10 things for historians of food to think about, 1-2
In many ways, history of food is going great guns. Twenty years ago, we knew rather little about it, especially outside the West. Indeed we didn’t have much idea about food outside the West. Now every region has its cookbook, increasing numbers have books dedicated to their food history, or at least articles in journals or encyclopedias. A vast piling up of knowledge.
But how are we to prevent this becoming antiquarian, a display of scholarship for the sake of scholarship? What sense can we make of the pile.
When I saw that the subject for this year’s Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery was Food and Language, it occurred to me that food and language have lots in common. They are both systems we have created to help us survive in the world around us.
Well, actually it wasn’t the first time it had occurred to me because it was impossible to live in Hawaii for ten years without being struck by the parallel creation there of a “pidgin” language, Hawaii Creole Dialect, and a “pidgin” cuisine, Local Cuisine.
So now I had the chance to explore these interesting parallels a bit further. Since only a few of you who read my blog were in Oxford, I thought it might be fun to share some of my thoughts with you.
Now, understand, I am not a linguist, so I may be skating on thin ice in some of the things I say about historical linguistics.
And second, understand that I am using “cuisine” not food as the parallel to language. And by that I simply mean a style of cooking and eating. I don’t mean high cuisine. Any recognizable style of cooking and eating counts as a cuisine for me. “Food” is a hopelessly vague and general term including everything from farming to food aid, from policy to processing. All animals eat food. Only humans eat cuisines.
So here are the first two of ten things I think we might pick up from linguists.
1. Create an Inventory of Cuisines
Linguists estimate that there are somewhere between three thousand living languages and ten thousand living languages, most scholars tending toward an estimate of four or five thousand languages, all of which they have named.
How many cuisines are there? For all the outpouring of cookbooks, handbooks, and encyclopedias of food, so far as I know we have not the foggiest notion how many cuisines exist, nor have we gone about naming these cuisines. What about a map or maps of the world’s cuisines, now and in the past? Again nothing. A pretty sad state of affairs, I’d say.
Of course, to make an inventory or to draw maps, we have to have criteria for deciding when two cuisines are really different, not just variants. So the second thing we might do, actually we have to do this first is
2. Establish Rules for Deciding When Cuisines are Different
Languages, just like cuisines, come in infinite gradations, each individual speaking or eating his own variant. So how do linguists decide when two cuisines really are different? One way of distinguishing dialects from cuisines is to ask whether they are mutually unintelligible. To most English speakers, British English (and its regional dialects), American English, Australian English and Indian English are mutually intelligible. French and Hindi are not. Can cuisines be mutually unintelligible?
I think so. I remember a Mexican meal served at the Oxford Symposium a decade or more ago, when Mexican cuisine was even less known outside Mexico than it now is. Only three of us in a dining room that seated 150 to 200 people had encountered maize tortillas: the woman who supplied them, the attaché from the Mexican Embassy, and me because I had recently moved to Mexico. We were bombarded with questions.
How did you hold tortillas? Did you eat them before the meal or with the meal? And how did you judge whether they were good or bad? One of the most diverse, inquisitive, and knowledgeable groups of diners you could find anywhere was completely baffled by Mexican Cuisine, at least by the part of it that you might call the “maize cuisine.”
When a group of cooks and diners does not recognize the ingredients, nor understand the rules for combining them, nor have any idea of the context in which certain dishes would be used, nor of the meaning to be attached to them, then he or she does not understand the cuisine. It is a different cuisine.
So with that in hand, anyone want to make a guess at how many cuisines there are in the world today? in the past?
Rachel –
Tricky business!!
Indeed, as you say, linguists can’t agree on languages-language families…
So, how could we hope to develop categories for different cuisines?
Very interesting question.
PS – I still don’t get notifications of your new blogs!
Diana.
Hi Diana, no, linguists can’t agree. But some clarifications have come from their attempts to get clear. We do have a range for the numbers of languages. We do have some ideas about language families, especially the great big well-studied ones.
My sense, and of this more later, is that there are far few cuisines than languages. When I was in West Africa (Niger Delta), so far as I could see the girls in the school who spoke a daunting number of languages were all accustomed to eating essentially the same cuisine. I would also say that English and French, say, who speak different languages, eat the same cuisine.
What I want to avoid is the endless proliferation of details about different cuisines. I want structure!
Agree with that, Rachel – that there are probably less cuisines than languages.
I was amused at your timing, though, because I was just reviewing some recent stuff on linguistic re-orderings of to-badawi, the languages of the Beja, and several other languages. There is a general streaming away from anything faintly ‘Hamitic’ by way of languages, in part because of the bad-press-baggage attached to the term (about which I’m doing a blog just now).
Here, too, (Burundi) folks speak several languages but eat just about the same things with differences often more according to strata/wealth and-or season.
Look forward to your ongoing discussions of all of this.