Food is symbolic
Monday, March 31, 2014 at 11:23PM 
Food is symbolic. I encountered this idea early on in my studies in food anthropology. It is often presented as one of reasons why food is useful as a ‘lens’ through which to explore wider social, cultural, political and economic issues. But what does this really mean?
It took me a while to gain more than a superficial understanding. As I write this it becomes clear why that might have been. I had never been encouraged to think beyond the macro level. The idea that food is symbolic remained an abstract concept, referring to food in general and applied broadly.
A few months into my studies I had a eureka moment. I read two papers in which the authors honed in on a single foodstuff of particular importance to the society they were studying. Their focus on a specific food in a particular context made it much clearer to me why food is symbolic and how this can be a useful way of exploring other issues.
In her chapter, Bread as World, Carole Counihan (1999) looks at the impact of modernisation on social relations in the small town of Bosa, Sardinia. She argues that Bosa has experienced ‘modernisation without development’, which is reflected in a movement towards Western patterns of consumption at the same time as local production is dwindling. “These large-scale economic trends are accompanied by changes in social relations” (1999: 25). Counihan sees this as part of a process of individualisation, as the people of Bosa become less dependent on community ties.
Counihan focuses on the production, distribution and consumption of bread in order to illuminate these wider socioeconomic changes.
“Like all foods, bread is a nexus of economic, political, aesthetic, social, symbolic, and health concerns. As traditionally the most important food in the Sardinian diet, bread is a particularly sensitive indicator of change.” (1999: 29)
Wheat was a major subsistence crop in Bosa for centuries. Men produced the grain and the women turned it into bread. The women took the grain to communal mills and baked bread together. Grain cultivation began to diminish around 1960 as a result of national agricultural policies that reduced support prices for grain and encouraged the industrialisation of agriculture. Wage labour was an attractive alternative to subsistence agriculture and many people emigrated to industrial centres in the north of Italy and elsewhere in Europe.
When the first bakery opened in Bosa in 1912 buying bread was considered shameful. However, with centralised grain collection, rationing and the decline of grain production, people got used to buying bread from the bakery. The grain mills closed and many people had their ovens removed in an effort to modernise their homes. “Today there is not one woman left in Bosa who still bakes bread for her own family” (Counihan, 1999: 34). Interestingly, men are now responsible for baking bread in the town’s five local bakeries, signifying a shift in gender relations.
From the summary so far we can see how focusing on an important staple food can elucidate wider social and economic trends and the related impacts on social relations at the local level. What I found particularly interesting, though, was that the Bosans themselves saw bread as symbolic. A number of peasant proverbs reflected an idea of bread as symbolic of life. Also, certain breads and their mode of consumption can have specific meanings, for example, Counihan is told by an informant that a husband and wife are supposed to eat the traditional Easter bread together as a symbol of their union and interdependence.
Counihan (1999: 37) argues that the traditional Easter bread “reaffirmed the complementarity of men and women and the nuclear family social structure, the basis of society and locus of individual identity”, whereas the bakery bread only reaffirmed participation in a global economy from which Bosans were disconnected. This disconnect is symptomatic of a general trend towards the Western culture of individualism.
In his article, Industrial Tortillas and Folkloric Pepsi, Jeffery Pilcher (2002) also uses an important staple food to chart wider socioeconomic processes. He highlights how in 1999 the Mexican government eliminated a long-standing subsidy on corn tortillas forcing neighbourhood tortilla factories to close in the face of competition from industrial producers. Like Counihan, Pilcher demonstrates how modernisation has transformed social and economic relations, focusing in particular on the mechanisation of traditional tortilla making processes.
As in Bosa, this modernisation is associated with the incorporation of subsistence peasants into the capitalist economy, both as consumers and as peasant labourers when they are forced to move to urban industrial areas in search of work.
The issue of gender relations raised by Counihan is also significant in the Mexican context. Pilcher explains that labouring at the metate (mortar) was women’s work and gave them status and identity within the family and community. In both examples, women were initially resistant to change, despite the hard labour they could be spared, because it was seen to compromise their role and identity.
