Food and Culture: A Reader (3rd edition)

food and culture

The classic book that helped to define and legitimize the field of food and culture studies is now available, with major revisions, in an affordable e-book version (978-0203-07975-1). The third edition includes forty original essays and reprints of previously published classics under five Sections: Foundations; Hegemony and Difference; Consumption and Embodiment; Food and Globalization; and Challenging, Contesting, and Transforming the Food System. Seventeen of the forty chapters included are either new to this edition, rewritten by their original authors, or edited by Counihan and Van Esterik. A bank of test items applicable to each article in the book is available to instructors interested in selecting this edition for course use. Simply send an email to the publisher at [email protected]. Carole Counihan is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Millersville University in Pennsylvania and editor-in-chief of Food and Foodways. Her earlier books include Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family, and Gender in Twentieth-Century Florence, Food in the USA, and The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power. Penny Van Esterik is Professor of Anthropology at York University in Toronto, Canada, where she teaches nutritional anthropology, in addition to doing research on food and globalization in Southeast Asia. She is a founding member of WABA (World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action) and writes on infant and young child feeding, including her earlier book, Beyond the Breast-Bottle Controversy.

food and culture a reader third edition

edited by

carole counihan and penny van esterik

First published 2013 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Food and culture : a reader / edited by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. – 3rd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Food–Social aspects. 2. Food habits. I. Counihan, Carole, 1948- II. Van Esterik, Penny. GT2850.F64 2012 394.1'2–dc23 ISBN: 978-0-415-52103-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-52104-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-07975-1 (ebk) Typeset in Minion by Cenveo Publisher Services, Bangalore

2012021989

Contents

Foreword from The Gastronomical Me, M.F.K. Fisher Preface to the Third Edition Acknowledgments Why Food? Why Culture? Why Now? Introduction to the Third Edition Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik

xi xii xiii 1

Foundations 1. Why Do We Overeat? Margaret Mead

19

This piece questions attitudes towards food and eating in a world where food is overabundant and we face the ambiguity of overindulgence and guilt.

2. Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption Roland Barthes

23

Barthes explains how food acts as a system of communication and provides a body of images that mark eating situations.

3.

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste Pierre Bourdieu (tr. Richard Nice)

31

Bourdieu addresses differences between taste of luxury and taste of necessity through his theory of class distinction.

4. The Culinary Triangle Claude Lévi-Strauss

40

This classic structuralist statement, often critiqued, shows how food preparation can be analyzed as a triangular semantic field, much like language.

5. The Abominations of Leviticus Mary Douglas Douglas applies structural analysis to the establishment of Jewish dietary rules as a means to develop self-control, distinction, and a sense of belonging based on the construction of holiness.

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6. The Abominable Pig Marvin Harris

59

Materialists like Harris reject symbolic and structuralist explanations and explain food prohibitions based on economic and ecological utility.

7. Industrial Food: Towards the Development of a World Cuisine Jack Goody

72

The early industrialization of food processing was made possible by advancements in preservation, mechanization, marketing, and transport of food items. These advances also separated urban and rural societies from food manufacturing.

8. Time, Sugar, and Sweetness Sidney W. Mintz

91

Colonialism made high-status sugar produced in the Caribbean into a working class staple.

Hegemony and Difference: Race, Class, and Gender 9. More than Just the “Big Piece of Chicken”: The Power of Race, Class, and Food in American Consciousness Psyche Williams-Forson

107

Ethnographic, historical, and literary research reveals not only controlling and damaging stereotypes about African Americans and chicken but also the ways Black women have used chicken as a form of resistance and community survival.

10. The Overcooked and Underdone: Masculinities in Japanese Food Programming T.J.M. Holden

119

Cooking shows featuring male chefs predominate on Japanese television and propagate one-dimensional definitions of masculinity based on power, authority, and ownership of consumer commodities.

11. Domestic Divo? Televised Treatments of Masculinity, Femininity, and Food Rebecca Swenson

137

The programs of The Food Network manifest gender stereotypes while also providing an avenue for challenging ideas of male and female roles regarding food.

12. Japanese Mothers and Obento-s: The Lunch-Box as Ideological State Apparatus Anne Allison Japanese mothers, in preparing elaborate lunch-boxes for their preschool children, reproduce state ideologies of power.

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13. Mexicanas’ Food Voice and Differential Consciousness in the San Luis Valley of Colorado Carole Counihan

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173

Food-centered life histories portray the voices and perspectives of traditionally muted Hispanic women of rural southern Colorado whose food stories reveal differential behaviors and consciousness which promote empowerment.

14. Feeding Lesbigay Families Christopher Carrington

187

Because feeding work is complex, laborious, and highly gendered, it is problematic in lesbigay families because a full accounting of it would destroy illusions of equality and call into question masculinity of gay men who do it and femininity of lesbians who do not.

15. Thinking Race Through Corporeal Feminist Theory: Divisions and Intimacies at the Minneapolis Farmers’ Market Rachel Slocum

211

By applying feminist materialist theory, Slocum analyses the embodiment of race and its manifestations through food practices and behavior displayed at the farmers’ market.

16. The Raw and the Rotten: Punk Cuisine Dylan Clark

231

Punk cuisine—based on scavenged, rotten, and/or stolen food—challenges the hierarchy, commodification, toxicity, and environmental destruction of the capitalist food system.

Consumption and Embodiment 17. Fast, Feast, and Flesh: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women Caroline Walker Bynum

245

Medieval women used food for personal religious expression, including giving food away, exuding foods from their bodies, and undertaking fasts to gain religious and cultural power.

18. Not Just “a White Girl’s Thing”: The Changing Face of Food and Body Image Problems Susan Bordo

265

Bordo argues that eating disorders and body image issues are created through social and media pressures that target all women regardless of race or class.

19. De-medicalizing Anorexia: Opening a New Dialogue Richard A. O’Connor This paper offers a biocultural approach to anorexia that stresses how young people obsess not over beauty but over an ascetic search for self-control.

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20. Feeding Hard Bodies: Food and Masculinities in Men’s Fitness Magazines Fabio Parasecoli

284

Men’s fitness magazines define masculinity through discussions of food and body, increasingly involving men in concerns about constructing corporeal perfection and regulating consumption to build muscle and strength.

21. Cooking Skills, the Senses, and Memory: The Fate of Practical Knowledge David Sutton

299

Practical knowledge of food preparation is an embodied skill that uses all the senses. Standardization of modern food practices affects the social dimensions of this type of experiential learning.

22. Not “From Scratch”: Thai Food Systems and “Public Eating” Gisèle Yasmeen

320

The urban phenomenon of public eating in Thailand is a reflection of changes in gender, labor, and household dynamics in a (post)industrial food system.

23. Rooting Out the Causes of Disease: Why Diabetes is So Common Among Desert Dwellers Gary Paul Nabhan

330

Skyrocketing type two diabetes among desert dwelling Seri Indians of Northern Mexico suggests that changes in diet have caused this major health problem and that traditional desert foods—especially legumes, cacti, and acorns—are protective.

24. Between Obesity and Hunger: The Capitalist Food Industry Robert Albritton

342

Political economists identify how the industrial food system manipulates the price of commodity goods in order to shape the diet of Americans. This global capitalist food system with its cheap and addictive foods promotes both hunger and obesity.

Food and Globalization 25. “As Mother Made It”: The Cosmopolitan Indian Family, “Authentic” Food, and the Construction of Cultural Utopia Tulasi Srinivas

355

This chapter examines the growing consumption of packaged foods by middle-class South-Asian Indians in Bangalore and Boston and focuses on the relationship between authenticity, meanings of motherhood, and definitions of the family.

26. “Real Belizean Food”: Building Local Identity in the Transnational Caribbean Richard Wilk

376

Contents

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Transformations in Belizean food from colonial times to the present demonstrate transnational political, economic, and culinary influences that have affected the ways Belizean people define themselves and their nation.

27. Let’s Cook Thai: Recipes for Colonialism Lisa Heldke

394

Cultural food colonialism is reproduced by food adventurers who seek out ethnic foods to satisfy their taste for the exotic other.

28. Slow Food and the Politics of “Virtuous Globalization” Alison Leitch

409

This chapter provides a brief history of the Slow Food movement’s politics and controversies.

29. Taco Bell, Maseca, and Slow Food: A Postmodern Apocalypse for Mexico’s Peasant Cuisine? Jeffrey M. Pilcher

426

The case of Mexico highlights challenges to the program of Italy’s Slow Food Movement which offers strategies for the maintenance of traditional, local, and sustainable Mexican food but which does not address problems of class and food access.

30. Food Workers as Individual Agents of Culinary Globalization: Pizza and Pizzaioli in Japan Rossella Ceccarini

437

This chapter examines globalization of food through a case study of pizza in Japan through the transnational experiences of Japanese and Italian pizza chefs.

31. Of Hamburger and Social Space: Consuming McDonald’s in Beijing Yungxiang Yan

449

In Beijing, Chinese consumers localize fast food by linking it to being American and being modern. They enjoy the standardization of meals, the hospitable service, the democratic environment, and the cleanliness, which create a desirable space to socialize and linger.

32. On the Move for Food: Three Women Behind the Tomato’s Journey Deborah Barndt

472

The neoliberal model of production has contributed to the feminization of labor and poverty as told through the stories of two Mexican and one Canadian worker forced to adapt to the flexibility of labor in the global food system.

Challenging, Contesting, and Transforming the Food System 33. The Chain Never Stops Eric Schlosser

485

The mistreatment of meatpacking workers in the United States is linked to the high rates of trauma in this dangerous industry and reveals general problems of corporate food production.

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34. Fast Food/Organic Food: Reflexive Tastes and the Making of “Yuppie Chow” Julie Guthman

496

This chapter examines salad greens to study the development of modern organic food production, its roots in the counter culture movement of the 1960s, and its transformation into a gentrified commodity reserved for a privileged niche market.

35. The Politics of Breastfeeding: An Advocacy Update Penny Van Esterik

510

The commodification of baby food has had severe consequences, but advocacy groups actively resist the promotional tactics of transnational food and pharmaceutical companies.

36. The Political Economy of Food Aid in an Era of Agricultural Biotechnology Jennifer Clapp

531

The advent of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) has seriously affected food aid, even in the context of famine and extreme hunger.

37. The Political Economy of Obesity: The Fat Pay All Alice Julier

546

The culture-wide denigration of the “obesity epidemic” is due not only to its health consequences, but also to the political and economic benefits to the food corporations, the diet industry, and the health professions.

38. Want Amid Plenty: From Hunger to Inequality Janet Poppendieck

563

Because of great need, many US volunteers feed the hungry, but charity not only fails to solve the underlying causes of hunger—poverty and inequality—but contributes to it by offering token rather than structural solutions and taking the government off the hook.

39. Community Food Security “For Us, By Us”: The Nation of Islam and the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church Priscilla McCutcheon

572

McCutcheon looks at Black Nationalist religious organizations that aim to achieve racial self-reliance through community food movements.

40. Learning Democracy Through Food Justice Movements Charles Z. Levkoe

587

The modern detachment of people from their food sources has fostered a surge of community involvement in the food movement. Through engagement in food justice organizations the public is relearning democratic citizenship and empathy for activism.

Contributors Credit Lines Index

602 609 614

Foreword

People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do? They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft. The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it . . . and warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied . . . and it is all one. I tell about myself, and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits, and it happens without my willing it that I am telling too about the people with me then, and their other deeper needs for love and happiness. There is food in the bowl, and more often than not, because of what honesty I have, there is nourishment in the heart, to feed the wilder, more insistent hungers. We must eat. If, in the face of that dread fact, we can find other nourishment, and tolerance and compassion for it, we’ll be no less full of human dignity. There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk. And that is my answer, when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love? M. F. K. Fisher The Gastronomical Me, originally published 1943

Preface to the Third Edition

In this third edition of Food and Culture: A Reader, our aim mirrors that of the previous two editions: to provide a comprehensive introduction to the field that contains classic foundational pieces, a range of outstanding articles reflecting diverse perspectives and topics, and cutting edge new work. This task has become more challenging with each edition as the field has exploded over the sixteen years since the first edition appeared in 1997. To include new work and keep the Reader current and lively, we had to omit some pieces that we love, but we hope that the new articles will excite our readers and more than make up for what we dropped. In this new edition, we have kept almost all of the foundational pieces but cut the article by De Certeau and Giard to include a selection from Pierre Bourdieu. We have modified the section on food consumption and the body by reducing the number of articles on anorexia nervosa, expanding the focus on obesity, and including more diverse approaches to the body. This edition of the Reader maintains a broad geographical and multicultural coverage with articles on Euro-Americans, African Americans, and Latinos as well as on Japanese, Greek, Italian, Thai, South Asian, native American, Mexican, and Chinese food cultures. It continues to explore enduring topics of food and gender, consumption and meaning, globalization, and political economy, but introduces new topics with articles on farmers’ markets, community food security, the complexities of the organic food market, democracy and food justice, cooking skill and its meanings, gender in food television, and packaged foods in the South Asian diaspora. Since the first edition of the book, we have been privileged to participate in the creation of the sumptuous covers. From the multihued noodles and fruit of the first edition, to the sensuous chocolate dessert and colorful spices of the second, we have endeavored to combine foods like fish and tomatoes with culturally constructed products like sandwiches. We chose the Thai fruit and vegetable carving for this edition’s cover to underscore the skill and effort involved in transforming foods into edible works of art, and the important place of the visual aspects of food in the anthropology of the senses. We are pleased to publish this third edition not only in standard book format but also as an electronic book. For instructors who adopt the book in courses, we have also prepared test questions which are available on the book’s website. We have tried to pay more attention to temporal context in this edition, giving the original date of publication at the beginning of each article, to draw more attention to the scholarly context in which these papers were written.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank many colleagues who provided feedback on the book, both those who chatted with us informally and those who provided formal reviews for Routledge. Jonathan Maupin, Arizona State University Mary Malainey, Brandon University Janet Alexanian, California State University, Fullerton Julie Fairbanks, Coe College Amy Speier, Eckerd College Thierry Rigogne, Fordham University Ari Ariel, New York University Susan C. Rogers, New York University Susan Cooper, Roosevelt University Claudia Chang, Sweet Briar College Sharyn Jones, University of Alabama at Birmingham Don Pollock, University of Buffalo J.D. Baker, University of Hawaii at Manoa Judy Rodriguez, University of North Florida Frayda Cohen, University of Pittsburgh Ann Reed, University of Akron We thank the Boston University Gastronomy MLA students in Carole’s Food Anthropology class in spring semester 2012 who wrote reviews of many articles which helped us narrow our selection for this book: Mayling Chung, Aubee Duplesss, Monet Dyer, Jennifer French, Susie Helm, Brad Jones, Joyce Liao, Emily Olson, Katie Peterson, Erin Powell, Jessica Roat, Allison Schultz, Natalie Shmulik, Penny Skalnik, Shannon Streets, Kaylee Vickers, Rachel Wegman, and Chao-Hui (Amy) Young. We express eternal gratitude to Boston University Gastronomy MLA student Alexandre Galimberti for serving as editorial assistant on the project with efficiency and equanimity. We would also like to thank our Routledge editor, Steve Rutter, for his good publishing sense and his unbelievable deadlines, Fred Courtright for help with permissions, Tom Hussey for the cover design, and Samantha Barbaro and Leah Babb-Rosenfeld for their editorial assistance. Carole would like to thank the Millersville University Sociology-Anthropology Department and Faculty Grants Committee for years of support; the Boston University MLA Gastronomy program and Rachel Black, its coordinator; the University of

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Acknowledgments

Gastronomic Sciences students, faculty and administration for providing the opportunity to teach food anthropology in an international setting for the past eight wonderful years; and the University of Cagliari Visiting Professor program and colleagues Gabriella Da Re, Giovanna Caltagirone, Alessandra Guigoni, and many others. She would also like to thank her patient, smart, supportive husband, Jim Taggart, who has put up with more food anthropology than he ever dreamed of, and her children for their continuing ability to amaze her. Penny would like to thank Vivian Khouw, Anne Meneley, Paul Antze, and Megan Davies for sharing their resources and experiences teaching about food, and suggesting readings that students enjoy, as well as her husband, John, whose hands and eyes greatly facilitated this project. Penny’s efforts on the reader are dedicated to her late mentor, Dr. Michael Latham, founding director of International Nutrition at Cornell, who embodied lasting lessons about how to combine academic integrity with activist social justice around the subject of food and hunger.

Why Food? Why Culture? Why Now? Introduction to the Third Edition Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik

In 1997, when we proposed the first Food and Culture Reader, we had to persuade Routledge of the importance of publishing it. In 2012, Routledge had to persuade us to undertake the arduous task of reviewing the incredibly expanded literature to produce a third edition. We hope that the current selection of articles gives a snapshot of how the field has grown and developed from its early foundations. Cultural anthropology remains the central discipline guiding this field. Food and nutritional anthropology in particular, and food studies generally, manage to rise above the dualisms that threaten to segment most fields of study. This field resists separating biological from cultural, individual from society, and local from global culture, but rather struggles with their entanglements. Food and culture studies have somehow made interdisciplinarity workable. Sometimes co-opting, more often embracing the history and geography of food as part of the holistic emphasis of anthropology, food studies have become increasingly sophisticated theoretically. We hope these papers reveal the roots of contemporary issues in food studies, and we acknowledge our bias towards particular subjects that most engage our interest. Scholarship in food studies has expanded remarkably over the past decade. A quick and by no means exhaustive bibliographic search turns up scores of recent food books in fields as diverse as philosophy (Heldke 2003, Kaplan 2012, Korsmeyer 2002), psychology (Conner and Armitage 2002, Ogden 2010), geography (Carney 2001, 2010, Friedberg 2009, Guthman 2011, Yasmeen 2006), film studies (Bower 2004, Ferry 2003, Keller 2006)1, and architecture (Franck 2003, Horwitz and Singley 2006), not to mention the vast literature in food’s traditional fields of nutrition, home economics, and agriculture. Countless new texts abound on food in literature—from the study of eating and being eaten in children’s literature (Daniel 2006) to food symbols in early modern American fiction (Appelbaum 2006) and classical Arab literature (Van Gelder 2000), to post-Freudian analysis of literary orality (Skubal 2002). In its more longstanding disciplinary homes, food continues to fascinate, so we find texts exploring the history of food from the Renaissance banquet (Albala 2007a) through the broad sweep of time (Claflin and Scholliers 2012, Parasecoli and Scholliers 2012) to the future of food (Belasco 2006); from the United States (Williams-Forson 2006) to Italy (Capatti and Montanari 2003, Montanari 2010) and all of Europe (Flandrin and Montanari 1999); to the history of many specific foods including tomatoes (Gentilcore 2010), beans (Albala 2007b), turkey (Smith 2006),

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chocolate (Coe and Coe 2000), salt (Kurlansky 2003), and spices (Turner 2004). Sociologists have not hesitated to stir the food studies pot (Ray 2004), and anthropologists have continued to produce work on topics as varied as hunger in Africa (Flynn 2005), children’s eating in China (Jing 2000), the global trade in lamb flaps (Gewertz and Errington 2010), food and memory in Greece (Sutton 2001), the globalization of milk (Wiley 2010), Japan’s largest fish market (Bestor 2004), the culture of restaurants (Beriss and Sutton 2007), and the role of cooking in human evolution (Wrangham 2010). These examples provide some measure of the many texts that have been published in the last decade. Why has the field exploded so? We would like to suggest several reasons for this explosion. Without a doubt, feminism and women’s studies have contributed to the growth of food studies by legitimizing a domain of human behavior so heavily associated with women over time and across cultures. A second reason is the politicization of food and the expansion of social movements linked to food. This has created an increased awareness of the links between consumption and production, beginning with books on food and agriculture (e.g. Guthman 2004, Magdoff et al. 2000) as well as more interdisciplinary work on food politics (Guthman 2011, Nestle 2003, Patel 2007, Williams-Forson and Counihan 2012). A third reason is that once food became a legitimate topic of scholarly research, its novelty, richness, and scope provided limitless grist for the scholarly mill, as food links body and soul, self and other, the personal and the political, the material and the symbolic. Moreover, as food shifts from being local and known, to being global and unknown, it has been transformed into a potential symbol of fear and anxiety (Ferrieres 2005), as well as of morality (Pojman 2011, Singer and Mason 2006, Telfer 2005). Scholars have found food a powerful lens of analysis and written insightful books about a range of compelling contemporary issues: diaspora and immigration (Gabaccia 1998, Ray 2004, Ray and Srinivas 2012); nationalism, globalization, and local manifestations (Barndt 1999, Inglis and Gimlin 2010, Wilk 2006a, 2006b); culinary tourism (Long 2003); gender and race-ethnic identity (Abarca 2006, Williams-Forson 2006); social justice and human rights (Kent 2007, Wenche Barth and Kracht 2005)2; modernization and dietary change (Counihan 2004, Watson 1997); food safety and contamination (Friedberg 2004, 2009, Nestle 2004, Schwartz 2004); and taste perception (Howes 2005, Korsmeyer 2002, 2005). Many of these subjects have important material dimensions, which have also been studied by archaeologists, folklorists, and even designers, as food leaves its mark on the human environment. The explosion of the field of food studies is also reflected in new and continuing interdisciplinary journals such as Agriculture and Human Values, Appetite, Culture and Agriculture, The Digest, Food and Foodways, Food, Culture and Society, Gastronomica, The Anthropology of Food, and Nutritional Anthropology. Hundreds of websites inform food professionals, researchers, and the general public. Groundbreaking documentary films such as Fast Food Nation, The Garden, Supersize Me, The Future of Food, The Real Dirt on Farmer John, King Corn, Farmageddon, and Two Angry Moms have called attention to problems in our food system and efforts to redress them. Food advocacy is reflected in food movements that promote organic,

Introduction to the Third Edition

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local, fairly traded, and slow food, revitalizing vegetarianism and freeganism (Van Esterik 2005), and decrying what fast, processed food has done to our bodies and communities. Of particular interest is how food-focused social movements interact with one another, and with academic research (Belasco 2007). The last few years have also seen a dramatic increase in popular books about food, some by talented journalists such as Michael Pollan, and others by food faddists more closely linked to the diet industry, the latter often relying on hearsay rather than research. It is important that students understand that the papers in this reader come from specific disciplinary perspectives and are based on sound research. We hope that this Reader helps students acquire the critical skills to distinguish between the different sources of information about food. Given the vastness of the food studies repast, there is no way this book can offer up a complete meal. Rather we envision it as an appetizer to introduce the field to the reader—a taste of the diverse array of scrumptious intellectual dishes that await further pursuit. We have chosen articles that are high quality and that explore issues of enduring importance written by some of the leading food studies scholars. “Write a book with legs,” our editor urged us in 1997—and we did. But those legs have taken food studies in exciting new directions in the last decade, and this revised Reader reflects these changes. The third edition retains the classic papers reflecting the foundations of food studies, and provides an interdisciplinary collection of cutting-edge articles in the social sciences that combine theory with ethnographic and historical data. We hope our readers will find this third edition engages even more deeply with both past and present scholarship on food and culture. From the first reader, we retain the wise words of M.F.K. Fisher, and reaffirm that food touches everything and is the foundation of every economy, marking social differences, boundaries, bonds, and contradictions—an endlessly evolving enactment of gender, family, and community relationships.3

Foundations In rethinking and updating the “Foundations” section, we recognize the significant contributions these authors have made to food studies by introducing basic definitions and conceptual tools used by later scholars. The papers we have retained in this edition are considered classics and are fundamental for demonstrating the history of food studies. While we continue to value the pioneering work by Bruch (1979, 2001) and de Certeau (2011) which we included in earlier editions, we have omitted them in this Reader to make room for other approaches and because new editions have made their work easily accessible. Our selection demonstrates the centrality of cultural anthropology to the development of the field.4 We begin with Margaret Mead’s 1971 Redbook article on “Why Do We Overeat?”, in which she explores the very contemporary problem of the relation between overindulgence and guilt. This piece illustrates Mead’s commitment to making the insights of anthropologists available to the public and we open with it as a tribute to Mead’s

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pioneering work as one of the earliest anthropologists to articulate the centrality of foodways to human culture and thus to social science.5 Her article draws attention to the double role of many anthropologists who write about food as both academics and advocates, a topic explored further in the last section of the Reader. The classic articles by Barthes, Bourdieu, and Lévi-Strauss present different approaches to food’s ability to convey meaning. Barthes’s ruminations on “The Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption” provide an idiosyncratic account of the semiotic and symbolic power of foodways—an account that is not always tightly linked to ethnographic evidence, but is highly provocative and anticipates much later writing on food as communication. In contrast, Bourdieu provides mammoth amounts of ethnographic detail on food in French families in his book, Distinction. This challenging author opens up a new world of scholarship to students, particularly around the concept of class. We were concerned that Bourdieu’s influence in food studies was not being fully recognized because of the difficulty students and teachers have in accessing and understanding the ethnographic context from which his concepts of life style and habitus emerged. This small excerpt on food and meals gives readers a sample of Bourdieu’s contribution. While many have critiqued the specifics of Lévi-Strauss’s “Culinary Triangle,” and he himself later revised his formulations in his 1978 book, The Origin of Table Manners, this piece remains a classic structuralist statement about food preparation as language. Mary Douglas builds on the work of Barthes and Lévi-Strauss to explain Jewish dietary law, a much debated topic in the field of food and culture and an excellent case study for examining food prohibitions and symbolism. In this edition we have included Douglas’s chapter on “The Abominations of Leviticus” from her path-breaking book Purity and Danger (1966). Although Douglas later revised her argument in “Deciphering a Meal” (1999) to address subsequent scholarship, we feel that her original formulation has value for its simplicity and elegance. While Douglas explains Jewish food prohibitions on the basis of the religious conception of holiness based on wholeness, Marvin Harris rejects semiotic interpretations of the abomination of pigs and offers a cultural materialist explanation based on economic and ecological utility. The mystery of food taboos—even when the prohibited foods are available, nutritious, and “edible”—is a test case for exploring the gustatory selectivity of all human groups, and a wonderful example of how the same cultural phenomenon can be explained from different theoretical viewpoints. We have returned to Jack Goody’s wonderful article on “Industrial Food” from the first edition, since no other anthropologist frames the historical context of the industrialization of food processing as well. His study of the changes in the British food system that made colonial expeditions possible sets up Mintz’s memorable paper on “Time, Sugar and Sweetness” in the Caribbean, an appropriate tribute to his influence on the field. Mintz shows how the rich controlled access to desirable high status sugar, until it was produced in sufficient quantity to become a working class staple rather than a luxury consumed only by the elite; this transformation—and the processes of slavery, global trade, and worker exploitation on which it depended—changed the course of human history.

