Declaration of a foodist

1. Declaration of a foodist Part 1 • The foodie and his food Part 2 • The importance of food.

2. The foodie and his food • Childhood: • Mother as an credible foodie; • Enormous difficulties to be a foodie: • Scarcity; • Political ideology: “[to conduct] the revolution is not inviting guests to dinner parties.” -- Chairman Mao, 1927 • American journey: • Food as an anchor of identity • Food as compass • The intellectual of mundane situations in everyday life • A purpose of these discussions: reveal my subjectivity and limitation; explain my topic choice.

3. The importance of food The State of the Field: Historiography Reasons for our failure to fully recognize the importance of food The importance of food

4. The state of the field: Historiography Food historians often have to explain and defend their subject matter: – the lack of adequate understanding of the importance of food as a subject of vigorous academic inquiry • Historiography: the existing scholarship or a body of literature, on a given topic. It also covers theories and methodologies in historical research and writing. • Increasing interest in food among historians and other scholars. • Reasons for this increase: • concern over health and food safety; • The popularity of food as entertainment; • Popular writers have also come to the realm of food: • Dan Koeppel, Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World (2008) • Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006) • Jacques Pépin, The Apprentice (2003); • King Corn (2007) Directed by Aaron Woolf. Starring Earl L. Butz, Ian Cheney, Curt Ellis. • Limitations of food studies in American history in terms of influence and scope. • Limitations of food studies in general: • Apparent holes • Not a coherent field of study yet. • We have not yet recognized the over importance of food.

5. The declaration of a foodist: The centrality of food in human history • Foodie vs foodist • Human Desire • The declaration of a foodist: Food is the most important and most fundamental desire

6. Human Desire • Definition: • Desire is a longing of the desiring individual to bring objects or conditions into one’s possession or existence. Desire, then, is the attempt of self-consciousness to realize itself by connecting to what is other than itself. It is the most fundamental driving force for all human activities. It is source of human energy and creativity; it can also be extremely harmful. • Variety of desires: • emotional vs. material • personal vs. social • Desires change over time • Innate vs “deliberate” (Aristotle) desires • Natural vs social: • Karl Marx – necessities and luxuries; • John Kenneth Galbraith (author of The Affluent Society): The "Dependence Effect" • Of all these kinds of desires, food represents the most important and most fundamental.

7. American history as food history • as symbols of the country; • Affluence; • Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) • as symbols of the country; • as an index to increased diversity; • Changes in life style

9. Wednesday, January 12, 2005 • The Morning Read: Dipping into melting potUCI professor chows down with an eye on the future of ethnic food and culture in America. • By MARLA JO FISHERThe Orange County Register • Yong Chen leans over his chopsticks, which are dripping with stewed squid, and reflects on his obsession with food. • He isn't exactly sure when it began or when it started taking over his life. Maybe it was in the Chinese re-education camp where he was sent with his parents as a child. • Maybe it was later, when he studied history at Cornell University, before he became a popular associate professor of history and Asian- American studies at UC Irvine. • Now, when he's not teaching, he's writing a book about the cultural significance of ethnic food in America. And, when he's not writing, he's eating. When he's not eating, he's collecting old cookbooks, restaurant menus, diaries and poring over vintage business directories, all in a quest to link food and culture, food and memory. • "Taste is always acquired, and we acquire our tastes very early on," Chen says. "You don't need to read philosophy to understand a culture. Sometimes, it's much more mundane, like the food." • Chen's research not only seeks to trace the phenomenal rise of ethnic foods in this country but to describe how food is important to culture and a society. • Chen, 44, recalls a Republican TV ad he saw before the election that negatively depicted presidential candidate Howard Dean as a sophisticate eating sushi and drinking lattes. "Republicans don't eat sushi," Chen jokes. • But, as his book will show, over the past 10 years, ethnic food has become not only a cultural but also a commercial phenomenon in America. • "Food has always had two major highways: It travels with people, as in immigration," Chen says. "It also travels with the movement of capital." • As an immigrant, he is a living example of the former. When he lectures on globalization in one of the classes he teaches at UCI, he could be talking about his own life.

10. Chen remembers that his father was a government agriculture official in China's Hubei Province before the Cultural Revolution took hold of the country in the late 1960s. He remembers the Red Guard searching his family's house, and his family's relocation into a Communist re-education camp, where his parents were forced to work in rice paddies by day and study the sayings of Chairman Mao at night. • Later, after the movement subsided, Chen says, his father became president of a small university, and Chen went to study at Peking University in 1978. There he met Bruce Stave and Sondra Astor Stave, an American couple teaching at the university who encouraged him to apply to graduate school in the United States. • He arrived in the United States in 1985 after being accepted for graduate studies at Cornell University. Sondra Stave met him in New York and took him out for pizza, a ritual of American life. • "What's more American than pizza?" she said. • Chen remembers well his baptism into the American taste palate, though he admits he didn't find it tasty at the time. "They said, 'Now, you're in America. We want to Americanize you.' " • …… • Meanwhile, certain ethnic groups have settled into Southern California life into certain food-service industries but not necessarily their own. • "Cambodians have almost monopolized the doughnut business," Chen says. "And Greeks are into candy making. You see more Mexicans opening Chinese restaurants." • For the future, Chen sees more "fusion food" melding different cultures, as well as a trend toward healthy cuisines. • "California has been the national food trend-setter, and I expect that to continue," he says. Standing in the 99 Ranch Market, a Chinese supermarket in Irvine that also sells Japanese soft drinks and Korean barbecue, Chen leans over the fish tank, with its live Maine lobster and silver carp. • Asked what he and his wife have at that very moment in the home refrigerator, Chen recalls some foie gras, duck livers special-ordered from Gelson's, enoki mushrooms, bean sprouts, bamboo shoots. Oh, and Cajun leftovers. • "My wife likes Emeril," he says with a grin. • http://www.ocregister.com/ocr/2005/01/12/sections/morning_read/article_374403.php • Orange County Register article on yong Chen

11. New York City: Museum of Chinese in the Americas;Philadelphia: Atwater Kent Museum

15. Food as “Sensual”: • Food as “Sensual”: Lin Yutang, Food is one of the “keen sensual pleasures of our childhood” ( 1935). • Tell me what you eat and I will tell you how you feel – food is also tied to our emotions.

