43). Therefore, the pleasures of eating out are generated by the totality of the experiences and stories provided by the restaurant—the “symbolic work” discussed by Berris and Sutton, including the chef’s biography, which is a “promise” to the diner that the food on the plate will be reflective of the culinary expertise and values of the creator. The fact that in the past few years, print and digital media have started to refer to museum restaurants as a genre of eating out indicates the repetition of a series of practices which become visible, desirable, and expected. Just like restaurants that serve regional, farm-to-table or new American cuisine, the museum restaurant can be identified as a new form of dining, presenting its own characteristics, manifested in the restaurant’s mission, chef biography, cooking philosophies, plating techniques, and design considerations. In At the Chef’s Table, Vanina Leschziner analyzes the work of chefs in elite restaurants as cultural production motivated by the enactment of creativity. She writes, “Just like musicians, painters, filmmakers, or scholars, chefs must convey a sense of authenticity in their styles to legitimate their work” (Leschziner 2015, 7). At the same time, Leschziner continues, “Chefs face competing pressures to emulate the ideas that are popular in their environment to ensure a customer base and to differentiate from peers to stand out” (ibid.). Being a chef in a restaurant located in an art museum provides the opportunity for a new form of differentiation, which creates a dining experience centered on the artistic ethos borrowed from the broader institutional context, while maintaining authorship and independence. In this framework, the restaurant and the museum are partners in cultural and artistic production, functioning on equal footing. This is very visible at The Broad’s Otium, which creates its own museological experience—integration of art in the restaurant, as it brands its culinary style as “elegant rusticity”; at AGO’s FRANK, a

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restaurant serving “global bistro cuisine” which is named after two Franks: Gehry, the architect, and Stella, whose art is on display in the restaurant; at the Whitney’s Untitled, which is a winner of the James Beard Award for Best Restaurant Design; and at the recently opened Estela Breuer, located in the new Met Breuer, which promises to “provide a distinctively modern culinary experience that responds to the contemporary context of The Met Breuer and its iconic Marcel Breuer-designed building” (“The Metropolitan Museum” 2016). This new genre of dining borrows from the broader contemporary culinary scene while differentiating itself through its distinct location—inside an art museum, an institution that already has significant cultural capital. Inside the art museum, the restaurant can comfortably rely on the curatorial discourses and artistic ambiance already in place. Therefore, the partnership between celebrity chefs and art museums raises the expectation for creative and artful dishes, which decreases the need for a historically grounded rationale for the borrowing of culturally diverse ingredients and the embracing of locally sourced ingredients, two practices which are often critiqued in the work of restaurants that cater to a foodie audience (Johnston and Baumann 2015; Heldke 2003). Much like the encounter with an art object in a gallery is often curated as an intimate experience, not requiring contextualization in history or culture (McClelland 2003), an interpretive approach critiqued by Cheryl Meszaros (2006), the ingestion of a dish in a museum restaurant follows similar assumptions. Hyman writes about these new “kitchen stars” that they brought their own vision of Americanness into the kitchen—a vision still shaped by French notions of excellence, but incorporating regionalism, local ingredients, the tastes and flavors of the street and the home kitchen. They brought new ideas about finedining cookery to their kitchens, borrowing from the immigrant and post-immigrant home cooking many had grown up with, from the “ethnic” restaurants of their cities, from regional American folk-cultural and street-cultural foodways. (2008, 44) In the museum restaurant, under the discourse of creativity, innovation, and groundbreaking techniques on par with the museum’s identity, the appropriation of “ethnic” ingredients and the pairing of foods with very distinct geographies and histories—“Fluke aguachile, cherry tomato, cashew” (Untitled Menu 2016), “Halloumi Tacos, Mashed Avocado, Pickled Shallots, Radish, Petite Cilantro, Chipotle Salsa” (The Wright Menu 2016), “Jerk Chicken: Coconut Rice, Black Beans, Pineapple” (Otium Menu 2016), or “Jidori Chicken: Black barley, yogurt, za’tar spice, almond crust” (Ray’s and Stark Bar Menu 2016)— is not explained in relation to the chef’s cultural identity or tied to the contemporary multicultural ethos. Thus, such restaurants claim an identity which is acultural due to the universality of artistic creation. In addition, the restaurants commit to a cuisine that is as local and ethically sourced as possible. Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Ray’s and Stark Bar serves “a Mediterranean-inspired menu, consisting of seasonal fare and favorites from our woodburning oven, including Neapolitan-style pizza, housemade pastas, salads made with the freshest ingredients from our own garden, and small plates to share” (Patina Group, 2016). At the Broad Museum, Otium “draws inspiration from the 100-year-old olive trees planted in The Broad’s adjacent plaza by utilizing rustic cooking with wood fire and sustainable ingredients grown in the garden of the restaurant’s mezzanine” (Otium 2016). At the Cleveland Art Museum, the focus on locally sourced ingredients is embedded in the name of the restaurant itself: “The name ‘Provenance’ is derived from the French

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provenir, meaning ‘to come from.’ The word refers to the chronology of ownership pertaining to a historical object or work of art, but can also be used when describing the origin of food—particularly food from local sources” (About Provenance, 2016). The repetition of similar discourses, ingredients, and chef’s stories suggests that what is framed as artistry and creativity is in fact a calculated and necessary strategy for surviving in an overcrowded food market. Leschziner writes that “understanding creativity in cultural creation requires an analysis of the organizational dynamics of a field to explain its social structure and internal logics” (2015, 171). The market-driven decisions of the restaurant management should not detract from the potential of the restaurant to represent an integral space in the interpretive infrastructure of the museum. A restaurant is indeed a space for consumption but it is also an essential cultural producer, and in the context of the museum, a potential generator of visitor experiences founded in taste. Looking at the complexity of the museum restaurant as a contemporary institution with deep historical roots can provide some nuanced interpretations of its changes and adaptations.

CONCLUSION: ARTFUL DINING IN MUSEUM RESTAURANTS It appears that restaurants in museums have come a long way since the turn of last century but in a sense they have followed the broader historical trajectory of the relation between food and society. Looking back at the restaurants in North American art museums, it is possible to note how the restaurant and its culinary culture have been influenced by forces external to the museum, such as culinary preferences of diners, media coverage, and the place of the chef in cultural production. At the same time, the restaurant has shaped the space of the museum, starting in the basement as a necessary experience secondary to the museum visit and making its way to prime space, being partner with rather than being subordinate to the museum. By changing the geography of the museum, the restaurant has also impacted museum-goers’ experiences and expectations to a point where many plan their museum visits based on the culinary options available on-site. The presence of the celebrity chef in museums has also created hierarchies and pressures in museological contexts. While most large art museums in North America have restaurants and try to keep up with all the current trends, not all can afford to house a state-of-the-art restaurant, designed and furnished by a famous architect and managed by a top chef. Cities that are already rich in celebrity chefs and culinary capital, such as New York City and Los Angeles (Leschziner 2015), tend to have more visible museum restaurants, also due to the spectacular nature of their art museums. A cursory look at art museums in cities such as St. Louis, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Cleveland, Seattle, Chicago, Calgary, Houston, and Vancouver shows a tendency toward the same direction: many of these museums include the chef’s story with other information about the restaurant, often emphasizing the chef’s experience in other well-known restaurants; the menus take inspiration from the museum’s content; and partnerships with local farmers and producers are emphasized. This anticipates the question: What’s next for museum restaurants? A possible answer comes from a recent experiment at In Situ, the “exhibition restaurant” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which, under the leadership of chef Corey Lee, has assembled a menu of “reproductions” of famous dishes composed by celebrity chefs, such as “Ketchup Fried Rice, fried egg, sesame seed” (In Situ Menu, 2016), a dish created by Roy Choi in

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2013. The language used to define the menu’s composition is directly borrowed from artistic terminology, suggesting that the museum restaurant imagines itself as an exhibition, a space of display where authenticity comes from references to major culinary “artists.” It is possible that the museum restaurant of the future will be fully integrated with the museum where it is located, transformed into a gallery rather than an auxiliary experience. Along the same lines, museum galleries can be transformed into restaurants, such as the case of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, where Chef Craig Thornton installed a rococo-themed pop up dining room as an art installation, serving creamed kimchi and beef tongue (Ulaby 2016). Such culinary projects play on the intersections between cooking and artistic production, blurring the lines between artists, chefs, and curators. While such projects are artistic and highly imaginative, they are not inclusive or welcoming to all museum visitors, requiring, besides financial capital, interpretive skills and artistic knowledge that are not the norm among contemporary citizens. What I tried to do in this chapter is connect current practices in museum restaurants with the history of museums and their eating spaces. The evolution of the museum restaurant cannot be explored without bringing the restaurant back into the stories we tell about museums in various bodies of academic literature. Therefore, museum studies scholarship needs to be inclusive, documenting all spaces that make up the museum and considering the relation between traditional museological spaces and spaces for consumption. Museum archives are full of information about the history of museums, including their restaurants. By accessing archival documents—museum bulletins, reports of the volunteer committees, internal communication between various departments, exhibition files, and public programming records, researchers can see just how important food and eating have been for the history of museums. Such research projects focused on food would also uncover collaborations between museums and other commercial and cultural institutions in their communities. Every art museum has a culinary story, and more research in this area would reveal the complexity of the museum as a cultural institution which is composed of a diversity of spaces, some unexpectedly relevant, such as the restaurant.

REFERENCES Alvarez Sainz, Maria. 2012. “(Re)building an Image for a City: Is a Landmark Enough? Bilbao and the Guggenheim Museum, 10 Years Together.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 42(1): 100–32. “America’s Best Museum Restaurants.” Travel and Leisure. Accessed June 15, 2016, http://www. travelandleisure.com/slideshows/americas-best-museum-restaurants. Art Gallery of Ontario. 1974. Coming events November/December. “Back Matter.” 1929. Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts 27(164): 102. Barnes, Donna R. and Peter G. Rose. 2002. Matters of Taste: Food and Drink in SeventeenthCentury Dutch Art and Life. Syracuse: Albany Institute of History and Art/Syracuse University Press. Barranco, Marika, Sabina Carr, Ann Chan, Ann Wei-ting and Lindsay Martin. 2015. “Food Forward: Eat and Drink Trends in Museums.” Museum 94(May/June): 50–53. Barter, Judith. 2016. “Reflections on ‘Art and Appetite’: Painting America’s Identity through Food.” In Food and Museums, edited by Nina Levent and Irina D. Mihalache, 277–87. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

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Bennett, Tony. 1995. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. New York: Routledge. Beriss, David and David Sutton. 2007. “‘Starter’ Restaurants, Ideal Postmodern Institutions.” In The Restaurant’s Book: Ethnographies of Where We Eat, edited by David Beriss and David Sutton, 1–15. New York: Berg. Betley, Erin and Eleanor Sterling. 2016. “Exhibiting the Food System at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.” In Food and Museums, edited by Nina Levent and Irina D. Mihalache, 149–157. London: Bloomsbury. Carbonell, Bettina Messias. 2012. Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts. London: WileyBlackwell. Celent, Germano. 2015. ed. Arts & Foods: Rituals since 1951. Electa: Milano. Collins, Kathleen. 2009. Watching What We Eat: The Evolution of Television Cooking Shows. New York: Continuum. Classen, Constance. 2007. “Museum Manners: The Sensory Life of the Early Museum.” Journal of Social History 40(4): 895–914. Clintberg, Mark. 2012. “Gut Feeling: Artists’ Restaurants and Gustatory Aesthetics.” Senses & Society 7(2): 209–24. Clintberg, Mark. 2016. “Local, National, Cosmopolitan: The Rhetoric of the Museum Restaurant.” In Food and Museums, edited by Nina Levent and Irina D. Mihalache, 203–220. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Costello, Lineu. 2009. “The Multiple Roles of a ‘Starchitecture’ Museum.” The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum 2(1): 45–66. Cushing, Belle. “Museum Restaurants with Food so Good You Might Want to Skip the Art.” Bon Appétit. Last modified May 1, 2015. http://www.bonappetit.com/restaurants-travel/ article/museums-restaurants. Duncan, Carol. 1991. “Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship.” In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Levine, 88–103. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Duncan, Carol. 2002. “Museums and Department Stores: Close Encounters.” In High-Pop: Making Culture into Popular Entertainment, edited by Jim Collins, 129–54. New York: Blackwell Publishers. Elliott, Charlene. 2016. Introduction to Food Promotion, Consumption and Controversy, 3–18. Edmonton: AU Press. Fabricant, Florence. “Günter Seeger Wants You to Feel at Home.” New York Times. Last modified May 17, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/18/dining/restaurants-gunterseeger-ny.html?_r=0. Frederick, Missy. “Where to Eat by the National Mall during Tourist Season”. DC Eater blog May 27, 2016. http://dc.eater.com/maps/national-mall-restaurants-visiting-dc. Furrow, Dwight. 2016. American Foodie: Taste, Art and the Cultural Revolution. Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield. Gelt, Jessica. “Damien Hirst Mural to Adorn new Broad restaurant Otium.” Los Angeles Times. Last modified September 14, 2015. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-etcm-damien-hirst-mural-broad-museum-restaurant-otium-20150914-story.html Guerzoni, Guido. 2015. “The Museum Building Boom.” In Cities, Museums and Soft Power, edited by Gail D. Lors and Ngaire Blankenberg, 187–200. Washington, DC: The AAM Press. Harris, Jessica B. 2015. “Cafeteria Connections: Some Food for Thought and Thought for Food.” Museum 94(May/June): 36–42.

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Ho, Tienlon. 2016. “Corey Lee’s Collection of Masterpieces.” Lucky Peach Fall: 88–94. Howes, David. 2014. “Introduction to Sensory Museology.” Senses & Society 9(3): 259–67. Hudson, Kenneth. 2015. “The Museum Refuses to Stand Still.” Museum International 261–64: 136–42. Hyman, Gwen. “The Taste of Fame: Chefs, Diners, Celebrity, Class.” Gastronomica 8(3): 43–52. Johnston, Josée and Shyon Baumann. 2015. Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape. New York: Routledge. Johnson, Paula J. 2016. “Growing Food History on a National Stage: A Case Study from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.” In Food and Museums, edited by Nina Levent and Irina D. Mihalache, 113–29. London: Bloomsbury. Kang, Matthew. “Inside Otium, Timothy Hollingsworth’s Blockbuster Downtown LA Restaurant.” Los Angeles Eater blog, November 23, 2015. http://la.eater. com/2015/11/23/9784994/otium-timothy-hollingsworth-restaurant-downtown-losangeles#4886903. Karp, Ivan and Steven D. Levine, eds. 1991. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. “Kimball Belmont House.” 1927. Bulletin of the Pennsylvania Museum, 22(111): 333– . Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1999. “Playing to the Senses: Food as Performance Medium.” Performance Research 4(1): 1–30. Levent, Nina and Irina D. Mihalache, eds. 2016. Introduction to Food and Museums, London: Bloomsbury. Levent, Nina. 2016. “Chefs as Content Creators: Arzak Kitchen and elBulli Foundation.” In Food and Museums, edited by Nina Levent and Irina D. Mihalache, 104–10. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Leschziner, Vanina. 2016. At the Chef’s Table: Culinary Creativity in Elite Restaurants. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Luchessi, Paolo. “Chef Corey Lee’s SF MOMA Restaurant Breaks the Rules” San Francisco Chronicle. Last modified June 6, 2016. http://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/article/ChefCorey-Lee-s-SFMOMA-restaurant-breaks-the-7961920.php. Malaguzzi, Silvia. 2006. Food and Feasting in Art. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum. McClelland, Andrew, ed. 2003. Art and Its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium. New York: Blackwell Publishing. McClelland, Andrew. 2008. The Art Museum from Boulée to Bilbao. Berkeley: University of California Press. Macdonald, Sharon, ed. 2006. A Companion to Museum Studies. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Merritt, Elizabeth. 2015. “Beyond Four Walls: A Conversation with Peter Kim about Creating a Museum of Food and Community.” Museum 94(May/June): 43–49. Meszaros, Cheryl. 2008. “Un/Familiar.” Journal of Museum Education 33 (3): 239–46. Mihalache, Irina D. 2016a. “A Museum’s Culinary Life: Women’s Committees and Food at the Art Gallery of Toronto.” Global Food Histories 2(2). Mihalache, Irina D. 2016b. “Critical Eating: Tasting Museum Stories on Restaurant Menus.” Food, Culture & Society 19(2): 317–36. Mihalache, Irina D. 2014. “Taste-full Museums: Educating the Senses One Plate at a Time.” In The Multisensory Museum: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Touch, Sounds, Smell, Memory and Space, edited by Nina Levent and Alvaro Pascual-Leone, 197–212. Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield. Moon, Michelle. 2016. Interpreting Food at Museums and Historic Sites. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Naccarato, Peter and Kathleen LeBesco. 2012. Culinary Capital. London: Berg. National Gallery of Art. “Garden Café Menu.” Accessed July 10, 2016. http://www.nga.gov/ content/dam/ngaweb/visit/pdf/menus/spring-2016-recipe-card.pdf. Overby, Osmund. 1987. “The Saint Louis Art Museum: An Architectural History.” Bulletin (St. Louis Art Museum) 18 (3): 1–41. Otium. “About.” Accessed July 10, 2016. http://otiumla.com/about/. Otium: Chapter One. Directed by Antonio Diaz. Los Angeles: Life & Thyme, Sprout LA, 2015. Accessed July 10, 2016. http://lifeandthyme.com/films/otium-chapter-one/ Patina Group. “About.” Accessed July 10, 2016. https://www.patinagroup.com/rays-and-starkbar/about. Ponzini, Davide and Michele Nastasi. 2011. Starchitecture: Scenes, Actors and Spectacles in Contemporary Cities. New York: Umberto Allemandi & C. Post, Stephanie. “Table d'hote and à la carte: The Museum’s Restaurants.” The Met Beta blog, June 13, 2014. http://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/digital-underground/2014/museumrestaurants. Provenance Restaurant. “About.” Accessed July 10, 2016. http://www.clevelandart.org/visit/ provenance/about-provenance Riley, Gillian. 2015. Food in Art: From Prehistory to the Renaissance. London: Reaktion Books. Rousseau, Signe. 2012. Food Media: Celebrity Chefs and the Politics of Everyday Interference. New York: Bloomsbury. Smith, Andrew R. 2009. “Fair Food.” In Eating History: 30 Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine, 95–104. New York: Columbia University Press. Spang, Rebecca L. 2000. The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Summers, John. 1998. “Beyond Brown Bread and Historic Cookies: New Directions for Historic Kitchens.” Material Culture Review 27: 1–14. The Broad. “Mission Statement.” Accessed July 10, 2016. http://www.thebroad.org/about/ mission-statement “The Metropolitan Museum of Art Collaborates with Estela Restaurateurs at The Met Breuer.” The Met. Accessed July 10, 2016. http://www.metmuseum.org/press/news/2015/estela-breuer. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Exhibition Menu—Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection. ” Accessed January 10, 2015. “The Restaurant.” 1930. Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago 24(1): 15. Tran, Van Troi. 2015. “How ‘Natives’ Ate at Colonial Exhibitions in 1889, 1900 and 1931.” French Cultural Studies 26 (2): 163–75. Trubek, Amy. 2007. “Tasting Wisconsin: A Chef’s Story.” In The Restaurant’s Book: Ethnographies of Where We Eat, edited by David Berris and David Sutton, 35–43. New York: Berg. Ulaby, Neda. “At LA’s MOCA, A Celebrated Chef Serves Up Dinner as Art Installation”. Accessed October 6, 2016. http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/07/11/485572488/atlas-moca-a-celebrated-chef-serves-up-dinner-as-art-installation. Untitled. “About.” Accessed July 10, 2016. http://www.untitledatthewhitney.com/ Wasson, Haidee. 2007. “Every Home an Art Museum: Meditating and Merchandising the Metropolitan.” In Residual Media, edited by Charles R. Acland, 159–84. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Watson, Sheila, ed. 2007. Museums and their Communities. New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Performing With(in) Food DAVID SZANTO

OVERTURE . . . in which a staging is suggested . . . In the domain of food, many things perform and in many different ways. Under the appropriate conditions, seeds germinate, grow into plants, and produce fruiting bodies (themselves containing a new generation of potential “performers”). Cooks and eaters also perform, in an interdependent way, enacting gestures and utterances, while following and improvising around scripts that are both formalized and intuited. Many types of artists perform both with and about food, producing visceral and cognitive effects in those who witness their work. All of these food performances perpetuate (and sometimes destabilize) the socio-technical and eco-political patterning of natural environments, cultural landscapes, and human existence. And together, they can be understood as constituting the broader, collective performance of the world’s food systems. For many, “food performance” may evoke images of culinary theatrics and chocolatesmeared bodies. Yet the examples above suggest that performative food moments exist in an array of forms, from the artistic to the social to the ecological. Thus while performance might be described as a “twice-behaved behavior” (Schechner 1985, 35) or a “behavior consciously separated from the person doing it” (Carlson 2004, 3), it can equally be understood more generally, as the “dynamic relationship between action and the environmental conditions of its enactment” (Pearson 2006, 220). Debate over performance abounds—whether it is the “re-presentation” of real life (Fischer-Lichte 2008), an imitative “representation” of reality (Plato), or the relationship between lived experience and cultural expression (Turner 1982)—making it a rich field for food scholarship. In any interpretation of performance, a number of common elements can be found: articulations of matter, meaning, and movement; spatial boundaries and the unfurling of time; and the processes of perception and interpretation, themselves a type of “actor” in what transpires. This raises an intriguing question about who or what needs to be present for a performance to exist: Can it occur beyond the gaze of human audiences? And how might we understand material, nonhuman, and ecological movements as performances— fruit trees falling, yeasts migrating, genes adapting, markets shifting—and then use these interpretations in meaningful ways for other areas of food study? Examining where and when performances begin and end, and therefore what they encompass and exclude, can help us reimagine epistemic and ontological frameworks for food. Performance acknowledges the multisensory, cognitive, emotional, and

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affective nature of food and food systems, broadening theoretical models and methodological practices. Performance creates fluidity between research and reporting, and can decentralize knowledge beyond conventional authority figures and forms of representation. Importantly, when we use food and performance to blur boundaries— between self and other, mind and body, matter and discourse—new questions emerge about the larger project of scholarly work overall. By probing a number of examples of food performance, this chapter begins to respond to these matters, while revealing several throughlines within food and food systems at multiple scales. In parallel, it also serves to transition between Section III and IV of this book, demonstrating the continuities within such themes as eating, architecture, art, and design, as well as subsequent concerns regarding power, agency, and sociodiscursive constructions.

LIGHTS UP . . . as we imagine the scope of what is to come . . . Consider these two performance scores:1 I slowly eat 1 kilo of honey with a silver spoon. I slowly drink 1 liter of red wine out of a crystal glass. I break the glass with my right hand. I cut a five pointed star on my stomach with a razor blade. I violently whip myself until I no longer feel any pain. I lay down on a cross made of ice blocks. The heat of a suspended space heater pointed at my stomach Causes the cut star to bleed. The rest of my body begins to freeze I remain on the ice cross for 30 minutes until the audience interrupts the piece by removing the ice blocks from underneath. (Abramović 1973) I place 1 teaspoon of sencha in a measuring cup. I pour water heated to 75°C into the cup. I stop when it rises to (just above) the 10-ounce line. I walk to my desk. I sit on the chair that is there. With my right index finger on my laptop trackpad, I slide the cursor over the Finder icon. With my right thumb, I click twice in rapid succession. I select a file, and reiterate the thumb actions above. I rise. I move to my bookshelf and select several volumes. I place them on the floor near my chair. I walk to the kitchen. Using a small white plastic strainer, I slowly pour the green tea into a mug. I lift the mug and walk back to my desk. I open a notebook and read. I sit. I type. I repeat the above until I have completed a book chapter. (Szanto 2017)

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The former, from Marina Abramović’s boundary-breaking Lips of Thomas, outlines a theatrical presentation in which actor, audience, food, other matter, and the built environment blur into a singular transformative moment. The latter, conceived and written by me for this book chapter, would likely produce little emotional-affective impact were it to be enacted for an observer. As you read the second score, you may think it describes a few mundane events, bearing minimal significance beyond an academic’s ordinary writing day. You could argue that, without audience or explicit dramaturgy, it is not a performance. You might compare it to the food art of Alicia Rios, Marije Vogelzang, or Rirkrit Tiravanija, and decide it provides nothing in terms of cultural or cognitive impact. Or (as you may currently be doing) you might view it as a tool to reimagine the notion of performance and start to develop a framework for thinking-doing-feeling through food contexts. (Even as you read the words “you” and “I,” you may recognize how a book chapter is itself a multiple performance— of writer, editor, publisher, reader, and other agencies.) All of these reactions are what food performances can provoke. Another (more frustrated) response has been: If anything from contemporary gastro-art to growing and eating can be considered a food performance, then what’s the use in naming it “performance”? Indeed, classifying things as “performance” or “not performance” is not particularly useful. The greater value is in using performance to perceive realities anew. Performance is “less ‘a thing done’ than a set of questions asked” (Schneider 2006, 253) and a way to draw attention to the situational “actants” (Latour 2005) that often go less observed. Importantly, it is also a way to attend to the agency that these things carry in our food systems and related practices.

. . . and are introduced to some of the players . . . Performance is a means to view the ways in which matter, meaning, and movement are inseparably entangled, together producing observable effects—that is, our so-called food realities. Often, however, research and reporting practices aim at separating such realities into “component elements,” motivated by a desire to understand variables individually. A useful tension arises between holism and granularism, and it is in this negotiative space that performance provides value. Granularizing things, we could say that matter refers to physical elements, such as plants and animals, human bodies, tools for making and transporting food, kitchens and classrooms and fields, and many others. Meaning then comprises discursive symbols and what they represent, including recipes and almanacs and food policies, less-tangible things like the concept of gastronomy or the notion of food identity. And movement involves processes of interaction—gestures and modes by which relationships are activated among matter and discourse. Viewed holistically, however, matter cannot exist without meaning, or vice versa, and interaction is an irrelevant concept without physical stuff or ways to describe it. Practice, therefore, is the unification of all three elements of performance, and embraces all the moments within the food production-consumption web, whether they are carried out by humans or not. Scale, framing, perception, and reflection are additional elements that are key to performance. Scale of observation frames how a performance is viewed and interpreted: narrowly, or “on stage” and at a distance from its observers; or more broadly, and engulfing the audience, the space of performance, spectation, documentation and recordings, and subsequent reflection. At this point, delimiters of performance become somewhat

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arbitrary, and the question What IS performance? gives way to the more useful query, What can performance DO? In what follows, three portrayals of performance help respond to this question. Act I looks at food performance within a close framing, including instances of art, theater, and installation. They point to the ways in which food activates the breadth of the human sensorium,2 and thus highlight the importance of attending to a multiplicity of food knowledges, beyond the visual-cognitive. Act II widens the framework to encompass more systemic performances, including those of biogeophysical and socio-technical ecologies (i.e., “nature” and “culture”). Here, the importance of scale is underscored, including the ways in which it can elide certain performers. Act III then deals with the framework of power, using performance to critique the assumptions and models that undergird many academic and social practices. Authority and positionality come to attention, as well as the ways in which apparatuses of research and reporting figure in constructing our socalled food experts—doctors and marketers, grandmothers and scholars. A final section presents some possible what if? scenarios for food and performance, and where such work might eventually lead.

ACT I . . . in which the senses take center stage . . . Although Lips of Thomas is not widely cited as an instance of food performance, it is exemplary of the performative potential of food matter. In the piece, the consumption of honey and wine forms an initial corporeal connectivity between artist and audience. Later, those “spectators” break the performance boundary by “interrupting” it, in part because of this affective relationship. Over the past decades, performance artists have increasingly come to exploit the relational presence of actual food, because of the way it troubles the line between “imitative” representation and “real” re-presentation. In the moment when an actor eats or drinks on stage, the sensorial immediacy blurs the two interpretations of performance into a “multistable” whole (Fischer-Lichte 2008). By activating our emotional and corporeal responses, the sensory effects of food in performance go beyond theorization. Artist Karen Finley’s work with chocolate, honey, eggs, yams, and a series of other edibles has aroused enthusiastic, angry, and visceral responses (Finley 2000). Over her extended history in performance, she has variably engaged food to represent other (often bodily) substances. Similarly, Jana Sterbak’s infamous Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic (1987) stirred up discomfort and controversy, while simultaneously demonstrating how food itself performs (along with salt, air, and time). Sometimes referred to as the “meat dress,” the cured flank-steak couture was ostensibly about fashion, aging, and the restrictions placed on women’s bodies; its fleshy immediacy, however, generated far more than intellectual discussion. In these two cases, the foods that were mobilized in artistic performance did just what foods do in more day-to-day performances: they created a commonality that crossed the boundary between actor and audience, unifying both sets of bodies in a collective performance. The works demonstrate that, when placed on or in another body, food serves to destabilize the boundary between outside and inside—the self-other divide that both isolates and securitizes the individual (Bell and Valentine 1997; Fischler 1993). In addition to terrorizing public funders such as the National Endowment for the Arts,

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Finley’s and Sterbak’s work with food was troubling to audiences because of the relational intimacies it made evident. Food performance, however, can also reassure and nurture those who witness it. Comforting smells, gestures, and sounds often accompany the work of those artists who make and serve food as an enactment of home, placemaking, and belonging (AlZeri 2014; banished? productions 2015). At the same time, however, when such sensory cues take place within an artspace, museum, or theater setting, they call attention to the normativities of the surrounding environment and the extraordinary nature of food within these settings. For example, in his 1992 performance Untitled (Free), Rirkrit Tiravanija prepared and served Thai curry at a New York art gallery (Nickas and Consey 1997). By eating, visitors suddenly contravened the don’t-touch-the-art rule (let alone don’t-stick-it-in-your-mouth . . .), calling into question who and what was performing— artist, food, society, mores.

. . . while denying conventional hierarchies . . . Historically, the human senses were divided into “proximate” and “distant,” “upper” and “lower” (Tuan 2005; von Hoffman 2013). By bringing close the outside world, sight and hearing were deemed worthy of intellectual attention, while smell, taste, and touch were considered corporeal and base, because they demonstrated our animalistic natures. Although contemporary work in food scholarship and sensory studies is helping to topple this hierarchy (Banes and Lepecki 2007; Howes and Classen 2013), millennia spent privileging ocular-centrism have had its toll. Usefully, however, the very disfavor of the ‘low’ senses supports the distinct value of deploying food in performance: it stands out from the formal distanciation of sight and sound, jumping (often literally) into our throats and bodies. In a similar fashion to Tiravanija’s work, the food-related performance-installations within the 2014 Elektra/BIAN exhibition at Montreal’s Museum of Contemporary Art also messed with conventional interpretations of performance. A feeding robot, a 3-D sugar printer, and a digestive tract pill-camera brought together digital technologies, food matter, and human bodies in complex, boundary-blurring ways (Tingley 2014). These works demonstrated that non-human agents as well as the insides of human bodies both perform and constitute sites of performance. Importantly, as much of these performances took place in mouths, esophagi, and viscera, they were not visually perceived by the eater, yet nonetheless sensed in other ways.3 Many senses came to the fore, deeply experienced by the “audience.” Such work oscillates along conventional art-life delimiters, “denying the line, crossing it, bringing art into life and life into art” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1999, 26). Over the history of using food in performance, artists have brought important attention to the ways in which we use our senses. The early 1900s saw the Italian Futurists challenging norms by seeking to isolate sensorial channels, creating banquets of both edible and non-edible stuff (Marinetti 1989). By the end of the same century, however, artists like Alicia Rios and Daniel Spoerri were creating works with the objective of demonstrating the inseparability of the human sensorium, and the ways in which ‘sensing’ time and space play in perceiving and interpreting foodish realities. Rios’ A Temperate Menu, first performed in Cardiff in 1994, brought to the table mini environments made of food. Through this multisensory performance, Rios activated a mutually immersive experience in which human participants entered her foodish environments, just as these ecological tableaux entered the humans4 (Kirshenblatt-

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Gimblett 1997). Spoerri’s work, while very different, uses sensory destabilization to immerse his audiences in the longitudinal environment of space-time. By mounting the remnants of meals on tables, and then orienting the tabletops vertically (and in a gallery) rather than horizontally (and in a home), he transfers past timelines of durationally performed commensality into the static present of representation (Howells and Hayman 2014). Once again, a “multistable” food moment is created, in which visual sensing blurs with the intuited reconstruction of multiple sensing. Notably, and in parallel to these movements, scholars have debated the value of the sensory immediacy of food in performance. Variably, it has been argued, it “upstages” theatricality (Iball 1999), imbricates itself with dramatic realism (Garner 2007), or nullifies precisely what makes theater relevant, infecting the exceptionality of drama with the mundanity of “real” food matter (Artaud 1958).

. . . and producing experience throughout the corpus . . . In these examples, food performance becomes a means by which to bring attention to the senses, to destabilize divisions among what and who is performing, and to upend conventional hierarchies. Importantly, it also shows that the experience of reality is produced when sensing and cognition perform together, also implicating the roles of emotionality and affect, as well as temporal and spatial perceptions. A key implication is that knowledge—as a residue of experience—is situated throughout the mind-body complex. What is more, knowledge often resides beyond the human corpus, in the diffused liminalities between humans, food, space, and time. Indeed, starting with a few localized examples of food performance, some key abstractions reveal themselves quite quickly, including the related notion of performativity.

ACT II . . . in which we depart the theater . . . All sorts of stage and acting metaphors come up when writing about performance, and yet these images become problematic when performance is examined more broadly. While food performances often take place within the spatial framings of an art space, restaurant kitchen, or studio, they also tend to sneak past those boundaries, merging with other bodies, places, and times while producing transformative effects across multiple scales. Usefully, performativity helps to trouble highly situated views of performance. In the previous section, this was suggested by the example of gallery-goers’ insides and outsides—two different systems of performing things, yet linked to and transformed by the other. Many scholarly examples of performativity exist within analyses of food production, processing, and consumption, such as those in fisheries, cheese making, and olive-oil tasting (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2010; Mansfield 2003; Paxson 2013). In these cases, numerous systemic elements bump up against each other across variable time frames and spatial delimiters. Performativity describes the transformational effects of these interactions. Within a system, “individual things” are never fully individualized, but inherently linked to the other parts of that system (Homer-Dixon 2011). Any interaction therefore performs change across the system, not just “locally” on the “individuals” involved. The extent to which these changes are either felt or perceived has become the focus of the many “performative turns” currently taking place in such areas as reflexive anthropology,

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science and technology studies, economics, and design, among others.5 Performativity has thus become an articulation point among multiple fields, enabling performance to penetrate wider discourses, including those that construct what we call nature and culture, ecology and society. By directing attention toward food, performativity, and performance, insights can be extrapolated from one to the other, and back again. Why name systemic behaviors as performance, rather than ecology or mechanics? One reason is that it helps recall that, when discursive and material elements interact with each other, they are mutually transformed, as is the system that they comprise. Linear explanations of what is taking place tend to break down, while space is made for the emergence of unexpected outcomes. Marianne Lien and John Law’s discussion of Norwegian salmon fisheries, for example, portrays a series of effects that cannot rightly be understood through causality-based explanations (2011). Transformations abound in their narrative: individual fish become biomass; feed-conversion ratios become digital data; salmon become “wild” salmon and farmed salmon become “aliens”; quotas and regulations become acceptances and resistances; fin morphologies become other physical patterns. Yet none of these semio-technical changes can be traced to a single interaction; instead, they are all a collective performance of the whole system.

. . . to wander into the wilderness of words (and other things) . . . Some of the history of performativity can be traced to the “performative speech act,” a term coined by linguistic philosopher John Langshaw Austin (1978). This type of verbal utterance (for example, “I declare you husband and wife . . .,” “I christen this ship . . .,” “I bet you . . .”) is understood as changing the reality in which it takes place, but only when the conditions around it also enable such change. Although much debate over performativity has since ensued (Loxley 2007; Miller 2007; Searle 1977), the idea that words perform, when articulated into other socio-technical assemblages, has opened up a great deal of useful discourse on the performativity of nonhuman things. Extending performativity from words to language, and from language to other immaterial things such as thought, sensing, and perception, many artists and scholars also now deal with the performativities of food matter. “Material agency” or “thing power” (Bennett 2009; Knappett and Malafouris 2008) describes the capacity of the nonhuman to have effects in the world, including in food contexts. Peter Atkins’ historiography of milk (2010) and Michel Callon’s analysis of “domesticating” both scallops and fishermen (1986), for example, demonstrate that naming humans as “producers” can tend to ignore critical parts of what happens when food is made. Performativity helps draw attention to these moments of unexpected agencies, while also challenging certain conventions of scholarship.

. . . while wondering about what else is performing . . . One scholarly assumption that is destabilized by performativity is that our apparatuses of research are neutral to the results of that work. That is, as an assemblage of both theoretical and mechanical elements, research apparatuses are not simply devices by which we observe and measure reality. Instead, they may “produce the phenomenon in the first place” (Bachelard 1984, 13). Certainly, if we accept the performative potential of words and matter, then when we put words together into theories, and attach them to the material devices of methodologies, outcomes will emerge that cannot be predicted in advance. Moreover, where an apparatus starts and stops is not always determined by

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our own hands. Despite the “agential cuts” (Barad 2007) that scholars make to define the limits of their practice, the articulations between our apparatuses and the world “beyond” continue to operate. This conundrum is particularly challenging when attempting to understand the performances of larger food systems. That is, if one tries to account for every one of the elements of a given research subject, the scale of things becomes unwieldy. We therefore make our cuts, describe what is inside and what is outside, and then carry out the work. But does the world beyond still have effects on what happens “within” the framing? Does an unseen physical element influence the behaviors of the identified elements under investigation?6 Does the language used to describe a research context—in research notes, academic articles, book chapters—alter the reality of that situation? The answer to all these questions is Yes, sometimes. And being able to continue with our research, knowing that that uncertain “sometime” might be now, is what a performance-based approach supports.

. . . so as to return to a stage reset . . . Increasingly, using performance in research is opening up new questions about food and food systems, ones that challenge some of the assumptions and paradigms that undergird historic knowledges (Doonan 2016; Jones and Heathfield 2012). Some of these include the points addressed above—the relevancy of material and linguistic agency, of the distributed nature of assemblages, of the unpredictability of complex dynamics. Others relate to the frameworks that have guided academic practices in the past—that is, the ways in which disciplines perform scholarly outcomes. Performance-based work allows the researcher to participate within her focus of attention, creating endogenous and participative moments that can only be described subjectively. This may diverge from what is often valorized in academia, that is, “objectivity.” Nonetheless, such a non-dualistic trajectory can redirect our thinking-doing practices of food in order to resituate us “beside” our research subjects—forming alternative relations of “desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and others” (Sedgwick 2003, 8), rather than ordering, controlling, and even knowing (with certainty, anyway). Moreover, and particularly as food research butts up against some of the “super wicked problems” (Levin et al. 2012) that characterize contemporary food systems, the beside and within of performance may be a useful, nonlinear means of engagement.

