Food

John Coveney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134083862
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medizin
• Subtopic: Ernährung, Diätetik & Bariatrie

The centrality of food in life, and the importance of food as life, is undeniable. As a source of biological substrates, personal pleasure and political power, food is and has been an enduring requirement of human biological, social and cultural existence. In recent years, interest in food has increased across the academic, public and popular spheres, fuelled by popular media's constant play on the role of food and body size, and food and cooking, as a mass spectacle for TV audiences.

In Food, a new book part of the Shortcuts Series, John Coveney examines 'food as…' humanness, identity, politics, industry, regulation, the environment and justice. He explores how food helps us understand what it means to be human. Through food, we construct our social identities, our families and communities, but this book also highlights the tensions between the industrialisation of food, the environment, and the fair (or otherwise) worldwide distribution of food. It considers how the food industries, on which most of us have to rely, have also had direct effects on our bodies – whether through diet and longevity, or the development of illness and diseases.

This book is for all students and general readers alike – or for anyone with a fascination with food. It questions the idea that food is merely something inert on the plate, and instead shows how influential, symbolic, powerful and transformative food has come to be.

This book is part of the Shortcuts series published by Routledge, a major new series of concise, accessible introductions to some of the major issues of our times.

1

Food as … Humanness

Introduction

In this chapter we will look at the fundamental role played by food in human development. We will look at how food was central to early medicine as a correction, not only to repair physical health but also to restore moral character. This role of food is largely overlooked today, because the medieval science in which it belongs faded in history. But this did not diminish the centrality of food in human development and understanding. For as the human science differentiated into what we now understand as biology, psychology, sociology, anthropology and so on, food continued to play a central role in pursuits to understand what it means to be ‘human’. In this central role food is, of course, never merely things on a plate. Indeed, the central foundation of this book is that food is never just ‘food’, but is always symbolic of other capabilities and capacities, depending on the lens used.

It goes without saying that we regard food as a necessity for life. We see that all living things need some kind of food, and indeed water, in order to continue living. Food constitutes us and sustains us. Our knowledge of food and of the elements in food, the basic building blocks of food, allow us to know how, at every level of life, food plays an essential role in keeping us going. From the cellular angle we know that various nutrients are essential for the reproduction of new cells for the body. From the organ level we know that a variety of food elements are needed for proper growth and maintenance. And from a systems level we know that food is needed to regulate particular pathways. We acknowledge the discoveries in molecular biology, anatomy, physiology and biochemistry for these understandings. Of course, as we will see in later chapters, we also acknowledge the science of nutrition itself for helping build into the discoveries of physiological and biochemical systems our knowledge of nutrients.

There is, however, another science, more like an art, much older than the ones already mentioned, which deserves some credit for laying the foundations for how we understand the role of food and the body in health and illness. The field is dietetics, and it has a long and interesting history.

The dietetics

Today we often collapse together the knowledge of nutrition and dietetics. A distinction could be made, however, that nutrition is about the science of food and dietetics is about applying that science to address illness. So people are often required to see a dietitian if they have a medical condition in which food plays a role to help manage it. Later, in Chapter 6, we will touch on the fact that dietetics in ancient Greece was much more than this therapeutic role. It concerned the management of everyday life (diete meaning daily regime). In this chapter, however, we will look at the way in which food has long been considered essential, not only for addressing physical health, but also for correcting one’s psychological wellbeing, and indeed one’s character and temperament. This role played by food has a long history in western culture, and indeed in other cultures (although we will not be able to look closely beyond our own). To a large extent these properties of food were foundational to the development of food cultures and gastronomies. Thus many of the differences we see now in food cultures – and indeed celebrate, with an appreciation of, say, French, Italian, and other cuisines – will have been influenced by early thinking about food and its central role in creating and sustaining life at all levels. To better understand this early thinking we need to look at how food linked with early ideas of medicine in western history.

