Declaration of a foodist
Part 1
 The foodie and his food
Part 2
 The importance of food.
The foodie and his food
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Childhood:
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Mother as an credible foodie;
Enormous difficulties to be a foodie:
1.
2.
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American journey:
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Scarcity;
Political ideology: “[to conduct] the revolution is not
inviting guests to dinner parties.” -- Chairman Mao, 1927
Food as an anchor of identity
Food as compass
The intellectual of mundane situations in everyday life
A purpose of these discussions: reveal my
subjectivity and limitation; explain my topic
choice.
The importance of
food
1.
2.
3.
The State of the Field:
Historiography
Reasons for our failure to
fully recognize the
importance of food
The importance of food
The state of the field: Historiography
Food historians often have to explain and defend their subject
matter: – the lack of adequate understanding of the
importance of food as a subject of vigorous academic
inquiry
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Historiography: the existing scholarship or a body of
literature, on a given topic. It also covers theories and
methodologies in historical research and writing.
Increasing interest in food among historians and other
scholars.
Reasons for this increase:
– concern over health and food safety;
– The popularity of food as entertainment;
– Popular writers have also come to the realm of food:
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Dan Koeppel, Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World (2008)
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006)
Jacques Pépin, The Apprentice (2003);
King Corn (2007) Directed by Aaron Woolf. Starring Earl L. Butz, Ian
Cheney, Curt Ellis.
Limitations of food studies in American history in terms of
influence and scope.
Limitations of food studies in general:
– Apparent holes
– Not a coherent field of study yet.
– We have not yet recognized the over importance of food.
The declaration of a foodist: The centrality of food in human history
a.
b.
c.
Foodie vs foodist
Human Desire
The declaration of a foodist: Food is
the most important and most
fundamental desire
Human Desire
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Definition:
– Desire is a longing of the desiring individual to bring objects
or conditions into one’s possession or existence. Desire,
then, is the attempt of self-consciousness to realize itself by
connecting to what is other than itself. It is the most
fundamental driving force for all human activities. It is
source of human energy and creativity; it can also be
extremely harmful.
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Variety of desires:
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emotional vs. material
personal vs. social
Desires change over time
Innate vs “deliberate” (Aristotle) desires
Natural vs social:
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Karl Marx – necessities and luxuries;
John Kenneth Galbraith (author of The Affluent Society): The
"Dependence Effect"
Of all these kinds of desires, food represents the
most important and most fundamental.
American history as food history
 as
symbols of the country;
– Affluence;
– Notes on the State of Virginia (1785)
 as
symbols of the country;
 as an index to increased diversity;
 Changes in life style
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Wednesday, January 12, 2005
The Morning Read: Dipping into melting pot
UCI professor chows down with an eye on the future of ethnic food and
culture in America.
By MARLA JO FISHER
The Orange County Register
Yong Chen leans over his chopsticks, which are dripping with stewed
squid, and reflects on his obsession with food.
He isn't exactly sure when it began or when it started taking over his life.
Maybe it was in the Chinese re-education camp where he was sent with
his parents as a child.
Maybe it was later, when he studied history at Cornell University, before
he became a popular associate professor of history and Asian- American
studies at UC Irvine.
Now, when he's not teaching, he's writing a book about the cultural
significance of ethnic food in America. And, when he's not writing, he's
eating. When he's not eating, he's collecting old cookbooks, restaurant
menus, diaries and poring over vintage business directories, all in a quest
to link food and culture, food and memory.
"Taste is always acquired, and we acquire our tastes very early on," Chen
says. "You don't need to read philosophy to understand a culture.
Sometimes, it's much more mundane, like the food."
Chen's research not only seeks to trace the phenomenal rise of ethnic
foods in this country but to describe how food is important to culture and
a society.
Chen, 44, recalls a Republican TV ad he saw before the election that
negatively depicted presidential candidate Howard Dean as a sophisticate
eating sushi and drinking lattes. "Republicans don't eat sushi," Chen jokes.
