Speed and Foodscapes

In the nineteenth century, photography produced visually evocative images and telegraphy introduced a type of visualizing mechanism in which people and places could be seen as networks. Both technologies introduced new ways of imagining place, drawing boundaries and corroding boundaries between places. More crucially, these technologies contributed to a visual milieu in which the speed of images reached a critical point, transforming places from static topographical materials located on a map into visual spectacles. Place was known primarily through visual means. 

This shift did not occur statically, as if all one had to do was look through a camera lens and see place rather than smell or feel place. A place became more than a place, more than a territory or environment. A place became a "scape," a fluid image crossing over and through boundaries. Place melted from a solid to a liquid; the accelerated speed of image transmission pushed place into a new pattern of information, one that no longer relied on presence to figure material reality. Images moving in rapid succession, like a strip of film at the movies, appear fluid: a smooth stream of motion flickers across the screen. Scapes, likewise, are fluid. Not metaphorically, but materially. Places, now scapes, pour into individual and collective bodies, reacting with them as much as any other fluid--water, alcohol, coffee. The foodscape of New Orleans, for example, is at first limited by its material constraints, like a young body of water, but then as time progresses it begins to carve out a deep basin to become a river. 

The fluid of places can be trapped, pushed through electric turbines in a dam, a practice that affords actors new capacities to generate complex material like the foodscape. A cookbook is such a dam. It impinges on the flow of a place, stealing image of New Orleans by drawing from the very technologies that created the flow in the first place. A photographic gaze not only accelerates image transmission, but also confines it, directs it, using it to capture scapes and generate new hybrid entities called foodscapes. Fluid place composed partly of food, foodscapes emerge from the intensity of flavor and temperature brought about by visual media. The foodscape capacities had yet to be realized, but they ranged from branding New Orleans an exotic Creole scape at the 1884 world's exhibition to casting Southern foodways as something available to San Francisco consumers in the wake of reconstructionist nostalgia in the U.S. 

Photography and telegraphy first accelerated image transmissions, then were modified into machines servicing cookbooks (the photographic or telegraphic gaze). These visualizing machines caught the fluid scapes, converting them into cultural energy that could be used to produce foodscapes of various colors. 

What to Drink When Writing

As a food studies researcher, I can be highly conscious of what I eat and drink when I write. And typically iced coffee is my drink of choice. The taste of the coffee as much as the caffeine induces focus. At a subconscious level, it tells me "it is time to write." Coffee brings together the experience of writing, folding my ideas into my environment, the computer screen, and, eventually, into language.

I tend to drink coffee for this specific purpose. My "writing drink" introduces a specific pattern of information, affording me certain connections with my environment. I become a rhizome, an assemblage of different things that are given cohesion through coffee. I become an embodied subject, fusing with my material environment.

Where to Write

There is an article by Benedict Carey published in the NYTimes on study habits, "Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits," which cited research on study locations that runs counter to traditional thought: studying in different locations can be good. We make subconscious connections with our environment, helping us think through the same problems in different ways.

I assume the same research findings might apply to writing. Perhaps use novel locations for free writing, which I already practice when I write more experimental blog entries. For now, I am trying to keep consistent hours at the desk in my home. But I'll try to keep track of any variations in my writing when I write in coffee shops, in other people's houses, at the library, in the outdoors, etc. I'll try to supply updates here.

Oct. 6 - So far: writing at coffee shops presents a host of distractions & writing in the morning may not be any more productive but it leaves me in a better mood the rest of the day.

Oct. 12 - blogging offers a site to digress a bit more than I feel is appropriate in Microsoft Word. Even creating a "swimming" doc of loose ideas are better described through my blogs. However, blogging does border on rabbit holing, taking long tangential breaks.

Defining My Project in 25 Words

Got some good advice from a professor, who recommended that I work on summarizing my dissertation project in twenty-five words or less. This advice became relevant after I tried to explain my project to my dentist. I oscillated between vague generalities and hyper-specialized research findings. Needless to say, I would make a horrible CNN contributor. So here are some dissertation soundbites. (I'll keep revising as my writing progresses).

