I speak and read food - and so do you!
Have you ever experienced a version of the following scenario? You’re at a meeting or social event and there is a meal from another culture that is served. Let’s say the meal is cipaille. You notice that people are curiously, in some cases hesitantly, picking up their forks to dig into this this stew-like, pie-like, meat-filled thing you’ve been served. You look around and notice that, like you, some are unsure about the proper utensil. Should you be using a fork or a spoon? Some people are digging in. You have questions. So you ask: “What is this?”
“It’s stew!” someone affirms.
“With… pie crust?”
“It’s cipaille,” someone else offers, reading from the menu that’s been left on the table. “A layered meat dish.”
“I’ve heard of cipaille,” your neighbour offers. “Wasn’t it brought over on ships in colonial times to keep the sailors from developing scurvy?”
“So s-e-a-p-i-e? The menu says c-i-p-a-i-l-l-e. Shouldn’t it have fish in it if it’s sea pie?”
“I ate cipaille growing up in St. Jean,” a small voice comes from down the table. “But it was more like a meat pie. You know, with ground meat.”
“So, it’s a French meal?”
“I’ve got it!” the man across from you says reading off his phone. “Here are recipes for cipaille. Hey! Shouldn’t this have potatoes in it?”
Before you know it, the discussion has broken off into all sorts of different direction around the table: With what culture is this food associated? What ingredients are needed to make this dish authentically? Can a meat pie and a cipaille be the same thing? Is there a vegetarian version? People who’ve had the meal before have formed as a group of experts who share their own experiences with the meal and answer questions.
As you finish the meal together, it’s clear that you’ve all shared in a culinary experience. Everyone at the table, even those who tuned out and moved on to discussions about cats or mortgage rates or what they were going to be doing on the weekend, also have a connection to this food in that they now know about it. It doesn’t mean they are a part of it. Just that they recognize that this food communicates something more than individual ingredients.
If you’re reading this blog, it’s likely because you’re interested in how food makes you feel. You might want to know more about how food connects individuals or you’re curious about your own food habits or traditions. If you’re here, it’s that you likely already recognize that we all speak a food language: an internalized repertoire of what constitutes good and bad food. Just like any other language, we all have our own accents and dialects. In fact, many have studied this concept, for example Claud-Lévi-Strauss’ well-known “The Culinary Triangle,” Mary Douglas in “Deciphering a Meal,” and Roland Barthes in “Toward a Psychology of Contemporary Food Consumption” which can all be found in Food and Culture: A Reader.
Almost all academic disciplines and fields of study have, at some point, seen their scholars turn to food. That’s because food is a human requirement. Without nutrients, our bodies would die. But, perhaps more importantly, food is inextricably linked to who we are. The well-known adage “you are what you eat” coined by Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin in “On Taste” cannot be disputed. We eat what tastes good to us. We eat what we are served in specific places by specific people. We eat what we can afford. We aspire to eat the foods we cannot. We crave certain foods to satisfy personal needs. In their introduction to Acquired Tastes: Why Families Eat the Way They Do, the authors explain that “[f]oods carry differing meanings and associations for people in different social contexts… These meanings are often place-specific, learned through locally available social discourses that constitute some foods as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy,’ ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’ for members of specific social groups” (9).
Food languages, like actual languages, vary with time and the context in which a particular food is desired, made, and/or consumed is important. As individuals interact with others who have similar food habits, they validate their practices. When individuals encounter other food habits, especially when individuals are immersed within other groups or must negotiate food habits within a shared space, individuals adapt their ways. They might adopt new meals and they might stop making some of the foods they previously considered important, satisfying, or special. It’s therefore “not enough,” Kathy Neustadt argues, “to focus on food as a symbol and code without recognizing that food also involves a myriad of practical, technical, historical, and personal issues” (140). The problem with focusing on food as merely a structure or a language, she continues, is that when food “is taken to be a language, its ‘grammar’ is preeminent; its tangible, physical, and sensory qualities are brushed aside. There are no cooks, no eating, no occasion: there are only structures, forms, and systems of signs. Continuity, unlike metaphor, implies contiguity, tangible connections, even physical contact, and it directs the analytical focus inward, rather than outward” (159). Neustadt’s Clambake: A History and Celebration of an American Tradition, David Sutton’s Remembrance of Repast: An Anthropology of Food and Memory, and Diane Tye’s Baking as Biography: A Life Story in Recipes are good examples of studies that move beyond a structuralist interpretation of food. Their works include an analysis of how food structures social behaviour and how food is used to affirm one’s beliefs and values to one’s self and to others.
The study of food habits, especially of traditional food habits, is an important element in the study of a minority culture and group because food is one way individuals express their cultural selves. Making culturally specific food raises questions such as: What defines a cultural group? What criteria can be used to measure and recognise membership? Does regularly eating fajitas make a person Mexican? Does putting maple syrup on pancakes make one Canadian? And, in a similar way, does speaking a language not only make one part of a linguistic group, i.e. a French-speaking Canadian, but also a member of the cultural group, i.e. a French-Canadian or a Franco-Ontarian? What does it mean to be Franco-Ontarian? What is the difference between Franco-Ontarian and French-Canadian? Does it include all French speakers in the province of Ontario? In Canada? Who are these people? What do they look like and how does one recognise them? Why do my daughters call themselves Franco-Ontarian while I call myself French-Canadian?
“What is the connection between FrenchCanadian traditional food and cultural retention? How do evolution and adaptation of foodways threaten or facilitate cultural preservation?” Franglisch Foods aims to answer these questions. “Raspberry Memories” was a first example of how food provides a structure, a sign of systems, that shapes one’s understanding of the world and how it is used to express a rural commonality that transcends race, culture, or one’s first language. Future blog posts will offer other, specific examples. We’ll also discuss the merits of autoethnography in the study of food and food habits. In doing so, we’ll show the importance of understanding the person and people wanting, requesting, making, serving, and/or consuming the food.
For today, I want to leave you thinking about your own food language. What do you think your choices (the ingredients you pick, the recipes you make, the requests you receive…) say about who you are as a person? How do others read you? How do you interpret your choices? In what ways do these food choices connect you with and/or distinguish from others? How do your traditional foods differ or resemble what you eat on a regular basis?
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