Author: Charlotte Hayden

When I first spotted all six volumes of A Cultural of History of Food on a neglected library shelf, I foolishly thought, “I’m set!” I expected to rely heavily on the volumes to inform the trajectory of my research (i.e. which period(s) I would select for my thesis) and to provide me with the most complete, deep research on its advertised focus, “a cultural history of food.” But I am disappointed in these volumes. Here I focus on volume six, A Cultural History of Food in the Modern Age, a period the editors define as 1920-2000. The chapter titles are promising: “Food Production,” “Food Security, Safety, and Crises,” “Kitchen Work,” and “Family and Domesticity” all relate to the work I am doing on home cooking and cookbooks in periods of infrastructural crisis: the Victorian era (industrializing food production), the Turn of the Century (further industrialization and overwhelming immigration and population influx (Pilcher 27)), WWI, and WWII (both of which experienced crippling rationing and food shortages).

Since this volume’s parameters are 1920-2000, I knew its only overlap with my periods was WWII. But on WWII this volume’s information is meager. “Food Security, Safety, and Crises” and “Family and Domesticity” proved the most fruitful chapters, but even their research related tangentially to mine. They provided context and a broad scope rather than detailed information on wartime interactions with food. In “Family and Domesticity,” Alice Julier sweeps over the crux of food in WWII with statements like, “reformers and government agents promoted [added vitamins to widely distributed foods] after World War I because they worried about the supply of healthy potential soldiers” (150), and the helpful (in that it confirms my own conclusions from examining wartime cookbooks) but boring (because it lends nothing to my research, pushes on no facet of wartime cooking) statement, “As the market was unreliable, canning, preserving, and growing food…were still common place practices, reinvigorated by national propaganda campaigns in World War II…” (154). But this is obvious from any wartime poster; of course citizens relied on their home kitchens during wartime, when embargoes and hostile national relations interfered with trade. I am picking on Julier’s chapter, but all the chapters I read in volume six shared this problem of sweeping over the exciting, probing questions of why citizens ate this way, what the challenges on the home front were with daily eating and providing for families, what health problems emerged from this malnutrition? This volume fails to address the questions its research provokes.

When I read volume five (which I read before volume six), I was bored and frustrated for the same reasons listed above: the research did not provide me with any conclusions about wartime attitudes to food that I could not glean from examining a few wartime posters; it did not challenge my initial assumptions that cookbooks would provide evidence of the frugal, anxious attitudes towards food in WWI and WWII. Volume five, which focused on the “Age of Empire” (about 1800-1920), attended to French and Italian schools of cooking, and Middle-Eastern and Asian countries’ food production modernizing, but very little on Victorian industrialization affecting British food production, which I figured was a notable change in this period. And while volume five focused overtly on non -American and -British countries, which frustrated me because I sought information on Britain, volume six infuriated me for its unrelenting focus on American food, when the collection’s title implies a world-view.

So my sense of these volumes has completely altered since I first encountered them. I originally looked on them as research Bibles, the answers to my wonderment of what the heck I would write a food thesis on. But now that I have specified the periods and nations (mostly British, some American) I am focusing on, I see that much of the volumes are useless to me. Granted, they do provide, as I have said, broad contextualization; they present a starting point. But even anthologies that are designed to cover most “bases” and introduce readers to a subject ensure that they satisfy the questions more probing readers will have. The Cultural History of Food collection fails to do this: the research is too general, then too preoccupied with one nation’s experience; the chapters mention a major focal point (WWII) and then provide surface-level research on it; and the research is so sweeping and all-encompassing that it is rendered minimally valuable.

Works Cited:

Bentley, Amy, ed. A Cultural History of Food in the Modern Age. Bloomsbury, 2016.

Bruegel, Martin, ed. A Cultural History of Food in the Age of Empire. Bloomsbury, 2016.