Hopefully practicing this condensing method will help during job interviews, grant and fellowship applications, and most importantly help me explain to friends and family why I'm not an inane, overspecialized academic.

My dissertation project is about:

-the role that food images play in shaping our image of political, social, and economic systems that affect food production and consumption.

-the way food images can spice up the way we eat and grow food.

-cross-cultural food images that can provide new relationships among cultures, foodways, and vision.

-the way writers, communities, and nations visualize the role of food in social, political, and economic systems.

-how food images function as efficient statements about individual and collective identity

1/16/10
My dissertation, "Complex Foodscapes: Visualizing Cross-Cultural Networks through Food Images," studies the complex system of food images that help define our relationships with food. Food might be succulent, as in a juicy piece of meat. It might be exotic, as Thai food and Mexican food are often presented. Or, food might be comforting, like a hearty bowl of chili. The types and combinations of relationships with food are endless, but they remained constrained by our economic, political, and social relations. Putting food images from literature, cookbooks, and social movements in a broader cross-cultural context characteristic of today's global food system, I describe the way images both constrain our ways of perceiving food and liberate our vision to perceive new food worlds. In Chapter One, using the concept of emergence--a process in which novel food images emerge, or self-organize, from simple rules--I demonstrate how John Dryden's efforts to control the interpretation of his historical poem, Annus Mirabilis, as a type of advertisement for free trade and English nationalism unintentionally produces an image of a decentralized economic system based on the early modern spice trade. Against assumptions that Annus Mirabilis univocally reflects an imperialist politics, I draw attention to the images of decentralized systems that emerge out of Dryden's poem. Chapter Two...

NPR's Images of Violent Mexico, Imagining the Authentic Meal

Is it me or is NPR doing an inordinate amount of reporting on violence in Mexico? The latest headline, "Fed Up, A Mexican Town Resorts to Mob Justice," depicts Mexico as the new Wild West, a town turned into a type of collective Batman. Today's headline stories on Mexico in Fox News and Democracy Now focus on the "protection" of Mexican journalists, rather than the epidemic violence apparently surging among the Mexican population.

NPR, our National Public Radio, continues to fuel the nationalist machinery that nation builds other countries through U.S. cultural pathways. It is not exactly imperialism, but it is not responsible journalism either.

This image of a violent Mexico risks becoming the unspoken precursor to authenticating anything identified as Mexican. The very notion of an "authentic" Mexico requires an image of violence: the "artificial" act of eating a meal becomes a triumph over the "natural" violence of Mexico. A background of violence forms the conditions against which everything Mexican must emerge.

The Masterchef Rankings: Foucault & Distribution

I've been thinking about the concept of distribution mostly in terms of networks: distributed networks are totally decentralized. Feminism, for example, is a movement that possesses distributed qualities: it tends to stress ubiquity over unity, widespread reform rather than uniform change.

But Michel Foucault's studies on "Discipline," an institution emerging in the eighteenth century, bring together distributed networks and the ranking of the body in ways I'm still trying to flesh out. Discipline, he says,

"individualizes bodies by a location that does not give them a fixed position, but distributes them and circulates them in a network of relations" (Discipline and Punish 146)

This statement on the fluidity of bodies is directly preceded by a statement on "rank," which seems opposed to fluid, distributed movement: "Discipline is an art of rank, a technique for the transformation of arrangements." How is a body simultaneously included in a system of ranks and a system of distribution? Why does Foucault pair rank with distribution?

He doesn't make this point very explicit, but I think by the term "rank" he means "arrangement." He dissociates rank from hierarchy. For instance, he discusses the transformation from Roman pyramidal supervision--a hierarchical system of governance, military, and education--to a distributed system of education in the eighteenth century when "'rank' begins to define the great form of distribution of individuals in the educational order" (146). Students occupy multiple ranks, some determined by test scores, others by behavior, and still other by social position--by cliques perhaps. They are arranged according to different criterion.

