Food is symbolic

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.

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The Industrialisation of Agriculture

Our class on the industrialisation of agriculture started with a simple game of word association. Professor Harry West asked us to think of terms that we associated with this idea. These were the results:

When we had completed the task, Harry made an interesting point. He highlighted that any term that evokes this many associations is complex by nature. For this reason we can’t rely on the term to say any one thing, because it says something about all of these things.

It is also clear that it means different things to different people.  As budding anthropologists we placed emphasis on the socio-cultural dimensions of agricultural industrialisation, as well as considering the environmental implications. The results would probably look quite different if we were a class of economics students at the LSE.

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