Andrea Broomfield, in a Gastronomica article on the Titanic dining menus, demonstrates that despite the tripartite class segregation aboard the ship the bill of fares actually encourage patrons to "see their potential" rather than "feel their place" (41). Among third class passengers, for example, roast beef marked a cuisine normally reserved for higher classes. Upwardly mobile foods attracted a new market of third class passengers by placing them in a new food assemblage not found on other large ships. Even in offering a limited number of items the restaurant menu opens passengers to new horizons, including all the imaginative baggage of the American Dream.
The sense that third class travelers were embarking on a new path, whether the promise of class mobility was actual or not, is a type of distributed visuality affording them a new picture of what is possible. The image roast beef conjures is a worldmaking one, not simply reflecting economic conditions but producing an image of economic reality--of the U.S.--that invites exploitation. Of course, the consequences of the American Dream, much criticized, are far from perfect, the capacity of inducing a feeling of potential through a restaurant menu remains a powerful, if commonplace, strategy still in use today. Distributed visuality, as an invitation to other possible food worlds, is as much a filter or constraint upon material cultures as it is a line of flight away from hackneyed categories, stale ideas, and old images.
Marek Korczynski and Ursula Ott argue that the restaurant menu enables by constraining, "It lends shape and pattern to the plethora of alternatives that are available in many social spheres in contemporary society" (913). A type of visual activity, the menu helps structure what J.J. Gibson's adherents call the affordance landscape, which helps decide possibilities for action. A menu positions us as actors, Korczynski and Ott explain, providing us with the opportunity to make a meaningful choice. We experience ourselves as autonomous subjects; we gather pleasure through seeing ourselves as sovereign subjects. In a world where institutional constraints often incite disciplined routines and make docile bodies, experiencing ourselves as autonomous subjects can become a pleasurable escape from everyday pressures. Distributed visuality, then, risks being employed as an autonomy machine, affording us "false" choices that only reify hegemonic institutions.
But in a complex system, distributed visuality like the restaurant menu teeters between chaos and order, a far-from-equilibrium state, and placed in the right niche--given the right environment--it can create lines of flight, new affordances, and actuate new capacities towards a re-visioning food.