Although I struggle with the term "rank," I can see Foucault's description of distributed ranks possessing some significant implications for the way food images induce our bodies into institutionally specified arrangements. I've been watching celeb chef Gordon Ramsey's show on Fox, Masterchef, which arranges its contestants according to specific skill sets. The final two contestants, for instance, were type cast as the "pastry princess," a twenty-two year old female from the South, and "the experimenter," a male from Boston. In accordance with the dominant institution of gender in the US, the pastry princess occupies a relatively passive position, embodying the "traditional" Southern cuisine. The male "experimenter" occupies the active, innovating position: he takes risks, which could lead to his downfall or elevate him to godly status. Ooooo the excitement! The pastry princess eventually won, her Southern gal appearance made for good television especially for the all-male panel of judges. In terms of rank, the pastry princess occupied the high position among desert cooking, but a lower position among those experimenting with entrees.

Whitney, the "pastry princess"

The prevailing food image emerging out of the show was one in which rank mattered, but only as a concept distributed among different culinary spheres. No single person was the measure of what counted as a Masterchef; thus, the panel of three judges, and not just Gordon Ramsey. This distributed ranking system extends well into other aspects of food images, especially among images produced by food critics. Even the prevailing conversations on health and "going green" reinforce the idea of ranking. A certain acumen, a set of knowledge, is required to be on the side of good food, health, and sustainability. In fact, I find that the more you use the term "sustainability" the higher your rank in institutions focused on healthy food and fair trade. Foucault reveals that such rankings still fall under the regime of Discipline, making bodies "docile."

Say No to Symbols: Evolution from HGTV to Victory Gardens

I routinely regret not investing in Scripps Networks Interactive, the parent company of the Food Network, the Travel Channel, and other lifestyle television networks. Lifestyle images are parceled into categories: separate channels focus on design, home and garden, travel, and food--even "fine" food. The boundaries between these categories, though porous, are not arbitrary; channel developers must work through the cultural materials that make any boundary cohesive. Categories are more like species, they are born at a specific historical moment and in time they will go extinct. The separation between food and home design, for example, becomes wider as the capacity to profit off these categories intensifies. Profit serves as the river separating a single species into two isolated reproductive communities, which, like horses and mules did, evolve into their own species.

Where profit flows, new species are born. (Monsanto can literally create a new species of grain as it institutes monopolistic practices over all aspects of cereal production.) When these new species are born, it becomes harder for us to see their commonalities. It is harder for us to discern their interaction in creating an image of middle-class lifestyle, for example. We focus on their extensive properties, the things that common sense tells us are different. One category clearly deals with material that potentially enters our bodies, the other deals with material that surrounds our bodies.

But these differences are merely different manifestations of a single genetic flow: the genetics of the American middle class. Just because different tools are used--a spatula for the cook and a paint brush for the home designer--doesn't mean we aren't dealing with the same image. Scripps, after all, is the parent company, embracing both HGTV and the Food Network.

Is it profitable for us, the television audience, to bring together these two species? Perhaps. No, if we think we are going to see an underlying truth: a whole picture will suddenly emerge, enlightening us to the mechanization of the capitalist system. Yes, if we accept that something new may emerge, a new assemblage, like the coupling of cattle with humans that allowed communities to become sedentary. In fact, the coupling between food images and home design images is already occurring. For example, Michelle Obama's efforts to revive the White House Victory Garden are recorded on youtube:



This new garden marks a significant change in the White House landscape and even in its design: the flow of traffic presumably increases between the kitchen and the section of the White House lawn where the garden is placed. People's material bodies flowing through doorways change the design of the House, perhaps requiring new security posts and new maintenance buildings (a shed). The link between home design and food is barely apparent in this video, but it is there.

Contrary to popular declarations that the new garden represents a "symbolic" change, echoing the symbolic change of Barak Obama's election to the White House, the actual affects of the new garden are potentially much greater. The term "symbolic" seems to imply that the garden and Obama represent something that is already visible, ready for showing off. But the election of Obama had an incredibly diverse set of reactions not reducible to any apriori images. He is far more than a symbol of African American accomplishment; his election literally changed the racial landscape of the US, if not the world: while ethnic minorities found a new role model, conservatives found a new demon. The garden combines the home design species and its kin, food image species, and produces something new, something that has yet to be clearly outlined. Like species in biology, these lifestyle species become the raw material for evolution, or perhaps (r)evolution.