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Our Half-Baked Culture

Review: Tom Nealon, 'Food Fights & Culture Wars: The Secret History of Taste'

AP
April 29, 2017

At any given time, a few dozen large ideas are rampaging through the culture like wild bulls through the pampas. As Max Weber saw when he tried to analyze the cultural movements that created the Modern Age, sometimes, despite their differences, the feral ideas combine into herds and begin to run in the same direction—out of no fully intelligible necessity. What did French philosophe political theory, the scientific method, magisterial Protestantism, and the bureaucratic impulses of the new nation states have to do with one another? Not much, in truth. But they nonetheless joined in a stampede to trample the Middle Ages. They had, as Weber put it, an elective affinity.

The leftist claim of intersectionality—the idea that all marginalized people share an identity, even when their interests conflict—is a more recent attempt to define an elective affinity. It's a somewhat artificial one, imposed from above as theory rather than rising from below as a social fact. Still, it helps explain something of the mindset of the recent left. What do radical Muslims and radical feminists have in common? They ought, by nature, to be enemies. But in their intersectionality—the affinity they elect in opposing the older themes of Western civilization—they can be made to run in the same direction.

All of which gives us a way to think about food these days—about food at a moment when the New York Times can run an op-ed complaining about the existence of a dish called "Asian salad" at an Applebee's restaurant. The "casual racism of the Asian salad" is just too much to bear, complains the author, Bonnie Tsui, because . . . well, because Asia is too big a place to have a single cuisine. And Asians themselves don't have Asian salads, which are an American invention—the down-market effect of the fusion cooking styles of Wolfgang Puck and other celebrity chefs of the late 1990s and early 2000s. As anyone who isn't a racist should know.

The response to the Times op-ed was not kind. "Am I taking this too seriously?" Ms. Tsui asked. And the nearly universal answer from commenters on the paper's website was yes, she was taking herself and an Applebee's menu item far too seriously.

But here's the thing: Bonnie Tsui was at least on the right track, however inane her example. Cooking is a major source of cultural fascination, and we have much anxiety about food these days. So if you were a leftist, wouldn't you want to bring food into the herd? Harness the energy of worry about what we eat, through the magic of intersectionality, and point it in the same direction as agitation about class, race, and gender? Admittedly, Asian salad isn't going to be the goad that Ms. Tsui rather idiotically hoped it would. But the impulse behind her hope was not unintelligent. It was just insane.

No, even that's not quite right. In certain senses, food is not culturally determined. Some things poison us, some things do not, and no amount of belief in the social construction of reality will change that. Still, in the gap between rooting for tubers and carving a Beef Wellington, there's plenty of room for cultural definition. When Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote his classic study of Native American myths, The Raw and the Cooked, back in 1964, it seemed we were well on the way to expounding a cultural anthropology of food. The French title of the book, Le Cru et le Cuit, was particularly telling, with a sense of the Crude and the Cultivated lurking in the words.

Over the past fifty years, however, the project petered out. A good Structuralist, Lévi-Strauss insisted that cooking was a language and food was its words. But, unable to resist the lure of identifying social constructions, he could not hold on to the simple truth that not everything about eating is a human invention. If it's true that some things poison us and some things do not, then the Structuralist account of food must fail, in the end, and we need something better to understand the cultural importance of how and what we eat.

We certainly won't get it from Tom Nealon's new history of cooking, Food Fights & Culture Wars: The Secret History of Taste. I guess you could call the book quirky, if you wanted. More accurate would be sloppy, disorganized, and badly laid out on the page. What a mess of a book. Food Fights & Culture Wars is printed in columns, the better to flow around the illustrations from the British Library, which seem mostly the book's point. Not that they aren't nice illustrations, but if you were hoping for a genuine cultural history of food, you won't find it here. Just some quirky anecdotes and pretty pictures.

I'm probably harder on Nealon's lightweight text than it deserves. His claim that the Parisian fad for lemonade stopped the plague in the late 1660s is beyond implausible, as is his finding a cause for the American Revolution in chocolate. His story of the birth of Worcestershire sauce is charming, however, and he relates well the history of barbeque.

The trouble is that the stories do not cohere into the real account of food and culture that his title promised—the real account of historical culture wars we need. What can history tell us that might help understand the prim and puritanical passion of militant vegetarians today? What resources can we bring from the past to understand why some college students seem determined to see their cafeteria's "Taco Tuesday" as an outrage of cultural appropriation?

For that matter, how did Americans turn from being suspicious of alien foods to being mad consumers of foreign cuisines? How did the hot-peppering of American cuisine come about, in a culture that as recently as the 1930s actually named blandness a desirable quality in food? And where, in all this, do the roiling anxieties about cholesterol, salt, and polyunsaturated fats fit in? How can we make sense of a culture simultaneously obsessed with food and angry about its own obesity?

We are all supposed to be health-conscious valetudinarians these days, at the same time that we're supposed to be gourmets. We're supposed to be wildly open to new foods, at the same time that we're supposed to avoid appropriating other cultures' cooking. We're supposed to be thin as Twiggy, at the same time that we're supposed to chow down with gusto.

These are the kinds of issues a deep investigation of our culture and our food would need to take up. The human worry about the body will always find a focus. Where the Victorians tended to make sex the center of their bodily anxieties, we have transferred much of that to food.

In fact, that's a useful way to begin thinking about our half-baked culinary culture. We may mock the Victorians for the oddities, self-contradictions, and hypocrisies in the ways they tried to understand and control one kind of bodily function. But we have recreated every one of those oddities, self-contradictions, and hypocrisies in the way we try to understand and control another bodily function. We tried to remove sex from the realm of moral judgments, and food slipped in to take its place.

Published under: Book reviews