Word of Mouth: What We Talk About When We Talk About Food
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About this ebook
What does it mean, Ferguson asks, to cook and consume in a globalized culinary world subject to vertiginous change? Answers to this question demand a mastery of food talk in all its forms and applications. To prove its case, Word of Mouth draws on a broad range of cultural documents from interviews, cookbooks, and novels to comic strips, essays, and films.
Although the United States supplies the primary focus of Ferguson's explorations, the French connection remains vital. American food culture comes of age in dialogue with French cuisine even as it strikes out on its own. In the twenty-first century, culinary modernity sets haute food against haute cuisine, creativity against convention, and the individual dish over the communal meal. Ferguson finds a new level of sophistication in what we thought that we already knew: the real pleasure in eating comes through knowing how to talk about it.
Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson
Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson is Professor in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. After publishing on French literary identity in Literary France: The Making of a Culture, she studied the urban culture of Paris in Paris as Revolution: Reading the Nineteenth-Century City. Her work on cuisine and food started with Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine and has moved into an ever more comparative perspective.
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Reviews for Word of Mouth
3 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5More aptly subtitled, "What A Sociologist Talks About When She Talks About Food". For Parkhurst Ferguson, that means hefty helpings of jargon and sweeping generalizations about cooking and food culture. The former I found hard to understand (I still don't know what she means by "field"), and the latter I sometimes disagreed with. I especially disliked her insistence on drawing a distinction between feminine home cooks and male chefs -- a divide that, with the rise of many, many women chefs, no longer makes sense. (Besides which, the word she made up? "Chefing"? Ugh.) And her book focuses almost exclusively on Western gastronomy, particularly French, so the pronoun "We" in the title is really misleading. But she does have some interesting things to say about the various competing priorities of a restaurant experience, and it was fun to read about some food history and food-related films and stories, though one could probably find all that somewhere else -- or better yet, just watch "Ratatouille" for yourself.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5More aptly subtitled, "What A Sociologist Talks About When She Talks About Food". For Parkhurst Ferguson, that means hefty helpings of jargon and sweeping generalizations about cooking and food culture. The former I found hard to understand (I still don't know what she means by "field"), and the latter I sometimes disagreed with. I especially disliked her insistence on drawing a distinction between feminine home cooks and male chefs -- a divide that, with the rise of many, many women chefs, no longer makes sense. (Besides which, the word she made up? "Chefing"? Ugh.) And her book focuses almost exclusively on Western gastronomy, particularly French, so the pronoun "We" in the title is really misleading. But she does have some interesting things to say about the various competing priorities of a restaurant experience, and it was fun to read about some food history and food-related films and stories, though one could probably find all that somewhere else -- or better yet, just watch "Ratatouille" for yourself.
Book preview
Word of Mouth - Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson
Word of Mouth
CALIFORNIA STUDIES IN FOOD AND CULTURE
Darra Goldstein, Editor
1. Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices, by Andrew Dalby
2. Eating Right in the Renaissance, by Ken Albala
3. Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, by Marion Nestle
4. Camembert: A National Myth, by Pierre Boisard
5. Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety, by Marion Nestle
6. Eating Apes, by Dale Peterson
7. Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet, by Harvey Levenstein
8. Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America, by Harvey Levenstein
9. Encarnación’s Kitchen: Mexican Recipes from Nineteenth-Century California: Selections from Encarnación Pinedo’s El cocinero español, by Encarnación Pinedo, edited and translated by Dan Strehl, with an essay by Victor Valle
10. Zinfandel: A History of a Grape and Its Wine, by Charles L. Sullivan, with a foreword by Paul Draper
11. Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World, by Theodore C. Bestor
12. Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity, by R. Marie Griffith
13. Our Overweight Children: What Parents, Schools, and Communities Can Do to Control the Fatness Epidemic, by Sharron Dalton