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Categories of Difference: Race, Class, and Gender Our second section considers the expression of race, class, nation, and personhood through food production and consumption. It recognizes the productive crossfertilization between food studies, gender studies, and race-ethnic studies marked by a plethora of publications, including Inness’s four volumes (2001a, 2001b, 2001c, 2005); Abarca’s (2006) study of culinary chats among Mexican and MexicanAmerican working class women; Witt’s (1999), Williams-Forson’s (2006), Bower’s (2008), and Opie’s (2008) books on African-American foodways; and Avakian and Haber’s (2005) interdisciplinary edited collection on feminist approaches to food studies. We open this section with Williams-Forson’s paper about food stereotypes which uncovers both the harmful effects of controlling images on African Americans, and also the ways in which Black women have resisted oppression and fostered cultural survival by reversing the stereotypes surrounding chicken and using it as a source of income and community bonding. While the food studies literature is replete with work on the female gender and food, there has still been little research on how food and masculinity construct each other beyond Julier and Lindenfeld’s (2005b) edited special issue of Food and Foodways on “Masculinities and Food.” We have included two papers from that issue—in the next section is Parasecoli’s on how fitness magazines construct male bodies and food, and in this section is Holden’s on how Japanese food television transmits images of ideal masculinity based on power, authority, and consumerism. Holden’s article reveals how television can provide exciting new opportunities for foodways research; Swenson’s article demonstrates how programs on the American Food Network both challenge and uphold gender binaries that are increasingly problematic in North American culture. We follow with Allison’s fascinating article on how women reproduce Japanese definitions of subservient femininity through their construction of children’s lunch boxes, or obentos. Counihan uses food-centered life histories to document the voices of traditionally muted Hispanic women of rural southern Colorado who challenge notions that Mexican American women are compliant housewives complacently accepting subservient feeding roles. They reveal differential behaviors and attitudes towards food work that promote empowerment. To avoid limiting understandings of food and gender to heterosexual populations, we have included Carrington’s paper on food, gender identity, and power in gay and lesbian households, one of very few published studies of non-heteronormative populations. Carrington finds that food work is associated with femininity and subservience. While the cooks in both sets of families often enact deference by catering to partners’ preferences, lesbigay couples implicitly acknowledge the subordinating dimensions of that practice by denying the extent of the feeders’ work and the inequality it implies.6 Rachel Slocum’s article moves the focus on race and gender outside the home to the farmers’ market where she looks at intimate interactions between diverse people and food. She uses corporeal feminist theory to suggest how gender and race are constructed in food purchases. Dylan Clark looks at identity constructions in self-defined punks through their food practices and ideologies enacted in a grubby Seattle restaurant called the Black Cat Café. He uses insights from Lévi-Strauss and Marx to

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examine punk cuisine as a challenge to the capitalist food system and its entrenched inequalities, environmental destruction, and wastefulness. Punks offer an alternative ethic and practice of consumption to demonstrate how eating is an ideological as well as a physical act.

Consumption and Embodiment In our third section, we include articles that consider eating and the body from variety of disciplinary and topical perspectives. A key issue in Western women’s relationship to food and body for hundreds of years has been their unremitting fasting. We have retained Caroline Bynum’s striking discussion of how medieval women used food to gain religious and cultural power. By giving food to the poor, exuding milk from their bodies, and relentlessly fasting, they were able to subvert the economic control of husbands and the religious authority of male priests to commune directly with God.7 Bynum’s article sets the historical stage for the following two very different articles on contemporary eating disorders. Philosopher Susan Bordo challenges the notion that troubled eating is restricted to white women, and describes its permeation throughout United States communities of color and around the globe.8 Anthropologist Richard O’Connor uses interviews with recovered North American anorexics to question the medicalization of anorexia nervosa which is enacted through an enduring mind body dualism, and to show how young anorexics obsess not over beauty but over self-control, an important value in today’s society. While much work has looked at women’s difficult relationship to food and body, men do not escape cultural manipulation through ideologies of food and body, as Parasecoli’s article demonstrates. He finds that men’s fitness magazines alienate men from cooking except in pursuit of sex, reduce eating to a form of body-building, and propose a nearly unattainable ideal of fitness. David Sutton looks at the body in a very different and more positive way by focusing on corporeal cooking skill as an enactment of practical knowledge, sensory awareness, and memory. Combining ethnographic research in Greece and the United States with an analysis of anthropological literature on the senses, he explores how cooking tools and sense organs are repositories of tradition that face challenges from the values and practices of modernity. Gisèle Yasmeen’s article (a different one from that used in the second edition) also broadens the notion of consumption and embodiment by considering the performance of gender through public eating in Thai food stalls. In addition to revealing the changing notions of Thai food, she shows how public eating relates to female labor force participation. Ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan examines the important health aspect of consumption and embodiment in his study of the desert dwelling Seri Indians of Northern Mexico and their rapidly increasing rates of type-two diabetes. Listening to elders who asserted that diabetes was non-existent two generations earlier, and thus rejecting simple genetic explanations for the disease, Nabhan suggests that dietary changes towards high-sugar, low fiber, rapidly digested foods have caused this major health problem and that traditional “slow release” desert foods are protective against diabetes. This research provides support from a nutritional and health perspective for

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global efforts to promote local foods and traditional agriculture, a goal also endorsed by Robert Albritton. He engages with concerns over food, body, and health with his interrogation of the paradoxical contemporary situation where rates of hunger and obesity increase simultaneously. He shows how an analysis of the political economy of capitalism can explain this paradox, and can provide a path to reforming the food system to promote healthy bodies and well-nourished consumers while sustaining the earth that feeds us all.

Food and Globalization Globalization is not new; it is not a one way exchange of items and ideas, and certainly not an expansion of values from Euro-America to peripheries lacking their own culinary identities. But it is probably also true that at no time in history has the pace of change been so rapid and so tied up with new technologies. Neoliberal practices such as deregulation and just-in-time production make our global food system even more vulnerable to abuse. It is a challenge for international and national regulatory agencies to keep up with, let alone solve problems caused by this new economic environment. Food globalization draws our attention to diasporic identities, authenticity, food nostalgia, and power. Srinivas weaves these themes together through her examination of packaged food consumption in Bangalore, India, and Boston, USA. Transnational instant foods, such as chutneys and spice powders, play interesting roles in the construction of female Indian identity among middle class families in the two locations. The loss of home-cooking also occurs in Belize, where families define themselves and their nation through food consumption. Wilk examines historical transformations in Belizean food resulting from colonialism and globalization. Reversing the lens, Heldke examines how food adventurers at home reproduce “cultural food colonialism” by seeking and cooking ethnic foods to satisfy their taste for the exotic other without actually encountering “real” others on their own terms. She raises important questions about the meaning of “authenticity” in food studies. While there have been many critiques leveled against claims about authentic traditional foods, she brings attention to recipe authorship and ownership, challenging scholars and cookbook writers to think about their responsibility to the native cooks whose recipes they appropriate. Both Leitch and Pilcher examine the ideology and practices of the Slow Food Movement, and its efforts to foster local, sustainable, and just food production. Leitch looks at Slow Food’s work in its country of origin, Italy, through a fascinating case study of pork fat—lardo di Colonnata—in the Carrara region famous for its marble on which the lard is cured in humid underground cellars. Achievement of protected status for this traditional product raises questions of national autonomy and identity in the context of the European Union’s efforts to impose universal food safety standards. Pilcher investigates the relevance of the Slow Food Movement to Mexico’s culinary traditions and sees similar issues to those confronted in Italy, as Mexican peasant producers strive for living wages to produce traditional varieties of maize and handmade tortillas, in competition with industrially processed versions from global chains like Taco Bell.

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Pizza is both authentically local and universal; Thai pizza, German pizza, and Japanese pizza exist as hybrid foods in globalized settings. Rossella Ceccarini draws attention not only to hybrid foods, but also to the transnational experiences of the food workers who create these products in Japan. Much like pizza in Japan, hamburgers in China are modern standardized foods. Yan stresses that the attraction of consuming American fast foods has more to do with their social context and meaning than with their taste in his intriguing ethnographic study of McDonald’s in Beijing. Barndt’s article introduces us to three women from her long-term project on the tomato food chain (Barndt 2007). Through their stories, we see how agri-businesses, fast food giants, and supermarket chains increasingly rely on “flexible,” part-time, low-wage female labor, which enables them to generate huge profits at the expense of women workers who lack health and other benefits, cannot earn a living wage, and must constantly juggle their lives to accommodate their ever-changing work schedules. Food globalization sets up complex problems in households, communities, NGOs, and UN agencies. But as these papers demonstrate, ethnographers are well prepared to shift directions and pick up on subtle changes that reveal the intricacies of global food practices.

Challenging, Contesting, and Transforming the Food System If the section on Food and Globalization sets readers up for encountering a food system out of the hands of consumers, this last section renews optimism about how individuals and groups are challenging and contesting globalized food systems. Those activists working to transform the food system, however, are working within a new economic context. This section provides examples of some of the recent food activism undertaken since the publication of the second edition of the Food and Culture Reader. It is a reminder that all published work needs to be situated in the decade or even year of its writing (as we have done with the papers in this new edition), and that complex issues underlying food activism remain important long after attention has shifted from boycott Nestle to eat local or slow food. Just as every mouthful has a history, every cause has a past, present, and hopefully, a future. Food activism has been around longer than food studies. What has changed is that only recently have the activities of activists been observed, analyzed, and reflected upon as subjects/objects of research. Most research remains grounded in the political economy of food, but reflects the ever more sophisticated work done in the last decade on how contemporary food systems are changing. The articles demonstrate that food commodification is deeply implicated in perpetuating and concealing gender, race, and class inequalities while transforming cultures. Case studies on meat (Schlosser), baby foods (Van Esterik) and “yuppie chow” (Guthman) exemplify some of the social implications of the industrial processing of basic foods. Schlosser carries forward the work he did in his renowned Fast Food Nation (2002) to examine the many health dangers suffered by meat-packing workers—including broken bones, muscle strain, burns, and severed limbs—resulting from exhausting and monotonous labor for low wages, few benefits, and high

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turnover. Worker exploitation results from the concentration of the meatpacking industry, its reliance on immigrant labor, its concerted resistance to unionizing efforts, and its political power. Guthman’s insight into organic farming in California is revealed in her groundbreaking research on the subject (2004, 2011). In her study of the salad mixes known by organic farmers as “yuppie chow,” she critiques the dualistic thinking that contrasts alternative farming with industrial farming, fast with slow food, and even good with bad eaters. Her work draws attention to the need for increasing class and gender analysis in food studies, which Van Esterik undertakes in her study of how the commodification of infant food through the international marketing of infant formula has had severe economic and health consequences. Activists have constantly challenged the actions of transnational pharmaceutical and food companies promoting industrially processed baby foods. The addendum shows how current advocacy work must adapt to the new economic climate where conflicts of interest and public– private partnerships with food companies are the new normal. Even food aid has been affected by the concentration of power in the hands of global food industries. Clapp shows how different African societies exercise their rights to limit the import of genetically modified foods even in the face of famine and extreme hunger. The lens of political economy provides fascinating insights into the current obsession with obesity, as Julier shows. Taking a critical functionalist approach, she shows who benefits from blaming the obese for their weight: the government, the diet food and supplement industries, bariatric medical practitioners, and exercise businesses. Blaming individuals for being obese draws attention away from the broader social and economic causes of obesity, including poverty, inadequate food distribution systems, and the excess of unhealthy food available to the poor. Following the recession of 2008, hunger and food handouts have played an increasingly important role in North American communities. Poppendieck looks at the role of charity in combating food insecurity in the United States. While charity plays a critical role in temporarily abating hunger, it fails to address the poverty and structural inequality that are its real underlying causes (Berg 2008, Fitchen 1988, Lappé and Collins 1986, Patel 2007, Poppendieck 1998, Winne 2008). Priscilla McCutcheon provides another approach to hunger in examining community empowerment through food in her study of two black nationalist religious organizations—one Christian and the other, the Nation of Islam. Her research brings out the complex entanglements of food and racial identity in the American south where self-reliance in food production offered a means to address both hunger and black identity. Charles Levkoe’s prize-winning student essay on “Learning Food Democracy through Food Justice Movements” concludes the section and the Reader with more examples of successful community organization around food issues. As a form of adult education that promotes engagement with democratic values, the food justice movement in Canada brings together a wide range of food activists who act not simply as food consumers, but as citizens who advocate for changes in food policy. Food is a particularly powerful lens on capital, labor, health, and the environment. Taken together, these papers force us to re-examine the interconnections between the availability of cheap food in North America and the conditions of its production in

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other parts of the world. Food advocacy is a growing arena for political activism, as the success of Italy’s Slow Food Movement shows. Food unites all humans; its lack strikes a painful chord among haves and have-nots alike. Progress towards social justice can only come through a concerted effort on the part of social activists everywhere to end world hunger and bring about universal access to nutritious and adequate food.

Cross-Cutting Themes Throughout the five sections of the reader, several themes emerge that can structure how readers approach the book. Theory and method constitute one important theme. While all of the articles are embedded in theory, some explicitly identify theoretical positions: semiotic (Barthes), structuralist (Lévi-Strauss), symbolic (Douglas), materialist (Harris), Marxist (Clark), critical functionalist (Julier), and liberal, advocacy, corporeal, and Third-World feminist (Bordo, Counihan, Slocum, Van Esterik, Williams-Forson). Articles also employ different methodologies, providing readers with a wealth of information about the different means of investigating the role of food in history and culture. A number of articles use ethnographic approaches; for example, Allison, Carrington, Sutton, and Yan use interviews and participant-observation, and Counihan uses food-centered life histories.9 Analysis of cultural symbols and meanings is employed by Douglas and Bordo, the former from an anthropological and the latter from a philosophical perspective. Nabhan uses methods of ethnobotany, and Yasmeen of geography, while Bynum, McCutcheon, and Williams-Forson employ fine-grained historical research, and Srinivas, Sutton, and Williams-Forson examine the material culture of food. Holden, Parasecoli, and Swenson analyze the mass media, while several articles analyze restaurants including fast-food and fancy ones in China (Yan), Taco Bell in Mexico (Pilcher), pizza restaurants in Japan (Ceccarini), and street stalls in Thailand (Yasmeen). Together, these articles provide readers with a rich sampling of diverse theories, approaches, and methods to inspire their own research. Another cross-cutting theme is food as a means of communication. Because of food’s multi-sensorial properties of taste, touch, sight, sound, and smell, it has the ability to communicate in a variety of registers and constitutes a form of language (Barthes). Definitions of acceptable and prohibited foods (Lévi-Strauss, Douglas, Harris), stereotypes associating certain groups with certain foods (Williams-Forson), consumption of foods to express belonging (Clark, Heldke) or attain desired states (Parasecoli, Yan), and use of food narratives to speak about the self (Counihan) are all ways that food communicates. New forms of communication include information technology and social media. Papers on social media are quickly outdated, as technology and apps change quickly. However, future research will no doubt address the incredible opportunity presented by research in cyberspace. What are the implications of people sharing on Facebook every detail about a just-consumed meal, or of dieters using a smart phone app to instantly document the calories and nutritional content of the dish they are about to eat, or of friends living in different parts of the world sharing a meal in cyberspace?

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Is this really commensality when eaters watch each other eating the same meal? Photographs shared quickly on social media can provide instant evidence of food safety violations or advertising that “breaks the rules,” such as inappropriate ads directed to children, false health claims for specific foods, or promotions advertising infant formula. These images can be sent to food activists quickly, and possibly be addressed just as quickly both by activists and food corporations. Food as an index of power relations is another significant theme in several articles. Hierarchy and oppression are themes in Williams-Forson’s paper on African American women’s contested relationship with chicken, Counihan’s exploration of differential consciousness among rural Mexicanas, and Barndt’s and Schlosser’s examination of the exploitation of workers. Complex global power dynamics are explored in different ways in Mintz’s treatise on the growth of the sugar industry, Van Esterik’s analysis of breast vs. bottle feeding of infants, and Heldke’s examination of first world consumers’ “adventure cooking and eating.” Julier addresses how the excoriation of the obese serves to maintain economic and ideological hegemony of elites, while Clark shows how punks explicitly challenge the power of the agroindustrial food system in their veganism and dumpster diving. Many other articles engage with issues of power in the food economy, ideology, and politics. Access to food is at the heart of food security and human rights, and its denial is a terrible measure of human powerlessness, an issue addressed in different ways by Nabhan’s examination of Native Americans’ degraded health, Poppendieck’s insightful study of food charity, and McCutcheon’s examination of Nation of Islam community feeding programs. With the increasing commodification and globalization of food, power issues are revealed not only in access to food but also in the production of local, culturally meaningful foods whose endurance is key to cultural survival, as Wilk, Nabhan, Leitch, Pilcher, and Clapp demonstrate (see Van Esterik 2006b). Integrating the cultural dimensions of food and eating with the legal discourse on human rights is an ongoing challenge of great significance that Ellen Messer’s work addresses (Messer 2004, Messer and Cohen 2008). Concluding Thoughts The questions we raised at the end of the second edition are worth asking again, as they still deserve the attention of food researchers. What is it about food that makes it an especially intriguing and insightful lens of analysis? What questions about foodways still need to be addressed? How have food regimes changed through time? How does the universal need for food bind individuals and groups together? What are the most serious problems in the global food system and what causes them? What political, economic, social, and ideological structures enhance food sovereignty and social justice, and what structures contribute to inequitable food systems? Notes 1. 2.

Some recent articles on food and film are Baron 2003, Johnson 2002, Van Esterik 2006a. Two insightful articles on food and human rights are Bellows 2003, Van Esterik 1999b.

12 3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik M.F.K. Fisher (1954, 1961, 1983) is one of the most lyrical food writers who has inspired countless others. The development of research interests in food in anthropology is as old as the discipline. Early anthropologists recognized the central role of food in different cultures, most notably Audrey Richards (1932, 1939), but also Raymond Firth (1934), Bronislaw Malinowski (1935), M. and S.L. Fortes (1936), and Cora DuBois (1941). Anthropology continues to make important contributions—both ethnographic and theoretical—to the field today. Some influential books on the anthropology of food are Anderson 1988, 2005, Counihan 1999, 2004, Dettwyler 1994, Fink 1998, Goody 1982, Kahn 1986, Kulick and Meneley 2005, Meigs 1984, Mintz 1985, 1997, Nichter 2000, Ohnuki-Tierney 1993, Pollock 1992, Watson 1997, Weismantel 1988, Wilk 2006a, 2006b. See Spang (1988) on anthropologists’ work on food during World War II. On the complex relationship between gender, cooking, and power, see Avakian 1997, Avakian and Haber 2005, Charles and Kerr 1988, Counihan 2004, DeVault 1991, Inness 2001a, 2001b, 2001c, Van Esterik 1996, 1997, 1999a, Williams-Forson 2006, and Witt 1999. Some books that examine the religious and ideological dimensions of fasting and dieting are Adams 1990, Bell 1987, Brumberg 1988, Bynum 1987, Griffith 2004, Sack 2005, and Vandereycken and Van Deth 1994. The following are influential studies of women’s food restriction: Bruch 1973, 1978, Brumberg 1988, Nichter 2000, Thompson 1994. Often food and eating become critically important parts of ethnographic fieldwork, even when the research did not originally focus on food (cf. Coleman 2011).

