Foundations
1 Why Do We Overeat?
Margaret Mead
2 Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption
Roland Barthes
3 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
Pierre Bourdieu (tr. Richard Nice)
4 The Culinary Triangle
Claude Lévi-Strauss
5 The Abominations of Leviticus
Mary Douglas
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6 The Abominable Pig
Marvin Harris
7 Industrial Food: Towards the Development of a World Cuisine
Jack Goody
8 Time, Sugar, and Sweetness
Sidney W. Mintz
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1
Why Do We Overeat?*
Margaret Mead
Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved.
Holiday cheer inevitably means a great abundance of food and drink—delicious,
tempting and for most of us a hazard.
How often during the Christmas holidays have you heard someone say, “Well, just
a little more—I can’t resist”? How often have you yourself said, “I really shouldn’t …”?
The pressure to enjoy all these varied good things is very great. But in the back of
many people’s minds there is the thought, After New Year’s I’ll go on a diet.
Feasting at festivals and eating meagerly in the long intervals between great events
is a way of handling food that is very widespread among the peoples of the world who
seldom have more than just enough to live on. It is one way of coping with perennial
scarcity that allows everyone to share occasionally a very limited supply of foods that
are really good.
But this is no longer our way. Daily abundance of food is one of the main characteristics of our very affluent society. So abundant, in fact, is food that many—perhaps
most—Americans find it almost impossible to believe that there are millions among
us who do not have access to sufficient food.
For the majority of Americans food is omnipresent. Supermarkets, hot-dog stands,
candy counters, snack bars, soft-drink machines and a constant stream of highly
colored advertisements continually keep the possibility of eating before us. For holidays we make a special effort to buy and prepare foods that take time, effort and
thought—foods that demonstrate how far we have come in learning to treat cooking
and the enjoyment of eating as an art. But holidays are only a high point. We have
contrived to construct a world in which food in great variety is present everywhere at
all times of the year.
So the problem for great numbers of Americans is not how to get enough food or
how to be well nourished. Instead it is how to fend off the insistent pressure to eat. It
has been estimated that at least one in five Americans is ten per cent or more overweight—in most cases the consequence of giving in to that pressure and eating too
much. It has been estimated variously, also, that some 10 to 20 million Americans at
any one time are dieting—some because they are fat and others because they “feel fat”
in relation to current styles.
*
Originally published 1971
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20
Margaret Mead
The vast proliferation of nonfattening and nonnourishing foods in the past decade
represents one attempt to cope with the situation—how to eat “harmlessly.” There
are also the shelves of books on dieting, the books on exercising and the dozens of
devices advertised everywhere that are guaranteed to trim one down. All are evidence
of good business appreciation of the anxieties we feel and the dilemma we find ourselves in as a result of our present style of eating.
For the truth is, Americans are extremely intolerant of people who, as we see it, “let
themselves go.” This applies to anyone who neglects to “fix” anything physical that
can be remedied. It is the responsibility of parents to make the best of each child; but
we believe that adults, as individuals, have control over their own bodies and should
demonstrate through the care they exercise both how they see themselves and how
they wish to be seen in their relations to others. There are handicaps, clearly, that
cannot be overcome. But everyone can try. To make the most of oneself, we say, is
good. To give up is wrong.
Today this moral attitude places a very heavy burden on one group—a very mixed
group—in our society. This is the group of all those who, for whatever reason, are
obese. No fashions are designed for them. No furniture is built for them. Potentially
or actually, they are outcasts.
We believe it is wrong to be obese. It shows a lack of character, a disregard for
health and a blatant lack of self-discipline. In the light of this belief, all kinds of obesity
are lumped together. We treat as similar in kind the overweight of glandular imbalance, weight put on during pregnancy, weight that comes to the lonely girl who eats
comforting chocolates that make her fatter and even less likely to get a date and weight
that is a response to feelings of unworthiness. Detailed studies have shown that there
are many and very different origins of overweight.
But to the average person who is deciding whether to accept a student or whether
to hire someone for a job or to promote someone to a higher position, who is anxiously watching the girls a son is dating or (less often) the boys a daughter is dating,
obesity is just obesity—unattractive, unacceptable and reprehensible. Back of all the
comments, the warnings and the cutting jokes lies the moral reproof “You should lose
weight, and you could if you would.”
Those who succeed in keeping down their weight—or in getting it down within
acceptable limits—count their virtues, suffer for their sins and denigrate others who
fail or obviously won’t try. Certainly it is important for us to feel that we are in control
of our own well-being. But are the obese really sinners? Why today do we still have
these puritanical attitudes about eating? Is it necessary to invoke guilt to control our
enjoyment of plenty?
The Weight Watchers movement, which has swept the country in the past eight
years, gains its greatest strength from the belief that those who try and succeed are good
and will be rewarded. Like Alcoholics Anonymous and other groups that use like mindedness as a kind of external conscience to bolster up the will to reform and improve
oneself, Weight Watchers expresses a peculiarly American idea. This is the idea that the
best way to do something you don’t want to do is to get others in the same situation to
meet with you and to support you whenever your resolve to kick the habit flickers.
As the obese so often describe themselves (echoing the beliefs and attitudes of those
around them), they are people who can’t resist indulging their gluttonous greed; who
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Why Do We Overeat?
21
hide their compulsive eating from one another, their families, their spouses and
friends; and who come in time to lie even to themselves. Confessing their familiar sins
to each other, as is done in all such mutual-support groups, helps them to face themselves and so to take each necessary step in the arduous and painful process of dieting
to lose 50,100 or even 200 pounds of cumbersome, misery-making weight. But there
is a reward. In the words of Jean Nidetch (the inventor of the movement, who calls
herself a Formerly Fat Housewife), getting down to normal size will “make you confident that you are capable of controlling your own body, that you are not the victim
of your compulsions.”
The system works—after a fashion. Given sufficient support, many of the overweight
can suffer their way toward a “normal” figure and perhaps better health. But the various
ways we have devised to deal with overweight do not come to grips with the fundamental question: Why do we have this constant struggle with food? Is there no other way?
Recently a movement has been formed called the National Association to Aid Fat
Americans (NAAFA), whose founders picture the obese as another persecuted minority. They may well point out some of the injustices suffered by the overweight. But this
is likely at best to strengthen the resolve of those who diet to escape the penalties of
being fat.
Our peculiar attitudes toward food in this country become even clearer when one
looks at another group—the rebellious young. Just as they have rejected so much
else that they regard as part of the corrupt adult world, they have rejected the food
habits they were taught. In spite of their emphasis on the values of “natural” food, few
of them have any real knowledge of sound nutrition. Many are extreme food faddists.
Often they are painfully thin, and in many cases seriously malnourished.
We do not condemn them for being thin; most people would like to be thin. But
their situation is serious, for their health may be permanently impaired. Even more
serious may be the impairment to the health of their children. Very recent studies
have shown that adequate prenatal nutrition, which in most cases permits a pregnant
woman to gain at least 25 pounds, can mean the difference between a handicapped
and a flourishing baby.
Both the obese and the rebellious young are victims—victims of our obsolete attitude toward food and eating. The obese, whom we treat as sinners, are scapegoats for
all of us, made to suffer as examples of what many of us fear we might become—if we
let ourselves go. They feel left out. For them, getting thinner means a chance to
re-enter society—a chance to go to a good college, to get a good job, to make friends,
to marry and to be a part of what is going on. The youthful rebels, in contrast, reject
our accepted eating habits as part of their search for a new life-style.
But so are we all victims. The real problem is one all of us must face. Most Americans find themselves in the ambiguous situation of having to fight what they enjoy—
of feasting and then guiltily fasting in order to be “good.” And the question is this:
Must the next generation face the same dilemma?
The basic difficulty, I think, is that we have carried over into the present outmoded
methods of teaching children how and what to eat, and we back up this teaching with
inappropriate moral attitudes toward food.
In the past, when the quantity and variety of foods were much more limited, meals
could be extremely monotonous. Then mothers urged and begged and forced
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22
Margaret Mead
children to eat the food set before them three times a day. There was no alternative.
The good child dutifully ate the dull food “that is good for you.” The reward was dessert, Sunday dinner, holiday fare, the rare treat, all the pleasant and delicious foods
that were “good.” The child (and the adult too, of course) who uncomplainingly ate
the plain, nourishing everyday fare was morally justified in enjoying what came afterward as a sign that all was well.
We still plan our three meals a day in the same way, treating them as if they constituted all the food available to us. We still teach children to be “good” through food—
and to express rebellion by not eating the right food. We still treat some foods (the
kinds we define as “good, but not really good for you”) as rewards and signs of love.
There is one major change, but this serves only to reinforce what we teach and believe:
Adults, having eaten too much, go on a diet that they treat as difficult, unpleasant and
intrinsically unrewarding. Children should be good first; adults do penance afterward.
We punish the obese. But we all have become the victims of this outmoded style.
Recognizing this, we can help our children to eat in a new style.