But, as his book will show, over the past 10 years, ethnic food has become
not only a cultural but also a commercial phenomenon in America.
"Food has always had two major highways: It travels with people, as in
immigration," Chen says. "It also travels with the movement of capital."
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Chen remembers that his father was a government agriculture official in China's
Hubei Province before the Cultural Revolution took hold of the country in the late
1960s. He remembers the Red Guard searching his family's house, and his family's
relocation into a Communist re-education camp, where his parents were forced to
work in rice paddies by day and study the sayings of Chairman Mao at night.
Later, after the movement subsided, Chen says, his father became president of a
small university, and Chen went to study at Peking University in 1978. There he met
Bruce Stave and Sondra Astor Stave, an American couple teaching at the university
who encouraged him to apply to graduate school in the United States.
He arrived in the United States in 1985 after being accepted for graduate studies at
Cornell University. Sondra Stave met him in New York and took him out for pizza, a
ritual of American life.
"What's more American than pizza?" she said.
Chen remembers well his baptism into the American taste palate, though he admits
he didn't find it tasty at the time. "They said, 'Now, you're in America. We want to
Americanize you.' "
……
Meanwhile, certain ethnic groups have settled into Southern California life into
certain food-service industries but not necessarily their own.
"Cambodians have almost monopolized the doughnut business," Chen says. "And
Greeks are into candy making. You see more Mexicans opening Chinese restaurants."
For the future, Chen sees more "fusion food" melding different cultures, as well as a
trend toward healthy cuisines.
"California has been the national food trend-setter, and I expect that to continue," he
says. Standing in the 99 Ranch Market, a Chinese supermarket in Irvine that also
sells Japanese soft drinks and Korean barbecue, Chen leans over the fish tank, with
its live Maine lobster and silver carp.
Asked what he and his wife have at that very moment in the home refrigerator, Chen
recalls some foie gras, duck livers special-ordered from Gelson's, enoki mushrooms,
bean sprouts, bamboo shoots. Oh, and Cajun leftovers.
"My wife likes Emeril," he says with a grin.
http://www.ocregister.com/ocr/2005/01/12/sections/morning_read/article_374403.p
New York City: Museum of Chinese in the Americas;
Philadelphia: Atwater Kent Museum
Food as “Sensual”:
 Food
as “Sensual”: Lin Yutang, Food
is one of the “keen sensual pleasures
of our childhood” ( 1935).
 Tell
me what you eat and I will tell
you how you feel – food is also tied
to our emotions.
Food is gendered
Are food preferences genderspecific?
CNN NEWS
"He is meat and potatoes all the way, and I
could eat pasta and fruit and fish every day
and I'd be fine," says one woman. Her
sentiments may well be echoed by many
other women. Indeed, studies show men like
to eat heavier foods”.
 "I eat salads now and then," said one man.
"I start to feel like a rabbit and I don't eat
them no more."
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Information:http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9604/10/gender.food/
Which would you choose?
Mao Zedong (1893-1976); leader of the Chinese communist party; and founder
of the People Republic of China (1949)
Reasons for the society’s failure to fully recognize the
importance of food
 Food
is sensual;
 It is seen as feminine;
 It is obvious and easily accessible or
attainable, which has been especially
true in affluent societies like the
United States.
Foodie vs Foodist
 The
word foodie describes someone
who loves food;
 A foodist is one who believes that
food is of central importance in all
human history.
Food: the most important and most fundamental.
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Confucius (551-479 BCE), a philosopher and
educator as well as a foodie: food and sex
embody the great desires of human beings (Book
of Rites).
Gaozi: the desire for food and sex represents
human nature;
To reiterate an earlier statement: In modern
Western society, food studies have not produced
the kind of systematic attempts to theorize the
centrality of food in human consciousness and
developments in the same way Freud theorized
about sexuality and magnified its significance in
life.
