Queering Foodways

As I finish the first complete drafts of chapter one and two, a distinction between these chapters and the later three has begun to emerge. The first two chapters, examining the emergence and intensification of novel food images, highlights systemic effects that provide social and material bodies with coherent self images (interpretants). The later three chapters, focused on the complex systems concepts of distribution, embodiment, enactment, examine the way these social-material bodies interact with multiple, cross-cultural foodways. So, metaphorically and literally bodies are at the forefront of the next three chapters.

As such, a healthy background of queer theorists', cyberneticists', and posthumanists' approaches to "the body," in all its ideological baggage, can benefit any research on the dynamics surrounding food and the bodies that derive symbolic and chemical nourishment from food. Queer theory especially deals with the complexities of interweaving material and social systems, a plaiting of food and culture with the body. Among cross-cultural foodways, ranging from tasting the Other thorugh foregin food to Creolizing culture with fusion foods, the fetish of occupying the Other's body through consumption often occurs within the matrix heteronormative behavior. The Other's food is coded as feminine, to put it reductively, and the consumer is coded male. Of course, television commercials often play with this normative binary, as in ads for the Quizno's torpedo sandwich.



Placing a phallic sandwich in a male-voiced machine, the sandwich "artist" (as Subway calls them) really does nothing more than enact a homosocial event akin to men horsing around in a football locker room. Nothing subversive here.

Where food begins a queer praxis, a new line of flight away from gender norms, is through a series of divorces, so to speak, from heteronormative pairings: food and reproduction, food and the fetish of the Other, food and nutrition (as a mainstream media enterprise, not Marion Nestle's empathic Food Politics). Divorcing, an appropriate legal metaphor indexing issues of gay marriage in the U.S., is a crucial first step towards reinventing the idea of marriage among actors and food with a queer image.

For starters, food, like sexuality, does not teleologically contribute to reproduction. The mass production of food in the U.S. bears more similarities with Walter Benjamin's descriptions of "mechanical reproduction" in the communications and aesthetic spheres than with Slow Food's vision of locally-produced food. The default process  of food production is in fact reproduction. Food production comes implicitly packaged as God's plan, to echo to Catholic Church, for food to reproduce without variation. Evolution is stopped in its tracks. Likewise, food is often reduced to its nutritive value; it exists purely as fuel for the body. In this view, we measure pleasure in food against a background of health: if it tastes good, it must be bad. Similarly, sexual impulses and gender performances outside the heterosexual norm may impart some perverse, fetishistic pleasure, but it is pleasure measured against the heteronormative background.

What, then, might a queer foodways look like? Of course, as many theorists have pointed out, queer refers to a deviation from the norm and need not refer directly to sexuality. Stimulating accounts incorporating sexuality, however, may derive from Cherri Moraga's metaphors of hunger and closetedness in Loving in the War Years and Gloria Anzaldua's imaginings of corn in Borderlands. Julia C. Ehrhardt covers these topics in an article, "Towards Queering Food Studies: Foodways, Heteronormativity, and Hungry Women in Chicana Lesbian Literature."

Samples of a queer foodways appear in more diffused form among food images used in the Showtime series, Dexter.



Images in the opening credits intentionally reflect Dexter Morgan's odd occupation as a serial-killing blood-spater specialist with the Miami PD. Not only is meat murder, but food and eating generally is murder. This weird association between food and Dexter's quirky serial killer justice lends a bit of queerness to food, bringing to the surface the pathological nature of eating and cooking. Take a closer look, the intro suggests, at the food you consume: the details reveal a little too much for comfort. Eating is a discontinuous process with no natural rhythm, no smooth path between male consumer and female nutrient. In a queer foodways, such binaries do not even exist. The eggs, the ham, the coffee, all have their singular texture; each has a culturally infused path, allowing us to connect to the world in novel ways. Already, I eat eggs with visions of bursting open bodies of strange yolk-ish creatures. A queer image, scary, pathological, and savory.

Modality Quotes

From Kress and Van Leeuwen's Reading Images
84
-networks "tend to obscure the fact that the range of choices is ultimately pre-designed and limited"
-"the network is modelled on a form of social organization which is a vast labyrinth of intersecting [85] local relations in which each node is related in many different ways to other nodes in its immediate environment, but in which it is difficult, if not impossible, to form a coherent view of the whole"

85
-"may obscure the globalizing tendencies"


99
-"When analytical structures are topological, theyare read as accurately representing the 'logical' relations between participants, the way in which participants are connected to each other...but not the actual physical size of the participants or their distance from each other"


154
-modality is about "the reliability of messages"
-"we regard our sense of sight as more reliable than our sense of hearing"
-modality markers, "cues for what can be regarded as credible," help us to make decisions


155
-modality "refers to the truth value or credibility of (linguistically realized) statements about the world"
-modality markers in language: may, will, must, possible, probable, certain
-modality is composed of "shared truths"

156
-"while the photograph restricts itself to representing what would normally be visible to the naked eye, the diagrams do not: they make visible what is normally invisible"...."they take recourse to abstract graphic elements"

158
-"A 'realism' is produced by a particular group"
-"Each realism has its naturalism--that is, a realism is a definition of what counts a real--a set of criteria for the real"
-"photorealism"...."how much correspondence there is between what we can 'normally' see of an object, in a concrete and specific setting and [159] what we can see of it in a visual representation"