First I think we can give up using food as a punishment and a reward—as a symbol
of a duty performed (or neglected), a consolation or an accolade. Where food is so
plentiful, food can be food and the focus of our feeling can be directed toward the
pleasure of sharing a meal with others.
Second we can recognize the fact that the rule of “there square meals a day” has
become a kind of strait jacket. We would do better to take into account the variations
in individual rhythms in the need for food as well as the different rhythms in the
working day for different people. A generation ago we began infant feeding on a flexible, self-demand basis—and there we stopped. More realistically, however, eating on
the basis of self-demand could be the beginning of self-discovery and flexibility,
throughout childhood and on into adulthood.
In the past children were taught to eat. If they were thin, they should eat more; if
they stuffed, they were deprived of good things. But in the last generation, those children who were brought up with a genuine sense of self-demand within the bounds of
sensible nutrition are the ones who, as adults, have kept a relaxed sense of what their
physical need for food is and what they can enjoy. This capacity to follow their individual rhythms in eating would really give people a sense of personal—instead of
arbitrarily determined—control over their own bodies. Less punitive toward ourselves, I think, we would become less punitive toward others who differed from us.
Finally, the whole world today is linked through food, the food that some have in
superabundance and others urgently need. By freeing our children from the strictures
of conscience about their personal consumption of food, they would be freer to think
of shared food as a source of well-being for everyone everywhere.
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2
Toward a Psychosociology of
Contemporary Food Consumption*
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Roland Barthes
The inhabitants of the United States consume almost twice as much sugar as the
French.1 Such a fact is usually a concern of economics and politics. But this is by no
means all. One needs only to take the step from sugar as merchandise, an abstract item
in accounts, to sugar as food, a concrete item that is “eaten” rather than “consumed,”
to get an inkling of the (probably unexplored) depth of the phenomenon. For the
Americans must do something with all that sugar. And as a matter of fact, anyone who
has spent time in the United States knows that sugar permeates a considerable part of
American cooking; that it saturates ordinarily sweet foods, such as pastries; makes for
a great variety of sweets served, such as ice creams, jellies, syrups; and is used in many
dishes that French people do not sweeten, such as meats, fish, salads, and relishes. This
is something that would be of interest to scholars in fields other than economics, to
the psychosociologist, for example, who will have something to say about the presumably invariable relation between standard of living and sugar consumption. (But is
this relation really invariable today? And if so, why?)2 It could be of interest to the
historian also, who might find it worthwhile to study the ways in which the use of
sugar evolved as part of American culture (the influence of Dutch and German immigrants who were used to “sweet-salty” cooking?). Nor is this all. Sugar is not just a
foodstuff, even when it is used in conjunction with other foods; it is, if you will, an
“attitude,” bound to certain usages, certain “protocols,” that have to do with more
than food. Serving a sweet relish or drinking a Coca-Cola with a meal are things that
are confined to eating habits proper; but to go regularly to a dairy bar, where the
absence of alcohol coincides with a great abundance of sweet beverages, means more
than to consume sugar; through the sugar, it also means to experience the day, periods
of rest, traveling, and leisure in a specific fashion that is certain to have its impact on
the American. For who would claim that in France wine is only wine? Sugar or wine,
these two superabundant substances are also institutions. And these institutions necessarily imply a set of images, dreams, tastes, choices, and values. I remember an
American hit song: Sugar Time. Sugar is a time, a category of the world.3
I have started out with the example of the American use of sugar because it permits
us to get outside of what we, as Frenchmen, consider “obvious.” For we do not
see our own food or, worse, we assume that it is insignificant. Even—or perhaps
*
Originally published 1961
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24
Roland Barthes
especially—to the scholar, the subject of food connotes triviality or guilt.4 This may
explain in part why the psychosociology of French eating habits is still approached
only indirectly and in passing when more weighty subjects, such as life-styles, budgets, and advertising, are under discussion. But at least the sociologists, the historians
of the present—since we are talking only about contemporary eating habits here—
and the economists are already aware that there is such a thing.
Thus P.H. Chombart de Lauve has made an excellent study of the behavior of
French working-class families with respect to food. He was able to define areas of
frustration and to outline some of the mechanisms by which needs are transformed
into values, necessities into alibis.5 In her book Le mode de vie des familles bourgeoises
de 1873 à 1953, M. Perrot came to the conclusion that economic factors played a less
important role in the changes that have taken place in middle-class food habits in the
last hundred years than changing tastes; and this really means ideas, especially about
nutrition.6 Finally, the development of advertising has enabled the economists to
become quite conscious of the ideal nature of consumer goods; by now everyone
knows that the product as bought—that is, experienced—by the consumer is by no
means the real product; between the former and the latter there is a considerable production of false perceptions and values. By being faithful to a certain brand and by
justifying this loyalty with a set of “natural” reasons, the consumer gives diversity to
products that are technically so identical that frequently even the manufacturer
cannot find any differences. This is notably the case with most cooking oils.7
It is obvious that such deformations or reconstructions are not only the manifestation of individual, anomic prejudices, but also elements of a veritable collective imagination showing the outlines of a certain mental framework. All of this, we might say,
points to the (necessary) widening of the very notion of food. For what is food? It is
not only a collection of products that can be used for statistical or nutritional studies.
It is also, and at the same time, a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behavior. Information about food must be gathered
wherever it can be found: by direct observation in the economy, in techniques, usages,
and advertising; and by indirect observation in the mental life of a given society.8 And
once these data are assembled, they should no doubt be subjected to an internal analysis that should try to establish what is significant about the way in which they have
been assembled before any economic or even ideological determinism is brought into
play. I should like to give a brief outline of what such an analysis might be.
When he buys an item of food, consumes it, or serves it, modern man does not
manipulate a simple object in a purely transitive fashion; this item of food sums up
and transmits a situation; it constitutes an information; it signifies. That is to say that
it is not just an indicator of a set of more or less conscious motivations, but that it is
real sign, perhaps the functional unit of a system of communication. By this I mean
not only the elements of display in food, such as foods involved in rites of hospitality,9
for all food serves as a sign among the members of a given society. As soon as a need
is satisfied by standardized production and consumption, in short, as soon as it takes
on the characteristics of an institution, its function can no longer be dissociated from
the sign of that function. This is true for clothing;10 it is also true for food. No doubt,
food is, anthropologically speaking (though very much in the abstract), the first
need; but ever since man has ceased living off wild berries, this need has been
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Contemporary Food Consumption
25
highly structured. Substances, techniques of preparation, habits, all become part of a
system of differences in signification; and as soon as this happens, we have communication by way of food. For the fact that there is communication is proven, not by the
more or less vague consciousness that its users may have of it, but by the ease with
which all the facts concerning food form a structure analogous to other systems of
communication.11 People may very well continue to believe that food is an immediate
reality (necessity or pleasure), but this does not prevent it from carrying a system of
communication; it would not be the first thing that people continue to experience as
a simple function at the very moment when they constitute it into a sign.
If food is a system, what might be its constituent units? In order to find out, it
would obviously be necessary to start out with a complete inventory of all we know of
the food in a given society (products, techniques, habits), and then to subject these
facts to what the linguists call transformational analysis, that is, to observe whether
the passage from one fact to another produces a difference in signification. Here is an
example: the changeover from ordinary bread to pain de mie involves a difference in
what is signified: the former signifies day-to-day life, the latter a party. Similarly, in
contemporary terms, the changeover from white to brown bread corresponds to a
change in what is signified in social terms, because, paradoxically, brown bread has
become a sign of refinement. We are therefore justified in considering the varieties of
bread as units of signification—at least these varieties—for the same test can also
show that there are insignificant varieties as well, whose use has nothing to do with a
collective institution, but simply with individual taste. In this manner, one could,
proceeding step by step, make a compendium of the differences in signification regulating the system of our food. In other words, it would be a matter of separating the
significant from the insignificant and then of reconstructing the differential system of
signification by constructing, if I may be permitted to use such a metaphor, a veritable
grammar of foods.
It must be added that the units of our system would probably coincide only rarely
with the products in current use in the economy. Within French society, for example,
bread as such does not constitute a signifying unit: in order to find these we must go
further and look for certain of its varieties. In other words, these signifying units are
more subtle than the commercial units and, above all, they have to do with subdivisions with which production is not concerned, so that the sense of the sub-division
can differentiate a single product. Thus it is not at the level of its cost that the sense of
a food item is elaborated, but at the level of its preparation and use. There is perhaps
no natural item of food that signifies anything in itself, except for a few deluxe items
such as salmon, caviar, truffles, and so on, whose preparation is less important than
their absolute cost.