ACT III . . . in which we act and then reflect . . . In eating designer Marije Vogelzang’s performance-installation, Eat Love Budapest, Roma women feed Hungarian citizens while telling stories of their past lives (Gajdos 2013). The eaters sit within fabric tents, surrounded by images of the women’s families, homes, and culture. The feeders sit outside the tents, passing food through the cloth with spoons and fingers. There is no face-to-face contact, yet a close intimacy is constructed through the words and food matter that are provided. Vogelzang’s work rattles various relationships—between eater and eaten, artist and witness, traveler and resident. It puts on display the power dynamics that become activated through food practices, while also destabilizing the assumptions and expectations of

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the people who participate. Interviews with the Hungarian eaters show that, after the experience, they sense multiple kinds of transformation—in themselves, their perceptions of the Roma, their feelings about nurturing and being nurtured. In this way, Eat Love exemplifies what a food performance can do, provided there is occasion to be reflexive about what has unfolded. The process of reflecting (and often incorporating those reflections into subsequent iterations of a work) is what makes performance a powerful tool in both activist art and critical academic work. That is, it becomes a “strategy” for acknowledging how both the presentation of artistic concepts and the representation of academic research are laden with power (Dolan 1996). Importantly, it also becomes a call to make manifest the positionality of the artist or researcher in presenting her work, and to challenge one’s own “expertise” as author. By extension, it also challenges the common perception that performance audiences are mere passive spectators, while resituating in them the authority of being co-performing “experts.” In similar ways, artists Basil AlZeri and Jennifer Rubell work to induce reflection among those who participate in their performances. AlZeri, a Toronto-based Jordanian Palestinian, uses the small details of food making to redirect attention inward. His durational performance of Pull, Sort, Hang, Dry, and Crush (2014) is slow and minimal, both allowing and requiring those who witness it to reflect on his acts and the food matter in front of them. It leverages obliquity and evocation, forcing participants to mingle whatever knowledge they possess of Middle Eastern food, politics, and identity with their own personal stories and histories. The experience is distinct for each person, yet linked by the process of reflection. In Rubell’s work—often taking the form of meticulously arranged, large-scale installations—witnesses taste and wander, explore and question. Her Just Right (2010) is designed to inspire a Goldilocks-like curiosity about the perfect bowl of porridge (although perhaps with less naïveté than the original character). What she does not explicitly present creates a “process gap” or “gap-opportunity” (Szanto 2015) that invites individuals to bridge disconnects and thereby acquire a sense of agency. Whereas all performances may do this to a certain extent, the intentionally incomplete design of Rubell’s and AlZeri’s work shows how mindfulness can be used in activating a participative, reflective, and very active role among audiences.

. . . on our collective participation . . . Now established as a permanent structure in Pittsburgh’s Schenley Plaza, Conflict Kitchen is a food-stand-cum-performance-space-cum-social-experiment (Howells and Hayman 2014). The concept is simple and threefold: (a) serve hot, delicious food from a downtown take-out window at relatively low cost; (b) source the recipes from countries with which the United States is in military conflict; and (c) print the food wrappers with interview transcripts from people living within those regions. The effects of this performance, however, are anything but simple. Over the years, the artist-academics behind Conflict Kitchen have come under fire by various critics and lobby groups claiming that they are, variously, disseminating falsehoods, being anti-patriotic, and supporting terrorists (McCart 2014). International media, as is their wont, have produced coverage of these critiques, while often layering in their own analyses and interpretations (Conflict Kitchen 2016). These stories and others are then used as examples of food performance and activism in classrooms,

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conference presentations, and book chapters, and perhaps from there inspire future artbased interventions or academic theories. And all the while, local Pittsburghers continue to head over to Schenley Plaza at their lunch breaks for some tasty sandwiches, salads, and snacks. At each of these scales, the performance of Conflict Kitchen shrinks or expands to encompass food, eaters, design, political agents, media devices, and story construction. The threads of qualitative research methods, cuisine, and drama weave throughout. And importantly, what emerges is an understanding of collectivity in making food realities, including the participative agency and responsibility of more than just the “central” actors. A related performance entity is the Center for Genomic Gastronomy (CGG), which plays between the artistry of food and the science of human bodies. Their work also implicates the externalities of technology that remain within these environments. Smog Tasting (2011) and Cobalt-60 BBQ (2013) toy with the tension between the pleasures of sweet treats and backyard barbecues, and the risks associated with breathing and ingesting sulfur oxides and heavy metals (CGG 2016). With these performances, the “world out there” becomes part of human physiology. Concomitantly, human actions are shown to produce those same residues that circle back to our bodies. In a more recent CGG work, Molly Garvey’s Soylent Social (2016) brought the functionality of the food-powder system, Soylent,7 into a performative gastronomy context. With three small cups of liquids and pastes laid out before her audience members, Garvey led a guided tasting, complete with note taking on aroma, body, and texture. The three quasi-food samples were found to be quite distinct from each other— not as “tasteless” as originally assumed, and far from neutral. What is more, by situating these “food replacements” within a sensory analysis context, they re-became food, while simultaneously implicating the distributed nature of edibility, pleasure, and taste, among other gastronomic concepts.

. . . and the continuity within food systems . . . Ecologists have long known that “there’s no environment out there . . . we are the environment” (Gunnarson 2010) and that the key characteristic of food systems is the inseparability of their elements (Clapp 2012). This is what food performances demonstrate, from the art-activism examples above to the academic analyses that portray them. In the commercial sphere, many contemporary restaurateurs have also started engaging with performance, both to delight their dining clients as well as demonstrate ecological continuity. The so-called field-to-fork approach is one model, in which a farm-kitchenmouth throughline is enacted at the table. Other, more subtle versions also exist within the culinary landscape. René Redzepi’s Copenhagen-based restaurant, Noma, is known for having contributed momentum and brought attention to New Nordic Cuisine (Hayes 2007). This style of cooking not only valorizes northern-sourced ingredients and recipes, but also places the food within a material-culture environment that is locally relevant. Table settings, architectural elements, and restaurant atmospherics all perform a role in the experience of such meals. In 2016, Noma “traveled” to Australia, where the notion of Nordic was turned upside down, both figuratively and literally (Redzepi 2016). The chef and his team used their new location as actor and theater, script and audience, while continuing to probe how a food system performs a meal and directing attention to different details of the revised environment.

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In another take on systemic performances, Polish gastronomes Matylda Grzelak and Adrian Klonowski have used their aptly named Gdansk-based restaurant, Metamorfoza, as an anchor for a number of annual experiments. In 2016, the project involved building an “urban farm” in a disused part of the city, planting crops and installing dairy equipment to serve the restaurant’s needs (Metamorfoza 2016). Rather than viewing it as a closed loop, they situated both restaurant and garden as elements within a broader assemblage— including suppliers, diners, Polish foodways, and the vagaries of the northeastern European climate. In addition to activating food media attention and gastronomic wordof-mouth, the pair mobilized a community’s imaginary into the performance, pointing to the ways in which poetics and politics are also implicated.

. . . including systems of scholarship . . . Curiously, and despite the robust potential for reflexivity and epistemic innovation, few food scholars have fully engaged with the hybrid cycles of research-and-representation that are offered up by performance. Similarly, the material agency of food—its “liveliness” (Whittall 2017)—goes under-examined by performance researchers, which is perhaps an artifact of the anthropocentrism that characterizes academic work more generally. Performance thus remains an analytic framework for the most part, rather than also being an applied method of research. Where this is not the case is in certain institutions that have embraced “research-creation,” “practice as research,” or “artsbased research” (Chapman and Sawchuck 2012), and among those individuals for whom art and academia are meaningfully complementary tools (Doonan 2014; Szanto 2016). Given the movement toward expanding the boundaries of food studies (Anderson et al. 2016), critical engagement with performance will surely grow in time.

DENOUEMENT . . . in which little is untangled, but an encore is suggested . . . Contemporary performance practices offer artists, activists, academics, and agrarians a means by which to acknowledge and participate in the “becoming” nature of food systems. Performance reveals the emergent nature of food milieus while drawing attention to the numerous things that perform their realities. It privileges more of the human sensorium in research and reporting methods, and it helps de-center power and authority from conventional sites of knowledge making. As this domain of intervention and investigation continues to evolve, what might performance activate next? Even as artists have shown some oft-obscured agencies within macro food environments, attention might well be drawn to smaller ecologies as well. Increasingly, researchers are coming to understand the critical role of the microbiome in performing the nature of humanity (Faure et al. 2015; Zimmer 2012). Bodily bacteria, yeasts, and viruses—in and on us—play a crucial role in physiological, cognitive, and perhaps affective human functions. Yet as we collectively seem to be eradicating more and more microbial life through our “war on germs” (Katz 2012), what is being wiped out of ourselves? Through work at the intersection of performance, food, and fermentation, a number of practitioners may be starting to answer some of these questions. Artist-academics such as Markéta Dolejšová (2016) and Maya Hey (2015) are probing the what if? possibilities of microbial performance in their work, layering in perspectives from human-computer

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interaction, political theory, feminist technoscience, and dance, among others. Combined with, for example, knowledge about distributed sensor networks (Salter 2015) or insect swarm behaviors (Gloor 2006), this kind of leading-edge food-and-performance practice may offer exciting breakthroughs in terms of how intelligence and knowing are produced, and the role of food in such processes. Within pedagogy, performance might offer tools that support innovation and studentcentered learning. The perspective that performance is a process of “dealing with the ergonomic problems of [a] taskspace” (Pearson 2006, 220) suggests that enabling students as performers can be a means to activate learning-through-doing. Weaving in threads from actor-network theory, autoethnography, and reflexive storytelling (Conquergood 2002; Latour 2005; Wacquant 2004) might then allow performance to become a way of constructing “agential antenarratives” (Boje 2011), that is, hypothetical stories that empower students to imagine and enact their own academic futures. A much more speculative (and extreme) direction for performance might be to create contexts in which the power of a food expert is so decentralized as to evaporate her authority altogether. Such an accelerationism-inspired shift in expertise may seem like an absurd misinterpretation of Dolan’s “strategy” for using performance to critique academic positionality. Yet if it allowed knowledge to become radically resituated within an extensive world of “non-experts,” what might it lead to in terms of actually democratizing food access and sovereignty? Future generations may be better able to weigh in. From farming to cookery, theater to fermentation, theorization and definition to epistemic upending, performance offers food scholars a wide array of tools, perspectives, and strategies for activating and representing knowledge. Within its wide embrace, performance brings together the materiality and significance of food, and the ecology of ecologies whence food appears and into which it diffuses. And within the universe of potentialities across which it stretches, performance also contains the seeds of its own undoing—the critical, reflexive awareness that it is but one framework for thinking, doing, and feeling with(in) food.

NOTES 1 A performance score, like a musical score, is an artist’s tool for both framing a performance and providing cues for eventual interpretation, expansion, and improvisation. 2 The human sensorium can be understood as the full complement of a person’s sensing capacities, as articulated with her cultural and historical context. That is, it is not limited to physiological-cognitive processes, nor just to the conventionally understood “five senses,” but brings together “the entire perceptual apparatus as an operational complex” (Bull et al. 2006). 3 It should be noted that, at a broader scale, the outside of the eaters also performed— facial expressions, bodily gestures, vocalizations, etc. In this case, the other museumgoers surrounding and perceiving these “actors” did use vision as a sensing tool of the performance. More about scale is addressed in Act II. 4 A decade later, a similar experience would be enacted by restaurant chefs, such as Noma’s René Redzepi, practicing the so-called New Nordic Cuisine. 5 Other fields engaging with performativity include complexity theory, gender studies, political science, design, and actor-network theory. For more, see: Butler 1988; Callon 2006; Conquergood 1989; Derrida 1977; Fry 2008; Ingold 2011; Law and Hassard 1999; Orr 2004; Salter 2014; Sedgwick 2003.

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6 For an elegant illustration of the surprise effects of “outside” elements on research outcomes, see Karen Barad’s discussion (2007, 161–68) of the famous Stern-Gerlach experiment, in which a puff of smoke from a researcher’s cheap cigar made a success of what was initially assumed to be a failed moment in quantum physics. 7 Soylent is the name of a meal-replacement powder manufactured from rice, oats, sunflower oil, and vitamins and minerals. According to its website, it provides “optimum nutrition, personalized experience, and outstanding per-calorie value” (Rosa Labs 2016). It has become the subject of discussion and debate in recent years, from both opponents and advocates, including an online community that shares open-source recipes and consumption modes (Dolejšová 2016).

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Hayes, Jonathan. 2007. “Manifesto for a New Nordic Cuisine.” Food & Wine, May. Hayes-Conroy, Allison, and Jessica Hayes-Conroy. 2010. “Visceral Difference: Variations in Feeling (Slow) Food.” Environment and Planning A 42(12): 2956–71. doi:10.1068/a4365. Heldke, Lisa. 2006. “Farming Made Her Stupid.” Hypatia 21(3): 151–65. doi:10.1111/j.1527-2001.2006.tb01118.x. Hey, Maya Eva. 2015. “Messy Matters: How Performative Acts of Fermentation and Material Agency ‘Do’ Food.” Master Thesis, Pollenzo, IT: University of Gastronomic Sciences. Homer-Dixon, Thomas. 2011. “Complexity Science.” Oxford Leadership Journal 2(1). http:// www.oxfordleadership.com/journal/vol2_issue1/oljindex.html. Howells, Tom, and Leanne Hayman, eds. 2014. Experimental Eating. London: Blackdog Publishing. Howes, David, and Constance Classen. 2013. Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society. New York: Routledge. Iball, Helen. 1999. “Melting Moments: Bodies Upstaged by the Foodie Gaze.” Performance Research: On Cooking 4(1): 70–81. Ingold, Tim. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London ; New York: Routledge. Jones, Amelia, and Adrian Heathfield. 2012. Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History. Bristol: Intellect Books. Katz, Sandor Ellix. 2012. The Art of Fermentation. White River Junction (VT): Chelsea Green. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1997. “Alicia Rios: Tailor the Body’s Interior.” The Drama Review 41(2): 90–111. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1999. “Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium.” Performance Research: On Cooking 4(1): 1–30. Knappett, Carl, and Lambros Malafouris. 2008. Material Agency: Towards a NonAnthropocentric Approach. New York: Springer Science & Business Media. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Law, John, and John Hassard. 1999. Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: WileyBlackwell. Levin, Kelly, Benjamin Cashore, Steven Bernstein, and Graeme Auld. 2012. “Overcoming the Tragedy of Super Wicked Problems: Constraining Our Future Selves to Ameliorate Global Climate Change.” Policy Sciences 45(2): 123–52. doi:10.1007/s11077-012-9151-0. Lien, Marianne Elisabeth, and John Law. 2011. “‘Emergent Aliens’: On Salmon, Nature, and Their Enactment.” Ethnos 76(1): 65–87. doi:10.1080/00141844.2010.549946. Loxley, James. 2007. Performativity. New York: Routledge. Mansfield, Becky. 2003. “Fish, Factory Trawlers, and Imitation Crab: The Nature of Quality in the Seafood Industry.” Journal of Rural Studies 19(1): 9–21. doi:16/S0743-0167(02)00036-0. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. 1989. The Futurist Cookbook. Translated by Suzanne Brill. San Francisco: Bedford Arts. McCart, Melissa. 2014. “Conflict Kitchen Wrappers Spark Conversation on Foundation’s Role.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, November 6. http://www.post-gazette.com/local/ city/2014/11/06/Conflict-Kitchen-wrappers-spark-conversation-on-foundation-s-role/ stories/201411060163. Metamorfoza. 2016. “Restauracja Metamorfoza Gdańsk.” Accessed June 7. https://www. facebook.com/Restauracja-Metamorfoza-Gda%C5%84sk-261389470544653/.

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Miller, J. Hillis. 2007. “Performativity as Performance / Performativity as Speech Act: Derrida’s Special Theory of Performativity.” South Atlantic Quarterly 106(2): 219–35. doi:10.1215/00382876-2006-022. Nickas, Bob, and Kevin Consey. 1997. “Rirkrit Tiravanija.” In Performance Anxiety. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art. http://ejournal.narotama.ac.id/files/Rirkrit%20Tiravanija.pdf. Orr, David W. 2004. The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paxson, Heather. 2013. The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America. California Studies in Food and Culture, vol. 41. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pearson, Mike. 2006. “In Comes I”: Performance, Memory and Landscape. Exeter Performance Studies. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press. Redzepi, René. 2016. “Redzepi on Redzepi: The Noma Australia Exit Interview.” Gourmet Traveller. March 30. http://www.gourmettraveller.com.au/restaurants/restaurant-newsfeatures/2016/3/redzepi-on-redzepi-the-noma-australia-exit-interview/. Rios, Alicia. 1994. “A Temperate Menu.” Peformance/plant matter. http://www.alicia-rios.com/ en/food/edible-representations/temperatemenu.html. Rosa Labs. 2016. “Products.” Accessed June 7. https://www.soylent.com/products/. Rubell, Jennifer. 2010. “Just Right.” JenniferRubell.com. http://jenniferrubell.com/projects/19just-right-project. Salter, Chris. 2014. Alien Agency: Ethnographies of Nonhuman Performance. Cambridge: MIT Press. Salter, Chris. 2015. “Ilinx.” Video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF8RKjvewIk. Schechner, Richard. 1985. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Schechner, Richard. 2003. Performance Theory. New York: Routledge. Schneider, Rebecca. 2006. “Intermediality, Infelicity, and Scholarship on the Slip.” Theatre Survey 47(2): 253–60. doi:10.1017/S0040557406000238. Searle, John R. 1977. “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida, by John R. Searle.” Glyph 2. http://www.scribd.com/doc/29238861/Reiterating-the-Differences-A-Reply-toDerrida-by-John-R-Searle. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press. Sterbak, Jana. 1987. “Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic.” http://collections.walkerart. org/item/object/957. Szanto, David. 2015. “Performing Gastronomy: An Ecosophic Engagement with the Liveliness of Food.” PhD dissertation, Montreal: Concordia University. Szanto, David. 2016. “Eater/Eaten: What Revolves Around Who?” In Food and Revolution. Dublin Institute of Technology. http://arrow.dit.ie/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1071&conte xt=dgs. Szanto, David. 2017. “Performing With(in) Food.” In Handbook of Food and Popular Culture, edited by Peter Naccarato and Kathleen LeBesco. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Tingley, Jane. 2014. “Hedonistika at the BIAN.” University of Waterloo. July 23. https:// uwaterloo.ca/stratford-campus/blog/post/jane-hedonistika. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 2005. “Pleasures of the Proximate Senses.” In The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink, edited by Carolyn Korsmeyer. New York: Berg. Turner, Victor Witter. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications.

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von Hoffmann, Viktoria. 2013. Goûter le monde: une histoire culturelle du goût à l’époque moderne. New York: Peter Lang. Wacquant, Loïc. 2004. Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whittall, Edward. 2017. “Taste, Performed: M. Clavel and the Live Feed.” Performance Research: On Taste 22(3): 31–34. Zimmer, Carl. 2012. “Tending the Body’s Microbial Garden.” The New York Times, June 18, sec. Science. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/19/science/studies-of-human-microbiomeyield-new-insights.html.

PART FOUR

Sociopolitical Considerations: Contemporary Debates and Trends

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

From Food Advertising to Digital Engagements: Future Challenges for Public Health REBECCA WELLS AND MARTIN CARAHER

Global spending on advertising is predicted to increase in 2016, with large food companies being the second biggest category after the automotive industry. These food companies are predicted to spend $30.7 billion on advertising and promotion, compared to $30.4 billion in 2015 (Maddox 2015). An increasingly globalized food industry has successfully used advertising and marketing to develop and promote trademarked products in order to increase sales with brand recognition, brand loyalty, and economies of scale. Oxfam (2013) estimates that worldwide, 500 companies control 70 percent of food choice. They identify ten powerful global food and beverage corporations, employing millions around the world and generating revenues of more than $1.1 billion a day (Oxfam 2013). Their food brands are promoted, marketed, and advertised in a sophisticated way, with many of them recognized worldwide. The global reach and influence of these companies is significant—their annual revenues of more than $450bn outstrip the GDP of all lowincome countries combined (Oxfam 2013), which the World Bank put at $392.9bn in 2015 (World Bank 2016). This global food market has emerged within the last 100 years or so. While some products have been branded for centuries, for example bread, which carried its baker’s mark since at least the thirteenth century (Wilkins 1994), Lien and Jacobsen (2013) connect the beginning of mass food marketing to food production changes at the end of the nineteenth century. This period saw the industrialization of the food industry with advances in transportation, packaging, and processing (Wilkins 1994). Food produced at a distance from its consumers began to be sold by middlemen such as shopkeepers. Food manufacturers began to package and brand their products both to protect them and to denote their quality. This had the additional impact of building manufacturers’ own relationships with their customers (Douglas 1984). The rise of the mass media in the form of newspapers was occurring at about the same time and the mass circulation of these newspapers ensured a wider audience for the advertisements they carried. Lien and Jacobsen (2013) see a paradigm shift in the mid-twentieth century when mass production

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of food and supply surpluses saw a growing interest in generating consumer demand and adopting sophisticated marketing techniques. Further shifts in media occurred with the development of new technologies, including the introduction of television and more recently with social media. Advertising and marketing are separate but linked activities, advertising being part of the marketing process. However, while advertising occurs at a specific point in the production process, marketing occurs throughout: before, during, and after. Food marketing “is enacted as complex and all-encompassing. It is potentially everything to do with food until it is digested” (Lien and Jacobsen 2013, 259). The “marketing mix” model, introduced in the 1950s (Borden 1964) sees the marketer as a “mixer” of a number of product elements to optimize profit (Gronroos 1994). The Four P’s model (product, price, place, and promotion) of the marketing mix gained popularity in the 1960s (McCarthy 1960) and came to dominate marketing theory for decades (Gronroos 1994). Some have introduced more Ps to the list to account for the marketing of services (e.g., people, physical evidence) but the original 4P model has persisted, despite its limitations (e.g., Glanz et al. 2012). However, another paradigm has emerged, “relationship marketing,” which focuses on interaction between company and consumer in an effort to create a longer-term relationship that builds profits on repeat business (Gronroos 1994; Lindgreen 2003). The food industry makes use of both the 4Ps model and increasingly uses social media to enhance its relationship marketing, for example, to encourage brand loyalty (e.g., Nieburg 2013; Heneghan 2016). Originally carried out in-house, marketing and advertising are now often carried out by separate, expert organizations—themselves now constituting a massive global industry. Alongside has grown a substantial public relations industry, dating from the early twentieth century (Evans 2013). There are clear links between the old media channels of print, radio, and television and new social media. At the moment, social media are largely used to build on the relationships developed through marketing processes and have not, as yet, replaced traditional mass media channels. This replacement may occur as a generation emerges that is more comfortable with new media. Currently, traditional media such as television and radio use advertising to encourage individuals to visit social media sites. Here products are “directly marketed” to individuals based on their browsing history across multiple devices, creating the illusion of personal interaction. Researchers have examined the extent to which marketing and advertising have led to the mass global consumption of highly processed food and beverage brands or whether global brands have achieved market dominance through efficient distribution, economies of scale, and market forces. At the end of the twentieth century, the majority of food industry advertising expenditure was on highly packaged food, while advertising of meats, fruits, and vegetables was negligible (Gallo 1999; Adams et al. 2009). By 2006 some researchers found a decline in overall food advertising on television; in Canada, the majority of television food advertising focused on restaurants and meals while in the UK the majority was for food stores, for example, supermarkets (Adams et al. 2009). This reflects both social trends and power concentrations: eating out in North America accounts for a large and growing percentage of the household budget (USDA 2014) giving power to the North American hospitality industry (Schlosser and Wilson 2006; Albritton 2009). In the UK eating in the home represents the bulk of household food spent (DEFRA 2015) and the big retailers in the UK have a powerful influence on food choice and culture (Blythman 2012; Lawrence and Dixon 2015). These ratios fluctuate over time, relative to food prices and disposable incomes, however, the total amount spent on advertising by

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the food industry has consistently dwarfed the amount spent by the government on nutrition information or education (Keane 1997; Gallo 1999; Nestle 2013). The public health community has repeatedly expressed concern over the mass consumption of highly processed foods that are energy-dense and high in fat, salt, and sugar (HFSS foods). Moodie et al (2013) point out that these industrially produced “ultra-processed” foods and drinks are durable, appetizing, and convenient, giving them a commercial advantage over fresh, perishable products. Marketers and advertisers have promoted these advantages, emphasizing reliability, convenience, and economy in their intensive and extensive marketing of these products. Many scholars (e.g., Moodie et al. 2013; Nestle 2013; Moubarac et al. 2014) say that HFSS processed foods have largely replaced fresh, minimally processed foods in the diets of the Global North, prompting further concern over the extent or contribution the aggressive marketing of HFSS products has on rising global noncommunicable diseases related to poor diets (Moodie et al. 2013). Public discourse (e.g., in the mass media, see Adams 2011) has focused on a binary argument in which public health actors argue for increased regulation of “unhealthy” foods (e.g., Story and French 2004; Moodie et al. 2013) while marketing and industry bodies tend to argue for the benefits of self-regulation, the free market, and individuals’ right to choose (Buse and Harmer, 2007; Kraak et al. 2012; Gornall 2014). However in the academic literature there are debates about the simplistic classification of foodstuffs as “healthy” or “unhealthy,” and the tendency for the media and research in nutrition science to focus on individual nutrients at the expense of overall diets. Dixon (2009) and Scrinis (2008) argue that this “nutritionalism” can cause food to be seen merely as a collection of nutrients—denying its complex cultural and social significance. In some countries such as Brazil and Australia, new food guidance relegates some foods to the category of discretionary, removing them from the “food plate” or “food pyramid” altogether. This helps negate some of the arguments over definitions of “healthy” versus “unhealthy” food, as they are deemed non-foods to begin with. While this may not have much impact on consumer choice, it could encourage the food industry to reformulate their products, to avoid having them designated as a nonessential food. A response from the public health community has been the development of a discipline called “social marketing,” which seeks to harness commercial advertising and marketing principles for social good (Hastings 2007). Examples include campaigns by public health organizations to promote healthier eating patterns such as the UK’s Change4Life program (see below for further discussion on this), fortification of foods with micronutrients in India (Bhagwat et al. 2014), and culturally relevant diabetes interventions in the United States (Thackeray and Neiger 2003). However, this can never compete against either the budgets or reach of full-scale commercial marketing and so public health advocates have consistently encouraged regulation as an important element to encourage good nutrition (Kraak et al. 2016; Panjwani and Caraher 2014).

REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE Much of the published public health literature has concentrated on measuring the effects of advertising and marketing, and authors have taken part in a vigorous debate with the food industry as to the impact of advertising and marketing of “unhealthy foods” on audiences (Lindstrom 2008; Nestle 2013; Lang and Heasman 2015). There is also a raft of literature on the pros and cons of regulation of marketing and advertising. Research in this area has focused on health claims for food (e.g., Heasman and Mellentin 2001;

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Lawrence and Germov 2004; Nocella and Kennedy, 2012), advertising of alcoholic beverages (e.g., Smart 1988; Nelson 2010; Hastings et al. 2010; Bosque-Prou et al. 2014), marketing of infant formulas (e.g., Howard et al. 2000; Aguayo et al. 2003; Brady 2012), and marketing of food to children (e.g., Hastings et al. 2003; Hawkes 2008; McGinnis et al. 2012). These debates have generally centered on the effectiveness of marketing restrictions and a neoliberal impulse to argue for choice. The food industry has argued for its right to advertise its products within a free market structure, in which it regulates itself with support from the government (Sharma et al. 2010), even when there are societal costs such as damaging health or environmental outcomes, for example, contribution to chronic disease patterns or greenhouse gas emissions (Panjwani and Caraher 2014). For their part, public health researchers have repeatedly put forward arguments in favor of legislation and regulation (Hastings et al. 2010). This long-running debate about individuals’ rights to choose what they eat reached a peak with disagreements about food advertising aimed at young people. Here, public health campaigners have successfully argued that children and adolescents belong to a special group of consumers who are vulnerable to advertising messages differently than adults.

MARKETING TO CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS One of the main debates among researchers, civil society groups, and policy makers centers on how and whether legislation against advertising toward children and adolescents could work (Hastings et al. 2003; Livingstone 2006; Hawkes and Lobstein 2011; Cairns et al. 2013). Before regulation and legislation can even be implemented there are practical difficulties of definition—how should (un)healthy food be defined? How should children be defined in age terms? In addition, there has been fierce debate over whether or not food advertising and marketing is demonstrably linked to rising childhood obesity and diet-related noncommunicable diseases (DRNCDs). Researchers have found that advertisements influence children’s eating habits and food preferences and can have a harmful effect on their health (Hastings et al. 2003; Cairns et al. 2009; Kelly et al. 2013) but while television viewing is positively correlated with obesity in children, research has found that there are multiple influences on childhood obesity and it is difficult to isolate precisely the influence of television. In addition, some have argued that a focus on childhood obesity misses the contribution to other diet-related noncommunicable diseases (DRNCDs), problematizes weight in a way that is moralistic (Kirkland 2011; Guthman 2003), unfairly responsibilizes individuals (Crawford 1977; 1980; 1984), and is used by the food and marketing industries to deflect attention away from the wider issues of DRNCDs (Caraher, Landon and Dalmeny 2006). The weight of evidence from what became known as the Hastings Review (Hastings et al. 2003) resulted in the Office of Communications (Ofcom), the UK communications regulator, introducing new restrictions on the advertising of foods high in fat salt and sugar in television programs aimed at children under sixteen in the UK (Ofcom 2006). The UK is not alone in considering regulation in this area—in 2011, of 59 countries surveyed, “26 have made explicit statements on food marketing to children in strategy documents, and 20 have, or are developing, explicit policies in the form of statutory measures, official guidelines or approved forms of self-regulation” (Hawkes and Lobstein 2011, 83). Further evidence linking advertising to childhood obesity led to the World Health Organization (WHO 2016, 18) recommending that “settings where children and adolescents gather and the screen-based offerings they watch, should be free of marketing

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of unhealthy foods and sugar-sweetened beverages.” Nonetheless, Kraak et al (2016, 542) reported that no WHO Member State had “implemented comprehensive legislation or enforced mandatory regulations to prohibit the marketing of fatty, salty, and/or sugary branded foods and nonalcoholic beverage products to young people.” This is within the context of an ongoing neoliberal debate about the effectiveness of legislation, with governments preferring to act in partnership with industry, using voluntary agreements. This strategy risks accusations that governments are protecting food industry interests over public health, and more recently the voluntary approach has been questioned by some food companies that are part of what has been termed “Big Food” (Nkwocha 2016), who are keen to see a level playing field in food legislation. Two international examples are instructive when considering the benefits and limitations of regulation in this area. The longest running model of restrictions on advertising of food to children comes from Québec, which has regulated on this issue since 1980. For over two decades no food advertising targeted directly at children, on Québec-controlled French language stations within its borders, has been broadcast during children’s viewing times. A number of analyses of the Québec model have shown the impact of restrictions on television advertising (Hawkes 2004; Dhar and Baylis 2011). In the modern world of global communications, cross-border media impact was often cited as an impediment— and one of the challenges faced in Québec, where most of the English programming comes from Ontario or the United States (e.g., via satellite) and is therefore not subject to Québec regulation. The ban on advertising to children in Québec was upheld by a Supreme Court ruling in 1989. Challenged on the basis that it contravened the right to free speech, the Canadian court found that the ban did not in fact unduly limit free expression. For regularly updated reports on this and other international food advertising legislation, see the World Cancer Research Fund’s NOURISHING Framework (WCRF 2016). Other lessons learned from Québec included that marketing should be defined much more broadly and inclusively—not just of existing media, but of other unthought-of avenues that reach children—to prevent the marketing dollars flowing via alternative unregulated pathways. This included packaging, sponsorships, endorsements, and so on. In addition, large numbers of children are also exposed to advertising through mainstream programming which is not specifically directed at children, but which is often viewed by many more children and adolescents than children’s programming itself (Dhar and Baylis 2011). The other example, from Sweden, is used by both advocates of a ban to show what can be achieved and by opponents who claim that the ban has failed to halt the rising tide of obesity. In Sweden all advertising aimed at children under the age of twelve is banned, as are advertisements before or after children’s programs. This initiative was introduced not to reduce obesity or to improve health per se but as a human rights scheme—the guiding principle is fair play and protection of children from undue influence such as advertising and marketing (Caraher, Landon and Dalmeny 2006). The Swedish case is based not on “good” or “bad” food but on the findings from research that children under twelve cannot clearly distinguish advertising messages from program content. The issue was discussed during the Swedish Presidency of the EU in 2001, in preparation for the revision of the EU Broadcasting Directive in 2002/3. This drive by Sweden for changes in Europe alarmed the advertising lobby, who advised their members that this could lead to wider bans (Caraher, Landon, and Dalmeny 2006). A recent development in Chile that is being discussed at the time of writing is removal of advertising of food high in calories, sugar, salt, and fat from television,

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radio, magazines, and websites. This is based on the argument that prohibition in one area results in displacement to other channels with the result that overall the number of advertisements for HFSS foods remains the same (WCRF 2016). This is an ongoing debate with countries acting unilaterally and taking different approaches to regulation and legislation. For example, new rules banning adverts for food and drinks high in fat, salt, or sugar in children’s nonbroadcast media (including print, posters, cinema, online, and social media) were introduced in the UK in July 2017.

CORPORATE CAPTURE OF POPULAR FOOD CULTURE Alongside the public health literature on marketing of food to children and adolescents, there is an emerging body of public health literature on food and marketing that examines the corporate capture of food and its related cultural meanings (Mindell et al. 2012; Panjwani and Caraher 2014). Public health researchers have identified marketing opportunities used by food companies at mass public events as contributing to an environment where energy-dense, nutrient-poor food choices are the default option and often the cheapest one (WCRF 2016; Swinburn et al. 1999). Studies looking at food and drink marketing at sporting events have investigated, for example, the advertising of fast food and alcoholic beverages at cricket matches in Australia (Sherriff et al. 2010), consumer opinions on food and drink advertising during Canadian sporting events (Danylchuk and MacIntosh 2009), professional athletes’ endorsements of food and beverages in the United States (Bragg et al. 2013), and World Cup football sponsorship by fast food and soda brands (Collin and MacKenzie 2006). These studies have indicated that fast food and sugarsweetened beverage companies have to some extent replaced tobacco advertising at sporting events and that these sponsors have been considered preferable to alcohol and tobacco advertising both by consumers and regulators. However, studies have shown that food and drinks endorsed by celebrities and chosen as sponsors for major sporting events such as World Cup football were energy-dense and nutrient-poor and these were at odds with the stated ambition of many of these publicly funded tournaments to inspire greater public sporting activity and achievement. While Bell et al (2011) outline the dangers associated with extrapolating public health measures on smoking to those attempting to address diet-related ill-health, public health academics see lessons to be learned in the regulation and promotion of food from the areas of tobacco and alcohol control. Key among these is that education and voluntary agreements must be combined with legislation, regulation, and economic approaches. Corporate power, they feel, cannot be matched and therefore should be regulated (Moodie et al. 2013; Mercer et al. 2003; Daynard 2003). Other researchers have focused on product placement in films, television programs, and online gaming environments. Again, literature here has focused on targeted marketing to children. Scholars (Lackey 1993; Beng 1995; Sutherland et al. 2010) have documented the nature and frequency of food and beverage advertising in movies, pinpointing the successful placement of Reese’s Pieces confections in the 1982 children’s movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial as the starting point for an expansion in product placement in children’s movies. Sutherland et al (2010) analyzed the top twenty US box office movies for each year from 1996 to 2005 and found that confectionary and salted snacks were the predominant food brands in movies, while sugar-sweetened beverages were the predominant drinks. Fast food made up two-thirds of the food retail brand placements. There has been conflicting research, some (e.g., Gupta and Lord 1998) showing that prominent product

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placements were more effective than advertisements, while others (e.g., Beng 1995) showed that consumers did not necessarily recall the brand or indicate any intention to buy it after having seen the film. Public health researchers raised concern that such covert advertising was unethical, unhealthy, and should be regulated, especially in films directed at a young audience. However, compared to television advertising to children this is a neglected research area (Sutherland et al. 2011) and Sabour et al (2016) reported that in contrast to regulations on advertising, product placement legislation/regulation in the United States ranges from “weak to non-existent.” Elsewhere, regulation for product placement of unhealthy foods to children has been proposed in various forms (industry self-regulation, government guidelines, statutory regulation) in various countries, but most has focused on self-regulation (Hawkes 2008; Hawkes and Lobstein 2011). There has been some literature exploring attempts to raise awareness of the health status of food products within the advertising space. The alcoholic beverage industry has for some time voluntarily included “drink responsibly” messages in its advertising. These have been examined in the public health literature (e.g., Smith et al. 2014) and the advertising literature (e.g., Ringold 2008) with mixed results. Some public health commentators argue that these voluntary warnings are often incidental to the main slogan or tagline, fail to define moderate drinking, and may even encourage heavier drinking, while others argue that responsible drinking messages can promote moderate drinking behavior. In a related but more recent development, the city of San Francisco has required billboards to add warnings to advertisements for sugar-sweetened beverages. This development, reminiscent of warning labels used on cigarette packaging, was fought by the beverage industry but welcomed by public health campaigners (Arthur 2016). These, however, remain public education initiatives and are not designed to limit the product, placement, or price. Parallel examples are the sugar tax in Mexico, the proposed sugar tax in the UK, and the failed Danish fat tax (Caraher and Cowburn 2015). In these instances, the focus has moved beyond control of advertising to focus on the Ps of placement and price of such products. In all instances the power of food and marketing companies extends beyond the budget they have for lobbying activities and the access and influence on government and government departments they have at their disposal. This lobbying is legitimate although not covered by agreements on disclosures or public accountability (Nestle 2013).

THE IMPACT OF NEW AND SOCIAL MEDIA Those looking at the media in the light of changing technologies have long sought to understand and emphasize the changes technological advances in communications have had on social interaction (McLuhan et al. 2008). The rise of the internet and social media has provided new opportunities for marketers and advertisers to promote their products in a more sophisticated way that accounts for the interactive nature and immediacy of social media platforms. The marketing literature reflects the interest of business in engaging and using social media for its own purposes (Drury 2008; Mangold and Faulds 2009; Kaplan and Haenlein 2010). Lang and Heasman (2015) document the shift in food marketing budgets from television (which remains an important platform) toward digital marketing activities using the internet, social media, and advergaming (advertising using video games). The time lag inherent in academic research means that public health research is still measuring the scope and scale of digital marketing (e.g., Montgomery and Chester 2009),

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but little work has yet been done exploring the impact this new development is having on nutrition and diets. However, in common with the food industry, health professionals at various levels have begun to use digital marketing in combination with the techniques of social marketing to engage consumers and try to change behavior. Two pertinent UKbased examples are Change4Life and GULP (Give Up Loving Pop). Change4Life is a government social marketing campaign (www.nhs.uk/change4life) introduced in 2009 as part of the “Healthy Weight, Healthy Lives” strategy. While this is an innovative public/private model using apps, animations, and games as well as traditional media, Change4Life again focuses heavily on weight reduction and is undermined by industry involvement and a lack of opportunities for users to interact in a meaningful way. GULP (www.giveuplovingpop.org.uk) is a civil society initiative which aims to raise awareness of the health harms associated with overconsumption of soda. While innovative, as a local, charitable organization GULP has limited resources to engage proactively with users.

