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and the role it plays in the story. In Korsmeyer s own words, there
are numerous cases in which expressive properties attach to foods the
particular context of a story, but there are also more ordinary cases in
which foods come to express certain properties because of the tradi-
tional or routine circumstances of their preparation. 46 Regarding
this later ordinary case of the expressiveness of food, Korsmeyer
provides the example of chicken soup (as it is popularly made in the
USA), a dish whose implicit properties are in some cultures associated
with adjectives such as soothing and comforting, and which is
used as a home remedy for minor illnesses such as colds.
4 Food and the role it plays in ceremonials and rituals provides another
important illustration of food practices as constructing meaning.
Here again, food points beyond itself and serves a broader purpose
than mere nourishment. For instance, the Eucharist is, for Catholics,
an element of a sacramental ritual-liturgical practice governed by the
belief that God becomes food (bread re-presenting Christ s body
and wine re-presenting Christ s blood) for the purpose of sharing
divinity with humanity. Another example is the tea ceremony,
described by the Zen master Takuan as the embodiment of an entire
philosophy and tradition within Japanese culture.47 There is
45
Korsmeyer quotes Mary Douglas: Each meal carries something of the meaning of
the other meals; each meal is a structured social event which structures others in its own
image. The upper limit of its meaning is set by the range incorporated in the most impor-
tant member of its series. The recognition which allows each member to be classed and
graded with the others depends upon the structure common to them all. The cognitive
energy which demands that a meal look like a meal and not like a drink is performing in
the culinary medium the same exercise that it performs in language. First, it distinguishes
order, bounds it, and separates it from disorder. Second, it uses economy in the means of
expression by allowing only a limited number of structures. Third, it imposes a rank scale
upon the repetition of structures. Fourth, the repeated formal analogies multiply the
meanings that are carried down any one of them by the power of the most weighty.
Mary Douglas, Deciphering a Meal, Daedalus (Winter 1972), 69 70, cited in
Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste, 130 1.
46
Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste, 132.
47
For her examples of the Eucharist, Korsmeyer is mainly relying on Louis Marin, Food
for Thought, trans. Mette Hjort (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989). For
her example of the tea ceremony she uses D. T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970).
TASTE AND THE EROS OF COGNITION 59
something epiphanic about food practices in ceremonials and ritu-
als, for they attempt to express that which is inexpressible: mystery,
and the reaching out to some experience of transcendence, somehow
activated in the ceremonial event around food.
There are many more typologies that could be included in this list. What
is important to underline with such typologies is that food and food
practices can be linguistic systems of communication that bring light to
the bodily experience of knowledge, construction of meaning, systems of
valuation, and so forth.
Recipes are another important example of this construction of meaning
as they are passed on by individuals, families, and cultural traditions
through time and space. At times, these traditions are passed on in written
form through notes, or even as books.48 Like Water for Chocolate is an
example of a novel constructed around monthly recipes and home remedies
which are passed on to the next generation. But at other times these culi-
nary traditions are transmitted not by writing but verbally, and with accom-
panying stories. This was the case with the Mexican baroque mole discussed
in chapter 1, which was a tradition first passed on orally within religious
communities and then became part of people s culinary traditions, usually
accompanied by folk stories of its invention. Time and space are important
elements in this inherited knowledge, as they are in the case of molli. During
the baroque era in Mexico, nuns and monks incorporated the culinary
wisdom of pre-Colombian times, and so the original molli was later
adapted to and re-created and syncretized in a different time and space.
In addition, there are recipes that may involve very few, or even non-
verbal, instructions. Many recipes are learned just by doing. One has
to bodily perform the actions over and over in order to achieve a
refined skill as well as to obtain the desired final product.49 Again, this
form of performative knowledge relates to the body. Here the body is
not just a series of bodily mechanical motions, but also (among other
48
This is indeed a whole fascinating genre that sheds light on how food is constructed,
written styles, views about food, world-views about eating and social rules, and so forth.
See e.g. Goody, Cooking, Cuisine, and Class.
49
Regarding alternative forms of knowledge that are more performative and include
few (or no) verbal or alphabetical elements, see Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of
the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization, 2nd edn. (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2003). Mignolo s research is helpful for a critique of the
Eurocentric (a form of colonization) notion of knowledge that not only values verbal-
ity/literacy over non-verbal practices, but also used its own epistemological and linguistic
categories as strategies of control, government, and colonization, which often violently
wiped out other practices.
60 TASTE AND THE EROS OF COGNITION
things) a developed sense of smell, an awareness of texture that one
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