If the units of our system of food are not the products of our economy, can we at
least have some preliminary idea of what they might be? In the absence of a systematic
inventory, we may risk a few hypotheses. A study by P.F. Lazarsfeld12 (it is old, concerned with particulars, and I cite it only as an example) has shown that certain sensorial “tastes” can vary according to the income level of the social groups interviewed:
lower-income persons like sweet chocolates, smooth materials, strong perfumes; the
upper classes, on the other hand, prefer bitter substances, irregular materials, and
light perfumes. To remain within the area of food, we can see that signification (which,
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26
Roland Barthes
itself, refers to a twofold social phenomenon: upper classes/lower classes) does not
involve kinds of products, but flavors: sweet and bitter make up the opposition in signification, so that we must place certain units of the system of food on that level. We can
imagine other classes of units, for example, opposite substances such as dry, creamy,
watery ones, which immediately show their great psychoanalytical potential (and it is
obvious that if the subject of food had not been so trivialized and invested with guilt, it
could easily be subjected to the kind of “poetic” analysis that G. Bachelard applied to
language). As for what is considered tasty, C. Lévi-Strauss has already shown that this
might very well constitute a class of oppositions that refers to national characters
(French versus English cuisine, French versus Chinese or German cuisine, and so on).13
Finally, one can imagine opposites that are even more encompassing, but also more
subtle. Why not speak, if the facts are sufficiently numerous and sufficiently clear, of
a certain “spirit” of food, if I may be permitted to use this romantic term? By this I
mean that a coherent set of food traits and habits can constitute a complex but homogeneous dominant feature useful for defining a general system of tastes and habits.
This “spirit” brings together different units (such as flavor or substance), forming a
composite unit with a single signification, somewhat analogous to the suprasegmental
prosodic units of language. I should like to suggest here two very different examples.
The ancient Greeks unified in a single (euphoric) notion the ideas of succulence,
brightness, and moistness, and they called it yávos. Honey had yávos, and wine was the
yávos of the vineyard.14 Now this would certainly be a signifying unit if we were to
establish the system of food of the Greeks, even though it does not refer to any particular item. And here is another example, modern this time. In the United States, the
Americans seem to oppose the category of sweet (and we have already seen to how
many different varieties of foods this applies) with an equally general category that is
not, however, that of salty—understandably so, since their food is salty and sweet to
begin with—but that of crisp or crispy. Crisp designates everything that crunches,
crackles, grates, sparkles, from potato chips to certain brands of beer; crisp—and this
shows that the unit of food can overthrow logical categories—crisp may be applied to
a product just because it is ice cold, to another because it is sour, to a third because it
is brittle. Quite obviously, such a notion goes beyond the purely physical nature of the
product; crispness in a food designates an almost magical quality, a certain briskness
and sharpness, as opposed to the soft, soothing character of sweet foods.
Now then, how will we use the units established in this manner? We will use them
to reconstruct systems, syntaxes (“menus”), and styles (“diets”)15 no longer in an
empirical but in a semantic way—in a way, that is, that will enable us to compare them
to each other. We now must show, not that which is, but that which signifies. Why?
Because we are interested in human communication and because communication
always implies a system of signification, that is, a body of discrete signs standing out
from a mass of indifferent materials. For this reason, sociology must, as soon as it deals
with cultural “objects” such as clothing, food, and—not quite as clearly—housing,
structure these objects before trying to find out what society does with them. For what
society does with them is precisely to structure them in order to make use of them.
To what, then, can these significations of food refer? As I have already pointed out,
they refer not only to display,16 but to a much larger set of themes and situations. One
could say that an entire “world” (social environment) is present in and signified by food.
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Contemporary Food Consumption
27
Today we have a tool with which to isolate these themes and situations, namely,
advertising. There is no question that advertising provides only a projected image of
reality; but the sociology of mass communication has become increasingly inclined to
think that large-scale advertising, even though technically the work of a particular
group, reflects the collective psychology much more than it shapes it. Furthermore,
studies of motivation are now so advanced that it is possible to analyze cases in which
the response of the public is negative. (I already mentioned the feelings of guilt fostered by an advertising for sugar which emphasized pure enjoyment. It was bad advertising, but the response of the public was nonetheless psychologically most interesting.)
A rapid glance at food advertising permits us rather easily, I think, to identify three
groups of themes. The first of these assigns to food a function that is, in some sense,
commemorative: food permits a person (and I am here speaking of French themes) to
partake each day of the national past. In this case, this historical quality is obviously
linked to food techniques (preparation and cooking). These have long roots, reaching
back to the depth of the French past. They are, we are told, the repository of a whole
experience, of the accumulated wisdom of our ancestors. French food is never supposed to be innovative, except when it rediscovers long-forgotten secrets. The historical theme, which was so often sounded in our advertising, mobilizes two different
values: on the one hand, it implies an aristocratic tradition (dynasties of manufacturers, moutarde du Roy, the Brandy of Napoleon); on the other hand, food frequently
carries notions of representing the flavorful survival of an old, rural society that is itself
highly idealized.17 In this manner, food brings the memory of the soil into our very
contemporary life; hence the paradoxical association of gastronomy and industrialization in the form of canned “gourmet dishes.” No doubt the myth of French cooking
abroad (or as expressed to foreigners) strengthens this “nostalgic” value of food considerably; but since the French themselves actively participate in this myth (especially
when traveling), it is fair to say that through his food the Frenchman experiences a
certain national continuity. By way of a thousand detours, food permits him to insert
himself daily into his own past and to believe in a certain culinary “being” of France.18
A second group of values concerns what we might call the anthropological situation of the French consumer. Motivation studies have shown that feelings of inferiority were attached to certain foods and that people therefore abstained from them.19
For example, there are supposed to be masculine and feminine kinds of food. Furthermore, visual advertising makes it possible to associate certain kinds of foods with
images connoting a sublimated sexuality. In a certain sense, advertising eroticizes
food and thereby transforms our consciousness of it, bringing it into a new sphere of
situations by means of a pseudocausal relationship.
Finally, a third area of consciousness is constituted by a whole set of ambiguous
values of a somatic as well as psychic nature, clustering around the concept of health.
In a mythical way, health is indeed a simple relay midway between the body and the
mind; it is the alibi food gives to itself in order to signify materially a pattern of immaterial realities. Health is thus experienced through food only in the form of “conditioning,” which implies that the body is able to cope with a certain number of day-to-day
situations. Conditioning originates with the body but goes beyond it. It produces
energy (sugar, the “powerhouse of foods,” at least in France, maintains an “uninterrupted flow of energy”; margarine “builds solid muscles”; coffee “dissolves fatigue”);
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28
Roland Barthes
alertness (“Be alert with Lustucru”), and relaxation (coffee, mineral water, fruit juices,
Coca-Cola, and so on). In this manner, food does indeed retain its physiological function by giving strength to the organism, but this strength is immediately sublimated
and placed into a specific situation (I shall come back to this in a moment). This situation may be one of conquest (alertness, aggressiveness) or a response to the stress of
modern life (relaxation). No doubt, the existence of such themes is related to the
spectacular development of the science of nutrition, to which, as we have seen, one
historian unequivocally attributes the evolution of food budgets over the last fifty
years. It seems, then, that the acceptance of this new value by the masses has brought
about a new phenomenon, which must be the first item of study in any psychosociology of food: it is what might be called nutritional consciousness. In the developed
countries, food is henceforth thought out, not by specialists, but by the entire public,
even if this thinking is done within a framework of highly mythical notions. Nor is
this all. This nutritional rationalizing is aimed in a specific direction. Modern nutritional science (at least according to what can be observed in France) is not bound to
any moral values, such as asceticism, wisdom, or purity,20 but on the contrary, to
values of power. The energy furnished by a consciously worked out diet is mythically
directed, it seems, toward an adaptation of man to the modern world. In the final
analysis, therefore, a representation of contemporary existence is implied in the consciousness we have of the function of our food.21
For, as we said before, food serves as a sign not only for themes, but also for situations; and this, all told, means for a way of life that is emphasized, much more than
expressed, by it. To eat is a behavior that develops beyond its own ends, replacing, summing up, and signalizing other behaviors, and it is precisely for these reasons that it is a
sign. What are these other behaviors? Today, we might say all of them: activity, work,
sports, effort, leisure, celebration—every one of these situations is expressed through
food. We might almost say that this “polysemia” of food characterizes modernity; in the
past, only festive occasions were signalized by food in any positive and organized
manner. But today, work also has its own kind of food (on the level of a sign, that is):
energy-giving and light food is experienced as the very sign of, rather than only a help
toward, participation in modern life. The snack bar not only responds to a new need, it
also gives a certain dramatic expression to this need and shows those who frequent it to
be modern men, managers who exercise power and control over the extreme rapidity of
modern life. Let us say that there is an element of “Napoleonism” in this ritually condensed, light, and rapid kind of eating. On the level of institutions, there is also the
business lunch, a very different kind of thing, which has become commercialized in the
form of special menus: here, on the contrary, the emphasis is placed on comfort and
long discussions; there even remains a trace of the mythical conciliatory power of conviviality. Hence, the business lunch emphasizes the gastronomic, and under certain circumstances traditional, value of the dishes served and uses this value to stimulate the
euphoria needed to facilitate the transaction of business. Snack bar and business lunch
are two very closely related work situations, yet the food connected with them signalizes
their differences in a perfectly readable manner. We can imagine many others that
should be catalogued.