METHODOLOGIES AND PARADIGMS Public health academics and policy makers seek to understand how traditional and new media influence purchasing behaviors. Concentrating on quantitatively measuring marketing output, public health researchers have analyzed thousands of hours of television advertising and thousands of words of media texts (e.g., Boyland et al. 2015, 2016). These analyses can measure correlations with health effects but cannot show causality. Additionally, Lindstrom (2008) shows that many assumptions about relationships between advertisements and the decision-making process are in fact mistaken, as these relationships are more complex than imagined. The literature in public health has been largely driven by a linear model of communication which mainly fails to take account of the complex nature of communication and food choice. In contrast, the fields of communication and cultural studies have developed theories that explore audience interaction with messages, emphasizing that audiences do not simply passively accept messages, texts, symbols, or signs, but that they also negotiate, oppose, or interpret them (e.g., McQuail 2011; Hartley 2012). Literature in marketing, public relations, and business has also shown interest in these complex models of communication, new technologies, and new methods in advertising and marketing (e.g., Belk 2007). For their part, advertisers base their budgets on numbers of consumers reached and sales data, but they also have difficulty attributing impact or effect on their audiences to advertising. Traditionally the assumption of advertisers has been that increases in sales show correlation, in contrast to the delayed effects of public health messages. The difficulty of measuring the effect of advertising and an associated debate about this has antagonized relationships between public health researchers and advertisers (e.g., Advertising Association 2013). Food in the internet age, with a vast and expanding array of food blogs, apps, sponsored websites, and games, poses new difficulties (Aspray, Royer, and Ocepek 2013). While we agree it is necessary to understand the mechanism through which these marketing endeavors work from a public health perspective, too little focus has been on a public health precautionary approach where the onus is on the food and marketing industries to show no harm, by documenting how food and food categories contribute to ill-health. As noted above, a popular government strategy in this area is voluntary agreement with industry. While there is some evidence that PPPs (public-private partnerships) can contribute positively to public health outcomes (Buse and Harmer 2007), many have not

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had the desired effects, and accountability and monitoring are often missing from the equation (Panjwani and Caraher 2014; Buse and Harmer 2007; Kraak et al. 2012, 2016). Also many lack a clear outcome against which success and company culpability can be measured. Key learning is that business often defaults on the original intention and there is a lack of accountability by politicians and civil servants to argue for the greater good or to set limits on what is negotiable.

THE FUTURE Current problems with public health research relate to its conceptualization of information and behavior change as a linear model of movement, whereas the food and beverage industries are increasingly moving toward new media and use these platforms to build relationships with and between customers. While public health policy has been successful in introducing restrictions on advertising to groups such as children, particularly in the realm of television advertising, public health research and action have been slow to respond to the new areas of digital and social media. At the moment, much is made of the power of “nudge” (Thaler and Sunstein 2008) to bring about positive health changes. While such persuasive behavioral interventions may be useful, public health academics have argued that they still do not and cannot match the power of “Big Food” and the promotion of highly processed food that is high in calories, fat, salt, and sugar. In common with other areas of prevention work, research on advertising restrictions suffers from a lack of evidence-based, well-designed intervention projects. One way of addressing this is by adopting a solution-oriented approach (Robinson and Sirard 2005). In essence, this moves the research focus away from developing more descriptions of the problem, to working on solutions. This means that research in this area, in addition to focusing on the processes and mechanisms involved in marketing, would also look to develop policies that use econometric and health data to estimate the impact of “Big Food,” including how its marketing and advertising contributes to ill-health. This is a strategy already adopted by sections of public health engaged with alcohol control, where the contribution of alcohol companies to alcohol-related ill-health and other social costs such as domestic violence have been measured (Addiction and Lifestyles in Contemporary Europe Reframing Addictions Project, www.alicerap.eu). This possible new area for public policy to develop, could also address criticism of public health research by shifting from victim blaming that emphasizes individual behavior change toward a system in which large companies are held responsible (Crawford 1977; Guthman 2011). As Julie Guthman notes, many individual, consumerist solutions are based on singular causes, “which tends to neglect the sources of the problem in production and lets off the hook those more responsible for the problem (corporate bad actors and policy makers)” (Guthman 2011, 187). As noted above, public health research is lagging behind that of industry in the move to understanding and developing social media (see Lindstrom 2008 for an industry view on this). In policy terms, public health practitioners do not always possess the requisite skills to develop policy interventions in new areas (Caraher and Cowburn 2015). Future debates will be further complicated by discussions on the right of the food industry to promote and sell food and the public health mandate to protect citizens and populations. Current trends predict more countries adopting restrictions, in combination with industry partnership to try to bridge this gap. Public health researchers will continue to try to keep up with the advances and changes in technology, which offer increasing opportunities

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and platforms for marketing and advertising. Key developments include the use of big data and social media algorithms for direct marketing (O’Raghallaigh 2015). The debate at the moment is polarized and diffuse, with a notable lack of interdisciplinary work. Opportunities exist for public health researchers to work more closely with academics in the fields of communications, marketing, and advertising as well as anthropology and sociology, to explore the options for both restricting and harnessing the power of marketing for the public good.

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Scourge or Savior? The Complex Relationship between Food and Science RACHEL A. ANKENY AND HEATHER J. BRAY

INTRODUCTION The relationship between food and science has long been complex and contested. On the one hand, various technologies have been fundamental to providing access to affordable, safe, and nutritious food (Laudan 2001), with beer, wine, and cheese being oft-cited examples of products made using science. Food science is responsible for many innovations on which people depend for convenience, such as preserved, shelf-stable, and nutritionally enriched foods, as well as “fun” foodstuffs that enjoy widespread popular appeal due to their novel textures, colors, and flavors. Some contend that scientific and technological advances hold the key to major global problems such as food security. Some historians trace the rise of food science to the eighteenth century when the urban bourgeoisie began to develop, when many in Western Europe were able for the first time to take interest in food for reasons other than sheer survival. Industrialization and the demands of food safety drove standardization of taste and appearance; together with increased globalization of the food supply, long-standing ties between food and the local environment began to sever. In turn, different ways of defining what counts as “quality” and prioritization of diverse values arose (Roudot 2004). There is growing mistrust of manufactured and processed foods, including genetically modified (GM) products, thought to be harmful to health or to violate unspoken laws of nature, as the science fiction moniker “Frankenfoods” suggests. Many members of the general public, particularly elites, believe that “modern” food, often equated with being scientifically or technologically altered, is making us “sick.” Further challenges are presented by slow-food advocacy and various dietary trends (Knight 2013), as well as a continued growth of the “risk society” (Beck 1992), which encourage rejection of foods made using science and technology. Many assume that altering food using what are perceived as “unnatural” and “bioactive” techniques is unethical (Frewer et al. 2011). Recent growths in various political and ethical consumer movements emphasize choice, often in the form of resistance to what are perceived to be corporate efforts to control the food supply including via technological interventions, thus inadvertently reinforcing the very neoliberalism they seek to protest (Guthman 2008).

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In this chapter, we focus on five points of intersections of science, technology, food, and popular culture: hybridization in agriculture; genetic modification; food production; additives; and more recent innovations in food technology including molecular gastronomy, in vitro meat, and 3D printing. We use selective examples from popular culture that are caricatures of the interaction of science with food, but that nonetheless are deeply revealing about the tensions felt by many. As Fabio Parasecoli notes with regard to science fiction and its relevance for understanding food culture, these types of accounts remind us that our world could be different than it is, and thus they “succeed in evoking realities that are at the same time foreign and fascinating” (2008, 64). Our chapter takes a different tack than existing literature on representations of the influences of science and technology on food by not focusing on utopian or futuristic views (e.g., Forster 2004; Retzinger 2008) or on unusual food habits (e.g., on space food, Levi 2008, 2010), but on everyday food practices that have been or are being shaped by science. Similar to the portrayal of science in popular culture as isolated and beyond our reach (AllenderHagedorn and Ruggerio 2005), we contend that popular representations of science’s influences on food rely on ideas of science as being unnatural, and therefore bad. We provide several examples where scientific interventions into the food supply have been made invisible to consumers, therefore rendering these products risky and untrustworthy: in science and technology studies, this process is known as “black boxing,” which refers to the way in which scientific and technical work often is made invisible by its own success. As Bruno Latour puts it, “Paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become” (1999, 304). Finally, we argue that emphasizing that consumers can or should choose to avoid certain products made with science or technology merely reinforces neoliberal approaches to the food supply, and suggest that new approaches are required.

LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS: FEARS OF HYBRIDS Fears about hybrid plants and animals running amuck are commonplace: although we enjoy the conveniences and novelties produced by using science on the food supply, we also have deep concerns about how such interventions may result in loss of control. A classic example of this tension can be found in The Little Shop of Horrors, which began as a 1960 film that was simultaneously dark comedy, spoof, and horror, and upon which a popular musical and second film were later based. It recounts the story of a florist’s assistant (Seymour) who accidentally cultivates a hybrid plant. Although the attention paid to the plant saves Seymour’s job and the floundering shop, the plant feeds on human flesh and blood, which becomes increasingly difficult to obtain and drives Seymour to kill. As the plant proclaims: “I’m a mean green mother from outer space and I’m bad!” (Little Shop of Horrors, 1986 film). Despite the revelation of the plant’s origins, the plot emphasizes Seymour’s culpability in its creation and path of destruction. Although accounts of the influences on the original story do not explain its symbolism in terms of concerns about modern agriculture, the underlying concept clearly resonates with many fears associated with hybridization of plants and animals, and modern agriculture more generally. In order to interpret public views about hybridization in relation to popular culture, we must consider the broader historical and scientific contexts surrounding agriculture. Humans have been intervening in nature for millennia, since the domestication of wheat

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and other cereals in the Fertile Crescent about 12,000 years ago (Kilian, Martin, and Salamini 2010). What we now describe as the genetics of animals and plants have been altered for thousands of years through domestication and selective breeding: consider not only food plants including corn and animals but also ornamental varieties of flowers and pedigree domestic animals, all of which arose through selective breeding. Little is known about the specific events leading to the development of many plants and animals that we currently use for food and other purposes; whether these processes were directed by humans selecting individual organisms and breeding them, or were a side effect of saving the best individuals within a generation and allowing them to produce more offspring (rather than consuming them), and how much simple trial and error was involved, is difficult to ascertain. As groups of people moved and traded, plants were introduced to new areas and some bred with local ones, creating hybrids. Most plants that are consumed today are the result of hybridization processes, which were utilized to make plants more pest and disease resistant, drought tolerant, or even simply tastier, more attractive, or flavorful, more reliable, or cheaper to produce. Thus many of the foods that we consume and consider to be “natural” are in fact the result of these complex, human-directed processes that explicitly have altered the course of evolution (Kingsbury 2009): consider tangelos (a cross of tangerine and pomelo or grapefruit created in the 1910s), boysenberries (a hybrid of dewberries and loganberries, the latter an earlier hybrid of raspberries and blackberries), or our typical modern type of strawberries (a cross of Virginia and Chilean strawberries that arose through accident in Europe in the 1700s). In this brief history, we can see that humans have had a long-standing focus on creating new, and what they consider to be “improved,” organisms that have been adapted for human purposes, particularly use as food. One of the clear tensions between this history and our commonplace ideas of the origins of what many often consider to be the most natural parts of our contemporary food supply is that intervention has been key, and such intervention becomes largely invisible and black boxed for most consumers. Little Shop of Horrors emphasizes that hybrids are to be feared because we ultimately may lose control over them, and we cannot ever truly understand their origins; these issues also resonate with reactions to and reception of GM foods, which are discussed in more detail in the next section.

DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS, ATTACK OF THE KILLER TOMATOES, AND MORE: FRANKENSTEINIAN VISIONS OF GENETIC MODIFICATION Day of the Triffids is a postapocalyptic novel about an aggressive species of plant that takes over Earth following an epidemic of blindness among humans. These creatures are tall, venomous, carnivorous plants capable of locomotion and communication, and are said to provide extracts that are superior to fish or vegetable oils. The main character is Bill Masen, a biologist who has long worked with triffids, who describes the them as “the outcome of a series of ingenious biological meddlings—and very likely accidental, at that” (Wyndham 1951, chapter 2), likely in the Soviet Union and then accidentally released, resulting in worldwide cultivation. Wyndham was not the first to emphasize that human interventions in nature could have disastrous consequences. “Frankenfood,” the seemingly indelible nickname for food

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made from genetically modified organisms (GMOs) first coined by English professor Paul Lewis in a 1992 letter to the editor of the New York Times, alludes to the classic Mary Shelley parable warning of disastrous consequences when humans attempt to alter nature, or “meddle.” GMOs are generally defined as living entities that have had their genes altered by laboratory techniques that remove a gene or change a gene’s function, or by inserting a gene from another organism, to create desirable attributes. Various GM plants, including soy, canola, and corn, are available on the commercial market, with the modified attributes ranging from herbicide or pesticide resistance to improved nutritional or other attributes, or permitting growth under adverse environmental conditions. Development of GM animals for commercial use has been limited for both scientific and commercial reasons, although a form of Atlantic salmon genetically engineered for faster growth was recently approved for human consumption in the United States (Pollack 2015). Although the earliest efforts at hybridization discussed previously were low tech, we know now that spontaneous mutations were sometimes utilized to produce novel organisms. Mutation as a mechanism for creating heritable variability was first described in the scientific literature in the early 1900s, when it was proposed that newly discovered forms of radiation could be used to induce mutations. Ultraviolet light and various chemical agents were later observed to be highly mutagenic. Between 1950 and 1970, several countries took up crop mutagenesis programs (Khawkwal 2012). Many plants currently in commercial production arose from mutant-derived varieties, including herbicide-tolerant crops such as the Clearfield® varieties of maize, wheat, rice, oilseed rape (canola), and sunflower (Tan et al. 2005). Recombinant DNA research began in earnest in the mid-1970s, following the implementation of safety protocols and voluntary codes of conduct, most of which were based on containment determined according to levels of risk. In 1991, Pamela Dunsmuir and her colleagues developed one of the most iconic GM foods by introducing a synthetic afa3 gene (analogous to that found in the winter flounder) into tobacco and tomato plants which produced antifreeze proteins (Hightower et al. 1991). Subsequent experiments showed that the protein did not protect the tomato from frost damage and so it was never commercialized (Fedoroff and Brown 2004). The first GM food to be made commercially available was the Flavr Savr tomato, developed by Calgene and released in the United States in 1994 (Kramer and Redenbaugh 1994). The product did not meet market expectations as it was fragile and tasteless, and it was withdrawn from sale in 1996. A GM tomato with enhanced shelf life was produced by Zeneca and sold in tomato paste produced for the UK supermarket Sainsburys; however commercial pressure and community concerns about safety led to this product being withdrawn by 1999. Against the backdrop of this history, it is unsurprising that the tomato has become iconic of the dangers and unknowns associated with GMOs, and that the badly reviewed but now cult film, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1978), is frequently invoked in discussions of novel food products. Although we never discover why the tomatoes have become sentient, nor why they have a vendetta against humans that leads to many deaths, forces high up in the US government are ultimately found to be responsible. This film has symbolic resonance for many who are concerned or opposed to GM foods, and particularly for those who see GM as a corporate or even governmental plot; “mutant tomato” masks have even been worn by GM protestors (Scott 2000). For critics, such organisms raise high and unknown (or unknowable) risks, especially in relation to longer-term effects on

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the environment and human health, despite reassurances from many scientific bodies and national governments that the risks are no more than those presented by conventional foods, given existing regulatory regimes and stringent testing that they claim show no evidence of harm. Perceived risks (as compared to quantifiable risks, see Boulter 1997) and the attendant fears produced by them cannot necessarily be quelled with scientific claims of little or no risk, as the plethora of movies featuring “GM gone bad” attest. These include wellknown classics such as The Fly, Jurassic Park, X-Men, and Spiderman, as well as less popular but no less revelatory films such as the New Zealand horror-comedy Black Sheep about GM sheep released from the laboratory by inept environmental activists. The sheep change from docile vegetarians to violent carnivores whose bite can transform humans into bloodthirsty, part demon and part mutant, were-sheep. Thus we find key themes repeated from Day of the Triffids: seemingly “ingenious” science is used to create creatures that cannot be controlled, and which ultimately have extreme and negative impacts on human beings. A final way in which popular culture has influenced our views in this domain relates to what types of modification are considered more acceptable or to have less risk: GM foods that come from plants and contain genetic material sourced from either that or other (particularly closely related) plants are more acceptable than those that contain genetic material from animals. These views are widespread despite the fact that the donor genetic material used in a GMO is only used as a template for synthesizing new DNA, either in the laboratory or within the new host, and is not transferred directly. Within popular culture, the chimeric “Frankenstein’s monster” image is so dominant that it influences public understanding of GMOs; a simple image search for GMOs on the internet returns a range of exotic animal/vegetable chimeras, most of which do not actually exist, and numerous pictures of tomatoes being injected with colored liquid. As has been noted by Roslynn D. Haynes, Frankenstein “has become an archetype in his own right . . . his name [has] become synonymous with any experiment out of control” (1994, 92). Frankenstein imagery has come to be closely associated with GM (Lederer and Ratzan 2005): Malcolm Walker (then chairman of the UK food retail group Iceland) described GM products as “Frankenstein foods” in banning them from his supermarkets, and the Daily Mirror ran a mocked-up photo of former British prime minister Tony Blair as Frankenstein, calling him “The Prime Monster” because of his support of GM foods (Scott 2000).

SILENT RUNNING, SILENT SPRING, AND PRODUCING FOOD WITH NEITHER EARTH NOR PEOPLE Silent Running, a postapocalyptic science fiction film, features three ideas that recur throughout popular culture and science fiction with regard to future food production methods: we may no longer be able to grow (enough) food on Earth to feed our growing population; we will need to grow food in controlled environments; and mechanized labor will increasingly be used in food production. These ideas have simultaneously fueled research and developments in agriculture as well as the imagination of writers and filmmakers throughout the twentieth century. Like other films in this genre, Silent Running focuses primarily on environmental anxieties; however, the importance of the relationships between people and nature, and the impacts of scientific and technological

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progress, are closely related to ideas about food production. In his close reading of Silent Running and Soylent Green (1973), Rowland Hughes (2013) argues that these films emphasize that nature is important because of how it relates to the shaping of human identity. Thus scientific progress leads to homogenization, regulation, control, and the “taming” of nature (including agriculture), and is resisted in popular culture. This theme echoes contemporary resistance of corporatization, control, and use of science in the food supply, again raising the specter of neoliberalism. It is notable in Silent Running, unlike Soylent Green and other dystopian portrayals, that there is enough food to feed the world, even if it is “synthetic crap.” It is the loss of nature that is lamented by the main character. The Malthusian idea that the human population would reach a point where demand outstripped supply has been a dominant theme in popular culture, particularly science fiction movies, where alternate strategies to solve this problem are suggested (Belasco 2006). A common theme is the prospect of needing to consume humans: consider The Matrix trilogy and Soylent Green. Although the formal terminology associated with “food security” is relatively new, there has been long-standing recognition that our food supply might become threatened and that science and technology might provide answers. In the 1950s, concerns about global security led to the United States adopting foreign policy aimed at increasing the amount of food in developing nations. In Mexico, India, and later the Philippines, the so-called “Green Revolution” enabled the production of enough wheat, corn, and rice to meet these countries’ food needs and in some cases for them to become net exporters (on the Green Revolution and food systems, see Belasco 2006). Accompanying an extensive training program for local plant breeders and farmers and use of superior crop varieties was the introduction of improved farming techniques including the use of fertilizers and pesticides, synthesized by chemical manufacturing companies established during the Second World War. Although undoubtedly saving millions from starvation, the Green Revolution also increased the global use of agricultural chemicals. The tension between ensuring food security, especially in developing nations, and intensive, technology-dependent agriculture continues to this day. In 1962 Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published, triggering what many consider to be mainstream environmentalism. Her interest in the insecticide DDT was stimulated by large-scale pest eradication programs involving aerial spraying rather than its use in food production, but the book laid the foundation for anxiety about the chemical industry and firmly established “chemicals” as harmful to people and the environment in the popular imagination. The role of chemicals in food production has been a cause of increasing consumer concern, and the popularity of “organic” foods in the Global North. While there is no doubt that chemicals should be used with caution, the social construction of all chemicals as “bad” arguably hinders more nuanced discussions about the role of agricultural chemicals in food production, and obscures situations where chemical use has had overall positive effects, for example in minimum tillage (plowing) farming which can reduce soil erosion and promote soil health. Many popular images of the future of food production involve the growth of plants on space stations, starships, and planetary bases. Silent Running portrays large domes that contain entire ecosystems being towed through space. These domes are “arks,” the last remnants of Earth’s flora and fauna saved from environmental destruction. The central character Lowell tends forests in the dome and grows food. In an exchange with those on the spaceship Valley Forge, he describes a cantaloupe (rockmelon) that he grew as “nature’s greatest gift” as compared to their synthetic food. The need to produce

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fresh food in artificial environments, usually in some form of dome, has been repeated in many science fiction films and television programs: stranded astronaut Mark Watney grows potatoes in the “Hab” in The Martian; the USS Enterprise-D in Star Trek: The Next Generation has an arboretum, even though food can be replicated at the touch of a button. Hydroponics, or growing plants in a liquid culture without soil, is not a new technique: it was supposedly the method of culture used in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. It is used in commercial vegetable production today, especially in countries with limited agricultural space such as Israel. The technique relies on an inert growth medium, fed with a supply of nutrients in liquid form. Hydroponics has been used to grow plants on the Space Station and is seen as the most feasible method of producing fresh vegetables for consumption on a future Mars base. While being almost diametrically opposed to organic production as it is chemically dependent, hydroponics is frequently linked to the future of food production, especially to ideas of vertical farming in cities. Although vertical farms have been part of visions of the future since the 1950s, and feature prominently in contemporary discussions and portrayals of urban food production and food security, critics argue that the extensive resources used in vertical or controlled environment gardening are not offset by the benefits of such systems. In Silent Running, a decision to re-deploy the spaceships towing the domes leads to their planned destruction. Lowell refuses to allow this to happen, killing his crewmates and creating a set of drones to tend to the forest, introducing a third key theme. Robots and other forms of artificial intelligence are often associated with a scientifically and technologically generated future; however they are already used in several industries. Modern computing and other technologies are well-integrated in agriculture; farmers around the world use smartphones to access information ranging from weather forecasts to commodity prices. GPS technology allows farmers to drive their tractors over the same tracks each year, and plant between the tracks to minimize the compaction of soil. Driverless tractors appear to be an imminent reality. In other industries, mechanized harvesting, drones, and remote sensing of plants to capture precise information such as water stress, are commonly used. Automation has not been as successful with animal products, with the exception of the robotic dairy. Robotic dairies enable dairy cows to “milk themselves,” while the farmers manage other aspects of their farms. Robotic dairy proponents claim that they reduce stress since the cow can enter the milking parlor whenever she chooses. Thus we see that key ideas in popular culture and science fiction are converging and also are in tension with developments in modern agriculture. Our anxieties about producing enough food, in an efficient and environmentally sustainable manner, conflict with many people’s attitudes about acceptable ways of producing food, and in particular strain popular beliefs about needing to maintain “natural” modes of production.

DELIGHT OR DECEPTION? ADDITIVES GONE BAD The popular 1971 movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, based on the classic children’s book by Roald Dahl, reflected many values of its time, particularly in its psychedelic sets. It also emphasized and bemoaned children’s misbehavior, ranging from being spoiled and watching too much TV to gluttony. The film views candy as having a special place in our cultural imagination, both for children and the young at heart, placing particularly high value on confectionaries produced via new and amazing technologies.

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Everlasting gobsmackers are portrayed as the pinnacle of Wonka’s inventions; aimed at a market of children with limited pocket money, they are supposed to last indefinitely. However they also are the key test of Charlie’s honesty, a sort of candy-coated version of the apple in the Garden of Eden that can cause its consumer considerable evil. Eric Schlosser (2001) explicitly compares his experiences at the world’s largest flavor company to a trip to Wonka’s factory. Food processing and production were revolutionized in the post–Second World War period, in part through the use of chemical agents including colorings, flavorings, stabilizers, preservatives, emulsifiers, and other types of additives. But this period also was notable for increasing concerns about the effects of chemicals on human health as previously discussed, and the rise of the “counterculture” that developed organic foods and other responses against processed foods (Belasco 1989). Thus the wonders and mysteries of food technologies as portrayed in Willy Wonka underscore many of our contemporary dilemmas relating to substances typically added to processed foods. On the one hand, we often simply ignore such substances, particularly those that are essential for convenience products upon which we have come to rely, once again black boxing the associated science and technology. Admittedly, keeping formulas for particular flavors and other compounds secret, and assigning them numbers for labeling purposes, is a critical part of the burgeoning flavor and additive industry, and makes them even more mysterious. Contemporary consumer rhetoric privileges the “natural” over the artificial, viewing the latter substances with suspicion or even fear, and promoting rejection of these products as a form of political consumerism. The irony is that no prepared food is ever “natural” in its most generic sense, as humans have produced it through a variety of interventions. Food regulators such as the US Food and Drug Administration define “natural” in a less limited sense, allowing producers and marketers to use the label so long as the food product does not contain artificial flavors, synthetic substances, or added colors. But this distinction obscures some of the key issues underlying concerns about these sorts of additions. First, as much as we enjoy being deceived in an explicit fantasy such as Willy Wonka, many of us become more concerned about deceptions in food that we actually ingest. Natural ingredients (typically defined as those derived from plants or animals) are often used to mimic other flavors for various purposes including to reduce costs, make flavors stronger, or create tastes to align with our expectations. For instance, prepared “grilled” meats often have not been grilled; instead a “grilled” flavor is created by adding a series of natural ingredients such as stock, fat, and sugar. A strawberry flavor is frequently mimicked by a combination of other natural substances. Recent efforts have been made to identify natural substances that induce physiological or psychological reactions that enhance flavor, primarily for the purposes of producing healthier foods (e.g., with reduced sodium) (Gravitz 2012), but questions still remain for many consumers about how genuine such reactions are, even if elicited by natural substances. A second issue frequently raised is that natural flavors are seen as less addictive, or healthier or purer than artificial ones. Some natural flavors are obviously problematic, such as almond flavor which can be poisonous when derived in larger quantities from fruit pits. Those in the food industry defend artificial substances as they permit creation of foods containing fewer allergens, and can support various dietary preferences including religious prohibitions and avoidance of animal products. In contrast, one of the most commonly used natural color additives (used to make foods look pink, red, or purple) is derived from cochineal extract (or carmine) made from dried and ground bodies of

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female insects that have fed on red cactus berries. This coloring violates some religious dietary restrictions (as it involves consumption of insects), and can cause allergic reactions in susceptible people. Perhaps more troubling are accusations by some that certain substances are simply unhealthy: a provocative example can be found in the complex history associated with monosodium glutamate (MSG). MSG is chemically identical to an amino acid found naturally in our bodies, but which we do not need to consume as we produce it in sufficient quantities. After the Second World War, MSG became extremely popular outside of Asia as a “flavor awakener” added to processed foods, and as a seasoning added during cooking or at the table instead of salt. By the late 1960s, MSG was in common use, but the 1968 “discovery” of “Chinese restaurant syndrome” contributed significantly to public opposition to additives particularly in the United States (Belasco 1989; Levenstein 1993) as part of environmental awareness and related consumer movements (Sand 2005). However, many of the basic assumptions associated with the recognition and legitimization of Chinese restaurant syndrome have been argued to be related to racialized discourse about Chinese cultural practices and ongoing “othering” of Chinese immigrants (Mosby 2009). The recent “discovery” of the fifth taste, umami, which long has been a cornerstone of many Asian cuisines, occurred in part through aggressive and clever marketing by MSG’s major producer (which is in fact Japanese and not Chinese) and led to its widespread adoption particularly among elite chefs (Sand 2005). MSG in fact has never left the processed food supply and remains a common ingredient in numerous foodstuffs, having retained its FDA approval as it is considered to be a safe additive. Finally, additives are rejected by many because of the popular association between them and children’s behavioral problems, fueling the idea that they may be affecting all of us over time, likely in subtler ways. As Matthew Smith (2011) argues in his provocative exploration of the Feingold diet, these views fit more generally into cultural trends associated with “negative nutrition” approaches of the 1970s and 1980s, which claimed that particular nutrients (saturated fat, sugar, salt, and of course cholesterol) could be causally linked to most major health conditions, which in turn had widespread ramifications for the food industry. Although many would claim that the association of additives with hyperactivity and the Feingold elimination diet in particular have been clinically disproven, their power in popular culture remains trenchant to this day; some claim that it was the economic and political power of the food industry that in fact undermined the diet’s validity, rather than any scientific facts. Thus it is clear that the values associated with various types of additives are difficult to disentangle from their representations in popular culture. The idea that “additives” are unhealthy, particularly for children, relates generally to trends that tend to dichotomize responses to their use in food. In short, the binary between the natural and the artificial implicitly assumes that all that is natural is “good” and all that is artificial is “bad,” and thus in turn that science also is bad and unnecessary when used to make food additives; in addition, there is a stress on avoidance and consumerism as key ways to exercise values.

NEW WAYS OF COMBINING SCIENCE AND FOOD In recent years, science and technology have come to be highly valued particularly among many “foodies” (Johnston and Baumann 2010) as a means of transforming food. The techniques and products associated with molecular gastronomy have become particularly

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popular; chemical methods are used, together with culinary skills, to better understand what happens when food is cooked and these findings are harnessed to improve food and produce novel compounds, textures, flavors, and dishes (Kurti 1997; This 2009). Restaurants such as The Fat Duck in England, Noma in Denmark, Alinea in the United States, and the now-defunct El Bulli and Mugaritz in Spain have become globally recognized, along with their chefs, due to their development of these techniques. The growth of the field has resulted in heightened interest in the science behind cooking and in numerous science-focused cookbooks, TV shows, movies, and other forms of popular culture designed to make these techniques more accessible for the home cook. There have been commercial efforts to provide the instruments and ingredients needed to produce these types of dishes at home, such as air pumps, blow torches, dry ice, and xanthum gum, and increased numbers of prepared food items made using molecular gastronomy techniques. However, these developments do not necessarily represent a counterexample to the general suspicion about the use of science and technology with regard to food. Although they may present an instance where scientific techniques are less black boxed than in other cases, it is not clear that molecular gastronomy is having widespread influence on everyday food habits and attitudes. Its use tends to be only accessible for those in elite groups who can afford to eat at its promoters’ restaurants, with most only able to catch a glimpse on competitive cooking shows such as MasterChef, which tend to focus on the retailing opportunities presented by more mainstream products (Phillipov 2016). In addition, some versions of it promote a narrow understanding of science as about power and control, and hence a problematic notion of what makes “good” food and cooks (Ankeny 2006). Recent attempts to use science to produce in vitro meat highlight the growing tensions in many potential uses of science and technology for food production. When the first in vitro or lab-grown hamburger was unveiled in 2013, it was hailed as having potential positive ethical effects on the environment as well as for human health and animal welfare (Post 2013; van der Weele and Driessen 2013). However, a variety of ethical concerns have been noted, including the “unnaturalness” of such techniques (Laestadius 2015; Dillworth and McGregor 2015). Concerns about the practical unknowns of these sorts of novel technologies may simply stem from a general tendency toward neophobia or fear of anything new (Verbeke et al. 2015). A final example of novel food technologies can be found in the recent invention of 3D food printing, which has frequently been compared to food synthesizers in the film The Fifth Element or the food replicator in Star Trek: Troi: “And computer, I’d like a real chocolate sundae.” Computer: “Define ‘real’ in context, please.” T: “Real . . . not one of your perfectly synthesized, ingeniously enhanced imitations . . . real chocolate ice cream, real whipped cream . . .” C: “This unit is programmed to provide sources of nutritional value. Your request does not fall within current guidelines” (Star Trek: The Next Generation, “The Price,” 1989). Such innovations use a range of different technological processes (Godoi, Prakash, and Bhandari 2016), and are argued to be useful because they could eliminate food waste by making otherwise unwanted and unpalatable ingredients attractive for consumption, greatly increasing shelf life (of particular interest to those seeking to provide foods for extreme conditions such as space travel), reducing environmental impacts from cooking and production of conventional foods, allowing personalized nutrition, contributing to greater food security, and permitting foods to be presented in forms that might make them more acceptable, for instance to children. They are already in use for novelty

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products in high-end restaurants and to make complex confectionary products such as cake decorations that are difficult or impossible to do by hand, with smaller-scale versions recently made commercially available for home cooks. However, as more generally noted with regard to various popular portrayals of technologies, the actual consumption of 3D food products is typically viewed as being accompanied by ambivalence, anxiety, and even fear (Buchanan-Oliver and Cruz 2011).

CONCLUSIONS As we have argued in this chapter via a series of examples exploring popular cultural depictions of the intersection of science, technology, and food, the public is conflicted. We generally value science and various technological innovations resulting from it, but become anxious when they are used in food production, particularly because we ingest food. However, it is undoubtedly the case that food will continue to be shaped by new technologies, many of which cannot even be envisioned at this time. We contend that there are three main issues at stake, and that these point toward themes worthy of further investigation by food studies research: first, the food system is often overromanticized and made idyllic because many key processes involving scientific or technological interventions are black boxed, and thus made invisible to most consumers. In turn, the resulting products often are viewed as risky and untrustworthy, in part because it is felt that something is being hidden or at very least not being made transparent. Against this background, it clearly is critical to foster policies and processes that promote more transparency in the food system, including improved labeling particularly of currently unregulated categories and more explicit declarations of conflicts of interest and industry involvement. Second, there is a common tendency to make binary distinctions between the “natural” and the “unnatural,” with foods produced using science and technology frequently associated with the unnatural, and therefore considered to be “bad.” Although these beliefs clearly are oversimplified and reflect lack of knowledge of the history of agriculture and food, much of which has been heavily shaped by human intervention, it is critical to take account of these views, particularly because ethical judgments of the natural are grounded in distinct worldviews and thus are unlikely to be changed through provision of further information about new technologies (Deckers 2005). Finally, we believe that key fears and concerns about the use of food science and technologies are less about the science itself, and more about contemporary visions of risk (Beck 1992). Thus more effective public engagement around science and technology is essential, without reinforcing a “deficit model” approach which holds that rejection of a particular technology is due primarily to an information deficit within the intended users or consumers of that technology (Miller 2010). To rely on a consumerist model emphasizing that individuals simply should avoid products that they find problematic reinforces neoliberal approaches to the food supply and fails to allow the general public to be engaged as food consumers, let alone food citizens, in productive dialogue about their key values and how these could be better reflected in their food supply (Ankeny 2016). As John Lanchester puts it: “The story of mankind and food can be reduced to science, but it is not primarily about science . . . . Man’s relationship with food is, and always has been, a terrible and passionate drama” (2000, 170). Thus to bridge the chasm between those who view science as a savior and those who see it as a scourge, we need new approaches.

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REFERENCES Allender-Hagedorn, S., and C. W. Ruggerio. 2005. “Connecting Popular Culture and Science: The Case of Biotechnology.” 2005 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference Proceedings, 161–75. Ankeny, Rachel A. 2006. “The Rise of Molecular Gastronomy and Its Problematic Use as an Authenticating Authority.” In Authenticity in the Kitchen: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2005, edited by Richard Hosking, 44–52. Blackawton, Totnes: Prospect Books. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. 1978. Directed by John De Bello. USA: NAI Entertainment. Ankeny, Rachel A. 2016. “Inviting Everyone to the Table: Strategies for More Effective and Legitimate Food Policy via Deliberative Approaches.” Journal of Social Philosophy 4: 10–24. Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage. Belasco, Warren. 1989. Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry. New York: Pantheon. Belasco, Warren. 2006. Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food. Berkeley: University of California Press. Black Sheep. 2006. Directed by Jonathan King. New Zealand: Live Stock Films. Boulter, Donald. 1997. “Scientific and Public Perception of Plant Genetic Manipulation: A Critical Review.” Critical Reviews in Plant Science 16: 231–51. Buchanan-Oliver, Margo, and Angela Cruz. 2011. “Discourses of Technology Consumption: Ambivalence, Fear, and Liminality.” Advances in Consumer Research 39: 287–91. Carson, Rachel. 1962. Silent Spring. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Deckers, Jan. 2005. “Are Scientists Right and Non-Scientists Wrong? Reflections on Discussions of GM.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 18: 451–78. Dilworth, Tasmin, and Andrew McGregor. 2015. “Moral Steaks? Ethical Discourses of In Vitro Meat in Academia and Australia.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 28: 85–107. Fedoroff, Nina, and Nancy M. Brown. 2004. Mendel in the Kitchen: A Scientist’s View of Genetically Modified Food. Washington: Joseph Henry Press. The Fifth Element. 1997. Directed by Luc Besson. France: Gaumont Buena Vista International. The Fly. 1986. Directed by David Cronenberg. USA: Brooksfilms. Forster, Laurel. 2004. “Futuristic Foodways: The Metaphorical Meaning of Food in Science Fiction Films.” In Reel Food: Essays on Food and Film, edited by Anne L. Bower, 251–65. New York: Routledge. Frewer, Lynn et al. 2011. “Consumer Response to Novel Agri-Food Technologies: Implications for Predicting Consumer Acceptance of Emerging Food Technologies.” Trends in Food Science and Technology 22: 442–56. Godoi, Fernanda C., Sangeeta Prakash, and Bhesh R. Bhandari. 2016. “3D Printing Technologies Applied for Food Design: Status and Prospects.” Journal of Food Engineering 179: 44–54. Gravitz, Lauren. 2012. “Food Science: Taste Bud Hackers.” Nature 486: S14–15. Guthman, Julie. 2008. “Neoliberalism and the Making of Food Politics in California.” Geoforum 39: 1171–83. Haynes, Roslynn D. 1994. From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hightower, Robin et al. 1991. “Expression of Antifreeze Proteins in Transgenic Plants.” Plant Molecular Biology 17: 1013–21.

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Hughes, Rowland. 2013. “The Ends of the Earth: Nature, Narrative, and Identity in Dystopian Film.” Critical Survey 25: 22–39. Jurassic Park. 1993. Directed by Steven Spielberg. USA: Universal Pictures. Johnston, Josée and Shyon Baumann. 2010. Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape. New York: Routledge. Kilian, Benjamin, William Martin, and Francesco Salamini. 2010. “Genetic Diversity, Evolution and Domestication of Wheat and Barley in the Fertile Crescent.” In Evolution in Action, edited by Matthias Glaubrecht, 137–65. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Kingsbury, Noel. 2009. Hybrid: The History and Science of Plant Breeding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kharkwal, M. C. 2012. “A Brief History of Plant Mutagenesis.” In Plant Mutation Breeding and Biotechnology, edited by in Q. Y. Shu et al., 21–30. Wallingford: CABI. Knight, Christine. 2015. “‘We can't go back a hundred million years’: Low-Carbohydrate Dieters’ Responses to Nutritional Primitivism.” Food, Culture & Society 18: 441–61. Kramer, Matthew G., and Keith Redenbaugh. 1994. “Commercialization of a Tomato with an Antisense Polygalactouranase Gene: The FLAVR SAVR Tomato Story.” Euphytica 76: 293–7. Kurti, Nicholas. 1997. But the Crackling is Superb. Bristol: Institute of Physics Publishing. Laestaudius, Linnea I. 2015. “Public Perceptions of the Ethics of In-Vitro Meat: Determining an Appropriate Course of Action.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 28: 991–1009. Lanchester, John. 2000. “Edible Complex.” The New Yorker 27(November), 170. Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Laudan, Rachel. 2001. “A Plea for Culinary Modernism: Why We Should Love New, Fast, Processed Food.” Gastronomica 1: 36–44. Lederer, Susan E. and Richard M. Ratzan (2005), “Mary Shelley: Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.” In A Companion to Science Fiction edited by David Seed, 455–65. Oxford: Blackwell. Levenstein, Harvey. 1993. Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levi, Jane. 2008. “The Rise of the Gastronaut.” In Food, edited by John Knechtel, 3–17. Cambridge: MIT Press. Levi, Jane. 2010. “An Extraterrestrial Sandwich: The Perils of Food in Space.” Endeavour 34: 6–10. Lewis, Paul. 1992. “Mutant Foods Create Risks We Can’t Yet Guess; Since Mary Shelley.” New York Times, 16 June. Little Shop of Horrors. 1960. Directed by Roger Corman. USA: Filmgroup. The Martian. 2015. Directed by Ridley Scott. USA: 20th Century Fox. The Matrix. 1999. Directed by The Wachowski Brothers. Australia/USA: Roadshow Entertainment/Warner Brothers. Miller, Steve. 2010. “Deficit Model.” In Encyclopedia of Science and Technology Communication, edited by Susannah H. Priest, 208–9. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Mosby, Ian. 2009. “‘That Won-Ton Soup Headache’: The Chinese Restaurant Syndrome, MSG and the Making of American Food, 1968–1980.” Social History of Medicine 22: 133–51. Phillipov, Michelle. 2016. “The New Politics of Food: Television and the Media/Food Industries.” Media International Australia 158: 90–98.