Food, body and soul

For more than 1,000 years in western culture, and longer in some others, a system of understanding the mind and the body reigned supreme. It was based on a set of principles that are traceable to early Greece – and indeed to Hippocrates, who is considered to be the father of medicine. The system was refined by Galen of Pergamum (AD 129–216?), whose writings on the subject were copious. The system was based on a belief that the body relied on four fluids, or humors, that circulated throughout the system. The fluids had independent properties, but they also had a relationship with each other, so careful balance of the humors was required. The humoral fluids were blood, yellow bile (or choler), black bile, and phlegm. Each of these was credited with having different and distinctive effects on the body, making it more or less vulnerable to various sicknesses. Having too little or too much of one humor could create a susceptibility to particular diseases.

Moreover, once illness struck, the re-balancing of the humors was necessary to fight the problem and return the individual to wellness. However, to think of the humors as almost drugs for the body is to miss a number of other important functions they played. For, while humors were of obvious importance to physiological functioning, they were also vital for psychological, and indeed moral, fitness. Because each humor was endowed with particular strengths and weaknesses, humoral balance was thought to influence a person’s temperament, character and mood. This was because each humor had a particular set of characteristics. Blood is considered hot and moist; choler is hot and dry; black bile is cold and dry; and phlegm is cold and moist. The mixing together of the humors provided an individual’s overall disposition. For example, blood was associated with being sanguine – that is, healthy and merry; choler bestowed the property of quickness of wit but also quickness of anger; black bile brought melancholy, a sad and solitary disposition; and phlegm provided a calm, cool, detached, even bland nature.

Food and the humors

There were many things that could influence the humors. Certain physiological states could have an effect – for example, a woman’s menstrual cycle, or a person’s age. Also, as we have mentioned, pathological states could influence humors. However, the humors could also be influenced by external forces, such as the time of year, geography and even the cosmos, since astrological arrangements and alignments could influence one’s humoral balance. Thus humoral medicine linked individuals to their social, geographical and indeed cosmological environments.

Importantly, it was through food and drink that the humors were corrected and re-balanced, and complexion, or personal nature, restored. (Incidentally, it was believed that the humoral state of an individual could be read from their skin, thus the term ‘complexion’ became synonymous with skin tone and colour.)

It was thus the role of dietetics to recommend what to eat and drink not only when people were physically ill, but also when they felt psychologically indisposed or weak of character. This was because one’s mood and disposition was influenced by humoral balance. And because of the natural flux of one’s psycho-somatic wellbeing, as well as the changing terrestrial and extra-terrestrial elements, there was a constant need to pay attention to diet to re-adjust and re-calibrate body and mind. Attention to diet was also necessary because foods could enhance certain humoral effects. For example, black pepper was choler-producing, and the use of black pepper in the diet provided dietitians with at least two possibilities: recommend more of it when a more choleric effect was required (such as to combat an overly sanguine disposition), or less of it when an individual’s complexion was regarded to be imbalanced towards yellow bile.

The point is to emphasise the centrality of food and drink to the person themselves: their physiology, psychology, pathology, character, mood and moral dispositions. In other words, food was life, in every aspect of the meaning – food was humanness. While the humoral theory has roots in ancient Greece and Rome, this model of thinking exploded during the early Renaissance. According to Ken Albala (in his book Eating Right in the Renaissance), this was for a number of reasons, not least of which was the outpouring of medical texts and treatises made possible by the growth of the printing and bookbinding industries. These technologies made available large archives concerned with maladies and medicine. And because humoral theory was central to medicine, writings on the humors were plentiful. However, another reason for the high volume of books on the subject was the changing nature of thinking about moral and ethical comportment. That is to say, the way people thought about themselves as ‘selves’ was transformed.