This much can be said already: today, at least in France, we are witnessing an extraordinary expansion of the areas associated with food: food is becoming incorporated
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Contemporary Food Consumption
29
into an ever-lengthening list of situations. This adaptation is usually made in the
name of hygiene and better living, but in reality, to stress this fact once more, food is
also charged with signifying the situation in which it is used. It has a twofold value,
being nutrition as well as protocol, and its value as protocol becomes increasingly
more important as soon as the basic needs are satisfied, as they are in France. In other
words, we might say that in contemporary French society food has a constant tendency
to transform itself into situation.
There is no better illustration for this trend than the advertising mythology about
coffee. For centuries, coffee was considered a stimulant to the nervous system (recall
that Michelet claimed that it led to the Revolution), but contemporary advertising,
while not expressly denying this traditional function, paradoxically associates it more
and more with images of “breaks,” rest, and even relaxation. What is the reason for
this shift? It is that coffee is felt to be not so much a substance22 as a circumstance. It is
the recognized occasion for interrupting work and using this respite in a precise protocol of taking sustenance. It stands to reason that if this transferral of the food substance to its use becomes really all-encompassing, the power signification of food will
be vastly increased. Food, in short, will lose in substance and gain in function; this
function will be general and point to activity (such as the business lunch) or to times
of rest (such as coffee); but since there is a very marked opposition between work and
relaxation, the traditionally festive function of food is apt to disappear gradually, and
society will arrange the signifying system of its food around two major focal points: on
the one hand, activity (and no longer work), and on the other hand, leisure (no longer
celebration). All of this goes to show, if indeed it needs to be shown, to what extent
food is an organic system, organically integrated into its specific type of civilization.
Notes
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This article originally appeared in “Vers une psycho-sociologie de l’alimentation moderne” by Roland Barthes, in
Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations no. 5 (September–October 1961), pp. 977–986. Reprinted by permission of
Annales.
1. Annual sugar consumption in the United States is 43 kg. per person; in France 25 kg. per person.
2. F. Charny, Le sucre, Collection “Que sais-je?” (Paris: P. U. F., 1950), p. 8.
3. I do not wish to deal here with the problem of sugar “metaphors” or paradoxes, such as the “sweet” rock singers
or the sweet milk beverages of certain “toughs.”
4. Motivation studies have shown that food advertisements openly based on enjoyment are apt to fail, since they
make the reader feel guilty (J. Marcus-Steiff, Les études de motivation [Paris: Hermann, 1961], pp. 44–45).
5. P. H. Chombart de Lauwe, La vie quotidienne des familles ouvrières (Paris: C.N.R.S., 1956).
6. Marguerite Perrot, Le mode de vie des familles bourgeoises, 1873–1953 (Paris: Colin, 1961). “Since the end of the
nineteenth century, there has been a very marked evolution in the dietary habits of the middle-class families we have
investigated in this study. This evolution seems related, not to a change in the standard of living, but rather to a
transformation of individual tastes under the influence of a greater awareness of the rules of nutrition” (p. 292).
7. J. Marcus-Steiff, Les études de motivation, p. 28.
8. On the latest techniques of investigation, see again J. Marcus-Steiff, Les études de motivation.
9. Yet on this point alone, there are many known facts that should be assembled and systematized: cocktail parties,
formal dinners, degrees and kinds of display by way of food according to the different social groups.
10. R. Barthes, “Le bleu est à la mode cette année: Note sur la recherche des unités signifiantes dans le vêtement de
mode,” Revue française de sociologie 1 (1960): 147–162.
11. I am using the word structure in the sense that it has in linguistics: “an autonomous entity of internal dependencies” (L. Hjelnislev, Essais linguistiques [Copenhagen, 1959], p. 1).
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30
Roland Barthes
12.
13.
14.
15.
P. F. Lazarsfeld, “The Psychological Aspect of Market Research,” Harvard Business Review 13 (1934): 54–71.
C. Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale (Paris: Plon, 1958), p. 99.
H. Jeanmaire, Dionysos (Paris: Payot), p. 510.
In a semantic analysis, vegetarianism, for example (at least at the level of specialized restaurants), would appear as
an attempt to copy the appearance of meat dishes by means of a series of artifices that are somewhat similar to
“costume jewelry” in clothing, at least the jewelry that is meant to be seen as such.
The idea of social display must not be associated purely and simply with vanity; the analysis of motivation, when
conducted by indirect questioning, reveals that worry about appearances is part of an extremely subtle reaction
and that social strictures are very strong, even with respect to food.
The expression cuisine bourgeoise, used at first in a literal, then in a metaphoric way, seems to be gradually disappearing while the “peasant stew” is periodically featured in the photographic pages of the major ladies’ magazines.
The exotic nature of food can, of course, be a value, but in the French public at large, it seems limited to coffee
(tropical) and pasta (Italian).
This would be the place to ask just what is meant by “strong” food. Obviously, there is no psychic quality inherent
in the thing itself. A food becomes “masculine” as soon as women, children, and old people, for nutritional (and
thus fairly historical) reasons, do not consume it.
We need only to compare the development of vegetarianism in England and France.
Right now, in France, there is a conflict between traditional (gastronomic) and modern (nutritional) values.
It seems that this stimulating, re-energizing power is now assigned to sugar, at least in France.
16.
17.
18.
19.
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20.
21.
22.
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3
Distinction: A Social Critique of
the Judgement of Taste*
Pierre Bourdieu (tr. Richard Nice)
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Three Styles of Distinction
The basic opposition between the tastes of luxury and the tastes of necessity is specified in as many oppositions as there are different ways of asserting one’s distinction
vis-à-vis the working class and its primary needs, or—which amounts to the same
thing—different powers whereby necessity can be kept at a distance. Thus, within the
dominant class, one can, for the sake of simplicity, distinguish three structures of the
consumption distributed under three items: food, culture and presentation (clothing,
beauty care, toiletries, domestic servants). These structures take strictly opposite
forms—like the structures of their capital—among the teachers as against the industrial and commercial employers (see Table 3.1). Whereas the latter have exceptionally
high expenditure on food (37 percent of the budget), low cultural costs and medium
spending on presentation and representation, the former, whose total spending is
lower on average, have low expenditure on food (relatively less than manual workers),
limited expenditure on presentation (though their expenditure on health is one of the
highest) and relatively high expenditure on culture (books, papers, entertainments,
sport, toys, music, radio and record-player). Opposed to both these groups are the
members of the professions, who devote the same proportion of their budget to food
as the teachers (24.4 percent), but out of much greater total expenditure (57,122 francs
as against 40,884 francs), and who spend much more on presentation and representation than all other fractions, especially if the costs of domestic service are included,
whereas their cultural expenditure is lower than that of the teachers (or even the engineers
and senior executives, who are situated between the teachers and the professionals,
though nearer the latter, for almost all items).
The system of differences becomes clearer when one looks more closely at the patterns of spending on food. In this respect the industrial and commercial employers
differ markedly from the professionals, and a fortiori from the teachers, by virtue of
the importance they give to cereal-based products (especially cakes and pastries),
wine, meat preserves (foie gras, etc.) and game, and their relatively low spending on
meat, fresh fruit and vegetables. The teachers, whose food purchases are almost
*
Originally published 1979
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32
Pierre Bourdieu
Table 3.1 Yearly spending by teachers, professionals and industrial and commercial employers,
1972.
Type of
spending
% of total
Francs
% of total
Industrial and
commercial employers
Francs
% of total
24.4
12.0
4.3
13,956
12,680
1,298
24.4
22.2
2.3
16,578
5,616
574
Teachers
(higher and secondary)
Francs
9,969
Fooda
Presentationb 4,912
1,753
Culturec
Professionals
37.4
12.7
1.3
a
Includes restaurant or canteen meals.
Clothes, shoes, repairs and cleaning, toiletries, hairdressing, domestic servants.
c
Books, newspapers and magazines, stationery, records, sport, toys, music, entertainments.
Source: C.S. Ill (1972).
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b
identically structured to those of office workers, spend more than all other fractions on
bread, milk products, sugar, fruit preserves and non-alcoholic drinks, less on wine and
spirits and distinctly less than the professions on expensive products such as meat—
especially the most expensive meats, such as mutton and lamb—and fresh fruit and
vegetables. The members of the professions are mainly distinguished by the high proportion of their spending which goes on expensive products, particularly meat (18.3
percent of their food budget), and especially the most expensive meat (veal, lamb,
mutton), fresh fruit and vegetables, fish and shellfish, cheese and aperitifs.1
Thus, when one moves from the manual workers to the industrial and commercial
employers, through foremen, craftsmen and small shopkeepers, economic constraints
tend to relax without any fundamental change in the pattern of spending (see Figure 3.1).
The opposition between the two extremes is established here between the poor and the
rich (nouveau riche), between la bouffe and la grande bouffe 2 the food consumed is
increasingly rich (both in cost and in calories) and increasingly heavy (game, foie gras).
By contrast, the taste of the professionals or senior executives defines the popular taste,
by negation, as the taste for the heavy, the fat and the coarse, by tending towards
the light, the refined and the delicate. The disappearance of economic constraints is
accompanied by a strengthening of the social censorships which forbid coarseness and
fatness, in favour of slimness and distinction. The taste for rare, aristocratic foods points
to a traditional cuisine, rich in expensive or rare products (fresh vegetables, meat).
