Simulación de los efectos futuros de la explotación

I love to eat fish, and I also love to eat bears’ paws, but if I can’t have both, I will leave the fish and take the bears’ paws. I love life, and I love doing right; but if I can’t have both, I will give up life to do what’s right. . . .

Here’s a basket of grain and a plate of soup. Getting them means life, lacking them means death. But if you offer them with a harsh insulting voice, even a traveler won’t accept them, and if you step on them, even a starving beggar won’t accept them. Here is a salary of ten thousand, but offered without concern for the right. What is that ten thousand to me?

—Mencius (Book 6, passage 10, my translation. In this passage, the great Chinese social thinker Mengzi [Mencius to the western world] is in desperate straits but is turning down a compromised appoint- ment. Bears’ paws remain a Chinese delicacy—which is now a problem for endangered bear species. “Right” undertranslates yi, which, here, means acting with absolute honor and probity.)

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Food as communication finds most of its applications in the process of defining one’s individuality and one’s place in society. Food communi- cates class, ethnic group, lifestyle affiliation, and other social positions. Eating is usually a social matter, and people eat every day. Thus, food is available for management as a way of showing the world many things about the eater. It naturally takes on much of the role of communicating everything. Indeed, it may be second only to language as a social com- munication system.

Elaborate social messages are carried in feast behavior. In Chinese for- mal hospitality, honor and respect are showed by the host using his own

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chopsticks to serve the guest; by hosts serving chicken and wine rather than salt fish and boiled water; or by literally thousands of other gestures. Weddings are supposed to include shark-fin soup. Lotus rhizomes may be served at a wedding, too, because when you break a cooked lotus rhizome the starch forms long strings that hold the two pieces together no matter how far apart they are pulled. The symbolism is obvious. At birthday par- ties, long noodles mean “may you live long.” More generally, food has its own meanings. Everywhere, food is associated with home, family, and se- curity.

At a deeper level, food may become a real part of one’s identity. Rice is so important in Japanese culture that Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney wrote a brilliant study of Japanese character and food with the significant title

Rice as Self (1993). This book explains in detail the cultural reasons be-

hind our poetic guide Ryokan’s use of a phrase like “everyone eats rice.” Ryokan was indeed speaking not only of food but also of self—that in- terpersonal construction that is regarded by Buddhists as an illusion.

One main message of food, everywhere, is solidarity. Eating together means sharing and participating. The word “companion” means “bread sharer” (Latin cum panis). Buying dinner, or otherwise feeding a prospect, is so universal in courtship, business, and politics that it is al- most certainly grounded in inborn tendencies; we evolved as food sharers and feel a natural link between sharing food and being personally close and involved. Such venues as cafés, coffee shops, coffee houses, cafeterias, bars, neighborhood restaurants, and other eateries are vital to social life. Ray Oldenburg, in a very important book, showed that such “third places” were almost as important as home and work (the other two places) in people’s lives (Oldenburg 1989). Note that several of these types of eateries have names based on coffee; caffeine has been the stim- ulant of sociability for centuries, more so even than alcohol (Anderson 2003; Hattox 1985).

The other main message is separation. Food marks social class, eth- nicity, and so on. Food transactions define families, networks, friendship groups, religions, and virtually every other socially institutionalized group. Naturally, one group can try to use food to separate itself, while another is trying to use food to eliminate that separation.

Clearly, humans are social feeders. There are some obvious benefits, such as the creation of social alliances, or the possibility of combining to defend the food. However, the immediate reason for most social feeding is that people simply like to eat with others. A big feed almost inevitably

becomes a party, and a party almost always involves food—and drink. The importance of family mealtime continues to be recognized, even in the contemporary United States, where the average nuclear family sits down together for only three meals a week. Major holidays are occasions for family reunions, inevitably defined and structured by food.

