ABSTRACT
The great nineteenth-century gourmet Brillat-Savarin, quoted above, lived in a period where confident assertions about the cultural ‘purity’ of national cuisines and foodways could be agreed to by all persons of good sense. French cuisine seemed to be as markedly different from its Anglo-Saxon and Germanic neighbours as it was from the cooking of Japan and China, a view shared by people all across Europe. Thus, when searching for a way in Ecce Homo to describe the cultural essence of the Germans, Nietzsche’s mind seemed naturally to turn to matters of cuisine:
[As to] German cuisine quite generally – what doesn’t it have on its conscience! Soup before the meal … overcooked meats, vegetables cooked with fat and flour; the degeneration of pastries and puddings into paperweights! Add to this the virtually bestial prandial drinking habits of the ancient, and by no means only the ancient, Germans, and
you will understand the origin of the German spirit – from distressed intestines. (Nietzche, 1967: 238)
For those living in the late nineteenth century, one could be certain that the world was like a culinary mosaic, made up of various national or regional pieces that were relatively incommensurate with each other, each possessed of its own distinctive alimentary Volksgeist. The world in the present day may well continue to be divided into and by competing forms of taste in food, but not in the same ways, and not for the same reasons, as the writers of Nietzsche’s time imagined. This is for a range of reasons, which this chapter will outline and explore. The contemporary world condition of food and cuisine differs from that which pertained
a century ago in many ways, the main ones being: (a) a globe-spanning (but certainly not fully integrated) system of food production and distribution has developed over time, especially since the end ofWorldWar II; (b) this system, once relatively unchallenged and hidden from the view of most people, has become a source of very public problems, crises and contestations, especially those centred on the ‘health’ of both humans, animals and plant-life across the planet; (c) present-day food and cuisine exhibit a range of markedly homogenizing tendencies, such that ‘global McDonaldization’ has become one central way in which social actors, of various political hues and dispositions, can imagine and reflect upon contemporary social conditions; (d) relatedly, opposition and hostility to perceived global food homogenization increasingly takes the form of the invention of culinary traditions and the alleged ‘rediscovery’ of ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ ingredients and modes of food preparation and consumption. In these various ways, then, food today is not only structured by both ‘globalizing’ and
‘localizing’ social, political, economic and cultural forces; it also very often figures as a symbol of these forces, as a crucial stake and resource in the struggles they both express and compel, and as a means by which they are enacted and performed. As Georg Simmel (1997) noted a century ago, food is not just an absolutely essential component of any social order’s material functioning; it is also – once transformed by cultural processing into ‘cuisine’ – a key means of both expressing and regulating sociality. Of all possible sets of phenomena that can symbolize particular epochs of human history, it seems that food and cuisine are particularly able to represent the tendencies of an age, its hopes and fears, its sense of what the ‘good life’ is and which forces threaten to destroy the latter altogether. Food thus can figure as both the promise of pleasure and as the index of approaching apocalypse. In an age of endemic globalization and globality, food both symbolically expresses and is materially constituted in ways that make it a quintessential aspect of the contemporary social order, for it is wholly caught up within the dialectics of globality and locality, of placelessness and situatedness, of brave new worlds and fear-ridden nostalgias. The salmon used unwillingly by the fictional Vancouver chef in Timothy Taylor’s novel
cited above, very well embody many of these elements. Reared in a Chilean salmon farm such that they ‘lived independent of geography, food chain or ecosystem’ and were thus ‘immune to the restrictions of place’, they seem to be globalized commodities of the first order, the piscine equivalents of the Big Mac and the bottle of Coca-Cola. They point to the dynamics of globalized capitalist agri-business, the tentacles of which reach out all across the planet, traducing apparently age-old ecosystems and culinary cultures alike. They also point to endemic factory farming on a massive scale, and to burgeoning fears of what effects genetically modified creatures and crops will have on the biosystems of the planet in the medium and long terms. But their radically un-situated, hyper-commodified nature – so unsettling because so apparently ‘unnatural’ – also indicates senses of nostalgia as to biotic conditions and culinary
traditions apparently lost forever that goes together with such developments, such sensibilities generating attempts to recapture rooted feelings of history and tradition in and through food. The dialectics of globality and locality in food keep generating ever more senses of crisis and loss, which in turn are productive of projects to create feelings of stability, security and sense of place in culinary terms. In a recent book on the subject of food globalization,Nutzenadel and Trentmann argue,‘in
much of the literature on globalization food has played little more than a Cinderella role, marginalized and subordinated to the leading cast of financial markets, migration, communication and transnational political cooperation’ (2008: 1). This is true to a certain extent, as in the plethora of work on globalization that has appeared since the late 1990s, food has not figured as a major point of focus or interest. However, this situation varies from one academic discipline to another, with a lot of research on globalized (or localized) foodways being carried out, as we will see below, in anthropology in particular, and also in the sorts of sociology closely related to the latter. Such studies tend – by dint of the ethnographic method they generally employ – to be focussed on micro-level processes, while studies of global food systems and regimes have been carried out more by political economists, often those of a radical hue. In this chapter, we will examine the results of both sorts of work, as well as the valuable contributions of historians, which have amply demonstrated both that contemporary food globalization is not wholly historically unprecedented, and that present-day developments have to be contextualised within the broader dynamics of world history.
