Academic study within the humanities has undergone a sea change over the past twenty-five years. The hierarchy that placed mind above body and intellect above emotion has given way to an integrative approach focused on interdependence, transformation, and symbiosis. This shift toward pluralism, which has profoundly altered scholarly attitudes toward the human body along with the bodily senses of smell, taste, and touch, has coincided with monumental scientific breakthroughs in our understanding of the senses of taste and smell—how they function on the physiological level and, in the case of smell, its remarkable effect on cognition, emotion, and memory.
Not surprisingly, the shift toward pluralism in the humanities as well as recent scientific discoveries about the function of taste and smell have influenced the gastronomic scholarship that has emerged over the past decade. This scholarship, which hails from a range of academic disciplines—philosophy, political studies, sociology, cultural studies, history, environmental studies, human geography, and literary studies to name just a few—revives and extends the investigation begun by Brillat-Savarin almost two centuries ago. Like The Physiology of Taste, contemporary research examines gastronomy’s effect on social relations and explores the material nature of eating. In particular, studies on the social component of gastronomy have extended their focus well beyond the dinner table to create a subfield that takes into account a meal’s entire production history. This research works to overcome the charges of elitism and hedonism that have haunted gastronomy since Brillat-Savarin’s time, charges that stem from gastronomy’s emphasis on the pleasures of consumption, pleasures which, in many cases, are enabled by the grueling, underpaid labor of society’s least privileged as well as the inhumane treatment of animals. In order to recuperate gastronomic pleasure, scholars have expanded its definition to include a strong ethical component that brings food production to the fore. By making gastronomes responsible for knowing the production history of the meals they eat, twenty-first century gastronomic scholarship has expanded the role of the nineteenth-century connoisseur. Rather than being primarily a consumer, as he was in the nineteenth century, today’s gastronome must practice an ethical engagement with the production process, one that promotes sustainability and food justice.
Such “ethical gastronomy” not only concerns itself with the social networks forged at the dining table and delineated by etiquette, but also takes into account the social, economic, and political context of those individuals whose labor went into a meal’s production, including all those who helped transform each ingredient from its natural state into its “cultured” form. It likewise promotes stewardship of the land and of the animals that provision our tables. The scholarship on the social ethics of eating has focused sharply on the capacity of gastronomy to reshape our relationship with nature and to nourish a commitment to the well being of the surrounding community. This scholarship has its roots in the countercultural movements of the 1960s and can be understood as an extension of late-twentieth-century thinking.
Yet another subfield within relational ethics focuses intently on the material nature of eating, exploring the exchanges and transformations that result from our literal incorporation of the physical world. This subfield, which began to coalesce into a discernible shape over the past two decades, investigates what scholar Emma J. Roe describes as “a material ethic [which can be] traced through the processes by which bodies move in and out of one another” as well as the “connections between bodies eating and eaten” (110, 118). In other words, such scholarship focuses on the ways in which bodies conjoin and are reconfigured through the act of eating. As the following review of relational ethics demonstrates, the social and the materialist subfields are fundamentally interconnected in their revaluation of pleasure as a worthy and rich subject for academic study.
Much of the scholarship focused on defining a relational ethics of gastronomy draws on Wendell Berry’s notion of extensive pleasure. In particular it grounds itself in the following passage:
The pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet. People who know the garden in which their vegetables have grown and know that the garden is healthy will remember the beauty of the growing plants.... Such a memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating.... Some, I know, will think it bloodthirsty or worse to eat a fellow creature you have known all its life. On the contrary, I think it means that you eat with understanding and with gratitude. A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes. (151)
Just a few of the scholars focusing on the extensive pleasures of eating as outlined by Berry include philosophers Lisa Heldke, Roger J. H. King, and Carolyn Korsmeyer, literary critic Daniel J. Philippon, and cultural critic Roger Haden. For each of these scholars, gastronomers, or connoisseurs, are ethically bound to gather knowledge. This knowledge, in turn, makes them responsible for their own eating practices, because, as Korsmeyer argues “the connoisseur cannot be both knowledgeable and innocent” (95).
