Food is Culture (review)

To understand food is to understand the human condition in all its complexity; it offers a key to various types of social organization, uses of technology, expressions of a market economy, and patterns of daily life. For decades, ethnographers and anthropologists have focused on preindustrial food systems as a way to discuss how a given people-group organizes and gives meaning to the world it creates and inhabits—that food is part of a cultural system. In the past twenty years, studies of food production and consumption have gone far beyond isolated portraits of human activity toward more integrated analyses of nutritional regimes in terms of self, society, politics, and economic life. Moreover, food has served a focal point for cultural studies of complex societies as it brings into view symbolic meanings of human activity born of changing material conditions, scientific and medical understandings, as well as political and social contingencies. No one has done more to advance this approach than Massimo Montanari, medieval historian at the University of Bologna, Italy. With this latest work, Montanari encapsulates a thirty-year career of research and writing on European culinary history in twentythree short “thought pieces” (none more than eight pages, hardly long enough to be chapters). And thoughtful they are, for this work goes much further than a collection of assorted commentaries on the cultural expressions and manifestations of alimentary systems—it presents a sustained and convincing argument that food IS culture.

The thesis Montanari advances rests on the premise that every facet of food production, distribution, and consumption is itself a cultural act, encoded with implicit and explicit intentions which, when studied closely, reveal how a people make sense of what they eat and why. Montanari sets out his argument with a brief sketch of the thought behind how humans transformed food (and themselves) from a state of nature to a state of culture, from a hunting economy to an economy characterized by commodity production. Rejecting the historical materialist’s point of view, Montanari eschews the march of economic development away from agricultural life, questioning the oversimplified view of a transition from so-called “primitive” to “civilized” societies. Instead, he offers another avenue that allows the two economic models to unfold concurrently in ways where tradition and innovation may intersect. Even today, how we think about the “natural” or the “traditional” may appear as harkening for a simpler way of life, while in reality that life includes knowledge, techniques, and in some cases the most successful innovations, all of which make up the culture of another time or place.

Montanari continues to disrupt the simple binaries of then and now, the regional and the international. For instance, how we eat is neither global nor local, but both (glocal). This kind of convergence comes forth in examples such as coffee, chocolate, and bread where each is prepared and used differently according to native tastes. Montanari relies on a more fluid concept of culture even as he posits a structural explanation of cuisine and its rules of implementation (what he calls a “grammar of cuisine”). By analyzing the ingredients and preparations within a given schemata, the meaning of a particular cuisine should not be considered as part and parcel of the nutritive and economic aspects of the food itself, but also as “an aggregate of conventions [. . . ] a lexicon that redefines itself in the changing context of environmental, economic, social and cultural circumstances” (99). The function of these foods serves different purposes according to the ways in which different societies adapt and vary each comestible according to their needs and wants.

This historical anthropology of food relies heavily upon examples from the pre-modern world of Italy and Western Europe with the occasional reference to Asia and Africa. This perspective gives us a clear picture of a world that is familiar, yet far from our own, one where the danger and fear of hunger was palpable and the noble entitlement to plenty physically real. As Montanari reminds us, this medieval...