What Can the Culinary Historian Learn from the Linguist? Preamble
The theme of the 2009 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery was Food and Language. I gave a paper on a topic I had been mulling over for some time, “What can the culinary historian learn from the linguist?” It has now been published by the marvelous Prospect Books, which I urge you to support if you have any interest in food and its history.
Because the topic bears on the question of how to think about the history of cuisine that lurks behind the submissions to the Intangible Heritage Program of UNESCO I have been writing about, because the Proceedings have very limited distribution, I’ve decided to post the paper here.
Today I offer the preamble. I will follow up in the coming days with the ten suggestions and some commentary where my ideas have moved along. As always, I welcome comments.
What Can the Culinary Historian Learn from the Linguist? Ten Suggestions
Some years ago, I lived in Hawaii. If you can penetrate the cloud of marketing put out by the tourist industry, you realize that this is one of the most multi-cultural lands on earth.
A population of only a million people is made up of roughly equal numbers of three great diasporas: one from the South Pacific, one from Europe and America, and a third from Asia. Each of those diasporas is in itself complex: native Hawaiians, Samoans and Tongans; British, Germans, Mexicans, and Americans; and Hakka and Han Chinese, Japanese and Okinawans, Tagalog and Ilocano Filipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese and Thais, who arrived at different times and for different reasons.
With no group in the majority, with no group having cultural or economic dominance, living in a few hundred square miles of the most isolated inhabited land on earth, it was a case of learn to live together or perish.
As a result, the inhabitants of Hawaii created a creole language, known to Islanders as Pidgin and linguists as Hawaii Creole, so that they could communicate. It is now the main language in the islands, the first language of half a million people, and has its own printed literature.
They also created in lunch wagons and restaurants a fusion cuisine known to residents as Local Food. Everyone in the Islands drew parallels between cuisine and language. A book in pidgin describing Local Food, Pupus to Da Max (roughly translatable as “everything you need to know about the foods you take to a pot luck) is a long-time best seller in Hawaii. Greeting cards chirping phrases such as “It musubi your birthday” fly off the shelves, everyone enjoying the play on the word musubi, the nori-wrapped, Spam-topped rice log ultimately of Japanese origin that is the favorite quick lunch sold in every convenience store.[i]
The parallel creation of a creole language and a creole food made me think about the possibility that the culinary historian could learn from the linguist.
Since the study of language history goes back further–through the great scholars of the nineteenth century, the work of William Jones in the late eighteenth century, and the studies of antiquarians in the Renaissance—and has engaged more scholars than the history of cuisine, the question is what can the culinary historian learn from the way that linguists have framed questions about the history of languages that will offer new perspectives or open up new lines of research?
The possibility that we can learn something from linguists is made yet more plausible when we consider the parallels between language and cuisine. While many different species communicate and while all species feed themselves, no other species carries these activities to the same level as humans. Human language, both spoken and written, is vastly more elaborate and complex than that of other species. Human alimentation is similarly elaborate and complex, being based on cooked, not raw foods.
Before I proceed, let me clarify a couple of issues.
First, comparing language and cuisine as means of human expression, or as ways of expressing identity, although a perfectly legitimate enquiry (indeed one to which the Hawaii case lends itself) is not my major interest. Exploring the parallels between the changing global distribution of languages and of food is.[ii]
Second, I am no expert in historical linguistics. What I have learned I have learned from books for a general audience. I have no considered opinion on theoretical debates such as the origin of words or the emergence of syntax.
To start, we need to decide what in the culinary sphere corresponds to language. Language is clearly a system, comprising at the least sounds, words, ways of combining words (grammar), the context in which words are used, and the meanings words are given. Because the concept “food” is so vague and general, so lacking in any sense of system, it does not seem an adequate equivalent. I propose instead to use the concept “cuisine” for the system of ingredients, rules and techniques for combining them into dishes and meals, and understandings about context and meaning.[iii]
So, OK, to many cuisine reeks of elitism and in English is used as a synonym for high cuisine. Yet since there is no good English equivalent for, say, the Spanish cocina meaning both the kitchen and the way of cooking, and since even among English speakers cuisine is increasingly used to suggest a way of cooking (as the titles of many cookbooks indicate), I think it is quite reasonable to use this as our unit of analysis.
Cuisine captures the system of the way we eat just as language captures the system of the way we communicate. Linguists defend the idea that all languages, understood as ways of expressing the needs of their users, are equal in the sense that “there is nothing intrinsically limiting, demeaning, or handicapping about any of them.”[iv] For the purposes of this paper, all cuisines too are equal in the sense that they make up the panorama of the way humans feed themselves.
