The Anthropology of Food

I thought it would be interesting to publish my work on food in this blog that I did during my Social Anthropology degree. On one hand it is an insight (quite detailed and sometimes long-winded for the average reader) into the world of anthropology and its approach to food and its meanings, but on the other hand it's just an interesting read about the associative relation between eating and the senses, emotions and places, and very importantly, people or social relations. I think for everybody it is interesting to not just take the world we know for granted but reflect on what we're doing and the differences between different cultures. And the more I learn and write about food, I keep going back to what I learnt in anthropology and that there is so much more to food than just the physical act of eating. 

So below is my entire essay on food and memory, a group project that explored the power of evocation, or the proustian moment, that food flavours, smells and memories invoke in us. Note that I took out the methodolgy and ethics bits for more enjoyable reading.

Evoking Memory through Food

By Hendrik Dennemyer

Introduction

“Next to breathing, eating is perhaps the most essential of all human activities, and one which much of social life is entwined” (Mintz and Du Bois, 2002: 102; italics mine).

Mintz and Du Bois make a good point which all of us know, but often forget or take for granted. Food is essential to us, as it sustains our bodies nutritionally and because it plays such an important role in our lives in many ways, whether it is a family meal or celebration, a hobby and a passion for cooking, or growing and collecting your own food. Food takes many facets and it is not only about the eating part. And this has long been realised in anthropology. Although food has not been centre-stage in the discipline as for example Ritual or Kinship, it has nevertheless played an important role in writings as far back as the late 19^th Century, as for example Mallery’s paper “Manners and Meals”, and food has also figured in the writings of classic anthropologists such as Boas, Radcliffe-Brown, and Evans-Pritchard (Mintz and Du Bois, 2002: 100; Sutton, 2001: 5). What all of these writers understood, as Sutton puts it, was that “food can hide powerful meanings and structures under the cloak of the quotidian” (2001: 3). And as observers of “the imponderabilia of actual life”, it makes absolute sense to study something as mundane yet important as “the manner of taking food and preparing it” (Malinowski, 2001: 18). Thankfully, since the 1990s the attitude towards food studies has become more positive and there is now a large and growing academic literature, and not only in anthropology (Mintz and Du Bois, 2002: 111; Sutton, 2001: 3).

One of the more interesting developments in food studies has been to look at the connection between memory and food. This development has no doubt been influenced a lot by Marcel Proust’s writings on the senses and involuntary memory, particularly his famous madeleine episode, which for near a century was one of the only literary inspirations that academics who were interested in the subject could use (Sutton, 2001: 1; 83-84). When we were discussing topics in our group discussion for this project, I mentioned that I had read Proust when I was in secondary school and still remembered the madeleine episode and how by tasting and smelling the peculiar combination of a madeleine mixed with tea Proust’s protagonist was transported back in time and space to his childhood memories of happiness in Combray and how he used to eat his madeleine in the exact same way (1981: 48, 50-51). Then we also had a lecture by our module convenor Dr. Barbara Graham where we all discussed different forms of evoking memory and if memory could evoke a certain feeling or sensory experience but if the senses could also evoke a memory. As a group we found this kind of topic very interesting and we decided to look at how the experience of food may evoke or shape memories. We wanted our topic to be quite broad for a reason, because we did not only want to focus on the Proustian way of understanding food and memory, and we did not want to limit ourselves on specific senses and specific practices of food. After all, as outlined above, food entails so many experiences and meanings and therefore each person in our group tried to let their interviews and their findings shape their approach of looking at food and memory.

Research Findings

Bad food memories:

A lot of the questions in our interviews tend to be quite similar, as for example what people’s favourite or least favourite meal was and whether they have any specific memories that are related to this dish. For example, most of our interviewees tend to have a negative memory concerning their least favourite food as a child, which seems to be due to the circumstances of that food or particular dish. Fiona’s mum does not like eggs and tea to this day because it reminds her of the hardboiled egg and tea she had to eat and drink when she got her tonsils removed as a child. Ryan’s mum did not like sweet corn the first time she tried it and also relates this negative memory to the fact that she was forced to eat it. Here is my mum’s description of her least favourite dish:

“My brother Hans-Jürgen loved Brotsuppe (Bread soup) as a child and for our birthday, every one of us could chose our favourite meal for lunch, and of course Hans-Jürgen always chose Brotsuppe for his birthday. And I absolutely despised it, it was the most horrible taste you could imagine, strangely sour and sweet, with a sickly smell of vomit and it looked like diarrhoea. But of course we all had to eat it. The rule in our house was that you had to eat what was on the table, and so I had to eat that disgusting soup when it was my brother’s birthday.”