14. The Art of Cooking: The First Modern Cookery Book, by The Eminent Maestro Martino of Como, edited and with an introduction by Luigi Ballerini, translated and annotated by Jeremy Parzen, and with fifty modernized recipes by Stefania Barzini
15. The Queen of Fats: Why Omega - 3s Were Removed from the Western Diet and What We Can Do to Replace Them, by Susan Allport
16. Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food, by Warren Belasco
17. The Spice Route: A History, by John Keay
18. Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World: A Concise History with 174 Recipes, by Lilia Zaouali, translated by M. B. DeBevoise, with a foreword by Charles Perry
19. Arranging the Meal: A History of Table Service in France, by Jean-Louis Flandrin, translated by Julie E. Johnson, with Sylvie and Antonio Roder; with a foreword to the English language edition by Beatrice Fink
20. The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir, by Amy B. Trubek
21. Food: The History of Taste, edited by Paul Freedman
22. M. F. K. Fisher among the Pots and Pans: Celebrating Her Kitchens, by Joan Reardon, with a foreword by Amanda Hesser
23. Cooking: The Quintessential Art, by Hervé This and Pierre Gagnaire, translated by M. B. DeBevoise
24. Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century, by Laura Shapiro
25. Of Sugar and Snow: A History of Ice Cream Making, by Jeri Quinzio
26. Encyclopedia of Pasta, by Oretta Zanini De Vita, translated by Maureen B. Fant, with a foreword by Carol Field
27. Tastes and Temptations: Food and Art in Renaissance Italy, by John Varriano
28. Free for All: Fixing School Food in America, by Janet Poppendieck
29. Breaking Bread: Recipes and Stories from Immigrant Kitchens, by Lynne Christy Anderson, with a foreword by Corby Kummer
30. Culinary Ephemera: An Illustrated History, by William Woys Weaver
31. Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar: Stories of Food during Wartime by the World’s Leading Correspondents, edited by Matt McAllester
32. Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism, by Julie Guthman
33. Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics, by Marion Nestle and Malden Nesheim
34. Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food, and South Asia, edited by Krishnendu Ray and Tulasi Srinivas
35. The Cookbook Library: Four Centuries of the Cooks, Writers, and Recipes That Made the Modern Cookbook, by Anne Willan, with Mark Cherniavsky and Kyri Claflin
36. Coffee Life in Japan, by Merry White
37. American Tuna: The Rise and Fall of an Improbable Food, by Andrew F. Smith
38. A Feast of Weeds: A Literary Guide to Foraging and Cooking Wild Edible Plants, by Luigi Ballerini, translated by Gianpiero W. Doebler, with recipes by Ada De Santis and illustrations by Giuliano Della Casa
39. The Philosophy of Food, by David M. Kaplan
40. Beyond Hummus and Falafel: Social and Political Aspects of Palestinian Food in Israel, by Liora Gvion, translated by David Wesley and Elana Wesley
41. The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America, by Heather Paxson
42. Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds: Recipes and Lore from Rome and Lazio, by Oretta Zanini De Vita, translated by Maureen B. Fant, foreword by Ernesto Di Renzo
43. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History, by Rachel Laudan
44. Inside the California Food Revolution: Thirty Years That Changed Our Culinary Consciousness, by Joyce Goldstein, with Dore Brown
45. Cumin, Camels, and Caravans: A Spice Odyssey, by Gary Paul Nabhan
46. Balancing on a Planet: Critical Thinking and Effective Action for the Future of Food and Agriculture, by David A. Cleveland
47. The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India, by Sarah Besky
48. How the Other Half Ate: A History of Working-Class Meals at the Turn of the Century, by Katherine Leonard Turner
49. The Untold History of Ramen: How Political Crisis in Japan Spawned a Global Food Craze, by George Solt
50. Word of Mouth: What We Talk About When We Talk About Food, by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson
51. Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet, by Amy Bentley
52. Secrets from the Greek Kitchen: Cooking, Skill, and Everyday Life on an Aegean Island, by David E. Sutton
METAPHORIC CONSUMPTION. Laden with cultural meanings, food is always more than matter. If we are what we eat, we also eat what we are—or imagine ourselves to be—and we use food to show us how to be. As this fruit stand reminds us, food is rife with metaphor. With its biblical resonance (Revelation 14:18–20) the grapes of wrath
entered American culture during the Civil War through Julia Ward Howe’s immensely popular (in the North) Battle Hymn of the Republic
(1861). John Steinbeck’s novel of 1939 and John Ford’s movie the following year extended the reach. Decades later, these grapes produce a world that turns every fruit into metaphor. W. B. Park, The New Yorker Collection/www.cartoonbank.com.