Those preliminaries over, I now offer ten suggestions for research, based on lines of investigation already established in historical or comparative linguistics, that as a culinary historian I think might open up new frontiers of research or new analytical tools.
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Commentary. Here I urge that for historical purposes scholars should treat all cuisines as equal just as linguists treat all languages as equal, since both serve the purposes of their users. This is one reason why I feel uneasy about UNESCO essentially handing out gold stars to some cuisines and not others. We would be very uneasy about selecting certain languages for special status.
This is not to say I am a relativist about languages or cuisines. I think some are better than others, depending on the needs and wants of their users. French High Cuisine served the purposes of international diplomacy extremely well. Arctic Cuisine allowed people to survive in one of the most hostile environments possible. Both excellent for the job at hand, but apples and oranges if your aim is to rank them.
[i] Rachel Laudan, The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Cultural Heritage (Honolulu, Hawaii: The University of Hawaii Press, 1996). Kent Sakoda and Jeff Siegel , Pidgin Grammar: An Introduction to the Creole Language of Hawaiʻi. (Honolulu: Bess Press, 2003).
[ii] See the special section edited by Annie Hauck-Lawson in Food, Culture and Society, Spring 2004, 24-146.
[iii] Many distinguished students of food, including Jack Goody, Sidney Mintz, and Stephen Mennell, have found the term cuisine indispensable. Since, however, there is no agreement on exactly how to define it, I feel free to use it in my own way.
[iv] David Crystal, Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 6.
it’s true that all languages are equal, but sociolinguistically speaking, this idea cannot be sustained in my opinion.
some languages were in the past considered more important, in the same way that english is nowadays; this doesnt mean that english is now a ‘better’ language than others, but let’s think about the ways that the english language infiltrates practically all other languages:
1. greeks (as an example) often claim that english words are created from greek words (as well as other languages) – yes, but when coining new words (which come from new concepts), we often find that the english language is the one where the concept was first used, which then needed to be named; the word that’s created for the concept is often an anglified word made up of foreign ‘stem’ words, and this is used as a base for all other languages, which the word eventually gets translated into
2. english is now an all-encompassing language: it embodies the ‘esperanto’ idea (however fallacious that was in its formation): therefore, it has a ‘higher among equals’ status; we can choose to learn french and german at (again for example) greek schools, but english is compulsory – is there a parent (anywhere in the world) who wouldnt prefer english to be taught over another language?? i doubt it
if we can talk about ‘dialectal’ cuisines, we are already placing them in a hierarchy
Maria, I think we are working with two senses of hierarchy here. (1) A hierarchy of quality–some languages are “better” than others at expressing things, in their literature, etc. The food analogy would be that some cuisines taste better than others. I want to resist this. I think its hard to compare “taste good” across cuisines (though there are some objective differences–use of salt or sugar for example). (2) A hierarchy of impact. Clearly some languages have more impact than others, Greek and Roman for example having more impact on the European tradition than Egyptian or Aramaic. And clearly English has huge impact/influence today. These are usually political questions. I would argue that family of English cuisines has had huge impact in the last 150 years for the same reasons. Does this clarify what I am saying?
yes indeed, i agree with everything here
here’s another thought: we could be taught to eat/like different cuisines, just like we can learn different languages while our mother tongue is acquired by immersion; yet in order to learn the language proficiently, ie be able to read/write as well as understand/speak, we need to be taught it (ie thru education)
is there a similarity for cuisine here too? we usually start off eating food that we grew up with, and we usually like it – but to reproduce even our own cuisine, we must be taught it in some way – there is a similarity in acquiring proficiency between cuisine and language, but there are also many people who claim that they cant cook – why the cuisine illiteracy? is it similar to linguistic illiteracy?
Love the idea of cuisine illiteracy. I hadn’t thought about these issues from the perspective of learning. What I have thought about, and it is relevant to your point, are the different aspects of acquiring language fluency. For example, my Spanish comprehension is first rate, both listening and reading. My spoken Spanish is OK. My written Spanish, well, it depends how long I take, but it’s still what I would call so-so. My general vocabulary is really good, but specialist is hopeless, as I discovered when I tried to describe a visit to a horse farm to friends (what is colt, yearling, stall, castrating, bit, mane, etc in Spanish?).
My suspicion is that a lot of people who call themselves bi-cuisinal are in fact good at ordering in restaurants, a highly artificial and constrained setting. They would be not as good at cooking, nor at planning menus, for example, especially for special occasions.
many intersting points to think about here
Thanks Maria.