In cultural contexts that require polite formulas rather than honest words, language may lose almost all its communicative function, and here food often takes over the role. In formal dinners around the world, for in- stance, it is not usually appropriate to send the important social messages verbally. Words are bland and carefully chosen. More information about the actual social transactions going on at the dinner is transmitted by food choice and distribution. The most valued guest gets the choicest por- tion, and so on down. Other aspects of the ritual may communicate even more. Everyone carefully observes who sits next to the host, who sits at the host’s table, who is the first one to be greeted, who is served first, who

Local tastes, Venice. Fresh mushrooms—six out of a good dozen local species for sale. Mushrooms were feared and avoided as “toadstools” in the English- speaking world through much of history, but in Italy they are a veritable cult, and one can see bankers and lawyers on their lunch hours foraging for mush- rooms in public parks. Photo by E. N. Anderson, 2002

gets the best piece of meat, who is urged to have seconds, and so on (and on and on).

The whole purpose of a feast is usually to bring people together and affirm their solidarity. Alliances are formed, deals are struck. Visiting dig- nitaries are feted. In Chinese society, no important deal can be concluded without food and drink. A major contract signed necessitates a lunch or dinner. The more important the contract, the larger and more expensive the meal.

Often a feast has the purpose of affirming the host’s generosity. From the feasts of ancient Ireland (The Tain 1983) to the potlatches of the Northwest Coast, a leader earned the loyalty of his followers by feasting them and giving them lavish gifts at or after the feast. This was a life-or- death matter. A leader who was ungenerous lost his followers, and was soon conquered and almost certainly killed by rivals. Thus, a reputation for generosity was life, and the opposite was death. This is the most im- portant reason for the extreme power of the bards of old Ireland and the

griots (bards) of west Africa. They can literally destroy a man by publi-

cizing his stinginess.

Dinnertime, India. The family gathers round to cook dinner. Photo by Barbara Anderson, 1996

We say someone is “below the salt” because in medieval and Renais- sance Europe the salt was set in the middle of the table, separating the higher-ranked people near the table’s head from the lower ones near the foot (Scully 1995). According to scurrilous (but dubious) history-student folklore, at a family dinner the legitimate children would sit above the salt, the bastards below it.

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When you sit at the table with others, sit long, for it is a time that is not counted against you as part of [the ordained span of] your lives. —Ja’far al-Sadiq (medieval Shi’a Muslim leader)

So socialized food is always structured along particular lines. Perhaps most frequently, it conveys messages about group identification. Regions are defined by preferred staple: rice, bread, potatoes. Religions are defined by food taboos (see following chapter). Some religions have en- tire food cultures of their own; the Hindus (Khare 1976a, 1976b, 1992) and Seventh-Day Adventists are notable among these. Foods can convey a rich symbolic mix of religion, philosophy, lifestyle, and identity in a complex, shifting, exquisitely fine-tuned pattern (Curtin and Heldke 1992). The phenomenology of food and eating would require many vol- umes to survey.

Even political ideologies have their food cultures. Conservative Amer- icans cling to beefsteak, baked potatoes, and presliced white bread. The eastern Midwest has a heart disease rate far higher than that of the rest of the nation, partly because of obesity and high cholesterol levels. Poor eating, lack of exercise, and above all smoking combine to produce a deadly combination, with heart-disease death rates over two hundred per one hundred thousand people per year (data from an untitled note on pages A8–A9 of the May 11, 2001, edition of the Los Angeles Times). People know the lifestyle is unhealthy, and the food is not usually good- tasting either, but it is their lifestyle, and people are loyal to it unto death. Their identity is caught up in it; they will sacrifice themselves for it. By contrast, liberal urban sophisticates seek out the trendiest Europeanoid restaurant. They maintain a zealous commitment to “fitness,” but the commitment is not infrequently misguided; being “with it” takes prece- dence over actual research into the issue. Vegetarian cuisine defines yet

other political factions. Health devotees express political as well as med- ical conviction when they seek out greens and tofu.