In his essay “Eating Well: Thinking Ethically About Food,” Roger King defines the ethical connoisseur’s responsibility, asserting that we must develop eating practices “that protect the health and integrity of the soil, the well being of wild and domesticated animals, the health and rights of those people who work the world’s fields and farms, and our own sense of self and community” (189). In this configuration, the extensive pleasures of eating not only include a commitment to sustainability and food justice but also nurture an ethical engagement with the community from which our food is sourced, an engagement that gastronomes have a responsibility to nourish.
Literary critic Daniel J. Philippon directly addresses the responsibility of humanities scholars to promote sustainability. According to Philippon, the humanities provides meaning and perspective, both of which can aid in developing the language and the tropes needed to define sustainability as well as to guide its development. Philippon grounds much of his argument in the aforementioned passage from Wendell Berry’s “Pleasures of Eating” to argue that it “has given us a new trope on which to base a cultural transformation.” In particular, “it collapses the all-too- common distinction between aesthetics or pleasure on the one hand and politics on the other. ... Berry gives us the verbal equivalent of balsamic reduction: a condensing image that encapsulates why the gastronomic pleasures of the past are, on their own, no longer sufficient in an age of sustainability” (172). By defining eating pleasure as an ethical engagement with the land, the people, and the animals that provision our table, Berry offers a means of rescuing gastronomy from the charges of elitism and hedonism that have plagued it for almost two centuries.
That charges of elitism and frivolity have been leveled against gastronomy since it first coalesced into a field in the nineteenth-century attests to the fact that Western culture has long suffered from an impoverished understanding of taste. Within the past fifteen years, however, scholars such as Denise Gigante, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Caroline Korsmeyer, and Lisa Heldke have begun the considerable work needed to revise and expand our knowledge of taste and its importance to individual and cultural identity. Roger Haden articulates the importance of this revaluation when he writes: “The historical decontextualization of taste has [had] a huge shaping influence on taste’s potential as a mode of knowing.... “Taste [is] conflated with instant gratification.... Taste and pleasure therefore tend...to be experienced as transient, internalized effects that bear no real relation to social reality.... sensation as opposed to perception.” (274-5) In order to combat this impoverished, decontextualized notion of taste, Haden calls for a contemporary connoisseurship that jettisons the definition of taste as primarily about consumption and focuses instead on “taste’s deep connectedness to the natural world” (279).
By redefining the gastronome as one whose eating practices are grounded in an ethical engagement with food production, gastronomic scholarship has begun articulating just such an integrative and nuanced notion of taste. Lisa Heldke, for example, urges us to push the definition of a food aesthetic beyond “the experience of tongue and nose” to draw “upon all its potential layers of symbolic meaning—including layers that are ethical and political in nature” (143). Toward that end, Wendy Parkins and Geoffrey Craig offer a definition of what they term “situated pleasures” that elegantly integrates the social and materialist components of ethical gastronomy. They explain: “[i]n relation to food and eating, situated pleasures are firstly grounded in the body—in the physicality and an attentiveness to the location of the body, its association with other bodies in convivial settings, and an awareness of the nexus between the bodies that produce and consume food, in specific times and places” (87). Like Berry’s extensive pleasures, Parkins’ and Craig’s “situated pleasures” are dependent on an ethical engagement with the environment as well as with those individuals who grow, produce, and prepare the food we eat. But first and foremost, “situated pleasures” are grounded in the body, a body that is physically and ethically bound to all those bodies whose labor and flesh it consumes. In this way, ethical gastronomy firmly binds the gastronome to the production process.
Just one of many recent studies that illustrate the political potential of “situated pleasures,” California Cuisine and Just Food examines the development of alternative food networks in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s and 1970s and explores how these networks have nourished an ideology founded on community ethics, sustainability, and food justice. Drawing together the research of six scholars, California Cuisine and Just Food examines the radical mix of politics and food aesthetics that has enabled the San Francisco Bay Area to thrive not only as a gastronomic capital of the United States but also as a region devoted to food justice for migrant farm laborers as well as for those living in food deserts. As Marion Nestle summarizes in her forward to the book, California Cuisine and Just Food “ is about how the Bay Area food movement evolved to what it is today: a vibrant community of highly diverse groups working on highly diverse ways to produce better-quality food and promote a more just, healthful, and sustainable food system” (xi). As the authors acknowledge, however, the wealthiest members of the community are also those who have benefitted the most from the district’s struggle against the mainstream food system. What the authors find heartening, however, is that “the degree to which the priorities of urban communities of color have been embraced by those whose first concerns were food aesthetics and ecological sustainability reflects important learning and fairly consistent openness in a common enterprise in the district” (8).