Elaine Freedgood’s “Introduction: Reading Things,” from The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel, introduces Freedgood’s goal to glean novelistic meaning from “things” in Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, and Mary Barton. But Freedgood neglects to emphasize, perhaps because it would distract from her purpose, that this tactic can be applied to arguably any “thing” a culture produces: namely, my own subject of ingredients and cooking habits in the Victorian, Turn of the Century, WWI, and WWII eras. By modeling my research perspective on Freedgood’s argument that “things” in the Victorian novel expose historic and character-centered meaning, I can apply her ideology to my subject of “food in crisis” and tease out “fugitive meanings” that cookbook recipes, culinary articles, and domestic cooking habits divulge of their recipe-makers and the people who interact with those culinary texts.

Freedgood writes, “[E]ach of these objects, if we investigate them in their ‘objectness,’ was highly consequential in the world in which the text was produced” (2) – I would add, the culture in which the people or characters are produced. I included two novels on my reading list for the purpose of connecting the cookbooks and Victorian journal articles I read to a personal experience, to illustrate my larger discoveries on a personal scale. In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Francie’s weekly trip to the candy store and her mother’s insistence that Francie throw out her coffee if she prefers (even though the family is scraping by in 1911 Brooklyn) shows that food poses a mode of empowerment for the young girl, and gives the family a sense of worth among degrading jobs and being forced to buy the tongue of a cow, an undesirable but cheap cut of meat. Interactions with food in this novel and the Victorian and wartime cookbooks I am reading illustrate the cooks and Francie defining their self-worth by the food they can afford or are savvy enough to get ahold of – even Fannie Farmer’s recipe for “mock turtle soup,” which uses a cow head, illustrates this (Fannie’s Last Supper). For these consumers, food becomes a precious commodity of self-worth.

Freedgood’s introduction focuses heavily on the examples she will provide in the novel’s subsequent chapters, which does not pose useful to my work. But her contextualizing passages do help to frame my research. One meaning Freedgood represses throughout her article is the possibility that her chosen Victorian authors’ inclusion of “things” “at crucial narrative moments” (2) could be subconscious – this is the assumption my fledgling thesis argument seeks to unearth or recover. As stated in the previous paragraph, Francie Nolan’s self-definition relies on her ability to access food; Laura Shapiro emphasizes in Perfection Salad that turn of the century housewives channeled their measuring of themselves into writing to housekeeping columns and removing blemishes from their domestic skills – “culinary idealism,” Shapiro calls it (3). Shapiro even notes that Mary Lincoln “asked,” “Now, what does all this interest in cookery mean?” (71). Cultural (and here culinary) fads often appear to the consumer to emerge out of the air, without predictors or precedent, framing them as subconscious. For my purposes, “subconscious” refers to symptoms, ones from existing in a culture (in this case, British and American culture from about 1880-1945) and seeking self-definition and reassurance via that culture’s fads (“this interest in cooking”) or contemporary causes (wartime recipes designed to reduce food consumption and waste).

Freedgood does not attend to the subconscious in her argument, and instead asserts, for instance, that the cultural implications of mahogany in Jane Eyre (2) are intentional and crafted by the author. I cannot rationalize why Freedgood neglects to explore the subconscious, since it would assist her argument rather than undermine it: Freedgood argues that the prevalence of mahogany in Jane Eyre signifies the culture in which Jane’s story occurs; but Jane uses her story to define herself, and undergoes a journey of self-discovery. So even if I challenge Freedgood’s assertion that the novel intentionally features mahogany “at crucial narrative moments” (2), those moments still exist; they continue to hold all the historical and colonial implications Freedgood identifies, but more tellingly of the impact Jane’s culture has on her self-perception, they do this un- or subconsciously. In the novels and cookbooks I am examining, the people interacting with food utilize cuisine in the same self-defining way.

Works Cited: (the blog software wouldn’t let me indent lines so I apologize for the incorrect MLA formatting)

Fannie’s Last Supper. Directed by Michael Rothenberg, American     Public Television, 2010.

Freedgood, Elaine. “Introduction: Reading Things.” The Ideas in Things: Fugitive   Meaning in the Victorian Novel. The University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Shapiro, Laura. Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century. Collins Publishers, 1986.

Smith, Betty. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Harper Collins, 1947.