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Pollack, Andrew. 2015. “Genetically Engineered Salmon Declared Ready for US Plates.” New York Times 20(November), A1. Post, Mark J. 2013. “Cultured Beef: Medical Technology to Produce Food.” Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture 96: 1039–41. Retzinger, Jean P. 2008. “Speculative Visions and Imaginary Meals: Food and the Environment in (Post-Apocalyptic) Science Fiction Films.” Culture Studies 22: 369–90. Roudot, Alain-Claude. 2004. “Food Science and Consumer Taste.” Gastronomica 4: 41–6. Schlosser, Eric. 2001. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Sand, Jordan. 2005. “A Short History of MSG: Good Science, Bad Science, and Taste Cultures.” Gastronomica 5: 38–49. Scott, Ian M. 2000. “Green Symbolism in the Genetic Modification Debate.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 13: 293–311. Silent Running. 1972. Directed by Douglas Trumbull. USA: Universal Pictures. Smith, Matthew. 2011. An Alternative History of Hyperactivity: Food Additives and the Feingold Diet. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Soylent Green. 1973. Directed by Richard Fleischer. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Spiderman. 2002. Directed by Sam Raimi. USA: 20th Century Fox. Tan, S. et al. 2005. “Imidazolinone-tolerant Crops: History, Current Status and Future.” Pest Management Science 61: 246–57. This, Hervé. 2009. Building a Meal: From Molecular Gastronomy to Culinary Constructivism. New York: Columbia University Press. van der Weele, Cor and Clements Driessen. 2013. “Emerging Profiles for Cultured Meat: Ethics through and as Design.” Animals 3: 647–62. Verbeke, Wim et al. 2015. “‘Would you eat cultured meat?’: Consumers’ Reactions and Attitude Formation in Belgium, Portugal and the United Kingdom.” Meat Science 102: 1–10. Wyndham, John. 1951. Day of the Triffids. New York: Doubleday. X-Men. 2000. Directed by Bryan Singer. USA: 20th Century Fox.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Nutrition, Health, and Food: “What should I eat?” JESSICA MUDRY

“What should I eat?” is a question answered by many experts: nutritionists, dieticians, politicians, alternative healthcare practitioners, magazine columnists, trusted friends, and celebrities. But the answer to the question, it seems, changes almost daily. We are advised to eat a “superfood” one day, and avoid it the next; to cut protein intake today, and consume it in abundance tomorrow. In the current scientific paradigm of eating, where food’s nutritional components are synecdochal stand-ins for the food itself, the answer to the question “What to eat?” is both scientific and epistemological. Healthcare professionals look to repeatable results of the science of nutrition for the answer to the “What should I eat?” question, and the answer depends on what kind of biological effects one hopes the food will have on the body. Nutrition treats food as a medicine, and imbues food with a function: to contribute to, or detract from, one’s health.  However, as evidenced by the popularity of fad diets, celebrity-endorsed regimens, diet supplements, and proclaimed superfoods, and the “media of nutrition” by way of books, television shows, mobile device applications, and circulating web content, popular culture appropriates nutritional data and addresses the question as often as scientific disciplines and governmental policy. As such, differences in nutritional advice between popular culture and, say, national food guides are more about content than form. Dietary advice becomes legitimated when the body is presented as a science project, whether it is a federally funded project to improve a nation’s health, or a project of the culture industry that decides what a “healthy body” looks like, and what ought to be eaten to achieve that body. One could say that at its core, popular food culture is nutrition because the way in which we manage our bodies in the current food climate is through science. The myriad answers to the “what should I eat?” question come in the form of objective data, much of which is anecdotal, riddled with methodological errors, suffering from absurdly low sample sizes (n = 1, for example), or lacking evidence of repeatability. These answers are presented as science, nonetheless. In what follows, I will detail how the popular culture of food became science, and the results that this epistemological framework has had on understanding the body, food, exercise, and national diet. Scientific or governmental nutritional advice is often, at best, heeded at the same rate as nutritional advice promoted and circulated by celebrities, spokespeople, and media outlets. Gwyneth Paltrow’s urgings to eat an “alkaline diet,” Dolly Parton’s Cabbage Soup regime to stay slim, or the nomination of certain “superfoods” like kale or goji berries become part of our cultural fabric by circulating through print, television, and the digital

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media. As such, the structure of nutrition as dictated by both the scientific voice, and by Dolly’s, occupies the same epistemological position: eating the “right” way (with health, longevity, or even vanity in mind) is not a personal choice but a popular one. There are choices, sure, Gwyneth, Dolly, Dr. Oz, or even federal food guides, but the range of options are curated through the screens, both terministic and digital, of contemporary popular culture. As a result, knowing what to eat is fraught with questions of authority, body, politics, and community. What unites all of these definitions of “nutritious” diets is the approach to the body: a disembodied self-management that gives agency to diets, stars, mediated spokespeople, and technologies. This chapter looks critically at the field of nutrition and the often conflicting answers to the question “what should I eat?” The objective of the chapter is to identify the social, moral, cultural, and historical processes of medical advice around food, and to identify conflicting and often shifting patterns of nutritional advice that cause the answer to the question “what should I eat?” to be so unanswerable and fraught with such tension and conflicting advice. For simplicity and boundary, in what follows I will define nutrition as eating to optimize health, realizing that “health” itself is a slippery concept. This chapter treats popular culture as a residual category; after high culture or good taste have been parsed, what is left is pop culture. This kind of ideological selectivity, with connotations of inferiority, presents itself in nutrition and discourses of nutrition in different ways and venues than the “hard science” of nutritional research. Often, kernels of nutrition research become amplified and decorated through spokespeople, media, and governments. In popular culture, nutrition is just as much about being popular as it is about being healthy.

THE RISE OF NUTRITION IN THE UNITED STATES Contextualizing nutrition in the United States through popular culture requires a review of historically relevant moments and involves highlighting the histories of the making of nutrition into a formal discipline. This “making” of nutrition through the processes of academic research, politics, and medicine influences how it becomes integrated into popular culture. The justification of what to eat, when to eat it, and why, when buttressed by the scientific method, makes nutrition itself an argument. The veneer of authority, established through processes of professionalism, objectivity, and scientific form, means that as long as there is quantifiable justification, pop culture can use nutrition to dictate diet. Nutrition, as an academically justified field of study, has a formal curriculum of education, standard research procedures and protocols, and formal regulatory bodies that advise governments on policy. However, as scholars, journalists, and social commentators have written, nutrition as a process is fraught with politics and these politics play just as important a role in determining which answers to the “What to eat?” question will gain and maintain footholds in popular culture (Nestle 2002; Pollan 2006; Biltekoff 2013; Scrinis 2013; Levenstein 2003; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2013). Nutrition comes to popular culture through the politics, practices, and research mandates of determining the scientific relationships among food and eating. However, prior to “demonstrable” science that established food as having a measurable impact on human health, what to eat was defined, to a large extent, by religion. Many doctors, religious types, and health reformers used principles of categorizing food with religious and moral justifications for what was deemed to be a healthy diet. These categories provided alternatives to the “official” nutrition advice that eventually came from the

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scientists of the United States Department of Agriculture. Early on, the most notable spokesperson for eating for health was Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham, after whom the “graham” cracker was named. Graham spoke for the Pennsylvania Temperance Society in 1830; he and William Alcott preached that it was the responsibility of people to “understand the structure and function of the human body” (Whorton 1982, 60), so that they could achieve health, both moral and physical. Though Graham did not use the word “nutrition,” he preached exercise, appropriate dress, abstinence, and lots of vegetables as the pillars of good health. Graham’s proposed diet of vegetables and grains gained popularity in the early-mid-1800s and he used the term “hygiene” as a stand-in for “nutrition” in order to promote his diet. Stimulants like meat, spice, alcohol, coffee, and tea were considered evil and immoral cultural touchstones, and by calling them out as such, Graham’s bland “hygiene” diet aimed to quash physiological and sexual desire could be easily justified in America as healthy (Gevitz 1988). In the United States, the shift that encouraged the documentation of this science arose when, in 1862, Abraham Lincoln established the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). This “scienceproducing agency” that tested the agricultural output of farms, established best-practices of farming, and encouraged particular patterns of eating based on optimizing bodily function (Cochrane 1993; Congress Act 37). Over the last century and a half, nutrition has focused on the optimization of the body by using the model of “body-as-machine,” a model imported by USDA scientists who had studied abroad, and who had established research labs in various land grant colleges. These labs gave rise to the beginning of American nutrition and, because researchers were encouraged to identify themselves as scientists, and to publish their research in journals (put out by the USDA and circulated among the laboratories) this wrested both agriculture and the definition of “eating well” from the population, and placed it under the umbrella of objective research that approached the “what to eat” question in quantifiable and verifiable ways. It was during this period that “what to eat” became an answerable question imbued with morals. Processes of quantifying calories, fat grams, protein content or various nutrients meant that certain foods were objectively better than others; or that some foods were “right” while others were “wrong.” The specific messages in the moral framework depended on the nutritional paradigm at the time, but a binary of good/bad, or right/wrong positioned food through its itinerant quantities. This framework has a history and in America in the late nineteenth century, at a USDA-funded laboratory at Wesleyan University established by the principal scientist, Wilbur Olin Atwater. Atwater and his adviser Samuel Johnson were key figures in introducing a scientific mandate for food research, and in popularizing the relationship between food, science, and the body. Atwater was greatly influenced by German chemists and physiologists who worked to establish the relationships between and among food, metabolism, and health. Atwater had worked at the University of Munich with Carl von Voit (a former student of Justus Liebig) who established the metabolic effects of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats on the body. Much of the German research that Atwater imported understood the body as a machine that was fueled by food and outputted work (Cravens 1976; Carpenter 1994). Atwater’s appreciation for this model of the body influenced his research at the Wesleyan experiment station, and his articles in the USDA publications reflected that (Atwater and Benedict 1903; Atwater and Rosa 1899). As well, the bodyas-machine model provided an organizing principle for both a politics and economics of nutrition research. Following from Atwater's published research out of the Wesleyan laboratories, USDA food guides began pushing quantified answers to “what to eat” in and through food guides, dietary studies among populations, and USDA circulars.

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Religion and science continued to contribute to popular discourses of nutrition over the latter part of the nineteenth century and health reformer John Harvey Kellogg continued Sylvester Graham’s earlier legacy of “hygiene.” Also a religious man, Seventh Day Adventist Kellogg was the resident physician at Michigan’s Battle Creek Sanitarium, and thus had the ethos of a medical education (Gevitz 1988). Also a teetotaler, Kellogg preached no sex, no booze, lots of vegetables, and the frequent emptying of the bowels. Foreshadowing the late twentieth century’s obsession with dietary fiber, Kellogg treated nutrition as a process that began at the table and ended in the toilet. Kellogg encouraged the consumption of cereals and grains for breakfast, introducing granola as a health food, and touting the importance of bran. The 1910 advertisement announcing “Good Morning! I’ve had my Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. Have You?” (Kellogg’s 1910) was tantamount to saying that this doe-eyed woman has had her morning constitutional. Kellogg’s Corn Flakes turned the collective attention to breakfast as an important part of a healthy diet, and several companies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries began making breakfast a trope for good nutrition. Another health food zealot concerned with the ins and outs of nutrition was Horace Fletcher, whose approach to food was less about religion-driven moral purity and more about the drive to efficiency and wastereduction of the Progressive Era. Fletcher thought that the secret to good health was excessive chewing of the food and, as such, was known as the “Great Masticator.” By chewing food until it was entirely liquefied and ground to almost nothing, the body could use every vitamin and mineral in the food. As a result, Fletcher’s method of nutrient extraction ought to, he proclaimed, result in one bowel movement every two weeks (Whorton 2002; 2000; 1982). Despite the fact that these popular dietary reformers had different opinions regarding what to eat, why, and how, their goals remained the same: to achieve health through eating. Graham and Kellogg’s earlier diets saw food as a vehicle for religious salvation through health, while Horace Fletcher’s efficient nutrient extraction by mastication better represented the Progressive Era in the United States. The themes of efficiency and wastereduction in nutrition were also seen in the launch of the federally published food guides, the first of which was published by the USDA in 1917.

NUTRITION AND/AS POPULAR CULTURE Early in the twentieth century, the idea of eating for health was often eclipsed by eating “defensively” against food adulteration. Understanding how food could impart health was secondary to avoiding foods that had been mislabeled, lengthened with toxic or indigestible substances, or were simply just rotten. Where food came from and what was in it remained a concern among the population and was reflected in the passing of the 1906 Food and Drug Act championed by chemist Harvey Wiley. Fighting burgeoning industrial food lobbies in the American Congress, Wiley fought food adulteration at the level of popular media, by establishing himself at the helm of Good Housekeeping (GH) magazine. In 1914, Wiley and Anne Lewis Pierce wrote an article for the magazine titled “Swindled Getting Slim” that detailed the ways that diet aids were being sold to unwitting consumers with misleading and fraudulent claims of health, beauty, and slimness (Wiley 1914). Yet, GH became a classic example of a manifestation of nutrition as pop culture of food. In 1908, GH announced the establishment of the Good Housekeeping “Experiment Station: A Complete Chemical Laboratory, Model Kitchen and Testing Room, Operated in Connection with Our Editorial Department” (Larned and Maddox 1908). The answer

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to the “What to eat?” question according to GH was to be found in a chemical laboratory that would give GH “a foundation and an authority never before enjoyed by a household magazine” (Larned and Maddox 1908). At the turn of the twentieth century, then, eating to be healthy required two approaches: first, to avoid food that had been adulterated and second, to eat foods that, informed by the scientific method and justified by testing, were good for you. The first national American food guide published by the USDA was released in 1917, and scientific pragmatism framed the guide: eat according to caloric “fuel” value. With such an approach, food had agency and biological function: it could give the eater “energy” in the form of calories or it could provide vitamins or minerals to combat various diseases. More influential, however, was that this approach created the concept of food groups that could act as an organizing principle for meals, bodies, and diets and overall nutrition. Cereals, fruits, vegetables, meats, fats, and dairy products became categories that dictated moral, economic, and health qualities and quantities. Foods could then be functionalized by enrichment with certain nutrients. In the 1920s iodized salt, touted as a goiter-preventer, was one of the first functionalized foods. “Health authorities” recommended Morton’s Salt to prevent goiter because iodide saved “hundreds of thousands of children from impaired health and possible deformity” (115. Morton’s Advertisement). In America, where bowel movements were never far from Kellogg’s party-line, their Pep cereal promoted Pep as containing bran, which was “mildly laxative” (138. Kellogg’s Advertisement). This was one of the earlier examples where a specific physiological function was brought into relationship with a food and its biologically active nutrient. Underpinning these kinds of products on the market was the establishment of the American Institute for Nutrition (AIN) and the Journal of Nutrition, both in 1928. These venues provided a direction for cultural and media outlets to craft their messages about what to eat. Early issues showed entrenchment of the Atwater Units of food and the body, as the journal focused largely on energy intake, basal metabolism, and the role of vitamins and minerals. Articles like “Food Intake in Pregnancy, Lactation and Reproductive Rest in the Human Mother” (Shukers et al. 1931) and “A Comparison of Apricots and Their Carotene Equivalent as Sources of Vitamin A” (Morgan and Madsen 1933) were common and showed how the alignment of nutrition and the scientific process was codified. By the 1930s the social landscape of the United States had undergone widespread changes, bringing rampant unemployment, hunger marches, and breadlines. From the late 1920s to the early years of the 1930s, household incomes plummeted and a third of the American workforce was unemployed. Nutrition in the United States was reduced to concerns about stretching calories to feed the population. How to choose those calories wisely and economically became important, and food guides from this era reflected this. In the years between the Great Depression and the Second World War, federal regulatory bodies in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries recognized nutrients as being the most important part of food as it related to health. Foods became functional agents and the media through which people could ingest certain magic bullet nutrients of which, with expanded research into the role of vitamins and minerals in health and disease-prevention, governments began mandating consumption. The development and expansion of the reductionist approach to food through vitamins can be found in Rima Apple’s Vitamania (1996); Apple points clearly to the patterns of nutrition, through nutrient isolation, which fostered an idea of functionality in food and a culture of food being able to “do” something in the body to encourage health.

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In 1941 the United States established the nutrient minimums known as the recommended dietary allowances (RDA) and foods became the therapeutic agents of nutrition explicitly in both policy and popular food discourses. The RDA meant that the food industry could begin marketing foods as healthy and nutritious if they contained certain amounts of certain nutrients. In an advertisement from the 1930s, General Mills’ Kix cereal advertised that it was “enriched with four added food elements” and as a result it contained Vitamin B for nerves, Vitamin D for bones and teeth, and Calcium and Phosphorous which were “needed for bodily development.” (120. Kix Advertisement) A 1936 Nucoa margarine advertisement proclaimed that it “supplies the food energy they need” (216. Nucoa Advertisement) and a Nabisco Shredded Wheat advertisement from 1942 showed a picture of a child and her testimonial “My breakfast tastes so good, and Mother says it has Vitamin B1 as NATURE provides it” (122. Nabisco Advertisement). Despite the prevalence of an economically parsimonious food discourse at the time, and concerns about getting enough to eat on a tight budget, the idea of food as being something more than just filler for an empty belly began to take hold (Mudry 2009). The 1930s and 1940s saw a rise in breakfast powders like Ovaltine—processed foods that were engineered specifically to provide the body with the required daily vitamins and minerals. These new fortified products did more than simply provide ingredients that had physiological benefits. Their secondary function was to reformulate the category of “food” through marketing. Advertisements for Ovaltine show that the function of “tasting good” to the body became supplanted by “doing good” to the body. These milk supplements were not “foods” in the traditional sense; they were foods because they encouraged the eater to think about eating as an activity designed to fulfill the Recommended Daily Allowances. An Ovaltine print advertisement from 1944 showed a bounty of food, its vitamin content, and two glasses of Ovaltine that were its nutritional equivalent. “Ovaltine provides as much Vitamin G (now known as Vitamin B2 or riboflavin) as ¾ pound of sirloin steak, more niacin than 5 slices of fortified bread, more Vitamin B1 than 3 servings of oatmeal, and more Vitamin D than 10 ounces of butter” (213. Ovaltine Advertisement). The establishment of the Recommended Daily Allowances in 1943 by the United States Department of Agriculture began the equation between nutrition and health, and the subsequent National Wartime Food Guide made the biological function of foods the basis upon which to group foods: carbohydrates, proteins, fats, dairy products, and vegetables. During the war, vitamin-rich “nutritious” foods (fruits and vegetables) were to be grown and preserved and meats, sugars, and coffee were to be rationed (Bentley 1998). Public campaigns encouraged winning the war through planting, growing, and eating the harvest of the garden and forfeiting meat, sugar, and coffee for the war effort. The “rations” for Americans overseas were upwards of 2,500 calories and, as such, servicemen became accustomed to large portions and a wide variety of foods. There was a marked shift in nutrition after the Second World War. Because the war required innovation in food chemistry and preservation, the magic bullet vitamins and minerals that made a food “nutritious” could be found in more and different kinds of foods. This fortification meant a new food culture that reflected currents in nutrition research: margarine, rice, bread, and cereal were fortified with folate, iron, and niacin. Processed, preserved, or prepared foods could be constructed as nutritious by adding in a soupçon of scientific language as evidenced by the Baby Ruth candy bar that was “rich in dextrose, vital food-energy sugar” (84. Baby Ruth Advertisement). This framework in the zeitgeist of the 1950s, however, ushered in the widespread use of a new pop cultural unit of nutrition: the calorie. The taking up of the unit of the calorie worked coincidentally

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with the positive association with “energy” and work (Rabinbach 1992). Depressionera concerns about malnutrition had largely subsided. New food guides counseled what constituted an “adequate” diet, which consisted of four food groups: meats, grains, dairy, and fruits and vegetables. These “Basic Four” groups were considered the backbone to good nutrition, but nutritionists at the United States Department of Agriculture expected that they be supplemented with fats, oils, and refined grains to “round out the meals” and “satisfy the appetite” (Page and Phipard 1956, 1). As well, the landscape of the supermarket, the postwar ubiquity of cheap sources of saturated fats, and the chemical processes of lipid hydrogenation meant that shelf-stable snacks and dairy-like products needed a place in nutrition (Critser 2003). Cool Whip advertised itself as a healthy, lower-calorie alternative to whipped cream, and Cheez-Whiz was the tasty vehicle that made vegetables into something delicious. Nutrition research in the 1960s reflected the pre- to postwar shift from concern about not enough, to concern about too much. Prior to the 1930s the idea of a “diet,” as understood as a method for slimming down, saw little press. However, by the Second World War, the female silhouette became the target for a variety of diets that trotted out “nutrition” as a justification for slimness (Foxcroft 2013). The calorie became recognized as a food unit, and controlling them, as well as other micronutrients, became part of popular discourse. Concurrently, the medical profession began to voice concern about overweight and obesity, signaling this shift in attitudes toward food and nutrition. By the 1960s, the American Red Cross, the American Heart Foundation, and the USDA all indicated this shift. Being overweight was a danger and eating “right” meant eating less. Though remaining with the Basic Four food guide, in the 1960 the USDA published a circular entitled “Food and Your Weight.” The circular provided the reader with calorie counts for a variety of foods and contained “Basic Weight-Control Facts” (Page and Fincher 1960, 5) and “Suggestions for Reducers” (Page and Fincher 1960, 15.) The guide cautioned not to eat a diet that was too limited or that was “inadequate in essential nutrients” (Page and Fincher 1960, 15). These popular media equating nutrition and obesity arose out of the learned journals which, at the time, began ramping up article publication on obesity. In 1965, the Journal of Nutrition and the Journal of Clinical Nutrition published 26 articles on obesity. Three years later, in 1968, the number was 44 and by the late 1970s the number was topping 100. The reason for the climbing rates of obesity, according to Jean Mayer of Harvard, was the overconsumption of everything: salt, sugar, and fat, most notably saturated fat. In the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs Meeting of 1977, Dr. Julius Richmond, the assistant secretary of health, stated, “Many experts now believe that we have entered a new era in nutrition, when the lack of essential nutrients is no longer the major nutritional problem facing most American people” (DHHS 1977, xxxiii). The committee issued a report that contained many worrisome words for industry, but that shaped the popular culture of nutrition: reduce, avoid, and limit. The beef, sugar, and salt industries were unhappy to be linked to poor nutrition habits and to heart disease, high cholesterol and diabetes (Nestle 2002). And so this new approach to nutrition, one framed by eating less instead of eating more, forced both eaters and industry to rethink the answer to the “what should I eat” question. In the 1970s, popular diets relied mainly on calorie cutting, with the Cabbage Soup Diet resurfacing from its introduction in the 1930s. Alongside this, however, were appetite suppressant pills like Dexatrim, and meal-replacement drinks like Slim-Fast and Metrecal, all of which promised a completely nutritious meal in a can. In 1980, after the USDA published the McGovern report that contained the advice from Meyer and Richmond, they issued new dietary guidelines. Good nutrition now

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meant eating a variety of foods, but with an eye to limiting fat, sodium, cholesterol, and sugar. In the years between this guide and the now infamous food pyramid of 1992, discourses of nutrition weighted heavily to the prevention of diseases of abundance. Among developed nations, rates of obesity were skyrocketing and nutrition scientists focused on what to not eat to be healthy, instead of what to eat. In 1982, the “Obesity Society” was established to “promote research, education and advocacy to better understand, prevent and treat obesity” (Obesity Society, 2016). The society began the scholarly journal Obesity: The Journal for Health and Social Behavior in 1993; together, the research society and journal provided scientific fodder for popular culture messages. The pop culture of nutrition from the 1980s and early 1990s remained resolutely antifat, with a mantra that eating fat would make you fat. This was simplistic science, but food marketers and food producers began to pull fat out of everything: yogurt, ice cream, salad dressings, cakes and cookies, peanut butter, chips, and snacks. Things that had little or no fat in them touted this fact: bread, crackers, breakfast cereals, skimmed milk, sorbets, and jams. McDonalds released the briny-tasting, seaweed-filled “McLean” burger in 1991 that advertised itself as “91%” fat-free. Good nutrition messages became the key to combating obesity. They gained semantic weight with the media as the rates of obesity rose and it was dubbed a crisis, an epidemic, and a pandemic (Brownell and Horgen 2004; Campos 2004). By 1990, the US government had passed the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act that required packaged foods to contain a Nutrition Facts label that enumerated the serving size, cholesterol, calories, fats, sugar, protein, sodium, and carbohydrate content of the food in the package. The hope was, and remains, that consumers will look to the food’s nutrient content to both inform and persuade their choices. As well, the data provides the food industry with a structure upon which they can make certain nutrition claims. Alongside this legislation was the release, in 1992, of the now infamous ‘food guide pyramid’ that further villainized fat. When the USDA released the food guide pyramid in 1992, the goal was to introduce a symbol that was both simple to understand, but that could contain a century’s worth of nutrition research. The shape of the guide was a key feature, and the USDA hired a consumer relations firm to research and test its efficacy among focus groups. The pictograph was a triumph of simplification. The base of the pyramid was starches: breads, grains, and cereals, the next level had proportionally smaller-sized food categories for fruits and vegetables, the next level up had even smaller categories for dairy and proteins, and the top of the pyramid was “fats, oils and sweets” which were to be used sparingly. Perhaps it was the cartoon-ish nature of the visual, its colorful representations of Swiss cheese, or broccoli or saltine crackers, or perhaps it was the simple message of proportionality that the pyramid shape afforded, but whatever the reason, the food guide pyramid represented a visual manifestation of nutrition as popular culture. The guide was culturally malleable: Latino diets could put cartoon tortillas on the bottom, Asian diets could have bowls of rice forming the foundation, the Mediterranean Diet could be shoved into pyramid form with its glass of red wine. The guide was widely parodied: the toddler food pyramid consisted almost entirely of animal crackers, the pirate food pyramid had a foundational base of rum; and the Texas food pyramid had an entire food group for barbecue. With the food guide, the concept of nutrition became visible and iconic. The pyramid itself became a trope for nutrition, a picture to answer the “What should I eat?” question. After the release of the official food guide pyramid in 1992, low-fat cooking took off, low-fat products flooded the grocery stores, and food chemistry experimented with

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unmetabolized synthetic fats like Olestra to allow people to eat fat in a form that was unusable by the body. The unpleasant side effects of the fake fat, including vitamin depletion, cramping, and anal leakage, seemed to outweigh the benefits of eating French fries; Proctor and Gamble all but discontinued its use in human food preparation by the 2000s. As the food pyramid took hold in popular culture, the food industry’s goal was to stick to the nutritional guidelines of the pyramid but to allow consumers to eat what they wanted. But a confounding pattern emerged for nutritionists: as the industrialized world ate less fat, obesity rates continued to rise. Between 1991 and 2010, obesity rates nearly doubled from 20 percent to just below 40 percent among the American population (CDC 2016). Type 2 diabetes and “metabolic syndrome” (referring to the unhealthy profile of high insulin, high blood sugar, elevated triglycerides and low levels of HDL cholesterol) rose alongside obesity rates. Though popular medical opinion held on tightly to the now tenuous link between red meat, saturated fat, heart disease, and corpulence, outliers like endocrinologists Gerald Reaven pointed to sugar and high glycemic-indexed carbohydrates, whose rampant consumption was encouraged by the “low-fat” nutritional advice of the 1990s as the enemy. Journalist Gary Taubes’ article in The New York Times Magazine titled “What if it’s all been a big fat lie?” published in 2002 may well be considered a turning point for public opinion on the low-fat craze. The protein-heavy “Dr. Atkins New Diet Revolution” made carbohydrates the enemy and sales of the book, originally published in the 1970s, rose in the early 2000s. By the end of the first decade of the 2000s, finding where to go to get an answer to the “What should I eat?” question could lead one to a variety of websites, blogs, online videos, and digital mobile device applications. A YouTube video released in 2009 by pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig, entitled “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” was viewed almost seven million times. In it, he argues that sugar is toxic and disrupts endocrine and metabolic functions in the body. Lustig’s findings were published in 2012, citing the link between the consumption of refined sugar and metabolic syndrome, and their contribution to the increase in obesity and diabetes in the Western world (Lustig 2012).

CONCLUSION As a variety of stakeholders including researchers, policymakers, the diet and food industries, and individual success stories attempt to weigh in on what makes a nutritious diet, the idea that food can affect health or be made to function by adding certain magic bullet nutrients makes for a market of strange edibles. There seems to be no widespread outrage or much popular critical discourse about yogurt with added fish oil, pasta with the gluten removed, or milk with no lactose. Drawing more, not less, attention to a food’s role in making health demonstrates how the popular culture of food, writ large, is nutrition. Bestowing such a function to foods makes food, according to professor of consumer behavior and nutritional science Brian Wansink, “consequence-related” (Wansink 2007). Per Wansink, a new trend of functional foods work in the body above the chemically simple Atwater-unit, “attribute level”: calories, fat, proteins, and carbohydrates. Foods can be nutritionally functional because they naturally contain a desired ingredient—oats have soluble fiber that may reduce cholesterol, turmeric is anti-inflammatory—or foods may be made to be functional through the processes of food science. Cookies with added probiotics or margarine with added plant sterols are considered nutritious because the added nutrient provides “functionality.” When these kinds of foods are normalized and unquestioned by popular culture, it becomes evident that the popular culture of food is

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nutrition. In the current culture, food is reified in and through its chemical, medical, and metabolic properties. The spectrum of nutrition runs from good to bad, and the units for this become the scientifically determined nutrients in each food. Alongside this spectrum exists a moral discourse that makes one food better than another because of science, not taste, history, geography, or culture (Mudry 2009; Biltekoff 2013; Kimura 2013). The idea of a functional food is not new, but the idea that all foods function for better or worse demonstrates that the early idea of nutrition as the popular culture of food persists, repeats itself, and is continually reinforced. Food may promote health or cause disease, but it does something, biochemically, in the body. As the academic field of nutrition continues to probe the interactions between food and the body to draw relationships between food and health, the assumption is that popular culture remains attuned to, and literate in, the complexities of the human body: digestion, metabolism, gut flora, exercise, meal timing, hormones, and food sensitivities and allergies. In such a framework, then, the answer to the “What should I eat?” question will always change, but the steps to getting the answer will remain the same. The “experts” who answer the question know that codifying what constitutes a nutritious diet is difficult, but that the presentation of their message is most important. It is the “science” of nutrition and so vitamin donuts, Metrecal, the McLean, and kombucha will give way to something new to eat that answers the “What should I eat?” question that pays heed to the model of the body that rests upon the relationship of food being an agent of health, an artifact of science, and a representation of an epistemology of eating.

REFERENCES Hatch Act 1887. Sec. 3 Chapter 314 49th Congress Session 2) March 2, 1887. Apple, R. 1996. Vitamania: Vitamins in American Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Atwater, Wilbur, and Edward Rosa. 1899. “Description of a new respiration calorimeter and experiments on the conservation of energy in the human body.” Office of the Experiment Stations Bulletin. 63. Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office. Atwater, Wilbur, and Francis Benedict. 1903. “Metabolism of matter and energy in the human body.” Office of the Experiment Stations Bulletin. 136. Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office. Baby Ruth. 1942. Advertisement. Good Housekeeping, 84. Bentley, Amy. 1998. Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Biltekoff, C. 2013. Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health. Durham, Duke University Press. Brownell, Kelly, and Katherine Horgen. 2004. Food Fight: The Inside Story of The Food Industry, America’s Obesity Crisis, and What We can Do About It. New York City: McGraw-Hill. Campos, Paul. 2004. The Obesity Myth: Why America’s Obsession With Weight is Hazardous To Your Health. New York City: Gotham Books. Carpenter, Kenneth. 1994. “The Life and Times of W.O. Atwater (1844-1907)” The Journal of Nutrition 124: 1707S–14S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2016. Overweight and Obesity: Adult Obesity Facts. http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html last modified September 1, 2016 Cochrane, Willard W. 1993. Development of American Agriculture: A Historical Analysis, 2nd ed. University of Minnesota Press.

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Cravens, H. 1996. “The German-American Science of Racial Nutrition.” In Technical knowledge in American culture: science, technology and medicine since the early 1800's., edited by H. Cravens, A. Marcus, and D. Katzman Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press. Critser, Greg. 2003. Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World. New York: Houghton-Mifflin. Foxcroft, Louise. 2013. Calories and Corsets: A History of Dieting over 2000 years. London: Profile Books. Gevitz, N. 1988. Other Healers: Unorthodox Healers in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kellogg’s. “Good Morning! I’ve Had My Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. Have You?” Advertisement. Attic Paper. Accessed November 30, 2016. http://www.atticpaper.com/proddetail. php?prod=1910-kelloggs-corn-flakes-ad-henry-hutt_good-morning. Kimura, Aya H. 2013. Hidden Hunger: Gender and the Politics of Smarter Foods. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kix. June 1939. Advertisement. Good Housekeeping, 1939. Larned, Linda, and Mildred Maddox. 1908. “The Good Housekeeping Experiment Station,” Good Housekeeping. November: 585–86. Levenstein, Harvey. 2003. Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America. Berkeley, University of California Press. Lustig, Robert., L. Schmidt and C. Brindis. 2012. “Public health: The toxic truth about sugar” Nature. 482, 27–29. Morgan, A. F., and E. O. Madsen. 1933. “A Comparison of Apricots and Their Carotene Equivalent as Sources of Vitamin A” Journal of Nutrition 6, 83–93. Morton’s. November 1925. Advertisement. Good Housekeeping, 115. Mudry, Jessica. 2009. Measured Meals: Nutrition in America. Albany: SUNY Press. Nestle, Marion. 2002. Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nabisco. June 1942. Advertisement. Good Housekeeping, 122. Nucoa. December 1936. Advertisement. Good Housekeeping, 216. Obesity Society. 2016. “Home Page.” Last modified N.D. http://www.obesity.org/home. Ovaltine. November 1944. Advertisement. Good Housekeeping, 1944. Page, E., and L. Phipard. 1956. U.S. Department of Agriculture. “Essentials of An Adequate Diet.” Bulletin No. 160 Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Page, L., and L. Fincher. 1960. “Food and Your Weight.” US Home and Garden Bulletins. Institute of Home Economics, Agricultural Research Service. Washington DC: Government Printing Office. Pep. August 1932. Advertisement. Good Housekeeping, 138. Pollan, Michael. 2009. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. New York City: Penguin. Rabinbach, Anson. 1992. The Human Motor. Berkeley: University of California Press. Scrinis, Gyorgy. 2013. Nutritionism: The Science and Politics of Dietary Advice. New York City: Columbia University Press. Senate Select Committee. 1977. U.S. Department of Agriculture. 197. Hearings of the 64th Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs of the U.S. Senate. 95th Congress, 1st session, Feb 1-2 1977. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Shukers, C. F., et al. 1931. “Food Intake in Pregnancy, Lactation, and Reproductive Rest in the Human Mother.” Journal of Nutrition. 4: 399–410. Taubes, Gary. 2002. “What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?” New York Times Magazine, July 7. Accessed August 31, 2016.

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U.S. Department of Agriculture. 1977. Dietary Goals for the United States, 2nd ed. Washington DC: Government Printing Office, December. U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. 1980. Nutrition and Your Health: Dietary Guidelines For Americans. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. 1991. “Food Labeling: Nutrient Content Claims, General Principles; Health Claims, General Requirements and Other Specific Requirements for Individual Health Claims.” Docket 94P-0390 page 66208. Wansink, Brian. 2007. Marketing nutrition: soy, functional foods, biotechnology and obesity. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Whorton, James. 1982. Crusaders for Fitness: The History of American Health Reformers. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Whorton, James. 2000. Inner Hygiene: Constipation and the Pursuit of Health in Modern Society. New York City: Oxford University Press. Whorton, James. 2002. Natural Cures: The History of Alternative Medicine in America. New York City: Oxford University Press. Wiley, Dr. Harvey W. and Anne Lewis Pierce. (January 1914). “Swindled Getting Slim”. Good Housekeeping, 109.

CHAPTER TWENTY

A Kind Diet: Cultivating Consumer Politics, Status, and Femininity through Ethical Eating JOSÉE JOHNSTON, KATE CAIRNS, AND MERIN OLESCHUK

INTRODUCTION Shopping at our local market, we encounter a package of strawberries boasting the slogan, “Eat me, do good.” This message is not uncommon in today’s grocery stores. Consumers are frequently encouraged to buy foods that not only promote their own pleasure and well-being, but also offer benefits for animals, workers, and ecological systems. As the discourse of “ethical eating” gains popular appeal, many celebrities have embraced the cause, and numerous best-selling cookbooks promise both personal and planetary benefits. Gwyneth Paltrow’s popular lifestyle website, Goop, promotes “clean” eating, along with kitchen composting to reduce climate change, and vegan meals that are good for your health and the environment. Mark Bittman’s 2014 best-selling cookbook, VB6, advocates veganism before 6:00 p.m. to promote a vision of ethical eating that includes weight loss, good health, and a more sustainable relationship with food. Another ethical-eating spokesperson with much popular appeal is actor Alicia Silverstone. Silverstone’s 2009 vegan cookbook, The Kind Diet, was a New York Times bestseller, her follow-up book, The Kind Mama (2014), was widely anticipated, and her active online community (www.thekindlife.com) functions as a network for ideas and individuals uniting around the idea of a “kind diet.” Silverstone sells a vision of foodwork where women make food choices that are not only kind to themselves and their children, but also kind to animals and ecosystems. As stated in the book’s subtitle, The Kind Diet promises a “simple guide to feeling great, losing weight, and saving the planet.” In the opening pages, Silverstone emphasizes the connections between global problems and “simple” dietary choices: These days, it seems like there are a million and one problems in the world; global warming, droughts, rising food costs, toxic waterways, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, starvation . . . it’s enough to make anyone want to crawl into a hole with a big bowl of ice cream! Of course you know ice cream’s not the solution. But what if I told you that

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the ice cream you’re craving is actually one of the causes of every single one of those problems? What if I said that by choosing nondairy ice cream instead, you’d be taking a huge step toward solving them all? (2009, 1) According to Silverstone, the essence of kind eating involves a plant-based diet that avoids the “nasty stuff” prevalent in our industrial food system: the “meat, dairy and processed foods” that are “tracking toxic sludge” through our bodies, and the bodies of our children (2014, 18). By eating a kind diet, you will protect your health, create a safe and welcoming “baby house” for your pregnancy, lose weight, and earn an “eco-bonus” by doing the “greenest thing you can do” (ibid., 15). While Silverstone advocates a relatively extreme set of dietary practices compared to American norms, the “kind diet” fits within a broader discourse of ethical eating that connects the politics of one’s plate to social and environmental issues. The cultural discourse around ethical eating is multifaceted but contains a common theme that is plainly presented in Silverstone’s vision: making delicious, responsible food choices will make the world a better place. The popularity of Silverstone’s books—and their explicit articulation of core “kind” eating principles—makes them a compelling case to probe the contested discourse of ethical eating, and the scholarly debates that surround it. In the next section, we outline key themes and debates in ethical-eating literature, both historically and in contemporary scholarship. Then, we use the case of the kind diet to explore these themes more deeply. Specifically, we connect the idea of kind eating to a search for: 1) individual solutions to social problems; 2) high-status cultural practices; and 3) displays of femininity.