References Abarca, Meredith. 2006. Voices in the Kitchen: Views of Food and the World from Working-Class Mexican and Mexican American Women. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Adams, Carol. 1990. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum. Albala, Ken. 2007a. The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe. Champagne-Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Albala, Ken. 2007b. Beans: A History. Oxford: Berg. Anderson, E. N. 1988. The Food of China. New Haven: Yale University Press. Anderson, E. N. 2005. Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture. New York: NYU Press. Appelbaum, Robert. 2006. Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food Among the Early Moderns. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Avakian, Arlene Voski, ed. 1997. Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Cooking. Boston: Beacon. Avakian, Arlene Voski and Barbara Haber, eds. 2005. From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Barndt, Deborah, ed. 1999. Women Working the NAFTA Food Chain: Women, Food and Globalization. Toronto: Second Story Press. Barndt, Deborah. 2007. Tangled Routes: Women, Work, and Globalization on the Tomato Trail. Lantham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2nd edition. Baron, Cynthia. 2003. Food and Gender in Bagdad Café. Food and Foodways, 11(1):49–74. Belasco, Warren. 2006. Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food. Berkeley: University of California Press. Belasco, Warren. 2007. Appetite for Change. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2nd edition. Bell, Rudolph M. 1987. Holy Anorexia. Chicago: University of Chicago. Bell, David and Gill Valentine. 1997. Consuming Geographies: We Are Where We Eat. New York: Routledge. Bellows, Anne. 2003. Exposing Violences: Using Women’s Human Rights Theory to Reconceptualize Food Rights. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 16:249–279. Berg, Joel. 2008. All You Can Eat. How Hungry is America? New York: Seven Stories Press. Beriss, David and David Sutton. 2007. The Restaurants Book: Ethnographies of Where We Eat. New York: Berg. Bestor, Theodore C. 2004. Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bower, Anne, ed. 2004. Reel Food: Essays on Food and Film. New York: Routledge. Bower, Anne, ed. 2008. African American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Bruch, Hilde. 1979. Eating Disorders: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa, and the Person Within. New York: Basic Books. Bruch, Hilde. 2001. The Golden Cage: The Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa, with a New Foreword by Catherine Steiner-Adair, Ed.D. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. 1988. Fasting Girls: the Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bynum, Caroline Walker. 1987. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press. Capatti, Alberto and Massimo Montanari. 2003. Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History. New York: Columbia University Press. Carney, Judith A. 2001. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carney, Judith A. 2010. In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’ s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Charles, Nicki and Marion Kerr. 1988. Women, Food and Families. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Claflin, Kyri W. and Peter Scholliers, eds. 2012. Writing Food History: A Global Perspective. Oxford: Berg. Coe, Sophie D. and Michael D. Coe. 2000. The True History of Chocolate. London: Thames and Hudson. Coleman, Leo, ed. 2011. Food: Ethnographic Encounters. London: Berg Press. Conner, Mark and Christopher Armitage. 2002. The Social Psychology of Food. London: Open University. Counihan, Carole. 1999. The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning and Power. New York: Routledge. Counihan, Carole. 2004. Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence. New York: Routledge. Daniel, Carolyn. 2006. Voracious Children: Who Eats Whom in Children’s Literature. New York: Routledge. De Certeau, Michel. 2011. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dettwyler, Katherine. 1994. Dancing Skeletons: Life and Death in West Africa. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland. DeVault, Marjorie L. 1991. Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Du Bois, Cora. 1941. "Attitudes toward Food and Hunger in Alor," In Language, Culture, and Personality,LeslieSpier, et al. eds., Menasha, WI: Sapir Memorial Publication Fund, pp. 272–281. Ferrieres, Madeleine. 2005. Sacred Cow, Mad Cow: A History of Food Fears. New York: Columbia University Press. Ferry, Jane. 2003. Food in Film: A Culinary Performance of Communication. New York: Routledge. Fink, Deborah. 1998. Cutting into the Meatpacking Line: Workers and Change in the Rural Midwest. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Firth, Raymond. 1934. The Sociological Study of Native Diet. Africa, 7 (4):401–414. Fisher, M.F.K. 1954. The Art of Eating. Cleveland: World Publishing. Fisher, M.F.K. 1961. A Cordiall Water: a Garland of Odd and Old Receipts to Assuage the Ills of Man and Beast. New York: North Point Press. Fisher, M.F.K. 1983. As They Were. New York: Vintage. Fitchen, Janet M. 1988. Hunger, Malnutrition and Poverty in the Contemporary United States: Some Observations on Their Social and Cultural Context. Food and Foodways, 2(3): 309–333. Flandrin, Jean Louis and Massimo Montanari, eds. 1999. Food: A Culinary History. English edition edited by AlbertSonnenfeld. New York: Penguin. Flynn, Karen Coen. 2005. Food, Culture and Survival in an African City. New York: Palgrave. Fortes, Myer and S. L. Fortes. 1936. Food in the Domestic Economy of the Tallensi. Africa, 9(2):237–276. Franck, Karen A. ed. 2003. Food + Architecture. Academy Press. Friedberg, Susanne. 2004. French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age. New York: Oxford University Press. Friedberg, Susanne. 2009. Fresh: A Perishable History. Cambridge: Belknap Press. Gabaccia, Donna. 1998. We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Foods and the Making of Americans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gewertz, Deborah and Fred Errington. 2010. Cheap Meat: Flap Food Nations in the Pacific Islands. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gentilcore, David. 2010. Pomodoro!: A History of the Tomato in Italy. New York: Columbia University Press. Goody, Jack. 1982. Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology. New York: Cambridge. Griffith, R. Marie. 2004. Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Guthman, Julie. 2004. Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California. Berkeley: University of California Press. Guthman, Julie. 2011. Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Heldke, Lisa. 2003. Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer. New York: Routledge. Horwitz, Jamie and Paulette Singley, eds. 2006. Eating Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Howes, David, ed. 2005. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg.

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Inglis, David and Debra Gimlin. 2010. The Globalization of Food. Oxford: Berg. Inness, Sherrie A. ed. 2001a. Cooking Lessons: The Politics of Gender and Food. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Inness, Sherrie A. ed. 2001b. Pilaf, Pozole, and Pad Thai: American Women and Ethnic Food. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Inness, Sherrie A. ed. 2001c. Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Inness, Sherrie A. 2005. Secret Ingredients: Race, Gender, and Class at the Dinner Table. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Jing, Jun, ed. 2000. Feeding China’s Little Emperoros: Food, Children, and Social Change. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Johnson, Ruth D. 2002. The Staging of the Bourgeois Imaginary in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1990). Cinema Journal, 41(2):19–40. Julier, Alice and Laura Lindenfeld. 2005a. Mapping Men onto the Menu: Masculinities and Food. Food and Foodways, 13(1–2):1–16. Julier, Alice and Laura Lindenfeld, eds. 2005b. Masculinities and Food. Special double issue of Food and Foodways, 13:1–2. Kahn, Miriam. 1986. Always Hungry, Never Greedy: Food and the Expression of Gender in a Melanesian Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaplan, David M., ed. 2012. Philosophy of Food. Berkeley: University of California Press. Keller, James R. 2006. Food, Film and Culture: A Genre Study. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Kent, George. 2007. Freedom from Want: The Human Right to Adequate Food. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Korsmeyer, Carolyn. 2002. Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Korsmeyer, Carolyn, ed. 2005. The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink. Oxford: Berg. Kulick, Don and Anne Meneley, eds. 2005. Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession. New York: Penguin. Kurlansky, Mark. 2003. Salt: A World History. New York: Penguin. Lappé, Frances Moore and Joseph Collins. 1986. World Hunger: Twelve Myths. New York: Grove Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1978. The Origin of Table Manners. London: Jonathan Cape. Long, Lucy, ed. 2003. Culinary Tourism. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Magdoff, Fred, John Bellamy Foster, and Frederick H. Buttel, eds. 2000. Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment. New York: Monthly Review Press. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1935. Coral Gardens and their Magic; a Study of the Methods of Tilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands. New York: American Book Co. 2 volumes. Messer, Ellen. 2004. “Hunger and Human Rights: Old and New Roles for Anthropologists.” In Human Rights: The Scholar as Activist, C.Nagengast and C.G.Velez-Ibanez, eds. Oklahoma City: Society for Applied Anthropology, pp. 43–63. Messer, Ellen and Marc J. Cohen. 2008. U.S. Approaches to Food and Nutrition Rights, 1976–2008. Hunger Notes http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/08/hrf/toc.htm. Mintz, Sidney W. 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin. Mintz, Sidney. 1997. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past. Boston: Beacon. Montanari, Massimo. 2010. Cheese, Pears, and History in a Proverb. Translated by Beth Archer Brombert. New York: Columbia University Press. Nestle, Marion. 2003. Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nestle, Marion. 2004. Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nichter, Mimi. 2000. Fat Talk: What Girls and their Parents Say about Dieting. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ogden, Jane. 2010. The Psychology of Eating: From Healthy to Disordered Behavior. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. 1993. Rice as Self: Japanese Identities through Time. New Brunswick, NJ: Princeton University Press. Opie, Frederick Douglass. 2008. Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America. New York: Columbia University Press. Parasecoli, Fabio and Peter Scholliers, eds. 2012. A Cultural History of Food. Oxford: Berg. Patel, Raj. 2007. Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House. Pojman, Paul. 2011. Food Ethics. Boston: Wadsworth. Pollock, Nancy. 1992. These Roots Remain: Food Habits in Islands of the Central and Eastern Pacific since Western Contact. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Poppendieck, Janet. 1998. Sweet Charity? Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement. New York: Penguin. Ray, Krishnendu. 2004. The Migrant’s Table: Meals and Memories in Bengali-American Households. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Ray, Krishnendu and Tulasi Srinivas. 2012. Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food, and South Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Introduction to the Third Edition

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Richards, Audrey I. 1932. Hunger and Work in a Savage Tribe. London: Routledge. Richards, Audrey I. 1939. Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia: An Economic Study of the Bemba Tribe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sack, Daniel. 2005. Whitebread Protestants: Food and Religion in American Culture. New York: Palgrave. Schlosser, Eric. 2002. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. New York: Harper Collins. Schwartz, Maxime. 2004. How the Cows Turned Mad: Unlocking the Mysteries of Mad Cow Disease. Berkeley: University of California Press. Singer, Peter and Jim Mason. 2006. The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter. Rodale, PA: Rodale Press. Skubal, Susan. 2002. Word of Mouth: Food and Fiction After Freud. New York: Routledge. Smith, Andrew. 2006. The Turkey: An American Story. Champagne-Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Spang, Rebecca L. 1988. The Cultural Habits of a Food Committee. Food and Foodways, 2(4): 359–391. Sutton, David E. 2001. Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory. Oxford: Berg. Telfer, Elizabeth. 2005. Food for Thought: Philosophy and Food. New York: Routledge. Thompson, Becky. 1994. A Hunger So Wide and So Deep: American Women Speak Out on Eating Problems. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Turner, Jack. 2004. Spice: the History of a Temptation. New York: Vintage Books. Van Esterik, Penny. 1996. The Cultural Context of Breastfeeding and Breastfeeding Policy. Food and Nutrition Bulletin, 17(4):422–431. Van Esterik, Penny. 1997. Women and Nurture in Industrial Societies. Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, 56(1B): 335–343. Van Esterik, Penny. 1999a. “Gender and Sustainable Food Systems: a Feminist Critique.” In For Hunger-Proof Cities: Sustainable Urban Food Systems, M.Koc, R.MacRae, L.Mougeot and J.Welsh, eds. Ottawa: IDRC, pp.157–161. Van Esterik, Penny. 1999b. Right to Food; Right to Feed; Right to Be Fed: the Intersection of Women’s Rights and the Right to Food. Agriculture and Human Values, 16:225–232. Van Esterik, Penny. 2005. No Free Lunch. Agriculture and Human Values, 22:207–208. Van Esterik, Penny. 2006a. Anna and the King: Digesting Difference. Southeast Asian Research, 14(2):289–307. Van Esterik, Penny. 2006b. “From Hunger Foods to Heritage Foods: Challenges to Food Localization in Lao PDR.” In Fast Food/Slow Food: The Cultural Economy of the Global Food System, R.Wilk, ed., Lanham, Md.: Altimira Press, pp. 83–96. Vandereycken, Walter and Ron Van Deth. 1994. From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls: The History of Self-Starvation. New York: New York University Press. Van Gelder, Geert Jan. 2000. God’s Banquet: Food in Classical Arabic Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Watson, James L., ed. 1997. Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Weismantel, M. J. 1988. Food, Gender and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Wenche Barth, Eide and Uwe Kracht, eds. 2005. Human Rights and Development. Antwerp: Intersentia. Wiley, Andrea. 2010. Re-imagining Milk: Cultural and Biological Perspectives. New York: Routledge. Wilk, Richard. 2006a. Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists. Oxford: Berg. Wilk, Richard, ed. 2006b. Fast Food/Slow Food: The Cultural Economy of the Global Food System. Lantham: Altamira. Williams-Forson, Psyche A. 2006. Building Houses out of Chicken Legs : Black Women, Food, and Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Williams-Forson, Psyche and Carole Counihan, eds. 2012. Taking Food Public: Redefining Foodways in a Changing World. New York: Routledge. Winne, Mark. 2008. Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty. Boston: Beacon Press. Witt, Doris. 1999. Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U.S. Identity. New York: Oxford University Press. Wrangham, Richard. 2010. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. New York: Basic Books. Yasmeen, Gisèle. 2006. Bangkok’s Foodscape. Bangkok: White Lotus Press.

Foundations 1 Why Do We Overeat? Margaret Mead 2 Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption Roland Barthes 3 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste Pierre Bourdieu (tr. Richard Nice) 4 The Culinary Triangle Claude Lévi-Strauss 5 The Abominations of Leviticus Mary Douglas 6 The Abominable Pig Marvin Harris 7 Industrial Food: Towards the Development of a World Cuisine Jack Goody 8 Time, Sugar, and Sweetness Sidney W. Mintz

1 Why Do We Overeat?* Margaret Mead

Holiday cheer inevitably means a great abundance of food and drink—delicious, tempting and for most of us a hazard. How often during the Christmas holidays have you heard someone say, “Well, just a little more—I can’t resist”? How often have you yourself said, “I really shouldn’t …”? The pressure to enjoy all these varied good things is very great. But in the back of many people’s minds there is the thought, After New Year’s I’ll go on a diet. Feasting at festivals and eating meagerly in the long intervals between great events is a way of handling food that is very widespread among the peoples of the world who seldom have more than just enough to live on. It is one way of coping with perennial scarcity that allows everyone to share occasionally a very limited supply of foods that are really good. But this is no longer our way. Daily abundance of food is one of the main characteristics of our very affluent society. So abundant, in fact, is food that many—perhaps most—Americans find it almost impossible to believe that there are millions among us who do not have access to sufficient food. For the majority of Americans food is omnipresent. Supermarkets, hot-dog stands, candy counters, snack bars, soft-drink machines and a constant stream of highly colored advertisements continually keep the possibility of eating before us. For holidays we make a special effort to buy and prepare foods that take time, effort and thought—foods that demonstrate how far we have come in learning to treat cooking and the enjoyment of eating as an art. But holidays are only a high point. We have contrived to construct a world in which food in great variety is present everywhere at all times of the year. So the problem for great numbers of Americans is not how to get enough food or how to be well nourished. Instead it is how to fend off the insistent pressure to eat. It has been estimated that at least one in five Americans is ten per cent or more overweight—in most cases the consequence of giving in to that pressure and eating too much. It has been estimated variously, also, that some 10 to 20 million Americans at any one time are dieting—some because they are fat and others because they “feel fat” in relation to current styles. *

Originally published 1971

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The vast proliferation of nonfattening and nonnourishing foods in the past decade represents one attempt to cope with the situation—how to eat “harmlessly.” There are also the shelves of books on dieting, the books on exercising and the dozens of devices advertised everywhere that are guaranteed to trim one down. All are evidence of good business appreciation of the anxieties we feel and the dilemma we find ourselves in as a result of our present style of eating. For the truth is, Americans are extremely intolerant of people who, as we see it, “let themselves go.” This applies to anyone who neglects to “fix” anything physical that can be remedied. It is the responsibility of parents to make the best of each child; but we believe that adults, as individuals, have control over their own bodies and should demonstrate through the care they exercise both how they see themselves and how they wish to be seen in their relations to others. There are handicaps, clearly, that cannot be overcome. But everyone can try. To make the most of oneself, we say, is good. To give up is wrong. Today this moral attitude places a very heavy burden on one group—a very mixed group—in our society. This is the group of all those who, for whatever reason, are obese. No fashions are designed for them. No furniture is built for them. Potentially or actually, they are outcasts. We believe it is wrong to be obese. It shows a lack of character, a disregard for health and a blatant lack of self-discipline. In the light of this belief, all kinds of obesity are lumped together. We treat as similar in kind the overweight of glandular imbalance, weight put on during pregnancy, weight that comes to the lonely girl who eats comforting chocolates that make her fatter and even less likely to get a date and weight that is a response to feelings of unworthiness. Detailed studies have shown that there are many and very different origins of overweight. But to the average person who is deciding whether to accept a student or whether to hire someone for a job or to promote someone to a higher position, who is anxiously watching the girls a son is dating or (less often) the boys a daughter is dating, obesity is just obesity—unattractive, unacceptable and reprehensible. Back of all the comments, the warnings and the cutting jokes lies the moral reproof “You should lose weight, and you could if you would.” Those who succeed in keeping down their weight—or in getting it down within acceptable limits—count their virtues, suffer for their sins and denigrate others who fail or obviously won’t try. Certainly it is important for us to feel that we are in control of our own well-being. But are the obese really sinners? Why today do we still have these puritanical attitudes about eating? Is it necessary to invoke guilt to control our enjoyment of plenty? The Weight Watchers movement, which has swept the country in the past eight years, gains its greatest strength from the belief that those who try and succeed are good and will be rewarded. Like Alcoholics Anonymous and other groups that use like mindedness as a kind of external conscience to bolster up the will to reform and improve oneself, Weight Watchers expresses a peculiarly American idea. This is the idea that the best way to do something you don’t want to do is to get others in the same situation to meet with you and to support you whenever your resolve to kick the habit flickers. As the obese so often describe themselves (echoing the beliefs and attitudes of those around them), they are people who can’t resist indulging their gluttonous greed; who

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hide their compulsive eating from one another, their families, their spouses and friends; and who come in time to lie even to themselves. Confessing their familiar sins to each other, as is done in all such mutual-support groups, helps them to face themselves and so to take each necessary step in the arduous and painful process of dieting to lose 50,100 or even 200 pounds of cumbersome, misery-making weight. But there is a reward. In the words of Jean Nidetch (the inventor of the movement, who calls herself a Formerly Fat Housewife), getting down to normal size will “make you confident that you are capable of controlling your own body, that you are not the victim of your compulsions.” The system works—after a fashion. Given sufficient support, many of the overweight can suffer their way toward a “normal” figure and perhaps better health. But the various ways we have devised to deal with overweight do not come to grips with the fundamental question: Why do we have this constant struggle with food? Is there no other way? Recently a movement has been formed called the National Association to Aid Fat Americans (NAAFA), whose founders picture the obese as another persecuted minority. They may well point out some of the injustices suffered by the overweight. But this is likely at best to strengthen the resolve of those who diet to escape the penalties of being fat. Our peculiar attitudes toward food in this country become even clearer when one looks at another group—the rebellious young. Just as they have rejected so much else that they regard as part of the corrupt adult world, they have rejected the food habits they were taught. In spite of their emphasis on the values of “natural” food, few of them have any real knowledge of sound nutrition. Many are extreme food faddists. Often they are painfully thin, and in many cases seriously malnourished. We do not condemn them for being thin; most people would like to be thin. But their situation is serious, for their health may be permanently impaired. Even more serious may be the impairment to the health of their children. Very recent studies have shown that adequate prenatal nutrition, which in most cases permits a pregnant woman to gain at least 25 pounds, can mean the difference between a handicapped and a flourishing baby. Both the obese and the rebellious young are victims—victims of our obsolete attitude toward food and eating. The obese, whom we treat as sinners, are scapegoats for all of us, made to suffer as examples of what many of us fear we might become—if we let ourselves go. They feel left out. For them, getting thinner means a chance to re-enter society—a chance to go to a good college, to get a good job, to make friends, to marry and to be a part of what is going on. The youthful rebels, in contrast, reject our accepted eating habits as part of their search for a new life-style. But so are we all victims. The real problem is one all of us must face. Most Americans find themselves in the ambiguous situation of having to fight what they enjoy— of feasting and then guiltily fasting in order to be “good.” And the question is this: Must the next generation face the same dilemma? The basic difficulty, I think, is that we have carried over into the present outmoded methods of teaching children how and what to eat, and we back up this teaching with inappropriate moral attitudes toward food. In the past, when the quantity and variety of foods were much more limited, meals could be extremely monotonous. Then mothers urged and begged and forced

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children to eat the food set before them three times a day. There was no alternative. The good child dutifully ate the dull food “that is good for you.” The reward was dessert, Sunday dinner, holiday fare, the rare treat, all the pleasant and delicious foods that were “good.” The child (and the adult too, of course) who uncomplainingly ate the plain, nourishing everyday fare was morally justified in enjoying what came afterward as a sign that all was well. We still plan our three meals a day in the same way, treating them as if they constituted all the food available to us. We still teach children to be “good” through food— and to express rebellion by not eating the right food. We still treat some foods (the kinds we define as “good, but not really good for you”) as rewards and signs of love. There is one major change, but this serves only to reinforce what we teach and believe: Adults, having eaten too much, go on a diet that they treat as difficult, unpleasant and intrinsically unrewarding. Children should be good first; adults do penance afterward. We punish the obese. But we all have become the victims of this outmoded style. Recognizing this, we can help our children to eat in a new style. First I think we can give up using food as a punishment and a reward—as a symbol of a duty performed (or neglected), a consolation or an accolade. Where food is so plentiful, food can be food and the focus of our feeling can be directed toward the pleasure of sharing a meal with others. Second we can recognize the fact that the rule of “there square meals a day” has become a kind of strait jacket. We would do better to take into account the variations in individual rhythms in the need for food as well as the different rhythms in the working day for different people. A generation ago we began infant feeding on a flexible, self-demand basis—and there we stopped. More realistically, however, eating on the basis of self-demand could be the beginning of self-discovery and flexibility, throughout childhood and on into adulthood. In the past children were taught to eat. If they were thin, they should eat more; if they stuffed, they were deprived of good things. But in the last generation, those children who were brought up with a genuine sense of self-demand within the bounds of sensible nutrition are the ones who, as adults, have kept a relaxed sense of what their physical need for food is and what they can enjoy. This capacity to follow their individual rhythms in eating would really give people a sense of personal—instead of arbitrarily determined—control over their own bodies. Less punitive toward ourselves, I think, we would become less punitive toward others who differed from us. Finally, the whole world today is linked through food, the food that some have in superabundance and others urgently need. By freeing our children from the strictures of conscience about their personal consumption of food, they would be freer to think of shared food as a source of well-being for everyone everywhere.

