User:Alice/Grad reading

Main research topics

Reading on food

Article: Caring about food: doing gender in the foodie kitchen - Kate Cairns, Josee Johnston, Shyon Baumann

While I really dislike the usage of the term 'foodie' to refer to people who, like me, have a deep and personal interest in food, I regardless found this article to be quite helpful in outlining some points I would also like to make in my research. The article is based on a series of interviews with people of both genders whose lives revolve around food practices, without being involved directly in the food industry. The article tries to identify patterns of gender stereotypes being enforced in people's relationship with food, or as they call it 'doing gender'. Feminist literature on this topic has shown that 'social and cultural meanings attached to food serve to perpetuate unequal gender relations'. Traditionally, women have been disproportionately assigned food (unpaid) domestic labour, mostly associated with women's roles as care givers within the heteronormative family.

doing gender = 'a woman conducts herself as recognizably womanly' (Feeding the family, Marjorie DeVault (1991, 118) 
/// accountability, gender is accomplished through situated enactments that are accountable to the prevailing gender order (west and zimmermann, 1987, 135).

Even though women are mostly in charge of the preparation of food, their ability to take pleasure out of food is heavily restricted by societal pressure on maintaining a certain figure, restrains on expressing pleasure, etc. By contrast, men's involvement with food has always been seen mostly as a hobby, or a display of skill, often outdoors and for entertainment (even in TV, women are mostly portrayed in domestic settings, while many men cook outdoors). The interviewed people seemed to 'reinscribe particular understandings about gendered food practices' while negotiating 'cultural norms mandating gender equality'. The article also make clear the fact that class plays a crucial role when talking about 'foodie' culture, although they do not provide a cross-class representation. Privilege allows for people to invest time, money and energy into engaging with food at a superior level, other than subsistence: 'selective food consumption is enabled by class privilege'.

Other ideas that come up:

• cooking as investment in family health and care has very rarely been mentioned by any of the men interviewed, while the women had it as a central point
• cooking as obligation vs cooking as hobby, gendered
• emphasis on knowledge and skill to articulate their food identities (men), with role models (men), also heroic stories of exotic meats and ingredients

In conclusion, this article identifies instances in which gender stereotypes become clear in people who are highly interested in food culture, in three different aspects of it: pleasure, care work and knowledge. To be noted that the study took place in 2008 in the US across various states, with almost 50/50 gender distribution (slightly more women), 30 respondents of various ages.

Article: Cooking up lives: Feminist food memoirs - Arlene Avakian

Rather than being super informative regarding my research per se, this article has given me some insights into the genre of feminist food memoirs, of which I am certain I will be reading more soon. The memoirs referenced in this article are:

• The Language of Baklava: A Memoir - Diana Abu-Jaber, NY: Pantheon Books, 2005
• A day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love and War - Annia Ciezaldo, NY: Free Press, 2011
• Bento Box in the Heartland: My Japanese Girlhood in Whitebread America: A food Memoir - Linda Furiya, Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2006
• Tasting Home: Coming of Age in the Kitchen - Judith Newton, Berkeley, CA: She Writes Press, 2013

Book: Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation - Michael Pollan (2014) US, Penguin Press

Michael Pollan, one of the most well-known food writers of today, makes a couple of very interesting points in his book from 2013. For starters, he questions the current situation American society experiences today - while the total time spent cooking per day has fallen under half an hour (less than any other country in the world, but not too far from other western countries), people spend more and more time watching food being cooked on TV, reading about food, taking photos of their food, etc. This is a paradox that is hard to understand, but he manages to make a point by wondering if we're just simply amazed by people who still get to spend their time doing a real, physical activity with real material, unlike computer work that we often get to do, and there is some nostalgia about this real connection to food that most of us do not have these days.

Another theory that has grabbed my attention is the idea argued by both Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (The Physiology of Taste, published originally in 1825) and Claude Levi-Strauss (The Origin of Table Manners, 1978, NY Harper and Row) that human evolution is largely owed to the discovery of cooking, sicne it provided early humans with more energy and nutrients that required less effort to consume, thus giving way for the human brain to evolve. Cooking also represents a catalyst for humans to become more social beings, which became more civilized and introspective while sitting around the cooking fire.