Like Counihan, Pilcher suggests that the people themselves were aware of this symbolism. For example, before these changes a woman had to demonstrate her skill at the metate in order to be deemed suitable for marriage. Food was often used to communicate anger or love, for example, wives might serve cheating husbands burnt tortillas or their favourite children the best ones.
In both case studies, concerns around the opinions of other members of the community initially acted as an obstacle to modernisation. However, wider socioeconomic processes eventually took over. In Mexico the poorest women were the first to start using industrially processed corn flour since it freed up their time to do other (paid) work.
A key concern for Pilcher is health and nutrition, a point that is absent from Counihan’s analysis. He is concerned that the traditional peasant diet, a nutritionally balanced mix of maize and other vegetables, is being transformed as people substitute vegetable proteins for snack foods and corn that has been processed beyond recognition. Pilcher (2002: 222) argues that Mexicans, mainly the rural poor, “are suspended between traditional and modern diets, eating the worst of both worlds.”
For me, the relationship between food and identity is particularly interesting and both authors touch on this issue. I will be exploring this theme more over the next few weeks, but it is worth highlighting at this point the way in which identification with particular foods and foodways can often reflect wider socioeconomic processes of which the individual may be unaware.
What I am starting to learn as I read more papers on the subject is that connections between food and identity are not always about the sentimental stuff - traditional values, recipes handed down from generation to generation, childhood memories and nostalgia. Individuals in our capitalist world cannot help being influenced by trends, marketing, commodification, globalisation and politics.
In the Sardinian example, one gets the feeling that it is Counihan (1999: 35) who is sentimental for the good old days, rather than her informants. In the only lengthy quote from her interviews, one informant tells her that she is “truly thankful for this progress” since it gives her independence and privacy (less community interaction meant less gossip). It is evident that Counihan sees this movement away from communal ties as negative, but it is clear that not all her informants share these views. The widespread removal of ovens in an effort to modernise homes suggests a readiness to identify with and adopt Western consumer culture and values.
In the Mexican case, Pilcher suggests that in elite circles there has been a desire to preserve traditions that were seen to be slipping away, spurring a series of folkloric studies and cookbooks focusing on regional dishes. However, attempts by multinational corporations and government to transform rural people’s eating habits have also fed into the construction of a national cuisine and only time will tell which has been more successful. I’m sorry to say I’d put my money on Maseca, Mexico’s biggest producer of tortillas.
References
Counihan, C.M. 1999. Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning and Power. New York: Routledge.
Pilcher, J.M. 2002. Industrial Tortillas and Folkloric Pepsi: The Nutritional Consequences of Hybrid Cuisines in Mexico. In W. Belasco and P. Scranton, eds. Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies. New York: Routledge, 222-239.
consumption, economics, food production, gender, industrialisation, modernisation in Symbolism
Reader Comments (4)
I think this is fascinating, and certainly a new perspective for me on Western modernisation.We have been encouraged to believe that peasant people have always welcomed modernisation, becasue it has lifted them out of abject poverty. Yet as you report here : "In both examples, women were initially resistant to change, despite the hard labour they could be spared, because it was seen to compromise their role and identity".
Much food for thought !
Hi Ma, indeed, but as I hope my new ending (changed since you read it and commented to me privately that it wasn't really clear what I was getting at) conveys, in time many people have come to welcome these changes and not everyone shares the sentimentality or nostalgia for a bygone era often exhibited by academics and their counterparts in the countries they study (usually middle-upper classes).
So maybe it will be a generational thing. Even if they welcome the benefits of westernisation I bet the old timers don't "identify" with Maseca tortillas even if they like eating them. Whereas it is entirely likely that a new generation of Mexicans , brought up on them , will absolutely identify with them.
You have made me think about Heinz Baked beans. I think of them as quintessentially English , I identify them with an English childhood- but they are American devised - introduced to Fortnums in UK in 1901, and for the first few decades continued to be imported from America! Eventually they were mass produced in time to be considered a staple food during wartime rationing - and I ate them nearly every single day as a child , usually at tea time on toast .
Hi Ma, yes I think you are right that it is a generational thing, though it sounds as though in both cases some of the old timers were willing to embrace modernisation and, therefore, must have identified with some of the Western values that are part and parcel of that process, even if not the foods themselves. That is funny isn't it - I think of Heinz baked beans as quintessentially British too.