Lifestyle—that most protean and most important of concepts—results from political identity, from regional identity, from association with friends, from status, and from other factors. It defines individuals and their foodways.

Kin and family structure food in important ways. This has been the focus of much food research, especially since Audrey Richards’s pioneer- ing studies in Africa in the 1930s (Richards 1939, 1948). Every family has its traditions. These get passed on indefinitely. There is an old joke or urban folktale of a girl who was learning how to cook a roast. Her mother was teaching her to cut the ends off the roast. The girl asked why. Answered the mother, “That’s the way my mother did it.” The girl then sought out her grandmother and got the same answer. Fortunately, the great-grandmother was still alive, and revealed that when she was first married she had a small pan, and had to trim the ends off the large roasts of those days to get them to fit! This story appears to be purely legendary, but, as the Italians say, si non e vero, e ben trovato (loosely: if it isn’t true, well, it’s a good story).

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Food studies have followed other research into the forests and thickets of identity, gender, and ethnicity. These are the three classic topics of cultural anthropology—now important to all social sciences. It is transparently obvious that foodways are powerfully structured by considerations of personal and group identity. Identity is often constructed and communi- cated with regard to foods: “I’m a dry martini person, myself.”

Vegetarians make up a special food subculture in the United States. De- vout Seventh-Day Adventists make up a special subset within the vege- tarian world. Devout Buddhists form another subset. More loosely defined are the groups of vegetarians who abstain from meat simply be- cause they hate the thought of killing animals, or because they simply don’t like meat. Vegetarians can be quite militant, zealously propagating their cause, often to the acute discomfort of meat eaters.1

Similarly, food fights have erupted over the frenetic huckstering of junk food that passes for “modernization” in the modern world. Some of my European friends are active in the Slow Food movement, a political cause

that started in Italy and has spread widely. It has not really caught on in the United States, though it does have transatlantic members. More wide- spread is a general opposition to foods transformed by modern technol- ogy: processed, genetically engineered, additive laden, and so on. We have learned from bitter experience to distrust such foods. The additives and processing are rarely tested. Currently, giant corporations assure us that genetically engineered foods are safe but refuse to allow them to be tested. Said untested foods now make up 70 percent of America’s grain and soy- bean supply, but are banned in much of Europe.

People identify themselves in terms of locality, also. American regional cooking is less developed than European or Chinese, but Americans still stereotype “Boston” baked beans, Kansas City barbecue, and New Or- leans gumbo. In France, every village or rural region has (or used to have) its own distinctive cheese, wine, baked goods, and—often—sausage and other preserved meat specialties (cf. Root 1958). Italy seems to have a truly different cuisine in each town (Root 1971). China has regional spe- cialties ranging from the melons of the far west to the vinegar of Jiankang in the east.

These mark identity; people from the place in question often make a point of eating their specialty. Even if they do not, their “sense of place” (Feld and Basso 1996) is very much involved with the sense of taste. We are “consuming geographies,” as food geographers David Bell and Gill Valentine put it (1997). As we all know, nothing brings back a place, time, or occasion more powerfully than a scent or taste. To eat the familiar home food is to be at home, at least in the heart—as well as the stomach. In China and especially in Japan a traveler visiting a place has to bring back samples of its specialty foods for his family and friends. The Chinese phrase is xianpin, “local products.” This social rule explains the Japan- ese-labeled, extremely overpriced packages of smoked salmon one sees in Northwest Coast airports; the similarly overpriced steaks in Denver air- ports; and so on around the world. Japanese travelers who have put off buying the “local products” till the last minute are held hostage; they have to buy something, at any price, for the folks they are returning to.

Gourmets and foodies do not form true subcultures but are still defined by their tastes. Some cannot rest till they have sought out every pit barbecue in any city they visit. Others become absorbed with finding the perfect paté or taco or french fries. Individual taste has something to do with all this, but much of it is driven by the need of individuals to com- municate something special, distinctive, and personal about themselves.