My mum’s memory is not only influenced by the actual visceral experience of the dish, but also by the fact that every year she was forced to eat it. My mum also told me that she never liked lentil soup and the interview really stresses the fact that she had to sit down in front of her plate and eat it, which she said took hours sometimes, which only made the soup taste worse as it got cold.

There have been several studies in anthropology showing the emotional and memorable effect of trauma, and even though our group examples are less extreme, they bear certain similarities. Svasek’s study of the Sudeten German expellees shows that when people remember their traumatic experience they get to relive the trauma and become emotionally distressed (2005: 198, 200-201). Also, Winkler’s study on rape trauma shows how visceral triggers can evoke the same emotional and physical feelings as during the traumatic experience (1994: 253, 259-260). This reminds me of Fiona’s mother, who apparently was about to be sick once because she smelled a cup of tea. Whether more or less traumatic, memories, and that includes food experiences, can trigger negative feelings and carry negative associations.

However, a bad memory does not always influence people’s tastes for their entire lives. My mum likes lentil soup now and Ryan’s mum likes sweet corn these days. So memory does not necessarily have an absolute influence on one’s likes and dislikes, but these examples show that they do influence us a lot and that the bad food memories are often associated with particular situations, like being forced to eat something.

Good food memories:

Probably everybody has good food memories and our interviews reveal many fond memories of food and tastes that evoke feelings of home and happiness. And the senses play a really important role in good food memories about particular dishes. Here are a few of my mum’s experiences:

“One of my favourite meals was Hefeklösse (yeast-dough dumplings) with melted butter, cinnamon and sugar. That was fantastic, the smell and taste of the warm butter, the cinnamon and the sugar with the dumplings was just incredible. I also really liked Kartoffeln mit Specksauce (…) Granma would boil the potatoes and fry the fat bacon in little cubes and then add flour and milk to the pan to make a really delicious and creamy white sauce, which was then pored over the hot potatoes (…) I still remember watching Granma in the Kitchen, making the cabbage rolls. She first took the leaves off the cabbage and blanched them in boiling water and took them out to cool. Then she filled the leaves with the meat stuffing and rolled them and bound them with white string, and then she fried the cabbage rolls in the frying pan. And that smell when she started frying the rolls, it was just fantastic.”

These descriptions are really visual and emphasize the smell, the flavour, the texture, the temperature and the look of the food. Thus the experience of the senses is key in these food memories. In his study on Kalymnian food memories, Sutton describes the importance of the senses in remembering food and especially how smell and taste, as interrelated senses, are very powerful in evoking past experiences (2001: 88). He also notes that in particular “smells evoke what surrounds them in memory” (2001: 89). This rather reminds me of Feld’s idea of “acoustemology” and that “place is sensed, as senses are placed” (1996: 91). What Feld means by these terms is that our environment has specific sounds that are characteristic of that environment and which we then associate with when we hear those sounds. In other words, when people hear the sound of waves they normally think of the ocean or a beach, and this also triggers relevant emotions depending on the meaning of the memory and meaning of that particular sound. It seems to me that this is relevant to all senses when it comes to food memories and my mum’s experiences really show that all senses are involved, whereas Sutton’s approach of concentrating on smell and taste is rather limited in this respect and is very much influenced on the writings of Proust. It would make more sense to use a general approach of embodiment, and to look at food memories as embodied memories of the senses. After all, as Csordas reminds us by looking at Merleau-Ponty’s theories, “we do not have any objects prior to perception” and “perceptions begins (…) in the body” (1990: 9). And as food is such an important part of our bodily perception, it should be considered how we remember through eating and how food memories are not only about the actual food but everything that surrounds the memory. As Lunghorst et al. write: “Thinking about the body means thinking about the senses, and the ways in which senses are embedded in social and spatial relations” (2009: 334). Thus, as food memories carry embodied knowledge, it is no wonder that a smell or a memory of a meal actually evokes a particular space, a person or an entire situation.

Associative food memories:

One of the recurrent themes in our interviews is that food memories hardly ever involve but the eating of food. The memories are almost always associated with something else, whether it was a specific event, a social experience, a particular place or person even. The power of food memories to evoke multiple layers of experience of course reminds one of Proust and the madeleine episode. Many of the interviews discuss how the taste or memory of a specific food reminds them of a particular time and place. When Giuliano’s mum thinks of eating chitterlings, or calf intestines, she remembers spending entire afternoons at her friend’s house where the friend’s family prepared the chitterlings and fried them over the fire and were telling scary stories. Ryan’s mum has happy memories of sitting outside in France and drinking beer with her dad and eating cheese and chocolate croissants. In my interview I found that my mum associates coffee cream cake with her grandmother and vice versa:

“There was something special that my grandmother used to do with the cream that made it better than any other cake with coffee butter cream that I have ever tasted. Even the best ones you can buy don't come close to that taste. You know it's funny, but I think that cake is the only recipe that I can remember from my grandmother. Every time I think of my grandmother that cake springs to mind, and vice versa. And every time I think about the cake and my grandmother I can see her small kitchen and how she made the 'Mocha Torte' as she used to call it.”