Finally, the teachers, richer in cultural capital than in economic capital, and therefore
inclined to ascetic consumption in all areas, pursue originality at the lowest economic
cost and go in for exoticism (Italian, Chinese cooking etc.)3 and culinary populism
(peasant dishes). They are thus almost consciously opposed to the (new) rich with their
rich food, the buyers and sellers of grosse bouffe, the ‘fat cats’,4 gross in body and mind,
who have the economic means to flaunt, with an arrogance perceived as ‘vulgar’, a
life-style which remains very close to that of the working classes as regards economic
and cultural consumption.
Eating habits, especially when represented solely by the produce consumed, cannot
of course be considered independently of the whole life-style. The most obvious
reason for this is that the taste for particular dishes (of which the statistical
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A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
33
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Figure 3.1 The food space.
shopping-basket gives only the vaguest idea) is associated, through preparation and
cooking, with a whole conception of the domestic economy and of the division of
labour between the sexes. A taste for elaborate casserole dishes (pot-au-feu, blanquette, daube), which demand a big investment of time and interest, is linked to a
traditional conception of woman’s role. Thus there is a particularly strong opposition
in this respect between the working classes and the dominated fractions of the dominant class, in which the women, whose labour has a high market value (and who,
perhaps as a result, have a higher sense of their own value) tend to devote their spare
time rather to child care and the transmission of cultural capital, and to contest the
traditional division of domestic labour. The aim of saving time and labour in preparation combines with the search for light, low-calorie products, and points towards
grilled meat and fish, raw vegetables (‘salades composées’), frozen foods, yogurt and
other milk products, all of which are diametrically opposed to popular dishes, the
most typical of which is pot-au-feu, made with cheap meat that is boiled (as opposed
to grilled or roasted), a method of cooking that chiefly demands time. It is no accident
that this form of cooking symbolizes one state of female existence and of the sexual
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34
Pierre Bourdieu
division of the labour (a woman entirely devoted to housework is called ‘pot-au-feu’),
just as the slippers put on before dinner symbolize the complementary male role.
Tastes in food also depend on the idea each class has of the body and of the effects
of food on the body, that is, on its strength, health and beauty; and on the categories it
uses to evaluate these effects, some of which may be important for one class and
ignored by another, and which the different classes may rank in very different ways.
Thus, whereas the working classes are more attentive to the strength of the (male)
body than its shape, and tend to go for products that are both cheap and nutritious, the
professions prefer products that are tasty, health-giving, light and not fattening. Taste,
a class culture turned into nature, that is, embodied, helps to shape the class body. It is
an incorporated principle of classification which governs all forms of incorporation,
choosing and modifying everything that the body ingests and digests and assimilates,
physiologically and psychologically. It follows that the body is the most indisputable
materialization of class taste, which it manifests in several ways. It does this first in the
seemingly most natural features of the body, the dimensions (volume, height, weight)
and shapes (round or square, stiff or supple, straight or curved) of its visible forms,
which express in countless ways a whole relation to the body, i.e., a way of treating it,
caring for it, feeding it, maintaining it, which reveals the deepest dispositions of the
habitus. It is in fact through preferences with regard to food which may be perpetuated
beyond their social conditions of production (as, in other areas, an accent, a walk
etc.),5 and also, of course, through the uses of the body in work and leisure which are
bound up with them, that the class distribution of bodily properties is determined.
The quasi-conscious representation of the approved form of the perceived body,
and in particular its thinness or fatness, is not the only mediation through which the
social definition of appropriate foods is established. At a deeper level, the whole body
schema, in particular the physical approach to the act of eating, governs the selection
of certain foods. For example, in the working classes, fish tends to be regarded as an
unsuitable food for men, not only because it is a light food, insufficiently ‘filling’,
which would only be cooked for health reasons, i.e., for invalids and children, but also
because, like fruit (except bananas) it is one of the ‘fiddly’ things which a man’s hands
cannot cope with and which make him childlike (the woman, adopting a maternal
role, as in all similar cases, will prepare the fish on the plate or peel the pear); but
above all, it is because fish has to be eaten in a way which totally contradicts the masculine way of eating, that is, with restraint, in small mouthfuls, chewed gently, with
the front of the mouth, on the tips of the teeth (because of the bones). The whole
masculine identity—what is called virility—is involved in these two ways of eating,
nibbling and picking, as befits a woman, or with whole-hearted male gulps and
mouthfuls, just as it is involved in the two (perfectly homologous) ways of talking,
with the front of the mouth or the whole mouth, especially the back of the mouth, the
throat (in accordance with the opposition, noted in an earlier study, between the
manners symbolized by la bouche and la gueule).6
This opposition can be found in each of the uses of the body, especially in the most
insignificant-looking ones, which, as such, are predisposed to serve as ‘memory
joggers’ charged with the group’s deepest values, its most fundamental ‘beliefs’. It
would be easy to show, for example, that Kleenex tissues, which have to be used delicately, with a little sniff from the tip of the nose, are to the big cotton handkerchief,
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A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
35
which is blown into sharply and loudly, with the eyes closed and the nose held tightly,
as repressed laughter is to a belly laugh, with wrinkled nose, wide-open mouth and
deep breathing (‘doubled up with laughter’), as if to amplify to the utmost an experience which will not suffer containment, not least because it has to be shared, and
therefore clearly manifested for the benefit of others.
And the practical philosophy of the male body as a sort of power, big and strong,
with enormous, imperative, brutal needs, which is asserted in every male posture,
especially when eating, is also the principle of the division of foods between the sexes,
a division which both sexes recognize in their practices and their language. It behooves
a man to drink and eat more, and to eat and drink stronger things. Thus, men will
have two rounds of aperitifs (more on special occasions), big ones in big glasses (the
success of Ricard or Pernod is no doubt partly due to its being a drink both strong and
copious—not a dainty ‘thimbleful’), and they leave the tit-bits (savoury biscuits, peanuts) to the children and the women, who have a small measure (not enough to ‘get
tipsy’) of homemade aperitif (for which they swap recipes). Similarly, among the hors
d’oeuvres, the charcuterie is more for the men, and later the cheese, especially if it is
strong, whereas the crudités (raw vegetables) are more for the women, like the salad;
and these affinities are marked by taking a second helping or sharing what is left over.
Meat, the nourishing food par excellence, strong and strong-making, giving vigour,
blood, and health, is the dish for the men, who take a second helping, whereas the
women are satisfied with a small portion. It is not that they are stinting themselves;
they really don’t want what others might need, especially the men, the natural meateaters, and they derive a sort of authority from what they do not see as a privation.
Besides, they don’t have a taste for men’s food, which is reputed to be harmful when
eaten to excess (for example, a surfeit of meat can ‘turn the blood’, over-excite, bring
you out in spots etc.) and may even arouse a sort of disgust.
Strictly biological differences are underlined and symbolically accentuated by differences in bearing, differences in gesture, posture and behaviour which express a
whole relationship to the social world. To these are added all the deliberate modifications of appearance, especially by use of the set of marks—cosmetic (hairstyle, makeup, beard, moustache, whiskers etc.) or vestimentary—which, because they depend
on the economic and cultural means that can be invested in them, function as social
markers deriving their meaning and value from their position in the system of distinctive signs which they constitute and which is itself homologous with the system of
social positions. The sign-bearing, sign-wearing body is also a producer of signs which
are physically marked by the relationship to the body: thus the valorization of virility,
expressed in a use of the mouth or a pitch of the voice, can determine the whole of
working-class pronunciation. The body, a social product which is the only tangible
manifestation of the ‘person’, is commonly perceived as the most natural expression
of innermost nature. There are no merely ‘physical’ facial signs; the colour and thickness of lipstick, or expressions, as well as the shape of the face or the mouth, are
immediately read as indices of a ‘moral’ physiognomy, socially characterized, i.e., of a
‘vulgar’ or ‘distinguished’ mind, naturally ‘natural’ or naturally ‘cultivated’. The signs
constituting the perceived body, cultural products which differentiate groups by their
degree of culture, that is, their distance from nature, seem grounded in nature. The
legitimate use of the body is spontaneously perceived as an index of moral
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36
Pierre Bourdieu
uprightness, so that its opposite, a ‘natural’ body, is seen as an index of laisser-aller
(‘letting oneself go’), a culpable surrender to facility.
Thus one can begin to map out a universe of class bodies, which (biological accidents apart) tends to reproduce in its specific logic the universe of the social structure.
It is no accident that bodily properties are perceived through social systems of classification which are not independent of the distribution of these properties among the
social classes. The prevailing taxonomies tend to rank and contrast the properties
most frequent among the dominant (i.e., the rarest ones) and those most frequent
among the dominated.7 The social representation of his own body which each agent
has to reckon with,8 from the very beginning, in order to build up his subjective image
of his body and his bodily hexis, is thus obtained by applying a social system of classification based on the same principle as the social products to which it is applied.