ETHICAL-EATING DISCOURSE: THEMES AND DEBATES Ethical-eating discourse invites you, the consumer, to “vote with your fork”: to turn individual consumer food choices into political acts by shopping to support a range of causes. Whether it is by drinking fair-trade coffee or choosing local vegetables, this discourse suggests that individual consumers have the capacity to effect environmental and social change (Johnston 2008). This idea is popular and politically compelling, yet contradictions abound when attempting to eat ethically. Does eating an exclusively local diet mean neglecting the food economies of underdeveloped nations? Should consumers choose long-distance organic strawberries to reduce pesticide usage, or local strawberries that have been treated with the fumigant methyl bromide? These contradictions belie easy resolution, and illustrate the range of issues at stake in ethical-eating discourse. In general, the dominant discourse foregrounds environmental issues with less attention given to labor exploitation, hunger, and social justice (Johnston and Baumann 2015). While priorities vary, what unites ethical-eating discourse is the central idea that conscientious choices contain a win-win potential—helping yourself to a nutritious and tasty diet simultaneously allows you to aid in the collective pursuit of social or environmental change (Johnston and Cairns 2012). While a vision of “eating for change” may seem natural, this focus on individual consumer actions differs from past consumer activism that took a more collective approach (see Cohen 2003; Johnston and Cairns 2012; Gabriel and Lang 2006; Hilton 2003). Given women’s responsibility for domestic foodwork, it is perhaps not surprising that women have long been associated with these collective forms of food activism. Deutsch notes that historians have “documented the importance of women in food riots in both the United

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States and Europe throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries” (2010, 107). Besides episodic food riots, consumer protests took on an organized form in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; cooperatives formed to combat monopolies over basic foodstuffs and consumer organizations arose to protest food prices and demand stricter market regulation (Johnston and Cairns 2012, 222). In the 1890s, the US National Consumers League (NCL) issued “white lists” of approved stores with humane labor conditions, and urged middle-class women to spend their dollars accordingly. Although these lists targeted labor exploitation, the long-term historic trend of consumer activism was to demand greater protection for consumers. For example, Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle (1906) was a muckraking exposé of the unsanitary and exploitative labor conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking industry. To Sinclair’s disappointment, the public reacted more strongly to the grotesque imagery of contaminated meat than his narrative of immigrant labor exploitation. Still, the public outcry did work to generate regulatory reform, yielding the US Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. In the early twentieth century, the Great Depression solidified public perception of an unscrupulous marketplace, and inspired activism from consumer organizations that often worked in collaboration with trade unions, the labor movement, and women’s groups (Hilton 2007; Cohen 2003, 28). The 1930s and 1940s are seen as the heydays of consumer activism in the United States: numerous campaigns emerged to form consumer cooperatives, protest high food costs, and channel grocery dollars toward progressive causes like union-made goods and local businesses rather than chain stores (Deutsch 2010, 108–15). In 1935, a nationwide protest against the high cost of meat involved boycotts, pickets, petitions, public confrontation, and a meeting with the secretary of agriculture (ibid., 110–11). Historian Liz Cohen notes, “At a high point during the meat boycotts of 1935, women in cities throughout the country succeeded in effectively shutting down the retail butcher trade as well as implicating the wholesale meatpackers whose profiteering they held greatly responsible for recent price hikes” (2003, 36). Women’s consumer activism in these decades was frequently animated by high food prices, but was ambitious in scope and reach, mobilizing women across class and racial divides (ibid., 33–38, 51). While some consumer organizations depicted women shoppers as naïve housewives only concerned with cheap food, historians argue that women’s work served as a “spur to political activism” rather than a deterrent, and note how women often took on leadership positions in consumer organizations, a tendency particularly noted in African American consumer coops (Deutsch 2010, 127). In postwar America, the collective radicalism of consumer organizations receded. Cohen notes that the “citizen consumer,” who urged governments to protect the collective good, eventually lost ground to a “purchaser consumer,” who contributed “more by exercising purchasing power than through asserting themselves politically” (2003, 18–19; Cross 2000, 135). With the rise of mass consumption and chain grocery stores, consumer organizations abandoned their militant commitments and shifted their focus to product testing and information, producing guides like Consumer Reports magazine (Cross 2000, 135; Cohen 2003, 131). The most recent wave of consumer activism emerged in the 1980s and retained a focus on individual consumption. It is known by a range of names: alternative consumption, political consumption, ethical consumption, and green consumerism. While this latest phase of food activism frequently focuses on environmental issues that also impact human health (e.g., organics), various products have been linked to social justice (e.g., fair-trade coffee), animal welfare (e.g., grass-fed beef or cage-free eggs), and support for small, local producers (e.g., farmers’ markets).

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Scholarship on ethical-eating discourse can be conceptualized on a spectrum from optimistic to pessimistic perspectives, both of which offer valuable insights. More optimistic approaches highlight the appeal and potential of “vote with your fork” strategies. Citizens who feel daunted by large-scale social and environmental problems can craft a responsible identity through an ethical consumer lifestyle (e.g., Lorenzen 2014; MacKendrick and Stevens 2016). Additionally, because women have been historically marginalized from institutional politics, they may particularly welcome opportunities to engage in activism on a more individual scale (Cairns and Johnston 2015a, 17; Micheletti 2003). Furthermore, research suggests that consumer demand can create significant change, as corporations adopt more responsible practices to protect their market share (Cairncross 1992; Carrigan and de Pelsmacker 2009; Jones et al. 2005). While some worry that ethical consumption options discourage more radical approaches (e.g., buying an organic apple instead of organizing a protest), survey research suggests that ethical consumption does not necessarily replace, or squeeze out more traditional forms of political engagement (Willis and Schor 2012; Baumann, Engman, and Johnston 2015). In other words, concerned consumers who go to farmers’ markets and drink fair-trade coffee often also sign petitions and vote regularly. These perspectives suggest that politicizing everyday food consumption can foster political subjectivities, and may create a ripple of positive changes in our food system. While optimistic approaches emphasize the transformative possibilities of “voting with your fork,” other work usefully identifies detrimental consequences of consumer strategies. Ethical-eating discourse tends to individualize responsibility for structural problems in the food system (Guthman 2008), letting state and industry actors off the hook for systemic issues like food safety, worker conditions, and ecological degradation (Szasz 2008). Our democratic imagination may be limited when we focus food politics on shopping and neglect strategies involving collective organization, contentious action, and state regulation (Huddart Kennedy et al., 2016; MacKendrick 2010; Szasz 2008). Despite the claim that ethical eating is a simple win-win, this discourse can leave shoppers confused by contradictory claims (Cairns et al. 2014), stressed by the challenge of shielding children from harmful chemicals (MacKendrick 2014), or guilty if they can’t afford socially and ecologically responsible products (Cairns and Johnston 2015a). Some question the ethics of an ethical-eating discourse that celebrates the consumer practices of a privileged few (Biltekoff 2013), and obscures vast inequalities in the food system. Indeed, scholars have critiqued the elitism of ethical-eating practices that allow affluent consumers to claim the moral high ground through conscientious, but high-priced, food choices (Guthman 2003). While it can be helpful to sort ethical-eating debates into optimistic and pessimistic perspectives, recent scholarship suggests that the complexities of ethical eating go beyond a simple pro/con binary (e.g., Brown 2013; Schoolman 2016). Such scholars recognize that conscientious food choices cannot be dismissed as foodie elitism, nor can they be idealized as a panacea for multifaceted food-system problems. Willis and Schor highlight the complex relationship between civic action and ethical consumption, noting that “consumption is typically polysemic, driven by potentially divergent and conflicting motives” (2012, 167). The effects of myriad individual consumer actions are difficult to document, especially in a globalized foodscape controlled by a small number of powerful actors. Within contemporary debates, many scholars promote a dialectical approach that “recognizes that meaning and agency are present in consumption decisions, but takes seriously the structural conditions shaping consumer agency” (Johnston 2008, 234).

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While debates about individualized approaches to ethical eating are extensive and longstanding, the gendered dimensions of contemporary food politics have received less attention. This is striking, given that women continue to perform more of the household foodwork (e.g., planning meals, shopping, cooking), and thus are more likely to encounter ethical-eating messages (Bellows et al., 2010). In addition, cultural ideals linking femininity with compassion place particular responsibility on women for environmental and familial health (Hawkins 2012; Judkins and Presser 2008; Micheletti 2004). Beyond this, we argue that ethical consumption extends the gendered care-work women have long performed (Cairns and Johnston 2015a; Cairns et al., 2014; Cairns, Johnston, and MacKendrick 2013). An analysis of gendered care-work sheds light on how Silverstone’s idea of a kind diet is closely intertwined with femininity.

UNDERSTANDING THE KIND DIET: COMPETING PERSPECTIVES ON ETHICAL EATING The kind diet offers a compelling case for exploring ethical-eating discourse, as Silverstone emphasizes the central connection between conscientious food decisions and eco-social betterment. In this section, we use this case to further unpack three key themes within contemporary scholarship on ethical eating: 1) individual responsibility to change the food system; 2) food as a source of status and distinction; 3) caring through food as an expression of femininity. First, Silverstone’s diet showcases how contemporary discourses of ethical eating rely on individualized approaches to food-system change. Like much of ethical consumption discourse, the kind diet suggests that individual food decisions can improve lives and nurture the environment. Framing kindness as the emotional foundation of activism, Silverstone celebrates the individual as the locus of change. This vision of political engagement is focused centrally on the market, as laid out explicitly in a chapter entitled “We Are All Activists”: Each and every one of us can be an activist for change, you don’t have to pick up a sign or march at a rally to do it. Just start to think about your choices and vote with your dollar. For example, every time you shop at a farmers’ market—or buy organic food— you are supporting your community. Every time you purchase organic plant-based food, you are protecting the quality of the soil and participating in a more equitable distribution of resources. Conversely, every time you buy a mass-produced steak— packaged in Styrofoam and plastic—you are feeding a huge, unsustainable, toxic death machine. This may sound harsh, but it’s the truth! (Silverstone 2009, 131) Silverstone advocates a vision of “voting with your dollar” that pervades contemporary ethical-eating discourse. These perspectives emphasize the power of consumers to “make a difference” through small, doable food decisions. For example, addressing climate change may feel overwhelming, but choosing organic produce at the grocery store feels achievable and reduces environmental pesticides. The assurance that one needn’t “pick up a sign or march at a rally” also promotes an expanded conception of politics that validates the political work of social reproduction disproportionately performed by women (Micheletti 2003). Feminists have long argued that the “personal is political,” and the kind diet may appeal to consumers who feel they are most politically effective through everyday consumer choices (Cairns and Johnston 2015a). Indeed, Silverstone

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suggests that everyday decisions contain tremendous potential, as consumers “have the power to make real and important changes in the world just by being mindful of [their] choices” (Silverstone 2009, 131). While an emphasis on consumer choice can provide a sense of political agency to food shoppers, framing food ethics as an individual responsibility generates several thorny issues. First, the “vote with your dollar” strategy naturalizes a highly inequitable distribution of “votes”—and political agency. If dollars = votes, then the dream of a food democracy with equally empowered citizens is a distant one. Second, individualized approaches to “shopping for change” tend to fetishize market solutions, even though numerous studies show the limits of market mechanisms for generating substantive change (e.g., Bowen 2015). For example, while a shift toward organic food purchases has created environmental benefits, this sector still represents only 4 percent of the marketplace (Obach 2015, 131–38, 227). In a market model of food-system transformation, change occurs on a voluntary basis—when corporations can provide “ethical” foods profitably, and when consumers feel motivated (and financially able) to buy them (ibid., 227). A related problem concerns the way “vote with your fork” strategies obfuscate the importance of state actors. Complex food-system problems such as environmental degradation, food insecurity, industry concentration, and labor exploitation cannot be ameliorated through “simple” shopping solutions (e.g., Szasz 2007). An emphasis on consumer choice bolsters a neoliberal perspective that depicts social and environmental problems as best solved through the marketplace (Guthman 2008). Neoliberalism shifts responsibility for collective problems to consumers, and devalues the essential role of state policy, regulation, and redistribution. Indeed, Silverstone pays little attention to the state’s role in regulating the food system. In her words, “It’s easy to get angry at the cattle ranchers and the big business that keeps meat rolling into our stores and restaurants, but I have to remember that they are just responding to market demands” (Silverstone 2009, 31). Here, we see how a critique of industry works to naturalize market practices and suggest that consumer choices—not the regulatory state—are key to holding corporations accountable and ensuring a sustainable, socially just food system. An individualized approach to ethical eating emphasizes consumers’ responsibility for a healthy food system as well as their personal well-being. Silverstone highlights the rewards of this responsibility, exclaiming, “I love knowing that I am responsible for myself!” (2009, 98); however, health and consumption scholars have connected the rhetoric of health as a personal responsibility to the broader ideology of neoliberalism (Crawford 2006; Mansfield 2012). If individuals are ultimately responsible for their well-being, the state has little obligation to promote or protect citizens’ health. This puts immense pressure on individual eaters to navigate the complex risks embedded in everyday food choices (MacKendrick and Stevens 2016). Given these complexities, research suggests that consumers may intentionally ignore certain issues as a riskmanagement strategy (ibid.). Although ethical-eating discourse emphasizes the joy and empowerment derived through conscientious food practices, framing personal health and ecological well-being as the responsibility of individual consumers can foster negative emotions like guilt and shame. This is evident in The Kind Diet, which forcefully directs readers to feel responsible for the planetary and bodily implications of food choices. Including meat in one’s diet means “stepping very heavily on the planet” (Silverstone 2009, 28), and Silverstone suggests that heart disease and cancer “are basically preventable—and often even

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reversible—through diet and lifestyle changes” (ibid., 21). In keeping with a neoliberal approach to health as an individual duty, this articulation of ethical eating implies that those suffering from disease have made poor choices, and thus are responsible for their fate. Extending this logic suggests that the cause of planetary suffering lies with poor consumer choices—not food policies and market practices that compromise the health of citizens and the environment. Our analysis of the kind diet reveals a second key theme in scholarship on ethical eating: status. Ethical-eating practices certainly reflect consumers’ moral inclinations, but they also function as a source of distinction, possessing the potential to valorize some groups’ food choices while denigrating others. A long tradition of sociological research explores how consumption generates social status and distinction (Bourdieu 1984). That is, the process of aligning oneself with high-status culinary practices, while distancing oneself from others, can operate as a form of “culinary capital” (Naccarato and LeBesco 2012). Consumers with ample economic and cultural capital can distinguish themselves from low-income consumers by purchasing “yuppie chow” (Guthman 2003). Thus, food choices can reproduce class divides, elevating the practices and tastes of privileged “foodies,” while disparaging the choices of consumers with less economic and cultural capital (Johnston and Baumann 2015). Like other privileged eaters who express little class reflexivity (Johnston and Baumann 2015; Szabo and Johnston 2010), Silverstone asserts that the kind diet is available to everyone. She declares that her vision of ethical eating “isn’t a lifestyle designed for celebrities and rich people” (2009, 2), as the kind diet is universally accessible: This radiant health is available to every single one of us because it’s nature’s way. I love that! And these days, the food is even cheap; trade in steak for grains and beans, and your grocery bill goes down. Find a local farmers market for great prices on organic vegetables. Or even grow your own! (ibid., 2) Despite claims of accessibility, the books clearly assume economic and cultural resources associated with upper-middle-class eaters—a common pattern within ethicaleating discourse. The kind diet is composed of organic and whole foods that require substantial time and money to purchase and prepare, including specialized foods that the average eater is unlikely to have stocked in their kitchen (e.g., stevia, vegan cheese, nut spreads)—let alone the question of whether they would want to eat them. High-status foods are often less accessible, either because they are expensive or require specialized knowledge, and this exclusiveness generates social value (Johnston and Baumann 2015). To acquire these products, Silverstone encourages readers to enter shopping spaces commonly populated by elite consumers. Research suggests working-class consumers may feel uncomfortable or priced out of spaces associated with ethical eating, such as farmers markets and specialty stores (Beagan et al., 2015, 70–71), and may resist the elitism associated with such venues (Cairns and Johnston 2015a, 59). Notably, class dynamics are not the only relation of power at play, as such consumer spaces have also been associated with whiteness (Alkon and McCullen 2011; Slocum 2007, 2008). This association is reinforced throughout The Kind Diet and The Kind Mama, which feature happy, thin, smiling vegans who are almost exclusively white. This narrow representation of a white affluent lifestyle raises questions about who might see themselves reflected in Silverstone’s vision of ethical eating. Even when proponents acknowledge the expenses associated with ethical eating, these costs are framed as manageable and rewarding, and the presumed superiority of high-status foods goes unchallenged. Silverstone explains

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why a kind diet is the right choice regardless of one’s food budget, social location, or food preferences: These days, with budgets being squeezed everywhere, the idea of completely restocking your kitchen may feel daunting. You may be surprised to find that your grocery bill doesn’t change that much. While some new foods will be more expensive, others will be cheaper. More importantly, when compared to the cost of prescriptions, workdays lost, gas to the doctor, co-pays . . . not to mention that incalculable cost of feeling crummy, good food is worth every penny . . . . Load up on greens and beans, and you’ll have plenty of money left over for buying the best quality produce and natural foods you can get your hands on. Yes, some of those foods are expensive—Like umeboshi plums, Veganaise, and sea vegetables—but they are well worth it. (Silverstone 2009, 113–14) In this passage, Silverstone articulates a common refrain in ethical-eating discourse: “good” food is simply worth it. This rhetoric obfuscates the costs of ethical eating by highlighting the presumed rewards derived for individual and ecological well-being. Financial costs are framed as a matter of individual choice, suggesting that the only barrier to kind eating is personal commitment as opposed to a limited income, busy work schedule, restricted food access, or cultural disinterest in this diet. Food scholarship suggests that food choices are typically much more constrained than Silverstone suggests, as home cooks balance their budgets with family food preferences. For example, research with poor and working-class families has shown that foodwork may not be enjoyable when money and time are tight (Bowen et al. 2014), and that working-class mothers may prioritize children’s preferences to avoid the cost of uneaten meals (Daniel 2016). While it is important to critically interrogate the status associations of ethical food, it is equally important to investigate the complexity of distinction processes. As noted above, nuanced scholarly approaches recognize that ethical food consumption cannot be dismissed as foodie pretentiousness or snobbery. Carfagna et al. (2014) identify what they call an “eco-habitus”—an approach to ethical consumption that prioritizes environmentalism and involves high cultural capital, but incorporates taste preferences that expand beyond elite groups. Indeed, survey work suggests that income levels do not reliably predict who makes ethical food choices (Baumann et al., 2015, 417–18; Bellows et al., 2010). Additionally, the development of an eco-habitus is significant on environmental grounds. Even though organics represent a limited market niche, expanded consumer demand for organics fueled a fivefold increase in organic acreage between 1992 and 2013, a trend that yielded clear environmental benefits (Obach 2015: 136, 138). While ethical-eater politics often ignore labor and hunger issues, they have shed light on the industrial food system, raising awareness of issues like local eating, organic food, and animal welfare (e.g., Johnston and Baumann 2015, 122–51). More generally, it is useful to recognize that environmental movements have frequently featured middle-class participants with the privilege of mobilizing around post-materialist issues (Cotgrove and Duff 1980). Certainly, middle-class food activists sometimes fail to recognize their class privilege, but there have been historical examples of efforts to bring high quality food to marginalized communities. For example, Belasco’s (1993) seminal work on the 1960s American “countercuisine” demonstrated how food coops were torn between a desire to support working-class consumers, and the need to charge high enough food prices to encourage sustainable producers. The class/ecology tension continues to challenge contemporary food activists who struggle to develop programs that support small

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producers growing sustainable food while offering affordable options for low-income consumers (Johnston and Baker 2005). The complex relationship between food and status goes beyond access and exclusion. As scholarship by Bourdieu (1984) and others make clear, consumption choices involve moral evaluations that valorize the lifestyles of privileged groups, even if these lifestyles are not inherently superior (Paddock 2015). While overt statements about social class are seen as snobbish, stating a preference for high-status foods can draw class distinctions in subtler ways (Johnston, Szabo and Rodney 2011, 306; Johnston, Rodney, and Szabo 2012). In turn, ethical-eating discourse—which typically valorizes high-status, “healthy” foods like the specialty vegan foods in the kind diet—can stigmatize food practices stereotypically associated with working-class diets. Yet research has challenged the association between poor people and “poor” food choices. Low-income consumers value fruit and vegetables as part of a “healthy” diet even as their consumption is constrained by income (Beagan et al. 2015), and affluent consumers eat “unhealthy” foods like fast food at equal or higher rates than poor consumers (Vikraman et al. 2015; Dugan 2013). Nevertheless, in our own research, we observed a kind of middle-class disgust with the assumed food choices of poor consumers, expressed through visions of grocery carts filled with hotdogs and chips (Cairns and Johnston 2015a, 103–04). Like our interviewees, Silverstone avoids explicitly disparaging poor consumers, but derides food practices typically associated with working-class lifestyles: I’m fully aware that there are plenty of women out there who are popping out babies and basically live on cigarettes, Coca-Cola, and potato chips. Does that mean those babies are healthy and that the mamas are happy and able to embrace the joy and simplicity of total goddess mamahood? I’m not so sure. (Silverstone 2014, 7) By contrasting the kind diet with “Coca-Cola and potato chips,” Silverstone evokes stereotypical images of a stigmatized working-class consumer. Importantly, these lifestyle distinctions are presented as the product of individual choice. Consistently downplaying the resources required to follow a kind diet, Silverstone emphasizes the “invaluable” quality of health it provides: “Consider the price of what you were receiving: a beautiful body, vibrant health, a clear mind, and a longer life. Can you really put a price tag on those things? Feeling good is priceless” (Silverstone 2009, 113–14). Many consumers do not have access to—or interest in—this vision of healthy, ethical eating, no matter how “priceless” Silverstone imagines this lifestyle to be. What’s more, this discourse leaves little room for questioning whether such choices are actually better (e.g., healthier, kinder, more ethical), or simply afforded higher social status. Instead, we see how ethical eating may elevate the consumption practices of affluent consumers as though they were a reflection of moral superiority, rather than inescapably connected to class privilege. The third theme that we explore via the kind diet involves how caring through food functions as an expression of contemporary femininity. While people of any gender can adopt a kind diet, ethical-eating discourse frequently targets women as primary food shoppers. Indeed, Silverstone’s kind diet books provide statistics on women’s health specifically (ibid., 16–17), and use terms like “us womanfolk” (ibid., 38) to create a sense of camaraderie with assumed female readers. Feminist scholars have long shown how femininity and kindness are connected (Connell 1987), and how women perform femininity by caring through food (DeVault 1991). Here we demonstrate how “kind” eating is connected to cultural notions of femininity such as care, nurturance, and beauty,

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and identify a new foci of feminist scholarship connecting ethical eating with gendered care-work. Women today are encouraged to make food choices that prioritize their health and culinary pleasures, all while expressing concern for others (Cairns and Johnston 2015a; Lazar 2009). Today’s diets emphasize empowering, self-affirming food choices, rather than unpleasant restrictions, yet feminine expectations about thinness and beauty persist alongside gender inequality (Cairns and Johnston 2015b; Gill and Scarf 2011). While ethical eating is not always explicitly oriented toward beauty or thinness, various iterations of this discourse connect ethical food choices with physical appearance (e.g., Bittman 2014). In Silverstone’s books, ethical food choices are not only ecologically sustainable, nutritious, and delicious, but also aligned with a post-feminist project of self-affirmation accompanied by an implicit (but forceful) campaign against body fat. If you follow the kind diet, “you will lose weight easily, your skin will absolutely glow, you will have tons of energy, and you will become more sensitive to all the important things in life—like love, nature, and your deepest, truest, self” (Silverstone 2009, 1). Linking weight-reduction to ethical eating is politically significant in a larger cultural climate of fat-phobia (e.g., Guthman 2011; Kwan and Graves 2013; LeBesco 2011; Saguy 2013). Ethical food choices typically boast “wins” on multiple levels: the eater enjoys deliciousness, thinness, and youthfulness, all while supporting local farmers and reducing carbon emissions. These messages are frequently tailored to women, who shoulder a disproportionate responsibility for familial foodwork and weight management. While a regimen of kind eating promises health, weight loss, and beauty, this is not framed as a self-indulgent pursuit. In keeping with cultural constructions of femininity, the self-care advocated within ethical-eating discourse is typically connected to care for others, both within and beyond the home (Cairns and Johnston 2015a). Silverstone says that while she “used to equate having self-worth with being selfish,” she now understands that “taking care of myself is the most beautiful thing I can do . . . . I can’t be a good actor, I can’t be a good wife, friend, or mother . . . I can’t be good at anything until I’ve taken care of myself first” (2009, 7). While advising mothers on the specifics of feeding a baby, The Kind Mama advances the broader philosophy of using a plant-based diet to optimize the health of maternal bodies, babies, and the planet. Within a broader narrative of ethical eating, mothers bear primary responsibility for using “good” food to shape children’s growth, along with a healthy environment. Feminist scholarship offers insight into the connections between maternal foodwork and ethical food choices. Research has shown how mothers use ethical-eating strategies to establish a degree of control in a risk-filled foodscape (MacKendrick 2014). Additionally, scholarship on food and mothering reveals powerful cultural associations between foodwork and maternal femininity (Cairns and Johnston 2015a). Today, the gold standard of maternal foodwork is the “organic child,” an idealized conception of a “pure” child shielded from the risks of the industrial food system, and socialized to become a healthy and ethical consumer (Cairns, Johnston, and MacKendrick 2013). Raising an “organic child” involves considerable social pressure, but mothers may experience a sense of pride and satisfaction in moments when they achieve (or even approximate) these standards (Cairns and Johnston 2015a). While careful food choices can foster feelings of control and satisfaction, feminist scholarship reveals contradictions within the “organic child” ideal. First, the conception of ethical eating as an individual responsibility is especially penalizing for mothers. Striving to feed children only “pure,” ethically sourced ingredients typically involves

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“more work for mother” (e.g., visiting multiple stores, making food from scratch, researching food choices) (MacKendrick 2014). Second, these intensive feeding practices incur considerable costs—both financial and emotional. In our research, we were struck by mothers’ pervasive stress and uncertainty regarding foodwork. Even privileged women with ample economic and cultural capital worried that they weren’t doing enough to protect their children from food risks, or were prioritizing some concerns (e.g., organics) over others (e.g., fair-trade) (Cairns and Johnston 2015a). While we can’t fault mothers’ impulse to practice “precautionary consumption” (MacKendrick 2014), seemingly “simple” choices often belie the complexity of real-life risks (e.g., Is farmed salmon a safe choice for a child’s brain health if the fish is contaminated with PCBs?). And for poor and working-class women, these money- and time-intensive practices are often out of reach. Women with limited income may experience guilt and frustration when they are unable to make choices that are seen to be the “best” for their children. Finally, focusing on idealized feeding practices reproduces the idea that “good” mothers purchase expensive organic products to protect their children, and deemphasizes the importance of state regulations to manage environmental health risks for all children (Cairns, Johnston, and MacKendrick 2013). Like much ethical-eating discourse, the kind diet articulates feminine food responsibilities to express care at multiple levels—for oneself, children, animals, and the planet (Hawkins 2012; MacGregor 2006). Belying the complexity of ethical eating, the kind diet delivers a simple message: if women care enough about food, they have the chance to change the world. What’s more, not prioritizing kind food choices means being unkind, and inflicting harm on oneself and others. In this vision of ethical eating, the carework women are encouraged to perform by nourishing their bodies and their babies is discursively connected to the work of protecting animals and improving the environment for future generations.

CONCLUSION While ethical-eating discourse is diverse and multi-focused, it has a common refrain: consumers can change their diet to make the world a better place. In this chapter we argue that Alicia Silverstone’s books (The Kind Diet, The Kind Mama) provide a useful focal point for exploring scholarly debates about ethical eating. The kind diet suggests that individual consumers can promote global peace and reduce animal suffering—all while protecting their health, nurturing their families, and losing weight. While Silverstone’s diet is only one ethical-eating program in a diverse field, it shares the win-win logic of much of this discourse that promises social and ecological betterment through private consumption decisions. We have used the case of the kind diet to reveal three key themes that populate ethicaleating discourse, and often bewilder consumers, especially women, who experience a bevy of gendered expectations to express care through food. First, shoppers are offered a chance to create change through food choices. While a focus on individual choice appeals to consumers’ desire for control, it furthers a neoliberal logic that downloads individual responsibility and fetishizes market solutions. Second, ethical food choices emerge in a class-stratified foodscape where many “ethical” options are high-status, high-priced, and involve high cultural capital. The denial of class constraints on food choices is a clear theme in ethical-eating discourse, which tends to valorize the practices of privileged eaters. The classed, moral expectations around raising an “organic child” are especially

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concerning, given the immense pressure placed on low-income mothers. Third, ethicaleating discourse extends feminine care-work beyond the domestic sphere into the larger world of contaminated bodies, toxic vegetables, and damaged ecosystems. Through ethical food choices, women—and especially mothers—are responsible for caring for bodies, animals, the planet, and future generations. In this highly gendered discourse, children are seen as pure beings in need of protection, as well as targets to educate and politicize, in order to ensure a more hopeful food future. While past academic accounts of ethical eating have clustered around more optimistic narratives of “voting with your fork” and more pessimistic narratives of neoliberalism and elitism, current scholarship seeks to complicate this binary. Moving forward, research on ethical eating must grapple with the complexity at play in the politics of everyday consumer choice, recognizing the appeal of opportunities to “eat for change” alongside the limitations of individualistic approaches. Historical scholarship has shown the significance of women’s domestic work in food movements to secure a safe, healthy, ethical food supply, and contemporary research suggests the value of feminist approaches attentive to multiple forms of inequality. Gendered dynamics continue to position women’s caregiving as central to a more socially and environmentally just food system, yet women’s caregiving capacities are far from universal, and remain profoundly shaped by intersecting inequalities. While it is important to acknowledge the sense of pride and protection that can come with caring through food, it is crucial to question the gendered burdens and inequalities that may be normalized through the association of femininity with “responsible” food choices.

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Cairns, Kate, Kim de Laat, Josée Johnston, and Shyon Baumann. 2014. “The Caring, Committed Eco-Mom: Consumption Ideals and Lived Realities of Toronto Mothers”. In Green Consumption: The Global Rise of Eco-Chic, edited by Bart Barendregt, and Rivke Jaffe, 100. New York: Bloomsbury. Cairns, Kate, and Josée Johnston. 2015a. Food and Femininity. New York: Bloomsbury. Cairns, Kate, and Josée Johnston. 2015b. “Choosing Health: Embodied Neoliberalism, Postfeminism, and the ‘do-diet’”. Theory and Society 44: 153–75. Cairns, Kate, Josée Johnston, and Norah MacKendrick. 2013. “Feeding the ‘Organic Child’: Mothering Through Ethical Consumption”. Journal of Consumer Culture 13: 97–118. Carfagna, Lindsey B., Emilie A. Dubois, Connor Fitzmaurice, Monique Y. Ouimette, Juliet B. Schor, Margaret Willis, and Thomas Laidley. 2014. “An Emerging Eco-Habitus: The Reconfiguration of High Cultural Capital Practices Among Ethical Consumers”. Journal of Consumer Culture 14: 158–78. Cohen, Lizabeth. 2004. “A consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America”. Journal of Consumer Research 31: 236–39. Connell, Raewyn. 2014. Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics. New York: Wiley. Cotgrove, Stephen, and Andrew Duff. 1980. “Environmentalism, Middle-Class Radicalism and Politics”. The Sociological Review 28: 333–51. Crawford, Robert. 2006. “Health as a Meaningful Social Practice”. Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine 10: 401–20. Daniel, Caitlin. 2016. “Economic Constraints on Taste Formation and the True Cost of Healthy Eating”. Social Science & Medicine 148: 34–41. DeVault, Marjorie. 1991. Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dugan, Andrew. 2013. Fast Food Still Major Part of U.S. Diet. Gallup Research. Accessed June 28, 2016. http://www.gallup.com/poll/163868/fast-food-major-part-diet.aspx. Gabriel, Yiannis, and Tim Lang. 2015 [1995]. The Unmanageable Consumer: Contemporary Consumption and Its Fragmentations. 20th Anniversary Ed. Sage Publications. Gill, Rosalind, and Christina Scharff. 2011. “Introduction”. In New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity, edited by Rosalind Gill, and Christina Scharff, 1–17. London: Palgrave. Guthman, Julie. 2003. “Fast Food/Organic Food: Reflexive Tastes and the Making of ‘yuppie chow’”. Social & Cultural Geography 4: 45–58. Guthman, Julie. 2008. “Neoliberalism and the Making of Food Politics in California”. Geoforum 39: 1171–83. Guthman, Julie. 2011. Weighing in: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism. Oakland: University of California Press. Hawkins, Roberta. 2012. “Shopping to Save Lives: Gender and Environment Theories Meet Ethical Consumption”. Geoforum 43: 750–59. Hilton, Matthew. 2003. Consumerism in Twentieth-Century Britain: The Search for a Historical Movement. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. Huddart-Kennedy, Emily, Josée Johnston, and John Parkins. 2016 “Evaluating the Democratic Imagination of Citizen-consumer Practices: Comparative Insights from Eat-local Movements.” Journal of Consumer Culture. Kwan, Samantha, and Jennifer Graves. 2013. Framing Fat: Competing Constructions in Contemporary Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

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Lorenzen, Janet A. 2014. “Convincing People to go Green: Managing Strategic Action by Minimising Political Talk”. Environmental Politics 23: 454–72. Johnston, Josée. 2008. “The Citizen-Consumer Hybrid: Ideological Tensions and the Case of Whole Foods Market”. Theory and Society 37: 229–70. Johnston, Josée, and Lauren Baker. 2005. “Eating Outside the Box: FoodShare’s Good Food Box and the Challenge of Scale.” Agriculture and Human Values, 22(3): 313–25. Johnston, Josée, and Shyon Baumann. 2015 [2010]. Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape, Second Edition. New York: Routledge. Johnston, Josée, and Kate Cairns. 2012. “Eating for Change”. In Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times, edited by Sarah Banet-Wiser and Roopali Mukherji, 219–39. New York: NYU Press. Johnston, Josee, Michelle Szabo, and Alexandra Rodney. 2011. “Good Food, Good People: Understanding the Cultural Repertoire of Ethical Eating”. Journal of Consumer Culture 11: 293–318. Johnston, Josée, Alexandra Rodney, and Michelle Szabo. 2012. “Place, Ethics, and Everyday Eating: A Tale of Two Neighbourhoods”. Sociology 46: 1091–1108. Johnston, Josée, and Michelle Szabo. 2010. “Reflexivity and the Whole Foods Market Consumer: The Lived Experience of Shopping for Change.” Agriculture and Human Values 28: 303–19. Judkins, Brooke, and Lois Presser. 2008. “Division of Eco-friendly Household Labor and the Marital Relationship”. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 25: 923–41. Lazar, Michelle M. 2009. “Entitled to Consume: Postfeminist Femininity and a Culture of Postcritique”. Discourse & Communication 3: 371–400. LeBesco, Kathleen. 2011. “Neoliberalism, Public Health, and the Moral Perils of Fatness”. Critical Public Health 21: 153–64. MacGregor, Sherilyn. Beyond Mothering Earth: Ecological Citizenship and the Politics of Care. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006. Mackendrick, Norah. 2014. “More Work for Mother Chemical Body Burdens as a Maternal Responsibility”. Gender & Society 28: 705–28. MacKendrick, Norah A. 2010. “Media Framing of Body Burdens: Precautionary Consumption and the Individualization of Risk”. Sociological Inquiry 80: 126–49. MacKendrick, Norah, and Lindsay M. Stevens. 2016. “‘Taking Back a Little Bit of Control’: Managing the Contaminated Body Through Consumption.” Sociological Forum 31: 310–29. Mansfield, Becky. 2012. “Environmental Health as Biosecurity: ‘Seafood Choices,’ Risk, and the Pregnant Woman as Threshold”. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102: 969-976. Micheletti, Michele. 2003. Political Virtue and Shopping. New York: Palgrave. Micheletti, Michele. 2004. “Why More Women? Issues of Gender and Political Consumerism”. In Politics, Products, and Markets, edited by Michele Micheletti, Andreas Follesdal, and Dietlind Stolle, 245–64. Piscataway: Transaction Publishers. Micheletti, Michele, and Dietlind Stolle. 2012. “Sustainable Citizenship and the New Politics of Consumption”. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 644: 88–120. Naccarato, Peter, and Kathleen LeBesco. 2012. Culinary Capital. New York, NY: Berg. Obach, Brian. 2015. Organic Struggle: The Movement for Sustainable Agriculture in the United States. Cambridge: MIT Press. Paddock, Jessica. 2015. “Positioning Food Cultures: ‘Alternative’ Food as Distinctive Consumer Practice.” Sociology, 1–17. Accessed June 28, 2016. doi:10.1177/0038038515585474

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Saguy, Abigal. 2013. What’s Wrong with Fat? New York: Oxford University Press. Schoolman, Ethan D. 2016. “Completing the Circuit: Routine, Reflection, and Ethical Consumption.” Sociological Forum, 1–23. Accessed June 28, 2016. doi:10.1111/socf.12266 Silverstone, Alicia. 2009. The Kind Diet. A Simple Guide to Feeling Great, Losing Weight, and Saving the Planet. Emmaus: Rodale. Silverstone, Alicia. 2014. The Kind Mama. A Simple Guide to Supercharged Fertility, a Radiant Pregnancy, a Sweeter Birth, and a Healthier, More Beautiful Beginning. Emmaus: Rodale. Slocum, Rachel. 2007. “Whiteness, Space and Alternative Food Practice”. Geoforum 38: 520–33. Slocum, Rachel. 2008. “Thinking Race Through Corporeal Feminist Theory: Divisions and Intimacies at the Minneapolis Farmers’ Market”. Social & Cultural Geography 9: 849–69. Szasz, Andrew. 2007. Shopping our way to safety: How we changed from protecting the environment to protecting ourselves. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Vikraman, Sundeep, Cheryl D. Fryar, and Cynthia L. Ogden. 2015. “Caloric Intake From Fast Food Among Children and Adolescents in the United States, 2011—2012”. NCHS Data Brief No 213. Willis, Margaret M., and Juliet B. Schor. 2012. “Does Changing a Light Bulb Lead to Changing the World? Political Action and the Conscious Consumer”. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 644: 160–90.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Food and Cultural Heritage: Preserving, Reinventing, and Exposing Food Cultures ELISA ASCIONE

INTRODUCTION Heritage denotes the accumulation of tangible and intangible goods that a society inherits from the past, preserves in the present, and passes on to the future (Di Giovine and Brulotte 2014, 1). More and more the conceptualization of food as heritage has entered into a wide public debate, with a multitude of groups, associations, and committees working to give value to particular foods linked to certain places and communities, using words such as “tradition,” “cultural identity,” and “popular/folk culture” outside of the discipline of cultural anthropology (Clemente and Mugnaini 2001). Some anthropologists have argued that social scientists should consider contemporary notions of heritage and traditions as “native accounts,” namely as selections that people make of their past, used strategically for political, economic, and ideological goals. They advise not to consider the concept of heritage proposed by social actors as factual data, and they propose the disarticulation of processes of “heritagization” themselves in different contexts, raising questions about who has the right to claim ownership of the past, and with what results: heritage is not an identifiable object that preexists its construction and valorization (Badii 2012). Although heritage is a constructed set of discourses and practices, rethinking certain food practices as heritage has a real impact on the cultural and economic lives of people and places: among many other outcomes, it allows some people to be active agents in the re-articulation and revitalization of local settings in global contexts (Di Giovine 2014; Papa 1999). This chapter explores the ways food is used to create identity claims as cultural heritage on local, regional, national, and international scales. It will analyze the ways in which the European Union, consortia of producers, and voluntary organizations are claiming typicality for certain classes of food, often standardizing products in the process. On a national and international level, it will analyze the ways in which UNESCO has institutionally designated the food and cuisines of several countries as “intangible cultural heritage” not by simply identifying preexisting food cultures, but by actively constructing unity in different cuisines (Sammells 2014, 143). It will link the heritage industry with food museums, analyzing how food is used for group self-identification at different levels, in order to demarcate particular communities.