2 Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption* Roland Barthes

The inhabitants of the United States consume almost twice as much sugar as the French.1 Such a fact is usually a concern of economics and politics. But this is by no means all. One needs only to take the step from sugar as merchandise, an abstract item in accounts, to sugar as food, a concrete item that is “eaten” rather than “consumed,” to get an inkling of the (probably unexplored) depth of the phenomenon. For the Americans must do something with all that sugar. And as a matter of fact, anyone who has spent time in the United States knows that sugar permeates a considerable part of American cooking; that it saturates ordinarily sweet foods, such as pastries; makes for a great variety of sweets served, such as ice creams, jellies, syrups; and is used in many dishes that French people do not sweeten, such as meats, fish, salads, and relishes. This is something that would be of interest to scholars in fields other than economics, to the psychosociologist, for example, who will have something to say about the presumably invariable relation between standard of living and sugar consumption. (But is this relation really invariable today? And if so, why?)2 It could be of interest to the historian also, who might find it worthwhile to study the ways in which the use of sugar evolved as part of American culture (the influence of Dutch and German immigrants who were used to “sweet-salty” cooking?). Nor is this all. Sugar is not just a foodstuff, even when it is used in conjunction with other foods; it is, if you will, an “attitude,” bound to certain usages, certain “protocols,” that have to do with more than food. Serving a sweet relish or drinking a Coca-Cola with a meal are things that are confined to eating habits proper; but to go regularly to a dairy bar, where the absence of alcohol coincides with a great abundance of sweet beverages, means more than to consume sugar; through the sugar, it also means to experience the day, periods of rest, traveling, and leisure in a specific fashion that is certain to have its impact on the American. For who would claim that in France wine is only wine? Sugar or wine, these two superabundant substances are also institutions. And these institutions necessarily imply a set of images, dreams, tastes, choices, and values. I remember an American hit song: Sugar Time. Sugar is a time, a category of the world.3 I have started out with the example of the American use of sugar because it permits us to get outside of what we, as Frenchmen, consider “obvious.” For we do not see our own food or, worse, we assume that it is insignificant. Even—or perhaps *

Originally published 1961

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especially—to the scholar, the subject of food connotes triviality or guilt.4 This may explain in part why the psychosociology of French eating habits is still approached only indirectly and in passing when more weighty subjects, such as life-styles, budgets, and advertising, are under discussion. But at least the sociologists, the historians of the present—since we are talking only about contemporary eating habits here— and the economists are already aware that there is such a thing. Thus P.H. Chombart de Lauve has made an excellent study of the behavior of French working-class families with respect to food. He was able to define areas of frustration and to outline some of the mechanisms by which needs are transformed into values, necessities into alibis.5 In her book Le mode de vie des familles bourgeoises de 1873 à 1953, M. Perrot came to the conclusion that economic factors played a less important role in the changes that have taken place in middle-class food habits in the last hundred years than changing tastes; and this really means ideas, especially about nutrition.6 Finally, the development of advertising has enabled the economists to become quite conscious of the ideal nature of consumer goods; by now everyone knows that the product as bought—that is, experienced—by the consumer is by no means the real product; between the former and the latter there is a considerable production of false perceptions and values. By being faithful to a certain brand and by justifying this loyalty with a set of “natural” reasons, the consumer gives diversity to products that are technically so identical that frequently even the manufacturer cannot find any differences. This is notably the case with most cooking oils.7 It is obvious that such deformations or reconstructions are not only the manifestation of individual, anomic prejudices, but also elements of a veritable collective imagination showing the outlines of a certain mental framework. All of this, we might say, points to the (necessary) widening of the very notion of food. For what is food? It is not only a collection of products that can be used for statistical or nutritional studies. It is also, and at the same time, a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behavior. Information about food must be gathered wherever it can be found: by direct observation in the economy, in techniques, usages, and advertising; and by indirect observation in the mental life of a given society.8 And once these data are assembled, they should no doubt be subjected to an internal analysis that should try to establish what is significant about the way in which they have been assembled before any economic or even ideological determinism is brought into play. I should like to give a brief outline of what such an analysis might be. When he buys an item of food, consumes it, or serves it, modern man does not manipulate a simple object in a purely transitive fashion; this item of food sums up and transmits a situation; it constitutes an information; it signifies. That is to say that it is not just an indicator of a set of more or less conscious motivations, but that it is real sign, perhaps the functional unit of a system of communication. By this I mean not only the elements of display in food, such as foods involved in rites of hospitality,9 for all food serves as a sign among the members of a given society. As soon as a need is satisfied by standardized production and consumption, in short, as soon as it takes on the characteristics of an institution, its function can no longer be dissociated from the sign of that function. This is true for clothing;10 it is also true for food. No doubt, food is, anthropologically speaking (though very much in the abstract), the first need; but ever since man has ceased living off wild berries, this need has been

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highly structured. Substances, techniques of preparation, habits, all become part of a system of differences in signification; and as soon as this happens, we have communication by way of food. For the fact that there is communication is proven, not by the more or less vague consciousness that its users may have of it, but by the ease with which all the facts concerning food form a structure analogous to other systems of communication.11 People may very well continue to believe that food is an immediate reality (necessity or pleasure), but this does not prevent it from carrying a system of communication; it would not be the first thing that people continue to experience as a simple function at the very moment when they constitute it into a sign. If food is a system, what might be its constituent units? In order to find out, it would obviously be necessary to start out with a complete inventory of all we know of the food in a given society (products, techniques, habits), and then to subject these facts to what the linguists call transformational analysis, that is, to observe whether the passage from one fact to another produces a difference in signification. Here is an example: the changeover from ordinary bread to pain de mie involves a difference in what is signified: the former signifies day-to-day life, the latter a party. Similarly, in contemporary terms, the changeover from white to brown bread corresponds to a change in what is signified in social terms, because, paradoxically, brown bread has become a sign of refinement. We are therefore justified in considering the varieties of bread as units of signification—at least these varieties—for the same test can also show that there are insignificant varieties as well, whose use has nothing to do with a collective institution, but simply with individual taste. In this manner, one could, proceeding step by step, make a compendium of the differences in signification regulating the system of our food. In other words, it would be a matter of separating the significant from the insignificant and then of reconstructing the differential system of signification by constructing, if I may be permitted to use such a metaphor, a veritable grammar of foods. It must be added that the units of our system would probably coincide only rarely with the products in current use in the economy. Within French society, for example, bread as such does not constitute a signifying unit: in order to find these we must go further and look for certain of its varieties. In other words, these signifying units are more subtle than the commercial units and, above all, they have to do with subdivisions with which production is not concerned, so that the sense of the sub-division can differentiate a single product. Thus it is not at the level of its cost that the sense of a food item is elaborated, but at the level of its preparation and use. There is perhaps no natural item of food that signifies anything in itself, except for a few deluxe items such as salmon, caviar, truffles, and so on, whose preparation is less important than their absolute cost. If the units of our system of food are not the products of our economy, can we at least have some preliminary idea of what they might be? In the absence of a systematic inventory, we may risk a few hypotheses. A study by P.F. Lazarsfeld12 (it is old, concerned with particulars, and I cite it only as an example) has shown that certain sensorial “tastes” can vary according to the income level of the social groups interviewed: lower-income persons like sweet chocolates, smooth materials, strong perfumes; the upper classes, on the other hand, prefer bitter substances, irregular materials, and light perfumes. To remain within the area of food, we can see that signification (which,

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itself, refers to a twofold social phenomenon: upper classes/lower classes) does not involve kinds of products, but flavors: sweet and bitter make up the opposition in signification, so that we must place certain units of the system of food on that level. We can imagine other classes of units, for example, opposite substances such as dry, creamy, watery ones, which immediately show their great psychoanalytical potential (and it is obvious that if the subject of food had not been so trivialized and invested with guilt, it could easily be subjected to the kind of “poetic” analysis that G. Bachelard applied to language). As for what is considered tasty, C. Lévi-Strauss has already shown that this might very well constitute a class of oppositions that refers to national characters (French versus English cuisine, French versus Chinese or German cuisine, and so on).13 Finally, one can imagine opposites that are even more encompassing, but also more subtle. Why not speak, if the facts are sufficiently numerous and sufficiently clear, of a certain “spirit” of food, if I may be permitted to use this romantic term? By this I mean that a coherent set of food traits and habits can constitute a complex but homogeneous dominant feature useful for defining a general system of tastes and habits. This “spirit” brings together different units (such as flavor or substance), forming a composite unit with a single signification, somewhat analogous to the suprasegmental prosodic units of language. I should like to suggest here two very different examples. The ancient Greeks unified in a single (euphoric) notion the ideas of succulence, brightness, and moistness, and they called it yávos. Honey had yávos, and wine was the yávos of the vineyard.14 Now this would certainly be a signifying unit if we were to establish the system of food of the Greeks, even though it does not refer to any particular item. And here is another example, modern this time. In the United States, the Americans seem to oppose the category of sweet (and we have already seen to how many different varieties of foods this applies) with an equally general category that is not, however, that of salty—understandably so, since their food is salty and sweet to begin with—but that of crisp or crispy. Crisp designates everything that crunches, crackles, grates, sparkles, from potato chips to certain brands of beer; crisp—and this shows that the unit of food can overthrow logical categories—crisp may be applied to a product just because it is ice cold, to another because it is sour, to a third because it is brittle. Quite obviously, such a notion goes beyond the purely physical nature of the product; crispness in a food designates an almost magical quality, a certain briskness and sharpness, as opposed to the soft, soothing character of sweet foods. Now then, how will we use the units established in this manner? We will use them to reconstruct systems, syntaxes (“menus”), and styles (“diets”)15 no longer in an empirical but in a semantic way—in a way, that is, that will enable us to compare them to each other. We now must show, not that which is, but that which signifies. Why? Because we are interested in human communication and because communication always implies a system of signification, that is, a body of discrete signs standing out from a mass of indifferent materials. For this reason, sociology must, as soon as it deals with cultural “objects” such as clothing, food, and—not quite as clearly—housing, structure these objects before trying to find out what society does with them. For what society does with them is precisely to structure them in order to make use of them. To what, then, can these significations of food refer? As I have already pointed out, they refer not only to display,16 but to a much larger set of themes and situations. One could say that an entire “world” (social environment) is present in and signified by food.

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Today we have a tool with which to isolate these themes and situations, namely, advertising. There is no question that advertising provides only a projected image of reality; but the sociology of mass communication has become increasingly inclined to think that large-scale advertising, even though technically the work of a particular group, reflects the collective psychology much more than it shapes it. Furthermore, studies of motivation are now so advanced that it is possible to analyze cases in which the response of the public is negative. (I already mentioned the feelings of guilt fostered by an advertising for sugar which emphasized pure enjoyment. It was bad advertising, but the response of the public was nonetheless psychologically most interesting.) A rapid glance at food advertising permits us rather easily, I think, to identify three groups of themes. The first of these assigns to food a function that is, in some sense, commemorative: food permits a person (and I am here speaking of French themes) to partake each day of the national past. In this case, this historical quality is obviously linked to food techniques (preparation and cooking). These have long roots, reaching back to the depth of the French past. They are, we are told, the repository of a whole experience, of the accumulated wisdom of our ancestors. French food is never supposed to be innovative, except when it rediscovers long-forgotten secrets. The historical theme, which was so often sounded in our advertising, mobilizes two different values: on the one hand, it implies an aristocratic tradition (dynasties of manufacturers, moutarde du Roy, the Brandy of Napoleon); on the other hand, food frequently carries notions of representing the flavorful survival of an old, rural society that is itself highly idealized.17 In this manner, food brings the memory of the soil into our very contemporary life; hence the paradoxical association of gastronomy and industrialization in the form of canned “gourmet dishes.” No doubt the myth of French cooking abroad (or as expressed to foreigners) strengthens this “nostalgic” value of food considerably; but since the French themselves actively participate in this myth (especially when traveling), it is fair to say that through his food the Frenchman experiences a certain national continuity. By way of a thousand detours, food permits him to insert himself daily into his own past and to believe in a certain culinary “being” of France.18 A second group of values concerns what we might call the anthropological situation of the French consumer. Motivation studies have shown that feelings of inferiority were attached to certain foods and that people therefore abstained from them.19 For example, there are supposed to be masculine and feminine kinds of food. Furthermore, visual advertising makes it possible to associate certain kinds of foods with images connoting a sublimated sexuality. In a certain sense, advertising eroticizes food and thereby transforms our consciousness of it, bringing it into a new sphere of situations by means of a pseudocausal relationship. Finally, a third area of consciousness is constituted by a whole set of ambiguous values of a somatic as well as psychic nature, clustering around the concept of health. In a mythical way, health is indeed a simple relay midway between the body and the mind; it is the alibi food gives to itself in order to signify materially a pattern of immaterial realities. Health is thus experienced through food only in the form of “conditioning,” which implies that the body is able to cope with a certain number of day-to-day situations. Conditioning originates with the body but goes beyond it. It produces energy (sugar, the “powerhouse of foods,” at least in France, maintains an “uninterrupted flow of energy”; margarine “builds solid muscles”; coffee “dissolves fatigue”);

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alertness (“Be alert with Lustucru”), and relaxation (coffee, mineral water, fruit juices, Coca-Cola, and so on). In this manner, food does indeed retain its physiological function by giving strength to the organism, but this strength is immediately sublimated and placed into a specific situation (I shall come back to this in a moment). This situation may be one of conquest (alertness, aggressiveness) or a response to the stress of modern life (relaxation). No doubt, the existence of such themes is related to the spectacular development of the science of nutrition, to which, as we have seen, one historian unequivocally attributes the evolution of food budgets over the last fifty years. It seems, then, that the acceptance of this new value by the masses has brought about a new phenomenon, which must be the first item of study in any psychosociology of food: it is what might be called nutritional consciousness. In the developed countries, food is henceforth thought out, not by specialists, but by the entire public, even if this thinking is done within a framework of highly mythical notions. Nor is this all. This nutritional rationalizing is aimed in a specific direction. Modern nutritional science (at least according to what can be observed in France) is not bound to any moral values, such as asceticism, wisdom, or purity,20 but on the contrary, to values of power. The energy furnished by a consciously worked out diet is mythically directed, it seems, toward an adaptation of man to the modern world. In the final analysis, therefore, a representation of contemporary existence is implied in the consciousness we have of the function of our food.21 For, as we said before, food serves as a sign not only for themes, but also for situations; and this, all told, means for a way of life that is emphasized, much more than expressed, by it. To eat is a behavior that develops beyond its own ends, replacing, summing up, and signalizing other behaviors, and it is precisely for these reasons that it is a sign. What are these other behaviors? Today, we might say all of them: activity, work, sports, effort, leisure, celebration—every one of these situations is expressed through food. We might almost say that this “polysemia” of food characterizes modernity; in the past, only festive occasions were signalized by food in any positive and organized manner. But today, work also has its own kind of food (on the level of a sign, that is): energy-giving and light food is experienced as the very sign of, rather than only a help toward, participation in modern life. The snack bar not only responds to a new need, it also gives a certain dramatic expression to this need and shows those who frequent it to be modern men, managers who exercise power and control over the extreme rapidity of modern life. Let us say that there is an element of “Napoleonism” in this ritually condensed, light, and rapid kind of eating. On the level of institutions, there is also the business lunch, a very different kind of thing, which has become commercialized in the form of special menus: here, on the contrary, the emphasis is placed on comfort and long discussions; there even remains a trace of the mythical conciliatory power of conviviality. Hence, the business lunch emphasizes the gastronomic, and under certain circumstances traditional, value of the dishes served and uses this value to stimulate the euphoria needed to facilitate the transaction of business. Snack bar and business lunch are two very closely related work situations, yet the food connected with them signalizes their differences in a perfectly readable manner. We can imagine many others that should be catalogued. This much can be said already: today, at least in France, we are witnessing an extraordinary expansion of the areas associated with food: food is becoming incorporated

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into an ever-lengthening list of situations. This adaptation is usually made in the name of hygiene and better living, but in reality, to stress this fact once more, food is also charged with signifying the situation in which it is used. It has a twofold value, being nutrition as well as protocol, and its value as protocol becomes increasingly more important as soon as the basic needs are satisfied, as they are in France. In other words, we might say that in contemporary French society food has a constant tendency to transform itself into situation. There is no better illustration for this trend than the advertising mythology about coffee. For centuries, coffee was considered a stimulant to the nervous system (recall that Michelet claimed that it led to the Revolution), but contemporary advertising, while not expressly denying this traditional function, paradoxically associates it more and more with images of “breaks,” rest, and even relaxation. What is the reason for this shift? It is that coffee is felt to be not so much a substance22 as a circumstance. It is the recognized occasion for interrupting work and using this respite in a precise protocol of taking sustenance. It stands to reason that if this transferral of the food substance to its use becomes really all-encompassing, the power signification of food will be vastly increased. Food, in short, will lose in substance and gain in function; this function will be general and point to activity (such as the business lunch) or to times of rest (such as coffee); but since there is a very marked opposition between work and relaxation, the traditionally festive function of food is apt to disappear gradually, and society will arrange the signifying system of its food around two major focal points: on the one hand, activity (and no longer work), and on the other hand, leisure (no longer celebration). All of this goes to show, if indeed it needs to be shown, to what extent food is an organic system, organically integrated into its specific type of civilization.

Notes This article originally appeared in “Vers une psycho-sociologie de l’alimentation moderne” by Roland Barthes, in Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations no. 5 (September–October 1961), pp. 977–986. Reprinted by permission of Annales. 1. Annual sugar consumption in the United States is 43 kg. per person; in France 25 kg. per person. 2. F. Charny, Le sucre, Collection “Que sais-je?” (Paris: P. U. F., 1950), p. 8. 3. I do not wish to deal here with the problem of sugar “metaphors” or paradoxes, such as the “sweet” rock singers or the sweet milk beverages of certain “toughs.” 4. Motivation studies have shown that food advertisements openly based on enjoyment are apt to fail, since they make the reader feel guilty (J. Marcus-Steiff, Les études de motivation [Paris: Hermann, 1961], pp. 44–45). 5. P. H. Chombart de Lauwe, La vie quotidienne des familles ouvrières (Paris: C.N.R.S., 1956). 6. Marguerite Perrot, Le mode de vie des familles bourgeoises, 1873–1953 (Paris: Colin, 1961). “Since the end of the nineteenth century, there has been a very marked evolution in the dietary habits of the middle-class families we have investigated in this study. This evolution seems related, not to a change in the standard of living, but rather to a transformation of individual tastes under the influence of a greater awareness of the rules of nutrition” (p. 292). 7. J. Marcus-Steiff, Les études de motivation, p. 28. 8. On the latest techniques of investigation, see again J. Marcus-Steiff, Les études de motivation. 9. Yet on this point alone, there are many known facts that should be assembled and systematized: cocktail parties, formal dinners, degrees and kinds of display by way of food according to the different social groups. 10. R. Barthes, “Le bleu est à la mode cette année: Note sur la recherche des unités signifiantes dans le vêtement de mode,” Revue française de sociologie 1 (1960): 147–162. 11. I am using the word structure in the sense that it has in linguistics: “an autonomous entity of internal dependencies” (L. Hjelnislev, Essais linguistiques [Copenhagen, 1959], p. 1).

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12. 13. 14. 15.

P. F. Lazarsfeld, “The Psychological Aspect of Market Research,” Harvard Business Review 13 (1934): 54–71. C. Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale (Paris: Plon, 1958), p. 99. H. Jeanmaire, Dionysos (Paris: Payot), p. 510. In a semantic analysis, vegetarianism, for example (at least at the level of specialized restaurants), would appear as an attempt to copy the appearance of meat dishes by means of a series of artifices that are somewhat similar to “costume jewelry” in clothing, at least the jewelry that is meant to be seen as such. The idea of social display must not be associated purely and simply with vanity; the analysis of motivation, when conducted by indirect questioning, reveals that worry about appearances is part of an extremely subtle reaction and that social strictures are very strong, even with respect to food. The expression cuisine bourgeoise, used at first in a literal, then in a metaphoric way, seems to be gradually disappearing while the “peasant stew” is periodically featured in the photographic pages of the major ladies’ magazines. The exotic nature of food can, of course, be a value, but in the French public at large, it seems limited to coffee (tropical) and pasta (Italian). This would be the place to ask just what is meant by “strong” food. Obviously, there is no psychic quality inherent in the thing itself. A food becomes “masculine” as soon as women, children, and old people, for nutritional (and thus fairly historical) reasons, do not consume it. We need only to compare the development of vegetarianism in England and France. Right now, in France, there is a conflict between traditional (gastronomic) and modern (nutritional) values. It seems that this stimulating, re-energizing power is now assigned to sugar, at least in France.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

3 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste* Pierre Bourdieu (tr. Richard Nice)

Three Styles of Distinction The basic opposition between the tastes of luxury and the tastes of necessity is specified in as many oppositions as there are different ways of asserting one’s distinction vis-à-vis the working class and its primary needs, or—which amounts to the same thing—different powers whereby necessity can be kept at a distance. Thus, within the dominant class, one can, for the sake of simplicity, distinguish three structures of the consumption distributed under three items: food, culture and presentation (clothing, beauty care, toiletries, domestic servants). These structures take strictly opposite forms—like the structures of their capital—among the teachers as against the industrial and commercial employers (see Table 3.1). Whereas the latter have exceptionally high expenditure on food (37 percent of the budget), low cultural costs and medium spending on presentation and representation, the former, whose total spending is lower on average, have low expenditure on food (relatively less than manual workers), limited expenditure on presentation (though their expenditure on health is one of the highest) and relatively high expenditure on culture (books, papers, entertainments, sport, toys, music, radio and record-player). Opposed to both these groups are the members of the professions, who devote the same proportion of their budget to food as the teachers (24.4 percent), but out of much greater total expenditure (57,122 francs as against 40,884 francs), and who spend much more on presentation and representation than all other fractions, especially if the costs of domestic service are included, whereas their cultural expenditure is lower than that of the teachers (or even the engineers and senior executives, who are situated between the teachers and the professionals, though nearer the latter, for almost all items). The system of differences becomes clearer when one looks more closely at the patterns of spending on food. In this respect the industrial and commercial employers differ markedly from the professionals, and a fortiori from the teachers, by virtue of the importance they give to cereal-based products (especially cakes and pastries), wine, meat preserves (foie gras, etc.) and game, and their relatively low spending on meat, fresh fruit and vegetables. The teachers, whose food purchases are almost *

Originally published 1979

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Table 3.1 Yearly spending by teachers, professionals and industrial and commercial employers, 1972.