The work of Michel Foucault (in The Order of Things) provides us with a description of this transformation of individual subjectivity during and after the Renaissance, where attention paid to what might be described as the ‘interiority of self’ changed. Essentially a new awareness of, and thinking about, what it meant to be a person. Foucault called this new person, or subject, the ‘empirico-transcendental doublet’ to register the way in which an individual’s everyday experiences are matched with moral imperatives; that is, what one was required to do. The transformation from a medieval human understanding of government or control to a different form of authority that had a greater focus on self-control was swift and powerful. Thus an audience was ripe for works and manuals on how to be a better subject – in every aspect of personal and civil life. Of course, religion and religious texts had long provided sources of inspiration for enhancing one’s moral character. However, the body’s humoral system, and methods to adjust it, provided a ready and secular course of action outside the church on ways of leading a better, more enhanced way of living. And dietetics played a central role in the management of living through the ability of food to directly interact with the humoral elements.

This highly interactive system could not be more different from that which we understand today, where we regard our ‘selves’ as sentient, conscious minds complete with exterior bodies. Although there is recognition that our psychology does interact with our physiology – to use a fairly shallow example, when we mentally experience shame or guilt, we often physically blush – the mind and body are regarded as separated. In humoral theory, however, the mind and body were intimately linked, and were under the influence of external elements such as food and drink, as well as time, place and astrological pattern. The role of the diet in medicine was therefore paramount.

Another chief consideration was that diets were highly individualised, not only because of disposition, but also because of individual situations and experiences. Thus uniform, broad recommendations were rare. However, there were general guidelines, mostly about the value of particular foods. For example, melons and cucumbers were to be avoided, being thought to contain only water, which could get trapped and render the food indigestible, leading to putrefaction within the body. Fruits were also regarded with suspicion for similar reasons. While differing in detail, the humoral theory was widespread across Europe, with a heyday, as noted earlier, during the European Renaissance. A similar system of thought was present in the Arabic world.

In thinking about this we should acknowledge that the dietetics as explained so far was not available to all – mostly only to those who could afford to consider choices in what they ate and drank. Essentially, this meant people of affluence. Also, we must not think that dietaries were followed to the letter. Then, as now, there were authorities that spoke on what the ideal would be, generally and individually, but the extent to which these prescriptions and recommendations were followed is unknown. What we do know is that dietetics as expressed in the humoral theory of medicine had unifying influence about what is good to eat and drink, albeit individualised according to personal requirements. As the popularity for humoral explanations of what is good to eat faded, they were replaced by other forms of knowledge.

There is much debate about whether the dietetics informed or was informed by culinary practices. Indeed, food historian Barbara Santich shows how the basis for the humors, which emphasised good food, is foundational to gastronomy. Both humoral medicine and gastronomy seek to exercise discrimination and judgement about what is prudent and good to eat, not only as sustenance, but also as a route to better living and well-being. This understanding of gastronomy is far from that which sees it as a preoccupation with fine, rich or elaborated foods and dishes. The dietetic–gastronomic understanding of diet sees food as life, in all manifestations. Food is not merely what arrives on a plate, nor is it only what is prepared for the table. Food is the essence of life, even the spirit of living.

What is good to eat?

Social nutritionist Pat Crotty is famous for saying that the mouth divides our understanding of food. She describes this separation as the ‘pre-swallowing’ and ‘post-swallowing’ cultures. By this she means that food is understood today both from the viewpoint of psycho-social-cultural perspectives (pre-swallowing) and from the perspective of knowledge of food through nutrient interactions with bodily systems (post-swallowing). Of course, no such distinctions were possible under the earlier humoral theories of dietetics, where pre- and post-swallowing knowledges were intimately linked. However, within contemporary understandings and distinctions it is possible to separate out how individual disciplines and fields of knowledge draw on food and indeed food choice to explain aspects of our very ‘humanness’ in all the various manifestations.

How do we understand food choice?

According to some researchers, food choice is clearly something that can be understood solely in terms of biology and psychology. Within this understanding the selection of foods can be separated into two distinct lines of inquiry. The first seeks to locate mechanisms that govern food choice within a person’s biological and genetic make-up. It attempts to uncover so-called ‘innate’ processes that are regulated through biological precursors and chemical messengers. The second line of inquiry is closer to the area of behavioural psychology, and looks at food choice as a product of cognitive processes and conditioning, which themselves respond to various biological stimuli.