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HERITAGE, TRADITION, AND TYPICALITY Food is often a primary marker of identity connecting people through space and time: individuals collectively remember past experiences through meals, dishes, and gastronomy, and they recollect and re-create images of what their predecessors did before them through cooking certain foods, following certain dietary rules, re-enacting food rituals, and so on (Di Giovine and Brulotte, 2014). Food and agricultural products have entered the discourse around heritage at different levels, and the words “traditional” and “typical” are now fully part of the everyday language and are accepted as common sense. These terms were once the specific realm of study of anthropologists, who classified as traditional “folk” practices that people carried on for their internal consumption, and not for an external public, “unaware” of the fact that they were traditional. Now they are common concepts used by the social actors themselves, by administrators and institutions that validate certain food practices over others as representative of communities and places. Now that these concepts have entered the realm of everyday language, contemporary anthropologists and social scientists have shifted their attention from the study of traditions and heritage per se, to the processes through which heritage is claimed and constructed, and the cultural and political engineering behind its formation (Palumbo 2003; Dei 2002). Heritage is not a simple passage from the past, but indicates a form of cultural production with reformative significance, often claimed through a series of practices that entails arbitrations and engineering in the realm of cultural politics (Kuutma 2013, 1). It is about the regulation and negotiation of the multiplicity of meaning of the past, and the mediation of the cultural and social politics of identity, belonging, and exclusion. It designates configurations that articulate both relations of power and relations of meaning (2). It is not the authenticity per se but the question of authenticity that creates heritage designations, through acts of identification and negotiation (Di Giovine and Brulotte 2014). Many works on food in the European Union have explored the invention of tradition behind claims to typicality and the associated concept of terroir, that is the uniqueness that geography, climate, and human knowledge and practices give to food. The story of the concept of terroir (which can be translated as “the taste of place”) is complex, and Amy Trubek (2008) has traced the ways in which the use of ideas about place to make arguments about quality became increasingly important in the late nineteenth century in France. By the early twentieth century it had become part of a serious sociopolitical movement to protect French agricultural products, culminating with the founding of the Institut National des Appellations d’Origine in the 1930s and laws that supported the idea of Appellation d'origine contrôlée (24). Beginning in the twentieth century a group of people began to organize around this naturalized interpretation of taste, for they saw the potential benefits of a food view celebrating an agrarian and rural way of life. Food-specific notions of heritage often conflate sociocultural and natural qualities. Categories of Geographical Indications distinguish certain foods from others through claims of the impossibility to replicate food somewhere else; however, there isn’t consensus on the impact of geography on the quality and taste of products (Nowak 2012). Europe, by 2014, had 595 Protected Denominations of Origins and 601 Protected Geographical Indication products (Rippon 2014). In Italy, for example, prosciutto di Parma, ParmigianoReggiano, and Chianti wine are all registered trademarks through terroir claims. A few pioneer studies have deconstructed the naturalness of heritage claims of iconic products. For example, Kolleen Guy (2007) has shown that Champagne “became

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French” not just because it is not replicable anywhere else, but also because this beverage was invested with cultural capital by the rising middle class, and was instrumental to nation-building sentiments and the will to protect a market. In a similar fashion Susan Terrio (2000), in a study of chocolate artisans in South-East France, has explored the construction of chocolate as a cultural good used for the affirmation of national identity against a European universal culture. The defense of local chocolate craft is seen as an answer to international market competition in light of the heavier bureaucratic norms that have pushed local producers to assert their autonomy. As food becomes a vehicle for distinction in the search for an authenticity opposed to the perceived homogenizing forces of globalization, chocolate makers construct themselves as heirs of a carefully selected idealized past (Papa 1999). Cristina Grasseni (2011) argues that boundary construction is a key element in the social construction of food as heritage. In her ethnographic studies of certified Italian Alps cheeses, a consortium of producers had to commission archive studies in order to establish the historical boundaries of production, de facto reinventing mountain cheese as a typical product. Drawing defined boundaries over what has always been porous (especially in conjunction with practices of transhumance) created frictions. She reports the battle against the official consortium for the protection of the geographically denominated Bitto cheese (Consorzio Tutela Bitto Casera della Valtellina), from the rival association of Produttori di Bitto delle Valli del Bitto (“Producers of Bitto cheese from the Bitto valleys”). The consortium was accused of having enlarged the area of production with the objective of selling Bitto cheese that is not made in high pastures, and has less goat milk content. The original producers fought to maintain their own traditional areas of production following their routines of production: cheese making on the pastures straight after hand milking, under makeshift tents built around traditional roofless stone structures, with a ratio of at least 10 to 20 percent goat milk. A larger terroir to be trademarked as Bitto and a higher percentage of cow milk in the product has benefited the lowland producers from Valtellina at the expense of a niche production that advocates the values of local heritage and authenticity (30–31). Outside of Europe, Heather Paxson (2013), in her ethnographic study of artisanal cheese makers in the United States, calls terroir not an objective thing to protect, but “an articulation of value” (212). American producers don’t derive the value of authenticity from demonstrating continuity with the past, but translate the notion of terroir as embodying other aspirations: environmental stewardship, agrarian enterprise, and rural community (190). For the author, terroir offers a conceptual terrain on which artisan entrepreneurs negotiate the relationship between ecological and moral values, and the commercial values they seek (191). This concept in the United States is not yet routinized or standardized, and thus cheese makers use terroir as a way to situate their own senses of place (211). However, it is unclear if artisan food makers will have the final say on what “terroir” comes to signify in American popular culture or if this notion will become legally binding (212). In a similar fashion, Cristina Papa (1999), in her study of artisanal olive-oil producers in Umbria, Italy, explains the concept of typicality as a contested cultural field where local people and communities create value. She calls the typical product an oxymoron since it represents the tension between local and global horizons. In the passage from being local to becoming typical (defined by international markets and parameters), the local product becomes standardized: in order to protect its diversity, the myriad of local knowledges are frozen by official knowledges and regulations, thus effectively reducing diversity. Although olive-oil producers rely on local histories to

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construct their products as traditional and typical, the author warns not to limit the conceptual framework to the “invention of tradition” when analyzing those narratives. If all self-representations are constructed, and thus equally untrue, it would be impossible to differentiate between an industrial and an artisanal olive oil that presents objective differences, including its organoleptic qualities, namely the peculiar taste, smell, color, and general feel of artisanal Umbrian olive oil that distinguishes it from industrial oils. Instead, she offers a more nuanced working definition of typicality: What makes a product “typical” is an act of manipulation but not only an artifice, a construction for the sake of the market: it is also a construct aimed at self-representation and based on facts and behaviors that belong to the local and individual culture of the people that embody the tradition. It is an in situ selection of features that belong to a context by those who are part of that context and act on it consciously in a creative act of re-elaboration of the local style. (Papa 1999, 159) Terroir and locality discourses, despite being sometimes employed in such a manner as to both fetishize and anthropomorphize nature, have considerable virtues in the age of nondistinctive mass production (Ulin 2013); the popularity of terroir lies in its capacity to link food and wine to particular places in light of the general anonymity of commodities under late capitalism (Ulin and Black 2013, 13). Di Giovine (2014), in his important edited book about food and cultural heritage, emphasizes the deeper symbolic and emotional implications that heritage entails. Heritage can be used to revive local communities not only economically, but also socially and culturally. He shows the importance of sagre popolari (folk food festivals), in the Italian context, for the re-articulation of local foods into the heritage discourse, if not legally, at least in people’s imagination. Similarly, Ascione (2012), through the example of the festival of the Easter cheese bread (Torta di Pasqua) in Umbria, argues that a special bread that has historically been linked to Umbrian communities, has been rediscovered through a festival that celebrates it and claims it as typical. The Torta di Pasqua (called Pizza di Pasqua in Terni province), has been in the past part of the sphere of food and breads linked to an “extraordinary food regime,” linked to the abundance of festive periods in sharp contrast with the scarcity of daily diets in rural Umbria under the sharecropping system (Baronti 1999). This bread is much richer in flavors and nutritional value (with eggs, animal fat and cheese) than ordinary bread, and it is linked to the celebration of Easter. In the rural world, Easter was one of the most relevant festivities since it was linked to rebirth: it marked the end of Lent (with its strict food avoidances) and it was connected to spring and new agricultural products. Women have usually made the Torta in the domestic sphere and there are records that testify that this product has been made in Umbria for at least two centuries. The Torta continues to be made at home in many Umbrian families, but can also be consumed every day of the year thanks to the many bakeries that produce it. In addition, since the year 2000, there has been a festival in the Province of Perugia to celebrate this product, the Festival della Torta di Pasqua Umbra. The advertisement for the festival (which shows a loaf of Torta placed on a geographical map of the territory) reads: The Umbrian tradition says that at the end of Lent, just before Easter period, people worked hard at the Torta di Pasqua, obtained with the mix of eggs, flour and different types of cheese . . . . The Torta di Pasqua and its history represent a richness for the territory, and we can find a mixture of popular traditions and religiosity: the Torta

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di Pasqua was eaten at breakfast, with boiled eggs, blessed wine and cold cuts just matured from the pork that has been killed in January . . . . Our objective is not only the preservation of a recipe or an ingredient, but also its rediscovery on the daily table. (90) One member of the local government involved in the organization of the festival said during an interview, “On the one hand we can say that we recover tradition, on the other we offer a specific market for local bakers, in fact the local bakers have responded well, there is an economic side for them as well” (91). During the festival people can discover the varieties of Torte, and there are practical demonstrations by local women experts since this is a preparation that must be transmitted through practice. He continues, “People want to rediscover who they are, but they also want to learn new things. I am Umbrian, they say, I do Umbrian things, this is my typical cuisine, but I also want to discover where other dishes come from” (91). In fact, among other activities, in 2010 the festival hosted the “National Champion of Pesto alla Genovese.” This festival places the Torta in a scenario of “typical production”: although the original social context of production of Torta has changed (the rural extended family, the poverty of daily meals contrasted with the richness of Easter meals, the observance of food avoidances during Lent, the collective aspect of preparing festive foods), the making of this product persists as a local practice infused with new meanings, and it is now perceived as a hallmark of Umbrian identity. The festival is intended as an instrument that can preserve and reintroduce this practice, reaching people who are internal and external to the local community. In this case, the community is perceived as inherently local and regional rather than national, with events often coordinated from above (by politicians, administrators, associations, and so on) and not only from below. Groups seek representation and legitimacy of some traits of their culture through the preparation, the consumption, and the promotion of this special bread, shaping a new sense of community through the consumption of food refashioned as traditional (94). The discourse around food festivals (sagre) and typical foods has become very relevant for Italian regions, and laws have been issued in order to regulate them, placing them inside the heritage discourse. For example, the Regione Umbria, in January 2015, issued a regulation in order to “promote local sagre and folk food festivals as a way to integrate Umbrian identity, as expression of traditional cultures of the territory,” and “to give value to people’s identity, their culture, their tradition, the civilization of their territory, its places and people in a national and international context” (Regione Umbria, 2015). This law seeks to regulate the proliferation of local food festivals that from the 1960s have become popular in villages and in small towns around the region, sometimes preparing and consuming food that is not perceived as local and traditional (like the now abandoned Festa della Nutella). We see a clear act of engineering the legitimacy of some foods over other. People and villages are often activated by the mechanism of festa and sagra (dining together at communal tables, volunteering, reinvesting money earned back into the community), but for administrators it is becoming more urgent to select a food that represents the territory as an expression of locality, discarding others. In fact, heritage foods are also linked to the economy of tourism, since heritage converts locations into destinations, and tourism makes them economically viable as exhibits of themselves (Long 2004; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1996). For example, Valeria Siniscalchi (2000) has studied how the sweet torrone is transformed into a typical food in the Campania Region, Italy, showing how identity becomes a “good” that can be sold in the tourist market: the history of different producers and laboratories in the village of San Marco is presented in the

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tourist brochures as a “common good,” transcending internal divisions and genealogies of different families. Being named as typical, this sweet becomes a symbolic entity that doesn’t belong to anybody in particular, and can be claimed by the village in its totality as its own. The ethnographic and historical studies around typical foods show that heritage is a contested field where different groups exercise power and create meanings. Tradition is usually conceptualized as the permanence of the past into the present, a survival, something left from a past era that is now finished, something ancient that has remained more or less the same and that has been transferred in a new context, although tradition does not transfer the past in its totality, and works as a sort of filter of the past (Lenclud 2001). The notion of tradition also conveys a particular mode of transmission, usually what is passed to next generations orally, through words and by example as well. However, we could say, with Gerard Lenclud (2001), that tradition is an interpretation of the past with contemporary criteria, a “point of view” of the present. To understand its genesis, we must follow the past starting from the present. Tradition is a rear projection: we select what we declare ourselves to be determined by, and we present ourselves as the heirs of those whom we claimed as predecessors. Traditions actually entail “inverse filiation”: the offspring generate their parents, in a sort of paternity recognition. It is not the past that produces the present, but the present that produces the past. Of course it can be argued that a past must have existed, and somehow it must have also remained so that present generations can use it, and its invention is not totally free. Indeed the past imposes the limits within which we can direct our interpretations. Tradition is a form of rhetoric of what people think was in the past; it offers, to those who enunciate it and reproduce it, a tool to declare their difference and their authority (Lenclud 2001).

INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE: FROM UNESCO TO FOOD MUSEUMS Food as heritage can thus take on many meanings and shapes in a variety of settings and at different scales: from the informality of individual producers and small-scale community events, to the more formal definitions of appellation of origins, or those provided by cultural institutions and international organizations such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO. Food entered official international recognition as world heritage after the General Conference of UNESCO met in Paris in 2003 to ratify the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. The convention wanted to enrich international agreements concerning cultural and natural heritage by means of new provisions relating to intangible cultural heritage, having realized the role of communities and groups in maintaining and transmitting cultural diversity. For the convention, “intangible cultural heritage” means: The practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills—as well as the instruments, objects, artifacts and cultural spaces associated therewith—that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage. This intangible cultural heritage, transmitted from generation to generation, is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history, and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity, thus promoting respect for cultural diversity and human creativity.

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The “intangible cultural heritage” is manifested inter alia in the following domains: (a) oral traditions and expressions, including language as a vehicle of the intangible cultural heritage; (b) performing arts; (c) social practices, rituals and festive events; (d) knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe; (e) traditional craftsmanship. (UNESCO, 2003). The 2003 convention therefore represents a broader vision of culture compared to The World Heritage List of 1972, whose aim was the protection of cultural and natural heritage threatened by destruction not only by normal decay, but also by changing social and economic conditions. In that case, “cultural heritage” meant mainly groups of buildings, monuments, and sites, thus giving disproportionate representation to Western countries with their sites considered of “outstanding value” (UNESCO 1972; Di Giovine 2009 ). UNESCO tried to broaden its interpretation of what could be valued, and we had a shift from artifacts to people, their knowledge, and skills, to achieve a more holistic, living notion of heritage (Di Giovine and Brulotte 2014). After the Intangible Heritage Convention, states in Latin America and Europe that had already capitalized on their gastronomy began to put together a systematic narrative of their cuisine in order to be included on the list (Di Giovine and Brulotte 2014, 13). In 2010, food made its first appearance on the UNESCO World Heritage list with the Mediterranean diet, the French gastronomic meal, Mexican/Michoacan cuisine, and Croatian gingerbread. While in Mediterranean countries, academic anthropologists were employed to conduct surveys, Mexico relied mainly on renowned chefs and tourist promoters (Brulotte and Starkman 2014). This has led to different conceptualizations of which foods and cuisines were worthy of being elevated to the status of international importance. The outcomes were different, with emphasis on a transnational diet with certain common products, a meal, a cuisine of a particular region, or a dish. However, a feature common to all of them was the use of heritage as a narrative to counteract the changing food cultures in those areas in a globalized world (Di Giovine and Brulotte 2014). In 2008 the “Mediterranean diet” was proposed for inclusion on the list by Spain, Italy, Greece, and Morocco, but it wasn’t successful for a variety of reasons. First, it didn’t represent the style of the totality of people living in those countries and second, it was proposed by the Agricultural Ministries of those countries, without involving local communities. The definition of the Mediterranean diet at the beginning focused on a list of foods rather than the social and collective aspects that were implied in the definition of intangible heritage. The minister of Italian agriculture continued to work at this task, and employed a taskforce to catalogue and study the food practices of those communities chosen as “prototypical” of this lifestyle: the community of Cilento in Italy, where Ancel Keys, the American nutritionist who invented the term Mediterranean diet, lived and studied (Moro 2014, 85). Spain chose as a prototypical community the city of Soria; Greece the small village of Koroni; and Morocco the town of Chefchouen; these places were often chosen because they had a greater cultural and natural biodiversity. In 2013 Cyprus, Croatia, and Portugal were also added to the list. According to UNESCO: The Mediterranean diet involves a set of skills, knowledge, rituals, symbols and traditions concerning crops, harvesting, fishing, animal husbandry, conservation, processing,

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cooking, and particularly the sharing and consumption of food. Eating together is the foundation of the cultural identity and continuity of communities throughout the Mediterranean basin. It is a moment of social exchange and communication, an affirmation and renewal of family, group or community identity. The Mediterranean diet emphasizes values of hospitality, neighborliness, intercultural dialogue and creativity, and a way of life guided by respect for diversity. It plays a vital role in cultural spaces, festivals and celebrations, bringing together people of all ages, conditions and social classes. It includes the craftsmanship and production of traditional receptacles for the transport, preservation and consumption of food, including ceramic plates and glasses. Women play an important role in transmitting knowledge of the Mediterranean diet: they safeguard its techniques, respect seasonal rhythms and festive events, and transmit the values of the element to new generations. Markets also play a key role as spaces for cultivating and transmitting the Mediterranean diet during the daily practice of exchange, agreement and mutual respect. (UNESCO 2013) In her study on the history of the Mediterranean diet, the anthropologist Elisabetta Moro (2014) shows how UNESCO has constructed and defined this diet as ahistorical and archetypical. In the nomination documents, there are references to ancient Greece as the cultural reference for contemporary Southern Italy, without mentioning new products from the Americas, different migrations to the area, or the history of Christianity, as if the current “frugal abundance” praised so much as a sign of healthy living, came directly from an antiquity that wasn’t marked by change. The Mediterranean diet became ancestralized as an archaic and an autochthonous food style, in a sort of origin myth that came directly from ancient Greece. The UNESCO definition revision of 2013, however, included the idea that heritage is recreated daily, thus adopting a more dynamic notion of heritage (Moro 2014, 103). At the same time, the nomination triggered positive economic and cultural activities aimed at tourists and local people, thus starting a process of revitalization for groups and individuals living in areas of Southern Italy. Clare Sammels (2014) argues that the inscription of particular cuisines on the UNESCO list of “intangible heritage” creates “haute traditional” cuisines linking elements perceived as local with those seen as cosmopolitan. These cuisines do not only identify preexisting foodways, but actively forge cuisines, linking into a single narrative elements that might also be divided by class, ethnicity, or context. The cuisines included on the list were presented as local and “authentic,” grounded in practices that are domestic, semi-private, and largely feminine (Sammells 2014, 144). For the anthropologist Berardino Palumbo (2003; 2011), who conducted research on the processes of patrimonialization in Sicily, UNESCO not only produces objectified and essential “cultural things,” but transforms such “cultural things” into markers of collective identity that are essential and abstract, objectifying identities that become commodities in a global market. These labeled identities are then ideologically presented as “purely cultural” phenomena, separated from material, social, and political contexts of production. In such a scenario, “authenticity,” “typicality,” and “antiquity” become resources for institutionalized power to compete in what Herzfeld (2004) has called a “global hierarchy of values.” UNESCO thus removes social conflicts from its idea of culture because its main goal is to produce official symbols that can work as identity markers in a global market, and which can, de facto, act as instruments of a new neoliberal global governance (10). Fabio Dei (2002), in his important work on contemporary popular culture, rather than refusing any ontological nature to the concept of patrimony, proposes that

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heritage should always be studied empirically in each social setting. He agrees with Palumbo on the proposition that social scientists should distance themselves from the categories that are used in local contexts, even when these categories are borrowed from the anthropological lexicon. However, the concept of heritage is not always just an ideological tool that masks economic, political powers, and nationalistic sentiments. On the contrary, reflexive, critical anthropologists can still select, give value to, and represent heritage, trying to avoid representations of cultural identities that are naturalized (108). This can be done, for example, without concealing the political and conflictual dimensions or focusing solely on the narrative of a glorious past, documenting not only permanence, but also changes, giving voice to the ephemeral and not only to the monumental, and conceding visibility to the anti-hegemonic practices that resist heritagization. He argues that ethnographic museums can offer a great occasion to apply a critical notion of heritage. The idea of intangible patrimony (made of memories, know-how, experiences) is now central also to contemporary museographic debates. A number of museums today are no longer just a repository of objects, but a device for production of sense, an extension of places and landscapes, observing contexts and listening to the voices that inhabit them. Many museum curators have also shifted their focus from the preservation of objects to the people who use museums, affirming that museums have the role of “mediators” for education and civic cohabitation: to musealize today means to valorize objects, images, fragments of memories, documents that are chosen from a multitude of others to talk about histories and places (Lattanzi 1999). Thanks to this broader definition of cultural heritage, food has entered museums in a variety of ways. When food enters museum circuits, it usually transforms them. It is impossible to transform a food product into “just an object” to be looked at because it is a substance that often cannot be preserved and cannot become a reified cultural artifact, but must be treated as a “complex object” (Simeoni 1994) that is at once a biological reality and a social practice that is “microphysically” dispersed in daily actions (Pizza 2012). Before there were specialized museums of food and drink, food entered the scene in natural history museums, in agricultural museums, in historic house museums, and so on. Food now exists in galleries, temporary exhibitions, and in corporate buildings telling the story of a company and its products. In this case museums are designed to promote and nurture product mythologies, but they can also place the company in historical perspective and tell an interesting story (Williams 2014, 232). Italy is one of the countries in Europe with the most food museums. The guide “Musei del Gusto: mappa della memoria enogastronomica” (BAICR 2007) lists more than eighty-five museums scattered in different Italian regions: some are linked to ethnographic museums, showing traditional food-producing objects and techniques; others are financed by local food industries and are corporate museums. They cover a great variety of topics and products: olive oil, salt, prosciutto, bread, wine, sugar, lemon, vinegar, chestnuts, truffles, liquorice, and so on. Some focus on a single product, while others look at a plurality of processes. They contain old and modern objects; they celebrate single families or entire communities and regions. Some are financed by industries while others are the result of larger processes that involve government departments responsible for monuments and other treasures. These museums are relatively new in Italy. Open from the 1990s, they indicate, among other things, that tourists and travelers are not just satisfied by visiting famous collections or monumental museums. They want to relate to people and their work cultures, understanding their relationship with the natural landscape, reflecting on the economic activities that have

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transformed those landscapes, and they want to engage in “culinary tourism” (Long 2004) as a way to understand differences through food. Italian food museums are usually far away from the capitals, scattered throughout the territory in a multitude of small centers, sometimes in rural landscapes. The “food museums” in the Province of Parma, Italy, for example, are composed of seven museums that present the history of iconic foods of the territory (prosciutto, pasta, tomato, Parmigiano-Reggiano, olive oil, salame, wine). According to the museum website: The land, our territory, and the “art of food preparation” come together, not through an invention, but because of history which, over time, has molded these extraordinary products which are our ham and cured meat products, our cheese and the tomato preserves; products which are not “ours” but which during the course of the last century have found in Parma their natural capital. The Museums, as conceived by the working group that has developed the concept since October 1999, should be a place of memory and a much needed monument to previous generations, but it must also have the function of showplace to illustrate and demonstrate the value of our products, which are today, more than ever, the stars of the Italian way of eating . . . . The combination should be an exciting attraction for younger generations, helping to develop culture with them.  Foreign visitors will also be attracted to this cultural aspect thus consolidating the role that Parma is, quite rightly, assuming in Europe and elsewhere in the World. Ecomuseums are also interesting examples that have employed a more holistic definition of cultural heritage. The concept of an ecomuseum first originated in France, with the intent of giving value to cultural and natural contexts through the creation of “diffused museums” with different access points and thematic itineraries that are historically rooted in the places they represent. They work as “centers of memories” and they create new access codes to territories, favoring and promoting an integrated knowledge of natural, cultural, artistic, gastronomic, and social aspects (Davis 2011). The European Network of Ecomuseums (2004) defines an ecomuseum as a dynamic space in which communities preserve, interpret, and manage their heritage for sustainable development.  Ideally, it is based on a pact by people to take care of their territory. In this case, territory is conceived not just as a physical place, but as the story of people living in that territory, together with the signs left from previous generations. The prefix “eco,” in this case, means “home,” since the first users of these museums should be local people rather than only tourists and visitors. That is why there is a strong focus on laboratories, intended as places where memories get composed and re-elaborated, traditional techniques are passed on and artisanal activities are proposed again, keeping also in mind the sustainable economic development of marginal territories. According to Georges Henri Rivière (1992), the ecomuseum is like a mirror in which people observe themselves, in which they try to understand the territory they inhabit and the life of the population that came before them. It is a mirror that populations offer to their guests so that their work and their lives are better understood and respected. Founded with such a declaration of intent, the Valnerina Ecomuseum in Umbria, Italy, created by CEDRAV (Centro per la documentazione la ricerca antropologica in Valnerina e nella dorsale appenninica Umbra) was founded with the aim of revitalizing this mountain area through the creation of a “diffused museum.” It is developed through different scattered “antennas,” so called because they receive and then send information to the surrounding territories, serving as an amplifier. The antennas are

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dedicated to hemp fiber, folk forms of devotion, folk poetry, and agricultural and food production: olive oil, truffle, spelt and the art of norcini, processing pork for prosciutto and salame. The itinerary for touring the ecomuseum is circular, thus it can be entered from any direction. Of course ecomuseums also run the risk of freezing cultures with a focus on “timeless traditions” and rural life, and they risk focusing on the identity of small communities eliminating all references to alterity, thus serving to exclude rather than include. It will be interesting to see if in the future there will be space for more urban or industrial food ecomuseums, where the hypermodern and the past exist side by side, where contemporary rituals are given the same importance as traditional cultural aspects. Would people participate in the life of a museum that investigates, for example, modern supermarket shopping experiences? Would this museum be possible, or even desirable? The anthropologist Daniel Miller (1998), in his book A Theory of Shopping, shows us that shopping at supermarkets retains meanings linked to love and sacrifice, and is a highly ritualized experience. Is this contemporary food experience worthy of being included in future notions of cultural heritage? To conclude, the construction of food as heritage is not univocal, and scholars and professionals are adopting this concept in more critical ways by highlighting, rather than concealing, its processual nature. Heritage discourses shape representations of food at different levels and are an interesting field of study since they can be considered a barometer of cultural sensibilities, but most importantly, as LeBesco and Naccarato (2008) argue, “these representations actively produce cultural sensibilities and the possibility of transgression” (2). Future researchers will have the task of investigating if museum curators, international organizations, tourist operators, local communities, and those practitioners who are active agents in the classification, promotion, and circulation of knowledge and economic exchange around food, will adopt more or less dynamic definitions of heritage, and for which purposes. Will change, conflicts, and politics have more space in the narratives and practices that reinvent food as cultural heritage?

REFERENCES Ascione, E. (2012). “‘This Bread is Part of Our Tradition’: Identity, Locality and SelfRepresentation in Italy and Abroad.” In L’Altro Inside Out: L’Italia e il Mediterraneo, Echi Oltremare Conference Proceedings, edited by G. Spani, 14–16, June 2012, Rome: Boise State University. BAICR. (2007). Musei del Gusto. Mappa della Memoria Enogastronomica. Pescara: CARSA Edizioni. Badii, M. (2012). Processi di patrimonializzazione e politiche del cibo. Un’etnografia della Toscana contemporanea, Perugia: Morlacchi Editore University Press. Baronti, G. (1999). “Cibi dell’ordinario e cibi dello straordinario: alimentazione quotidiana e alimentazione rituale e festiva.” In Le opere e i Santi. Alimentazione rituale e festiva in provincia di Terni, edited by Baronti, G., 33–92, Terni: Provincia di Terni Editore. Black, R. E., and R. C. Ulin (2013), “Rethinking Terroir.” In Wine and Culture. Vineyard to Glass, edited by R. E. Black, and R. C. Ulin, 11–14, London and New York: Bloomsbury. Brulotte, R. L., and A. Starkman (2014). “Caldo De Piedra and Claiming Pre-Hispanic Cuisine as Cultural Heritage.” In Edible Identities: Food as Cultural Heritage, edited by M. A. Di Giovine, and R. L. Brulotte, 110–s23, Farnham, Burlington: Ashgate. CEDRAV, http://www.cedrav.org/?q=node/38. Accessed on July 1, 2016

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Clemente, P. and F. Mugnaini, eds. (2001). Oltre il Folklore. Tradizioni Popolari e Antropologia nella Società Contemporanea, Roma: Carocci. Davis, P. (2011). Ecomuseums. A Sense of Place. London and New York: Continuum International. Dei, F. (2002). Beethoven e le Mondine. Ripensare la Cultura Popolare. Roma: Meltemi. Di Giovine, M. A. (2009). The Heritage-Scape. UNESCO, World Heritage and Tourism. Lanham: Lexington Books Di Giovine, M. A. (2014). “The Everyday as Extraordinary: Revitalization, Religion and the Elevation of Cucina Casareccia to Heritage Cuisine in Pietrelcina, Italy.” In Edible Identities: Food as Cultural Heritage, edited by M. A. Di Giovine, and R. L. Brulotte, 77–92, Farnham, Burlington: Ashgate. Di Giovine, M. A. and R. L. Brulotte (2014). “Introduction: Food and Foodways as Cultural Heritage.” In Edible Identities: Food as Cultural Heritage, edited by M. A. Di Giovine, and R. L. Brulotte, 1–28, Farnham, Burlington: Ashgate. European Network of Ecomuseums, “Declaration of Intent of the Long Net Workshop”, May 2004. Trento (Italy). http://www.localworlds.eu/PAPERS/intents.pdf. Accessed on May 1 2015 Grasseni, C. (2011). “Re-inventing Food: Alpine Cheese in the Age of Global Heritage.” Anthropology of food [Online], (8) 2011. Online since 16 May 2011, connection on July 1, 2016. URL: http://aof.revues.org/6819. Guy, K. M. (2003). When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Herzfeld, M. (2004). The Body Impolitic. Artisan and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (1996). “Theorizing Heritage.” Ethnomusicology, 39(3): 367–80. Kuutma, K. (2013). “Concepts and Contingencies in Heritage Politics.” In Anthropological Perspectives on Intangible Cultural Heritage edited by L. Arizpe, and C. Amescua, 1–16. Cham, Heidelberg, New York, Dordrecht, and London: Springer. Lattanzi, V. (1999). “Per un'Antropologia del Museo Contemporaneo.” La Ricerca Folklorica 39, Antropologia museale, 29–40. LeBesco, K., and P. Naccarato (2008). “Introduction.” In Edible Ideologies : Representing Food and Meaning, edited by K. LeBesco, and P. Naccarato, 1–11. Albany: State University of New York Press. Lenclud, G. (2001). “La tradizione non è più quella di un tempo.” In Oltre il folkore. Tradizioni popolari e antropologia nella società contemporanea, edited by F. Mugnaini, and P. Clemente. 123–33. Roma: Carocci. Long, L. M. (2004). “Introduction.” In (ed) Culinary Tourism, edited by L. M. Long. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Miller, D. (1998), A Theory of Shopping, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Musei Del Cibo di Parma, http://www.museidelcibo.it/ing/. Accessed on June 1 2016 Nowak, Z. (2012). “Against Terroir.” Petit Propos Culinaires 96: Essays and Notes on Food, Cookery and Cookery Books, August 2012, 92–108. Moro, E. (2014). La Dieta Mediterranea. Mito e Storia di uno Stile di Vita. Bologna: Il Mulino. Palumbo, B. (2003). L’UNESCO e il Campanile. Antropologia, Politica e Beni Culturali in Sicilia Orientale. Roma: Meltemi. Palumbo, B. (2011), “Politics, Heritage, and Globalization: South Eastern Sicily in the ‘Patrimonialization’ Process (1996-2011).” Il Nostro Tempo e la Speranza, Nuova Serie, 7, 7–15.

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Paxson, H. (2013). The Life of Cheese. Crafting Food and Value in America. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. Papa, C. (1999). Antropologia dell’Impresa. Milano: Angelo Guerini. Pizza, G. (2012). “Microfisiche del Cibo tra Edonismo e Cultura.” Italianieuropei, 12(10), 40–46. Regione Umbria. (2015). “Disciplina delle sagre, delle feste popolari e dell’esercizio dell’attività temporanea di somministrazione di alimenti e bevande” http://leggi.crumbria.it/mostra_atto. php?id=78059&v=FI,TE,IS,VE,SA&m=5 accessed on 1 July 2016 Rivière, G.-H. (1992). “L’Ecomusée, un modèle evolutif (1971-1980).” In (ed.) Vagues: une antologie de la nouvelle museology, edited by A. Desvallées. Mâcon: Editions W-MNES. Rippon, M. J. (2014). “What is the Geography of Geographical Indications? Place, Production Methods and Protected Food Names.” Area, doi:10.1111/area. 12085, 1–9. Sammells, C. A. (2014). “Haute Traditional Cuisines: How UNESCO’s List of Intangible Heritage Links the Cosmopolitan to the Local.” In Edible Identities: Food as Cultural Heritage, M. A. Di Giovine, and R. L. Brulotte, 141–58, Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate. Simeoni, P. E. (1994). ‘La Catalogazione del Cibo. Un Corpus di Oggetti Virtuali’, La Ricerca Folklorica, Antropologia dell'Alimentazione, 30, 95–98. Siniscalchi, V. (2000). “‘Il Dolce Paese del Torrone’. Economia e Storia in un Paese del Sud.” Meridiana, 38–39: 199–222. Terrio, S. J. (2000). Crafting the Culture and History of French Chocolate, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Trubek, A. (2008). The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Ulin, R. C. (2013). “Terroir and Locality: An Anthropological Perspective.” In Wine and Culture. Vineyard to Glass, edited by R. E. Black, and R. C. Ulin, 67–84, London, New York: Bloomsbury. UNESCO. (1972). http://whc.unesco.org/en/convention/. Accessed on June 10 2016 UNESCO. (2003). http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/convention#art1. Accessed on June 10 2016 Williams, E. (2014). “Food Museums.” In Routledge International Handbook of Food Studies, edited by K. Albala, 229–37, New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

A Smiling Face is Half the Meal: Setting a Place for Culture in Food Advocacy (*Latvian proverb) WAYNE ROBERTS AND LORI STAHLBRAND

INTRODUCTION As recently as 1990, a bold but obvious truth needed to be said, and food philosopher Wendell Berry said it—“Eating is an agricultural act” (Berry 1990, 145). Berry did not say eating was a biological need, or a business transaction. He said farming and eating are not the beginning and end of the line, but two phases of an ongoing relationship. There is purposeful human agency in eating, not just unthinking passive consumption. Food expresses engagement, connection, participation, and empowerment, not just fueling the body. But twenty-five years later, we need to take Berry’s statement further—eating is a cultural act. Our starting point is that all food experiences sustain and respond to human cultural needs, as much as they nourish and respond to human bodily needs. The two are inseparable from the moment of bonding that takes place between mother and child during breast-feeding, to the food served at memorials—with countless food-centered rituals, such as birthday cakes, Valentine’s dinners, wedding cakes, banquet celebrations of fiftieth anniversaries, feasts that mark the passage of time and seasons, religious rituals, and untold “breaking bread” in between. The French, as we might suspect, have something to say on this. French sociologist Thibaut de Saint Paul rejects any notion that meals are about anything as humdrum as refueling. “Eating is not only to give us energy, but even more than this,” he says, the food experience provides “a moment when our identity is formed by what we eat, how we eat, and who we eat with” (Pook 2016, 49). This chapter will explore how culture has been decoupled from both eating and agriculture in North America. We will briefly track the triumph of the productionist food paradigm since the end of the Second World War (Roberts 2013), and explore how four major discourses of food advocates—human rights, public health, food security, and sustainability—have largely neglected the realm of culture, creating a vacuum that global

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food corporations filled. We propose that reclaiming the cultural dimension of food will set us on track for understanding food’s full power as an accompaniment to everyday lifestyles of joyful and life-affirming engagement. Gaining appreciation for the cultural significance of food is part of the reframing and re-envisioning of food’s full potential as a transformative force in society. To date, advocacy efforts around food are often depicted as earnest and righteous. Most food advocates work on severe problems that can lead to suffering, illness, and death. The sheer length and contents of the advocacy list are worrisome—hunger, malnutrition, food disorders, chronic disease, soil erosion, deforestation, toxic pesticides, water pollution, child labor, workplace injuries, animal cruelty, biodiversity loss, food waste, and global warming. After hearing this unappetizing list of food problems, it’s embarrassing to ask, “Can we add a culture of pleasure to the priority list?” But comfort and joy are also important human needs. Neglecting them can cause serious problems, not the least of which are burnout and despair among advocates, and loss of hope and agency among potential supporters (Cox 2008). A positive culture is also a resource for social movements reaching out to new supporters. A creative and vibrant culture that expresses food themes in the visual, literary, and performing arts, as well as at watering holes where food is enjoyed, can inspire, animate, and sustain positive campaigns for food system improvement.

