More Scholars Focus on Historical, Social, and Cultural Meanings of Food, but Some Critics Say It's Scholarship-Lite

Article from The Chronicle of Higher Education
Research and Publishing Issue
July 9,1999 Toronto

By JENNIFER K. RUARK

On a recent Friday afternoon at Rube's, "The Rice Maven's Haven" in the St. Lawrence Market here, yuppies toting cell phones scooped up wehani brown for $4 a pound, black Japonica for $2.95, and fragrant pecan rice for $4.95.

Several blocks away, Warren J. Belasco smiled to think that rice, long associated in Anglo culture with despised immigrants, drooling babies, and toothless old people, had become fashionable. "It's marketed as hip and sexy, in contrast to the square potato," he said.

At the conference where he was speaking, it was clear that Mr. Belasco's specialty, "food studies," is much like rice: Once shunned as too ordinary, it's now a hot commodity, available in countless varieties.

A professor of American studies at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, Mr. Belasco is one of a growing number of scholars interested in the historical, social, and cultural meanings of food. Most of the panels at the conference -- a joint meeting of the association for the Study of Food and Society and the Society for Agriculture and Human Values -- were filled by nutritionists, rural sociologists, and political economists, who talked about sustainable agriculture, food security, and farmers' rights. But many of the participants were historians, philosophers, folklorists, or literary scholars, discussing what we can learn about human nature and particular societies from the way people cook, eat, market, and talk about food.

Mr. Belasco, for example, didn't give advertising all the credit for rice's rebirth. He also pointed to the modernist search for "authenticity," a postmodern desire to incorporate the Other, and the recent tendency to think of meals as medicine. "Grains have been recast as protective and life-sustaining," he said.

At panel sessions and over elegant meals featuring organic produce or one of Toronto's 80 different ethnic cuisines, other scholars talked about food as a symbol of power, an aesthetic display, a community ritual, and an expression of ideology or identity.