Whatever it is that pop culture does to reach it goals, it does it right. It is a spectacle that works, building on dreams and desires. And food is pervasive in contemporary Western pop culture, influencing the way we perceive and represent ourselves as individuals and as members of social groups.
I was recently invited by Food Anthropology, the blog of the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition, to review Anita’s Annur’s Intimate Eating: Racialized Spaces and Radical Futures. Working on that post brought me back to my own work on food in popular culture and why it matters. While I invite you to read about Anita Annur’s book, I also want to share something I wrote back in 2008 in in the introduction to my book Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture. It turns out, it is still relevant today. And it explains why I so often write about food in film, TV, or other popular culture expressions in this blog.
“Pop culture happens to be the arena where new narratives, changing identities, and possible practices become part of a shared patrimony that participates in the constitution of contemporary subjectivities. By creating projections about the future, by picturing alternative realities, and by prompting all sorts of interests, attachment, and aspirations, collective imagination can become a basis for agency and social mobilization. In this sense, imagination is deeply political, since it comes to constitute an organized field of social practices and discourses, and a space of negotiation that is neither totally free from power nor completely controlled.
And here is where food is relevant, since it deals with those crucial aspects of the human experience that hinge on the material, the physical, and the body. We all realize how fraught and complex the relationship between lived bodies and imagined realities often is: desires, fantasies, fears, and dreams coagulating around and in the body deeply influence our development as individual subjects. From where do many of these imaginary elements derive? I believe that pop culture constitutes a major repository of visual elements, ideas, practices, and discourses that influence our relationship with the body, with food consumption, and, of course, with the whole system ensuring that we get what we need on a daily basis, with all its social and political ramifications.
Whatever it is that pop culture does to reach it goals, it does it right. It is a spectacle that works, building on dreams and desires. And food is pervasive in contemporary Western pop culture, influencing the way we perceive and represent ourselves as individuals and as members of social groups. However, the ubiquitous nature of these cultural elements makes their ideological and political relevance almost invisible, buried in the supposedly natural and self-evident fabric of everyday life. Meanwhile, our own flesh becomes fuel for all kinds of cultural battles among different visions of personhood, family, society, and even economics. For these reasons, developing an accessible analytical framework to handle these topics is an important task to achieve a deeper, even if somewhat unorthodox, comprehension of our twenty-first-century globalized consumer society.
Our bodies, including our crucial relationship with food and ingestion, are represented in pop culture as a reflection of wider cultural, social, and political debates among various and diffused agencies, trying to influence the way we perceive ourselves and our world, and the way we operate in it. I believe that analyzing and uncovering certain practices, ideas, and discourses hidden – or, it would be better to say, made to look natural and neutral – in the way pop culture deals with food and eating, we can adopt a more critical and constructive stance as citizens, and not only when it comes our choices about what to put on the table and in our mouth.
In the worldwide, instantly connected, and overexposed contemporary pop culture, it is likely that apparently distant elements actually influence each other, surfacing in the most unexpected contexts. A given ingredient can be analyzed by scientists and nutritionists, whose research is picked up in bits and pieces by newspapers, magazines, TV talk shows, and blogs, influencing consumers’ expectations and behaviors, creating fads and fashions, prompting changes in distribution chains and in shopping habits, while at the same time interfering with the industry development of new foods, which translates into nutritional claims, advertising, and marketing campaigns that in turn interact with consumers’ perceptions and with scientists’ research. Something similar happens, say, when a slice of certain ripe cheese is shown by a farmer to a visitor from out of town, and then later when the same slice appears in the counter of an upscale gourmet shop, on the table of a famous star in her last movie, in the hands of a political lobbyist defending local agriculture, in the pages of a diet book, and last but not least in the logo of an association.
What happens when this transmutation from media to media and from context to context becomes as fast and intense as in today’s pop culture? In this process, certain signifiers bounce around, reflected and distorted, acquiring different and even controversial meanings. However, their presence or omnipresence as signifiers, as elements of communication regardless of their actual sense, is reinforced. Their life might be shorter, but their temporary interaction with the rest of the communication network is much more intense: the ripples travel faster and wider in the global meaning pond. And signifiers take on new connotations, sometimes even denotations, in every culture that receives them in order to embrace them, tweak them to meet its needs, or refuse them. The use of signifiers coming from another culture can turn out to be extremely creative. What would happen to the slice of ripe cheese we mentioned when exported to China, where consumers are not very used to cheese in the first place, to appear later in the menu of a fashionable Tokyo restaurant and in a food show in Thailand?
We can interpret pop culture as an all-embracing signifying network that includes elements such as values, practices, ideas, and objects, whose meaning is determined by their reciprocal influence within the network as a whole and by the negotiations taking place among its users. Going back to the example we used, cheese becomes the objects of ongoing negotiations within the communities that produced it, the larger bodies of which those communities are part, the different social strata and political groups within them, with their specific agendas, the media that use those elements in different ways according to their editorial needs, the consumers and their sense of who they are and what they like (or supposed to like). Certain dishes and street foods that until a few years ago had low-class connotations are now recognized as part of cultural heritage under a changing social and political climate that nurtures different sensibilities. The same slice of ripe cheese that until a few years ago might have been considered with disdain in comparison to neatly packed, hygienically made, and ready-to-serve slices of industrially produced cheese is now perceived as an embodiment of culture, tradition, know-how, prestige, gourmet expertise, and even political resistance.
Ingestion constitutes an important layer, based on our own physical presence, in the interconnected webs of signification that constitute pop culture. The meanings of our own bodies change over time for ourselves and for society, and in turn they determine and influence other factors in food production, distribution, and consumption processes. When it comes to eating, many contentious and negotiable elements become weapons in a struggle within various cultural and political interests to gain hegemony in our societies.”