Type of spending

% of total

Francs

% of total

Industrial and commercial employers Francs % of total

24.4 12.0 4.3

13,956 12,680 1,298

24.4 22.2 2.3

16,578 5,616 574

Teachers (higher and secondary) Francs

9,969 Fooda Presentationb 4,912 1,753 Culturec

Professionals

37.4 12.7 1.3

a

Includes restaurant or canteen meals. Clothes, shoes, repairs and cleaning, toiletries, hairdressing, domestic servants. c Books, newspapers and magazines, stationery, records, sport, toys, music, entertainments. Source: C.S. Ill (1972). b

identically structured to those of office workers, spend more than all other fractions on bread, milk products, sugar, fruit preserves and non-alcoholic drinks, less on wine and spirits and distinctly less than the professions on expensive products such as meat— especially the most expensive meats, such as mutton and lamb—and fresh fruit and vegetables. The members of the professions are mainly distinguished by the high proportion of their spending which goes on expensive products, particularly meat (18.3 percent of their food budget), and especially the most expensive meat (veal, lamb, mutton), fresh fruit and vegetables, fish and shellfish, cheese and aperitifs.1 Thus, when one moves from the manual workers to the industrial and commercial employers, through foremen, craftsmen and small shopkeepers, economic constraints tend to relax without any fundamental change in the pattern of spending (see Figure 3.1). The opposition between the two extremes is established here between the poor and the rich (nouveau riche), between la bouffe and la grande bouffe 2 the food consumed is increasingly rich (both in cost and in calories) and increasingly heavy (game, foie gras). By contrast, the taste of the professionals or senior executives defines the popular taste, by negation, as the taste for the heavy, the fat and the coarse, by tending towards the light, the refined and the delicate. The disappearance of economic constraints is accompanied by a strengthening of the social censorships which forbid coarseness and fatness, in favour of slimness and distinction. The taste for rare, aristocratic foods points to a traditional cuisine, rich in expensive or rare products (fresh vegetables, meat). Finally, the teachers, richer in cultural capital than in economic capital, and therefore inclined to ascetic consumption in all areas, pursue originality at the lowest economic cost and go in for exoticism (Italian, Chinese cooking etc.)3 and culinary populism (peasant dishes). They are thus almost consciously opposed to the (new) rich with their rich food, the buyers and sellers of grosse bouffe, the ‘fat cats’,4 gross in body and mind, who have the economic means to flaunt, with an arrogance perceived as ‘vulgar’, a life-style which remains very close to that of the working classes as regards economic and cultural consumption. Eating habits, especially when represented solely by the produce consumed, cannot of course be considered independently of the whole life-style. The most obvious reason for this is that the taste for particular dishes (of which the statistical

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33

Figure 3.1 The food space.

shopping-basket gives only the vaguest idea) is associated, through preparation and cooking, with a whole conception of the domestic economy and of the division of labour between the sexes. A taste for elaborate casserole dishes (pot-au-feu, blanquette, daube), which demand a big investment of time and interest, is linked to a traditional conception of woman’s role. Thus there is a particularly strong opposition in this respect between the working classes and the dominated fractions of the dominant class, in which the women, whose labour has a high market value (and who, perhaps as a result, have a higher sense of their own value) tend to devote their spare time rather to child care and the transmission of cultural capital, and to contest the traditional division of domestic labour. The aim of saving time and labour in preparation combines with the search for light, low-calorie products, and points towards grilled meat and fish, raw vegetables (‘salades composées’), frozen foods, yogurt and other milk products, all of which are diametrically opposed to popular dishes, the most typical of which is pot-au-feu, made with cheap meat that is boiled (as opposed to grilled or roasted), a method of cooking that chiefly demands time. It is no accident that this form of cooking symbolizes one state of female existence and of the sexual

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division of the labour (a woman entirely devoted to housework is called ‘pot-au-feu’), just as the slippers put on before dinner symbolize the complementary male role. Tastes in food also depend on the idea each class has of the body and of the effects of food on the body, that is, on its strength, health and beauty; and on the categories it uses to evaluate these effects, some of which may be important for one class and ignored by another, and which the different classes may rank in very different ways. Thus, whereas the working classes are more attentive to the strength of the (male) body than its shape, and tend to go for products that are both cheap and nutritious, the professions prefer products that are tasty, health-giving, light and not fattening. Taste, a class culture turned into nature, that is, embodied, helps to shape the class body. It is an incorporated principle of classification which governs all forms of incorporation, choosing and modifying everything that the body ingests and digests and assimilates, physiologically and psychologically. It follows that the body is the most indisputable materialization of class taste, which it manifests in several ways. It does this first in the seemingly most natural features of the body, the dimensions (volume, height, weight) and shapes (round or square, stiff or supple, straight or curved) of its visible forms, which express in countless ways a whole relation to the body, i.e., a way of treating it, caring for it, feeding it, maintaining it, which reveals the deepest dispositions of the habitus. It is in fact through preferences with regard to food which may be perpetuated beyond their social conditions of production (as, in other areas, an accent, a walk etc.),5 and also, of course, through the uses of the body in work and leisure which are bound up with them, that the class distribution of bodily properties is determined. The quasi-conscious representation of the approved form of the perceived body, and in particular its thinness or fatness, is not the only mediation through which the social definition of appropriate foods is established. At a deeper level, the whole body schema, in particular the physical approach to the act of eating, governs the selection of certain foods. For example, in the working classes, fish tends to be regarded as an unsuitable food for men, not only because it is a light food, insufficiently ‘filling’, which would only be cooked for health reasons, i.e., for invalids and children, but also because, like fruit (except bananas) it is one of the ‘fiddly’ things which a man’s hands cannot cope with and which make him childlike (the woman, adopting a maternal role, as in all similar cases, will prepare the fish on the plate or peel the pear); but above all, it is because fish has to be eaten in a way which totally contradicts the masculine way of eating, that is, with restraint, in small mouthfuls, chewed gently, with the front of the mouth, on the tips of the teeth (because of the bones). The whole masculine identity—what is called virility—is involved in these two ways of eating, nibbling and picking, as befits a woman, or with whole-hearted male gulps and mouthfuls, just as it is involved in the two (perfectly homologous) ways of talking, with the front of the mouth or the whole mouth, especially the back of the mouth, the throat (in accordance with the opposition, noted in an earlier study, between the manners symbolized by la bouche and la gueule).6 This opposition can be found in each of the uses of the body, especially in the most insignificant-looking ones, which, as such, are predisposed to serve as ‘memory joggers’ charged with the group’s deepest values, its most fundamental ‘beliefs’. It would be easy to show, for example, that Kleenex tissues, which have to be used delicately, with a little sniff from the tip of the nose, are to the big cotton handkerchief,

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which is blown into sharply and loudly, with the eyes closed and the nose held tightly, as repressed laughter is to a belly laugh, with wrinkled nose, wide-open mouth and deep breathing (‘doubled up with laughter’), as if to amplify to the utmost an experience which will not suffer containment, not least because it has to be shared, and therefore clearly manifested for the benefit of others. And the practical philosophy of the male body as a sort of power, big and strong, with enormous, imperative, brutal needs, which is asserted in every male posture, especially when eating, is also the principle of the division of foods between the sexes, a division which both sexes recognize in their practices and their language. It behooves a man to drink and eat more, and to eat and drink stronger things. Thus, men will have two rounds of aperitifs (more on special occasions), big ones in big glasses (the success of Ricard or Pernod is no doubt partly due to its being a drink both strong and copious—not a dainty ‘thimbleful’), and they leave the tit-bits (savoury biscuits, peanuts) to the children and the women, who have a small measure (not enough to ‘get tipsy’) of homemade aperitif (for which they swap recipes). Similarly, among the hors d’oeuvres, the charcuterie is more for the men, and later the cheese, especially if it is strong, whereas the crudités (raw vegetables) are more for the women, like the salad; and these affinities are marked by taking a second helping or sharing what is left over. Meat, the nourishing food par excellence, strong and strong-making, giving vigour, blood, and health, is the dish for the men, who take a second helping, whereas the women are satisfied with a small portion. It is not that they are stinting themselves; they really don’t want what others might need, especially the men, the natural meateaters, and they derive a sort of authority from what they do not see as a privation. Besides, they don’t have a taste for men’s food, which is reputed to be harmful when eaten to excess (for example, a surfeit of meat can ‘turn the blood’, over-excite, bring you out in spots etc.) and may even arouse a sort of disgust. Strictly biological differences are underlined and symbolically accentuated by differences in bearing, differences in gesture, posture and behaviour which express a whole relationship to the social world. To these are added all the deliberate modifications of appearance, especially by use of the set of marks—cosmetic (hairstyle, makeup, beard, moustache, whiskers etc.) or vestimentary—which, because they depend on the economic and cultural means that can be invested in them, function as social markers deriving their meaning and value from their position in the system of distinctive signs which they constitute and which is itself homologous with the system of social positions. The sign-bearing, sign-wearing body is also a producer of signs which are physically marked by the relationship to the body: thus the valorization of virility, expressed in a use of the mouth or a pitch of the voice, can determine the whole of working-class pronunciation. The body, a social product which is the only tangible manifestation of the ‘person’, is commonly perceived as the most natural expression of innermost nature. There are no merely ‘physical’ facial signs; the colour and thickness of lipstick, or expressions, as well as the shape of the face or the mouth, are immediately read as indices of a ‘moral’ physiognomy, socially characterized, i.e., of a ‘vulgar’ or ‘distinguished’ mind, naturally ‘natural’ or naturally ‘cultivated’. The signs constituting the perceived body, cultural products which differentiate groups by their degree of culture, that is, their distance from nature, seem grounded in nature. The legitimate use of the body is spontaneously perceived as an index of moral

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uprightness, so that its opposite, a ‘natural’ body, is seen as an index of laisser-aller (‘letting oneself go’), a culpable surrender to facility. Thus one can begin to map out a universe of class bodies, which (biological accidents apart) tends to reproduce in its specific logic the universe of the social structure. It is no accident that bodily properties are perceived through social systems of classification which are not independent of the distribution of these properties among the social classes. The prevailing taxonomies tend to rank and contrast the properties most frequent among the dominant (i.e., the rarest ones) and those most frequent among the dominated.7 The social representation of his own body which each agent has to reckon with,8 from the very beginning, in order to build up his subjective image of his body and his bodily hexis, is thus obtained by applying a social system of classification based on the same principle as the social products to which it is applied. Thus, bodies would have every likelihood of receiving a value strictly corresponding to the positions of their owners in the distribution of the other fundamental properties— but for the fact that the logic of social heredity sometimes endows those least endowed in all other respects with the rarest bodily properties, such as beauty (sometimes ‘fatally’ attractive, because it threatens the other hierarchies), and, conversely, sometimes denies the ‘high and mighty’ the bodily attributes of their position, such as height or beauty.

Unpretentious Or Uncouth? It is clear that tastes in food cannot be considered in complete independence of the other dimensions of the relationship to the world, to others and to one’s own body, through which the practical philosophy of each class is enacted. To demonstrate this, one would have to make a systematic comparison of the working-class and bourgeois ways of treating food, of serving, presenting and offering it, which are infinitely more revelatory than even the nature of the products involved (especially since most surveys of consumption ignore differences in quality). The analysis is a difficult one, because each life-style can only really be constructed in relation to the other, which is its objective and subjective negation, so that the meaning of behaviour is totally reversed depending on which point of view is adopted and on whether the common words which have to be used to name the conduct (e.g., ‘manners’) are invested with popular or bourgeois connotations. Plain speaking, plain eating: the working-class meal is characterized by plenty (which does not exclude restrictions and limits) and above all by freedom. ‘Elastic’ and ‘abundant’ dishes are brought to the table—soups or sauces, pasta or potatoes (almost always included among the vegetables)—and served with a ladle or spoon, to avoid too much measuring and counting, in contrast to everything that has to be cut and divided, such as roasts.9 This impression of abundance, which is the norm on special occasions, and always applies, so far as is possible, for the men, whose plates are filled twice (a privilege which marks a boy’s accession to manhood), is often balanced, on ordinary occasions, by restrictions which generally apply to the women, who will share one portion between two, or eat the left-overs of the previous day; a girl’s accession to womanhood is marked by doing without. It is part of men’s status

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to eat and to eat well (and also to drink well); it is particularly insisted that they should eat, on the grounds that ‘it won’t keep’, and there is something suspect about a refusal. On Sundays, while the women are on their feet, busily serving, clearing the table, washing up, the men remain seated, still eating and drinking. These strongly marked differences of social status (associated with sex and age) are accompanied by no practical differentiation (such as the bourgeois division between the dining room and the kitchen, where the servants eat and sometimes the children), and strict sequencing of the meal tends to be ignored. Everything may be put on the table at much the same time (which also saves walking), so that the women may have reached the dessert, and also the children, who will take their plates and watch television, while the men are still eating the main dish and the ‘lad’, who has arrived late, is swallowing his soup. This freedom, which may be perceived as disorder or slovenliness, is adapted to its function. Firstly, it is labour-saving, which is seen as an advantage. Because men take no part in housework, not least because the women would not allow it—it would be a dishonour to see men step outside their rôle—every economy of effort is welcome. Thus, when the coffee is served, a single spoon may be passed around to stir it. But these short cuts are only permissible because one is and feels at home, among the family, where ceremony would be an affectation. For example, to save washing up, the dessert may be handed out on improvised plates torn from the cake-box (with a joke about ‘taking the liberty’, to mark the transgression), and the neighbour invited in for a meal will also receive his piece of cardboard (offering a plate would exclude him) as a sign of familiarity. Similarly, the plates are not changed between dishes. The soup plate, wiped with bread, can be used right through the meal. The hostess will certainly offer to ‘change the plates’, pushing back her chair with one hand and reaching with the other for the plate next to her, but everyone will protest (‘It all gets mixed up inside you’) and if she were to insist it would look as if she wanted to show off her crockery (which she is allowed to if it is a new present) or to treat her guests as strangers, as is sometimes deliberately done to intruders or ‘scroungers’ who never return the invitation. These unwanted guests may be frozen out by changing their plates despite their protests, not laughing at their jokes, or scolding the children for their behaviour (‘No, no, we don’t mind’, say the guests; ‘They ought to know better by now’, the parents respond). The common root of all these ‘liberties’ is no doubt the sense that at least there will not be self-imposed controls, constraints and restrictions—especially not in eating, a primary need and a compensation—and especially not in the heart of domestic life, the one realm of freedom, when everywhere else, and at all other times, necessity prevails. In opposition to the free-and-easy working-class meal, the bourgeoisie is concerned to eat with all due form. Form is first of all a matter of rhythm, which implies expectations, pauses, restraints; waiting until the last person served has started to eat, taking modest helpings, not appearing over-eager. A strict sequence is observed and all coexistence of dishes which the sequence separates, fish and meat, cheese and dessert, is excluded: for example, before the dessert is served, everything left on the table, even the salt-cellar, is removed, and the crumbs are swept up. This extension of rigorous rules into everyday life (the bourgeois male shaves and dresses first thing every morning, and not just to ‘go out’), refusing the division between home and the exterior, the quotidian and the extra-quotidian, is not explained solely by the presence of

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strangers—servants and guests—in the familiar family world. It is the expression of a habitus of order, restraint and propriety which may not be abdicated. The relation to food—the primary need and pleasure—is only one dimension of the bourgeois relation to the social world. The opposition between the immediate and the deferred, the easy and the difficult, substance (or function) and form, which is exposed in a particularly striking fashion in bourgeois ways of eating, is the basis of all aestheticization of practice and every aesthetic. Through all the forms and formalisms imposed on the immediate appetite, what is demanded—and inculcated—is not only a disposition to discipline food consumption by a conventional structuring which is also a gentle, indirect, invisible censorship (quite different from enforced privations) and which is an element in an art of living (correct eating, for example, is a way of paying homage to one’s hosts and to the mistress of the house, a tribute to her care and effort). It is also a whole relationship to animal nature, to primary needs and the populace who indulge them without restraint; it is a way of denying the meaning and primary function of consumption, which are essentially common, by making the meal a social ceremony, an affirmation of ethical tone and aesthetic refinement. The manner of presenting and consuming the food, the organization of the meal and setting of the places, strictly differentiated according to the sequence of dishes and arranged to please the eye, the presentation of the dishes, considered as much in terms of shape and colour (like works of art) as of their consumable substance, the etiquette governing posture and gesture, ways of serving oneself and others, of using the different utensils, the seating plan, strictly but discreetly hierarchical, the censorship of all bodily manifestations of the act or pleasure of eating (such as noise or haste), the very refinement of the things consumed, with quality more important than quantity—this whole commitment to stylization tends to shift the emphasis from substance and function to form and manner, and so to deny the crudely material reality of the act of eating and of the things consumed, or, which amounts to the same thing, the basely material vulgarity of those who indulge in the immediate satisfactions of food and drink.10 Given the basic opposition between form and substance, one could re-generate each of the oppositions between the two antagonistic approaches to the treatment of food and the act of eating. In one case, food is claimed as a material reality, a nourishing substance which sustains the body and gives strength (hence the emphasis on heavy, fatty, strong foods, of which the paradigm is pork—fatty and salty—the antithesis of fish—light, lean and bland); in the other, the priority given to form (the shape of the body, for example) and social form, formality, puts the pursuit of strength and substance in the background and identifies true freedom with the elective asceticism of a self-imposed rule. And it could be shown that two antagonistic world views, two worlds, two representations of human excellence are contained in this matrix. Substance—or matter—is what is substantial, not only ‘filling’ but also real, as opposed to all appearances, all the fine words and empty gestures that ‘butter no parsnips’ and are, as the phrase goes, purely symbolic; reality, as against sham, imitation, windowdressing; the little eating-house with its marble-topped tables and paper napkins where you get an honest square meal and aren’t ‘paying for the wallpaper’ as in fancy restaurants; being, as against seeming, nature and the natural, simplicity (pot-luck, ‘take it as it comes’, ‘no standing on ceremony’), as against embarrassment, mincing and posturing, airs and graces, which are always suspected of being a substitute for

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substance, i.e., for sincerity, for feeling, for what is felt and proved in actions; it is the free-speech and language of the heart which make the true ‘nice guy’, blunt, straightforward, unbending, honest, genuine, ‘straight down the line’ and ‘straight as a die’, as opposed to everything that is pure form, done only for form’s sake; it is freedom and the refusal of complications, as opposed to respect for all the forms and formalities spontaneously perceived as instruments of distinction and power. On these moralities, these world views, there is no neutral viewpoint; what for some is shameless and slovenly, for others is straightforward, unpretentious; familiarity is for some the most absolute form of recognition, the abdication of all distance, a trusting openness, a relation of equal to equal; for others, who shun familiarity, it is an unseemly liberty.

Notes 1. The oppositions are much less clear cut in the middle classes although homologous difference are found between primary teachers and office workers on the one hand and shopkeepers on the other. 2. La bouffe: ‘grub’, ‘nosh’; grande bouffe: ‘blow-out’ (translator). 3. The preference for foreign restaurants—Italian, Chinese, Japanese and, to a lesser extent, Russian—rises with level in the social hierarchy. The only exceptions are Spanish restaurants, which are associated with a more popular form of tourism, and North African restaurants, which are most favoured by junior executives. 4. Les gross: the rich; grosse bouffe: bulk food (cf. grossiste: wholesaler; and English ‘grocer’). See also note 2 above (translator). 5. That is why the body designates not only present position but also trajectory. 6. In ‘The Economics of Linguistic Exchanges’, Social Science Information, 26 (December 1977), 645–668, Bourdieu develops the opposition between two ways of speaking, rooted in two relations to the body and the world, which have a lexical reflection in the many idioms based on two words for ‘mouth’: la bouche and la gueule. La bouche is the ‘standard’ word for the mouth; but in opposition to la gueule—a slang or ‘vulgar’ word except when applied to animals—it tends to be restricted to the lips, whereas la gueule can include the whole face or the throat. Most of the idioms using la bouche imply fastidiousness, effeminacy or disdain; those with la gueule connote vigour, strength or violence (translator’s note). 7. This means that the taxonomies applied to the perceived body (fat/thin, strong/weak, big/small etc.) are, as always, at once arbitrary (e.g., the ideal female body may be fat or thin in different economic and social contexts) and necessary, i.e., grounded in the specific reason of a given social order. 8. More than ever, the French possessive pronouns—which do not mark the owner’s gender—ought to be translated ‘his or her’. The ‘sexism’ of the text results from the male translator’s reluctance to defy the dominant use of a sexist symbolic system (translator). 9. One could similarly contrast the bowl, which is generously filled and held two-handed for unpretentious drinking, and the cup, into which a little is poured, and more later (‘Would you care for a little more coffee?’), and which is held between two fingers and sipped from. 10. Formality is a way of denying the truth of the social world and of social relations. Just as popular ‘functionalism’ is refused as regards food, so too there is a refusal of the realistic vision which leads the working classes to accept social exchanges for what they are (and, for example, to say, without cynicism, of someone who has done a favour or rendered a service, ‘She knows I’ll pay her back’). Suppressing avowal of the calculation which pervades social relations, there is a striving to see presents, received or given, as ‘pure’ testimonies of friendship, respect, affection, and equally ‘pure’ manifestations of generosity and moral worth.

4 The Culinary Triangle* Claude Lévi-Strauss

Linguistics has familiarized us with concepts like “minimum vocalism” and “minimum consonantism” which refer to systems of oppositions between phonemes of so elementary a nature that every known or unknown language supposes them; they are in fact also the first oppositions to appear in the child’s language, and the last to disappear in the speech of people affected by certain forms of aphasia. The two concepts are moreover not really distinct, since, according to linguists, for every language the fundamental opposition is that between consonant and vowel. The subsequent distinctions among vowels and among consonants result from the application to these derived areas of such contrasts as compact and diffuse, open and closed, acute and grave. Hence, in all the languages of the world, complex systems of oppositions among phonemes do nothing but elaborate in multiple directions a simpler system common to them all: the contrast between consonant and vowel which, by the workings of a double opposition between compact and diffuse, acute and grave, produces on the one hand what has been called the “vowel triangle”:1 a u

i

and on the other hand the “consonant triangle”: k p

t

It would seem that the methodological principle which inspires such distinctions is transposable to other domains, notably that of cooking which, it has never been sufficiently emphasized, is with language a truly universal form of human activity: if there is no society without a language, nor is there any which does not cook in some manner at least some of its food. We will start from the hypothesis that this activity supposes a system which is located—according to very difficult modalities in function of the particular cultures *

Originally published 1966

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one wants to consider—within a triangular semantic field whose three points correspond respectively to the categories of the raw, the cooked and the rotted. It is clear that in respect to cooking the raw constitutes the unmarked pole, while the other two poles are strongly marked, but in different directions: indeed, the cooked is a cultural transformation of the raw, whereas the rotted is a natural transformation. Underlying our original triangle, there is hence a double opposition between elaborated/unelaborated on the one hand, and culture/nature on the other. No doubt these notions constitute empty forms: they teach us nothing about the cooking of any specific society, since only observation can tell us what each one means by “raw,” “cooked” and “rotted,” and we can suppose that it will not be the same for all. Italian cuisine has recently taught us to eat crudités rawer than any in traditional French cooking, thereby determining an enlargement of the category of the raw. And we know from some incidents that followed the Allied landings in 1944 that American soldiers conceived the category of the rotted in more extended fashion than we, since the odor given off by Norman cheese dairies seemed to them the smell of corpses, and occasionally prompted them to destroy the dairies. Consequently, the culinary triangle delimits a semantic field, but from the outside. This is moreover true of the linguistic triangles as well, since there are no phonemes a, i, u (or k, p, t) in general, and these ideal positions must be occupied, in each language, by the particular phonemes whose distinctive natures are closest to those for which we first gave a symbolic representation: thus we have a sort of concrete triangle inscribed within the abstract triangle. In any cuisine, nothing is simply cooked, but must be cooked in one fashion or another. Nor is there any condition of pure rawness: only certain foods can really be eaten raw, and then only if they have been selected, washed, pared or cut, or even seasoned. Rotting, too, is only allowed to take place in certain specific ways, either spontaneous or controlled. Let us now consider, for those cuisines whose categories are relatively well-known, the different modes of cooking. There are certainly two principal modes, attested in innumerable societies by myths and rites which emphasize their contrast: the roasted and the boiled. In what does their difference consist? Roasted food is directly exposed to the fire; with the fire it realizes an unmediated conjunction, whereas boiled food is doubly mediated, by the water in which it is immersed, and by the receptacle that holds both water and food. On two grounds, then, one can say that the roasted is on the side of nature, the boiled on the side of culture: literally, because boiling requires the use of a receptacle, a cultural object; symbolically, in as much as culture is a mediation of the relations between man and the world, and boiling demands a mediation (by water) of the relation between food and fire which is absent in roasting. The natives of New Caledonia feel this contrast with particular vividness: “Formerly,” relates M. J. Barrau, “they only grilled and roasted, they only ‘burned’ as the natives now say . . . The use of a pot and the consumption of boiled tubers are looked upon with pride . . . as a proof of . . . civilization.” A text of Aristotle, cited by Salomon Reinach (Cultes, Mythes, Religions, V, p. 63), indicates that the Greeks also thought that “in ancient times, men roasted everything.” Behind the opposition between roasted and boiled, then, we do in fact find, as we postulated at the outset, the opposition between nature and culture. It remains to

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discover the other fundamental opposition which we put forth: that between elaborated and unelaborated. In this respect, observation establishes a double affinity: the roasted with the raw, that is to say the unelaborated, and the boiled with the rotted, which is one of the two modes of the elaborated. The affinity of the roasted with the raw comes from the fact that it is never uniformly cooked, whether this be on all sides, or on the outside and the inside. A myth of the Wyandot Indians well evokes what might be called the paradox of the roasted: the Creator struck fire, and ordered the first man to skewer a piece of meat on a stick and roast it. But man was so ignorant that he left the meat on the fire until it was black on one side, and still raw on the other . . . Similarly, the Poconachi of Mexico interpret the roasted as a compromise between the raw and the burned. After the universal fire, they relate, that which had not been burned became white, that which had been burned turned black, and what had only been singed turned red. This explanation accounts for the various colors of corn and beans. In British Guiana, the Waiwai sorcerer must respect two taboos, one directed at roast meat, the other red paint, and this again puts the roasted on the side of blood and the raw. If boiling is superior to roasting, notes Aristotle, it is because it takes away the rawness of meat, “roast meats being rawer and drier than boiled meats” (quoted by Reinach, loc. cit.). As for the boiled, its affinity with the rotted is attested in numerous European languages by such locutions as pot pourri, olla podrida, denoting different sorts of meat seasoned and cooked together with vegetables; and in German, zu Brei zerkochetes Fleisch, “meat rotted from cooking.” American Indian languages emphasize the same affinity, and it is significant that this should be so especially in those tribes that show a strong taste for gamey meat, to the point of preferring, for example, the flesh of a dead animal whose carcass has been washed down by the stream to that of a freshly killed buffalo. In the Dakota language, the same stem connotes putrefaction and the fact of boiling pieces of meat together with some additive. These distinctions are far from exhausting the richness and complexity of the contrast between roasted and boiled. The boiled is cooked within a receptacle, while the roasted is cooked from without: the former thus evokes the concave, the latter the convex. Also the boiled can most often be ascribed to what might be called an “endo-cuisine,” prepared for domestic use, destined to a small closed group, while the roasted belongs to “exo-cuisine,” that which one offers to guests. Formerly in France, boiled chicken was for the family meal, while roasted meat was for the banquet (and marked its culminating point, served as it was after the boiled meats and vegetables of the first course, and accompanied by “extraordinary fruits” such as melons, oranges, olives and capers). The same opposition is found, differently formulated, in exotic societies. The extremely primitive Guayaki of Paraguay roast all their game, except when they prepare the meat destined for the rites which determine the name of a new child: this meat must be boiled. The Caingang of Brazil prohibit boiled meat for the widow and widower, and also for anyone who has murdered an enemy. In all these cases, prescription of the boiled accompanies a tightening, prescription of the roasted a loosening of familial or social ties. Following this line of argument, one could infer that cannibalism (which by definition is an endo-cuisine in respect to the human race) ordinarily employs boiling

