Senses and Sensibilities

Abstract

This article examines changes in tastes and practice in the context of establishing and maintaining a new cross-national couple relationship. Interviews provided accounts of the experience of change among fourteen Anglo-French couples. We describe two processes of change which, because accentuated in cross-national couples, reveal mechanisms lying behind the transformation and stabilisation of tastes and diets. Explanation of the evolution of taste and diet can be found in the interplay between aesthetic and ethical drives, incorporated bodily practices and social mechanisms of legitimation and integration. To make sense of gustatory and dietary change, tastes are best understood through their insertion in meaningful sequences, patterns and series.

Keywords:

• Britain
• cross-national couples
• disgust
• eating habits
• family meals
• France
• senses
• tastes

Acknowledgements

Special thanks are due to Bénédicte Brahic, Lecturer in Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University, for facilitating several contacts with young Anglo-French couples for our fieldwork.

Notes

1. Bove, Sobal and Rauschenbach (2003) offer a very useful review of the literature on couples and food.

2. There are advantages and drawbacks to interviewing couples together or rather in separate interviews, and these must be weighed against their relevance for the problems researched (Valentine 1999). We do not develop the point, as this article does not focus on the couple and family dynamics.

3. Bénédicte Brahic makes this important distinction in her own study of cross-national couples in Manchester (see Brahic 2013, 703).

4. Wise borrows the notion of “cultural fragrance” from Koichi Iwabuchi (2002), who contrasts the “cultural odour” of consumption products (their cultural marking by their country of origin) with “cultural fragrance,” which is but the “smell” become positive, “culturally and socially acceptable” (Wise 2011, 88–89).

5. Kaufmann (1994, 319) takes this concept from François de Singly and Gilda Charrier (1989), to designate an attitude of partners in some couples, who transform former “dormant” resources of their partners into “capital” and thereby act as Pygmalion with his Galatea. However Kaufmann argues that such behaviours, which produce what he calls a Pygmalion effect on the other partner, are more widespread and general than suggested by Singly and Charrier, though of unequal intensity.

6. Séverine Gojard (2000) unravels the crucial class differences of attitude vis a vis “scientific” recommendations and norms.

7. Connerton opposes “traceless incorporation” to inscription, the other way in which “societies remember” (Connerton 1989).

8. It is interesting to note how this “blandness” of British everyday food, often referred to by our respondents, features as the healthy pole in the structuring opposition with spiced, pleasurable food, in marked contrast with the “blandness” claimed for Chinese food, beyond all polarisations and a symbol of detachment. See J. Hansen’s (2008) review of François Jullien’s In Praise of Blandness.

9. Elsewhere, we have explored the very different ways in which contrast between ranges of foods, tastes and flavors obtains in the British and French environments, and we have suggested that looking at contrasts and polarisations is a dynamic and fruitful way of comparing food environments (see Darmon and Warde 2014).