Less cooking in the average household has meant, one the one side, less housework reserved for women, who can focus on activities they consider more important. It has also meant that people have had access to a wider range of cuisines, since not everybody has the skills or access to ingredients to cook food from different cultures. While these are all positive things, it also means that corporations have largely taken over the act of providing the food we eat on a daily basis, which comes with several downfalls. 'Corporations cook very differently from how people do (which is why we usually call what they do <food processing> instead of cooking). They tend to use much more sugar, fat, and salt than people cooking for people do; they also deploy novel chemical ingredients seldom found in pantries in order to make their food last longer and look fresher than it really is.' (pp 8) This has lead to a large variation of health issues related to diet. This shift has also meant that we are being targeted for packaged foods meant to be consumed alone and on the go, an activity he calls 'secondary eating', eating done while also performing another activity. He mentions this as 'the cultural contradictions of capitalism, its tendency to undermine the stabilizing social forms it depends on'(pp 8). Eating packaged foods has increased the distance between what raw ingredients are and where they come from, and the food we actually consume. 'Food becomes just another commodity, an abstraction. And as soon as that happens we become easy prey for corporations selling synthetic versions of the real thing - what I call edible foodlike substances. We end up trying to nourish ourselves on images.'(pp. 10) Discussing the gender politics of cooking, Pollan wonders: 'Was home cooking denigrated because the work was mostly done by women, or did women get stuck doing most of the cooking because our culture denigrated the work?'(pp10). Men have always had a privileged position when it comes to their cooking practice - mostly with meat, outdoors, seen as entertainment, celebrated, while women's cooking happened behind closed doors of tiny kitchens.

The thing that caught my attention the most is Pollan's argument for cooking as a political act. He argues that the work he has put in cooking in order to write this book, and cooking in general, can be considered, in this day and age, unnecessary work. He mentions an Op Ed piece in The Wall Street Journal 'written by the couple that published the Zagat restaurant guides [...] <People would be better off staying an extra hour in the office doing what they do well, and letting bargain restaurants do what they do best.>'(pp 19) This, he mentions, is the classic argument for the division of labour proposed by Adam Smith - 'specialization is undeniably a powerful social and economic force. And yet it is also debilitating. It breeds helplessness, dependence, and ignorance and, eventually, it undermines any sense of responsibility.' It has become the case that we do not do much of anything on our own, apart from what brings us an income, We have become consumers in every sector of our lives, of work done by specialists from all over the world. 'One problem with the division of labor in our complex economy is how it obscures the lines of connection, and therefore of responsibility, between our everyday acts and their real-world consequences.'(pp. 20) Handling the raw ingredients that make up our meals is a way to try and make visible again those lines. 'In a world where so few of us are obliged to cook at all anymore, to choose to do so is to lodge a protest against specialization - against the total rationalization of life. Against the infiltration of commercial interests into every last cranny of our lives. To cook for the pleasure of it, to devote a portion of our leisure to it, is to declare our independence from the corporations seeking to organize our every waking moment into yet another occasion for consumption. It is to reject the debilitating notion that, at least while we're at home, production is work best done by someone else, and the only legitimate form of leisure is consumption. This dependence marketeers call <freedom>.'(pp. 22)

Performance piece: Semiotics of the Kitchen - Martha Rosler (1975)

In this performance piece, made to be shown on a TV screen, Martha Rosler is seen standing in a typical kitchen environment, without any discernible facial expression. After sitting still for a few seconds, she proceeds to go through all kitchen tools spread out in front and around her, each representative of one letter of the alphabet. She manipulates every object with sudden, violent gestures, sometimes even performing useless tasks such as pretending to throw the contents of spoons over her shoulder, outside of the frame. Her piece is meant to express the frustration of women being stuck doing domestic labour, and the fact that this type of women's work is taken for granted. It is also meant to represent a parody to the cooking shows of the time that were on TV, particularly the one hosted by Julia Child, in which she is always portrayed as a cheerful housewife, more than happy to perform the tasks required of her in the kitchen. In her video, the woman becomes only a representation of the tools she uses, which is why, for the last few letters of the alphabet, she uses her body to represent the letters. 'I was concerned with something like the notion of 'language speaking the subject,' and with the transformation of the woman herself into a sign in a system of signs that represent a system of food production, a system of harnessed subjectivity.'--Martha Rosler In her mock culinary show, she is no longer a cheerful performer, but uses the tools that have been assigned to her as an expression of anger and frustration: 'when the woman speaks, she names her own opression'. (https://www.eai.org/titles/semiotics-of-the-kitchen) Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

Book: The Practice of Everyday Life Vol. 2 Living and Cooking - Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, Pierre Mayol, (1998), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis

There is no better way to describe this book than with a little paragraph on the back cover: 'To remain unconsumed by consumer society - this was the goal, pursued through a world of subtle and practical means, that beckoned throughout the first volume of The Practice of Everyday. The second volume of the work delves even deeper than did the first into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make living a subversive art.'