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One might recall . . . an anecdote of Darius. When he was king of Persia, he summoned the Greeks who happened to be present at his court, and asked them what they would take to eat the dead bodies of their fathers. They replied that they would not do it for any money in the world. Later, in the presence of the Greeks, and through an interpreter, so that they could understand what was said, he asked some Indians, of the tribe called Callatiae, who do in fact eat their parents’ dead bodies, what they would take to burn them [the Greeks cremated their dead]. They uttered a cry of horror and forbade him to mention such a dreadful thing. One can see by this what custom can do. . . .”

—Herodotus, The Histories

Darius was making a point: “Custom is king.” He was making it to con- found the Greek claim that there is a natural law grounded in human sen- timent—a human ethical sense. His story is also interesting to nutritional anthropology. One way that people define group identity is through

Food as communication, rural China near Loyang. Hospitality by production brigade head, serving superb fried pasta she made. Photo by E. N. Anderson, 1978

cannibalism. There are endocannibals who eat their own dead as a means of burial, and exocannibals who eat their enemies, almost always as an act of revenge. (Lurid travelers’ tales to the contrary notwithstanding, no one eats people just as food, except in cases of extreme starvation.) Claude Lévi-Strauss (1964) suggested that endocannibals should boil their relatives, since this transforms the food more than roasting does— exocannibals should roast. This turns out to be untrue; cannibals boil or roast indifferently (Shankman 1969).

Everybody loves a good cannibal story. Thus, travelers being what they are, cannibal tales are vastly exaggerated. William Arens subjected can- nibal stories to a devastating critique (Arens 1979), showing that almost all of them were clearly travelers’ fabrications. Arens argued that canni- balism occurs only when people are desperate for food (as in the cases of the Donner party, or the soccer team marooned in the Andes). Arens was partly correct. Cannibalism usually happens because of famine (as in China; Chong 1990). Other forms of cannibalism are rare, and most of the lurid claims in the popular literature are exaggerated or fabricated. However, Arens was overstating the facts; cannibalism often does occur for purely cultural reasons (Brown and Tuzin 1983). Burial of loved ones by endocannibalism used to be common in New Guinea, and exocanni- balism was widespread. Consuming parts of war captives was a well-nigh universal practice in many parts of the New World before contact, rising to a peak among the Aztecs. Among them it was definitely done for reli- gious reasons (associated with warfare), not for protein (contra the in- correct theory of Harner 1977; see Ortiz de Montellano 1990). Arens (and others) did establish that the scale of cannibalism was vastly exag- gerated by European accounts, particularly after the Pope banned en- slavement of New World indigenes unless they were cannibals—a clause that guaranteed endless attempts by conquistadors to label everyone they met as sure-enough man-eaters.

Herodotus’s story is well taken, but natural law does seem to surface in the human tendency to eat either one’s own or one’s enemies, and to do it as an act of ritual, in spite of felt disgust.

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Individuals fit into the social structure in terms of status and role. Role is perhaps the less important of the two. Particular roles (father, fisherman,

homemaker, teenager) may be signaled by food, but this is usually a minor part of a culture’s foodways. Fishermen have their own foods, be- cause of their occupation—it makes mixed seafood readily available while making land products harder to get. Often, they develop a gourmet- ship based on the small and less saleable products of their catch. The re- sult may taste better than the “good” products, and thus wind up com- manding a higher price in the end; San Francisco cioppino is an example (or was, before it became debased for the tourist trade).

Similarly, Hispanic cowboys in Texas made fajitas from the less saleable cuts of beef (specifically, the skirt steak), and wound up making fajitas a more popular dish than anything created from the expensive cuts. Chop suey, created by southeast Chinese vegetable growers as a way to use up small, unsaleable shoots, has had a more mixed fate. On its home turf, it is an excellent dish. Unfortunately, in California, it was de- based by oil, flour, and canned vegetables. It became synonymous with