Word of Mouth
What We Talk About When
We Talk About Food
PRISCILLA PARKHURST FERGUSON
UC LogoUNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles London
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.
University of California Press
Oakland, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2014 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst.
Word of mouth : what we talk about when we talk about food / Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson.
p. cm. — (California studies in food and culture ; 50)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-520-27392-4 (cloth, alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-520-95896-8 (electronic)
1. Food—Social aspects. 2. Food—Cross-cultural studies. 3. Food habits—Cross-cultural studies. I. Title.
GT2850.F46 2014
394.1’2—dc232014005773
Manufactured in the United States of America
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).
To the memory of Neale Sargent Parkhurst, who first taught me to prize Eager Eaters, and to Robert A. Ferguson, who pushed me to think about them
CONTENTS
Prologue: Talking About Food
PART I. FROM TALK TO TEXT
1. Thinking About Food
2. The Perils and Pleasures of Consumption
3. Texts Take Over
PART II. NEW COOKS, NEW CHEFS
4. Iconic Cooks
5. Chefs and Chefing
PART III: THE CULINARY LANDSCAPE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
6. Dining on the Edge
7. Haute Food
Epilogue: Last Words—Ratatouille
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
PROLOGUE
He likes bread and butter,
He likes toast and jam,
That’s what his baby feeds him,
He’s her lovin’ man.
Well . . . I like bread and butter,
I like toast and jam,
That’s what my baby feeds me,
I’m her lovin’ man.
He likes bread and butter,
He likes toast and jam,
That’s what his baby feeds him,
He’s her lovin’ man.
She don’t cook mashed potatoes,
She don’t cook T-bone steaks,
Don’t feed me peanut butter,
She knows that I can’t take.
He likes bread and butter,
He likes toast and jam,
That’s what his baby feeds him,
He’s her lovin’ man.
Well, I got home early one Monday,
Much to my surprise,
She was eating chicken and dumplings
With some other guy.
No more bread and butter,
No more toast and jam,
He found his baby eating
With some other man.
No, no, no. . . .
No more bread and butter,
No more toast and jam,
I found my baby eating
With some other man.
The Newbeats, Bread and Butter
(1964)*
STORIES ABOUT FOOD
Food talk takes many forms and does many things. When we talk about food, we share our pleasure in what we eat. But we conjure the dangers of consumption no less than we convey its delights. Sometimes we talk about food simply to talk about food. Yet as often as not we talk through food to speak of love and desire, devotion and disgust, aspirations and anxieties, ideas and ideologies, joys and judgments. Given the many connections between food and what humans do in the societies that we make, what we say about food offers a wonderful medium for exploring the social world. Food surely can be construed as a total social phenomenon,
as Marcel Mauss defined it—that is, as a set of experiences and practices so pervasive that we could not imagine our worlds without them. From the kitchen to the dining table and beyond, the talk generated by food draws our attention because of its connection to our social selves.
The song lyrics quoted above offer a case in point. As aficionados of 1960s popular music will no doubt recognize (and the rest of us can discover on the Internet), Bread and Butter
was a 1964 megahit by the vocal trio the Newbeats. A first viewing of the video shows it to be very much a period piece. From the vantage point of the more aggressive, insistent popular music of the twenty-first century, this performance seems very old-fashioned indeed—the flip hairdos of the teenage girls in the audience provide instant transport back a half century.
Yet if the Newbeats sing from another era, the story that they tell resonates today—if, that is, we take the time to give the song our full attention. Bread and Butter
turns out to be food talk at its most engaging. Unlikely though it may seem, this song is archetypal food talk. It displays and dramatizes the power of food to shape our lives. And it does so by telling a story.