The focus of this synopsis is, instead of the entire book, chapter 11, called 'Plat du jour', from the section 'Doing-Cooking' by Luce Giard. The author starts by discussing the invisible traces of personal and common histories that are hidden in our everyday gestures and customs. “under the silent and repetitive system of everyday servitudes that one carries out by habit, the mind elsewhere, in a series of mechanically executed operations whose sequence follows a traditional design dissimulated under the mask of the obvious, there piles up a subtle montage of gestures, rites, and codes, of rhythms and choices, of received usage and practiced customs.” (pp 171) Most customs ingrained in cultures even today stem back to the specific struggles of each culture in particular, in particular the obsession with the protection of sustenance. Even if, today, the circumstances have changed dramatically, with the year-round availability of resources and means of protecting them, these small but significant customs from our social and economic history still remain. 'From one social group to another, people do not consume the same products, do not prepare them in the same way, and do not injest them by respecting the same code of table manners.'(pp. 177) Levi-Strauss argues that cooking customs represent a language of a certain culture, a series of codes that follow a certain logic and reveal the inner structure of that culture. These codes can be split in three classifications: the choice if ingredients, the combination between them and modes of preparation, and table manners. But the specifics of each of these areas cannot be distanced from the characteristics of class, according to Pierre Bourdieu.

The author argues further that eating is, for humans, not only a means of sustenance, but it serves 'to make concrete one of the specific modes of relation between a person and the world'(pp 183). When a person is forced away from what she is used to, food memories and practices are the strongest elements that remain. Food habits are also deeply ingrained in our sense of self as a living body. Food can be used, from a very young age, as an instrument of coercion, a power relation between the parent and child, a tool of emotional blackmail on behalf of the mother caretaker and provider of nourishment, which is sometimes rejected by the members of the family. 'The relationship that one maintains with one's body and with others is read, translated into visible acts, across the interest and care given to meals, in the range of pleasures that are authorized or the restrictions that are imposed.' (pp 191-192)

The end of the chapter could maybe become my life motto: 'eating is always much more than just eating.'(pp 198)

Book: The Physiology of Taste - Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

The first person to coin the phrase 'You are what you eat.', considered to be the father of the gastronomic essay.

Reading on other things

Book:Geography of Home: Writings on Where We Live - Akiko Busch

In this book, Akiko Busch reflects on the domestic landscape and how it has changed its form and function throughout years and generations. Together with changes in traditional notions of families and gender roles within the family unit, people have adapted the homes they live in to suit their specific needs and situation. In the chapter 'Kitchen', she recalls her memories of her mother's kitchen as a laboratory, a place where alchemy experiments happened regularly: 'in our house, the kitchen was the place where science collaborated regularly and gracefully with creative imagination.' She then goes on to describe the history of kitchens as one of heat sources, as different solutions for heating throughout the years have greatly influenced the architecture of kitchens, as well as their place within the home: open fire, gas, electricity. The role of the kitchen today is similar to that in the 17th century, when kitchens first moved inside the home: 'the burgher dining room, often as the bedroom too, and occasionally as a social chamber'. It was also often represented in paintings, as with Dutch painters, establishing itself as the central part of a home in terms of importance. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the kitchen's role became more of a 'service area', when kitchen work became exclusively associated with women's work and therefore less important than whatever men were doing in factories. 'Food preparation was relegated to a separate building, partly because it was thought safer to distance the flame of the hearth from the rest of the house. But it was also kept separate because smells emanating from the kitchen were thought to be vulgar and inappropriate.' The kitchen has been reinvented throughout centuries by many; today, rather than being hidden, or considered simply a functional part of the home, it is a selling point. Busch argues that, with our increasing engagement with the electronic, cyber world, 'we simultaneously cultivate more physical, tangible experiences that demand we use our abilities to see, smell, hold, and touch in a real and visceral way.' She also argues that the importance of kitchens is also a sign of people's shifting attitudes towards domestic rituals done for pleasure rather than necessity, and the developing need for various food processing machinery that have found their place in the home (as opposed to buying already processed foods). 'When processed foods were introduced, they were seen as a luxury that would liberate housewives from unwanted domestic labor. Today's luxury, it seems, is to be able to do the work yourself - albeit with the help of your tools.' The kitchen is the place where people can 'find some balance to the acceleration in which we are so invested elsewhere', where a selection of 'chores' that we choose ourselves are performed, not as labour, but as comforting ritual.

Gesture

Essay on the recipe

Eating is always much more than eating. Rinse, peel, chop, slice. Fry, sear, roast, grill. The pieces of the algorithm are interchangeable, but only by respecting the order of the operations, repeating the steps, you will get to the same result. In every single operation hides a world of knowledge. Where we are now, it all depends on trial and error.

So what makes code, algorithms, programming so similar to instructions, recipes, cooking? Or is it a stretch to compare the two?

Many (programmers) have attempted to explain programming to 'the people' by imagining a computer program to function 'just like a recipe'. The assumption here is that cooking is easy, everybody likes to cook, everybody can understang cooking. What shapes can that take? In this example (http://www.cs4fn.org/programming/recipeprogramming.php), the author is quick to note that 'Programmers are the master chefs of the computing world - except the recipes they invent don't just give us a nice meal, they change the way we live.' His claim seems to be: the two are similar, but, of course, cooking is infinitely more trivial than programming, because the latter has lifechanging capacities.

Others have tried to provide simplified explanations for different concepts, through the medium of a recipe. In Algorithmic Kitchen, the author tries to explain big data by using a standard format for a recipe.