Word of MouthWhat We Talk About When We Talk About Food

pr iscill a pa rkhurst ferguson

u n i v e r si t y of c a l i f or n i a pr e s s

Berkeley Los Angeles London

california studies in food and culture

Darra Goldstein, Editor

1. Dangerous Tastes: Th e Story of Spices, by Andrew Dalby

2. Eating Right in the Renaissance, by Ken Albala

3. Food Politics: How the Food Industry In uences Nutrition and Health, by Marion Nestle

4. Camembert: A National Myth, by Pierre Boisard

5. Safe Food: Th e Politics of Food Safety, by Marion Nestle

6. Eating Apes, by Dale Peterson

7. Revolution at the Table: Th e Transformation of the American Diet, by Harvey Levenstein

8. Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America, by Harvey Levenstein

9. Encarnacins Kitchen: Mexican Recipes from Nineteenth-Century California: Selections from Encarnacin Pinedos El cocinero espaol, by Encarnacin Pinedo, edited and translated by Dan Strehl, with an essay by Victor Valle

10. Zinfandel: A History of a Grape and Its Wine, by Charles L. Sullivan, with a foreword by Paul Draper

11. Tsukiji: Th e Fish Market at the Center of the World, by Th eodore C. Bestor

12. Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity, by R. Marie Gri th

13. Our Overweight Children: What Parents, Schools, and Communities Can Do to Control the Fatness Epidemic, by Sharron Dalton

14. Th e Art of Cooking: Th e First Modern Cookery Book, by Th e Eminent Maestro Martino of Como, edited and with an introduction by Luigi Ballerini, translated and annotated by Jeremy Parzen, and with fty modernized recipes by Stefania Barzini

15. Th e Queen of Fats: Why Omega-3s Were Removed from the Western Diet and What We Can Do to Replace Th em, by Susan Allport

16. Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food, by Warren Belasco

17. Th e Spice Route: A History, by John Keay

18. Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World: A Concise History with 174 Recipes, by Lilia Zaouali, translated by M. B. DeBevoise, with a foreword by Charles Perry

19. Arranging the Meal: A History of Table Service in France, by Jean-Louis Flandrin, translated by Julie E. Johnson, with Sylvie and Antonio Roder; with a foreword to the English

language edition by Beatrice Fink

20. Th e Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir, by Amy B. Trubek

21. Food: Th e History of Taste, edited by Paul Freedman

22. M. F. K. Fisher among the Pots and Pans: Celebrating Her Kitchens, by Joan Reardon, with a foreword by Amanda Hesser

23. Cooking: Th e Quintessential Art, by Herv Th is and Pierre Gagnaire, translated by M. B. DeBevoise

24. Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century, by Laura Shapiro

25. Of Sugar and Snow: A History of Ice Cream Making, by Jeri Quinzio

26. Encyclopedia of Pasta, by Oretta Zanini De Vita, translated by Maureen B. Fant, with a foreword by Carol Field

27. Tastes and Temptations: Food and Art in Renaissance Italy, by John Varriano

28. Free for All: Fixing School Food in America, by Janet Poppendieck

29. Breaking Bread: Recipes and Stories from Immigrant Kitchens, by Lynne Christy Anderson, with a foreword by Corby Kummer

30. Culinary Ephemera: An Illustrated History, by William Woys Weaver

31. Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar: Stories of Food during Wartime by the Worlds Leading Correspondents, edited by Matt McAllester

32. Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism, by Julie Guthman

33. Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics, by Marion Nestle and Malden Nesheim

34. Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food, and South Asia, edited by Krishnendu Ray and Tulasi Srinivas

35. Th e Cookbook Library: Four Centuries of the Cooks, Writers, and Recipes Th at Made the Modern Cookbook, by Anne Willan, with Mark Cherniavsky and Kyri Cla in

36. Co ee Life in Japan, by Merry White

37. American Tuna: Th e Rise and Fall of an Improbable Food, by Andrew F. Smith

38. A Feast of Weeds: A Literary Guide to Foraging and Cooking Wild Edible Plants, by Luigi Ballerini, translated by Gianpiero W. Doebler, with recipes by Ada De Santis and illustrations by Giuliano Della Casa

39. Th e Philosophy of Food, by David M. Kaplan

40. Beyond Hummus and Falafel: Social and Political Aspects of Palestinian Food in Israel, by Liora Gvion, translated by David Wesley and Elana Wesley

