Messy, Visceral, and Tasty: Just How I Like My Grub

Ian et al, many thanks for the luncheon date as well as the sorts of things you have put on the menu for everyone to digest (ahem); sorry also that I am so late to the table (double ahem). Not quite drunk yet, but am trying.

I think I will take this moment to continue my ‘shouting’ (jeez was I that loud? Don’t answer that Julie) and take this space to reflect on Ian’s pieces, everyone’s comments, as well as some things I have been thinking about recently. Sorry I am not going to weave these things into a narrative, but here goes nothing; and pardon the light referencing as well as I am being extremely lazy.

· Alison says she might come across as ‘anti-consumption’? How is this possible? If you were anti-consumption, you would be dead. This is a short way saying consumption—and food consumption—is not negotiable at some very basic biological level; we all know this but it gets lost sometimes. Rather there is consumption, then there is Consumption (i.e. meanings, relationalities, affects, etc) just like there is consumption and there is Ethical/Sustainable consumption. This too is a ‘mixing’: the banal/ordinary with the hyper-meaningful et al in (and outside) of consumption.

· Right let’s get to it then: there is food, then there is Food. The point? This gets to what Probyn (2000; 32) talks about in terms of the ‘visceral’ nature of food and eating. Here is how she puts it:

[e]ating refracts who we are. Food/body/eating assemblages reveal the ways in which identity has become elementary, and that its composite elements are always in movement. As alimentary assemblages, eating recalls with force the elemental nature of class, gender, sexuality, nation. But beyond these monumental categories, eating places different orders of things and ways of being alongside each other, inside and outside inextricably linked. Beyond the facile celebration of authenticity, sincerity or conversely of the simulacra and artifice, alimentary identities reveal a mix of the primal and the hyperfake. But what is of interest here is the ways in which this extends our understanding and appreciation of the rich complexity of living in the present. … For some, this means wearing one’s stomach on one’s sleeve: thinking about where food comes from, or how core identities are now ingested in multicultural ways of being in the world. As such, these alimentary identities are ways of reworking the categories that once defined us. Now, beyond a model of inside and out, we are alimentary assemblages, bodies that eat with vigorous class, ethnic and gendered appetites, mouth machines that ingest and regurgitate, articulating what we are, what we eat and what eats us.

Now I’ll take Julie’s self-citation one step further and quote myself (Goodman, 2008; well it’s not published yet and I’d like to try some of this stuff out here) in order to take her point a bit further:

Here, drawing on Elspeth Probyn’s (2000) work, I wish to suggest that the complex and situated visceral nature of food—food as profound and deeply felt in the gut, yet also quite ordinarily instinctive, elemental and ‘everyday’ in the biological sense—needs to inform considerations of its economic geographies. This viscerality of food, then, is about the powerful role that food plays in constructing and re-constructing our lives, identities, families, communities and cultures and the uneven economic geographies these create and are enmeshed in. Yet, focusing at the scale of the consuming body is just one way of working up and on the economic geographies of food. I want to argue that it is just as equally important to consider how absolutely viscerally entangled food is in the landscapes of contemporary capitalistic political economies. This then is about the powerful role that uneven economic geographies—and also uneven environmental, social and political geographies—play in shaping and reshaping food and how these political economies, then, construct and reconstruct our lives, identities, families, communities and cultures…

The viscerality of food is about its connections—inside, outside, gender, sexuality, et al—but also how food contains the emotional (e.g. one’s stomach on one’s sleeve), the inexpressible, and the biological and how these are all inseparable and entangled in complex, complementary and ambiguous ways. The visceral incorporation of food in the rendering of our corporeal bodies (FitzSimmons and Goodman, 1998) is about the centrality of the meanings of food, but also very much the (non)emotional and biological relationships we have with it. In short, food is ordinary in its characteristic as simply the ‘fuel’ that keeps us going, but also extra-ordinary in the meals that make who and what we, our families and our cultures are. Simultaneously, food is also extra-ordinary in its characteristic as fuel and also ordinary in the meals that make who and what we, our families and our cultures are. You are what you eat, but also how, when, where and why you eat. Thus, food is ‘good to think’ (Beardsworth and Keil, 1997; see also Sage, 2003)—especially for those that can buy into this knowledge economy—but also very much ‘good to feel’ and often in ‘more-than-representational’ (Lorimer, 2005) in unconscious and ‘primal’ ways. Thus, reflexive aesthetic taste and its antimonies (Guthman, 2003) are just one factor in constructing the visceral entanglements we have with food, especially in a world where a full belly can often trump those dictates of ‘good taste’.

· This means to me that food can never just be about politics; thus there are food politics, then there are Food Politics, the later of which has been aired quite well by Guthman, Allen, et al. Food can never be ‘fixed’ given it is so messy and ‘dirty’, incomplete and un-orderly. Can we start to talk about food politics as ‘dirty’ and what might be gained doing this and what might be lost? In short, political food/food politics gotta taste good or no one will eat them. Thus, we can ask the following: when/where is food mixing versus fiid ‘Mixing’? When/where is food politics, versus food ‘Politics’? When is good tasting, versus ‘Good Tasting’? What are the boundaries here, who draws them and why? Both Julie and Ian are onto something here, but from different angles I think.

