WHAT DOES FOOD MEAN?
What did you have for dinner last night? Or did you call it supper? Whatever it was, future generations will know much less about it than about what people ate at the celebrations of Julia Child’s ninetieth birthday. But which meal is more representative of the way most people in the United States eat? One enormous difference is that Julia Child’s birthday dinners were eaten sitting down at a table, not while driving in the car, standing at the sink, working on the computer, or in front of the television.
What is the meaning of food? We humans live by symbols; they help us to make sense of the world, to organize and give meaning to our existence. Our alphabets are symbolic: we agree that a certain symbol stands for a certain sound. Time is another human invention: daylight, standard, leap year. Christianity’s year 2006 is Judaism’s 5765, Islam’s 1427, and China’s 4703. Nobody needed a nanosecond until Bill Gates
and computers came along at the end of the twentieth century. So, too, we give food meaning far beyond its survival function. It has been used in rituals to guarantee fertility, prosperity, a good marriage, and an afterlife. It has been used to display the power and wealth of the state, the church, corporations, a person
Food is one of the ways humans define themselves as civilized. But
“civilized” is a slippery concept, very much in the eye of the beholder.
For example, civilized people use utensils—forks, knives, spoons, chopsticks. Unless they’re eating with their hands. Civilization has been used
as a reason for vegetarianism—not eating meat elevates humans and separates them from “savages.” But notorious vegetarians include mass murderers like Robespierre, the leader of the Terror that followed the French
Revolution, and Hitler. Overcoming prejudices about what is civilized
can be difficult or impossible, even when survival is at stake. During
WWII, starving American servicemen could not bring themselves to eat
nutritious insects.
Identity—religious, national, ethnic—is intensely bound up with
food. Every group thinks of itself as special and exceptional and uses
food to show it. The French identity is connected to white bread, while
southern Italians insist on tomato sauce. This identification can also
take the form of a negative, in foods that are excluded: “We don’t eat
that. They [religion, country, ethnic group] eat that.” Some examples are
the Jewish and Muslim avoidance of pork, and the Buddhist taboo on
beef.
Food can be a political weapon. After the French objected to the
United States invasion of Iraq, some Americans refused to eat French
fries, but had no problem with Freedom fries—the same food, just renamed. Throughout history, people of one country have used food as a
way—usually not complimentary—to refer to people of another country.
When the British found that limes were a cure for the vitamin C deficiency, scurvy, they became “Limeys.” The French ate frog legs, so they
were called “Frogs.” Germans’ love of cabbage branded them “Krauts.”
Everything about how humans cook and eat has meaning: who is allowed to fish for it, farm it, mill it, or kill it; what vessels and utensils
are used in the preparation; what time of day the meal is eaten; who sits
where at the table (if you’re eating at a table), how close to an important person, a certain food, the salt, a person of another gender, race, or
class; what order the food is served in; who serves it; whether it is hot
or cold, cooked in water or by direct fire. In European and American cultures, serving a whole boiled chicken at an important occasion would
be an insult, while in Taiwan, it is the centerpiece of a banquet