41. Th e Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America, by Heather Paxson

42. Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds: Recipes and Lore from Rome and Lazio, by Oretta Zanini De Vita, translated by Maureen B. Fant, foreword by Ernesto Di Renzo

43. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History, by Rachel Laudan

44. Inside the California Food Revolution: Th irty Years Th at Changed Our Culinary Consciousness, by Joyce Goldstein, with Dore Brown

45. Cumin, Camels, and Caravans: A Spice Odyssey, by Gary Paul Nabhan

46. Balancing on a Planet: Critical Th inking and E ective Action for the Future of Food and Agriculture, by David A. Cleveland

47. Th e Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India, by Sarah Besky

48. How the Other Half Ate: A History of Working-Class Meals at the Turn of the Century, by Katherine Leonard Turner

49. Th e Untold History of Ramen: How Political Crisis in Japan Spawned a Global Food Craze, by George Solt

50. Word of Mouth: What We Talk About When We Talk About Food, by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson

51. Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet, by Amy Bentley

52. Secrets from the Greek Kitchen: Cooking, Skill, and Everyday Life on an Aegean Island, by David E. Sutton

metaphoric consumption. Laden with cultural meanings, food is always more than

matter. If we are what we eat, we also eat what we areor imagine ourselves to beand

we use food to show us how to be. As this fruit stand reminds us, food is rife with

metaphor. With its biblical resonance (Revelation 14:1820) the grapes of wrath entered

American culture during the Civil War through Julia Ward Howes immensely popular (in

the North) Battle Hymn of the Republic (1861). John Steinbecks novel of 1939 and

John Fords movie the following year extended the reach. Decades later, these grapes

produce a world that turns every fruit into metaphor. W. B. Park, Th e New Yorker

Collection / www.cartoonbank.com.

To the memory of Neale Sargent Parkhurst, who rst

taught me to prize Eager Eaters, and to Robert A.

Ferguson, who pushed me to think about them

Prologue: Talking About Food xiii

pa rt i. f rom ta l k to t e x t

1. Th inking About Food 3

2. Th e Perils and Pleasures of Consumption 33

3. Texts Take Over 50

pa rt i i. n e w c ook s, n e w c h e f s

4. Iconic Cooks 79

5. Chefs and Che ng 113

pa rt i i i: t h e c u l i na ry l a n d sc a pe i n t h e t w e n t y-f i r st c e n t u ry

6. Dining on the Edge 141

7. Haute Food 170

Epilogue: Last WordsRatatouille 197

c on t e n t s

xii Contents

Acknowledgments 205

Notes 207

Bibliography 251

Index 267

xiii

He likes bread and butter,

He likes toast and jam,

Th ats what his baby feeds him,

Hes her lovin man.

Well . . . I like bread and butter,

I like toast and jam,

Th ats what my baby feeds me,

Im her lovin man.

He likes bread and butter,

He likes toast and jam,

Th ats what his baby feeds him,

Hes her lovin man.

She dont cook mashed potatoes,

She dont cook T-bone steaks,

Dont feed me peanut butter,

She knows that I cant take.

prol o gu e

xiv Prologue

He likes bread and butter,

He likes toast and jam,

Th ats what his baby feeds him,

Hes her lovin man.

Well, I got home early one Monday,

Much to my surprise,

She was eating chicken and dumplings

With some other guy.

No more bread and butter,

No more toast and jam,

He found his baby eating

With some other man.

No, no, no. . . .

No more bread and butter,

No more toast and jam,

I found my baby eating

With some other man.

Th e Newbeats, Bread and Butter (1964)*

stor i e s a bou t food

Food talk takes many forms and does many things. When we talk about

food, we share our pleasure in what we eat. But we conjure the dangers of

consumption no less than we convey its delights. Sometimes we talk about

food simply to talk about food. Yet as often as not we talk through food to

speak of love and desire, devotion and disgust, aspirations and anxieties,

ideas and ideologies, joys and judgments. Given the many connections

* BREAD AND BUTTER. Written by: Larry Parks & Jay Turnbow. 1964 Sony/ATV Music Pub-

lishing LLC. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 8 Music Square West,

Nashville, TN 37203. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Prologue xv

between food and what humans do in the societies that we make, what we

say about food o ers a wonderful medium for exploring the social world.

Food surely can be construed as a total social phenomenon, as Marcel

Mauss de ned itthat is, as a set of experiences and practices so pervasive

that we could not imagine our worlds without them. From the kitchen to the

dining table and beyond, the talk generated by food draws our attention

because of its connection to our social selves.

