Chapter 2: Food - An Examination
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Chapter 2: Food - An Examination |
When we turn our attention to the examination of the other basic component of an escagraph, food, we soon see how it has handily managed to act as a sign for the many meanings which we have created and attached to it aside from its ability to stand for or be nourishment. vThe ability to establish meaning is a capacity which the human animal possess in greater abundance than any other.v Human beings can, and do, regularly cause any substance, concept or thing to stand for something else. vWe shall see that our food can become a sign with ease probably because it is a substance so intimately associated with our existence and so much a part of our cultural makeup. For example, food which costs a great deal of money, like genuine truffles or caviar or foods that involve special treatment of the animal (labor intensive) before we eat it like pate de fois gras, already have a meaning associated with them before we ever eat them, in fact it could be argued that we are predisposed to like or desire them before ever tasting them based on their exclusivity alone. They mean something to us even before we encounter them based on their cost and then, after tasting them, we add the meanings normally associated with foods, "That's really good!" or "That tastes awful!"
"Virtually nothing we do in our daily lives speaks so loudly of our sense of art, aesthetics, creativity, symbolism, communication, social propriety, and celebration as do our food habits and eating behavior," say the editors in the [1] "Prologue" to a special edition of the Western Folklore Journal in 1981. What those editors are saying is, as well as nourishing us, food has enormous power to mean. For example, we have celebrated Thanksgiving in this country for so long with the turkey as the protein centerpiece that the bird has come to mean Thanksgiving. So effectively has that occurred that we commonly call Thanksgiving "Turkey Day." Turkey growers and marketers have spent more than a little time and money over the last 25 years in order to overcome that established meaning in an effort to get us to purchase turkey at other times of the year. And, they have been successful.
Food, even before it has written words attached to it, has enormous power to carry meaning, As the French semiotician, Roland Barthes, put it, food is "...a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations and behavior" [2]. An article penned by Harriet Bruce Moore[3] in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition pointed out to us as early as 1957 that "...to humans the symbolic aspects of food are often of primary significance, and a given food will be refused, regurgitated, or traumatic if its symbolic significance makes it unacceptable to the eater." With Moore's words in mind, India's "holy cow" comes more clearly into perspective and we understand better why we are repulsed by people who eat deep-fried grasshoppers.
Food is also a readable code. For example, when invited to a friend's house for dinner, the food served first gives insight into a coded message about the nature of the rest of the meal. If the host or hostess begins by setting a bowl of chips on the table, you have been given the first part of a code which determines the entrees to follow. They will be informally presented and will have been prepared without great detail, very likely they will be pre-packaged. But, if Beluga caviar on melba toast points is presented at the beginning, you are alerted that the remainder of the meal will be presented rather formally and that the preparation of the food has involved complexities which consumed personal time on the part of the host.
Food also has the ability to cross reference other meaning systems. For example, if you have shown up in jeans, a T-shirt and loafers at the dinner which begins with Beluga caviar, you know (or knew at one time) that you have dressed incorrectly (a dress code is a meaning system). The food items, as they come to the table, have predictive value, that is, food is not just able to transmit a meaning, but it is a comprehensive code which can be read and which allows the reader to understand and predict the foods, and their preparation, which will follow. A meal that begins with roe of sturgeon is not very likely to sport Oscar Mayer hot dogs as the entree. A food code can be read with as much assurance as a transitive verb which shows up early in a sentence is read, alerting us to the direct object which is sure to follow.
Food as a system for sending messages is often employed in journalism. In a study of the 1980 presidential campaign, Brummett [4] studied what journalists reported the candidates were eating or were said to have eaten. He writes: "Reference to what candidates eat are rhetorical attempts to transfer popular connotations about the food to the person who eats it." Surely, one cannot forget Ronald Regan's jelly-beans in that election. Jack Anderson, the social critic, characterized John Anderson supporters as "Quiche-eating liberals" and Peter Goldman in Newsweek, referred to an Anderson palate that ran to prime rib and J&B on the rocks, [4].
Certain foods have culturally agreed upon meanings and they are a quick and effective way of characterizing a politician, and, by association, his/her grassroots support. Journalists have made the phrase, "Tell me what you eat and I'll tell you who you are," go to work for them. Reporting food habits is a culturally swift way to characterize a candidate. The first President Bush was reported, without much notice except from the nutrition mavens, not to like broccoli but President Carter's penchant for fruits and salads may have contributed to his undoing. How many of us were not surprised when a President who couldn't pass up a cheeseburger was put through impeachment hearings? The number of times that food shows up in the media's reporting of Presidential candidates or Presidential activity is a measure of how handily food takes on cultural meaning and can be used as surely as a word to capture or create an image. Journalists, who can not afford a wasted word or an uneconomical turn of phrase; turn to our firmly held cultural connotations about food to assist them in quickly establishing a politician's personality, and his politics.
In order for a discussion of food items and their meanings to make sense, it necessary to learn a little about sign systems and how they do their signing. How do meanings become attached to food?
Example: A golden brown roasted turkey has come to stand for Thanksgiving as celebrated in the US. The turkey, by accident of choice, repeated usage and prevailing myth, has accumulated the meaning Thanksgiving. Since the bird has no characteristics on its body or in its personality that resemble what we celebrants know Thanksgiving to mean, a turkey, then, stands for Thanksgiving symbolically. It is a symbolic sign of that holiday.
What is a sign? A sign is anything that stands for something else. For example the word "dog" stands for the accumulated experience we in this culture have had with that canine beast, we call them or 'sign' them dogs. Can signs be something other than a word? Indeed, they could be a wave of the hand or the letters of the word d*o*g.
For an example of a single letter of the alphabet that has meaning, consider the single letter 's' on the end of an English noun. It has the meaning, "more than one." We need to be careful of a sign like the wave of a hand, it could stand for the meaning "Hello" or "Goodbye" or possibly the meaning "Over here".
Context, naturally, plays a large part in your deciding which is the correct reading, as for example, with words in a language that are spelled the same but are often pronounced differently like sewer (one who sews) and sewer (where sewage belongs). Such words are often called homographs a subdivision of the larger homonym category. A sign has a signifier ( the thing doing the signifying) and a signified (the thing being signified). The word "dog" (signifier) stands for the accumulated experience of canine beasts (the signified).
Below are some definitions which will be useful in this study.
Symbol: The definition of a sign that is a symbol is that the signifier (a turkey, for example) has no resemblance to that for which it stands (thanksgiving), is not similar to it in any way (is arbitrary) to the thing it stands for (the holiday called Thanksgiving). The relationship between the signifier and what it stands for (signified) is an arbitrary one. When a culture agrees upon the assigned relationship between the signifier and the signified, the relationship becomes conventionalized, culturally agreed upon.
The appropriate definition of a symbol then reads: a sign is a symbol when the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary and conventional.
Icon: The photo of a person shares many qualities of the person in reality, if it didn't, it would be unrecognizable as a photo of the person in question. While it doesn't share the quality of size of the person of whom it is a photo, it bears the qualities of proportion to the person in question. If the person has big ears, then the photo will have big ears in relation to the head in the photo. The signifier (the photo) shares qualities with the signified (the person or thing of which it is a photo).
The definition of an icon should read: a sign is an icon when the signifier and the signified share qualities.
There are four more kinds of signs traditionally acknowledged by semioticians: the index, the signal, the symptom, and the name. The majority of signs of the food system are symbolic or iconic. Few in the food system are anything else than symbols and icons and I will not continue with definitions of those four signs as I don't think we will need them.
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