My mother’s account shows how her memory of the coffee cream cake not only evokes a specific taste but that the cake involves many layers of memory revolving around her grandmother and being in her kitchen. This shows why it is relevant to think of food experiences as embodied knowledge or memories, as our bodies experience and remember what surrounds them and what they experience. Thus, when people talk about food or remember food experiences they do not only remember specific tastes or smells, but they also remember what is associated with that moment, whether it may be positive or negative feelings, or specific people and situations. As Sutton notes, sometimes food rather acts as a catalyst to remember other things, because of its power to evoke embodied knowledge (2001: 90). As he notes about his friend’s memory of eating a bag of apricots forty years ago, this memory is not so important in itself, but rather that it reminds his friend of that particular era and what happened on Kalymnos at that time.  

Food memory and identity:

Most associations of food memories involve a specific space or social event as the examples above demonstrate. Most often they involve both, because food is often prepared and eaten in a home or a memorable place and most memorable foods have been eaten in the company of loved ones. That is why so often food is associated with the idea of home and belonging.

Again the interviews of our group show similar results. Even though Ryan’s mum does not like eating meat anymore, she still gets fond memories of home when she thinks of a traditional meat dinner. For Jielu’s friend the taste and memory of a chocolate chiffon cake brings back memories of home and how her mum taught her the recipe when she was a small girl. Here is what my mum has to say about food and identity:

“The food of my childhood brings me right back to that time and to Granma's kitchen. And in the end it influenced me a lot, especially in my way of cooking, as I learned all the basics from Granma and still cook certain Hamburg dishes today, that always just taste of home.”

As my mum’s words show food not only reminds us of home because certain dishes or flavours remind us of our childhood and our homes and family, but the way we learn about food and cooking often starts at home. The recipes we know, the food we like, the way people cook are part of one’s identity and feelings of belonging. Therefore particular foods may also become symbols of people’s homes or their country. Seremetakis writes that the taste of a particular peach variety from her hometown in Greece called “Breast of Aphrodite” always reminds her of home, because she could only get it there (1994: 1-2). Sutton writes that the smell of basil is so ubiquitous in Greek homes and kitchens that when Greek immigrants smell basil outside of Greece they say how much the smell reminds them of their homeland (2001: 74). Food has always been discussed as something that people can identify with and that makes them feel at home and my mum’s extract furthermore recalls Goddard’s understanding of food in Naples. Goddard explains that “the family remains the central context for the preparation and consumption of food, and the mother is the principal provider” (1996: 206). This to me seems a good explanation to my mum’s feeling of identity concerning food and cooking and how the meals she learned to cook at home will always remind her of that feeling of belonging.

Longhurst et al. also suggest that food can make people feel at home as their participants explain that it is important for their identity to prepare and eat the tastes and aromas that they know from home now that they live in a different country (2009: 339). These issues are all the more important for immigrants and Longhurst et al. explain that cultural food differences can be regarded as “embodied encounters” and that immigrants often feel out of place in a foreign environment and that food can make their bodies feel “at home” again (209: 340).

It seems clear again that embodied knowledge is an important aspect when explaining how food memories and the experience of food can make one feel at home or part of a specific identity. As Csordas writes, “the body is simultaneously both the original object upon which work of culture is carried out, and the original tool with which that work is achieved” (1990: 11). Thus, as socially informed bodies, what we learn culturally and what we understand as identity or home is not only understood but also influenced by the experiences of our bodies, such as memories of food. 