Thus, bodies would have every likelihood of receiving a value strictly corresponding to
the positions of their owners in the distribution of the other fundamental properties—
but for the fact that the logic of social heredity sometimes endows those least endowed
in all other respects with the rarest bodily properties, such as beauty (sometimes
‘fatally’ attractive, because it threatens the other hierarchies), and, conversely, sometimes denies the ‘high and mighty’ the bodily attributes of their position, such as
height or beauty.
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Unpretentious Or Uncouth?
It is clear that tastes in food cannot be considered in complete independence of the
other dimensions of the relationship to the world, to others and to one’s own body,
through which the practical philosophy of each class is enacted. To demonstrate this,
one would have to make a systematic comparison of the working-class and bourgeois
ways of treating food, of serving, presenting and offering it, which are infinitely more
revelatory than even the nature of the products involved (especially since most surveys of consumption ignore differences in quality). The analysis is a difficult one,
because each life-style can only really be constructed in relation to the other, which is
its objective and subjective negation, so that the meaning of behaviour is totally
reversed depending on which point of view is adopted and on whether the common
words which have to be used to name the conduct (e.g., ‘manners’) are invested with
popular or bourgeois connotations.
Plain speaking, plain eating: the working-class meal is characterized by plenty
(which does not exclude restrictions and limits) and above all by freedom. ‘Elastic’
and ‘abundant’ dishes are brought to the table—soups or sauces, pasta or potatoes
(almost always included among the vegetables)—and served with a ladle or spoon, to
avoid too much measuring and counting, in contrast to everything that has to be cut
and divided, such as roasts.9 This impression of abundance, which is the norm on
special occasions, and always applies, so far as is possible, for the men, whose plates
are filled twice (a privilege which marks a boy’s accession to manhood), is often balanced, on ordinary occasions, by restrictions which generally apply to the women,
who will share one portion between two, or eat the left-overs of the previous day; a
girl’s accession to womanhood is marked by doing without. It is part of men’s status
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A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
37
to eat and to eat well (and also to drink well); it is particularly insisted that they should
eat, on the grounds that ‘it won’t keep’, and there is something suspect about a refusal.
On Sundays, while the women are on their feet, busily serving, clearing the table,
washing up, the men remain seated, still eating and drinking. These strongly marked
differences of social status (associated with sex and age) are accompanied by no practical differentiation (such as the bourgeois division between the dining room and the
kitchen, where the servants eat and sometimes the children), and strict sequencing of
the meal tends to be ignored. Everything may be put on the table at much the same
time (which also saves walking), so that the women may have reached the dessert, and
also the children, who will take their plates and watch television, while the men are
still eating the main dish and the ‘lad’, who has arrived late, is swallowing his soup.
This freedom, which may be perceived as disorder or slovenliness, is adapted to its
function. Firstly, it is labour-saving, which is seen as an advantage. Because men take
no part in housework, not least because the women would not allow it—it would be
a dishonour to see men step outside their rôle—every economy of effort is welcome.
Thus, when the coffee is served, a single spoon may be passed around to stir it. But
these short cuts are only permissible because one is and feels at home, among the
family, where ceremony would be an affectation. For example, to save washing up,
the dessert may be handed out on improvised plates torn from the cake-box (with a
joke about ‘taking the liberty’, to mark the transgression), and the neighbour invited
in for a meal will also receive his piece of cardboard (offering a plate would exclude
him) as a sign of familiarity. Similarly, the plates are not changed between dishes. The
soup plate, wiped with bread, can be used right through the meal. The hostess will
certainly offer to ‘change the plates’, pushing back her chair with one hand and reaching with the other for the plate next to her, but everyone will protest (‘It all gets mixed
up inside you’) and if she were to insist it would look as if she wanted to show off her
crockery (which she is allowed to if it is a new present) or to treat her guests as strangers, as is sometimes deliberately done to intruders or ‘scroungers’ who never return
the invitation. These unwanted guests may be frozen out by changing their plates
despite their protests, not laughing at their jokes, or scolding the children for their
behaviour (‘No, no, we don’t mind’, say the guests; ‘They ought to know better by
now’, the parents respond). The common root of all these ‘liberties’ is no doubt the
sense that at least there will not be self-imposed controls, constraints and restrictions—especially not in eating, a primary need and a compensation—and especially
not in the heart of domestic life, the one realm of freedom, when everywhere else, and
at all other times, necessity prevails.
In opposition to the free-and-easy working-class meal, the bourgeoisie is concerned
to eat with all due form. Form is first of all a matter of rhythm, which implies expectations, pauses, restraints; waiting until the last person served has started to eat, taking
modest helpings, not appearing over-eager. A strict sequence is observed and all coexistence of dishes which the sequence separates, fish and meat, cheese and dessert, is
excluded: for example, before the dessert is served, everything left on the table, even
the salt-cellar, is removed, and the crumbs are swept up. This extension of rigorous
rules into everyday life (the bourgeois male shaves and dresses first thing every morning, and not just to ‘go out’), refusing the division between home and the exterior, the
quotidian and the extra-quotidian, is not explained solely by the presence of
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38
Pierre Bourdieu
strangers—servants and guests—in the familiar family world. It is the expression of a
habitus of order, restraint and propriety which may not be abdicated. The relation to
food—the primary need and pleasure—is only one dimension of the bourgeois relation to the social world. The opposition between the immediate and the deferred, the
easy and the difficult, substance (or function) and form, which is exposed in a particularly striking fashion in bourgeois ways of eating, is the basis of all aestheticization of
practice and every aesthetic. Through all the forms and formalisms imposed on the
immediate appetite, what is demanded—and inculcated—is not only a disposition to
discipline food consumption by a conventional structuring which is also a gentle, indirect, invisible censorship (quite different from enforced privations) and which is an
element in an art of living (correct eating, for example, is a way of paying homage to
one’s hosts and to the mistress of the house, a tribute to her care and effort). It is also
a whole relationship to animal nature, to primary needs and the populace who indulge
them without restraint; it is a way of denying the meaning and primary function of
consumption, which are essentially common, by making the meal a social ceremony,
an affirmation of ethical tone and aesthetic refinement. The manner of presenting and
consuming the food, the organization of the meal and setting of the places, strictly differentiated according to the sequence of dishes and arranged to please the eye, the
presentation of the dishes, considered as much in terms of shape and colour (like
works of art) as of their consumable substance, the etiquette governing posture and
gesture, ways of serving oneself and others, of using the different utensils, the seating
plan, strictly but discreetly hierarchical, the censorship of all bodily manifestations of
the act or pleasure of eating (such as noise or haste), the very refinement of the things
consumed, with quality more important than quantity—this whole commitment to
stylization tends to shift the emphasis from substance and function to form and
manner, and so to deny the crudely material reality of the act of eating and of the
things consumed, or, which amounts to the same thing, the basely material vulgarity
of those who indulge in the immediate satisfactions of food and drink.10
Given the basic opposition between form and substance, one could re-generate
each of the oppositions between the two antagonistic approaches to the treatment of
food and the act of eating. In one case, food is claimed as a material reality, a nourishing substance which sustains the body and gives strength (hence the emphasis on
heavy, fatty, strong foods, of which the paradigm is pork—fatty and salty—the antithesis of fish—light, lean and bland); in the other, the priority given to form (the shape
of the body, for example) and social form, formality, puts the pursuit of strength and
substance in the background and identifies true freedom with the elective asceticism
of a self-imposed rule. And it could be shown that two antagonistic world views, two
worlds, two representations of human excellence are contained in this matrix. Substance—or matter—is what is substantial, not only ‘filling’ but also real, as opposed
to all appearances, all the fine words and empty gestures that ‘butter no parsnips’ and
are, as the phrase goes, purely symbolic; reality, as against sham, imitation, windowdressing; the little eating-house with its marble-topped tables and paper napkins
where you get an honest square meal and aren’t ‘paying for the wallpaper’ as in fancy
restaurants; being, as against seeming, nature and the natural, simplicity (pot-luck,
‘take it as it comes’, ‘no standing on ceremony’), as against embarrassment, mincing
and posturing, airs and graces, which are always suspected of being a substitute for
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A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
39
substance, i.e., for sincerity, for feeling, for what is felt and proved in actions; it is the
free-speech and language of the heart which make the true ‘nice guy’, blunt, straightforward, unbending, honest, genuine, ‘straight down the line’ and ‘straight as a die’, as
opposed to everything that is pure form, done only for form’s sake; it is freedom and
the refusal of complications, as opposed to respect for all the forms and formalities
spontaneously perceived as instruments of distinction and power. On these moralities, these world views, there is no neutral viewpoint; what for some is shameless and
slovenly, for others is straightforward, unpretentious; familiarity is for some the most
absolute form of recognition, the abdication of all distance, a trusting openness, a
relation of equal to equal; for others, who shun familiarity, it is an unseemly liberty.
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Notes
1. The oppositions are much less clear cut in the middle classes although homologous difference are found between
primary teachers and office workers on the one hand and shopkeepers on the other.