159
-picture of coffee is clearer than soft background, and so holds higher modality

160
-abstraction relative to the standards of contemporary naturalistic representation

160-163
-types of modality markers

163
-"The world 'as we see it' (rather than 'as we know it', and certainly not 'as we hear it' or 'as we feel it') has become the measure for what is 'real' and 'true'"

164
-"the 'hyper-real' does not have the decreased modality it has in 'photographic' naturalism. Magazine photos of food are one example....the more a picture can create an illusion of touch and taste and smell, the higher its modality"

165
-"a realism that takes subjective emotions and sensations as the criterion for what is real and true"

171
-"a multiplicity of ways in which artists can relate to the reality they are depicting and 'define' reality in general"
-food photos both abstract and sensory

Cooking and Writing

I know Peter Elbow has covered the similarities between cooking and writing, but I'm compelled to recite my personal experience.

I love looking at the recipes in the NY Times but when it comes to transforming recipes into food, I see the ingredient list and realize all my shortcomings: my lack of ingredients and tools and my lack of motivation to spend three hours prepping, cooking, and plating elaborate dishes. These recipes require some serious economic resources and some real dedication to becoming a foodie. As a cook, I've come to revel in simplicity and develop an appreciation for good weekly planning.

Likewise, I've come to value clear writing over the opaque rhetoric often used by contemporary theorists. As much as I enjoy reading Zizek, Deleuze, and Butler, their complex, unclear writing cannot make complex issues more interesting. They are NY Times recipes, accessible to readers with the resources and know-how to decipher and use their opaque writing. And reading their books, I can't help but get discouraged: I simply don't have the ingredients and motivation to write like postmodern theorists.

Instead, I draw from Maya Angelou's memoir cookbook, The Welcome Table, which provides relatively simple recipes that connect to taste, culture, and tradition in complex ways. The recipes are simple but the resulting taste is complex, drawing from Angelou's heritage and personal experience. Her prose also expresses clarity without sacrificing complexity. The key to her clear writing, I think, is her capacity to create images, which are made from basic ingredients--good, though not necessarily standard, syntax and grammar. She plays with images at many levels, ranging from a cohesive picture of her whole book to individual metaphor used by her grandmother. Writing and cooking weave together, the clarity and simplicity of each practice producing complex images and tastes.

I may observe complex spectacles, but my sustenance starts with simplicity.

Defining "Food Image"

Explaining my project to "non-specialists" always helps me address basic issues that I tend to overlook. My mom asked me what I mean by "food image," a compound phrase I couldn't unpack very clearly for her. So here goes.

First, the institution of food studies has generally taken a more social, economic, and political perspective on food, rather than attempting a wholesale definition. One of the most quoted definitions comes from Arjun Appadurai, who sees food as a "highly condensed social fact." He points out that when we convert a part of our environment into food, we create a "powerful semiotic device." The boundaries of edibility and palatability often separate cultures, serving as grounds for perceived exoticism, primitiveness, or disgust. So food has a complex material and social DNA. 

Second, visual studies sees images as a cultural phenomenon. WJT Mitchell provides a widely cited and coherent definition, understanding images as a family that includes graphic, optical, perceptual, mental, and verbal forms. He also understands images, or pictures, as "worldmaking" devices, rather than world-reflecting devices. The definition I use the most comes from N Katherine Hayles's book on cybernetics and literature. Drawing from information theories, she claims an image is a condensation of information that can be both visually evocative and invite visualization. 

The symmetry between her definition of image as a condensation of information and Appadurai's notion of food a highly condensed social fact offers a pathway into defining food images. A food image condenses social information, affording a way of visualizing the world. Although food proper may be a condensed social fact, it does not necessarily lead to visualization or to visually evocative graphics and language. Here, I think, is the boundary between food and food images: it is not edibility that separates them, we can eat food but not food images; rather, it is visualization. When food allows us to visualize, it becomes a food image.

This definition actually accords with Manuel DeLanda's description of Hume's theory of images. Hume didn't think images were reflections of the world. Rather, images, even in the mind, were low-level reproductions of the world. The difference between the actual world and the image of the world was not that one was real and the other was just mental; the difference between world and image was a matter of intensity: the image is a lower-level intensity of the world. A low-level reproduction or image of an apple allows visualization in ways that the material apple cannot. In Proust's famous description of eating a madeleine, he reveals an image of food that allows us to not only represent the actual world but to also produce a world filled with memories, tastes, and psychological drama. 

When food allows us to visualize, then it becomes a food image. 

Revision

A few tips I've picked up.

1) Change the font. This practice can spice up routine reading, especially at the sentence level.

2) Read aloud, either by yourself or get someone to read for you. Hearing writing can help you hear unclear sentences.

3) Read backwards, from last sentence to first. The idea here is to get rid of the cohesive picture of your writing that you have in your head, and read for sentence-level clarity.

4) Highlight key sentences in each paragraph and put it into an outline. The best advice I have read from Tara Gray, using key sentences helps to provide a more global picture of your essay and makes you look for coherence. Be sure to organize everything with your working thesis.

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.