Bread and Butter
is a love story—alas, one with an unhappy ending, at least for the narrator. It tells of a love affair gone wrong because the lovers think about and use food so differently. Food, it becomes clear as the stanzas progress, is shorthand for life. In particular, food means doing love. In life as at table, ill-matched tastes bode ill. The man tells his story, putting the listener off track by adopting a screechy falsetto that wavers between a whine and a scream. The narrator’s opening (the text in roman above) and backup chorus (in italics, sung by two men) evoke a gustatory paradise where bread and butter, toast and jam satisfy every appetite. These elementary foodstuffs satisfy at once culinary cravings and amorous desire: That’s what my baby feeds me, I’m her lovin’ man.
Predictably, this gastronomic Eden proves a temporary sojourn. The narrator turns out to suffer from a severe case of arrested development. The simple life of bread, butter, toast and jam are the stuff of a child’s world—poor preparation for the real
world of adults. The foods he prefers are childhood standbys that adults tend to relegate to breakfast, and not even a real breakfast at that. The archetypal American breakfast of eggs, bacon, and possibly pancakes makes a real meal; starch, dairy, and sweets do not.
The culinarily attuned among us will not be surprised at the consequences of such dietary deprivation. Returning home unexpectedly, the narrator finds that he has been replaced—at the table and in his girl’s affections. Until now she has existed to feed her man. She does not cook, she feeds. Does she like bread and butter? All we know is that she makes neither mashed potatoes nor steak and stays clear of peanut butter she knows that [he] can’t take.
The result of this imbalanced diet and inadequate meal? Much to [his] surprise,
the narrator comes home to find her consuming a meal of her own, with some other guy.
A new culinary couple sits at table. Fed up, his baby
has grown up. Abandoning the surrogate motherhood of nursery feeding, she has taken to eating proper (adult) food with a proper (adult) dinner companion.
Betrayal at table says everything anyone needs to know about a love affair gone wrong. The new culinary couple is having a real
meal, a dinner for adults. Unlike bread and butter, chicken and dumplings have to be cooked. Supplying protein as well as carbohydrates, this dish, like steak and mashed potatoes, answers standard nutritional requirements for a good—that is, balanced—meal that contrasts with the dietarily and gastronomically impoverished snack of dairy, starch, and sugar.
Furthermore, along with the peanut butter that the narrator refuses to touch, this iconic dish integrates this dinner into a particular social setting. Chicken and dumplings is a common dish in the American South, and steak and potatoes is representative American fare. In refusing its foods, the narrator rejects his country, just as his refusal of a real
meal refuses a real
relationship. Bread, butter, toast, and jam are side dishes, not the real thing. Making a time-honored conjunction, this song all about food turns out to be all about sex after all.
SOCIOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDINGS
However improbable a cultural indicator, Bread and Butter
takes us to the heart of food talk. This pop song tells what it means to talk about food and why we do so. This talk lays bare the food world. It articulates the values and norms of that world and comments on its practices. Most succinctly, food talk—the ways we talk about and represent food—structures our experience of food, from kitchen to table, from menu to meal. As the drama of Bread and Butter
illustrates so vividly, food is part of the social relationship that it expresses, sustains, and occasionally alters. Food talk recounts the ways that food affects our lives. More than that, it shows how food can help us live those lives. We talk about food to both craft identities and construct social worlds.
The reflection that Word of Mouth places on food talk and its creation of social worlds is a sociological enterprise. As the undergraduate promotional brochure for my department has it, sociology studies associational life. Instead of focusing on people as individuals, sociologists look to the relationships that bring people together. In other words, we look at what people do when they are with other people, and we pay attention to how people talk and write about what they do—in this case, about the many ways they think about and do food.
The question is how to get at the food talk that is all around us. The limitations of eavesdropping and direct observation impel cultural sociologists to raid the arsenal of the historian and the literary scholar. Like them, we scrutinize texts. Traditionally, the texts most often consulted were literary works and historical sources of unimpeachable consequence that looked at the social world from above.
