Food, Morals and Meaning: The Pleasure and Anxiety of Eating
Review by Jennifer Hillier
John Coveney, Food, Morals and Meaning: The Pleasure and Anxiety of Eating (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 206, rrp. $150.
According to John Coveney, the science of nutrition has become one of the growth industries of the current era:
If popularity is judged by the amount of time, space and money expended in attempting to know and understand it, nutrition has a high approval rating. The latest discovery about what to eat and how to eat it is quickly turned into books and articles, receives immediate media coverage and finds a ready market with professional and popular audiences. Apparently people cannot wait to be told what they are doing wrong; they readily confess to their alimentary sins; and they eagerly attempt to put things right (p.10).
While this reader might choose not to identify with the guilt ridden subjects of Coveney’s text, I can now situate the remark, "I’ve been very bad today, far too much fat and sugar in that chocolate bar," as a response to the science of nutrition’s "expert gaze".
Coveney links the discourse of nutrition with that of another intellectual growth industry, the discourse about discourse deriving from the work of the French critical theorist Michel Foucault. However, the book’s Foucauldian take on nutrition is much more than a empty theoretical move.
Food, Morals and Meaning examines "our need to discipline our desires, our appetites and our pleasures at the table. It [argues] that, as well as providing a scientific rationale for eating, nutrition forms the moral basis of modern food choice, requiring us to rationalize our food pleasures."
Coveney plots the "moral" aspect of food choice through history. He shows how "problems" associated with the early Christian’s need to curb "natural" appetites were prefigured in antiquity and how eighteenth and nineteenth century scientific knowledge also grew out of religious concerns about indulgence and excess. In contemporary western society moral concerns about food arise as the "paradox of plenty", where nutrition confronts the problems of an affluent lifestyle and individuals again construct their food choices along ethical lines.
The publisher’s blurb recommends the book as "essential reading for those studying nutrition, public health, sociology of health and illness and sociology of the body," and I can see that it tries to introduce its theoretical terminology in an accessible and gradual manner. Yet, while the book shows convincingly that Foucault can help one "get outside" conventional nutrition discourse, it doesn’t offer the reader much opportunity to get outside Foucault. I would have preferred to see Coveney articulate the assumptions of French theory more transparently and to hear his particular voice a little more clearly.
As a gastronomic reader, I would be particularly interested to see where gastronomic discourse would fit into his schema. Coveney defines gastronomy rather narrowly as "the study of cuisines of different cultures", but surely gastronomy is a much broader discourse with a core concern about the relationship between food and pleasure. A book, which purports to examine the "problem" of this relationship in the history of Western thought, might at least canvass Brillat-Savarin’s philosophic inheritance surrounding the pleasures of the table.
Indeed my gastronomic imagination was aroused by the mention of two philosophies of the table. Firstly, discussing Kant’s "attitude to the dinner party" in the Tischgesellschaft [Table-fellowship], Coveney observes that, "The Tischgesellschaft tempered the "viciousness of the intellectual fight, since argumentation can be interrupted by eating; one can oscillate between ‘the thought’ and ‘the bowl’" (p.61). Coveney interprets this as the physical pleasure of eating being "mortgaged to the need to advance ideas" (p.61). However, my gastronomic antenna is humming to the significance of Kant’s rhetorical motive in illustrating his case with a dinner. This reaches back to a rich tradition of table talk and philosophy, one example being Plato’s Symposium.
Secondly, Coveney emphasizes that the Christian Eucharist "became an austere acknowledgment of Christ’s broken and suffering body" (p.174). Here, he draws on Michael Symons’ description of a ritual banquet evaporated "into the slimmest of wafers and most reverential sips of wine" (p.43). But for Symons the point of discovering the feast at the heart of the symbolic Eucharist is precisely to affirm a gastronomic perspective that recognises the centrality of the pleasures of the table to culture. Early Christianity began with "table-fellowship" and was associated with agape, the "love feast", and today open-minded Christians celebrate the Eucharist around a table with generous food and wine, thus restoring the original intention of the shared banquet. Even during the "flesh denying" Middle Ages, pre-Lenten Carnival lampooned the Christian orthodoxy with revelry and feasts celebrating gluttony and excess.
One can imagine a Foucauldian critique of modern nutrition discourse focussing on its role as a scientific instrument of social discipline. Despite his concern with the social construction of categories like "good eaters", "responsible parents" and "healthy children", Coveney’s position is more complex than this. He concludes his argument with his emphasis still firmly on individuals who make choices, making the point that discourses are productive in the emergence of such individuals and that no one discourse is truly dominant. This seems to me to be a very useful step towards creating a more critical approach to nutritional practice — and one capable of fruitful debate with the kind of gastronomic discourse about food and pleasure mentioned above.
References:
Michael Symons, Eating into Thinking: Explorations into the Sociology of Cuisine, Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Flinders University of South Australia, 1991.
Jennifer Hillier is a former restaurateur and currently a postgraduate student at Flinders University working on cookbooks.
|