Th e song lyrics quoted above o er a case in point. As a cionados of 1960s

popular music will no doubt recognize (and the rest of us can discover on the

Internet), Bread and Butter was a 1964 megahit by the vocal trio the New-

beats. A rst viewing of the video shows it to be very much a period piece.

From the vantage point of the more aggressive, insistent popular music of

the twenty- rst century, this performance seems very old-fashioned

indeedthe ip hairdos of the teenage girls in the audience provide instant

transport back a half century.

Yet if the Newbeats sing from another era, the story that they tell reso-

nates todayif, that is, we take the time to give the song our full attention.

Bread and Butter turns out to be food talk at its most engaging. Unlikely

though it may seem, this song is archetypal food talk. It displays and

dramatizes the power of food to shape our lives. And it does so by telling

a story.

Bread and Butter is a love storyalas, one with an unhappy ending, at

least for the narrator. It tells of a love a air gone wrong because the lovers

think about and use food so di erently. Food, it becomes clear as the stanzas

progress, is shorthand for life. In particular, food means doing love. In life as

at table, ill-matched tastes bode ill. Th e man tells his story, putting the lis-

tener o track by adopting a screechy falsetto that wavers between a whine

and a scream. Th e narrators opening (the text in roman above) and backup

chorus (in italics, sung by two men) evoke a gustatory paradise where bread

and butter, toast and jam satisfy every appetite. Th ese elementary foodstu s

xvi Prologue

satisfy at once culinary cravings and amorous desire: Th ats what my baby

feeds me, Im her lovin man.

Predictably, this gastronomic Eden proves a temporary sojourn. Th e nar-

rator turns out to su er from a severe case of arrested development. Th e sim-

ple life of bread, butter, toast and jam are the stu of a childs worldpoor

preparation for the real world of adults. Th e foods he prefers are childhood

standbys that adults tend to relegate to breakfast, and not even a real break-

fast at that. Th e archetypal American breakfast of eggs, bacon, and possibly

pancakes makes a real meal; starch, dairy, and sweets do not.

Th e culinarily attuned among us will not be surprised at the consequences

of such dietary deprivation. Returning home unexpectedly, the narrator nds

that he has been replacedat the table and in his girls a ections. Until now

she has existed to feed her man. She does not cook, she feeds. Does she like

bread and butter? All we know is that she makes neither mashed potatoes nor

steak and stays clear of peanut butter she knows that [he] cant take. Th e

result of this imbalanced diet and inadequate meal? Much to [his] surprise,

the narrator comes home to nd her consuming a meal of her own, with

some other guy. A new culinary couple sits at table. Fed up, his baby has

grown up. Abandoning the surrogate motherhood of nursery feeding, she has

taken to eating proper (adult) food with a proper (adult) dinner companion.

Betrayal at table says everything anyone needs to know about a love

a air gone wrong. Th e new culinary couple is having a real meal, a dinner

for adults. Unlike bread and butter, chicken and dumplings have to be

cooked. Supplying protein as well as carbohydrates, this dish, like steak and

mashed potatoes, answers standard nutritional requirements for a good

that is, balancedmeal that contrasts with the dietarily and gastronomi-

cally impoverished snack of dairy, starch, and sugar.

Furthermore, along with the peanut butter that the narrator refuses to

touch, this iconic dish integrates this dinner into a particular social setting.

Chicken and dumplings is a common dish in the American South, and steak

Prologue xvii

and potatoes is representative American fare. In refusing its foods, the nar-

rator rejects his country, just as his refusal of a real meal refuses a real

relationship. Bread, butter, toast, and jam are side dishes, not the real thing.

Making a time-honored conjunction, this song all about food turns out to be

all about sex after all.

soc iol ogic a l u n de r sta n di ngs

However improbable a cultural indicator, Bread and Butter takes us to the

heart of food talk. Th is pop song tells what it means to talk about food and

why we do so. Th is talk lays bare the food world. It articulates the values and

norms of that world and comments on its practices. Most succinctly, food

talkthe ways we talk about and represent foodstructures our experience

of food, from kitchen to table, from menu to meal. As the drama of Bread and

Butter illustrates so vividly, food is part of the social relationship that it

expresses, sustains, and occasionally alters. Food talk recounts the ways that

food a ects our lives. More than that, it shows how food can help us live those

lives. We talk about food to both craft identities and construct social worlds.