Food with the Famous (1979) by Jane Grigson explores the lives of eleven famous English and French artists (writers, painters) in history – Grigson’s mode of selecting the eleven was to “take a number of famous people who liked eating, and give recipes for their favourite dishes” (9). Grigson published this book as an established cookbook writer who performed light scholarship; but she was not a food sociologist. The titles listed in my first edition copy of Food with the Famous suggest that Grigson’s experience lay in writing about enjoying food rather than the history behind it; these titles include Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book, The Mushroom Feast (which explores the diversity of the mushroom family), English Food (which remains a “classic” and can be purchased updated with a modern cover on Amazon), Fish Cookery, and Good Things, all of which preceded Food with the Famous. In her introduction Grigson explains that she wrote “cookery articles in the Observer Magazine in 1978,” and that a conversation with a coworker spawned the idea for Food with the Famous (9). This frames Grigson’s career as oriented towards eating in history, but focused mostly on cuisine itself.

Excerpts of Food with the Famous did not appear before the full text was published, but Grigson’s writing in the Observer Magazine and her prolific career during the 1970s established her as a familiar name in English food writing. There appear to be only two editions of the book: the original 1979/80/81 publications, and an updated 1991 edition. This indicates that the book was popular during the 1980s and 1990s, before it could drown in the new millennium’s surge of cooking shows, cookbooks, and stylish diets requiring their own subcategory of cookbook. An Amazon search today generates only used first and second edition copies of Food with the Famous, all with visibly dated dust cover designs. The only book of Grigson’s that I discovered is still regularly read and praised is English Food (1974), which is sold on Amazon today by Penguin (a step up from the relatively unknown Hollen Street Press, who published Food with the Famous). The new edition features journalistic quotes testifying to the revival of English national cuisine that the book promoted. Jane Grigson died in 1990, so the decline in her books’ popularity may be due simply to her absence in emerging food writing.

Food with the Famous was published by an already popular author – English Food, evidently Grigson’s most lastingly influential book, was published five years before it, so Grigson’s name would have leapt out to customers. The book popularizes the history of food through famous cultural figures, all of whom are English or French, thus reinforcing the emphasis on nationality that characterizes Grigson’s work. Food with the Famous takes an unusual form: Grigson introduces her work and the book’s format in her introduction, then includes a section for each author, listing them chronologically, she explains. Each author section begins with a two or three page description of their life and relation to food, favorite dishes, and materials Grigson used to investigate their life through food. What follows are on average eight recipes, excerpted from diaries or family cookbooks but which Grigson modernized for the twentieth (and now twenty-first) century cook. She combines anthology, scholarship, biography, and recipes to form a book that maps English food. As a marketing strategy, this gives readers many reasons to buy the book: as a cookbook, a piece of academic work, or an exploration of the lives of figures famous and popular in England.

Grigson, Jane. Food with the Famous. Hollen Street Press, 1979.

Beloved presents a binary between flashback and the present moment, thus creating a recursive, revisiting, almost swirling sphere of time in the novel. This perception of time is almost exclusively expressed through Sethe’s perspective, which further suggests that the novel’s treatment of time acts as an allusion to Sethe’s mental state – her mind reels from past traumas that daily life invokes. But Morrison complicates this binary (embedded in linear time) by writing Sethe’s conscious and continuous resistance to the past’s, or memories’, shaping of her actions in the present moment. “Nothing better than to start the day’s serious work of beating back the past,” Sethe reflects (73). As Kristeva argues in “Women’s Time,” time can exist on linear, circular, and monumental dimensions. Because our society measures time linearly, we would say that Sethe’s traumatic memories occurred “in the past,” in a certain year and month. But they have not: Sethe’s memories are present for her and bleed into her conversations with Beloved, Denver, and Paul D; she is never free of their infliction on the decisions she makes or reactions she exhibits. These memories reoccur every time Sethe remembers: though they do not physically occur when she remembers them, they elicit fresh trauma that Sethe had not developed until she mentally relived them. Sethe’s remembering of her past shapes her present, morphing personality.

