Introduction
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Introduction |
Reading the newspaper while eating breakfast is a behavior so customary that it hardly deserves notice. We all do it; we read while we eat. Sometimes we do it to distract our taste buds from a lackluster entree, and we most certainly do it to discourage others from joining us. Perhaps the simultaneous nourishment of mind and body are so well suited to each other that reading while we eat is hard to avoid. Whatever the reason, we regularly read and eat simultaneously and some of us have developed expert facility at handling a novel or magazine in one hand while eating with the other.
During the Valentine season, someone hands you a conversation heart with a snappy saying written on it and you read it, smile, and eat it. Something quite else than reading while you eat has just happened; you have just eaten what you were reading.
That unique form of the combination of eating what we read deserves our attention. Messages written on our food are legion and have become so customary that we seldom reflect on the fact that we are eating what we read. Another example of such food is the familiar birthday cake with its message of "Happy Birthday" extruded on the surface of the cake along with other, personalized, messages referring to the profession of the recipient or his or her time of life, like "Over the Hill" which tauntingly appears on many a birthday cake for someone celebrating a fiftieth birthday.
Some years ago I started to notice and reflect on the amount of food available that had writing on it. I began to collect and categorize the examples I found. I soon discovered I needed a name for these edible artifacts that had writing on them. We do not have a generic word in English for messages that are made to be eaten. I called them escagraphs. I adopted esca from Latin (meaning: victuals - things to be eaten) and graph after the Greek (meaning: mark or the infinitive verb "to write") and have combined them to form the word escagraph: a piece of food with writing on it that is consumed along with the piece of food. This book will examine reading and eating at some length; but, rather than study the phenomenon of eating while we read, this book will study the long history of eating what we read, or Escagraphs.
We do it without noticing. We eat the traditional wishes on birthday cakes or the "Best Wishes" expressed for a new business that have been extruded onto a cake for its grand opening. We also eat the name of the candy company molded into its candy bar; we eat personalized messages, some ribald, which are custom made in novelty bakeries which abound in shopping malls. The lengths to which some of those bakeries will go to capture your business is staggering. They have a number of pre-printed illustrations which appeal to children, sugar decals, (called photo cakes in the business) which they can "lay" on the cake's surface over which they extrude your selected message; or, they will create a sketch, no matter how ribald or personal, which you bring in, to commemorate a "special occasion" for which no decal exists. Not every shop will do the latter, but the ones which will, put the creation into the hands of one of their consenting adult employees.
Companies also use escagraphs to promote and sell their products. For example, children enjoy picking out alphabet shaped cereal letters that spell words floating on the surface of milk in their cereal bowls. One cereal manufacturer advertised its alphabet cereal by showing kids how they could exert power over monsters by spelling out the monster's name and then eating it. For the consumer of escagraphs for whom money is plentiful, Neiman Marcus made available a complete chocolate Monopoly game so one could eat and play simultaneously giving the phrase "eating up the profits" a new dimension.
Eating what we read is a bit of social behavior that has become transparent, that is, we don't notice that we do it. No explanation is needed when we hand someone an escagraph. Not only do we understand escagraphs without explanation but there are times when we actually expect it, the birthday celebration, for example. The gesture of presenting a family member or friend with a birthday cake with some message written on it has a strong social history; we have already assimilated what it means into the cultural web just as we have the handshake. But, because eating written messages is socially transparent does not suggest that it means nothing.
Many of the messages we send today that are made to be eaten are made of substances with a high sugar content. The next most frequent substance used for the creation of escagraph messages is grain. Although fat is present in many escagraphs, birthday cake icing, for example, escagraphs made exclusively of fat are rare. Butter patties with the name of the restaurant stamped in it are still to be seen, however.
As we more closely examine escagraphs, we will note that they are made of two elements, writing and food. Sugar plays a large part in understanding the vitality of escagraphs, but we will learn that sugar is not a required ingredient of all escagraphs. But, every escagraph must contain human food and writing or the mechanism for writing, in order to be called an escagraph, a piece of food must contain writing, on it or in it, which can be eaten. Therefore the "Sunkist" label on an orange, originally stamped on the skin with blue ink, does not qualify as an escagraph because we tear off the skin and the imprinted label, before we eat it. Food and writing, we shall see, also have significant symbolic capacity in their own right, even before they are brought together in an escagraph.
As we examine escagraphs further we will see that there are two kinds: sweet and not sweet. The not sweet kind further breaks down into the category of those mandated by law and the category of single letterforms (principally alphabet pasta) which commemorate movable type.
No one has researched escagraphs up to now. No data bases exist and certainly no history of them exists except for brief mentions here and there in the pages of books on other subjects. Part of the joy of doing this work was doing the historical research on the use of food with writing on it as it has occurred across time, giving me the excuse to read as much of whatever I wanted to without ever knowing when a reference to escagraphs might pop up.
I need to thank a number of people who, after hearing about the subject of this work, kept in touch with me on references they came across in reality, history and literature. Thanks to Karen Mollett, Norman Hinton, Larry Shiner, Mark Siebert, Mike Lennon, Margaret Rossiter, Bill Bloemer and the numbers of students who brought me information about escagraphs.
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