2. La bouffe: ‘grub’, ‘nosh’; grande bouffe: ‘blow-out’ (translator).
3. The preference for foreign restaurants—Italian, Chinese, Japanese and, to a lesser extent, Russian—rises with
level in the social hierarchy. The only exceptions are Spanish restaurants, which are associated with a more
popular form of tourism, and North African restaurants, which are most favoured by junior executives.
4. Les gross: the rich; grosse bouffe: bulk food (cf. grossiste: wholesaler; and English ‘grocer’). See also note 2 above
(translator).
5. That is why the body designates not only present position but also trajectory.
6. In ‘The Economics of Linguistic Exchanges’, Social Science Information, 26 (December 1977), 645–668, Bourdieu
develops the opposition between two ways of speaking, rooted in two relations to the body and the world, which
have a lexical reflection in the many idioms based on two words for ‘mouth’: la bouche and la gueule. La bouche
is the ‘standard’ word for the mouth; but in opposition to la gueule—a slang or ‘vulgar’ word except when
applied to animals—it tends to be restricted to the lips, whereas la gueule can include the whole face or the throat.
Most of the idioms using la bouche imply fastidiousness, effeminacy or disdain; those with la gueule connote
vigour, strength or violence (translator’s note).
7. This means that the taxonomies applied to the perceived body (fat/thin, strong/weak, big/small etc.) are, as
always, at once arbitrary (e.g., the ideal female body may be fat or thin in different economic and social contexts)
and necessary, i.e., grounded in the specific reason of a given social order.
8. More than ever, the French possessive pronouns—which do not mark the owner’s gender—ought to be translated ‘his or her’. The ‘sexism’ of the text results from the male translator’s reluctance to defy the dominant use
of a sexist symbolic system (translator).
9. One could similarly contrast the bowl, which is generously filled and held two-handed for unpretentious drinking, and the cup, into which a little is poured, and more later (‘Would you care for a little more coffee?’), and
which is held between two fingers and sipped from.
10. Formality is a way of denying the truth of the social world and of social relations. Just as popular ‘functionalism’
is refused as regards food, so too there is a refusal of the realistic vision which leads the working classes to accept
social exchanges for what they are (and, for example, to say, without cynicism, of someone who has done a
favour or rendered a service, ‘She knows I’ll pay her back’). Suppressing avowal of the calculation which pervades
social relations, there is a striving to see presents, received or given, as ‘pure’ testimonies of friendship, respect,
affection, and equally ‘pure’ manifestations of generosity and moral worth.
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4
The Culinary Triangle*
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Linguistics has familiarized us with concepts like “minimum vocalism” and “minimum
consonantism” which refer to systems of oppositions between phonemes of so elementary a nature that every known or unknown language supposes them; they are in
fact also the first oppositions to appear in the child’s language, and the last to disappear in the speech of people affected by certain forms of aphasia.
The two concepts are moreover not really distinct, since, according to linguists, for
every language the fundamental opposition is that between consonant and vowel. The
subsequent distinctions among vowels and among consonants result from the application to these derived areas of such contrasts as compact and diffuse, open and
closed, acute and grave.
Hence, in all the languages of the world, complex systems of oppositions among
phonemes do nothing but elaborate in multiple directions a simpler system common
to them all: the contrast between consonant and vowel which, by the workings of a
double opposition between compact and diffuse, acute and grave, produces on the
one hand what has been called the “vowel triangle”:1
a
u
i
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and on the other hand the “consonant triangle”:
k
p
t
It would seem that the methodological principle which inspires such distinctions is
transposable to other domains, notably that of cooking which, it has never been sufficiently emphasized, is with language a truly universal form of human activity: if
there is no society without a language, nor is there any which does not cook in some
manner at least some of its food.
We will start from the hypothesis that this activity supposes a system which is
located—according to very difficult modalities in function of the particular cultures
*
Originally published 1966
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The Culinary Triangle
41
one wants to consider—within a triangular semantic field whose three points correspond respectively to the categories of the raw, the cooked and the rotted. It is clear
that in respect to cooking the raw constitutes the unmarked pole, while the other two
poles are strongly marked, but in different directions: indeed, the cooked is a cultural
transformation of the raw, whereas the rotted is a natural transformation. Underlying
our original triangle, there is hence a double opposition between elaborated/unelaborated on the one hand, and culture/nature on the other.
No doubt these notions constitute empty forms: they teach us nothing about the
cooking of any specific society, since only observation can tell us what each one means
by “raw,” “cooked” and “rotted,” and we can suppose that it will not be the same for all.
Italian cuisine has recently taught us to eat crudités rawer than any in traditional
French cooking, thereby determining an enlargement of the category of the raw. And
we know from some incidents that followed the Allied landings in 1944 that American
soldiers conceived the category of the rotted in more extended fashion than we, since
the odor given off by Norman cheese dairies seemed to them the smell of corpses, and
occasionally prompted them to destroy the dairies.
Consequently, the culinary triangle delimits a semantic field, but from the outside.
This is moreover true of the linguistic triangles as well, since there are no phonemes
a, i, u (or k, p, t) in general, and these ideal positions must be occupied, in each language, by the particular phonemes whose distinctive natures are closest to those for
which we first gave a symbolic representation: thus we have a sort of concrete triangle
inscribed within the abstract triangle. In any cuisine, nothing is simply cooked, but
must be cooked in one fashion or another. Nor is there any condition of pure rawness:
only certain foods can really be eaten raw, and then only if they have been selected,
washed, pared or cut, or even seasoned. Rotting, too, is only allowed to take place in
certain specific ways, either spontaneous or controlled.
Let us now consider, for those cuisines whose categories are relatively well-known,
the different modes of cooking. There are certainly two principal modes, attested in
innumerable societies by myths and rites which emphasize their contrast: the roasted
and the boiled. In what does their difference consist? Roasted food is directly exposed
to the fire; with the fire it realizes an unmediated conjunction, whereas boiled food is
doubly mediated, by the water in which it is immersed, and by the receptacle that
holds both water and food.
On two grounds, then, one can say that the roasted is on the side of nature, the
boiled on the side of culture: literally, because boiling requires the use of a receptacle,
a cultural object; symbolically, in as much as culture is a mediation of the relations
between man and the world, and boiling demands a mediation (by water) of the relation between food and fire which is absent in roasting.
The natives of New Caledonia feel this contrast with particular vividness: “Formerly,” relates M. J. Barrau, “they only grilled and roasted, they only ‘burned’ as the
natives now say . . . The use of a pot and the consumption of boiled tubers are looked
upon with pride . . . as a proof of . . . civilization.”
A text of Aristotle, cited by Salomon Reinach (Cultes, Mythes, Religions, V, p. 63),
indicates that the Greeks also thought that “in ancient times, men roasted everything.”
Behind the opposition between roasted and boiled, then, we do in fact find, as we
postulated at the outset, the opposition between nature and culture. It remains to
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42
Claude Lévi-Strauss
discover the other fundamental opposition which we put forth: that between elaborated and unelaborated.
In this respect, observation establishes a double affinity: the roasted with the raw,
that is to say the unelaborated, and the boiled with the rotted, which is one of the two
modes of the elaborated. The affinity of the roasted with the raw comes from the fact
that it is never uniformly cooked, whether this be on all sides, or on the outside and
the inside. A myth of the Wyandot Indians well evokes what might be called the paradox of the roasted: the Creator struck fire, and ordered the first man to skewer a piece
of meat on a stick and roast it. But man was so ignorant that he left the meat on the
fire until it was black on one side, and still raw on the other . . . Similarly, the Poconachi of Mexico interpret the roasted as a compromise between the raw and the burned.
After the universal fire, they relate, that which had not been burned became white,
that which had been burned turned black, and what had only been singed turned red.
This explanation accounts for the various colors of corn and beans. In British Guiana,
the Waiwai sorcerer must respect two taboos, one directed at roast meat, the other red
paint, and this again puts the roasted on the side of blood and the raw.
If boiling is superior to roasting, notes Aristotle, it is because it takes away the rawness of meat, “roast meats being rawer and drier than boiled meats” (quoted by Reinach, loc. cit.).
As for the boiled, its affinity with the rotted is attested in numerous European languages by such locutions as pot pourri, olla podrida, denoting different sorts of meat
seasoned and cooked together with vegetables; and in German, zu Brei zerkochetes
Fleisch, “meat rotted from cooking.” American Indian languages emphasize the same
affinity, and it is significant that this should be so especially in those tribes that show
a strong taste for gamey meat, to the point of preferring, for example, the flesh of a
dead animal whose carcass has been washed down by the stream to that of a freshly
killed buffalo. In the Dakota language, the same stem connotes putrefaction and the
fact of boiling pieces of meat together with some additive.
These distinctions are far from exhausting the richness and complexity of the contrast
between roasted and boiled. The boiled is cooked within a receptacle, while the roasted
is cooked from without: the former thus evokes the concave, the latter the convex. Also
the boiled can most often be ascribed to what might be called an “endo-cuisine,” prepared for domestic use, destined to a small closed group, while the roasted belongs to
“exo-cuisine,” that which one offers to guests. Formerly in France, boiled chicken was for
the family meal, while roasted meat was for the banquet (and marked its culminating
point, served as it was after the boiled meats and vegetables of the first course, and
accompanied by “extraordinary fruits” such as melons, oranges, olives and capers).