California Cuisine and Just Food illustrates a growing realization within academic studies that gastronomy is far from being an isolated, elitist, and frivolous practice. To the contrary, it is saturated with political, social, ideological, ethical, and environmental meanings that illuminate and are illuminated by the materialist nature of eating. Two scholars in particular, Allison Hayes-Conroy and Jessica Hayes-Conroy, have begun to research precisely how “the materiality of food choice (bodily experiences of food) and ideologies regarding food and eating” intersect (2008: 462). Toward this end, they insist on what they call a biosocial understanding of bodily feeling, one that conceives of “biological and social forces as internally combined” (2012: 517). This approach is essential to their research because, as they explain:
The ‘feel’ of food experiences, including quite emphatically the ‘taste’ of food itself, cannot be separated from each event of feeling or tasting; the taste of a meal or the feel of an environment includes the social relationships embedded in it, the cultural representation it brings up, the spiritual keys, imagery, a body’s past experiences with flavors, hunger sensation in the stomach, and so on. (521)
Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy chose Slow Food as the subject for one of their recent studies, deciding to explore, in particular, why Slow Food USA has failed in its repeated attempts to attract a more diverse membership. In sum, they found a stunning disconnect between the way in which Slow Food approaches taste education and the way in which successful minority food initiatives were engaging with people of color. In particular, they found that Slow Food’s attitude toward fast food does not allow “for the possibility that desire for fast food could signal a functioning and capable body” (523). Alternative food movements such as Slow Food approach “food knowledge as something that connoisseurs, food professionals, or educated and refined individuals have, and that others, often the uneducated, minorities, and the poor, need to be provided or taught.” According to one minority food initiative leader, a more successful approach lies in giving “people of color a sense of wisdom in relation to food” that reinforces “that what their culture eats, that is intelligent, that is wise, [is] a part of their evolution.... They still exist because they knew to eat foods ... [in] certain combinations that maybe killed this bacteria or had this enzyme to break down this protein and make it available.” Such an approach imparts a sense of empowerment rather than erects a hierarchy that defines privileged bodies as healthy and wise, yet codes underprivileged bodies as unhealthy and ignorant.
Although not concerned with food studies in particular, Gail Weiss’ work on embodiment explores the dynamic of material exchanges in a way that can be easily applied to the production, preparation, and consumption of a meal. She explains:
the experience of being embodied is never a private affair, but is always mediated by our continual interactions with other human and nonhuman bodies. Acknowledging and addressing the multiple corporeal exchanges that continually take place in our everyday lives demands a corresponding recognition of the ongoing construction and reconstruction of our bodies and body images. These processes of construction and reconstruction in turn alter the very nature of these intercorporeal exchanges, and, in so doing, offer the possibility of expanding our social, political, and ethical horizons. (5-6)
If we apply Weiss’ definition of intercorporeality to gastronomy, then we begin to understand the transformative potential inherent in the act of eating. This notion of the gastronomic experience as a transformative mode of engagement, however, is hardly new. In fact, from Brillat-Savarin onward, gastronomes have been writing, in part, to capture and convey just such transformations. Proust’s madeleine moment serves as the most oft-cited transformation. Other examples abound throughout gastronomic literature and many can be found in the memoirs of M.F.K. Fisher, who often writes in order to convey the emotional, psychological, and spiritual transformations wrought by gastronomy. In particular, Fisher often explores the moment when eater and eaten are conjoined in order to articulate an “eat and be eaten” dynamic that illuminates gastronomy as a practice with the capacity to shape the way we engage with the surrounding world. In the following passage, which appears in Fisher’s posthumously published Last House, Fisher recounts the events of an evening struggling with a stubborn illness:
I coughed steadily in a small, dry, exhausting way until the speed and sound of the cough changed, and up into my throat moved my soul. . . . The soul, smooth and about the size of a small truffle or scallop or a large marble, rose firmly into my upper throat. . . . I knew what it looked like, for I had seen it long ago. I knew its color and its contours and its taste. . . . I told it, in a flash of our first meeting, and of the mystery and respect and indeed affection I had battened on from that day. I was about five, maybe four. . . . [A]ll I remember is that my young, small soul rose into my throat and then came out. . . . It was about as big as a little hazelnut or chickpea, of the subtlest creamy white, like ivory but deeper. . . . I recognized it fully, without any doubt or timidity, as my own soul. Then I put it gently into my mouth, bit into it, and chewed and swallowed it. . . . I made sure that none had stayed in my mouth and that all of it was well down my throat, for it was important that it reassemble itself and stay there inside me, to grow. . . . I never wondered about its next visit, but I knew there would be one (28-31).