16. Food is gendered

17. Are food preferences gender-specific?

18. CNN NEWS • "He is meat and potatoes all the way, and I could eat pasta and fruit and fish every day and I'd be fine," says one woman. Her sentiments may well be echoed by many other women. Indeed, studies show men like to eat heavier foods”. • "I eat salads now and then," said one man. "I start to feel like a rabbit and I don't eat them no more." • Information:http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9604/10/gender.food/

19. Which would you choose?

24. Mao Zedong (1893-1976); leader of the Chinese communist party; and founder of the People Republic of China (1949)

25. Reasons for the society’s failure to fully recognize the importance of food • Food is sensual; • It is seen as feminine; • It is obvious and easily accessible or attainable, which has been especially true in affluent societies like the United States.

26. Foodie vs Foodist • The word foodie describes someone who loves food; • A foodist is one who believes that food is of central importance in all human history.

27. Food: the most important and most fundamental. • Confucius (551-479 BCE), a philosopher and educator as well as a foodie: food and sex embody the great desires of human beings (Book of Rites). • Gaozi: the desire for food and sex represents human nature; • To reiterate an earlier statement: In modern Western society, food studies have not produced the kind of systematic attempts to theorize the centrality of food in human consciousness and developments in the same way Freud theorized about sexuality and magnified its significance in life. • Five ways to understand why food is more important than sex for the development of history.

28. Five ways to understand why food is more important than sex • 1. Food is more immediately related to our physical survival than sex; • 2. Food is more social; • 3. Sex is more universal; food is more defined by culture and is more about our uniqueness as individuals, communities, and nations • 4. While human sexual practices have remained largely unchanged, food and foodways – things we eat, how we obtain and prepare our food-- have changed a lot, corresponding to the five major stages in human history. • 5. Food and major historical events in history and in American history

29. Food is more social • Sex belongs largely to the private sphere; food belongs to both private and public spheres and often serves to connect the two. • Food better helps us understand and builds social relationship; the relationship based on sexuality tends to be exclusive. • We talk about food more than sex. • More so than sex, food is also about class relations. • Gender and gender relationships. • Food is gendered; • Aphrodisiacs; • It reflects gender roles; • Women have done most of the cooking at home; most chefs are men. Survey by StarChefs.com • Joyce Goldstein: “mama cooks and show-off cooks”

30. Food and culture • Sex is more universal; food is more defined by culture and is more about our uniqueness as individuals, communities, and nations -- There is ethnic food; but there is no ethnic sex: • “we are what eat” • “tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.” • In German, “Der Mensch ist was er ißt” (Man is what he eats.)] • Food is closely related to our sense of identity – a lasting element of our ethnicity. • Republicans do not drink latte – people judge others by their food. • Regional food.

31. Five gastronomical moments in human history • (1) The beginning: the mastery of fire: • Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human • Peking Man (Zhoukoudian); Use of fire? • (2) The transition from hunter/gatherer community to agricultural society: • Assisted by the domestication of animals. • (3) Separation from food production. • Gordon Ramsay (The F-Word): Where are French fries from? • tremendous political, socioeconomic, and cultural implications • (4) Separation from food preparation: dining out. • (5) “We what we don’t eat.”

32. “We what we don’t eat.” • From “how to get food” to “how to avoid food.” • In other words, we are increasingly defined by our level of choices, and by our non-participation in eating. • Beginning of popularity of natural foods; organic foods in the 1970s. • Dieting: a multi-billion dollar industry. • In the U.S., a prominent symptom of food scarcity or food desert is obesity. • The old social class line is reversed: The “haves” try not to eat; and the have-nots eat and even over-eat.

33. Food and major historical developments and events in history and in American history • Globalization • Sydney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985) – how sugar was connected to plantation labor, slavery, colonialism, and British consumers and working class. • Hunger revolutions: Chinese (1948); Russian (1917). • The American revolution started as a food revolution: Tea. • The temperance movement. • Food remains important to American life to this day, including its economy. 1/5 of America’s petroleum goes into producing and transporting food. • As nation of food abundance. • Food diversity vs cultural/ethnic diversity: the Civil Rights Movement also started a food revolution.

34. Cooking • Carleton Coon (American physical anthropologist and archaeologist): cooking was “the decisive factor in leading man from a primarily animal existence into one that was more fully human.” • Engels: The greatest liberation from natural necessity of humankind on record is "the generation of fire from friction.“ • Zeus: “If they only had fire,” said Prometheus to himself, “they could at least warm themselves and cook their food; and after a while they could learn to make tools and build themselves houses. Without fire, they are worse off than the beasts.”

35. Peking Man– the deer hunter

36. Learn to use fire – 1.8 million years ago (?)

37. Advantages of fire use • making food easier to digest; • shrinking the stomach size and teeth; so that we can redirect the energy to development of our brain. • making food safer to consume and easier to store; • expanding the range of foods. • freeing up time for other activities.