Th e re ection that Word of Mouth places on food talk and its creation of

social worlds is a sociological enterprise. As the undergraduate promotional

brochure for my department has it, sociology studies associational life.

Instead of focusing on people as individuals, sociologists look to the rela-

tionships that bring people together. In other words, we look at what people

do when they are with other people, and we pay attention to how people talk

and write about what they doin this case, about the many ways they think

about and do food.

Th e question is how to get at the food talk that is all around us. Th e limi-

tations of eavesdropping and direct observation impel cultural sociologists

to raid the arsenal of the historian and the literary scholar. Like them, we

scrutinize texts. Traditionally, the texts most often consulted were literary

works and historical sources of unimpeachable consequence that looked at

xviii Prologue

the social world from above. In the past half century, as critics and schol-

ars have become more concerned with looking at society from below,

there has been a corresponding shift in the material that we use to recon-

struct social worlds. We look at writings and representations of a great many

sorts, not as cultural monuments but as signs that reveal ways of doing and

thinking in a particular culture in a given time and place.

Th ese documents come in many guises. Like others before me, I draw on a

miscellaneous assortment, unequal in importance and signi cance, each of

which gives a glimpse into the world I am examiningin this case, our con-

temporary food world. Th e ephemeral plays its part, as does the classic; a pop

song turns up in Word of Mouth, as do the novels of Marcel Proust and Virginia

Woolf. Fleeting by de nition, journalistic reporting o ers powerful insight on

cultural ephemera. Images and representations of every sort have a concen-

trated, visual impact that makes them illuminating. Th e force, and the appeal,

of lm lies in its conjunction of images and stories. Texts describe and analyze

the food worlds that literature animates, images represent, and lm stages.

Cultural forms have their speci city. Each has its own public, follows its

own rules, uses idiosyncratic methods, and makes a singular appeal. Even

so, and as dissimilar as these cultural markers assuredly are, the analytic

lens that I have adopted sees them as equal. It is not useful for my purposes

to distinguish among the di erent indicators, either theoretically or empiri-

cally. To understand food talk and the food world that this talk creates, I

take each both on its own and as part of the cultural reading proposed in

Word of Mouth.

Th is methodological eclecticism takes its cue, and its inspiration, from

Walter Benjamins endlessly fascinating excavation of nineteenth-century

Paris. In Th e Arcades Project, Benjamin reconstructs the city through cultural

texts of all sorts. Th e incongruent nature of these texts along with his appar-

ent disregard for conventional intellectual hierarchies make Benjamin the

very model of the scholar as scavenger. Almost anything written o ers him

Prologue xix

a clue, however insigni cant it may seem to any other reader, about the peo-

ple, place, and period of the city that he famously celebrated as the Capital of

the nineteenth century. Snippets of mostly forgotten plays nd their place

next to the iconic poetry of Baudelaire; journalistic essays receive serious

attention alongside the work of esteemed historians. Th e Arcades Project all

but drowns the reader in its stories, tales, and anecdotes of nineteenth-

century Paris. Readers navigate the swirling currents as best they can.

Th e opening essay of Th e Arcades Project, Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth

Century, proposes straight o the reasoning behind what Benjamin knows

will seem like a scattershot approach to the past. Th e very rst sentence

announces his working premise: that the essence of history is to be found

in the conjunction between Herodotus and the morning newspaper, between

classic historiographical texts and the ephemera of everyday life. Th e writer

known as the Father of History takes his place alongside whatever sensa-

tional tidbit turns up in the latest news.

Th at same search takes me to scholarly studies of food and to a vintage

pop song about a meal gone wrong, to extensive interviews with chefs and

emblematic cartoons about dining. It makes the most of cookbooks and

lms about cooking and eating. In brief, rather like the cook who makes use

of what turns up in the larder, in this cultural chronicle I pick up the docu-

ments that I nd at hand.

Th is pursuit takes me on a Benjaminian treasure hunt for the telling

example, the vivid illustration, and the revelatory quote. My concern is not

with individuals or events. What counts are modes of being and kinds of

behavior. I work through social relations to construct models of relation-

ships much as Benjamin looked to character types (the neur, the collec-

tor), typical places (arcades and shops), and contemporary conventions

(fashion, exhibitions, and advertising). Benjamin does not spend much time

on discrete portraits or singular occurrences for their own sake. Even his

discussion of the Paris Communethe spectacular uprising of 1871 and its

xx Prologue

bloody repression by governmental troopsframes events as exemplary, not

singular. Benjamin takes the gures that he picks outMarx, Fourier, Saint-

Simon, Baudelaire, Daumier, Hugoas exempla of the modernity that made

Paris the Capital of the nineteenth century.