In the past half century, as critics and scholars have become more concerned with looking at society from below,
there has been a corresponding shift in the material that we use to reconstruct social worlds. We look at writings and representations of a great many sorts, not as cultural monuments but as signs that reveal ways of doing and thinking in a particular culture in a given time and place.
These documents come in many guises. Like others before me, I draw on a miscellaneous assortment, unequal in importance and significance, each of which gives a glimpse into the world I am examining—in this case, our contemporary food world. The ephemeral plays its part, as does the classic; a pop song turns up in Word of Mouth, as do the novels of Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf. Fleeting by definition, journalistic reporting offers powerful insight on cultural ephemera. Images and representations of every sort have a concentrated, visual impact that makes them illuminating. The force, and the appeal, of film lies in its conjunction of images and stories. Texts describe and analyze the food worlds that literature animates, images represent, and film stages.
Cultural forms have their specificity. Each has its own public, follows its own rules, uses idiosyncratic methods, and makes a singular appeal. Even so, and as dissimilar as these cultural markers assuredly are, the analytic lens that I have adopted sees them as equal. It is not useful for my purposes to distinguish among the different indicators, either theoretically or empirically. To understand food talk and the food world that this talk creates, I take each both on its own and as part of the cultural reading proposed in Word of Mouth.
This methodological eclecticism takes its cue, and its inspiration, from Walter Benjamin’s endlessly fascinating excavation of nineteenth-century Paris. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin reconstructs the city through cultural texts of all sorts. The incongruent nature of these texts along with his apparent disregard for conventional intellectual hierarchies make Benjamin the very model of the scholar as scavenger. Almost anything written offers him a clue, however insignificant it may seem to any other reader, about the people, place, and period of the city that he famously celebrated as the Capital of the nineteenth century. Snippets of mostly forgotten plays find their place next to the iconic poetry of Baudelaire; journalistic essays receive serious attention alongside the work of esteemed historians. The Arcades Project all but drowns the reader in its stories, tales, and anecdotes of nineteenth-century Paris. Readers navigate the swirling currents as best they can.
The opening essay of The Arcades Project, Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,
proposes straight off the reasoning behind what Benjamin knows will seem like a scattershot approach to the past. The very first sentence announces his working premise: that the essence
of history is to be found in the conjunction between Herodotus and the morning newspaper, between classic historiographical texts and the ephemera of everyday life. The writer known as the Father of History
takes his place alongside whatever sensational tidbit turns up in the latest news.
That same search takes me to scholarly studies of food and to a vintage pop song about a meal gone wrong, to extensive interviews with chefs and emblematic cartoons about dining. It makes the most of cookbooks and films about cooking and eating. In brief, rather like the cook who makes use of what turns up in the larder, in this cultural chronicle I pick up the documents that I find at hand.
This pursuit takes me on a Benjaminian treasure hunt for the telling example, the vivid illustration, and the revelatory quote. My concern is not with individuals or events. What counts are modes of being and kinds of behavior. I work through social relations to construct models of relationships much as Benjamin looked to character types (the flâneur, the collector), typical places (arcades and shops), and contemporary conventions (fashion, exhibitions, and advertising). Benjamin does not spend much time on discrete portraits or singular occurrences for their own sake. Even his discussion of the Paris Commune—the spectacular uprising of 1871 and its bloody repression by governmental troops—frames events as exemplary, not singular. Benjamin takes the figures that he picks out—Marx, Fourier, Saint-Simon, Baudelaire, Daumier, Hugo—as exempla of the modernity that made Paris the Capital of the nineteenth century.
Taking the exemplary over the singular puts me in good sociological company. Georg Simmel, to cite one of the founding fathers of the discipline, prizes form over content and structure over substance. He explains social phenomena by constructing patterns and configurations. Simmel looks to the forms of what he calls sociation—that is, forms of social interaction. Two of his most celebrated essays, The Metropolis and Mental Life
and The Stranger,
show these social forms in action. The modern city dweller is a social type, and so is the stranger. Each is the creature of a distinctive social space; each exposes a social relation that simultaneously unites and divides, setting the insider apart from the outsider, the self from the other.