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rather than roasting, and that the cases where bodies are roasted—cases vouched for by ethnographic literature—must be more frequent in exo-cannibalism (eating the body of an enemy) than in endo-cannibalism (eating a relative). It would be interesting to carry out statistical research on this point. Sometimes, too, as is often the case in America, and doubtless elsewhere, the roasted and the boiled will have respective affinities with life in the bush (outside the village community) and sedentary life (inside the village). From this comes a subsidiary association of the roasted with men, the boiled with women. This is notably the case with the Trumai, the Yagua and the Jivaro of South America, and with the Ingalik of Alaska. Or else the relation is reversed: the Assiniboin, on the northern plains of North America, reserve the preparation of boiled food for men engaged in a war expedition, while the women in the villages never use receptacles, and only roast their meat. There are some indications that in certain Eastern European countries one can find the same inversion of affinities between roasted and boiled and feminine and masculine. The existence of these inverted systems naturally poses a problem, and leads one to think that the axes of opposition are still more numerous than one suspected, and that the peoples where these inversions exist refer to axes different from those we at first singled out. For example, boiling conserves entirely the meat and its juices, whereas roasting is accompanied by destruction and loss. One connotes economy, the other prodigality; the former is plebeian, the latter aristocratic. This aspect takes on primary importance in societies which prescribe differences of status among individuals or groups. In the ancient Maori, says Prytz-Johansen, a noble could himself roast his food, but he avoided all contact with the steaming oven, which was left to the slaves and women of low birth. Thus, when pots and pans were introduced by the whites, they seemed infected utensils; a striking inversion of the attitude which we remarked in the New Caledonians. These differences in appraisal of the boiled and the roasted, dependent on the democratic or aristocratic perspective of the group, can also be found in the Western tradition. The democratic Encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert goes in for a veritable apology of the boiled: “Boiled meat is one of the most succulent and nourishing foods known to man. . . One could say that boiled meat is to other dishes as bread is to other kinds of nourishment” (Article “Bouilli”). A half-century later, the dandy BrillatSavarin will take precisely the opposite view: “We professors never eat boiled meat out of respect for principle, and because we have pronounced ex cathedra this incontestable truth: boiled meat is flesh without its juice. . . This truth is beginning to become accepted, and boiled meat has disappeared in truly elegant dinners; it has been replaced by a roast filet, a turbot, or a matelote” (Physiologie du goût, VI, 2). Therefore if the Czechs see in boiled meat a man’s nourishment, it is perhaps because their traditional society was of a much more democratic character than that of their Slavonic and Polish neighbors. One could interpret in the same manner distinctions made—respectively by the Greeks, and the Romans and the Hebrews—on the basis of attitudes toward roasted and boiled, distinctions which have been noted by M. Piganiol in a recent article (“Le rôti et le bouilli,” A Pedro Bosch-Gimpera, Mexico City, 1963). Other societies make use of the same opposition in a completely different direction. Because boiling takes place without loss of substance, and within a complete

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enclosure, it is eminently apt to symbolize cosmic totality. In Guiana as well as in the Great Lakes region, it is thought that if the pot where game is boiling were to overflow even a little bit, all the animals of the species being cooked would migrate, and the hunter would catch nothing more. The boiled is life, the roasted death. Does not world folklore offer innumerable examples of the cauldron of immortality? But there has never been a spit of immortality. A Cree Indian rite admirably expresses this character of cosmic totality ascribed to boiled food. According to them, the first man was commanded by the Creator to boil the first berries gathered each season. The cup containing the berries was first presented to the sun, that it might fulfill its office and ripen the berries; then the cup was lifted to the thunder, whence rain is expected; finally the cup was lowered toward the earth, in prayer that it bring forth its fruits. Hence we rejoin the symbolism of the most distant Indo-European past, as it has been reconstructed by Georges Dumézil: “To Mitra belongs that which breaks of itself, that which is cooked in steam, that which is well sacrificed, milk . . . and to Varuna that which is cut with the axe, that which is snatched from the fire, that which is ill-sacrificed, the intoxicating soma” (Les dieux des Germains, p. 60). It is not a little surprising—but highly significant—to find intact in genial mid-nineteenth-century philosophers of cuisine a consciousness of the same contrast between knowledge and inspiration, serenity and violence, measure and lack of measure, still symbolized by the opposition of the boiled and the roasted: “One becomes a cook but one is born a roaster” (Brillat-Savarin); “Roasting is at the same time nothing, and an immensity” (Marquis de Cussy). Within the basic culinary triangle formed by the categories of raw, cooked and rotted, we have, then, inscribed two terms which are situated: one, the roasted, in the vicinity of the raw; the other, the boiled, near the rotted. We are lacking a third term, illustrating the concrete form of cooking showing the greatest affinity to the abstract category of the cooked. This form seems to us to be smoking, which like roasting implies an unmediated operation (without receptacle and without water) but differs from roasting in that it is, like boiling, a slow form of cooking, both uniform and penetrating in depth. Let us try to determine the place of this new term in our system of opposition. In the technique of smoking, as in that of roasting, nothing is interposed between meat and fire except air. But the difference between the two techniques comes from the fact that in one the layer of air is reduced to a minimum, whereas in the other it is brought to a maximum. To smoke game, the American Indians (in whose culinary system smoking occupies a particularly important place) construct a wooden frame (a buccan) about five feet high, on top of which they place the meat, while underneath they light a very small fire which is kept burning for forty-eight hours or more. Hence for one constant—the presence of a layer of air—we note two differentials which are expressed by the opposition close/distant and rapid/slow. A third differential is created by the absence of a utensil in the case of roasting (any stick doing the work of a spit), since the buccan is a constructed framework, that is, a cultural object. In this last respect, smoking is related to boiling, which also requires a cultural means, the receptacle. But between these two utensils a remarkable difference appears, or more accurately, is instituted by the culture precisely in order, it seems, to create the opposition, which without such a difference might have remained too ill-defined

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to take on meaning. Pots and pans are carefully cared for and preserved utensils, which one cleans and puts away after use in order to make them serve their purpose as many times as possible; but the buccan must be destroyed immediately after use, otherwise the animal will avenge itself, and come in turn to smoke the huntsman. Such, at least, is the belief of those same natives of Guiana whose other symmetrical belief we have already noted: that a poorly conducted boiling, during which the cauldron overflowed, would bring the inverse punishment, flight of the quarry, which the huntsman would no longer succeed in overtaking. On the other hand, as we have already indicated, it is clear that the boiled is opposed both to the smoked and the roasted in respect to the presence or absence of water. But let us come back for a moment to the opposition between a perishable and a durable utensil which we found in Guiana in connection with smoking and boiling. It will allow us to resolve an apparent difficulty in our system, one which doubtless has not escaped the reader. At the start we characterized one of the oppositions between the roasted and the boiled as reflecting that between nature and culture. Later, however, we proposed an affinity between the boiled and the rotted, the latter defined as the elaboration of the raw by natural means. Is it not contradictory that a cultural method should lead to a natural result? To put it in other terms, what, philosophically, will be the value of the invention of pottery (and hence of culture) if the native’s system associates boiling and putrefaction, which is the condition that raw food cannot help but reach spontaneously in the state of nature? The same type of paradox is implied by the problematics of smoking as formulated by the natives of Guiana. On the one hand, smoking, of all the modes of cooking, comes closest to the abstract category of the cooked; and—since the opposition between raw and cooked is homologous to that between nature and culture—it represents the most “cultural” form of cooking (and also that most esteemed among the natives). And yet, on the other hand, its cultural means, the buccan, is to be immediately destroyed. There is striking parallel to boiling, a method whose cultural means (the receptacles) are preserved, but which is itself assimilated to a sort of process of auto-annihilation, since its definitive result is at least verbally equivalent to that putrefaction which cooking should prevent or retard. What is the profound sense of this parallelism? In so-called primitive societies, cooking by water and smoking have this in common: one as to its means, the other as to its results, is marked by duration. Cooking by water operates by means of receptacles made of pottery (or of wood with peoples who do not know about pottery, but boil water by immersing hot stones in it): in all cases these receptacles are cared for and repaired, sometimes passed on from generation to generation, and they number among the most durable cultural objects. As for smoking, it gives food that resists spoiling incomparably longer than that cooked by any other method. Everything transpires as if the lasting possession of a cultural acquisition entailed, sometimes in the ritual realm, sometimes in the mythic, a concession made in return to nature: when the result is durable, the means must be precarious, and vice-versa. This ambiguity, which marks similarly, but in different directions, both the smoked and the boiled, is that same ambiguity which we already know to be inherent to the roasted. Burned on one side and raw on the other, or grilled outside, raw within, the roasted incarnates the ambiguity of the raw and the cooked, of nature and culture,

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which the smoked and the boiled must illustrate in their turn for the structure to be coherent. But what forces them into this pattern is not purely a reason of form: hence the system demonstrates that the art of cooking is not located entirely on the side of culture. Adapting itself to the exigencies of the body, and determined in its modes by the way man’s insertion in nature operates in different parts of the world, placed then between nature and culture, cooking rather represents their necessary articulation. It partakes of both domains, and projects this duality on each of its manifestations. But it cannot always do so in the same manner. The ambiguity of the roasted is intrinsic, that of the smoked and the boiled extrinsic, since it does not derive from things themselves, but from the way one speaks about them or behaves toward them. For here again a distinction becomes necessary: the quality of naturalness which language confers upon boiled food is purely metaphorical: the “boiled” is not the “spoiled”; it simply resembles it. Inversely, the transfiguration of the smoked into a natural entity does not result from the nonexistence of the buccan, the cultural instrument, but from its voluntary destruction. This transfiguration is thus on the order of metonymy, since it consists in acting as if the effect were really the cause. Consequently, even when the structure is added to or transformed to overcome a disequilibrium, it is only at the price of a new disequilibrium which manifests itself in another domain. To this ineluctable dissymmetry the structure owes its ability to engender myth, which is nothing other than an effort to correct or hide its inherent dissymmetry. To conclude, let us return to our culinary triangle. Within it we traced another triangle representing recipes, at least the most elementary ones: roasting, boiling and smoking. The smoked and the boiled are opposed as to the nature of the intermediate element between fire and food, which is either air or water. The smoked and the roasted are opposed by the smaller or larger place given to the element air; and the roasted and the boiled by the presence or absence of water. The boundary between nature and culture, which one can imagine as parallel to either the axis of air or the axis of water, puts the roasted and the smoked on the side of nature, the boiled on the side of culture as to means; or, as to results, the smoked on the side of culture, the roasted and the boiled on the side of nature: RAW roasted (—) (—) Air Water (+) (+) smoked boiled COOKED ROTTED The operational value of our diagram would be very restricted did it not lend itself to all the transformations necessary to admit other categories of cooking. In a culinary system where the category of the roasted is divided into roasted and grilled, it is the latter term (connoting the lesser distance of meat from fire) which will be situated at the apex of the recipe triangle, the roasted then being placed, still on the air-axis, halfway between the grilled and the smoked. We may proceed in similar fashion if the culinary system in question makes a distinction between cooking with water and

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cooking with steam; the latter, where the water is at a distance from the food, will be located halfway between the boiled and the smoked. A more complex transformation will be necessary to introduce the category of the fried. A tetrahedron will replace the recipe triangle, making it possible to raise a third axis, that of oil, in addition to those of air and water. The grilled will remain at the apex, but in the middle of the edge joining smoked and fried one can place roastedin-the-oven (with the addition of fat), which is opposed to roasted-on-the-spit (without this addition). Similarly, on the edge running from fried to boiled will be braising (in a base of water and fat), opposed to steaming (without fat, and at a distance from the water). The plan can be still further developed, if necessary, by addition of the opposition between animal and vegetable foodstuffs (if they entail differentiating methods of cooking), and by the distinction of vegetable foods into cereals and legumes, since unlike the former (which one can simply grill), the latter cannot be cooked without water or fat, or both (unless one were to let the cereals ferment, which requires water but excluded fire during the process of transformation). Finally, seasonings will take their place in the system according to the combinations permitted or excluded with a given type of food. After elaborating our diagram so as to integrate all the characteristics of a given culinary system (and no doubt there are other factors of a diachronic rather than a synchronic nature; those concerning the order, the presentation and the gestures of the meal), it will be necessary to seek the most economical manner of orienting it as a grille, so that it can be superposed on other contrasts of a sociological, economic, esthetic or religious nature: men and women, family and society, village and bush, economy and prodigality, nobility and commonality, sacred and profane, etc. Thus we can hope to discover for each specific case how the cooking of a society is a language in which it unconsciously translates its structure—or else resigns itself, still unconsciously, to revealing its contradictions.

Note Translated from the French by Peter Brooks. 1. On these concepts, see Roman Jakobson, Essais de linguistique générale. Editions de Minuit, Paris (1963).

5 The Abominations of Leviticus* Mary Douglas

Defilement is never an isolated event. It cannot occur except in view of a systematic ordering of ideas. Hence any piecemeal interpretation of the pollution rules of another culture is bound to fail. For the only way in which pollution ideas make sense is in reference to a total structure of thought whose key-stone, boundaries, margins and internal lines are held in relation by rituals of separation. To illustrate this I take a hoary old puzzle from biblical scholarship, the abominations of Leviticus, and particularly the dietary rules. Why should the camel, the hare and the rock badger be unclean? Why should some locusts, but not all, be unclean? Why should the frog be clean and the mouse and the hippopotamus unclean? What have chameleons, moles and crocodiles got in common that they should be listed together (Levit. xi, 27)? To help follow the argument I first quote the relevant versions of Leviticus and Deuteronomy using the text of the New Revised Standard Translation. Deut. xiv 3. You shall not eat any abominable things. 4. These are the animals you may eat: the ox, the sheep, the goat, 5. the hart, the gazelle, the roebuck, the wild goat, the ibex, the antelope and the mountain-sheep. 6. Every animal that parts the hoof and has the hoof cloven in two, and chews the cud, among the animals you may eat. 7. Yet of those that chew the cud or have the hoof cloven you shall not eat these: The camel, the hare and the rockbadger, because they chew the cud but do not part the hoof, are unclean for you. 8. And the swine, because it parts the hoof but does not chew the cud, is unclean for you. Their flesh you shall not eat, and their carcasses you shall not touch. 9. Of all that are in the waters you may eat these: whatever has fins and scales you may eat. 10. And whatever does not have fins and scales you shall not eat it; it is unclean for you. 11. You may eat all clean birds. 12. But these are the ones which you shall not eat: the eagle, the vulture, the osprey; 13. the buzzard, the kite, after their kinds; 14. every raven after its kind; 15. the ostrich, the night hawk, the sea gull, the hawk, after their kinds; 16. the little owl and the great owl, the water hen; 17. and the pelican, the carrion vulture and the cormorant, 18. the stork, the heron, after their kinds; the hoopoe and the bat. 19. And all winged insects are unclean for you; they shall not be eaten. 20. All clean winged things you may eat. Lev. xi 2. These are the living things which you may eat among all the beasts that are on the earth. 3. Whatever parts the hoof and is cloven-footed and chews the cud, among the animals you *

Originally published 1966

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may eat. 4. Nevertheless among those that chew the cud or part the hoof, you shall not eat these: The camel, because it chews the cud but does not part the hoof, is unclean to you. 5. And the rock badger, because it chews the cud but does not part the hoof, is unclean to you. 6. And the hare, because it chews the cud but does not part the hoof, is unclean to you. 7. And the swine, because it parts the hoof and is cloven-footed but does not chew the cud, is unclean to you. 8. Of their flesh you shall not eat, and their carcasses you shall not touch; they are unclean to you. 9. These you may eat of all that are in the waters. Everything in the waters that has fins and scales, whether in the seas or in the rivers, you may eat. 10. But anything in the seas or the rivers that has not fins and scales, of the swarming creatures in the waters and of the living creatures that are in the waters, is an abomination to you. 11. They shall remain an abomination to you; of their flesh you shall not eat, and their carcasses you shall have in abomination 12. Everything in the waters that has not fins and scales is an abomination to you. 13. And these you shall have in abomination among the birds, they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination: the eagle, the ossifrage, the osprey, 14. the kite, the falcon according to its kind, 15. every raven according to its kind, 16. the ostrich and the night hawk, the sea gull, the hawk according to its kind, 17. the owl, the cormorant, the ibis, 18. the water hen, the pelican, the vulture, 19. the stork, the heron according to its kind, the hoopoe and the bat. 20. All winged insects that go upon all fours are an abomination to you. 21. Yet among the winged insects that go on all fours you may eat those which have legs above their feet, with which to leap upon the earth. 22. Of them you may eat: the locust according to its kind, the bald locust according to its kind, the cricket according to its kind, and the grasshopper according to its kind. 23. But all other winged insects which have four feet are an abomination to you. 24. And by these you shall become unclean; whoever touches their carcass shall be unclean until the evening, 25. and whoever carries any part of their carcass shall wash his clothes and be unclean until the evening. 26. Every animal which parts the hoof but is not cloven-footed or does not chew the cud is unclean to you: everyone who touches them shall be unclean. 27. And all that go on their paws, among the animals that go on all fours, are unclean to you; whoever touches their carcass shall be unclean until the evening, 28. and he who carries their carcass shall wash his clothes and be unclean until the evening; they are unclean to you. 29, And these are unclean to you among the swarming things that swarm upon the earth; the weasel, the mouse, the great lizard according to its kind, 30. the gecko, the land crocodile, the lizard, the sand lizard and the chameleon. 31. These are unclean to you among all that swarm; whoever touches them when they are dead shall be unclean until the evening. 32. And anything upon which any of them falls when they are dead shall be unclean. 41. Every swarming thing that swarms upon the earth is an abomination; it shall not be eaten. 42. Whatever goes on its belly, and whatever goes on all fours, or whatever has many feet, all the swarming things that swarm upon the earth, you shall not eat; for they are an abomination.

All the interpretations given so far fall into one of two groups: either the rules are meaningless, arbitrary because their intent is disciplinary and not doctrinal, or they are allegories of virtues and vices. Adopting the view that religious prescriptions are largely devoid of symbolism, Maimonides said: The Law that sacrifices should be brought is evidently of great use . . . but we cannot say why one offering be a lamb whilst another is a ram, and why a fixed number of these should be brought. Those who trouble themselves to find a cause for any of these detailed rules are in my eyes devoid of sense. . . .

As a mediaeval doctor of medicine, Maimonides was also disposed to believe that the dietary rules had a sound physiological basis, but we have already dismissed the medical approach to symbolism. For a modern version of the view that the dietary rules are not symbolic, but ethical, disciplinary, see Epstein’s English notes to the Babylonian Talmud and also his popular history of Judaism (1959, p. 24): Both sets of laws have one common aim . . . Holiness. While the positive precepts have been ordained for the cultivation of virtue, and for the promotion of those finer qualities which

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Mary Douglas distinguish the truly religious and ethical being, the negative precepts are defined to combat vice and suppress other evil tendencies and instincts which stand athwart man’s striving towards holiness . . . . The negative religious laws are likewise assigned educational aims and purposes. Foremost among these is the prohibition of eating the flesh of certain animals classed as ‘unclean’. The law has nothing totemic about it. It is expressly associated in Scripture with the ideal of holiness. Its real object is to train the Israelite in self-control as the indispensable first step for the attainment of holiness.

According to Professor Stein’s The Dietary Laws in Rabbinic and Patristic Literature, the ethical interpretation goes back to the time of Alexander the Great and the Hellenic influence on Jewish culture. The first century A.D. letters of Aristeas teaches that not only are the Mosaic rules a valuable discipline which ‘prevents the Jews from thoughtless action and injustice’, but they also coincide with what natural reason would dictate for achieving the good life. So the Hellenic influence allows the medical and ethical interpretations to run together. Philo held that Moses’ principle of selection was precisely to choose the most delicious meats: The lawgiver sternly forbade all animals of land, sea or air whose flesh is the finest and fattest, like that of pigs and scaleless fish, knowing that they set a trap for the most slavish of senses, the taste, and that they produced gluttony,

(and here we are led straight into the medical interpretation) an evil dangerous to both soul and body, for gluttony begets indigestion, which is the source of all illnesses and infirmities.

In another stream of interpretation, following the tradition of Robertson Smith and Frazer, the Anglo-Saxon Old Testament scholars have tended to say simply that the rules are arbitrary because they are irrational. For example Nathaniel Micklem says: Commentators used to give much space to a discussion of the question why such and such creatures, and such or such states and symptoms were unclean. Have we, for instance, primitive rules of hygiene? Or were certain creatures and states unclean because they represented or typified certain sins? It may be taken as certain that neither hygiene, nor any kind of typology, is the basis of uncleanness. These regulations are not by any means to be rationalised. Their origins may be diverse, and go back beyond history . . .

Compare also R. S. Driver (1895): The principle, however, determining the line of demarcation between clean animals and unclean, is not stated; and what it is has been much debated. No single principle, embracing all the cases, seems yet to have been found, and not improbably more principles than one cooperated. Some animals may have been prohibited on account of their repulsive appearance or uncleanly habits, others upon sanitary grounds; in other cases, again, the motive of the prohibition may very probably have been a religious one, particularly animals may have been supposed, like the serpent in Arabia, to be animated by superhuman or demoniac beings, or they may have had a sacramental significance in the heathen rites of other nations; and the prohibition may have been intended as a protest against these beliefs. . . .

P. P. Saydon takes the same line in the Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture (1953), acknowledging his debt to Driver and to Robertson Smith. It would seem that when

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Robertson Smith applied the ideas of primitive, irrational and unexplainable to some parts of Hebrew religion they remained thus labelled and unexamined to this day. Needless to say such interpretations are not interpretations at all, since they deny any significance to the rules. They express bafflement in a learned way. Micklem says it more frankly when he says of Leviticus: Chapters XI to XV are perhaps the least attractive in the whole Bible. To the modern reader there is much in them that is meaningless or repulsive. They are concerned with ritual ‘uncleanness’ in respect of animals (11) of childbirth (12), skin diseases and stained garments (13), of the rites for the purgation of skin diseases (14), of leprosy and of various issues or secretions of the human body (15). Of what interest can such subjects be except to the anthropologist? What can all this have to do with religion?