Taking the exemplary over the singular puts me in good sociological

company. Georg Simmel, to cite one of the founding fathers of the discipline,

prizes form over content and structure over substance. He explains social

phenomena by constructing patterns and con gurations. Simmel looks to

the forms of what he calls sociationthat is, forms of social interaction. Two

of his most celebrated essays, Th e Metropolis and Mental Life and Th e

Stranger, show these social forms in action. Th e modern city dweller is a

social type, and so is the stranger. Each is the creature of a distinctive social

space; each exposes a social relation that simultaneously unites and divides,

setting the insider apart from the outsider, the self from the other.

All of us recognize something of ourselves in Simmels types. Th ats one

reason why his essays work so well in the classroom. Just looking around

shows students how the space that they inhabit fosters the attitudes and

behaviors that Simmel identi es. None of us is anywhere near fully one type.

As Max Weber would later insist, ideal types never coincide with reality.

Th eir concentrated features are dispersed in ordinary life, making them

more real than reality and exceptionally useful tools for the sociologist.

Th ough I talk about people and events, my aim is formal. I propose forms of

connection, types of relationships, modes of action. I take the cook, the

chef, and the diner as types, categories, styles, modes of association. Instead

of proof, I o er my own text as document, illustration, and example, the

better to connect with the readers own experience.

qu e st ions

Every book begins with a question. Whether the whodunit of the mystery

story, the epistemological conundrum of the philosophical treatise, or any

Prologue xxi

number of variants in between, questions set the stage for the interpretive

drama under construction. Word of Mouth asks questions about foodhow we

think about it, what we do with it, and what e ect it has. Why do dining and

cooking preoccupy so many in contemporary society? Despite the highly

unequal distribution of food both across and within societies, why is need

surprisingly muted in discussions of what makes our contemporary food

world so di erent from what it was not all that long ago?

Crucial to understanding this strikingly assertive food world is food talk.

In every culture, people talk about, write about, and portray food for all sorts

of reasons. Today we contend with an extraordinary array of foodstu s

brought within easy reach by a globalizing economy. We confront unmatched

culinary diversity. We take note of arresting changes in food practices,

which some of us work to alter further. New modes of production and con-

sumption, new requirements of supply and demand, and new forms of din-

ing push us to think about food both more often and more intensely than

ever before. Th e explosion of food talk in the past twenty- ve yearsin arti-

cles, blogs, and television shows, cookbooks and memoirs, lms and, yes,

scholarly studiesis a sure sign of our times. Benjamin, for one, would have

leaped at the opportunity.

Talk anchors this food world by making it possible for us to share the

unshareablethat is, our sensual, powerfully private experiences of eating.

Chapter 1 shows the conversations that occur in the kitchen and at table,

along with the writings and images that take this talk beyond those spaces.

Firmly rooted in place, these ways of using food connect us to a culinary

country. Food talk is instrumental in making us aware of that identity.

At the same time, in the markedly mobile food world of the twenty- rst

century, no culinary country operates on its own, if it ever did. It cannot do

so because every country is part of a larger food world that favors exchange.

Th e greater the exchange, the more blurred the identities. In the culinary

conversation that Word of Mouth tracks most closely, France and America

xxii Prologue

have exchanged culinary products and practices for three centuries and

counting. Yet they maintain their distinct culinary identities even when

archetypal French croissants turn up in American supermarkets and fast

food outlets, from McDonalds to Kentucky Fried Chicken to Starbucks, dot

the French landscape. Chapter 1 suggests some of the means by which crois-

sants remain French and McDonalds stays American, and why, in this global

market, it is vital that they do so. McDo sells burgers, to be sure; it also

sells America. Croissants convey, however faintly, a certain idea of France.

Th at culinary nationalism is very much of our times comes to the fore in two

lms: Haute Cuisine, from France, and Le Grand Chef, from South Korea.

What do we actually say about food? How have people talked about it?

What about food fears? Every time we put something in our mouths, we put

our lives on the line, although few see the situation in such dire terms. As

chapter 2 points out, the hope of gustatory delight wins out over the fear of

poison, as it must if we are to survive. It then becomes a question of what we

can do to minimize the dangers and maximize the delights. Th e tension

between the two makes our relationship to food exceptionally tentative.

