Food, Power, and Agency PDF
Preview Food, Power, and Agency
ii Food, Power, and Agency ii iiiiii Food, Power, and Agency Edited by JÜRGEN MARTSCHUKAT AND BRYANT SIMON Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc LONDON • OXFORD • NEW YORK • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY iv iv Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Selection and Editorial Material: Jürgen Martschukat and Bryant Simon, 2017 © Individual Chapters: Their Authors, 2017 Jürgen Martschukat and Bryant Simon have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978- 1- 4742- 9876- 6 ePDF: 978- 1- 4742- 9874- 2 eBook: 978- 1- 4742- 9875- 9 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Cover design: ClareTurner.co.uk Cover image © ClareTurner.co.uk Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters. vv Contents List of Figures vii Acknowledgments viii Introduction: Food, Power, and Agency 1 Jürgen Martschukat and Bryant Simon PART ONE National characters 11 1 The power of food: Immigrant German restaurants in San Francisco and the formation of ethnic identities 13 Leonard Schmieding 2 Italian cuisine in Japan and the power of networking among cooks 37 Rossella Ceccarini and Keiichi Sawaguchi PART TWO Anthropological situations 57 3 Waiters, writers, and power: From dining room commanders to the emotional proletariat 59 Christoph Ribbat 4 The geography of silence: Food and tragedy in globalizing America 83 Bryant Simon PART THREE Health 103 5 Making food matter: “Scientific eating” and the struggle for healthy selves 105 Nina Mackert 6 “What diet can do”: Running and eating right in 1970s America 129 Jürgen Martschukat vi vi CONTENTS 7 Being too big—as deviance from the societal order 147 Eva Barlösius 8 When the grease runs through the paper: On the consumption of ultragreasy bureks 169 Jernej Mlekuž List of Contributors 191 Index 193 vviiii Figures 1.1 “Bismarck Specialties,” Bismarck Café, Bill of Fare 21 1.2 Bismarck Café, Main Dining Hall, ca. 1908 23 1.3 Bismarck Café, Beefsteak Room, ca. 1908 24 1.4 “Beer Maid with Heidelberg Students,” Heidelberg Inn, Bill of Fare 25 1.5 Heidelberg Inn, Interior 26 1.6 States Restaurant, Indian Room, ca. 1918 30 3.1 Thomas A. Morris. Headwaiter, Battery Park Hotel, Asheville, NC 69 3.2 Robert H. Grant. Headwaiter, McLure House, Wheeling, W. VA 71 3.3 W. Alonza Locke. Headwaiter, The Halliday Hotel, Cairo, IL, and Ex- Pres. Head, Second and Side Waiters’ National Benefit Association 72 3.4 John A. Gloster, Headwaiter, Hotel Sterling, Wilkes Barre, PA 74 3.5 C. M. Farrar, Treasurer Head, Second and Side Waiters’ National Benefit Association. Headwaiter Merchant Club, Baltimore, MD 75 8.1 Burek equation 174 8.2 The eating of greasy bureks 178 8.3 A badge from Ljubljana streets 181 8.4 “The Burek is Great” in Arabic 183 vni i viiiiewgenprepdf Acknowledgments No project is written alone, in particular a coauthored collection of essays featuring a wonderful group of inspiring scholars and colleagues. This book would not have been possible without the generous support of the Fritz- Thyssen- Foundation for the Erfurt- based research group “The Eating Self,” and the Alexander von Humboldt- Foundation for awarding Bryant Simon with a Humboldt Research Award. The idea for this collection sprang from a terrific workshop hosted by Maren Möhring at the University of Leipzig. Thanks to Lisa Bogert, Anita Mannur, and the others, including the contributors, who participated in the event and contributed to our wide- ranging and ongoing conversations about food, power, and agency. Thanks finally to Jennifer Schmidt and Clara Herberg and the rest of the crew at Bloomsbury. They have shepherded this project through every stage of the process from proposal to reviews to cover art to the final publication with great ease and clarity. 1 Introduction Food, Power, and Agency Jürgen Martschukat and Bryant Simon In 1961, Annales, the leading and most innovative historical and interdisciplinary journal of the time, published a piece by the French philosopher Roland Barthes on the significance of food for understanding the past and the present. Trained as a philologist at the Sorbonne in Paris, Barthes argued that food served as a gateway, perhaps the widest available to scholars, to the grammar and semantics of a society. “Food is a system,” Barthes declared, adding, “an entire ‘world’ (social environment) is present in and signified by food.”1 Barthes pointed to three principle areas for potential food research, each a place where the operation of the larger system was revealed and could be studied. First, he stressed that food permitted a person on an everyday basis to identify him or herself as belonging to a nation. By consuming certain food items and by preparing, eating, and enjoying these particular foods in particular ways, people asserted who they were or wanted to be, and made known their political and national identification. Barthes suggested that in America, sugar was not just a foodstuff but also an “attitude,” and that in France, wine was more than wine. He referred to foods like Coca Cola and moutarde du Roy as signifiers of national identity. While he might have relied too much on stereotypes and leaned too heavily on the nation- state as a unit of analysis, Barthes did see and identify the politics of food and the essential and performative acts of identification associated with food choices. Second, Barthes talked in his Annales article about what he labeled the “anthropological situation.” With this phrase, he pointed to the differences between people that were reflected by and shaped through food choices, consumption, and the making and growing of food. What people ate or
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