Pfeiffer’s general position is to be critical of the priestly and legal elements in the life of Israel. So he too lends his authority to the view that the rules in the Priestly Code are largely arbitrary: Only priests who were lawyers could have conceived of religion as a theocracy regulated by a divine law fixing exactly, and therefore arbitrarily, the sacred obligations of the people to their God. They thus sanctified the external, obliterated from religion both the ethical ideals of Amos and the tender emotions of Hosea, and reduced the Universal Creator to the stature of an inflexible despot. . . . From immemorial custom P derived the two fundamental notions which characterise its legislation: physical holiness and arbitrary enactment—archaic conceptions which the reforming prophets had discarded in favour of spiritual holiness and moral law. (p. 91)

It may be true that lawyers tend to think in precise and codified forms. But is it plausible to argue that they tend to codify sheer nonsense—arbitrary enactments? Pfeiffer tries to have it both ways, insisting on the legalistic rigidity of the priestly authors and pointing to the lack of order in the setting out of the chapter to justify his view that the rules are arbitrary. Arbitrariness is a decidedly unexpected quality to find in Leviticus, as the Rev. Prof. H. J. Richards has pointed out to me. For source criticism attributes Leviticus to the Priestly source, the dominant concern of whose authors was for order. So the weight of source criticism supports us in looking for another interpretation. As for the idea that the rules are allegories of virtues and vices, Professor Stein derives this vigorous tradition from the same early Alexandrian influence on Jewish thought (p. 145 seq.). Quoting the letter of Aristeas, he says that the High Priest, Eleazan: admits that most people find the biblical food restrictions not understandable. If God is the Creator of everything, why should His law be so severe as to exclude some animals even from touch (128 f)? His first answer still links the dietary restrictions with the danger of idolatry . . . . The second answer attempts to refute specific charges by means of allegorical exegesis. Each law about forbidden foods has its deep reason. Moses did not enumerate the mouse or the weasel out of a special consideration for them (143 f). On the contrary, mice are particularly obnoxious because of their destructiveness, and weasels, the very symbol of malicious tale-bearing, conceive through the ear and give birth through the mouth (164 f). Rather have these holy laws been given for the sake of justice to awaken in us devout thoughts and to form our character (161–168). The birds, for instance, the Jews are allowed to eat are all tame and clean, as they live by corn only. Not so the wild and carnivorous birds who fall upon lambs and goats, and even human beings. Moses, by calling the latter unclean, admonished the faithful not to do violence to the weak and not to trust their own power (145–148). Cloven-hoofed animals

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Mary Douglas which part their hooves symbolise that all our actions must betray proper ethical distinction and be directed towards righteousness. . . . Chewing the cud, on the other hand stands for memory.

Professor Stein goes on to quote Philo’s use of allegory to interpret the dietary rules: Fish with fins and scales, admitted by the law, symbolise endurance and self-control, whilst the forbidden ones are swept away by the current, unable to resist the force of the stream. Reptiles, wriggling along by trailing their belly, signify persons who devote themselves to their ever greedy desires and passions. Creeping things, however, which have legs above their feet, so that they can leap, are clean because they symbolise the success of moral efforts.

Christian teaching has readily followed the allegorising tradition. The first century epistle of Barnabus, written to convince the Jews that their law had found its fulfilment, took the clean and unclean animals to refer to various types of men, leprosy to mean sin, etc. A more recent example of this tradition is in Bishop Challoner’s notes on the Westminster Bible in the beginning of this century: Hoof divided and cheweth the cud. The dividing of the hoof and chewing of the cud signify discretion between good and evil, and meditating on the law of God; and where either of these is wanting, man is unclean. In like manner fishes were reputed unclean that had not fins and scales: that is souls that did not raise themselves up by prayer and cover themselves with the scales of virtue. Footnote verse 3.

These are not so much interpretations as pious commentaries. They fail as interpretations because they are neither consistent nor comprehensive. A different explanation has to be developed for each animal and there is no end to the number of possible explanations. Another traditional approach, also dating back to the letter of Aristeas, is the view that what is forbidden to the Israelites is forbidden solely to protect them from foreign influence. For instance, Maimonides held that they were forbidden to seethe the kid in the milk of its dam because this was a cultic act in the religion of the Canaanites. This argument cannot be comprehensive, for it is not held that the Israelites consistently rejected all the elements of foreign religions and invented something entirely original for themselves. Maimonides accepted the view that some of the more mysterious commands of the law had as their object to make a sharp break with heathen practices. Thus the Israelites were forbidden to wear garments woven of linen and wool, to plant different trees together, to have sexual intercourse with animals, to cook meat with milk, simply because these acts figured in the rites of their heathen neighbours. So far, so good: the laws were enacted as barriers to the spread of heathen styles of ritual. But in that case why were some heathen practices allowed? And not only allowed—if sacrifice be taken as a practice common to heathens and Israelites—but given an absolutely central place in the religion. Maimonides’ answer, at any rate in The Guide to the Perplexed, was to justify sacrifice as a transitional stage, regrettably heathen, but necessarily allowed because it would be impractical to wean the Israelites abruptly from their heathen past. This is an extraordinary statement to come from the pen of a rabbinical scholar, and indeed in his serious rabbinical writings Maimonides did not attempt to maintain the argument: on the contrary, he there counted sacrifice as the most important act of the Jewish religion.

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At least Maimonides saw the inconsistency and was led by it into contradiction. But later scholars seem content to use the foreign influence argument one way or the other, according to the mood of the moment. Professor Hooke and his colleagues have clearly established that the Israelites took over some Canaanite styles of worship, and the Canaanites obviously had much in common with Mesopotamian culture (1933). But it is no explanation to represent Israel as a sponge at one moment and as a repellent the next, without explaining why it soaked up this foreign element but repelled that one. What is the value of saying that seething kids in milk and copulating with cows are forbidden in Leviticus because they are the fertility rites of foreign neighbours (1935), since Israelites took over other foreign rites? We are still perplexed to know when the sponge is the right or the wrong metaphor. The same argument is equally puzzling in Eichrodt (pp. 230–1). Of course no culture is created out of nothing. The Israelites absorbed freely from their neighbours, but not quite freely. Some elements of foreign culture were incompatible with the principles of patterning on which they were constructing their universe; others were compatible. For instance, Zaehner suggests that the Jewish abomination of creeping things may have been taken over from Zoroastrianism (p. 162). Whatever the historical evidence for this adoption of a foreign element into Judaism, we shall see that there was in the patterning of their culture a pre-formed compatibility between this particular abomination and the general principles on which their universe was constructed. Any interpretations will fail which take the Do-nots of the Old Testament in piecemeal fashion. The only sound approach is to forget hygiene, aesthetics, morals and instinctive revulsion, even to forget the Canaanites and the Zoroastrian Magi, and start with the texts. Since each of the injunctions is prefaced by the command to be holy, so they must be explained by that command. There must be contrariness between holiness and abomination which will make over-all sense of all the particular restrictions. Holiness is the attribute of Godhead. Its root means ‘set apart’. What else does it mean? We should start any cosmological enquiry by seeking the principles of power and danger. In the Old Testament we find blessing as the source of all good things, and the withdrawal of blessing as the source of all dangers. The blessing of God makes the land possible for men to live in. God’s work through the blessing is essentially to create order, through which men’s affairs prosper. Fertility of women, livestock and fields is promised as a result of the blessing and this is to be obtained by keeping covenant with God and observing all His precepts and ceremonies (Deut. XXXVIII, 1–14). Where the blessing is withdrawn and the power of the curse unleashed, there is barrenness, pestilence, confusion. For Moses said: But if you will not obey the voice of the Lord your God or be careful to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command you to this day, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you. Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the field. Cursed shall be your basket and your kneading trough. Cursed shall be the fruit of your body, and the fruit of your ground, the increase of your cattle, and the young of your flock. Cursed shall you be when you come in and cursed shall you be when you go out. The Lord will send upon you curses, confusion, and frustration in all that you undertake to do, until you are destroyed and perish quickly on account of the evil of your doings, because you have forsaken me . . . The Lord will smite you with consumption, and with fever, inflammation, and fiery heat, and with drought, and with blasting and with mildew; they shall pursue you till you perish.

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Mary Douglas And the heavens over your head shall be brass and the earth beyond you shall be iron. The Lord will make the rain of your land powder and dust; from heaven it shall come down upon you until you are destroyed. (Deut. XXVIII, 15–24)

From this it is clear that the positive and negative precepts are held to be efficacious and not merely expressive: observing them draws down prosperity, infringing them brings danger. We are thus entitled to treat them in the same way as we treat primitive ritual avoidances whose breach unleashes danger to men. The precepts and ceremonies alike are focused on the idea of the holiness of God which men must create in their own lives. So this is a universe in which men prosper by conforming to holiness and perish when they deviate from it. If there were no other clues we should be able to find out the Hebrew idea of the holy by examining the precepts by which men conform to it. It is evidently not goodness in the sense of an all-embracing humane kindness. Justice and moral goodness may well illustrate holiness and form part of it, but holiness embraces other ideas as well. Granted that its root means separateness, the next idea that emerges is of the Holy as wholeness and completeness. Much of Leviticus is taken up with stating the physical perfection that is required of things presented in the temple and of persons approaching it. The animals offered in sacrifice must be without blemish, women must be purified after childbirth, lepers should be separated and ritually cleansed before being allowed to approach it once they are cured. All bodily discharges are defiling and disqualify from approach to the temple. Priests may only come into contact with death when their own close kin die. But the high priest must never have contact with death. Levit. xxi 17. Say to Aaron, None of your descendants throughout their generations who has a blemish may approach to offer the bread of his God. 18. For no one who has a blemish shall draw near, a man blind or lame, or one who has a mutilated face or a limb too long. 19. or a man who has an injured foot or an injured hand, 20. or a hunch-back, or a dwarf, or a man with a defect in his sight or an itching disease or scabs, or crushed testicles; 21. no man of the descendants of Aaron the priest who has a blemish shall come near to offer the Lord’s offerings by fire; . . . .

In other words, he must be perfect as a man, if he is to be a priest. This much reiterated idea of physical completeness is also worked out in the social sphere and particularly in the warriors’ camp. The culture of the Israelites was brought to the pitch of greatest intensity when they prayed and when they fought. The army could not win without the blessing and to keep the blessing in the camp they had to be specially holy. So the camp was to be preserved from defilement like the Temple. Here again all bodily discharges disqualified a man from entering the camp as they would disqualify a worshipper from approaching the altar. A warrior who had had an issue of the body in the night should keep outside the camp all day and only return after sunset, having washed. Natural functions producing bodily waste were to be performed outside the camp (Deut. XXIII, 10–15). In short the idea of holiness was given an external, physical expression in the wholeness of the body seen as a perfect container.

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Wholeness is also extended to signify completeness in a social context. An important enterprise, once begun, must not be left incomplete. This way of lacking wholeness also disqualifies a man from fighting. Before a battle the captains shall proclaim: Deut. xx 5. What man is there that has built a new house and has not dedicated it? Let him go back to his house, lest he die in the battle and another man dedicate it. 6. What man is there that has planted a vineyard and has not yet enjoyed its fruit? Let him go back to his house, lest he die in the battle and another man enjoy its fruit. 7. And what man is there that hath betrothed a wife and has not taken her? Let him go back to his house, lest he die in the battle and another man take her.

Admittedly there is no suggestion that this rule implies defilement. It is not said that a man with a half-finished project on his hands is defiled in the same way that a leper is defiled. The next verse in fact goes on to say that fearful and faint-hearted men should go home lest they spread their fears. But there is a strong suggestion in other passages that a man should not put his hand to the plough and then turn back. Pedersen goes so far as to say that: in all these cases a man has started a new important undertaking without having finished it yet... a new totality has come into existence. To make a breach in this prematurely, i.e. before it has attained maturity or has been finished, involves a serious risk of sin. (Vol. III, p. 9)

If we follow Pedersen, then blessing and success in war required a man to be whole in body, whole-hearted and trailing no uncompleted schemes. There is an echo of this actual passage in the New Testament parable of the man who gave a great feast and whose invited guests incurred his anger by making excuses (Luke XIV, 16–24; Matt. XXII. See Black & Rowley, 1962, p. 836) One of the guests had bought a new farm, one had bought ten oxen and had not yet tried them, and one had married a wife. If according to the old Law each could have validly justified his refusal by reference to Deut. XX, the parable supports Pedersen’s view that interruption of new projects was held to be bad in civil as well as military contexts. Other precepts develop the idea of wholeness in another direction. The metaphors of the physical body and of the new undertaking relate to the perfection and completeness of the individual and his work. Other precepts extend holiness to species and categories. Hybrids and other confusions are abominated. Lev. xviii 23. And you shall not lie with any beast and defile yourself with it, neither shall any woman give herself to a beast to lie with it: it is perversion.

The word ‘perversion’ is a significant mistranslation of the rare Hebrew word tebhel, which has as its meaning mixing or confusion. The same theme is taken up in Leviticus XIX, 19. You shall keep my statutes. You shall not let your cattle breed with a different kind; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed; nor shall there come upon you a garment of cloth made of two kinds of stuff.

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All these injunctions are prefaced by the general command: Be holy, for I am holy.

We can conclude that holiness is exemplified by completeness. Holiness requires that individuals shall conform to the class to which they belong. And holiness requires that different classes of things shall not be confused. Another set of precepts refines on this last point. Holiness means keeping distinct the categories of creation. It therefore involves correct definition, discrimination and order. Under this head all the rules of sexual morality exemplify the holy. Incest and adultery (Lev. XVIII, 6–20) are against holiness, in the simple sense of right order. Morality doesnot conflict with holiness, but holiness is more a matter of separating that which should be separated than of protecting the rights of husbands and brothers. Then follows in chapter XIX another list of actions which are contrary to holiness. Developing the idea of holiness as order, not confusion, this list upholds rectitude and straight-dealing as holy, and contradiction and double-dealing as against holiness. Theft, lying, false witness, cheating in weights and measures, all kinds of dissembling such as speaking ill of the deaf (and presumably smiling to their face), hating your brother in your heart (while presumably speaking kindly to him), these are clearly contradictions between what seems and what is. This chapter also says much about generosity and love, but these are positive commands, while I am concerned with negative rules. We have now laid a good basis for approaching the laws about clean and unclean meats. To be holy is to be whole, to be one; holiness is unity, integrity, perfection of the individual and of the kind. The dietary rules merely develop the metaphor of holiness on the same lines. First we should start with livestock, the herds of cattle, camels, sheep and goats which were the livelihood of the Israelites. These animals were clean inasmuch as contact with them did not require purification before approaching the Temple. Livestock, like the inhabited land, received the blessing of God. Both land and livestock were fertile by the blessing, both were drawn into the divine order. The farmer’s duty was to preserve the blessing. For one thing, he had to preserve the order of creation. So no hybrids, as we have seen, either in the fields or in the herds or in the clothes made from wool and flax. To some extent men covenanted with their land and cattle in the same way as God covenanted with them. Men respected the first born of their cattle, obliged them to keep the Sabbath. Cattle were literally domesticated as slaves. They had to be brought into the social order in order to enjoy the blessing. The difference between cattle and the wild beasts is that the wild beasts have no covenant to protect them. It is possible that the Israelites were like other pastoralists who do not relish wild game. The Nuer of the South Sudan, for instance, apply a sanction of disapproval of a man who lives by hunting. To be driven to eating wild meat is the sign of a poor herdsman. So it would be probably wrong to think of the Israelites as longing for forbidden meats and finding the restrictions irksome. Driver is surely right in taking the rules as an a posteriori generalisation of their habits. Cloven-hoofed, cudchewing ungulates are the model of the proper kind of food for a pastoralist. If they must eat wild game, they can eat wild game that shares these distinctive characters and is therefore of the same general species. This is a kind of casuistry which permits scope for hunting antelope and wild goats and wild sheep. Everything would be quite

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straightforward were it not that the legal mind has seen fit to give ruling on some borderline cases. Some animals seem to be ruminant, such as the hare and the hyrax (or rock badger), whose constant grinding of their teeth was held to be cud-chewing. But they are definitely not cloven-hoofed and so are excluded by name. Similarly for animals which are cloven-hoofed but are not ruminant, the pig and the camel. Note that this failure to conform to the two necessary criteria for defining cattle is the only reason given in the Old Testament for avoiding the pig; nothing whatever is said about its dirty scavenging habits. As the pig does not yield milk, hide nor wool, there is no other reason for keeping it except for its flesh. And if the Israelites did not keep pig they would not be familiar with its habits. I suggest that originally the sole reason for its being counted as unclean is its failure as a wild boar to get into the antelope class, and that in this it is on the same footing as the camel and the hyrax, exactly as is stated in the book. After these borderline cases have been dismissed, the law goes on to deal with creatures according to how they live in the three elements, the water, the air and the earth. The principles here applied are rather different from those covering the camel, the pig, the hare and the hyrax. For the latter are excepted from clean food in having one but not both of the defining characters of livestock. Birds I can say nothing about, because, as I have said, they are named and not described and the translation of the name is open to doubt. But in general the underlying principle of cleanness in animals is that they shall conform fully to their class. Those species are unclean which are imperfect members of their class, or whose class itself confounds the general scheme of the world. To grasp this scheme we need to go back to Genesis and the creation. Here a threefold classification unfolds, divided between the earth, the waters and the firmament. Leviticus takes up this scheme and allots to each element its proper kind of animal life. In the firmament two-legged fowls fly with wings. In the water scaly fish swim with fins. On the earth four-legged animals hop, jump or walk. Any class of creatures which is not equipped for the right kind of locomotion in its element is contrary to holiness. Contact with it disqualifies a person from approaching the Temple. Thus anything in the water which has not fins and scales is unclean (XI, 10–12). Nothing is said about predatory habits or of scavenging. The only sure test for cleanness in a fish is its scales and its propulsion by means of fins. Four-footed creatures which fly (XI, 20–26) are unclean. Any creature which has two legs and two hands and which goes on all fours like a quadruped is unclean (XI, 27). Then follows (V. 29) a much disputed list. On some translations, it would appear to consist precisely of creatures endowed with hands instead of front feet, which perversely use their hands for walking: the weasel, the mouse, the crocodile, the shrew, various kinds of lizards, the chameleon and mole (Danby, 1933), whose forefeet are uncannily hand-like. This feature of this list is lost in the New Revised Standard Translation which uses the word ‘paws’ instead of hands. The last kind of unclean animal is that which creeps, crawls or swarms upon the earth. This form of movement is explicitly contrary to holiness (Levit. XI, 41–44). Driver and White use ‘swarming’ to translate the Hebrew shérec, which is applied to both those which teem in the waters and those which swarm on the ground. Whether we call it teeming, trailing, creeping, crawling or swarming, it is an indeterminate form of movement. Since the main animal categories are defined by their typical movement, ‘swarming’ which is not a mode of propulsion proper to any

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particular element, cuts across the basic classification. Swarming things are neither fish, flesh nor fowl. Eels and worms inhabit water, though not as fish; reptiles go on dry land, though not as quadrupeds; some insects fly, though not as birds. There is no order in them. Recall what the Prophecy of Habakkuk says about this form of life: For thou makest men like the fish of the sea, like crawling things that have no ruler. (I, V. 14)

The prototype and model of the swarming things is the worm. As fish belong in the sea so worms belong in the realm of the grave, with death and chaos. The case of the locusts is interesting and consistent. The test of whether it is a clean and therefore edible kind is how it moves on the earth. If it crawls it is unclean. If it hops it is clean (XI, V. 21). In the Mishnah it is noted that a frog is not listed with creeping things and conveys no uncleanness (Danby, p. 722). I suggest that the frog’s hop accounts for it not being listed. If penguins lived in the Near East I would expect them to be ruled unclean as wingless birds. If the list of unclean birds could be retranslated from this point of view, it might well turn out that they are anomalous because they swim and dive as well as they fly, or in some other way they are not fully bird-like. Surely now it would be difficult to maintain that ‘Be ye Holy’ means no more than ‘Be ye separate’. Moses wanted the children of Israel to keep the commands of God constantly before their minds: Deut. xi 18. You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul; and you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. 19. And you shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in your house, and when you are walking by the way, and when you lie down and when you rise. 20. And you shall write them upon the doorposts of your house and upon your gates.

If the proposed interpretation of the forbidden animals is correct, the dietary laws would have been like signs which at every turn inspired meditation on the oneness, purity and completeness of God. By rules of avoidance holiness was given a physical expression in every encounter with the animal kingdom and at every meal. Observance of the dietary rules would thus have been a meaningful part of the great liturgical act of recognition and worship which culminated in the sacrifice in the Temple. References Black, M. and Rowley, H.H., 1962. (Eds.) Peake’s Commentary on the Bible. London. Driver, R.S., 1895. International Critical Commentary on Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments: Deuteronomy. Eichrodt, W., 1933 (first edit.) Theology of the Old Testament. Trans. Baker 1961. Epstein, I. Judaism. London. Hooke, S.H., ed., 1933. Myth and Ritual. Oxford. Hooke, S.H., C.N. Deedes, E.R. Burrows, A.R. Johnson and W.O.E. Oesterley, 1935. The Labyrinth: Further Studies in the Relation between Myth and Ritual in the Ancient World. London. Maimonides, Moses, 1881. Guide for the Perplexed. Translated by M. Friedlander, first edition, London. Micklem, Nathaniel, 1953. The Interpreter’s Bible, II, Leviticus. Pfeifer, R.H., 1957. Books of the Old Testament. Saydon, P.P., 1953. Catholic Commentary on the Holy Scripture. Stein, S., 1957. ‘The Dietary Laws in Rabbinic and Patristic Literature’. Studia Patristica, Vol. 64, pp. 141 ff. Zaehner, R.H., 1963. The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism.