· Building on this, food suffers from a radical contingency. Just as the same pizza from Pizza Express (chain in the UK) will taste different each time you eat it, so is there contingency to everything having to do with food, especially around meanings. Take Mexican Food (as Ian does in ‘Mixing’). For me this is the taste and indeed meaning of home (Southern California); here, in the UK, it is ‘exotic’ to some extent. For me, never; I grew up with it, love it and can’t get enough of it. It’s ‘my’ food because of were I grew up and what I ate. Or take turkey: at Thanksgiving, it is invested with conviviality, family, affect, etc; other times of the year, it’s just an alternative dish to chicken to keep the menu different and my palate from going stale.

· Where is taste in all of these discussions? Then again, there is taste and there is Taste. Why is it always so vilified when we surely like things to taste good? Clearly I know about the classist issues with taste, discernment, preciousness (thanks for this Julie), but, again, even political/alternative foods are going to have to taste good on some level. I love Pringles and can’t get enough of them I hate to admit; talk about ‘tasteless’, processed, low class, uniformed, unhealthy food, but for the life of me I cannot stop eating them, especially the Paprika ones! What about some fair trade Pringles? Also, here often good tasting (fusion food?) gets in the way of ‘authenticity’; hey if it tastes good who cares if its ‘proper’???

· Some interesting research is showing that consumers (kids actually) like it when the normal products they buy (sneakers, chocolate bars) normally become fair trade/organic. Thus making a fair trade Twix might actually be a good idea to spread fair trade, open markets, promote development, etc. So sayeth Nichols and Lee (2006); it is very ‘marketing’ oriented but I think the point is a very interesting one in connection to ethical consumption and fair trade. Is there radical possibility in the fair trade Twix or just another consumerist patch on the System?

· Why don’t we every talk about the ironies of ethical consumption? I like Barnett et al’s work but, come on, the inequalities and privilege of being concerned with ‘governing the ethical self’ as a fair trade consumer surely has to be questioned a bit when at the other end of the chain people are concerned about clean water, not going hungry and have access to toilets. Additionally, we really have gone too far around this cultural/consumption bend and have forgotten about the effects of the cultural politics of ethical consumption/fair trade on the actual people producing this stuff; fair trade ethical consumers have no idea that the drive to ‘quality’ in these production networks has actually left out those producers in most need of access to these markets because they have the worst quality compared to others; ethical consumption might be about and ‘ethics of care’ over distance but it is selective and it is competitive; Tad M’s (Mutersbaugh, 2002) work also gets right to this in organic markets. Here we need to do work on the realities and praxis of ethical consumption, not just theorise about it and call it ‘ethical’ when, at the other end and based on market realities, it might not really be so ethical.

· Is ethical consumption ‘alternative’ anymore? Wal-mart is one of the biggest purveyors of organic food and supermarkets in the UK sell more fair trade than anyone else. Is it time to talk about these as ‘transgressive’ foods with the alternative now thoroughly in the mainstream/conventional and vice versa? Fine, we are selling more organics, thus using less pesticides, etc; great we are selling more fair trade thus more Development. But, whence the cultural politics of these thing? I think we have lost there in some respects; this will be a point I make in an upcoming paper in Geoforum (if I can ever get it done!)

· The mirror of consumption stuff that Julie mentioned; yes this too is coming in the same Geoforum paper mentioned above, but just think about who is the face of ‘alternative’ fair trade consumption now (at least in the UK)? Chris Martin the lead singer of Coldplay. A celebrity is now fronting for what used to be a very different set of cultural politics in fair trade. Related quip: it’s sometimes worth looking in the mirror (reflexivity?) to see if you have something bad (racism?) caught in your teeth is it not???

· Transparency versus de-fetishisation: I think this is one of Julie’s key point made here and Ian you need to make some hay out of this if you can! We never can get ‘rid’ of that pesky fetish can we? It’s like a bad dinner, it keeps coming back and even ‘tearing it away’ (dare I say purging???) it makes itself anew as the re-fetished/de-fetished fetish! Ha, put that in your pipe and smoke it Karl!

Wow, for not having much to say, I sure blathered on. Hopefully something to chew on at least. And Ian, I think we are pretty much all in agreement: keep the style of writing as is (it is engaging no matter what others say!) and I love the ending; the later is about the visceral-ness/indeterminacy of writing—just like food—is it not???

Beardsworth, A. & Keil, T. (1997) Sociology on the menu: An invitation to the study of food and society (London: Routledge).

FitzSimmons, M. & Goodman, D. (1998). Incorporating nature: Environmental narratives and the reproduction of food, in: B. Braun and N. Castree (Eds.) Remaking reality: Nature at the millennium, pp. 194-220. (London: Routledge).

Goodman, M. (2008) Towards visceral entanglements: Knowing and growing the economic geographies of food. In A Compendium of Economic Geography eds. R. Lee, A. Leyshon, L. McDowell & P. Sunley, pp. Sage, London.

Guthman, J. (2003) Fast food/organic food: Reflexive tastes and the making of 'yuppie chow', Social and Cultural Geography, 4(1), pp. 45-58.

Lorimer, H. (2005) Cultural geography: The busyness of being 'more-than-representational', Progress in Human Geography, 29(1), pp. 83-94.

Mutersbaugh, T. (2002) The number is the beast: A political economy of organic-coffee certification and producer unionism, Environment and Planning A, 34, pp. 1165-1184.

Nicholls, A. & Lee, N. (2006) Purchase decision-making in fair trade and the ethical purchase 'gap': 'is there a fair trade twix?' Journal of Strategic Marketing, 14, pp. 369-386.

Probyn, E. (2000) Carnal appetites: Food, sex, identities (London: Routledge).

Sage, C. (2003) Social embeddedness and relations of regard: Alternative 'good food' networks in south-west ireland, Journal of Rural Studies, 19, pp. 47-60.