The same opposition is found, differently formulated, in exotic societies. The
extremely primitive Guayaki of Paraguay roast all their game, except when they prepare the meat destined for the rites which determine the name of a new child: this meat
must be boiled. The Caingang of Brazil prohibit boiled meat for the widow and widower, and also for anyone who has murdered an enemy. In all these cases, prescription
of the boiled accompanies a tightening, prescription of the roasted a loosening of
familial or social ties.
Following this line of argument, one could infer that cannibalism (which by definition is an endo-cuisine in respect to the human race) ordinarily employs boiling
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The Culinary Triangle
43
rather than roasting, and that the cases where bodies are roasted—cases vouched for
by ethnographic literature—must be more frequent in exo-cannibalism (eating the
body of an enemy) than in endo-cannibalism (eating a relative). It would be interesting
to carry out statistical research on this point.
Sometimes, too, as is often the case in America, and doubtless elsewhere, the roasted
and the boiled will have respective affinities with life in the bush (outside the village
community) and sedentary life (inside the village). From this comes a subsidiary
association of the roasted with men, the boiled with women. This is notably the case
with the Trumai, the Yagua and the Jivaro of South America, and with the Ingalik of
Alaska. Or else the relation is reversed: the Assiniboin, on the northern plains of North
America, reserve the preparation of boiled food for men engaged in a war expedition,
while the women in the villages never use receptacles, and only roast their meat. There
are some indications that in certain Eastern European countries one can find the same
inversion of affinities between roasted and boiled and feminine and masculine.
The existence of these inverted systems naturally poses a problem, and leads one to
think that the axes of opposition are still more numerous than one suspected, and
that the peoples where these inversions exist refer to axes different from those we at
first singled out. For example, boiling conserves entirely the meat and its juices,
whereas roasting is accompanied by destruction and loss. One connotes economy, the
other prodigality; the former is plebeian, the latter aristocratic. This aspect takes on
primary importance in societies which prescribe differences of status among individuals or groups. In the ancient Maori, says Prytz-Johansen, a noble could himself
roast his food, but he avoided all contact with the steaming oven, which was left to the
slaves and women of low birth. Thus, when pots and pans were introduced by the
whites, they seemed infected utensils; a striking inversion of the attitude which we
remarked in the New Caledonians.
These differences in appraisal of the boiled and the roasted, dependent on the democratic or aristocratic perspective of the group, can also be found in the Western tradition. The democratic Encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert goes in for a veritable
apology of the boiled: “Boiled meat is one of the most succulent and nourishing foods
known to man. . . One could say that boiled meat is to other dishes as bread is to other
kinds of nourishment” (Article “Bouilli”). A half-century later, the dandy BrillatSavarin will take precisely the opposite view: “We professors never eat boiled meat out
of respect for principle, and because we have pronounced ex cathedra this incontestable truth: boiled meat is flesh without its juice. . . This truth is beginning to become
accepted, and boiled meat has disappeared in truly elegant dinners; it has been
replaced by a roast filet, a turbot, or a matelote” (Physiologie du goût, VI, 2).
Therefore if the Czechs see in boiled meat a man’s nourishment, it is perhaps
because their traditional society was of a much more democratic character than that
of their Slavonic and Polish neighbors. One could interpret in the same manner distinctions made—respectively by the Greeks, and the Romans and the Hebrews—on
the basis of attitudes toward roasted and boiled, distinctions which have been noted
by M. Piganiol in a recent article (“Le rôti et le bouilli,” A Pedro Bosch-Gimpera,
Mexico City, 1963).
Other societies make use of the same opposition in a completely different direction.
Because boiling takes place without loss of substance, and within a complete
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44
Claude Lévi-Strauss
enclosure, it is eminently apt to symbolize cosmic totality. In Guiana as well as in the
Great Lakes region, it is thought that if the pot where game is boiling were to overflow
even a little bit, all the animals of the species being cooked would migrate, and the
hunter would catch nothing more. The boiled is life, the roasted death. Does not
world folklore offer innumerable examples of the cauldron of immortality? But there
has never been a spit of immortality. A Cree Indian rite admirably expresses this character of cosmic totality ascribed to boiled food. According to them, the first man was
commanded by the Creator to boil the first berries gathered each season. The cup
containing the berries was first presented to the sun, that it might fulfill its office and
ripen the berries; then the cup was lifted to the thunder, whence rain is expected;
finally the cup was lowered toward the earth, in prayer that it bring forth its fruits.
Hence we rejoin the symbolism of the most distant Indo-European past, as it has
been reconstructed by Georges Dumézil: “To Mitra belongs that which breaks of
itself, that which is cooked in steam, that which is well sacrificed, milk . . . and to
Varuna that which is cut with the axe, that which is snatched from the fire, that which
is ill-sacrificed, the intoxicating soma” (Les dieux des Germains, p. 60). It is not a little
surprising—but highly significant—to find intact in genial mid-nineteenth-century
philosophers of cuisine a consciousness of the same contrast between knowledge and
inspiration, serenity and violence, measure and lack of measure, still symbolized by
the opposition of the boiled and the roasted: “One becomes a cook but one is born a
roaster” (Brillat-Savarin); “Roasting is at the same time nothing, and an immensity”
(Marquis de Cussy).
Within the basic culinary triangle formed by the categories of raw, cooked and
rotted, we have, then, inscribed two terms which are situated: one, the roasted, in the
vicinity of the raw; the other, the boiled, near the rotted. We are lacking a third term,
illustrating the concrete form of cooking showing the greatest affinity to the abstract
category of the cooked. This form seems to us to be smoking, which like roasting
implies an unmediated operation (without receptacle and without water) but differs
from roasting in that it is, like boiling, a slow form of cooking, both uniform and
penetrating in depth.
Let us try to determine the place of this new term in our system of opposition. In
the technique of smoking, as in that of roasting, nothing is interposed between meat
and fire except air. But the difference between the two techniques comes from the fact
that in one the layer of air is reduced to a minimum, whereas in the other it is brought
to a maximum. To smoke game, the American Indians (in whose culinary system
smoking occupies a particularly important place) construct a wooden frame (a buccan)
about five feet high, on top of which they place the meat, while underneath they light
a very small fire which is kept burning for forty-eight hours or more. Hence for one
constant—the presence of a layer of air—we note two differentials which are expressed
by the opposition close/distant and rapid/slow. A third differential is created by the
absence of a utensil in the case of roasting (any stick doing the work of a spit), since
the buccan is a constructed framework, that is, a cultural object.
In this last respect, smoking is related to boiling, which also requires a cultural
means, the receptacle. But between these two utensils a remarkable difference appears,
or more accurately, is instituted by the culture precisely in order, it seems, to create
the opposition, which without such a difference might have remained too ill-defined
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The Culinary Triangle
45
to take on meaning. Pots and pans are carefully cared for and preserved utensils,
which one cleans and puts away after use in order to make them serve their purpose
as many times as possible; but the buccan must be destroyed immediately after use,
otherwise the animal will avenge itself, and come in turn to smoke the huntsman.
Such, at least, is the belief of those same natives of Guiana whose other symmetrical
belief we have already noted: that a poorly conducted boiling, during which the cauldron overflowed, would bring the inverse punishment, flight of the quarry, which the
huntsman would no longer succeed in overtaking. On the other hand, as we have
already indicated, it is clear that the boiled is opposed both to the smoked and the
roasted in respect to the presence or absence of water.
But let us come back for a moment to the opposition between a perishable and a
durable utensil which we found in Guiana in connection with smoking and boiling. It
will allow us to resolve an apparent difficulty in our system, one which doubtless has
not escaped the reader. At the start we characterized one of the oppositions between
the roasted and the boiled as reflecting that between nature and culture. Later, however, we proposed an affinity between the boiled and the rotted, the latter defined as
the elaboration of the raw by natural means. Is it not contradictory that a cultural
method should lead to a natural result? To put it in other terms, what, philosophically, will be the value of the invention of pottery (and hence of culture) if the native’s
system associates boiling and putrefaction, which is the condition that raw food
cannot help but reach spontaneously in the state of nature?
The same type of paradox is implied by the problematics of smoking as formulated
by the natives of Guiana. On the one hand, smoking, of all the modes of cooking,
comes closest to the abstract category of the cooked; and—since the opposition
between raw and cooked is homologous to that between nature and culture—it represents the most “cultural” form of cooking (and also that most esteemed among the
natives). And yet, on the other hand, its cultural means, the buccan, is to be immediately destroyed. There is striking parallel to boiling, a method whose cultural means
(the receptacles) are preserved, but which is itself assimilated to a sort of process of
auto-annihilation, since its definitive result is at least verbally equivalent to that putrefaction which cooking should prevent or retard.
What is the profound sense of this parallelism? In so-called primitive societies,
cooking by water and smoking have this in co...
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