Morrison formally constructs Sethe’s involuntary urge to remember. Morrison writes the novel in fragments that provide the reader with background plot necessary to understand the sometimes cryptic prose that refers to Sethe’s past, but that also dissolve the boundaries between Sethe’s memory and her reality. For instance, the chapter in which Sethe gives birth to Denver begins, “Upstairs Beloved was dancing…Denver sat on the bed smiling and providing the music” (74); this is the present moment, featuring grown Denver. By the chapter’s end, Sethe has given birth to Denver and has just decided on the child’s name (“Sethe felt herself falling into a sleep…On the lip of it…she thought, ‘That’s pretty. Denver. Real pretty’” (85)). The reader has already seen this name for seventy pages, a familiarity Morrison relies on to suggest that past moments and the present overlap in Beloved. Adult Denver and newborn Denver exist simultaneously, as do Sethe’s living and disappeared sons, and Baby Suggs as commander of 124 and as a physically minor figure in the house yet a monumental one in the residents’ imaginations. This collapsing of the past and present is displayed again when Sethe, Denver, and Beloved walk into the woods and the physical experience of being surrounded by nature plunges Sethe into a “rememory” of crossing the river to freedom. “Followed by the two girls…Sethe began to sweat a sweat just like the other one when she woke, mud-caked, on the banks of the Ohio” (90). Again, by the end of this sentence the reader is in a different year from where we were when the sentence began. Morrison follows this sentence with, “Amy was gone. Sethe was alone and weak, but alive, and so was her baby” (90). Here Sethe exhibits vulnerability and easy emotional undoing; the book’s treatment of time aims to convey this internal tussle of Sethe’s through its flashback-flash-forward form.

So the binary of past and present, flashback and current, memory and reality is not conveniently literal in Beloved. I would argue that “past” does not exist for Sethe, nor does present. Every moment she experiences, whether it is in linear time’s terms “happening now” or “has happened,” is wearing on her.

A keyword that continues to crop up in our class readings and especially in Culler is “culture.” This focus on “culture” signifies current literature studies’s self-consciousness in realizing that everything critics assert about a literary work is subjective, determined by the culture in which it was written and then read, and thus not a certain, all-encompassing answer. This point derives from many of the readings we have already discussed in class (Althusser, Culler, Mulvey who dwells on the symbiotic relationship between actor/screen and viewer) and it currently pervades the study of any discipline in which culture has an impact on the resulting creation – math and science are probably free of these effects, but the humanities cannot escape it. I think “culture” as a term deserves scrutiny because it is frequently used throughout serious academic writing and casual conversation, especially on the internet where a statement about culture can reach a substantial portion of the world’s population without any consideration for reliability. In this way, the definition of “culture” becomes muddled and requires distinguishing.

I have selected “culture” as a major keyword for my thesis research on food. In identifying “food culture” as my focus — rather than “food literature,” “food writing,” “food instructions/recipes” — I have pinpointed a preference to focus on the sociological, relationship-oriented dynamics that food engenders in our, or a, culture. I am intrigued by recipes, technique, ingredients, and national dishes, but not just because the process of making food compels me. For the purposes of my thesis, I consider these elements of food important because, for example, a culture’s popular recipes may act as medicine for an illness common to that region; a technique may have become popular because the tools needed were easily accessed or constructed, or because ancient populations perfected the technique and its modern use acts as ancestral remembrance and celebration; ingredients viewed as “indigenous” to a nation or “typical” of its food actually represent living records of colonization or, for instance, famine (in my Writing About Food class we have learned that Columbus brought chilies to India and tomatoes to Italy, which offers a revised perspective on deeming an ingredient “original” to a land). “Food culture,” for me — I haven’t conducted enough research to ensure this meaning is constant throughout academic writing — refers to human interactions with and because of food.