Five ways to understand why food is more
important than sex for the development of
history.
Five ways to understand why food is more important than sex
1. Food is more immediately related to
our physical survival than sex;
 2. Food is more social;
 3. Sex is more universal; food is more
defined by culture and is more about our
uniqueness as individuals, communities,
and nations
 4. While human sexual practices have
remained largely unchanged, food and
foodways – things we eat, how we obtain
and prepare our food-- have changed a lot,
corresponding to the five major stages in
human history.
 5. Food and major historical events in
history and in American history
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Food is more social
– Sex belongs largely to the private sphere; food belongs
to both private and public spheres and often serves to
connect the two.
– Food better helps us understand and builds social
relationship; the relationship based on sexuality tends to
be exclusive.
– We talk about food more than sex.
– More so than sex, food is also about class relations.
– Gender and gender relationships.
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Food is gendered;
Aphrodisiacs;
It reflects gender roles;
Women have done most of the cooking at home; most
chefs are men. Survey by StarChefs.com
Joyce Goldstein: “mama cooks and show-off cooks”
Food and culture
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Sex is more universal; food is more
defined by culture and is more about our
uniqueness as individuals, communities,
and nations -- There is ethnic food; but
there is no ethnic sex:
– “we are what eat”
– “tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who
you are.”
– In German, “Der Mensch ist was er ißt” (Man
is what he eats.)]
– Food is closely related to our sense of identity
– a lasting element of our ethnicity.
– Republicans do not drink latte – people judge
others by their food.
– Regional food.
Five gastronomical moments in
human history
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(1) The beginning: the mastery of fire:
– Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made
Us Human
– Peking Man (Zhoukoudian); Use of fire?
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(2) The transition from hunter/gatherer
community to agricultural society:
– Assisted by the domestication of animals.
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(3) Separation from food production.
– Gordon Ramsay (The F-Word): Where are French fries
from?
– tremendous political, socioeconomic, and cultural
implications
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(4) Separation from food preparation: dining out.
(5) “We what we don’t eat.”
“We what we don’t eat.”
From “how to get food” to “how to avoid
food.”
 In other words, we are increasingly
defined by our level of choices, and by our
non-participation in eating.
 Beginning of popularity of natural foods;
organic foods in the 1970s.
 Dieting: a multi-billion dollar industry.
 In the U.S., a prominent symptom of food
scarcity or food desert is obesity.
 The old social class line is reversed: The
“haves” try not to eat; and the have-nots
eat and even over-eat.
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Food and major historical developments and events in history and in
American history
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Globalization
– Sydney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in
Modern History (1985) – how sugar was connected to
plantation labor, slavery, colonialism, and British consumers
and working class.
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Hunger revolutions: Chinese (1948); Russian (1917).
The American revolution started as a food revolution: Tea.
The temperance movement.
Food remains important to American life to this day,
including its economy. 1/5 of America’s petroleum goes
into producing and transporting food.
As nation of food abundance.
Food diversity vs cultural/ethnic diversity: the Civil Rights
Movement also started a food revolution.
Cooking
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Carleton Coon (American physical anthropologist
and archaeologist): cooking was “the decisive
factor in leading man from a primarily animal
existence into one that was more fully human.”
Engels: The greatest liberation from natural
necessity of humankind on record is "the
generation of fire from friction.“
Zeus: “If they only had fire,” said Prometheus to
himself, “they could at least warm themselves
and cook their food; and after a while they could
learn to make tools and build themselves houses.
Without fire, they are worse off than the beasts.”
Peking Man– the deer hunter
Learn to use fire – 1.8 million years ago (?)
Advantages of fire use
 making
food easier to digest;
 shrinking the stomach size and
teeth; so that we can redirect the
energy to development of our
brain.
 making food safer to consume
and easier to store;
 expanding the range of foods.
 freeing up time for other
activities.