THE DECULTURING OF AGRICULTURE To understand how food culture was diminished, we must go back to the mid-twentieth century. North American food culture has been a casualty of the defining feature of the dominant food system since the Second World War—a high-input, high-technology, high-yield approach to farming that is sometimes called “production agriculture” or “industrial agriculture.” Agriculture had been especially ramped up for the war effort, and the momentum kept up, quickly making motorized equipment, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides the norm across the countryside. Like the society it fed, production agriculture was premised on an almost universal assumption that more equals better equals happier—a new rendition of the American Dream. The mood of the late 1940s and 1950s was marked by a yearning for consumer goods that had been denied over fifteen long years of scrimping during the Great Depression and the Second World War (Cohen 2003). The value of high-volume production, not only in agriculture, but everywhere, was expressed in the way economic progress has been popularly understood ever since the war—the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the very name of which makes the obsession with gross production explicit. Originally conceived for wartime use, the term became the postwar standard measure for how well a society was progressing. In the case of food and agriculture, the GDP—which only measures production and sales—by definition eliminates recognition of the value of non-commercial activities such as breast-feeding, gardening, cooking, parenting, and self-reliance skills (Coyle 2014). The GDP, fundamentally unchanged since the 1940s, is the measure of a culture engrossed by production and commercialism. This is not fertile soil for a food culture. In 1956, the new corporate system that delivered bigger and better food got a new name—agribusiness (Davis 1957; King et al. 2010). Modern farming was so integrated with input manufacturers of fertilizer, pesticides, and farm equipment, and so inextricably

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linked to processors, distributors, and retailers, that the industry was more accurately defined as agribusiness than agriculture. The term agribusiness recognized that food was no longer a simple and personal transaction between farmers and eaters, but had become a complex set of logistical exchanges dominated by global corporations. Eating had become a logistical act. Within two decades, US secretary of agriculture Earl Butz was telling farmers to scale up and think like corporations. “Get big or get out” was his advice (Pollan 2008; Wolf 2000). To this day, almost everything related to North American food and drink expresses the hold of the postwar productionist ethos. Breeding programs for plants and livestock are designed to increase yields, size, and shelf life, with little attention to taste profiles (Brummer et al. 2011; University of Wisconsin 2016; MacRae et al. 1989). The tasteless Florida tomato, for example, was bred for a uniform bright red color and for capacity to withstand mechanical harvesting, with no effort to brand the product around taste (Estabrook 2012). Storage, distribution, and wholesale technologies obliterate any unique “terroir,” location or cultural story behind North American grains, milks, cheeses, and meats, almost all of which are pooled, processed, and sold in bulk as homogeneous products, their identity based on corporate branding rather than taste, culture, or story (Moss 2013; Kosior, Prentice, and Vido 2002). Indeed, foods have come to be defined, labeled, and identified in conversation as mere carriers of their biochemical nutrients, without any reference to their sensual, cultural, or ecological context—what has been called the “ideology of nutritionism” (Scrinis 2008).   The logic of the de-culturing production and distribution process carries over to selling, preparation, serving, and eating. Supermarkets succeed by using the power of aggregation—bulk purchasing, and store-sponsored no-name brands. They typically assign staff to keep all shelves fully stocked, knowing that this mark of abundance puts shoppers in a buying mood (Winson 1993; Glanz, Bader, and Iyer 2012; Wansink and Sobal 2007; Wansink 2006). Within this environment of a superabundance of food, it is estimated that North Americans spend more than 60 billion dollars a year on weight-loss products and services (Williams 2013; Mathieu 2011). Close to $200 billion a year is then spent land filling food waste (Buzby and Hyman 2012; Gooch, Felfel, and Marenick 2010), so that it is kept out of sight, out of mind, and does not serve as a reminder of the fact that governments spend way too much money to spur on increased yields, and relatively little to encourage wiser use and conservation (Smil 2000).

INSERTING CULTURE INTO THE FOUR FOOD DISCOURSES The ongoing relationship between food and culture does not mean that we need to make a big deal about applying a specifically cultural lens to food, or developing food culture as an area of specialized expertise. North American understanding and treatment of food already suffer from more than enough specialization and departmentalization—silos that slice up food into such separate parts as agriculture, nutrition, food safety, public health, rural development, job creation, and so on. It’s hard to make the case for adding yet another silo of specialization for food culture. Therefore, we suggest each of the four major approaches to advocacy would add a rich dimension to their arguments by including references to the role and significance of culture.

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THE HUMAN RIGHTS DISCOURSE One way of advocating for improvements to the North American food system starts with the human right to food, a right that hinges on the fact that food is essential to life. Both the United States and Canada have constitutions that spell out popular rights, and people in these countries commonly refer to their constitutionally protected rights to free speech or equality under the law, for example. Such thinking is an almost instinctual part of their political culture. The same principle could apply to food. This approach is entirely in keeping with the late US president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 declaration of the four freedoms animating the dreams of people engulfed by the turmoil of the Second World War: freedom to speak and worship, as well as freedom from want and fear, together forming the “moral order” of what he called a “social economy.” All four freedoms mean “the supremacy of human rights everywhere,” FDR said in his landmark speech (Voices of Democracy 2016). Around the world, where democracy and constitutions cannot always be assumed, people advocate for government programs to address problems such as hunger by basing their claims on the right to food proclaimed in UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 (United Nations 2016b). The UN has since reaffirmed the human right to food a number of times, in the UN declaration on the rights of children, for example (United Nations 2016a). Such declarations are often called “aspirational.” They exercise influence by finding a place in the hopes, ethical culture, and “moral imagination” (Ryan 2015) of huge numbers of people, thereby gaining a stature virtually equivalent to law, because politicians believe they have a moral obligation to act. North American food advocates have had an impact in at least four specific circumstances by using human rights language. First, advocates in a number of US states who want labeling of genetically modified foods have engaged in several closely tied referenda, which highlighted the “right to know” whether food is the product of genetic modification (Just Label It 2016; USRTK 2014; Nauheim 2009). Second, advocates supporting local food, especially meats, put up a stiff fight for Country of Origin Labels (COOL) that give shoppers the “right to know” where the food they are buying was produced, even though the World Trade Organization has prohibited such labels as discriminating against foods produced outside the country (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada; Government of Canada 2014; IATP 2015). Third, advocates have had success organizing US-wide protests and strikes on behalf of food industry workers who need “the right to unionize” and a minimum wage of $15 an hour (Reich 2013; Worland 2015). Finally, advocates have successfully made the case for labels that give people with specific allergies the right to know if they are eating foods that could cause them acute harm (peanuts, for example) or that violate their religious or ethical beliefs (Kosher, Halal, vegetarian, for example). All four of these campaigns refer to specific rights. But as of yet, the notion of food rights has not been used to unify all food causes that express a rights philosophy, or to promote a culture of rights around food that matches the culture of entitlement around free speech or gender and racial equality. Food scholar and activist Molly Anderson has issued the most comprehensive call to action on behalf of a rights-based movement for local and sustainable food systems (Anderson 2008). She outlines six critical elements of a rights-based system. First, it would champion the workplace rights of agricultural and food service workers. Second, it would advocate the right of people to participate in decisions by food companies and food-related government departments that affect them. Third, it would advocate the

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right of people to access food-producing lands. Fourth, it would promote the rights of shoppers to have meaningful choices. Fifth, it would protect the resource base of food production to enable food rights for future generations. Sixth, it would assert the right of people in all countries to make key decisions about their own food system. But although Anderson identifies a wide-ranging and unifying agenda for a food movement based on a commitment to human rights, she does not identify a positive role for dynamic food cultures in promoting or implementing a human rights agenda. Culture seems to have been left out of the human rights discourse about food without much controversy or analysis. Food charters adopted by at least fifty cities across North America come close to Anderson’s model of identifying food issues and citizen rights to which city governments have pledged to respond (Neff 2015). However, few of these charters address the role of culture in a rights-based or city-based food movement, beyond passing comments about food as a compelling issue that people from all cultures agree is important. But there’s a price to this neglect. The absence of serious attention to food culture in the human rights discourse about needed food reforms distances food rights advocates from major elements of the human experience with food—which is commonly associated with feelings and rituals of sensual pleasure, intimate attachments with friends, loved ones, and family, a sense of connection to universal forces, and celebrations that link food with music, dance, and art. Are there no human rights to such pleasures and relationships? We argue that the centrality of such pleasures and relationships to the food experience speaks to human needs for food that go beyond physical survival and broach the preconditions for human thriving, potentially a right to which humans are entitled. Opening a conversation on such topics is one way of mainstreaming the discussion on a unifying human rights perspective to food issues in North America.

THE PUBLIC HEALTH DISCOURSE A second cluster of food policy advocacy and discourse has been taken up by people who emphasize issues related to food safety, nutrition, and prevention of chronic disease. Many of these advocates work for public health agencies, schools of public health, or nonprofits and charities promoting diet and lifestyles that prevent chronic illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease (Neff 2015; Nestle 2007). Despite the public health tenor of this discourse, it usually relies on what is called the “medical model” of health, which does not pay much attention to food, let alone culture. The North American medical model is based on diagnosing and treating acute illnesses, and rarely features health promotion as the chief strategy to prevent disease (Engel 1989; University of Ottawa 2016). Moreover, the medical model maintains a strict hierarchy in which doctors are at the top, non-medically trained workers are subordinate support staff, and clients are patients, not partners. As any experience eating what is generously called “hospital food” will readily confirm, the medical model has little respect for food or the food experience. Such medical model biases are also pronounced in the mental health field, where drug treatment of brain chemistry is the norm. The medical model is also marked by intense specialization, a pattern that often carries over to public health. Food safety inspectors are mainly concerned with food-borne diseases associated with microbial infections. Food safety does not refer to the workplace safety of farm or slaughterhouse workers, nor does it refer to pesticides used to grow food, and released in the environment. Public health advocacy seldom veers far from

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the medical model, certainly not far enough to take up advocacy of innovative cultural practices. Nutrition is also understood in limiting ways. Nutrients come from the food chemistry of a carrot or a slice of cheese. No nutritional claims are made on the basis of organic or artisanal production methods, the quality of irrigation water, or on the basis of being locally sourced, or well-handled during postharvest handling. Taste of food is not considered a factor in nutrition, nor is the conviviality and cultural environment of meal settings. When educational materials are issued to the general public, attention is seldom drawn to the importance of mealtime as a health-promoting social and cultural experience. Nutrition discourse focuses on food chemistry, not the experiential aspect of eating, a fixation that has been described as “nutritionism” (Scrinis 2013; Pollan 2009). In 1986, the United Nations’ World Health Organization adopted the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion (“WHO The Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion” 2016), which challenged the medical model of health. This classic public health statement argues that “social determinants of health” govern the overall prevalence and distribution of both health and disease in a society. Factors identified as social determinants of health include holding a secure job with a positive workplace environment, having a roof overhead, being able to afford nutritious meals, and enjoying supportive relations with families and friends (Marmot and Wilkinson 2006; “WHO The Determinants of Health” 2016). Such an approach might identify food culture as a determinant of health. In some societies, for example, people typically shop for food in public markets, where it’s easy to strike up conversations with vendors or neighbors, where spaces are provided for children to play, where entertainers are busking, and where people frequently just “hang,” rather than rushing in and out with tonight’s “heat-and-eat” meal. Such markets mostly sell fresh and unprocessed foods that do not usually come with harmful additives. As well, such places create supportive environments that can reduce loneliness—sometimes held responsible for as much medical harm as heavy smoking or alcohol drinking (“Campaign to End Loneliness” 2016). Similar benefits to mental and physical health and well-being are associated with community gardens (Baker 2004; Twiss et al. 2011; Wakefield et al. 2007), as well as neighborhood restaurants and watering holes, “third places” which play a community role akin to that featured in the television show “Cheers” (Rosenbaum 2006; Oldenburg and Brissett 1982; Oldenburg 1999).

THE FOOD SECURITY DISCOURSE One of Humpty Dumpty’s famous statements in Alice in Wonderland applies to food security. “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—nothing more nor less,” he said (Carroll 1897, 123). According to one study, food security has more than 200 distinct definitions and usages (Maxwell 1994). It is one of the best-known terms used by food advocates, perhaps because its meaning is open-ended enough to cover a wide spectrum of food issues. Few people know that the term was coined by Henry Kissinger, national security adviser and secretary of state during the 1970s for both President Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Although Kissinger is usually known as a devotee of power politics, not a champion of food for all, he came to appreciate food policy in the aftermath of three events: crop failures in 1972 and 1973 in the Soviet Union that tied up all surplus supplies of wheat in the world, and sent food prices on a runaway upward spiral; a 1973 Mid-East oil price hike that again sent food prices through the roof and made it

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clear that farming and food were no longer dependent on renewable energy, but rather on oil and gas products; and a horrifying famine in Ethiopia in 1973 that dramatized the suffering of food deprivation. These three events, together with the turmoil linked to independence movements among emerging nations of the Global South, left people everywhere feeling food supplies and prices were out of control. It suddenly became clear that whoever controlled oil controlled food and the well-being of all peoples dependent on production agriculture rather than subsistence agriculture. Abundance could no longer be taken for granted, and all people, including those in the mightiest of nations, were vulnerable. Kissinger, Nixon, and the US government responded by repositioning agriculture and food as strategic sources of American power in the world. Domination of food production capacity was a way of using the extraordinary resource wealth of fertile soil and moderate climate to equalize Arab oil power with American breadbasket power. In 1974, Kissinger delivered a keynote speech to the World Food Conference in Rome, pledging US leadership in expanding food production, storage, and exports, thereby ensuring food security for all (Kissinger 1974). His speech proclaimed a humanitarian objective that “within a decade no child will go to bed hungry, that no family will fear for its next day’s bread, and that no human future and capacities will be stunted by malnutrition” (Kissinger 1974, 829). But the definition of food security that emerged from the conference was strictly economic: “Availability at all times of adequate world supplies of basic food-stuffs . . . to sustain a steady expansion of food consumption . . . and to offset fluctuations in production and prices” (Maxwell 1994, 156). Shifting definitions of food security quickly expanded its meaning. In 1982, food security was described as “freedom from food deprivation for all of the world’s people all of the time” (Maxwell 1994, 169). In 1993, the term was reminted as “community food security” by the newly founded Community Food Security Coalition, the leading American organization around broad food justice issues for the next dozen years. In opposition to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), which coined the term “household food security” (Maxwell and Smith 1993), the Coalition asserted that food security was about community capacity and food policy, not the hunger suffered by individuals and families that could theoretically be remedied by food stamps and food banks (“Community Food Security Coalition” 2012; Fisher n.d.; Winne 2008). In 1995, the eaters’ need for dignity was recognized, when food security was redefined as “a basket of food, nutritionally adequate, culturally acceptable, procured in keeping with human dignity” (Maxwell 1994, 169). Subsequently, scholars Michael Hamm and Anne Bellows developed the most all-embracing definition yet: “Community food security exists when all community residents obtain a safe, culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through a sustainable food system that maximizes community self-reliance and social justice” (Bellows and Hamm 2003, 107; Hamm and Bellows 2003, 37). One day, the definition of food security may be stretched yet again to include the pleasures of growing, preparing, eating, romancing, and celebrating food. For now, however, even the most expansive definition of food security only identifies “culturally acceptable”—a reference to the personal respect owed to people who choose foods expressing their religious, spiritual, and ethno-cultural practices. Until culture is defined more broadly, food security remains removed from the mental, spiritual, and sensual aspects of food, and does not envision a role that cultural activities can play to enhance food security.

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THE SUSTAINABILITY DISCOURSE Since the 1990s, increasing numbers of North Americans have sought alternatives to what is often referred to as “conventional food,” an overarching reference to typical foods sold for a low price at supermarket chains—foods that have often been sprayed with pesticides, raised on “factory farms,” processed with salty, sweet, and fatty additives, transported from halfway around the world, named for corporate brands that carry no sense of personalities or places that produce food identity. Alternative foods, by contrast, are commonly seen as pricier, easier to find at independent health food stores or farmers markets, more likely to have been grown locally, sustainably, or organically, to embody humane treatment of animals and humanitarian treatment of workers, to provide high levels of natural nutrition, and to highlight the individuals and places associated with the food. Organic food, which goes back to the 1940s (Heckman 2006; SARE 2016), became the first alternative food to find its way into the commercial marketplace. It was originally a shot across the bow of conventional farm and processing technologies, because organic producers and processors refused to use synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Until the 1990s, organic food was mostly sold at alternative co-op, “natural” and “health food” stores. However, since the late-1990s, many organic products have increasingly been grown at industrial-scale farms, processed by conventional food powerhouses such as General Mills and Kellogg, and sold at superstores such as Walmart and Costco. Organic choices are often packaged with the same synthetic materials as conventional foods, transported from as far away as conventional foods, available regardless of growing season in any particular locality, and packaged ready-to-heat-and-eat or eaton-the-go, just like many conventional foods. Several scholars have documented the rise of “industrial organic” and traced the trend to monopoly ownership practices (Howard 2009; Jaffee and Howard 2010; Howard 2016). Lacking a sense of food culture that went beyond avoiding chemicals and genetic modification, organic food could be incorporated into the dominant food system—a dramatic reminder of how important culture can be to the identity protection and preservation of a philosophy of food production. Will the same process overtake more recent efforts to produce and commercialize locally grown, sustainably and ethically produced, craft or artisanally processed foods? “Locavore” was named word of the year by the Oxford Dictionary in 2007, but a year before, two critics of the local food trend warned against the “local trap.” Fully aware of how the organic movement was being led down the industrial path, Branden Born and Mark Purcell argued the same logic could carry over to local food. Farmers growing for local markets are equally capable of using pesticides, genetically modified seeds, or plastic packages, abusing their workers and animals, or ignoring the state of the local food culture, they reasoned (Born and Purcell 2006). It may be, however, that the deteriorating state of both local and world environments will override such logic. To take some of the predicted consequences of climate change as one of many possible environmental game-changers, planners no longer wonder if shocks from drought or floods or heat waves or cold snaps will disturb a local area; they wonder when the shock of a drought or flood or heat wave or cold snap will hit (Hanjra and Qureshi 2010; Davoudi et al. 2012; Newman 2009). In this turbulent environment, personal and community security will rely on the resilience of individuals, groups, and

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public agencies, and their ability to adapt to shock. The more widespread the abilities to grow, prepare, and dispose of food products when the usual technologies are not functioning, the more secure a community is. It is difficult to animate such resilience without supportive cultures—a tradition of local “landrace” seeds that have evolved with the twists and turns of local growing conditions; a craft or artisanal culture of workmanship that can produce quality products with light and flexible tools; a community food practice geared to cooking from scratch; gardeners’ clubs, baking ovens in parks, tool libraries, community bulletin boards, and on and on. Getting up close and personal with local and sustainable foods brings everyone closer to the key resource that will get the community through emergencies and turmoil—resilience. In the case of food (which happens to have a huge impact on water, energy, transportation, and other essential services equally vulnerable to disruption), such resilience comes from seeing food as a whole of person, whole of society, whole of government enterprise, not just a commodity that can be eaten and tossed (L. Dubé, Pingali, and Webb 2012; Laurette Dubé et al. 2014). In this scenario, culture is no longer a frill, a pastime, a form of recreation, an evening at the theater or opera. It becomes what it has been through tens of thousands of years of history—an indispensable community resource that links the skills and capacities of individual and collective minds to the worlds of work and everyday life. The most comprehensive effort to develop food guidelines that take a whole of person/whole of government/whole of society approach, and address cultural practices, comes from Brazil, where in 2003 a well-resourced campaign to move a country toward “zero hunger” was launched. In 2014, as this campaign was catching its stride, the government released dietary guidelines that went far beyond conventional nutritional thinking (Ministry of Health of Brazil 2014). Culture is prominently on the menu of these guidelines, designed to counter the impact of global corporate control over food. The “means of production, distribution, marketing and consumption” associated with the ultra-processing of global corporations, according to the guidelines, “damage culture, social life, and the environment” (Ministry of Health of Brazil 2014, 39). To establish a counterculture of engagement, citizens are encouraged to become active and involved in their communities, and not to passively rely on the government. The Brazilian guidelines give equal billing to nutritional and cultural considerations: prepare meals from fresh foods. Use oils, salt, fat, and sugar in moderation. Limit readyto-eat foods. Eat regular meals in nice environments. Eat in company when possible. Shop at places where fresh food is featured. Make your own meals whenever possible. Take the time, and find a nice place, to enjoy meals. Choose restaurants that feature fresh food, and avoid chains. Be conscious and critical of ads (Roberts 2015; Nestle 2014; Ministry of Health of Brazil 2014). Brazil’s initiative, based on strong human rights, public health, food security, and sustainability convictions and practices, set a precedent for supporters of healthy and sustainable food systems in North America to go beyond the frameworks and discourses that have confined most of their efforts to date. The exclusively productionist and commercial mindset behind the dominant food system leaves much to be desired. It leaves too many people underfed and undernourished. It leaves behind too much environmental waste and chronic disease. But this system cannot be transformed with critiques and policies alone. Transformation requires a positive project, and one place to begin the discussion of such a project is culture.

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ADDING CULTURE TO THE FOUR DISCOURSES A cultural agenda is part of reframing and reimagining food’s domain. A robust community food culture includes such obvious items as celebrations of each season (strawberry, plum, and peach festivals, for example), media and educational coverage of food themes associated with regular holidays (Thanksgiving and its relationship to First Nations and Native American heritages, for example), promotion of terroir and place-based identity in food and beverage specialties, museums that feature foods relating to themes of major exhibits (a pioneer herb garden in a pioneer exhibit, for example), establishing suitable civic celebrations of World Food Day to mark the anniversary of the UN agency on food and agriculture, inclusion of food skills and food literacy curriculum at all educational levels, fostering of farmers’ markets selling local foods and food-related crafts, marking of food celebrations in relevant ethno-cultural communities as ways to support interculturalism, encouragement of farmers and gardeners who grow “world foods” that come from other cultures, and community-based food centers supporting a range of food activities. It’s as simple as making food visible to our mind’s eye, which has been trained to exclude food, and giving food visibility in a community. Since 1945, governments, corporations, and consumers thought a viable food system could be constructed by technology alone, without nourishment from a vibrant food culture. Critics of this decultured food system—even people who worked for human rights to food, for healthy food, for food security and for organic, local, and sustainable food—could not find the turn of mind, the policy space or resources to develop a culture of food supportive of their goals. One exception to this dominant discourse about food as a product, rather than an experience, came to North America from Italy. In 1986, Italian journalist Carlo Petrini rebelled at the prospect of McDonald’s setting up shop at the foot of the exquisite Spanish Steps, defiling one of Rome’s historic public spaces. By 1989, he was ready to launch an international movement (currently in 150 countries) to counter fast food with Slow Food. The organization has fostered a culture based on food that is “good, clean and fair”—meaning authentic and traditional, produced and prepared in safe conditions, and fair in its treatment of workers and animals (“Slow Food Manifesto for Quality,” n.d.). Slow Food celebrates simple foods and food experiences that are pleasurable for the eaters and all those who contributed to the food’s production. While constructed as a cultural movement—it is organized into convivia of people who meet to eat, some 30 in Canada and 200 in the United States—Slow Food addresses food rights, food access, food nutrients, food security, and sustainability through the lens of culture (“Slow Food International” 2016; Petrini and Padovani 2006). Slow Food is by no means the end of the food and culture story. It is a beginning of a new discourse about food and culture, and a fresh way of looking at food. Reclaiming food culture invites us to upend the standard way of thinking about food relationships that has become ingrained in popular and official food thinking ever since the term “agriculture” was displaced by the term “agribusiness” during the 1950s. By cementing the connection between food and business, rather than food and culture, the new term introduced two key concepts. One was the idea that food is mainly about the delivery of products, a meaning which tends to link food with instrumental functions, such as nutrition and convenience, rather than expressive functions, such as enjoyment, belonging, and togetherness. The other was to embed a sense of directionality in the way a food supply chain flows—from commercially

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provided seeds, fertilizers and farm equipment to the farmer to the wholesaler processor, retailer, and finally the consumer. Reclaiming food as a cultural activity challenges both these implicit meanings of agribusiness. It upholds the centrality of expressive functions of food, and asserts that these expressive and cultural functions are an important place to start rethinking food. To reclaim food as a cultural act, we need to be intentional about our cultural preferences, not just take them for granted and assume that culture will take care of itself as long as food is available. We also need to develop an understanding of the food chain that starts with mission statements about the cultural and other public purposes of food, and to “backcast” from there. If we want a food system which engages people, which promotes food literacy and food skills, which strengthens conviviality, which enhances our identity of place, as well as our ability to learn from other food cultures and cuisines, which nurtures our sense of respect and gratitude for farmers, fishers, food ecosystems, and all who work to make food happen, then we must think not just “from farm to table” but “from table to farm,” and build public purpose and culture into the entire food system. It is timely for an emerging generation of North American food advocates to consider this approach and test the possibilities of integrating its insights with other food advocacy discourses. Eating, and indeed all of the activities that go into food, need to be reclaimed as cultural acts.

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http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&profile=ehost&scope=site&authtype =crawler&jrnl=07981759&AN=78949260&h=SISk83Aj9%2FcHMfWTkwHURFC6Ut% 2FeupLLSLg0bBuIADhFrc9sY%2Fm1IYzsALfNWug34%2FhD5KXSttNyKA2KlKYRfw%3 D%3D&crl=c. Howard, Philip H. 2016. Concentration and Power in the Food System: Who Controls What We Eat? New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic. IATP. 2015. “Tell the President to Keep COOL | Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.” May 4. http://www.iatp.org/blog/201505/tell-the-president-to-keep-cool. Jaffee, Daniel, and Philip H. Howard. 2010. “Corporate Cooptation of Organic and Fair Trade Standards.” Agriculture and Human Values 27(4): 387–99. doi:10.1007/s10460-009-92318. Just Label It. 2016. “Right to Know | Just Label It.” Accessed October 26. http://www. justlabelit.org/right-to-know-center/right-to-know/. King, R. P., M. Boehlje, M. L. Cook, and S. T. Sonka. 2010. “Agribusiness Economics and Management.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 92(2): 554–70. doi:10.1093/ ajae/aaq009. Kissinger, Henry. 1974. “Address by Secretary Kissinger.” The Department of State Bulletin LXXI(1851): 821–29. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/msu.31293008122172?urlappend=%3Bs eq=399. Kosior, Jake, Barry E. Prentice, and Erica Vido. 2002. A Mixed Logistics Strategy for Grain: The Competitiveness of Containers Versus Bulk. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba. http:// umanitoba.ca/faculties/management/ti/media/docs/graincont_2002.pdf. MacRae, Rod J., Stuart B. Hill, John Henning, and Guy R. Mehuys. 1989. “Agricultural Science and Sustainable Agriculture: A Review of the Existing Scientific Barriers to Sustainable Food Production and Potential Solutions.” Biological Agriculture & Horticulture 6(3): 173–219. doi:10.1080/01448765.1989.9754518. Marmot, Michael and Richard G. Wilkinson, eds. 2006. Social Determinants of Health. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mathieu, Emily. 2011. “Big Bucks, Few Controls in the Wild West of Weight Loss | Toronto Star.” The Toronto Star, June 19. https://www.thestar.com/life/health_wellness/ nutrition/2011/06/19/big_bucks_few_controls_in_the_wild_west_of_weight_loss.html. Maxwell, Simon. 1994. “Food Security: A Post-Modern Perspective.” http://mobile.opendocs. ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/123456789/3787. Maxwell, Simon, and Marisol Smith. 1993. “Part 1—Household Food Security: A Conceptual Review.” In Household Food Security: Concepts, Indicators, Measurements: A Technical Review. New York: UNICEF/IFAD. Ministry of Health of Brazil. 2014. Click here to enter text.Dietary Guidelines for the Brazilian Population, 2nd ed. Brazilia: Ministry of Health of Brazil. http://189.28.128.100/dab/docs/ portaldab/publicacoes/guia_alimentar_populacao_ingles.pdf. Moss, Michael. 2013. Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. Toronto: Signal. Nauheim, David Alan. 2009. “Food Labeling and the Consumer’s Right to Know: Give the People What They Want.” Liberty UL Rev. 4: 97. http://heinonline.org/hol-cgi-bin/get_pdf. cgi?handle=hein.journals/lunlr4§ion=5. Neff, Roni., ed. 2015. Introduction to the US Food System: Public Health, Environment, and Equity. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Nestle, Marion. 2007. Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. Berkeley: University of California Press. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/bios/ ucal052/2001027678.html.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

What is (not) Food? The Construction of Food Waste as a Social Problem LEDA COOKS

In July 2014, John Oliver dedicated an episode of his new and popular HBO Last Week Tonight series to food waste. Oliver opened the segment by observing the plethora of all you can eat commercials on American television, and linked Americans’ fascination with excessive food to their love of all things large. He connected this need for endless fulfillment (mimicking an Applebee's commercial for their Riblets™ sung to the tune of “Rawhide”) to “sadness, sadness, sadness” and filling the “holes in [our] hearts” with, in this case, lots and lots of . . . Riblets™. Oliver then observed that “celebrating America often goes hand in hand with celebrating its food.” By way of illustration, he played a popular Carl’s Jr. ad (2014) that asked the question, “What’s more American than a cheeseburger?” The ad reached comical heights proclaiming the glory of the new American Thickburger™ (a cheeseburger, hotdog, and potato chips smashed together on a bun), so authentically American that it is shown eaten by all-American model Samantha Hoops in a hot tub in the back of a pickup truck driven by an American bull rider that is on an aircraft carrier under the Empire State Building. As Oliver implies in his analysis of this Carl's Jr. ad, in US popular culture something big can always be trumped by something “huge” and, if we can't really celebrate these dubious markers of our national cuisine, we can celebrate the very excess of them in one burger. Indeed, in a US popular culture that prioritizes food, excess, and a never-ending hunger for more, the topic of food waste might get hidden. But as Oliver tells his audience, this too is enormous and deserves our attention. Oliver (via an ABC news report) gives us statistics: in the United States, 40 percent of food is wasted, we throw out 160 billion pounds of food per year, and 20 pounds per person of food waste is generated per month. He also provides graphics: in the United States we can fill 730 football stadiums with food waste annually. This evidence of our waste is followed by statistics on hunger and video of an interview with the mother of a food insecure family. People are starving, John Oliver tells us, while we throw out perfectly good food. Just what is to be celebrated and what is to be condemned in the juxtapositions posed throughout this episode (with almost 6,400,000 YouTube views as of this writing) of perfect food and perfect people next to waste, hunger, and excess? This seemingly simple admonition and its justifications: “Don’t waste: people are starving and we are fat”

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point both toward and away from the role of culture and popular media in perceptions of what's good to eat and reinforce the contradictions in the ways consumers in the United States think about waste and about how food should look and taste. What is good to eat is indeed first good to think, and what is good to think is intimately tied to aesthetics of taste and waste. Ideologies about food (and the values they impart) cannot be distinct from those about food waste (Blichfeldt, Mikkelson, and Gram 2015) and likewise cannot be separated from policies, activism, and the proclamations of progressive talk shows and news outlets that urge us to reduce food waste in the food system. Where not long ago the food sections of newspapers and magazines featured recipes and food adventure travelogues, these pages are being replaced with stories about food as a social justice issue. Reports about food waste and activism in news and entertainment media are increasingly a common feature of the Washington Post, New York Times, Huffington Post, Atlantic, and Time magazine, to name a few. Broadcast media such as NPR, PBS, NBC, and ABC have increased their reporting on food waste and reuse in the two years surveyed (July 2014 to July 2016). Many of these news outlets have dedicated food system blogs and columnists. Huffington Post named July 2016 “Reclaim Month” with continuous coverage on food waste throughout the month. Despite this growing coverage, it would be a stretch to describe food waste as central to the popular interest in food. While food waste stories and activism are certainly on the rise and on the radar of government and popular news outlets, social and mass media still resoundingly prefer all that is beautiful and/or exotic about food (Starkman 2016). It is precisely this media focus on all that is perfect about food and the relative invisibility of waste in social and popular food commentary (visual or otherwise) that gives warrant to this chapter on the construction of food waste in popular culture. Despite the pervasive presence of beautiful and excessive amounts of food in dominant broadcast and social media, cultural considerations of taste rarely arise in studies of waste along the food chain (Cooks 2015). The chapter explores the con/disjuncture in mass mediated stories about food as entertainment, and increasing media stories and activism around food justice, to locate hegemonic forces at work that make food waste such a complex social and cultural issue, albeit one with many seemingly “logical” scientific analyses and social solutions. Portrayals of food waste in the media have shifted slightly in the past few years from marginalization of waste as an object of disgust and derision to the accommodation of a recognition of the threat it poses to the food system. Ultimately, our food choices are performances of identity, and the choice of what to do with our excesses marks our privilege. We may feel guilty or ashamed by waste, and still feel unable to do anything to reduce wasted food or we may choose to ignore it all together. We might choose to eat reused or recovered food at a pop-up restaurant and have an exotic dining experience, or we might choose to buy misshapen or no-longer-fresh fruits and vegetables. Equally marked is the performance of eating food waste at a local shelter that has been recovered from local stores and restaurants. The bodies that have taste and the bodies that eat waste are not only marked by the food they eat, but where they eat it, the ability to pay for it, and the choice they have over what they eat. In this chapter two basic questions are posed: (1) how is food waste made meaningful in a foodscape (Johnston and Baumann 2009) that encompasses not only popular culture but also research and policy on its waste as a social and environmental problem; and (2) how are both the problem of and solution for food waste articulated within this mediated foodscape? Before responding to these questions, this chapter describes the various ways food waste has been defined and studied. Then, the chapter explores critical

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theoretical concepts that undergird the critical analysis of contradictions and tensions in the discourse on food waste: (popular) cultural production and articulation (Hall 1977; Willis 1977).

WHAT IS FOOD WASTE? Or, in accordance with the cultural approach of this chapter, how does “food” become “waste?” In the most basic terms, food is what we use (variously defined as food produced, distributed, purchased or eaten) and waste is what we don’t use. A multitude of scientific and social scientific studies, as well as policy studies of food waste, quantify amounts, connect them to losses along the food chain, and aim solutions at areas where the greatest losses are incurred (Food and Agriculture Organization 2016; Porpino 2016). For many logical reasons, solutions are often posed that rely on a simple problem, yet defining what counts as waste along the food chain, and where, when, and why it counts is much more slippery and not as easy as counting what is thrown out at the end of the day (Reynolds 2016). The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) differentiates food “loss” on the production end primarily in developing countries from food waste on the retail and consumer end in developed countries. The cultural implications of these divisions are reflected in food waste research; consumers and retailers are rarely studied in developing countries (for exceptions, see Porpino, Parente, and Wansink 2013; Somers 2016). New protocols attempt to provide standards for measurement at the producer, distributor, and consumer level, though food waste properly identified and recorded by producers and distributors may be scavenged or sold off the record. Waste donated to recycling or for immediate use may not in fact be reused (Cooks 2016). Consumer food waste, where recorded as that which is thrown out rather than donated, composted, etc., is subject to individual assessment, which varies broadly by culture, education, and income (Somers 2016). Assessing consumer food waste, like that of producers and distributors, may also be subject to social desirability bias, although this bias is more likely in contexts where waste is viewed as an ethical, legal, and social problem. Lastly, as Potteiger (2016) observed, even in best case scenarios where food waste has been diverted and accounted for, one person or even animal’s repurposed food intended for one use may in fact generate other uses. Recently, scholars such as Bodil Blichfeldt, Marie Mikkelson, and Malene Gram (2015), David Evans (2012), Zsuzsa Gille (2012), and Matt Watson and Angela Meah (2012) have begun to ask not what is food waste, but instead why and how does waste become a necessary but invisible everyday practice? Borrowing from earlier sociological and anthropological research on waste, they note the historical moment that waste and disposal were linked in cultural practice, when as Strasser notes, it was common knowledge that “this goes here, that goes there” and disposal divides private from public (1999, 6). Strasser goes on to claim that household waste, by virtue of its disposal, becomes (a) public matter, and thus a public (and in this case, social) problem. Food waste is a particularly tricky problem because, as Gille (2012) observes, food waste is often part of a hidden economy in which food provides positive value: food is assigned utmost importance as a commodity and social good, while waste is subject to differential conventions and governance systems that determine its relative worth at different points in the food chain. David Evans, Hugh Campbell, and Anne Murcott (2012) extend this view of waste’s invisibility and differential treatment to academia where studies of food waste have yet to be seen as significant in food studies research.

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While these studies do look at the social, cultural, and material practices that create waste, they are concerned ultimately with reducing it. Even the conceptual and alternative approaches to studying waste put forward by Watson and Meah (2012), Evans (2011), and Gille (2012) cite the same national and worldwide food waste statistics as indicative of both problem and solution. This return to the reality of the problem of food waste belies the social construction of the concept. While the current study does not by any means treat waste as a fiction, it attempts to situate waste in relation to identity and moreover, taste. Popular discourses on waste in the United States (as well as in other highly industrialized countries) are inevitably tied to past waste policies and socioeconomic practices; these discourses situate the goodness or badness of bodies, identities, and values within categories of race, class, sexuality, gender, and education, among others. As Strasser states, “Above all, sorting is an issue of class: trash making both underscores and creates social differences based on economic [and I argue race, ability, and gender] status” (1999, 9). This chapter asks: Who and what is included and implicated in activities of wasting and tasting in US popular culture?

POPULAR CULTURE AND CULTURAL PRODUCTION In this chapter, analysis of food waste in popular culture is interconnected with analysis of the ideologies that make up the foodscape: the systematic beliefs, sometimes in accordance and sometimes in tension, that comprise the landscape in which food takes on social and cultural value. Waste is devalued as part of bodily and natural production, and thus has been of little representational and social concern. Early in anthropological research on food, Douglas (2003) noted the cultural purposes for determining what is/ not edible, and the association of identity with what is/not eaten. Lupton (1996) and Levenstein (2003), among many others, have traced the many ways in which what we eat or don’t eat has become associated with who and how we wish to be. In popular media, food is associated with cultural (including ethical) practices of taste. Waste thus becomes that which is outside cultural consideration, hidden in a culture’s excesses, and thus is both invisible and critical to the cultural production of food. Willis (in Dolby, Dmitriadis and Willis 2004) notes that “for ‘culture’ to be effective as a notion, to give it some ‘go’ and to show the social work that it accomplishes, there must be some things that are ‘not culture’; this is actually to show precisely the autonomy of culture, that is, the manner of its autonomy with respect to something else” (171). Waste can be a popular topic as spectacle, danger, or taboo, but does not easily adhere to culture as a means of establishing value. Cultural production offers a useful approach to analyze material and social structures and to provide ways that identities might work against or in tension with structural constraints. Hall (1977) builds from Marx’s double relationship of production and reproduction to connect social forces and bodies to the material and economic base of relations. He explains a combination of relations—productive forces, social relations of production. These, in each epoch, form the determining matrix, in which social life and material existence is produced and reproduced. And the [political, legal, civil, and consciousness] structures raised on this foundation, which embody and articulate the social relations stemming from the productive matrix, correspond to it. Indeed, in the “double relationship,” both—material and social reproduction—are simultaneously founded. (51)

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Cultural re/production, accordingly, occurs through articulations or non-necessary linkages among social elements (Hall 1996). Articulation brings together seemingly different elements to form a conceptual whole. Hall notes that these alliances of concepts shift as social forces shift and change. Articulation produces a preferred meaning, or way of doing things that is given particular voice and structure through (embodied) practice, and thus is intimately tied to identities. In the case of food waste, articulation offers a theoretical and methodological way to ask how the waste surfaces as common and inevitable practice with particular effects and how those effects can be connected back to identities, social forces, and structures. Moreover, articulating the connections among identities and social forces can serve as a lens into the tensions that surround food waste discourse in a foodscape that prioritizes and separates food from waste. Gille (2012), citing the necessity of waste for food to exist, notes the hiddenness of waste and waste’s own economy of value side by side with the visible economy of food. Evans (2011), in his ethnographic study of Manchester households, found that waste emerged from a variety of intersecting factors, including time, taste, conventions, labor distribution, in the context of “domestic technologies, infrastructures of provisioning and the materiality of food itself” (12); thus, and regardless of other factors, food and waste are always constrained by the limits of biology and edibility. Cultural analysis deeply informs both what counts as food waste as well as the solutions both proffered and preferred to solve the problem. Utilizing the overarching idea of waste as a kind of cultural production that brings together the material and social in particular ways that tie to fundamental categories of identity, this chapter’s analysis proceeds in three stages: (1) identifying media representations of waste within the foodscape; (2) noting tensions or dialectics from the mediated texts under study; and (3) articulating non-necessary linkages among dialectics to broad social ideas of body, technology, and capital.