The first line of inquiry encompasses work on the genetic determination of food choice, based on the observation that food preferences tend to run in families. For example, investigations have demonstrated that the sensitivity to, say, bitter tastes may be genetically transmitted and a greater similarity in preferences for certain foods has been found between identical twins than between fraternal twins. Since each of the twin pairs was sharing the same home environment, the similarities in food choice represent a genetically transmitted trait rather than socially determined habits. Studies into so-called intrinsic tendencies have looked at taste preferences of infants, especially infants’ responses to different tastes like sweet, sour and bitter. Apparently, even within hours of birth neonates prefer sweet tastes. The usual explanation for such taste preferences is in terms of ‘nutritional wisdom’, in which an innate dislike for bitterness and a liking for sweetness is believed to guide infants towards safer, more nutritious foods (for example, breast milk) and protect against harmful substances that are usually bitter or sour tasting. Pause here to notice how food is used to provide evidence for so-called innate traits or human tendencies. In other words, food preference in babies is used to describe our ‘natural’ humanness.

The notion of intrinsic or innate ‘nutrition wisdom’ was investigated in the late 1920s by Clara Davis. In an effort to see whether humans could instinctively choose the right kind of food, she conducted a longitudinal study with orphanage infants aged 6–9 months. Throughout the study the children were presented with a variety of foods and were allowed to select whateverthey wanted. Over a course of months the children tasted everything (including spoons, trays, paper). They apparently selected from a wide range of foods and grew and developed according to the norms of the day. Davis concluded that in infants there must be an innate mechanism which guides food choice in the direction of good nutrition. Davis’ work became important to the theories about an innate basis of food choice in humans. The central tenet of these theories is that, given a free choice (that is, choice not constrained by ‘culture’), humans are ‘naturally’ guided to nutritious diets. While Davis’ conclusions have been criticised – mainly because the infants in her study were offered only wholesome foods and so could not help but construct healthy diets for themselves – the work is used as a starting point to understand so-called innate food choice mechanisms. This innateness takes as its starting point the biological make-up of humans: their physiological systems and their genetic precursors; properties that are considered to be predetermined and universal. Biology would assert that this is about the ways in which food, once ingested, breaks down to nutrients which form the building blocks of cells in every aspect of human growth, development, maintenance and repair. Indeed, it might be said that we are what we eat, biologically.

There is, however, debate about this claim by biology. Claude Fischler points out that biological adaptation often happens under the influence of cultural preference. We know, for example, that on a world scale most cultures do not consume milk after infancy; and in most cultures adults do not produce the enzyme, lactase, necessary to digest milk, lactose. In those cultures that choose to consume cows’ milk, however, the human body has adapted and continues to produce lactase. The argument here is then that culture sometimes pre-determines biology, in this case through the production of lactase. This is a perfect example of the ways in which food provides a tangible insight into human development. By collapsing what are often separate understandings of what it means to be human – how did humans develop a particular biology? how does culture work so as to give specificity to human groups? – our dietary practices show how what we eat shapes life, at all levels.

Another example of how food shapes life is through the grounding of food choice in larger frameworks of human society and culture. As Gordon Tait points out, a number of psychological theories about eating disorders have been extended to include ‘socio-cultural influences’. Good examples of these come from the writings of Susie Orbach, Naomi Wolf and Susan Bordo. Each author stresses that an understanding of eating problems in young women should be considered in terms of social structures in western culture, which both construct ‘womanhood’ and oppress women.

Studies of food have also been used to construct und...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series editor’s foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Food as … humanness
• 2. Food as … identity
• 3. Food as … politics
• 4. Food as … industry
• 5. Food as … regulation
• 6. Food as … the environment
• 7. Food as … justice
• References
• Index