Gastro-politics

Eating as assimilation: eating as being. Food substance, once ingested, literally becomes part of us. Through the digestive system, proteins, amino acids, carbohydrates, all gets turned into energy. For anthropologists such as Appadurai, food can be a powerful semiotic device that "presupposes and reifies technological arrangements, relations of production and exchange, conditions of field and market, and realities of plenty and want." Food, to Appadurai, is a "highly condensed social fact". It is the stage whereby “gastro-politics” play out. It is “deep-play”(Geertz). It is a “species of competitive encounter within a shared framework of rules and meanings in which what is risked are pro- found conceptions of self and other, high and low, inside and outside.” Each of these speculations of food can be broken down further. 

Firstly, food as semiotic device. When we speak about food, we are often not referring only to the food itself: we are speaking about the regulatory forces in food relations. We are talking about transfer, exchange, transaction, circulation. Food, being the central necessity for the sustenance of life, is key to the discourse of human relations. Who provides the food; the kind of food; the methods of preparation; the manner in which it is served; the pace and dynamics of the meal - all these are not innocuous. One can, if one chooses, read deeply into each gesture as signifier. Symbols, manifested in tangible, observable social forms, form the bulk of the source material for our analysis. From them we decipher the signified. In Appadurai’s work, concrete actions by Hindu actors at a marriage feast such as “loud complaints of quality of food” can be interpreted as a semiotic mode for enacting conflicts over roles, for resolving ambiguities about rules, and in general for debating and refining the fine points of the most intimate commensal context. There are deeper meanings to food-related actions than they meet the eye, and every culture would have their own interplay of gastro-politics that will be unique to themselves. In a sense, we are not only what we eat, we are also how we eat. 

Second, Appadurai claims that food is a highly condensed social fact. By that, he means that each action within the context of consumption can be broken down, analysed, interpreted, and accorded with social meaning. These meanings constitute the totality of the “fact”. The facts themselves, are subjective in nature, and in many cases, cannot be trusted for predictive purposes, although they can be used as a rough guide. For one would imagine Appadurai’s study of gastro-politics in Hindu South Asia to be useful for the foreigner who wants to understand the habits and customs of the Tamil speaking regions. In a lot of ways, knowledge around food constitutes “insider” knowledge. Whether it is polite to eat with your hands; whether you should or should not ask for the salt and pepper; whether it is permissible to text while having dinner - all these are questions involving customs and traditions, and hence naturally fall within the domain of gastro-politics. Knowledge formed through ethnographic research is highly practical in nature - although it must be recognised that context means everything, and that as a rule of thumb, one must remember that context has as much tendency to shift between cultures as through time. 

For other anthropologists, such as Alisson, food, or the symbolic system of food preparation and inherent expectations, has the capacity to be turned into an ideological state apparatus. Beginning with the study of the culture of Japanese Obentos that mothers prepare for their nursery school children, she claims that not only do lunches have a cultural order and meaning, it is also invested with a gender state ideology. Food, in other words, is political. It is not political in the micro logical way that it is to Appadurai, but more on a macro way, in the form of discourse shaping. To a certain degree, consumption habits have always been, in society, an indicator of social class. The relegation of familial, caring role of food preparers to the females is not unique in Japanese society - it runs across South Asia, Asia, and even western societies. In the broad sense, the division of “food” duties along gendered lines features expressly an unequal oppressive ideology, where the female nourishes the male through unpaid, hidden work in the domain of the house. A general feminist critique of the system can thus be levied. If we are what we eat, we must not be blind to the oppressive structures at work when we consume our meals. Food can be ideological. 

Alisson and Appadurai’s approach to food highlights the manner in which food can be treated as cultural signifiers that have deeper meanings that are specific to their respective cultures/context. Their’s is a position hard to disagree. On the other hand, we have Levi-Strauss’ model of triangles - which seeks to establish a universal meanings deeply innate to food itself. “The boiled is life, the roasted death”; “boiled is culture, roasted nature”…statements like these fill Strauss’ work, The Culinary Triangle; and it is precisely this claim to universality, or objectivity, that one should be most suspicious of. Indeed, as Edmund Leach has criticised, how is the Roast Chicken, a party food, any less cultural than steamed or boiled food, a domain typically reserved for elderlies? It is obvious that both can be cultural, and just because roasting has been along for a long time, does not make it a more primordial, form of cooking. It is therefore hard to take Levi Strauss’ views on food or gastro-politics seriously. For him, it is all about discovering the underlying structural rules that run across food consumption as human species. Whether there is such a rule is highly doubtable. 

The drawing of the culinary triangle is, in a way, senseless and trivial. There is no definitive value in imposing a geometric structure to our already clear cut understanding of what food is: raw, cooked, rotten - having them in a triangle does nothing to illustrate the nature of the relationship between them. Edmund Leach defended the invocation of the triangle concept by saying that it alludes to the fact that there are no distinct points in which the food becomes identifiably rotten from the state of being raw or cooked, just like how there is no definite point on the colour spectrum that we can safely say something has transited fully from red to yellow: things exist in spectrums, and it is us who box them up and render them in categorical forms. However, even after the clarification, the triangle makes no sense. Granted, there is a certain aesthetic value in conceiving of a concept that involves triangulation of the relationship of food, but the value is slight, and mainly visual. Even Leach feels that, upon learning about Levi-Strauss’ approach to frying, (where he argued that a tetrahedron shall replace the triangle to take frying into account) it is hard not to conceive “the whole argument (as) an elaborate academic joke”. I mean, what about stir fry? Baking? Microwave-ovening? The Octagon Model of food preparation, where Microwave-ovening is the ultimate symbol of death? 

Turning our attention to more modern conceptions of food, we find that in many cultures, as most anthropologists discussed in this essay so far have pointed out, feasting is a highly symbolic ritual. In corporate American banks, bringing your own take away lunch is a symbol of frugality, a trait typically associated with the secretariat class (Karen Ho). Moreover, going out to eat is also indicative of autonomous consumption, as having lunch with people signifies upward mobility relative to the anti-social behaviour of eating in your cubicle.  As such, women who work in finance pay attention not to “slip” to a lower class by going out to dine more. In general, anglo-western societies are more reserved and polite when it comes down to table etiquette, whereas for eastern nations, being boisterous is encouraged because it is a sign that you are enjoying yourself. Modern take away restaurants such as It-su and Wasabi leverage upon the consumer’s desire for clean, healthy food, and in a sense, is so far removed from any trace of originality that some have called it soulless Japanese food. They are the result of global capital’s chase for targeted desires of “health”. Health as advertising strategy, health as consumer preference. 

To conclude, there is no end to which food can be symbolically meaningful to our lives. Whether you are a Kit Kat person or a KinderBrueno person says something about you. Whether you drink Tropicana or Sainsbury’s Never From Concentrates says something about you as well. The quantity of food you consume, where you consume it, how it is prepared - they all contribute to the web of meaning through which deeper relational structures (or non-structural relationships) can be sifted out and analysed.