Food, literature, art, and the demise of dualistic thought

Abstract

In the early 1990s philosopher Deane Curtin proposed a “food‐centered philosophy of human being,” whereby food became a potential site for the elimination of the self/other duality so central to Western thought. Since food is ingested and becomes part of the self, it obliges us to reconceptualize not only the other but also the identity of a self that is so permeable, it can physically incorporate the other. Food/cooking/eating as a conceptual complex has further challenged the self/other dichotomy in barrier‐breaking new cultural artifacts such as “food books,” performance art pieces, and popular film.

Keywords:

• Self/Other Duality
• Food Literature
• Literary Cookbooks
• “Doing‐Cooking”
• Performance of Eating/Cooking
• Food Films
• G. Grass' The Flounder
• L. Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate
• I. Dinesen's Babette's Feast

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Ronald Bogue and Louis Pitschmann for their incisive critiques of the initial draft of this essay as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. I did not, however, always follow their advice.

Notes

See especially the Introduction and the essays “Food/Body/Person” and “Recipes for Values” (Curtin and Heldke 1992).

Elspeth Probyn seems to be thinking along similar lines when she writes: “I propose that in eating we lose ourselves in a wild morphing of the animate and the inanimate; what Foucault calls ‘that obscure desire … to become other than oneself’ ” (Probyn 2000, 8).

Elspeth Probyn similarly has recourse to Deleuze in making this connection, specifically to Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. She summarizes their argument: “[T]hey argue that ‘What regulates the obligatory, necessary, or permitted interminglings of bodies is above all an alimentary regime and a sexual regime’ ” [Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari 1988: 90], and comments: “The interminglings of the cultural, the culinary and the corporeal suggest to me other ways of thinking about ethical behaviours and practices” (Probyn 2000, 4).

In Alfonso Arau's film version of Like Water for Chocolate (1992), in which the elements of magical realism are emphasized, the 12 framing recipes disappear except for an occasional voiceover.

Linkages of orality, the gaze, sexuality/sensuality, and the ingesting of food can be found in the (in)famous scenes of several other films such as Tom Jones (1963) and 9 1/2 Weeks (1986).

More extensive discussions of edible vs. inedible and the related concept of disgust can be found in works such as William Miller's Anatomy of Disgust (1997), Alain Corbin's The Foul and the Fragrant (1986), and Deborah Lupton's Food, the Body and the Self (1996; see especially ch. 4).

Grass' political agendas have included notably an East/West predilection both in terms of Eastern and Western Europe and the former separation of the BRD and DDR. His political optiques seem to have stemmed from his childhood in the Polish/German city of Danzig (or Gdansk), his interest in European history, and terrorist events in Germany in the late 1970s when The Flounder was published.

The disclaimer reads: “The recipes in this book are based on traditional Mexican recipes and have not been tested by the publisher.”

In one photo, Allende provocatively holds a large, bulbous, glistening pepper to her lips.

On the mind/body split as related to consumer culture, see Thompson and Hirschman (1995).

The changing of named food items in the American congressional cafeteria from “French fries” and “French toast” to “Freedom fries” and “Freedom toast” as a protest against France's opposition to an invasion of Iraq in spring 2003 is at one level simply silly; at another level it reflects the profound link of a people's food with its national identity.

The lack of culinary details in Dinesen's text presented a difficulty for Gabriel Axel, who directed the 1987 film version of Babette's Feast; he was obliged, in emphasizing the preparation and consumption of the dinner in the film to invent numerous aspects from whole cloth. The lack of recipes has not, however, prevented people from attempting to recreate Babette's dinner: “Barry Snyder, chef and owner of La Poule à Dents, a restaurant in Norwich, Vermont … in 1990 … recreated the menu from the film and, over an October weekend, served it up Babette‐style, with patrons seated at a single table. He has ‘screened’ the meal every fall since” (event reported in US Airways Attaché, October 1998, 22).

One thinks in American culture of pie‐eating contests, all‐you‐can‐eat offers in restaurants, and jello wrestling. Other cultures indubitably have their own food barbarities.

Deborah Geis elaborates: “The piece is interesting in several respects in addition to the clearly parodic (or ‘ethical’) statement it makes about zoos and their purposes. Sherk comments, ‘It was about analogies and being an object on view.’ By timing her meal to coincide with the lions', Sherk interrogates the differences between ‘civilized’ and ‘primitive’ rituals of eating, suggesting perhaps that the trappings of civilization (the silverware, tablecloth, etc.) are merely devices for deluding ourselves into thinking that our feeding does not serve the same primal purpose as it does for the lions tearing apart their raw meat in their cage. Sherk's performance—which could be interpreted as a feminist response to Kafka's story ‘A Hunger Artist’—challenges the voyeuristic desire of the passers‐by (her audience) to watch her in the zoo, particularly while she is engaged in the act of eating. Her position, moreover, calls Brechtian attention to her status as a woman who ‘performs’ not only within the literal cage at the zoo (and one might think here, too, of the popularity of caged go‐go dancers), but also within the metaphorical cage of patriarchal culture” (Geis 1998, 223–24).

For comparison see a parallel scene in the film 9 1/2 Weeks (Dir. Adrian Lyne, 1986).

For a range of authors on food see anthologies such as Food for Thought (Digby and Digby 1987), A Literary Feast (Golden 1993), or more specialized, Kitchen Talk: Contemporary Women's Prose and Poetry (Alford and Harris 1992). Also useful is the series Best Food Writing (Hughes 2000–). For in‐depth treatment of more than one author see works such as The Ambiguity of Taste: Freedom and Food in European Romanticism, by Jocelyne Kolb (1995).

One might turn to works such as God's Banquet: Food in Classical Arabic Literature, by Geert Jan Van Gelder (2000) as a springboard for expanding the cultural context of this particular discussion.

Titles that fall into this category would include: Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, by Anthony Bourdain (2001); Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All‐American Meal, by Eric Schlosser (2002); and The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen, by Jacques Pepin (2003).