By visualizing her soul as a “truffle” or “chickpea” that she chews and swallows, Fisher images a realm of mutual construction, one in which she incorporates and is incorporated by the external world. In so doing, she eloquently illustrates taste as a transformative process, one through which eater and eaten, nature and culture, self and other are momentarily conjoined and permanently reconfigured. The passage also showcases how the practice of gastronomy can be interiorized as a form of self-management—a means of transforming fear, anxiety, and pain into a sense of fulfillment and well-being.
Cultural critic Roger Haden argues that in order to theorize and contextualize taste, we must adopt “a fluid model of flow and exchange. Such a model of flow and exchange already exists in sensory taste itself. Taste must not only be regarded as flavor (or texture, and so on), but also as a mode of engagement” (273). The passage from Fisher, as do countless passages from gastronomic literature, articulates eating as a dynamic “flow and exchange” with the power to transform the way we engage with the surrounding world. Scholars of ethical gastronomy have only just begun to explore the real world political, social, and cultural ramifications of this dynamic. Yet these initial studies indicate that a promising future lies ahead for gastronomic studies, one that nourishes and is nourished by pleasure.
Works Cited
Berry, Wendell. “The Pleasures of Eating.” 1990. What are People For? Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2010.
Coff, Christian. The Taste for Ethics: An Ethic of Food Consumption. Berlin: Springer, 2006. Fairfax, Sally K., Louise Dyble, Greig Tor Guthey Lauren Gwin, Monica Moore, Jennifer
Sokolove. California Cuisine and Just Food. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012.
Fisher, M. F. K. Last House. 1995. New York: Random House, 1997.
Haden, Roger. “Lionizing Taste: Toward an Ecology of Contemporary Connoisseurship.” Educated Tastes: Food, Drink and Connoisseur Culture. Ed. Jeremy Strong. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2011.
Hayes-Conroy, Allison and Jessica. “Taking Back Taste: Feminism, Food and Visceral Politics. Gender, Place & Culture. Vol. 15, No. 5; 2008, pp. 461-73.
—. “Visceral Difference: Variations in Feeling (Slow) Food.” Taking Food Public. Eds. Psyche Williams-Forson and Carole Counihan. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Heldke, Lisa. “The (Extensive) Pleasures of Eating.” Educated Tastes: Food, Drink and Connoisseur Culture. Ed. Jeremy Strong. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2011.
King, Roger. “Eating Well: Thinking Ethically About Food.” Food & Philosophy. Eds. Fritz Allhoff and Dave Monroe. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.
Korsmeyer, Carolyn. “Ethical Gourmadism.” The Philosophy of Food. Ed. David Kaplan. Berkeley: U.C. Press, 2012.
Parkins, Wendy and Geoffrey Craig. Slow Living. Oxford: Berg, 2006.
Philippon, Daniel J. “Sustainability and the Humanities: An Extensive Pleasure.” American Literary History, vol. 24, no. 1; Spring 2012, (163-179).
Roe, Emma J. “Things Becoming Food and the Embodied, Material Practices of an Organic Food Consumer.” Sociologia Ruralis, Vol. 46, No. 2, April 2006.
Weiss, Gail. Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality. Psychology Press, 1999.