Food preparation and sociability:

As I have stressed throughout this paper, the eating part is only one aspect of how people experience and remember food. Food preparation and sociability figured quite distinctly in my interview and indeed most of our interviews suggest that for women of our parents’ generation food preparation was an inextricable part of experiencing food. As earlier mentioned, Goddard’s work shows how important the family and food preparation are in a traditional setting, especially for women. Maybe this has changed over the years and may certainly differ from person to person and in different societies. In our group discussions, Giuliano mentioned that his mother and grandmother both remember who taught them specific recipes, for example their mothers, and how these people used to do prepare those dishes. Giuliano calls this a ‘food genealogy’, which is evoked when his mother and grandmother cook specific dishes or discuss certain styles of cooking, for example the Umbrian style of cooking in Italy. Giuliano’s mum also mentioned vivid memories of chickens being killed and plucked and also rabbits that were being skinned. When I was interviewing my mum I really enjoyed listening to her stories of my grandfather’s allotment and how they used to spend family days there and helped pick the vegetables and fruit and how they also collected wild blueberries and elderberries in the heath and hedgerows. Here’s my mum’s account of how they used to prepare their fruit and vegetables for preserving through the winter:

“No it really didn't seem like a chore to us, we really enjoyed those days because it was family time, we mostly sat in the kitchen all together and were talking about everything. It was really good fun! Of course sometimes you had small aches, for example when you had to de-stone hundreds of plums your fingers just got irritated after a while. But you didn't really notice too much. And you were just happy to know that through your work and effort there was always going to be enough food during the winter, because we stored so much of it in the cellar. You were also proud of what you accomplished, to see what you could do with your hands. And to see the whole process of how Granpa looked after his plants and how the harvest was then transformed into the end product just gave you a real sense of appreciation for the food you were eating.”

Food is such a social experience and especially in circumstances where people spend a lot of time together when collecting and preparing food it really influences one’s memory. My mum has always been talking about their family days when they were collecting and preparing food and even the above extract shows how many happy memories she has of those days. And even though some people might find that preparing and collecting food as a child is a chore, for my mum those days were some of the happiest of her childhood because she was having a good time with her family. Moreover, the sense of pride and achievement in preparing food also seems an important memory to her and that they all knew that there was going to be enough food stored away in the cellar for months and months to come. As my mum says, she had a real sense of appreciation for her food and what went into it and how much her hands could accomplish. This feeling of accomplishment also figures strongly in Fiona, Giuliano and Jielu’s interviews and it seems to be one of the main motivations but also one of the most important memories in cooking and food preparation. Cooking or preparing food for oneself and others and seeing how happy it can make people carries very strong and happy memories for most of our interviewees.

Conclusion

It has been said often enough in this paper, but food is really not just the simple nurturing of our bodies. Maybe because we sometimes consider it such a day-to-day phenomenon, we should perhaps realise how important food is to our lives and our bodies and what meanings it carries. And meanings are inherent in memory and are shaped through our experiences, and our interviews have shown many types of food memories, from bad memories about ‘forced’ eating to memories of preparing food with loved ones at home. The main motion of this paper is perhaps to show how powerful the experience of food is in evoking memories, and most certainly also emotions. Bad food memories recall bad emotions and situations, for example when one had to eat something as a child. Good food memories make one remember days of happiness and they are often linked to the idea of home and belonging, but also to feelings of accomplishment and food heritage. Thus, food memories recall what surrounds them, may it be memorable places, people or practices. This was one of the other main points of the paper, namely that food is so powerful for evoking the past because it is associative and it is so because food, maybe unlike other human activities, is so entrenched in the senses and in our bodily experiences. All the senses are involved when eating, and the senses, especially taste and smell, are evocative. However, it has also been argued that one cannot only limit one’s understanding of food and memory on the senses of taste and smell, and that a broader understanding of embodiment and embodied knowledge are useful when considering the evocative power of food memories. This paper has certainly demonstrated how much our bodies and our senses remember and how this influences our memories of food. It is through the body that we experience our world, and such a bodily experience as eating can only enlighten our understanding of the socially informed body and how we identify with food and why such memories evoke emotions.  And that is why I absolutely agree with Sutton when he writes that food “challenges us to rethink our methods, assumptions and theories in new and productive ways” (2001: 160).

References:

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Goddard, V.A. 1996 Gender, Family and Work in Naples. Oxford: Berg.

Longhurst, R., L. Johnston and E. Ho 2009 A Visceral Approach: Cooking ‘at home’ with Migrant Women in Hamilton, New Zealand. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34, no. 3: 333-345.

Malinowski, B. 2001 (1922) Introduction: The Subject, Method and Scope of the Inquiry. In B. Malinowski 2001 (1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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Sutton, D. 2001 Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory. Oxford: Berg.

Svasek, M. 2005 The Politics of Chosen Trauma: Expellee Memories, Emotions and Identities. In K. Milton and M. Svasek (eds.), Mixed Emotions: Anthropological Studies of Feeling. Oxford: Berg.

Wilson, S. and L. Peterson 2002 The Anthropology of Online Communities. Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 449-467.

Winkler, C. 1994 Rape Trauma: Contexts of Meaning. In T. J. Csordas (ed.), Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.