Culler’s statements in Chapter Three identify the dynamic I find so compelling about the interaction between a culture and its food, or food and the culture it spawns. “[C]ultural studies is drawn to the idea of a direct relationship, in which cultural products are the symptom of an underlying socio-political configuration” (Culler 51). More sparsely phrased, the field is about “how cultural productions work and how cultural identities are constructed and organized…” (44). This broad summary of cultural studies helps me understand why the term “food culture” felt relevant and apt for my thesis, even before I had considered what the phrase really meant: it focuses on the “thing’s” (i.e. food, literature, music, films in Mulvey’s case) relationship with its culture, or with cultures it has contact with. Culler employs literature to illustrate cultural studies, and I choose food. My interest in “food culture,” however, seeks not to express cultural studies through the lens of food, but to examine food through the lens of cultural studies. For me, food is not the tool; cultural studies is.

In the film Goodbye Lenin (2004), color symbolizes Germany’s political reality and communicates it to the viewer. When the viewer first meets the grown up son, sleeping in his room, the bedroom windows are shrouded in red cloth that spreads red light throughout the room. This directly relates to communism and East Germany as a police state at that moment in the movie. The red light that permeates the room acts as a visual signal to the viewer that the son remains oppressed by communism, an ironic message considering that when East Germany merges with West Germany, the son is relieved of communism’s pressure institutionally, but domestically he must resume living as a communist subject to comfort his mother. Thus, the son’s bedroom curtains foreshadow the movie’s remaining exploration of the characters’ relation to communism, whether or not it is officially installed in the country’s government.

The color contrast between Germany’s communist and unified state is partly due to logistics and partly functions as a visual communicative device through which the director can inform the viewer that the film’s environment has changed. Logistically, East Germany was not allowed to import goods from other countries, meaning that if East Germany did not make its own Coca Cola, for instance, none would appear on supermarket shelves. This explains the color contrast between the first part of the film, in which East Germany is still a police state, and the second half, in which capitalist, commercial goods begin trickling across East Germany’s borders. The son’s experience shopping at the supermarket provides another example of the film employing color as a signifier of progress (or perhaps a more observational and less biased word is simply “change”). When the son wanders the supermarket aisle, searching for the German pickles his mother craves, the camera ensures that the viewer registers the drastic alteration of the supermarket’s appearance. Where shelves once stood sparsely stocked, the son now finds them brimming with imported food, including pickles from the Netherlands. The variety of colorful labels in front of the viewer’s eyes offers evidence of the notable, daily adjustments East Germans are experiencing – even a mundane activity like going to the supermarket rattles the son.

The Coca Cola sign similarly acts as a color-oriented marker of major shifts in the culture being documented and examined in the film. There is a dramatic clip in which four giant trucks drive by the camera with a whoosh while the camera, and therefore the viewer, stands at eye level. This ensures that the viewer internalizes the feeling of being dwarfed and insignificant among national and governmental shifts. But the red Coca Cola trucks themselves also embody this. When the trucks plow past the camera, the viewer is struck by their number (four Coca Cola trucks in a row is a lot of soda), but also alarmed by the adjustment their eyes must make to digest the bright, deep red in contrast with the grey, rainy, melancholy background. When the Coca Cola sign is hung outside the mother’s window, it divides the party into those who wish to uphold the ruse the son has constructed, and those like his girlfriend, who feel uncomfortable and “creepy” maintaining a pretend past. The red of the Coca Cola sign contrasts so sharply with the grey building from which it hangs that the viewer immediately senses that an element of the environment is awry – the red does not fit with the yellow and brown of the mother’s bedroom, so on a visceral level the viewer registers a problem. And of course there is a problem, because the sign would not have been allowed in the East Germany the mother believes she is recuperating in.

Goodbye Lenin uses color to convey alteration (mostly governmental rather than emotional or mental) to characters and viewers. Prime examples of this are the plethora of Coca Cola signs and labels that pervade the scenery in united Germany, along with the use of red to communicate communism’s continued hold on East Germany. It is interesting that the film uses Coca Cola to signify the defeat of communism, because Coca Cola red and the red the Communist Party employs are almost exactly the same shade (but there remains no room to discuss that here). Still, Goodbye Lenin explores Germany’s communist and unified states, using color to signal the shift.