POPULAR DISCOURSES ABOUT FOOD WASTE WITHIN THE FOODSCAPE Surveys of mediated popular culture are necessarily arbitrary and limited, and the research presented here is no different. A more thorough analysis of the popular foodscape would include both the presence and absence of discussions of waste in all mediated portrayals of food; this study is necessarily limited to an analysis of how the food waste problem appears in media that reach dominant cultural demographics. For the purposes of analysis, fifty broadcast and cable news and entertainment segments and shows on food insecurity or food waste and fifty online news and entertainment sources were surveyed. The texts were read with an eye to the ways in which waste was defined and waste narratives were portrayed, as well as the perceived actors, agencies, and targets of food waste reduction. Choices were made about broadcast/mass and social media that relied on perceptions of popularity as sources for news and entertainment, as well as perception of reach (Lynch 2015). The time period of the study (July 2014 to July 2016) was selected as an indicator of the rising popularity of food waste stories in the mass and popular media. Network and cable news programs, as well as food entertainment programs featuring food waste (often tied to themes of food insecurity) were selected based on their reach to dominant demographics: white, middle class, middle income, and middle to older age groups. Specials (The Big Waste) and two longer program episodes (Last Week Tonight, PBS Newshour) were selected because they were shown on broadcast media and were

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designed to appeal to a large audience. Notably, some television shows chosen were repeats of earlier broadcasts (e.g., Restaurant Impossible), but the reach of the shows remained large on rebroadcast. Online media included sources with a large audience across news and entertainment topics (i.e., online versions of broadcast media, newspapers’ food issues). Some of these sites were extensions of broadcast coverage (including online columns and blogs) and others were produced solely for an online audience (e.g., Huffington Post, Buzzfeed). While I did not include sites dedicated to either food and eating (e.g., Eater) or food justice and activism (e.g., Civil Eats, Slow Food, Food and Environmental Reporting Network) directly in the texts analyzed, these sites as well as information from many food justice listserves, daily Twitter feeds on food waste, and documentaries produced on food waste provided a basis for comparison and certainly also inform coverage by the more popular media outlets. As with broadcast media included in the study, it is worth noting that during the time period of this research, increasing numbers of websites dedicated to food justice emerged, and coverage of food waste on those sites also increased. The numbers of celebrities becoming part of the effort to reduce food waste give the movement added popular coverage and credibility. These (food and other media) celebrities draw attention to the cause by attending (and tweeting about their experience at) large-scale dinner events, thereby drawing attention to waste. Food waste activist Tristram Stuart’s “Feeding the 5000” events: giant “community” dinners held in New York and DC in May 2016, were covered by major news outlets such as Fox, ABC, NBC, and NPR. The reach of the problem of waste to broader audiences can also be measured in the numbers of petitions circulated by MoveOn or Change.org asking a corporation (e.g., Walmart) to donate reusable waste or the government to produce legislation to reduce waste, from food date labeling to tax incentives. These petitions have a broad reach across the country and, whether they result in action or not, can raise awareness and participation in the movement with only the effort of reading a few paragraphs and clicking a mouse. Across the broadcast and online content studied, definitions of food waste as a problem and suggested solutions seem remarkably consistent and often repeat the same primary concerns for the environment and for people. Broadcast (e.g., Today Show, Fox News, ABC Evening News) infotainment segments and online publications aimed at lifestyle (e.g., Good Housekeeping and Buzzfeed articles on “how to waste less food”) tend to draw upon the assumption that most people aren’t aware of how big the problem of food waste is, especially in the United States. While most of the popular discourse is aimed at consumers, who we are told waste more than producers or distributors (“New Push to Reduce Food Waste” 2016), most of the solutions on offer are aimed at producers and distributors who are encouraged to donate excess food to shelters to divert waste. Technologies such as anaerobic digesters and new products made using organic compost are occasionally mentioned, as are bans on food waste in larger markets in the European Union. New business startups using food waste and new technologies for the production, distribution, and consumption of repurposed food waste are occasionally featured in lifestyle and business sections of the New York Times, Huffington Post, or Washington Post. A New York Times article proclaims that “food waste is the new platform for commerce” and praises the use of creative business ideas and innovative technologies to develop new ways of reducing waste (Strom 2016). These stories often discuss the financial and moral appeal of repurposing food waste, especially for younger consumers, by noting popular food writers and chefs (Michael Pollan, Mario Batali) and celebrities (Beyoncé) who both endorse and invest in these

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businesses. The audience for all of these stories is the consumer, and the assumption is that we all eat, we all waste, and many of us buy food. Thus, we should be interested and invested in food for our own consumption, and food waste for what opportunities it might pose for our reinvestment in the (capitalist) system. For those outside the system, these stories make clear, there are opportunities to consume donated and “repurposed” food. Or, more bluntly put: “You can eat our waste.” News of pop-up restaurants hosted by chefs that utilize otherwise wasted foods (e.g., kale ribs, fish heads) in a classy and tasteful menu seems to focus on the trendy aspect of repurposing food excess rather than making excess accessible to people who are hungry. In 2015, Dan Barber (activist chef, food celebrity, author, and co-owner of Blue Hill at Stone Barn) created a menu from food waste inspired by supermodel Giselle Bundchen’s favorite foods at his WastED pop-up in New York. Barber said that he wanted to make the point that waste can be central to a delightful dining experience. The supermodel reciprocated by posting her patronage on Twitter and Instagram, commenting that the meal was one of the best she’d ever had (Katz 2015). Another often-mentioned solution to food waste advocates redirecting excess of any kind to places where food is not as accessible; part of this solution lies in making otherwise wasted food affordable. Whether a story of a celebrity chef using repurposed food to help hungry people at shelters (Restaurant Impossible 2011) or innovative ways of feeding food insecure communities through discounted food waste restaurants and cafes, the food waste problem is addressed through local steps to reuse food in ways that benefit society, contribute to the local economy, and redistribute food waste. An NBC Nightly News story in June 2015 lauded The Daily Table, a combination reused food market and prepared food store that sells healthy food at a steep discount in the working-class neighborhood of Dorchester, Massachusetts (2015). A Facebook video with almost 20,000 views profiles the Real Junk Food Project: a group of over 100 organic cafes in the UK and Australia that operates under a “pay as you feel” model, providing low-income individuals access to healthy, affordable meals that are sourced from otherwise wasted perishable foods (“Good, Healthy Meals from Food Waste” 2015). Although certainly redistribution of wasted food goes a long way toward solving an immediate problem, it is remarkable how little mention was made in these stories of the need to actually reduce food waste at the source (see the Environmental Protection Agency's “Food Recovery Hierarchy”), rather than redistribute the current waste produced. Food Network’s “The Big Waste” (first broadcast in 2012) addressed the need for greater awareness by exposing the types of food that are typically thrown away and helping us to reshape what we consider waste and how we might repurpose excess. The documentary follows Food Network chefs and their experiences “in the field” from sourcing food to eating food. Emphasis was put on the star chefs’ personal learning experiences through this journey, indicating that waste is a widespread problem but the intricacies of our food waste system are a well-kept secret. The show also focused heavily on the surprise the chefs experience when noting the quality of many of the ingredients that are about to be or have been thrown away (deemed unfit for use) and explained that the issue in food waste lies not only in our excess purchasing of food, but in our perception of what is acceptable or unacceptable to eat. Still, in this show and across the media studied, the lack of attention to the consequences of allowing current levels of production, distribution, and consumption in developed countries to continue, as well as lack of awareness about the benefits to our environment and society of broadening our diet to include unused food, are remarkable.

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All the media studied offer a review of basic statistics of the amount of food wasted and indicate various points along the food chain where food goes unused. The problem is framed as one of environmental and bodily neglect with solutions varying for actors across the food chain. Many of these programs and publications assume too that the consumer/ reader is motivated less by actions they might take to help food system sustainability than by saving the dollars they are throwing out with their food. Consumers are mostly given tips for preserving food, tips for composting food, and sometimes encouraged to donate food they won’t use (Shanker 2015). Where political and collective action among all along the food chain is encouraged in popular news outlets, it is toward recovering food lost at the producer and distributor levels to feed the hungry (e.g., “Feeding the 5000”). Although no food commercials during the time period of the study discussed waste, it is worth noting that Panera's new “eating clean” campaign demonstrates the social, moral, and health associations with cleanliness. Food waste, while marked by its imperfection as thus defined, appears cleaned or prepackaged, and is very rarely portrayed as dirty or in later stages of decomposition. Even in the Last Week Tonight episode discussed at the beginning of the chapter, after chiding Americans for their obsession with perfection, the waste on display during the program either appeared perfectly normal (but past its due date) or was slightly misshapen or blemished. Notably, all portrayals of food waste suggest its potential for reuse. This has implications for the visibility given to palatable or “food-like” waste versus that which may be noticeably decomposing. For most people, waste produces strong feelings of disgust (Strasser 1999) and so appeals to reduce food waste try to combat this perception by only showing clean and almost perfect food waste. While this approach to portraying the prettier side of food waste is important to motivating public interest and concern, the underlying ideological and structural dilemmas for society that waste represents (Strasser 1999) remain untouched. Simply put, food waste is both symbolic and material, and communicating about food waste in the realm of popular culture is a political act.

ARTICULATING FOOD WASTE THROUGH TECHNOLOGIES, BODIES, AND CAPITAL Many dialectical tensions emerge across the popular discourse on food waste discussed above: food is clean, waste is dirty; food is safe, waste is dangerous; food is associated with taste and quality, (recovered) waste is associated with need and quantity; food is necessary, waste is unnecessary/excess; food is for consumers/those with choice over their diet, waste is for those without choice; food is good while waste is bad (except in cases where waste can generate capital in new forms, as energy, animal food, etc.). This list can be expanded and abstracted in a multitude of social, economic, political, and environmental directions. Food research and activism maintains these dialectics by separating cultural and historical studies of taste, cuisine, and quality from research on waste in terms of need and quantity. However, everyday practices of “tasting” and of “wasting” food bridge these binaries and intersect to form social group identities. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1990) concept of “habitus”— the conditioning of economic relations (relations of domination) within the subjectivity, identity, practices, and general cultural production of the individual within a given society (including the possession of taste as “cultural capital”)—is applicable here. The habitus lives within the individual as internalized social structures that guide an individual’s actions, connect the individual back to society, and essentially concretize the relations of domination

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within him or her and then work to reinforce and reproduce these larger relations. We see this manifest in the solutions offered to the problem of waste and in the connections between these solutions and the uses both for food and identities in the foodscape. Hall’s concept of articulation discussed above allows us to ask how these tensions in the popular cultural discourse around food waste link together social assumptions about and practices for food waste and its redistribution or reduction. Three interconnected themes emerge: the role of technologies in forging presumed solutions; the body as a site for the negotiation of these tensions; and the relationship between food waste and capitalist interests. First, technology articulates with each of these dialectics as a proposed solution to (over)consumption and hunger that promises food safety and sustainability. Technology promises to neutralize risk through science and standardization, solve hunger through better distribution systems, and create new and clean forms of food from waste (e.g., Wolinski 2015). In news stories that report sustainable food waste practices, technology is often the means through which food waste may be prevented and reduced. The donation of “recovered” food to food shelters has turned shelters, once seen as a band aid on hunger, into technologies for solving both hunger and the problem of waste. Technology attaches to waste as moral science and as a sign of economic and ecological progress. Technology civilizes food systems, and offers the ideological disconnection from the social and material matter of bodies that taste and waste. The body also articulates with each of the dialectics that emerge from food waste discourse, including in relation to the topic of sustainability. While sustainability is a central concern of many news stories, it is rarely discussed in terms of embodied practices of waste reduction such as choosing to buy and use food in ways that maintain a sustainable food system. Nonetheless, we see that ideologies of sustainability are embodied in popular culture through celebrities who promote awareness of food system issues, waste included. Chefs and food show hosts such as Tom Colicchio, Jamie Oliver, and Mario Batali, and well-known food writers like Michael Pollan, are attached to ethical and sustainable ideals and practices through their investment in new technologies for waste reuse and appeals to recover waste for the food insecure. The dialectics of food waste discourse can also be analyzed in relation to capitalist interests. With its social and relational attachment to marginal spaces and marginal people, food waste produces anxiety merely through its exposure to the larger public. Waste as danger and risk is articulated with marginalized bodies and refuse/d food. Trashing food is often a choice, eating that trash is not; therefore, when bodies associated with good taste (e.g., Giselle Bundchen, Beyoncé, Tom Colicchio) choose to pay to eat waste, it interrupts the dialectic. The choice revalues waste, but as an exotic and exciting dining “experience” (Katz 2015). Food waste can be commodified, but for whom and to what consequence? If reused or repurposed food is returned to the capitalist system and it gains value socially and materially, this may open it to more (re)consumers as newly palatable. Alternatively, markets follow trends and as long as taste is attached to power and status, not justice and equity, those with the power to choose will likely assign value and prioritize certain foods over others. Discourses and performances of taste involve status, choice, and autonomy. Choosing food that is aesthetically pleasing and tastes good, caring about healthy food, paying for quality food: all are aspects of taste reflected not only in popular discourses on food and waste but across research in food studies (Cooks 2015). Discourses that link waste to food insecurity provide a popular answer to the moral problem of waste that leaves the separation of taste (choice, subjectivity, and autonomy over diet and health) and waste (marginality, excess, disgust) intact.

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Related to these themes of technology, bodies, and capital and their attachment to waste is the topic of thrift, though it occupies a more ambiguous position in this constellation. Thrift is rarely associated with (bodies that) taste, and thrift abhors (bodies that) waste. Thrift is, nonetheless, more valued as ethical public practice by those with economic and social capital than for those who have had limited or no choices over their diet. Still, because thrift works to prevent the excesses of capital and to prevent food waste in the first place, it may elide the inside/outside connections to capital. Watson and Meah (2012) observed in their study of consumer food waste behaviors that thrift was most often connected to a concern for conservation of personal resources, and not necessarily a care for larger food system sustainability. Thrift may employ creative technologies for preserving food but may also lead to risky behaviors should tainted or toxic food waste be consumed. Thrift can be caring or selfish, personal or communal (sharing the spoils). Perhaps thrift, in its refusal of many of the binaries and dialectics posed, offers some possibility for penetrating the veneer of perfection that surrounds popular cultural representations of food.

CONCLUDING WITH SMALL STEPS: EATING AND TASTING (ALL OF OUR) WASTE Evans, Hughes and Murcott observe that waste does not reveal us as much as it constitutes who we are (2012, 9), literally and figuratively. All bodies waste and produce waste. The question at the heart of this chapter is: How does popular discourse work to produce bodies that taste, or are attached to taste, and (hungry) bodies for whom taste is not assumed or imagined and who get attached to waste? The process of separating and dividing bodies from their waste, and later in developing social hierarchies based on the distance between taste and waste has been key to the process of civilization (Mennell 1987; Strasser 1999). This process has always been in tension with the fact that problems of hunger and provisioning are as ancient as humankind (Higman 2012). Concerns over food waste have led to policy interventions that do not (yet) address the complex ways food waste is situated (as inside or outside economy, culture, identities) and tied to everyday individual and collective practices of providing and provisioning: production, distribution, and consumption. What might it take to broaden interpretations of and values for food that do not hide its disposal? Food waste stories that have recently made it into popular venues in mass and social media interrupt the taste/waste dis/connection to open up the possibilities for food justice and a more sustainable diet. Notably, these reports of social and economic ventures that interrupt the taste/waste binary are infrequent or have occurred outside of the United States where laws and policies would have prohibited such actions. Huffington Post and Upworthy, among more food-focused news outlets, reported the story of a restaurant owner in India who placed her restaurant’s leftovers outside in a fridge for anyone to take, and to add more food for others to use (Wanshel 2016). She may have been inspired by the solidarity fridge movement, which places community refrigerators in common areas where all can donate and take free leftover food. The fridge movement began in Spain in 2015 and inspired features on NPR, and in The Guardian and Huffington Post. Another promising step has been the increased adoption of “ugly foods” (fruits and vegetables) in markets. This movement to combat the perception that all food has to appear perfect to be tasty and edible has taken off in large part due to celebrity chef Jamie

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Oliver’s endorsement and widespread media coverage in 2015 and 2016 of the effort (Time, NPR, Fortune, USA Today, National Geographic). Walmart recently has got on board, and although their new venture has been critiqued as a public relations stunt rather than a shift in policy (Figuereido 2016), their adoption of ugly food has the potential to take the movement mainstream. If the marketing of less-than-perfect food becomes normalized, a good deal of produce that is currently thrown out or shipped back to the source will be put out for sale at a discounted price. Another step is seen in an AdCouncil public service announcement on food waste that follows a strawberry through its lifecycle (Save the Food 2016). The ad, which is getting wide exposure, is unusual both in its lack of verbal communication or text and its simple and emotional message about how food becomes waste. The ad displays loss without presuming blame or demanding guilt. The message is about choice, access, and sustainability without linking waste to excess or hunger. Although the problems with linking waste to food insecurity are discussed throughout the chapter, it is worth pointing out that the Last Week Tonight show on food waste began by pointing to media and the popular cultural fascination with excess and perfection in the United States. The call increasingly heard across the popular media to reduce our waste occurs simultaneously with the invitation to indulge in guilt-inducing but good tasting food as well as warnings that, as a nation of fat people, we need to eat better and healthier. Noting that campaigns to both indulge and eat healthily have been present in commercial media since the sixties, Warde (1997) observes that these paradoxical calls reflect both the valuing of pleasure and the individualization of choice. Appeals to do something with all our wasted food in a manner that does not make us feel guilty about consuming, or even consuming excessively, offer choices within the neoliberal system, some of which are noted in the small steps discussed above. Ultimately, the reduction of waste, however, will mean both producing less and doing more with what we do have. As the question “‘what shall we eat?’ is never outside of the ideology of individual choice” (Warde 1997, 90) so too are the problems posed and solutions offered to reduce food waste. Unsurprisingly, in the popular media surveyed, moral choices for resolving guilt become a number of choices for individual consumption that contradict the Environmental Protection Agency's number one goal of reducing waste at the source. Hegemony is therefore a key process to understanding food and social reproduction in any realm, taste and waste included. The fleeting cultural “common sense” of what makes for food quality, so key to the American cultural obsession with all things food, if not understood through the incompleteness and “hiddenness” of articulation, can lead the analysis and even the starting questions (as in the case of most food waste research) to ask what is food waste and how we might categorize good waste in relation to good food. Food waste “‘bites back’ and haunts society long after disposal” (Gille 2012, 28). Waste is necessary for food, and building from the work of Bataille (1988) and others, we might start to view waste as the necessary excess of any society that produces food, rather than the dark side of food’s positive visibility. Like food, Gille observes, waste is produced through social relationships and as such is “produced materially and conceptually by profoundly social relations” (2012, 29). Still, remarking on the inevitability and necessity of waste does not mean that throwing out edible food is a good thing to do, but messages in popular culture about the problem of and solutions for wasted food are hegemonic and reinscribe dominant cultural values, tastes, identities, and economies. These messages have been and can be interrupted through reclassifying and revaluing food and/as waste.

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AND SOME LIMITATIONS This chapter set out to survey the popular cultural discourses on food waste in order to better understand the ways food waste is produced and mass mediated. In focusing primarily on the ways waste is represented, the chapter was unable to look more deeply into the actual ways food waste is made meaningful and useful by producers, distributors, and consumers. The popular discourse about food waste as a problem and solution often presumes a logic to consumer practices that are social and emotional, and presumes a degree of resources (time, food knowledge, ability, money) that many consumers do not possess. Also, food waste is inevitably tied to myriad aspects of the food system and foodscape that could not be represented in this chapter. The degree to which, as one example, food service workers are underpaid and work in often terrible conditions impacts the degree to which they care about wasting a few tomatoes at the end of the day. Finally, given the explosion of interest in food waste, and the efforts to change or update producer/distributor tax incentives, policies, and legislation regarding donation and recovery, labeling, waste diversion, etc., these issues will likely be mentioned more even as this chapter goes to press. These limitations should not negate the importance either of studying what has been until now an unpopular topic in popular culture, or of examining the hegemonic cultural force of the medium.

REFERENCES “7 No-Brainer Ways to Stop Wasting Food.” Good Housekeeping. August 21, 2014, http://www. goodhousekeeping.com/home/a22125/reduce-food-waste/ Applebee’s. “All you can eat Riblets.” Filmed [2003]. YouTube Video. 00:15. https://youtu.be/ VfeWuQhI5Nc Bataille, Georges. 1988. The Accursed Share, vol. 1. New York: Zone Books. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 5.. Carl’s Jr. Most American Thickburger: Because America. https://www.ispot.tv/ad/73Uy/carlsjr-most-american-thickburger-because-america Cooks, Leda. 2015. “Constructing habitus in Matters of Waste and Taste.” In The Political Language of Food, edited by Samuel Boerboom, 123–40. Lanham: Lexington Books. Cooks, Leda. Re-searching the Afterlife of Repurposed Food Waste. Unpublished paper, 2016. Dolby, Nadine, Greg Dimitriadis, and Paul E. Willis. 2004. Learning to Labor in New Times. Park Drive: Psychology Press. Douglas, Mary. 2003. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. Evans, David. 2012. “Beyond the Throwaway Society: Ordinary Domestic Practice and a Sociological Approach to Household Food Waste.” Sociology 46(1): 41–56 Evans, David, Hugh Campbell, and Anne Murcott. 2012. “A brief pre‐history of food waste and the social sciences.” The Sociological Review 60(2): 5–26. “Food Recovery Hierarchy.” Environmental Protection Agency. https://www.epa.gov/sustainablemanagement-food/food-recovery-hierarchy “Feeding the 5000.” Feedback Global. 2016. http://feedbackglobal.org/campaigns/feedingthe-5000/

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Figuereido, Jordan. 2016. Walmart: What the Fork Are You Doing With Your Produce, Walmart? Change.org. “Food Loss and Food Waste.” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. http:// www.fao.org/food-loss-and-food-waste/en/ Food Network Special. “The Big Waste” January 8, 2012. http://www.foodnetwork.com/shows/ food-network-specials/all-specials/the-big-waste.html Gille, Zsuzsa. 2012. “From Risk to Waste: Global Food Waste Regimes.” The Sociological Review 60(2): 27–46. “Good, Healthy Meals from Food Waste.” Filmed [2015]. Facebook Video. 1:35. https://www. facebook.com/ajplusenglish/videos/659770464164464/ Hall, Stuart. 1977. “Rethinking the ‘Base-and-Superstructure’ Metaphor.” In Class, Hegemony and Party, edited by Jon Bloomfield, 43–72. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hall, Stuart. 1996. “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism Without Guarantees.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morely and Kuan-Hsing Chen, 25–36. London: Routledge. Higman, Barry W. 2012. How Food Made History. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Johnston, Josée, and Shyon Baumann. 2009. Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape. London: Routledge. Katz, Emily. “Blue Hill Chef Dan Barber Used Waste to Make One of Giselle Bundchen’s Favorite Meals.” Huffington Post April 29, 2015. http://www.huffingtonpost. com/2015/04/28/gisele-bundchen-dan-barber_n_7164072.html Last Week Tonight, [television program]. Director: Jim Hopkinson, July 19, 2014. Levenstein, Harvey A. 2003. Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America, vol. 8. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lupton, Deborah. 1996. Food, the Body and the Self. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Lynch, Jason. “Why TV Is Still the Most Effective Advertising Medium: Key findings from MarketShare Study.” AdWeek. June 9, 2015. http://www.adweek.com/news/ advertisingbranding/why-tv-still-most-effective-advertising-medium-165247 Mennell, Stephen. 1987. “On the Civilizing of Appetite.” Theory, Culture and Society 4: 373–403. NBC Nightly News, “Daily Table Supermarket Specializes in Food Past Its Prime” 2:03, June 29, 2015. http://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/food-past-its-prime-supermarketspecializes-expired-food-n383826 “What Does Eating Clean Mean?” Panera, 2016. https://www.panerabread.com/en-us/articles/ what-does-eating-clean-mean.html Fox News. “New Push to Reduce Food Waste,”. 1:35, May 11, 2016. http://video.foxnews. com/v/4889122658001/new-push-to-raise-food-waste-awareness/?#sp=show-clips PBS Newshour. “Why Does Almost Half of America’s Food Go to Waste?”. June 16, 2015. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/almost-half-americas-food-go-waste/ Porpino, Gustavo. 2016. “Household Food Waste Behavior: Avenues for Future Research.” Journal of the Association for Consumer Research 1(1): 41–51. Porpino, Gustavo, Juracy Parente, and Brian Wansink. 2015. “Food Waste Paradox: Antecedents of Food Disposal in Low Income Households.” International Journal of Consumer Studies 39(6): 619–29. Potteiger, Matthew. “Foraging, Novel Ecologies, and Design.” Presentation at the Annual Convention of the American Society of Food Studies, Toronto, Ontario, June 22–25, 2016. Restaurant Impossible [television program], “St. James Food Kitchen” 43 minutes. Food Network, Release date November 23, 2011.

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Reynolds, Christian. (2016). A comparison of the socio-economics of food waste in the United Kingdom and Australia. Paper presented at the Annual conference of the American Society of Food Studies, Toronto. Save the Food. “The Extraordinary Life and Times of Strawberry,” [YouTube Video uploaded April 20, 2016] AdCouncil. https://youtu.be/WREXBUZBrS8 Shanker, Deena. “34 Ways to Waste Less Food.” Buzzfeed. April 22, 2014. http://www.buzzfeed. com/deenashanker/ways-to-waste-less-food#.ivxo3VnzQ. Starkman, Naomi. “Food Will Not Save Media but the Right Media Might Help to Save Food.” Civil Eats. June 42, 2016. http://civileats.com/2016/06/24/food-will-not-save-media-but-theright-media-might-help-to-save-food Soma, Tamara. “‘Everyday Mundane?’ The influence of class and privilege on household food waste generation in Indonesia.” Presentation at the Annual Convention of the American Society of Food Studies, Toronto, Ontario, June 22–25, 2016. Storey, John. 2009. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (5th ed). Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman. Strasser, Susan. 1999. Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. New York: Metropolitan Books. Wanshel, Elyse. “Eatery Puts Fridge On Street, So Patrons Can Leave Leftovers For Those In Need.” Huffington Post, March 30, 2016 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/restaurantmakes-street-fridge-for-leftovers-to-feed-needy_us_56facba3e4b0a372181b2981 Willis, Paul E. 1977. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York City: Columbia University Press. Wolinski, Cat. “Toast with Mario Batali’s Beer Made out of Food Waste.” Civil Eats, December 23, 2015. http://civileats.com/2015/12/23/toast-with-mario-batalis-beer-madeout-of-food-waste/

INDEX

abattoir  7 Abbott Laboratories  92 adolescence  84 Adrià, Ferran  1, 160, 198, 201–2 advertising, food  245–59 to children  249 restrictions on  249, 253 and social media  251–2 agribusiness  315–16, 323–4 agriculture  8 industrial  315 production  315 urban  169–80 Alcott, William  276 alternative food movement  113, 116, 118 America Eats  99 American Geriatrics Society  92 American Heart Foundation  280 American Institute of Nutrition  278 American Red Cross  280 appropriation, cultural  127, 129, 147, 148 architecture  162, 184–94 art, food and  197–208, 211–22 avant-garde  199 Attack of the Killer Tomatoes  263–4 Atwater, Wilbur Olin  276 authenticity  48, 57, 115, 127, 219, 302, 303, 308 culinary  130, 131, 146 cultural  130 baby boomers  84 baby food  83, 85–7 commercial  83 homemade  86 Barber, Daniel  1, 204, 335 Batali, Mario  1, 18, 334, 337 Battle Creek Sanitarium  277 Beard, James  15 Big Waste, The  335 black boxing  261 Black Sheep  264 blogs, food  57–9, 69–70, 72 Blumenthal, Heston  18, 202 Boost  92

Bourdain, Anthony  22 Bové, José  132 breast-feeding  86 Butz, Earl  316 cafeteria, school  88 calorie  279–80 capital convergence  4 culinary  4, 17, 19, 58–61, 221, 292 cultural  4, 292, 303, 336 economic  115, 292 Carl’s Jr.  329 Change4Life  252 chefs, celebrity  13–24, 43, 45, 47, 100, 212, 218–21 Child, Julia  17, 100 Child Nutrition Act  88 Chinese restaurant syndrome  268 Choi, Roy  143–4 cinema  27–37, 43, 45 citizenship  97 civil rights movement  128–9 Claiborne, Craig  127 class economic  4 middle  6 social  14, 16–17, 22–3, 46, 50 climate change  321 Cold War  99 Colicchio, Tom  337 colonialism  48 commensality  29, 54, 93, 231 Community Food Security Coalition  320 Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs)  190–1 Conflict Kitchen  206, 234–5 Congregate Dining Facilities  91–2 connoisseurship  16–19 consumer citizen  288 purchaser  288 consumerism  97, 100 Consumer Reports  288

344INDEX

consumption conspicuous  85 ethical  8 precautionary  296 vote with your dollar/fork  289–91 Continuous Productive Urban Landscape (CPUL)  174, 178–80 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage  306 cookbooks  42–3, 49–50, 97–8,101, 199–200 community  98 cooking, home  5, 14, 16–19, 21, 46, 96–110, 206 American  97 gendering of  99, 100 racialized  98 cooking schools  97, 98 cooking shows  14–24, 46–7, 49, 100, 101 Corn Flakes  277 countercuisine  293 counterculture  267 Country of Origin Labels (COOL)  317 Daily Table, The  335 dataveillance  67, 72–6 Day of the Trifiids  262–3 Deen, Paula  127–8 Demolition Man  131 design, food  6, 156–66 dietary products  83, 89–91 DiSpirito, Rocco  1 eating  54 as cultural act  314–28 ethical  286–300 eco-habitus  293 elderly, food and  83, 91–2, 93 hunger and malnutrition among  91 Ensure  83, 92 environmentalism  265, 288 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)  339 ethnicity  4, 13, 22–3, 35, 57 European Union (EU)  302 events, food  164 exoticism  147 experience economy  165 Facebook  60–2 family, nuclear  91 fat activists  72 Feingold diet  268 femininity  8, 16–7, 100, 290, 294 and kindness  294–5 feminism  19–21

film  4, 27–37, 43, 45 and audience  36–7 documentary  32–3 food genre  34–6 history  28–9 scholarship  33–4 flavor, natural and artificial  267–8 Flavr Savr tomato  263 Fletcher, Horace  277 Floyd, Keith  22 Fluxus  200–1 food additives  266–8 advertising  101 advocacy  314–28 deserts  118 ethnic  129 fast  6, 131–3 in decline  133 festivals  305 functional  283 genetically modified  260, 262–4 groups  278, 280 guides  280 healthy vs. unhealthy  247 high-status  292 hybrid  261–2 industrial  6, 85, 114, 245, 287, 293, 295 insecurity  333, 337 justice  338 loss  331 natural vs. unnatural  270 organic  265, 267, 321 industrial  321 porn  4, 31–2, 35, 54, 57, 71 prepared  113 processed  100 provisioning  116 pyramid  281–2 safety  115 security  260, 265, 319–20 as social justice issue  330 street  6, 138–151 defined  142 history of  140–2 regulation of  141 television  4, 13–26 ugly  338–9 waste  8, 269, 329–41 defined  331–2 in popular culture  332–3 as social construction  330, 332–3 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)  331

INDEX 345

Food and Drug Act  277 Food and Drug Administration (FDA)  267 foodies  101, 131, 268, 292 Food Network  1, 100, 139, 335 formula, infant  85–7 Frankenfood  260, 262 Futurist Cookbook, The  199–200 Galatoire’s restaurant  124 gardening, community  59–63, 163, 172, 174–5 gender  4, 13–24, 84, 118 Gerber baby food  83, 86, 92 Give Up Loving Pop (GULP)  252 globalization  6, 40–63 Golden Girls, The  92 Good Housekeeping  277 Google Search  73 Gourmet magazine  100 Graham, Sylvester  276 Grandin, Temple  193–4 Great Food Truck Race  139 Great Society  88 Green Carts initiative  119 Green Revolution  265 gross domestic product (GDP)  315 habitus  118, 336–7 Hastings Review  248 health  46–7, 71–2, 74, 85, 92, 274–85 medical model of  318 public  8, 245–59, 318–19 Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act  89 hegemony  13, 339 heritage  8, 129 as contested field  306 cultural  301–313 intangible  301, 306–8 food as  301, 307 heritagization  301 heteronormativity  102 high culture  3 home economics  98 homogenization, cultural  132 housewife  16–17, 19, 84 human rights  317–18 hunger  41, 70, 89, 99, 164, 193, 278 and advocacy  315, 317, 320, 322 artists  35 and the elderly  91 and ethical eating  287, 293 and food waste  329, 337–9 hydroponics  266 hygiene  276

immigrants  40, 220 India  4, 40–63 indications, geographic  302 industrialization  84 Industrial Revolution  97, 140, 143 infancy, food in  85–7 Instagram  55, 60–1, 71 internationalism  47 in vitro meat  269 Johnson, Samuel  276 Journal of Clinical Nutrition  280 Journal of Nutrition  278, 280 Kellogg, John Harvey  277–8 Kerr, Graham  19 Keys, Ancel  307 Kind Diet, The  8, 286, 290–6 Kind Mama, The  286, 292 Kissinger, Henry  319–20 kitchens  205–6, 213 Kitchen Talks  207 Kogi BBQ truck  143–4 Lagasse, Emeril  1, 18 LaGuardia laws  143 Langeais, Catherine  15, 17 Last Week Tonight  329 Lawson, Nigella  15, 20–1, 23 League of Kitchens, the  206 Le Cirque restaurant  127 liberalization  41, 46 life span  84 lifestyle  85 Lignac, Cyril  23 Little Shop of Horrors, The  261 locavore  321 Lustig, Robert  282 McDonaldization  132 McDonald’s  131, 132, 133 McGovern report  280–1 marketing  246 to children and adolescents  248–50 niche  84–5 regulation of  247–8 at sporting events  250 and social media  251 masculinity  19–21, 99 material culture  3, 5 meal kits  102, 114 Meals on Wheels  91 Mediterranean diet  307–8 Mississippi: A Self-Portrait  128

346INDEX

modernist cuisine  160–1, 202, 216 molecular gastronomy  160–1, 268–9 monosodium glutamate (MSG)  268 motherhood  102, 295–6 mukbang  54 multiculturalism  130–2 multinational companies  86 museums  323 ecomuseums  310–11 ethnographic  309 food in  163–4, 211–22, 309–311 nanny state  89 National Consumers League (NCL)  288 National Exhibition in Moscow  99 National Healthy Food Financing Initiative  119 nationalism  133 National School Lunch Program (NLSP)  88, 89 National Wartime Food Guide  279 neoliberalism  291–2 Nestlé  86, 87 new domesticity  101 Northern League  129 nutrition  8, 85, 92, 247, 274–85, 319 body-as-machine model of  276 history of  275–7 negative  268 popular food culture as  274 nutritional supplements  92 Nutrition Labeling and Education Act  281 NuVal nutritional scoring system  115–16 obesity  280–2 childhood  248 Obesity: The Journal for Health and Social Behavior  281 Older Americans Act  91 Oliver, Jamie  1, 21, 22, 23, 337, 338–9 Oliver, John  329 Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion  319 Ovaltine  279 Oxfam  245 Pablum  86 Patten, Marguerite  15–16 Pennsylvania Temperance Society  276 performance art  164, 192, 226–238 performativity  7, 231–2 pester power  117 Petrini, Carlo  132, 323 Pierce, Anne Lewis  277 Playboy  18–19

policy, food  176–7 Pollan, Michael  334, 337 Pop Up Patch  5 privilege, cisgender  102 product placement  250 Progressive Era  97, 277 propaganda  29 Puck, Wolfgang  1 race  16, 22–3, 35, 57 radio  16, 41 Ramsay, Gordon  18, 22 rationing  16 Ray, Rachael  20 Real Junk Food Project  335 Reaven, Gerald  282 recipes  91 and art  199–201 celebrity chefs and  13, 16–17, 21 and health  115–16 and home cooking  96–101 Indian  42–9 online  13, 56–8, 69–71, 75 and performance  228–9, 234–5 school lunch  88 recommended daily allowances (RDA)  279 Reichl, Ruth  127 religion  275, 277 restaurants  6, 42, 59, 124–37, 160–1, 201–4, 206, 208 in art museums  7, 211–22 criticism  127 ethnic  127, 130 history of  125–7 in popular culture  124–37 in relation to race and ethnicity  127–31 retail, food  111–23 alternative  118 as white spaces  118 gendered  116 online  119 risk society  260 Roosevelt, Franklin D.  317 school lunch  83, 87–9 science  260–73 food  8, 156, 162 nutritional  90 Second Nature  7, 173–4, 180 selfies, food  71 sharing ethos  68 shopping, online  114 Silent Running  264–6 Silent Spring  265

INDEX 347

Silverstone, Alicia  286 Sinclair, Upton  288 slaughterhouse  184–94 Slow Food  101, 132, 260, 323 Smith, Delia  16 soul food  129 Soylent Green  265 Spam  133 Star Trek: The Next Generation  269 Stewart, Martha  16–17, 19, 20, 101 Street Food Project  141–2 superfood  274 supermarkets  6, 111–23, 280, 316 drive-through  119–20 globalization of  113 history of  111–13 Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)  119 sustainability  321–2, 337, 338 television  13–24, 43, 46 terroir  302, 303–4, 316, 323 3D food printing  269–70 thrift  338 Torta di Pasqua  304–5 tourism  305 culinary  138, 147, 165, 310 Trader Joe’s  111 truck, food  139 gourmet  143, 147, 148 and social media  142–6

Two Fat Ladies  21, 23 typicality  303–4, 308 Union Stockyards  190 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)  301, 306–7 Universal Declaration of Human Rights  317 US Department of Agriculture (USDA)  88, 118, 276, 279, 280, 320 von Voit, Carl  276 Walmart  339 effect  119 War on Poverty  88 War on Want  87 WastED pop-up  335 weight-loss industry  89 Whole Foods  111 Wiley, Harvey  277 Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory  266–7 women’s suffrage  99 Works Progress Administration (WPA)  88 World Cancer Research Fund  249 World Food Day  323 World Health Organization (WHO)  87, 89, 141, 248–50, 319 World Heritage List  307 YouTube  24, 61–3, 70

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