All of us recognize something of ourselves in Simmel’s types. That’s one reason why his essays work so well in the classroom. Just looking around shows students how the space that they inhabit fosters the attitudes and behaviors that Simmel identifies. None of us is anywhere near fully one type. As Max Weber would later insist, ideal types never coincide with reality. Their concentrated features are dispersed in ordinary life, making them more real than reality and exceptionally useful tools for the sociologist. Though I talk about people and events, my aim is formal. I propose forms of connection, types of relationships, modes of action. I take the cook, the chef, and the diner as types, categories, styles, modes of association. Instead of proof, I offer my own text as document, illustration, and example, the better to connect with the reader’s own experience.
QUESTIONS
Every book begins with a question. Whether the whodunit of the mystery story, the epistemological conundrum of the philosophical treatise, or any number of variants in between, questions set the stage for the interpretive drama under construction. Word of Mouth asks questions about food—how we think about it, what we do with it, and what effect it has. Why do dining and cooking preoccupy so many in contemporary society? Despite the highly unequal distribution of food both across and within societies, why is need surprisingly muted in discussions of what makes our contemporary food world so different from what it was not all that long ago?
Crucial to understanding this strikingly assertive food world is food talk. In every culture, people talk about, write about, and portray food for all sorts of reasons. Today we contend with an extraordinary array of foodstuffs brought within easy reach by a globalizing economy. We confront unmatched culinary diversity. We take note of arresting changes in food practices, which some of us work to alter further. New modes of production and consumption, new requirements of supply and demand, and new forms of dining push us to think about food both more often and more intensely than ever before. The explosion of food talk in the past twenty-five years—in articles, blogs, and television shows, cookbooks and memoirs, films and, yes, scholarly studies—is a sure sign of our times. Benjamin, for one, would have leaped at the opportunity.
Talk anchors this food world by making it possible for us to share the unshareable—that is, our sensual, powerfully private experiences of eating. Chapter 1 shows the conversations that occur in the kitchen and at table, along with the writings and images that take this talk beyond those spaces. Firmly rooted in place, these ways of using food connect us to a culinary country. Food talk is instrumental in making us aware of that identity.
At the same time, in the markedly mobile food world of the twenty-first century, no culinary country operates on its own, if it ever did. It cannot do so because every country is part of a larger food world that favors exchange. The greater the exchange, the more blurred the identities. In the culinary conversation that Word of Mouth tracks most closely, France and America have exchanged culinary products and practices for three centuries and counting. Yet they maintain their distinct culinary identities even when archetypal French croissants turn up in American supermarkets and fast food outlets, from McDonald’s to Kentucky Fried Chicken to Starbucks, dot the French landscape. Chapter 1 suggests some of the means by which croissants remain French and McDonald’s stays American, and why, in this global market, it is vital that they do so. McDo
sells burgers, to be sure; it also sells America. Croissants convey, however faintly, a certain idea of France. That culinary nationalism is very much of our times comes to the fore in two films: Haute Cuisine, from France, and Le Grand Chef, from South Korea.
What do we actually say about food? How have people talked about it? What about food fears? Every time we put something in our mouths, we put our lives on the line, although few see the situation in such dire terms. As chapter 2 points out, the hope of gustatory delight wins out over the fear of poison, as it must if we are to survive. It then becomes a question of what we can do to minimize the dangers and maximize the delights. The tension between the two makes our relationship to food exceptionally tentative. Food talk guides us through this dilemma. Rhetoric sits at every table, helping diners think through the standoff between danger and desire. The film Chocolat, the perennial favorite children’s story Winnie-the-Pooh, and Dagwood, from the long-running comic strip Blondie, all propose models of consumption that prize gluttony over gastronomy, enthusiasm over discrimination.
Chapter 3 moves from the talk to the talkers. From the Greek writer Athenaeus in second-century Rome, unquestionably the greatest food writer of all time, to the utopian