6 The Abominable Pig* Marvin Harris

An aversion to pork seems at the outset even more irrational than an aversion to beef. Of all domesticated mammals, pigs possess the greatest potential for swiftly and efficiently changing plants into flesh. Over its lifetime a pig can convert 35 percent of the energy in its feed to meat compared with 13 percent for sheep and a mere 6.5 percent for cattle. A piglet can gain a pound for every three to five pounds it eats while a calf needs to eat ten pounds to gain one. A cow needs nine months to drop a single calf, and under modern conditions the calf needs another four months to reach four hundred pounds. But less than four months after insemination, a single sow can give birth to eight or more piglets, each of which after another six months can weigh over four hundred pounds. Clearly, the whole essence of pig is the production of meat for human nourishment and delectation. Why then did the Lord of the ancient Israelites forbid his people to savor pork or even to touch a pig alive or dead? Of their flesh you shall not eat, and their carcasses you shall not touch; they are unclean to you (Lev. 11: 1) . . . everyone who touches them shall be unclean. (Lev. 11:24)

Unlike the Old Testament, which is a treasure trove of forbidden flesh, the Koran is virtually free of meat taboos. Why is it the pig alone who suffers Allah’s disapproval? These things only has He forbidden you: carrion, blood, and the flesh of swine. (Holy Koran 2, 168)

For many observant Jews, the Old Testament’s characterization of swine as “unclean” renders the explanation of the taboo self-evident: “Anyone who has seen the filthy habits of the swine will not ask why it is prohibited,” says a modern rabbinical authority. The grounding of the fear and loathing of pigs in self-evident piggishness goes back at least to the time of Rabbi Moses Maimonides, court physician to the Islamic emperor Saladin during the twelfth century in Egypt. Maimonides shared with his Islamic hosts a lively disgust for pigs and pig eaters, especially Christian pigs and pig eaters: “The principal reason why the law forbids swine-flesh is to be found in the circumstance that its habits and food are very filthy and loathsome.” If the law *

Originally published 1985

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allowed Egyptians and Jews to raise pigs, Cairo’s streets and houses would become as filthy as those of Europe, for “the mouth of a swine is as dirty as dung itself.” Maimonides could only tell one side of the story. He had never seen a clean pig. The pig’s penchant for excrement is not a defect of its nature but of the husbandry of its human masters. Pigs prefer and thrive best on roots, nuts, and grains; they eat excrement only when nothing better presents itself. In fact, let them get hungry enough, and they’ll even eat each other, a trait which they share with other omnivores, but most notably with their own masters. Nor is wallowing in filth a natural characteristic of swine. Pigs wallow to keep themselves cool; and they much prefer a fresh, clean mudhole to one that has been soiled by urine and feces. In condemning the pig as the dirtiest of animals, Jews and Moslems left unexplained their more tolerant attitude toward other dung-eating domesticated species. Chickens and goats, for example, given motivation and opportunity, also readily dine on dung. The dog is another domesticated creature which easily develops an appetite for human feces. And this was especially true in the Middle East, where dung-eating dogs filled the scavenging niche left vacant by the ban on pigs. Jahweh prohibited their flesh, yet dogs were not abominated, bad to touch, or even bad to look at, as were pigs. Maimonides could not be entirely consistent in his efforts to attribute the abstention from pork to the pig’s penchant for feces. The Book of Leviticus prohibits the flesh of many other creatures, such as cats and camels, which are not notably inclined to eat excrement. And with the exception of the pig, had not Allah said all the others were good to eat? The fact that Maimonides’s Moslem emperor could eat every kind of meat except pork would have made it impolitic if not dangerous to identify the biblical sense of cleanliness exclusively with freedom from the taint of feces. So instead of adopting a cleaner-than-thou attitude, Maimonides offered a proper court physician’s theory of the entire set of biblical aversions: the prohibited items were not good to eat because not only was one of them—the pig—filthy from eating excrement but all of them were not good for you. “I maintain,” he said, “that food forbidden by the Law is unwholesome.” But in what ways were the forbidden foods unwholesome? The great rabbi was quite specific in the case of pork: it “contained more moisture than necessary and too much superfluous matter.” As for the other forbidden foods, their “injurious character” was too self-evident to merit further discussion. Maimonides’s public health theory of pork avoidance had to wait seven hundred years before it acquired what seemed to be a scientific justification. In 1859 the first clinical association between trichinosis and undercooked pork was established, and from then on it became the most popular explanation of the Jewish and Islamic pork taboo. Just as Maimonides said, pork was unwholesome. Eager to reconcile the Bible with the findings of medical science, theologians began to embroider a whole series of additional public health explanations for the other biblical food taboos: wild animals and beasts of burden were prohibited because the flesh gets too tough to be digested properly; shellfish were to be avoided because they serve as vectors of typhoid fever; blood is not good to eat because the bloodstream is a perfect medium for microbes. In the case of pork this line of rationalization had a paradoxical outcome. Reformist Jews began to argue that since they now understood the scientific and medical basis of the taboos, pork avoidance was no longer necessary; all they had to do was to see to it that the meat was thoroughly cooked. Predictably, this provoked a reaction among

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Orthodox Jews, who were appalled at the idea that the book of God’s law was being relegated to the “class of a minor medical text.” They insisted that God’s purpose in Leviticus could never be fully comprehended; nonetheless the dietary laws had to be obeyed as a sign of submission to divine will. Eventually the trichinosis theory of pork avoidance fell out of favor largely on the grounds that a medical discovery made in the nineteenth century could not have been known thousands of years ago. But that is not the part of the theory that bothers me. People do not have to possess a scientific understanding of the ill effects of certain foods in order to put such foods on their bad-to-eat list. If the consequences of eating pork had been exceptionally bad for their health, it would not have been necessary for the Israelites to know about trichinosis in order to ban its consumption. Does one have to understand the molecular chemistry of toxins in order to know that some mushrooms are dangerous? It is essential for my own explanation of the pig taboo that the trichinosis theory be laid to rest on entirely different grounds. My contention is that there is absolutely nothing exceptional about pork as a source of human disease. All domestic animals are potentially hazardous to human health. Undercooked beef, for example, is a prolific source of tapeworms, which can grow to a length of sixteen to twenty feet inside the human gut, induce a severe case of anemia, and lower the body’s resistance to other diseases. Cattle, goat, and sheep transmit the bacterial disease known as brucellosis, whose symptoms include fever, aches, pains, and lassitude. The most dangerous disease transmitted by cattle, sheep, and goats is anthrax, a fairly common disease of both animals and humans in Europe and Asia until the introduction of Louis Pasteur’s anthrax vaccine in 1881. Unlike trichinosis, which does not produce symptoms in the majority of infected individuals and rarely has a fatal outcome, anthrax runs a swift course that begins with an outbreak of boils and ends in death. If the taboo on pork was a divinely inspired health ordinance, it is the oldest recorded case of medical malpractice. The way to safeguard against trichinosis was not to taboo pork but to taboo undercooked pork. A simple advisory against undercooking pork would have sufficed: “Flesh of swine thou shalt not eat until the pink has been cooked from it.” And come to think of it, the same advisory should have been issued for cattle, sheep, and goats. But the charge of medical malpractice against Jahweh will not stick. The Old Testament contains a rather precise formula for distinguishing good-toeat flesh from forbidden flesh. This formula says nothing about dirty habits or unhealthy meat. Instead it directs attention to certain anatomical and physiological features of animals that are good to eat. Here is what Leviticus 11: 1 says: Whatever parts the hoof and is cloven footed and chews the cud among animals, you may eat.

Any serious attempt to explain why the pig was not good to eat must begin with this formula and not with excrement or wholesomeness, about which not a word is said. Leviticus goes on to state explicitly of the pig that it only satisfies one part of the formula. “It divideth the hoof.” But the pig does not satisfy the other part of the formula: “It cheweth not the cud.” To their credit, champions of the good-to-eat school have stressed the importance of the cud-chewing, split-hoof formula as the key to understanding Jahweh’s

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abomination of the pig. But they do not view the formula as an outcome of the way the Israelites used domestic animals. Instead they view the way the Israelites used domestic animals as an outcome of the formula. According to anthropologist Mary Douglas, for example, the cud-chewing, split-hoof formula makes the split-hoof but non-cud-chewing pig a thing that’s “out of place.” Things that are “out of place” are dirty, she argues, for the essence of dirt is “matter out of place.” The pig, however, is more than out of place; it is neither here nor there. Such things are both dirty and dangerous. Therefore the pig is abominated as well as not good to eat. But doesn’t the force of this argument lie entirely in its circularity? To observe that the pig is out of place taxonomically is merely to observe that Leviticus classifies good-to-eat animals in such a way as to make the pig bad to eat. This avoids the question of why the taxonomy is what it is. Let me attend first to the reason why Jahweh wanted edible animals to be cudchewers. Among animals raised by the ancient Israelites, there were three cud-chewers: cattle, sheep, and goats. These three animals were the most important food-producing species in the ancient Middle East not because the ancients happened capriciously to think that cud-chewing animals were good to eat (and good to milk) but because cattle, sheep, and goats are ruminants, the kind of herbivores which thrive best on diets consisting of plants that have a high cellulose content. Of all domesticated animals, those which are ruminants possess the most efficient system for digesting tough fibrous materials such as grasses and straw. Their stomachs have four compartments which are like big fermentation “vats” in which bacteria break down and soften these materials. While cropping their food, ruminants do little chewing. The food passes directly to the rumen, the first of the compartments, where it soon begins to ferment. From time to time the contents of the rumen are regurgitated into the mouth as a softened bolus—the “cud”—which is then chewed thoroughly and sent on to the other “vats” to undergo further fermentation. The ruminant’s extraordinary ability to digest cellulose was crucial to the relationship between humans and domesticated animals in the Middle East. By raising animals that could “chew the cud,” the Israelites and their neighbors were able to obtain meat and milk without having to share with their livestock the crops destined for human consumption. Cattle, sheep, and goats thrive on items like grass, straw, hay, stubble, bushes, and leaves—feeds whose high cellulose content renders them unfit for human consumption even after vigorous boiling. Rather than compete with humans for food, the ruminants further enhanced agricultural productivity by providing dung for fertilizer and traction for pulling plows. And they were also a source of fiber and felt for clothing, and of leather for shoes and harnesses. I began this puzzle by saying that pigs are the most efficient mammalian converters of plant foods into animal flesh, but I neglected to say what kinds of plant foods. Feed them on wheat, maize, potatoes, soybeans, or anything low in cellulose, and pigs will perform veritable miracles of transubstantiation; feed them on grass, stubble, leaves, or anything high in cellulose, and they will lose weight. Pigs are omnivores, but they are not ruminants. In fact, in digestive apparatus and nutrient requirements pigs resemble humans in more ways than any mammal except monkeys and apes, which is why pigs are much in demand for medical research concerned with atherosclerosis, calorie-protein malnutrition, nutrient absorption,

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and metabolism. But there was more to the ban on pork than the pig’s inability to thrive on grass and other high-cellulose plants. Pigs carry the additional onus of not being well adapted to the climate and ecology of the Middle East. Unlike the ancestors of cattle, sheep, or goats, which lived in hot, semiarid, sunny grasslands, the pig’s ancestors were denizens of well-watered, shady forest glens and riverbanks. Everything about the pig’s body heat-regulating system is ill suited for life in the hot, sunparched habitats which were the homelands of the children of Abraham. Tropical breeds of cattle, sheep, and goats can go for long periods without water, and can either rid their bodies of excess heat through perspiration or are protected from the sun’s rays by light-colored, short fleecy coats (heat-trapping heavy wool is a characteristic of cold-climate breeds). Although a perspiring human is said to “sweat like a pig,” the expression lacks an anatomical basis. Pigs can’t sweat—they have no functional sweat glands. (Humans are actually the sweatiest of all animals.) And the pig’s sparse coat offers little protection against the sun’s rays. Just how does the pig keep cool? It does a lot of panting, but mostly it depends on wetting itself down with moisture derived from external sources. Here, then, is the explanation for the pig’s love of wallowing in mud. By wallowing, it dissipates heat both by evaporation from its skin and by conduction through the cool ground. Experiments show that the cooling effect of mud is superior to that of water. Pigs whose flanks are thoroughly smeared with mud continue to show peak heat-dissipating evaporation for more than twice as long as pigs whose flanks are merely soaked with water, and here also is the explanation for some of the pig’s dirty habits. As temperatures rise above thirty degrees celsius (eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit), a pig deprived of clean mudholes will become desperate and begin to wallow in its own feces and urine in order to avoid heat stroke. Incidentally, the larger a pig gets, the more intolerant it becomes of high ambient temperatures. Raising pigs in the Middle East therefore was and still is a lot costlier than raising ruminants, because pigs must be provided with artificial shade and extra water for wallowing, and their diet must be supplemented with grains and other plant foods that humans themselves can eat. To offset all these liabilities pigs have less to offer by way of benefits than ruminants. They can’t pull plows, their hair is unsuited for fiber and cloth, and they are not suited for milking. Uniquely among large domesticated animals, meat is their most important produce (guinea pigs and rabbits are smaller equivalents; but fowl produce eggs as well as meat). For a pastoral nomadic people like the Israelites during their years of wandering in search of lands suitable for agriculture, swineherding was out of the question. No arid-land pastoralists herd pigs for the simple reason that it is hard to protect them from exposure to heat, sun, and lack of water while moving from camp to camp over long distances. During their formative years as a nation, therefore, the ancient Israelites could not have consumed significant quantities of pork even had they desired it. This historical experience undoubtedly contributed to the development of a traditional aversion to pig meat as an unknown and alien food. But why was this tradition preserved and strengthened by being written down as God’s law long after the Israelites had become settled farmers? The answer as I see it is not that the tradition born of pastoralism continued to prevail by mere inertia and ingrown habit, but that it was preserved because pig raising remained too costly.

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Critics have opposed the theory that the ancient Israelite pork taboo was essentially a cost/benefit choice by pointing to evidence of pigs being raised quite successfully in many parts of the Middle East including the Israelite’s promised land. The facts are not in dispute. Pigs have indeed been raised for ten thousand years in various parts of the Middle East—as long as sheep and goats, and even longer than cattle. Some of the oldest Neolithic villages excavated by archaeologists—Jericho in Jordan, Jarmo in Iraq, and Argissa-Magulla in Greece—contain pig bones with features indicative of the transition from wild to domesticated varieties. Several Middle Eastern pre-Bronze Age villages (4000 b.c. to 2000 b.c.) contain concentrated masses of pig remains in association with what archaeologists interpret as altars and cultic centers, suggestive of ritual pig slaughter and pig feasting. We know that some pigs were still being raised in the lands of the Bible at the beginning of the Christian era. The New Testament (Luke) tells us that in the country of the Gadarenes near Lake Galilee Jesus cast out devils from a man named Legion into a herd of swine feeding on the mountain. The swine rushed down into the lake and drowned themselves, and Legion was cured. Even modern-day Israelites continue to raise thousands of swine in parts of northern Galilee. But from the very beginning, fewer pigs were raised than cattle, sheep, or goats. And more importantly, as time went on, pig husbandry declined throughout the region. Carlton Coon, an anthropologist with many years of experience in North America and the Levant, was the first scholar to offer a cogent explanation of why this general decline in pig husbandry had occurred. Coon attributed the fall of the Middle Eastern pig to deforestation and human population increase. At the beginning of the Neolithic period, pigs were able to root in oak and beech forests which provided ample shade and wallows as well as acorns, beechnuts, truffles, and other forest floor products. With an increase in human population density, farm acreage increased and the oak and beech forests were destroyed to make room for planted crops, especially for olive trees, thereby eliminating the pig’s ecological niche. To update Coon’s ecological scenario, I would add that as forests were being destroyed, so were marginal farmlands and grazing lands, the general succession being from forest to cropland to grazing land to desert, with each step along the way yielding a greater premium for raising ruminants and a greater penalty for raising swine. Robert Orr Whyte, former director general of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, estimated that in Anatolia the forests shrank from 70 percent to 13 percent of the total land area between 5000 b.c. and the recent past. Only a fourth of the Caspian shore-front forest survived the process of population increase and agricultural intensification; half of the Caspian mountainous humid forest; a fifth to a sixth of the oak and juniper forests of the Zagros Mountains; and only a twentieth of the juniper forests of the Elburz and Khorassan ranges. If I am right about the subversion of the practical basis of pig production through ecological succession, one does not need to invoke Mary Douglas’s “taxonomic anomaly” to understand the peculiarly low status of the pig in the Middle East. The danger it posed to husbandry was very tangible and accounts quite well for its low status. The pig had been domesticated for one purpose only, namely to supply meat. As ecological conditions became unfavorable for pig raising, there was no alternative function which could redeem its existence. The creature became not only useless,

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but worse than useless—harmful, a curse to touch or merely to see—a pariah animal. This transformation contrasts understandably with that of cattle in India. Subject to a similar series of ecological depletions—deforestation, erosion, and desertification—cattle also became bad to eat. But in other respects, especially for traction power and milk, they became more useful than ever—a blessing to look at or to touch—animal godheads. In this perspective, the fact that pig raising remained possible for the Israelites at low cost in certain remnant hillside forests or swampy habitats, or at extra expense where shade and water were scarce, does not contradict the ecological basis of the taboo. If there had not been some minimum possibility of raising pigs, there would have been no reason to taboo the practice. As the history of Hindu cow protection shows, religions gain strength when they help people make decisions which are in accord with preexisting useful practices, but which are not so completely self-evident as to preclude doubts and temptations. To judge from the Eight-fold Way or the Ten Commandments, God does not usually waste time prohibiting the impossible or condemning the unthinkable. Leviticus consistently bans all vertebrate land animals that do not chew the cud. It bans, for example, in addition to swine, equines, felines, canines, rodents, and reptiles, none of which are cud-chewers. But Leviticus contains a maddening complication. It prohibits the consumption of three land-dwelling vertebrates which it specifically identifies as cud-chewers: the camel, the hare, and a third creature whose name in Hebrew is sha-pha-n. The reason given for why these three alleged cud-chewers are not good to eat is that they do not “part the hoof”: Nevertheless, these shall ye not eat of them that chew the cud . . . the camel because he . . . divideth not the hoof. And the sha-pha-n because he . . . divideth not the hoof. . . And the hare, because he . . . divideth not the hoof. (Lev. 11: 4–6)

Although strictly speaking camels are not ruminants, because their cellulosedigesting chambers are anatomically distinct from those of the ruminants, they do ferment, regurgitate, and chew the cud much like cattle, sheep, and goats. But the classification of the hare as a cud-chewer immediately casts a pall over the zoological expertise of the Levite priests. Hares can digest grass but only by eating their own feces—which is a very uncud-like solution to the problem of how to send undigested cellulose through the gut for repeated processing (the technical term for this practice is coprophagy). Now as to the identity of the sha-pha-n. As the following stack of Bibles shows, sha-pha-n is either the “rock badger,” “cherogrillus,” or “cony”: Bibles Translating sha-pha-n as “Rock Badger” The Holy Bible. Berkeley: University of California Press. The Bible. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931. The New Schofield Reference Library Holy Bible (Authorized King James Version). New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. The Holy Bible. London: Catholic Truth Society, 1966. The Holy Bible. (Revised Standard Version). New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1952.

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The American Standard Bible. (Reference Edition). La Habra, CA: Collins World, 1973. The New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures. Brooklyn, NY: Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, 1961. Bibles Translating sha-pha-n as “Cony” The Pentateuch: The Five Books of Moses. Edited by William Tyndale. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967. The Interpreter’s Bible : The Holy Scriptures. 12 vols. New York: Abingdon Press, 1953. The Holy Bible. King James Version (Revised Standard Version). Nashville: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1971. Holy Bible. Authorized version. New York: Harpers. Holy Bible. Revised. New York: American Bible Society, 1873. Modern Readers Bible. Edited by Richard Moulton. New York: Macmillan, 1935. Bibles Translating sha-pha-n as “Cherogrillus” Holy Bible. (Duay, translated from Vulgate.) Boston: John Murphy and Co., 1914. The Holy Bible. (Translated from the Vulgate by John Wycliffe and his followers.) Edited by Rev. Josiah Forshall and Sir Frederick Madden. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1850. All three terms refer to a similar kind of small, furtive, hoofed herbivore about the size of a squirrel that lives in colonies on rocky cliffs or among boulders on hilltops. It has two other popular aliases: “dassie” and “damon.” It could have been any of these closely related species: Hyrax capensia, Hyrax syriacus, or Procavia capensis. Whichever it was, it had no rumen and it did not chew the cud. This leaves the camel as the only bona fide cud-chewer that the Israelites couldn’t eat. Every vertebrate land animal that is not a ruminant was forbidden flesh. And only one vertebrate land animal that is a ruminant, the camel, was forbidden. Let me see if I can explain this exception as well as the peculiar mixup about hares and sha-pha-n. My point of departure is that the food laws in Leviticus were mostly codifications of preexisting traditional food prejudices and avoidances. (The Book of Leviticus was not written until 450 b.c.—very late in Israelite history.) I envision the Levite authorities as undertaking the task of finding some simple feature which good-to-eat vertebrate land species shared in common. Had the Levites possessed a better knowledge of zoology, they could have used the criterion of cud-chewing alone and simply added the proviso, “except for the camel.” For, as I have just said, with the exception of the camel, all land animals implicitly or explicitly forbidden in Leviticus—all the equines, felines, canines, rodents, rabbits, reptiles, and so forth—are nonruminants. But given their shaky knowledge of zoology, the codifiers could not be sure that the camel was the only undesirable species which was a cud-chewer. So they added the criterion of split hooves—a feature which camels lacked but which the other familiar cud-chewers possessed (the camel has two large flexible toes on each foot instead of hooves).

The Abominable Pig

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But why was the camel not a desirable species? Why spurn camel meat? I think the separation of the camel from the other cud-chewers reflects its highly specialized adaptation to desert habitats. With their remarkable capacity to store water, with-stand heat, and carry heavy burdens over great distances, and with their long eye-lashes and nostrils that shut tight for protection against sandstorms, camels were the most important possession of the Middle Eastern desert nomads. (The camel’s hump concentrates fat—not water. It acts as an energy reserve. By concentrating the fat in the hump, the rest of the skin needs only a thin layer of fat, and this facilitates removal of body heat.) But as village farmers, the Israelites had little use for camels. Except under desert conditions, sheep and goats and cattle are more efficient converters of cellulose into meat and milk. In addition, camels reproduce very slowly. The females are not ready to bear offspring and the males are not ready to copulate until six years of age. To slow things down further, the males have a once-a-year rutting season (during which they emit an offensive odor), and gestation takes twelve months. Neither camel meat nor camel milk could ever have constituted a significant portion of the ancient Israelites’ food supply. Those few Israelites such as Abraham and Joseph who owned camels would have used them strictly as a means of transport for crossing the desert. This interpretation gains strength from the Moslem acceptance of camel meat. In the Koran, pork is specifically prohibited while camel flesh is specifically allowed. The whole way of life of Mohammed’s desert-dwelling, pastoral Bedouin followers was based on the camel. The camel was their main source of transport and their main source of animal food, primarily in the form of camel milk. While camel meat was not daily fare, the Bedouin were often forced to slaughter pack animals during their desert journeys as emergency rations when their regular supplies of food were depleted. An Islam that banned camel flesh would never have become a great world religion. It would have been unable to conquer the Arabian heartlands, to launch its attack against the Byzantine and Persian empires, and to cross the Sahara to the Sahel and West Africa. If the Levite priests were trying to rationalize and codify dietary laws, most of which had a basis in preexisting popular belief and practice, they needed a taxonomic principle which connected the existing patterns of preference and avoidance into a comprehensive cognitive and theological system. The preexisting ban on camel meat made it impossible to use cud-chewing as the sole taxonomic principle for identifying land vertebrates that were good to eat. They needed another criterion to exclude camels. And this was how “split hooves” got into the picture. Camels have conspicuously different feet from cattle, sheep, or goats. They have split toes instead of split hooves. So the priests of Leviticus added “parts the hoof ” to “chews the cud” to make camels bad to eat. The misclassification of the hare and sha-pha-n suggest that these animals were not well known to the codifiers. The authors of Leviticus were right about the feet—hares have paws and Hyrax (and Procavia) have tiny hooves, three on the front leg and five on the rear leg. But they were wrong about the cud-chewing— perhaps because hares and sha-pha-n have their mouths in constant motion. Once the principle of using feet to distinguish between edible and inedible flesh was established, the pig could not be banned simply by pointing to its nonruminant nature. Both its cud-chewing status and the anatomy of its feet had to be considered, even though the pig’s failure to chew the cud was its decisive defect.

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Marvin Harris

This, then, is my theory of why the formula for forbidden vertebrate land animals was elaborated beyond the mere absence of cud-chewing. It is a difficult theory to prove because no one knows who the authors of Leviticus were or what was really going on inside their heads. But regardless of whether or not the good-to-eat formula originated in the way I have described, the fact remains that the application of the expanded formula to hare and sha-pha-n (as well as to pig and camel) did not result in any dietary restrictions that adversely affected the balance of nutritional or ecological costs and benefits. Hare and sha-pha-n are wild species; it would have been a waste of time to hunt them instead of concentrating on raising far more productive ruminants. To recall momentarily the case of the Brahman protectors of the cow, I do not doubt the ability of a literate priesthood to codify, build onto, and reshape popular foodways. But I doubt whether such “top-down” codifications generally result in adverse nutritional or ecological consequences or are made with blithe disregard of such consequences. More important than all the zoological errors and flights of taxonomic fancy is that Leviticus correctly identifies the classic domesticated ruminants as the most efficient source of milk and meats for the ancient Israelites. To the extent that abstract theological principles result in flamboyant lists of interdicted species, the results are trivial if not beneficial from a nutritional and ecological viewpoint. Among birds, for example, Leviticus bans the flesh of the eagle, ossifrage, osprey, ostrich, kite, falcon, raven, nighthawk, sea gull, hawk, cormorant, ibis, water-hen, pelican, vulture, stork, hoopoe, and bat (not a bird of course). I suspect but again cannot prove that this list was primarily the result of a priestly attempt to enlarge on a smaller set of prohibited flying creatures. Many of the “birds,” especially the sea birds like pelicans and cormorants, would rarely be seen inland. Also, the list seems to be based on a taxonomic principle that has been somewhat overextended: most of the creatures on it are carnivores and “birds of prey.” Perhaps the list was generated from this principle applied first to common local “birds” and then extended to the exotic sea birds as a valid