Food talk guides us through this dilemma. Rhetoric sits at every table, help-

ing diners think through the stando between danger and desire. Th e lm

Chocolat, the perennial favorite childrens story Winnie-the-Pooh, and Dag-

wood, from the long-running comic strip Blondie, all propose models of con-

sumption that prize gluttony over gastronomy, enthusiasm over

discrimination.

Chapter 3 moves from the talk to the talkers. From the Greek writer Ath-

enaeus in second-century Rome, unquestionably the greatest food writer of

all time, to the utopian philosopher Charles Fourier in the nineteenth cen-

tury, from the great chef Marie-Antoine Carme to the critics Alexandre

Balthazar Laurent Grimod de La Reynire and Jean Anthelme Brillat-Sava-

rin, the di erent genres of food talk take a stand. Each articulates positions

in a cultural eldthat is, a con guration of intellectual and social positions

Prologue xxiii

that structure cultural practices. As danger and delight shape our personal

experiences of food, so these exemplary food talkers stake out the positions

and perspectives on food in the larger society. In working with and against

one another, these genres of food talk sustain a cultural elda con gura-

tion of interlocking positions that operates on its own, largely according to

its own rules. Th e food world of the twenty- rst century is very like a loosely

connected cultural eld.

Th en there are those who do food for the rest of us: the cooks and chefs

who stamp the food world with their personalities and their conceptions of

what it means to cook and eat. Chapters 4 and 5 recount Americas culinary

coming of age, via the cooks who brought French cuisine to the home front

and the chefs who altered what it meant to dine out. Investing food with

intellectual and aesthetic value, prizing eating no less than cooking as a

legitimate cultural pursuit, the French model proved crucialin translation.

To take hold, French cuisine had to be rendered in American terms. By the

mid to late twentieth century, American cooks and chefs had joined the

culinary conversation and started the work of translation in earnest.

Chapters 6 and 7 shift the spotlight to consumption and the consumer.

Th e past half century has radically rede ned consumption. It is no easy mat-

ter to decide today between dining in and dining out. From take-out and

order-in to food trucks to pop-up restaurants, ever more inventive means of

connecting food and consumer obscure the dissimilarities between once

distinct, even incompatible, activities. As more people consume more food

in an ever-greater variety of locations, a pervasive informalization blurs the

boundaries between cooking and eating, as between dining out and eating

in. Design magazines propose that the ideal kitchen has its own dining

space. Th e dining room, I was advised when I was moving to New York City,

is the least-used room in the apartment. Rather than indulge in an apoca-

lyptic lament that no one cooks anymore or eats a proper (i.e., sit-down)

meal, we might do well to ask, as I do in chapter 7, who cooks what, why,

xxiv Prologue

when, and for whom. Who dines with whom, on what occasions, and to

what purpose?

Th e unsettled, exceptionally mobile food world of the twenty- rst cen-

tury has spawned its own characteristic culinary construct: haute food.

Chapter 7 details the striking shift from haute cuisine to haute food. Haute

cuisine understands the partsdishes, ingredients, techniquesin rela-

tionship to the whole and the principles by which that whole is de ned.

French cuisine, for the most striking example, is such a strong culinary sys-

tem because it has a strong sense of the whole and the tradition on which it

depends.

Haute food, by contrast, takes the particular taste, dish, ingredient, or

technique on its own. Driven by an insistent culinary individualism, haute

food as I see it prizes personal taste over tradition, a single dish over any

culinary system. Th e weight placed on culinary creativity and innovation at

all costs pressures chefs to come up with something unrecognizable. Insofar

as the ultra-new dish is a context unto itself, haute food undermines culi-

nary principles and conventions. It also rede nes the meal by according

diners the right to their own food, regardless of anyone elses preferences.

Haute food disconcerts and excites in equal measure.

To counter the song about eating that opened this book, I close with a

lm about cooking. Ratatouille (2007) is a food fantasy of the rst order, pre-

cisely what is expected of a Disney production. Th at fantasy has lessons for

anyone concerned with the meaning of food. It is a food story that, in e ect,

summarizes all of the themes in the previous chapters. Th e hero is as unlikely

as his career trajectory. Remy the rat conquers Paris with cooking that works

wonders, creating happiness. Learning to cook and learning to dine, Rata-

touille tells us, is learning to live.