The Agency of Eating by Emma-Jayne Abbots

Author:Emma-Jayne Abbots
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Inscribing citizenship: Coterminous bodies and shared substance

I have thus far indicated how important bodies are to understanding food festivals through my discussion of affect and the senses and, in framing food festivals as bio-authorial encounters, have sought to demonstrate how cultural lessons about food are transmitted by, in and through bodies. I have also pointed to the ways food festivals can construct social cohesion and community spirit. I now want to draw these two threads together and consider how sameness and difference are constructed through eating and the body, as well as introduce ways in which eating can enmesh bodies to those of others and root them to place. I therefore return to questions of shared substance and relatedness.

Eating is curiously absent in the food festival literature. Ethnographies detail which foods are cooked, how they are transformed into various dishes and how much food is consumed, in addition to giving accounts of the smells, noises and sights. These multiple embodied and affective moments can all be seen as aspects of eating but, despite representations of these multisensory encounters, we rarely get a sense of festivalgoers’ experiences of tasting, swallowing, ingesting and digesting the food being celebrated. Echoing much work in interdisciplinary food studies, so much attention – with good reason – has been centred on which foods are valued and why, and the political and economic processes and consequences of these selections. Scholarship has tended to stop at the festival stall instead of following the food into the eating body. The critical role that eating plays is nonetheless implied. In reference to Bergamo salami, Cavanagh states that ‘consuming this salami would equate with consuming a little bit of that culture and history’ (2007: 159), and Adema writes that ‘the production and consumption of communal identities come together in the symbolic consumption and the literal consumption of iconic foods’ (2009: 19). It is on these foundational hints that I look to build and, in order to do so, I turn to work on citizenship and belonging in a national context.

Earle (2012) explores the relationship between food, bodies and colonialism in the Americas in the period 1492–1700, and demonstrates that diet was underpinned by and produced sameness and difference between Spaniards and Amerindians. European foods were essential, she argues, for keeping the colonizers Spanish and also for drawing the indigenous population into the colonial centre by making them more civilized. This civilizing process was, in part, performed through cultural practices, such as dress and language, but was also enacted through a corporeal transformation. Earle explains that Spaniards understood that Amerindian bodies would become European if they were to ingest European foods. Hispanicization and the associated notions of civilization and humanness were thereby to be produced by changes in diet. She states: ‘Amerindians would not merely becomes more civilized but would actually become more like the Spanish were they to eat their foods’ (ibid.: 165). The converse is also the case, and there was a concurrent ‘danger’ that the colonizers would become less Spanish should they eat the foods of the New World.

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