Conference: Eat and Drink and Be Merry? Cultural Meaning of Food and Drink in the 21st Century
Report by Danielle Gallegos and Felicity Newman
Visiting Amsterdam for the conference on "Eat and Drink and Be Merry? Cultural Meaning of Food and Drink in the 21st Century" (3-5 June 2002), the last thing we expected to find was the pre-eminence of "Australian chocolate", that’s right chocolate. The day we arrived we were amazed to come across a shop selling Australian ice cream and chocolate with no clues or even any familiar logos to help us figure out what was going on. But more of chocolate later.
We were asked to submit our papers in advance so that all participants in the six workshops would have read them. Each workshop met for two sessions and delegates used the time to provide material that informed their papers.
This only allowed for limited attendance at parallel sessions – the usual conference gripe. But it also meant we could present material that informed our papers.
Sessions were entitled:
- Stories of Eating and non-Eating
- Ideologies and Taboos
- Health, Healing and Well-being
- The Media: The Shaping of Food and Drink as Cultural Concepts
- Calculated Risks? Responses to and Ethical Implications of Food Phenomena
- Social Practices of Food and Drink
Felicity’s paper "A Disorderly Seder: Food, Identity and Secular Judaism" was included in the panel on "Ideologies and Taboos", while Danielle’s "Risky Business: The Ethnicisation of Nutrition" was in the panel "Calculated Risks". We both thought our papers would have been equally well placed in the "Social Practices" session but it seemed to make sense in the end. The beautiful Felix Meritis building provided an atmospheric setting but was by no means user friendly.
Panel Sessions:
Felicity: The highlight of my session was Roger Haden’s paper "From Macrocosm to Microwave: The Critical Environment Of Taste, Premodern and Contemporary". Roger demonstrated that metaphors of heat and taste are anything but new. I was pleased that Trinidadian Giselle Rampaul made extensive use of and drew parallels with my work on Jewish food. My presentation included a tongue in cheek video "cookumentary" on Passover food, including the ubiquitous Jewish mother (guess who?) cooking chicken soup. Along with Danielle’s presentation it was one of the rare moments of the conference where food itself was in the forefront.
Danielle: This session was perhaps dominated by a discussion on GM food and the acceptability of the industrial by "the consumer". The highlight of this session was the paper presented by Matias Pasquali who compared and contrasted the acceptability of GM foods between Italians and Dutch. The main difference, it would seem, is that for Italians, cuisine equates to identity and that GM food is associated with uniformity and americanisation. What was evident was the very pro-GM food stance adopted by the Dutch. My paper provided some light relief, with participants asked to identify the location of a particular advertisement for rice. After replies of Tuscany, somewhere in France and various other European destinations, to find out that it was in fact Newcastle, Australia, met with cries of disbelief.
The session on Media that we both attended was notable for David Goldstein’s paper "Recipes for Living: Martha Stewart and the New American Subject". David was able to deliver a scholarly exploration of Stewart’s deployment of georgic poetics on contemporary American culture, whist still managing to dish a little of the dirt on Martha.
Though we saw and tried an abundance of magnificent produce in Amsterdam’s markets including some gorgeous asparagus and an unfamiliar vegetable called zeekraal, the food we ate in restaurants during our stay was disappointing and made us think, yet again, how spoiled for choice and how "foodwise" we Australians are.
At the conference dinner we were served a rijstafel, and, at the risk of sounding like ungrateful guests, the Dutch influence hasn’t enhanced what we understand to be Indonesian cooking. We were also astonished at some of the delegates' inability to eat chilli! We were however surprised and pleased to end up sitting next to the charming, witty, urbane Minister for Agriculture. He turned out to be a great fan of Australian chocolate! We wondered if any of our politicians could speak for 15 minutes on the aesthetics of Japanese food? We also wondered how they were able to fund a conference without charging delegates for registration or the conference dinner?
Keynote Speakers:
Andrew Dalby was the first keynote speaker and the author of Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices. His discussion was a little meandering but centred on the long historical links between food and medicine, diet and health. His main message was that globalisation has been occurring for a very long time, and his example of ginger being taken on migratory treks as far back as 5-6000 years ago certainly exemplified this. Some of his information centred on the islands of Ambon – significant players in the origin of spices, and yet so little is known about this close Australian neighbour.
Paul Thompson describes himself as an Economist-Philosopher and is Professor of Applied Ethics at Purdue University. As befitting an economist his presentation was titled "You are NOT what you eat" and concluded, "You are what you BUY". After discussing the three main ethical questions associated with food, which he identified as environmental, social justice and identity, he argued that once you have bought the item, there is no further effect. His presentation highlighted that the interaction between food ethics and morality, between aesthetics and ethics and how these are circulated and the role for government, is an area which needs more thoughtful research and discussion.
Nira Rousso is food writer for Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper. Her subject, "300 Calories per Person: Observations on the Ethics and Poetics of Food Deprivation during the Holocaust", of course appeared a little daunting. Nira explained how her mission began with a letter from a reader requesting help in finding the recipe for a dish his mother had cooked (the dish is called Mandelbuchnik, mandelbourchinik or bulbanick and is a savoury bread made from potato). The response she got was astonishing and has resulted in her role in retrieving and archiving the lost culinary treasures of Ashkenazi Jewry. Those of you familiar with the Terezin concentration camp cookbook In Memory’s Kitchen, may still be surprised to discover that it is only one of many such books, attesting to the centrality of foodways in Jewish life and women’s identity. It was with great pleasure that I was able to give her a copy of Fantasy Cooking, a book edited by Australian Jewish survivor Edith Peer, purchased from the Jewish Museum in Sydney. It was devastating to learn that the Nazis had actually calculated that 300 calories per day would ensure that a (male) slave labourer could work and live for exactly 3 months. Nira mediated her talk with artwork from Holocaust survivors and though all of us turned up from a sense of duty we took something precious away. Contemplation of lack of food felt like a responsible note on which to end this culinary talkfest.
The plenary session provided an opportunity for all of us to hear what had been discussed during sessions and was very lively. The Europeans couldn’t understand the preponderance of antipodeans: of the 30 speakers at the conference, five were Australian and two New Zealanders. We saw it as our duty to inform them that Australia was (to quote Andrè Cointreau) a culinary laboratory and also to give them the bad news that Australian chocolate was probably a marketing ploy. Delegate and marketing guru Jordan Bel had visited the shop and interviewed the manager without getting any wiser. It befell a former Perth resident and wife of a delegate to explain that she had met the owner who confessed he had visited Australia where he first ate chocolate with nuts in it and thought it would go down well in Holland. And the rest is history. So we were able to leave Amsterdam having solved the "Australian Chocolate" conundrum and with our bags weighed down with Dutch chocolate!
Murdoch University
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