Table Of ContentFood, the Body
and the Self
Foody the Body
and the Self
DEBORAH LUPTON
SAGE Publications
London · Thousand Oaks · New Delhi
© Deborah Lupton 1996
First published 1996, Reprinted 1998
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
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available from the British Library.
ISBN 0 8039 7647-X
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 Theoretical Perspectives on Food and Eating 6
2 Food, the Family and Childhood 37
3 Food, Health and Nature 68
4 Tastes and Distastes 94
5 The Asceticism/Consumption Dialectic 131
Conclusion 154
Appendix: Details of Research Strategies and Participants 156
References 161
Index 170
Acknowledgements
This book was completed during a semester-long break from my usual
teaching and administrative duties at the University of Western Sydney,
Nepean, in the first half of 1995. I am grateful to the University for
providing me with this time to engage in research and writing. During this
period I spent some weeks as a visiting fellow at the MRC Medical
Sociology Unit, University of Glasgow, and the Centre for the Body and
Society, Deakin University, Geelong. I am grateful to the staff at both
institutions for their kind hospitality (including the sharing of good food
and wine) and stimulating discussions, particularly following seminars I
gave on my food research. Thanks are due to research assistants Else
Lackey, Jane McLean and Justine Lloyd who ably carried out interviews
and focus group discussions. Gamini Colless deserves special thanks for his
continuing support of my work.
The book includes sections from two previously published articles:
'Food, memory and meaning: the symbolic and social nature of food
events', published in The Sociological Review, 42(4), 664-85, 1994; and
"A healthy lifestyle might be the death of you": discourses on diet,
4
cholesterol control and heart disease in the press and among the lay public'
(with S. Chapman), published in Sociology of Health and Illness, 17(4),
477-94, 1995.
Introduction
Food and eating habits are banal practices of everyday life; we all, as living
beings, must eat to survive. This apparent banality, however, is deceptive.
Food and eating habits and preferences are not simply matters of 'fuelling'
ourselves, alleviating hunger pangs, or taking enjoyment in gustatory
sensations. Food and eating are central to our subjectivity, or sense of self,
and our experience of embodiment, or the ways that we live in and through
our bodies, which itself is inextricably linked with subjectivity . As such, the
meanings, discourses and practices around food and eating are worthy of
detailed cultural analysis and interpretation . This book seeks to explain
eating choices and preferences in the context of embodiment and subjectivity,
exploring questions concerning the extent to which bodily experiences and
physical feelings are constructed or mediated by society and culture.
It is now rarely asserted within sociology that a bodily process - be it a
disease, a sexual longing, an emotional response or a craving for a certain
food - is purely a product of biology. The social constructionist perspective
is commonly articulated, an approach which I have adopted in my own
analysis of the sociocultural meanings of food and eating. While I accept
that there is, to some degree, a physiological component to the meanings
and experiences around food - for it cannot be denied that without some
form of nourishment, human bodies simply cannot exist - I argue that
phenomena which are often understood to be largely biological, such as
hunger, taste and food preferences, are also products of the sociocultura l
environment into which we are born. Thus, while humans enter the world
with the need to eat to survive, from the moment of birth the ways in which
individuals interact with other people and with cultural artefacts shape
their responses to food.
There are manifold cultural meanings and discourses surrounding food
practices and preferences in all human societies. Indeed, food is 'the
symbolic medium par excellence' (Morse, 1994: 95). Food consumption
habits are not simply tied to biological needs but serve to mark boundaries
between social classes, geographic regions, nations, cultures, genders, life-
cycle stages, religions and occupations, to distinguish rituals, traditions,
festivals, seasons and times of day. Food 'structures what counts as a
person in our culture' (Curtin, 1992a: 4). Dietary habits are used to
establish and symbolize control over one's body. Food may be classified
into a number of binary categories: good or bad, masculine or feminine,
powerful or weak, alive or dead, healthy or non-healthy, a comfort or a
2 Food, the body and the self
punishment, sophisticated or gauche, a sin or a virtue, animal or vegetable,
raw or cooked, self or other. Each of these binary oppositions contains the
power to shape food preferences and beliefs in everyday life, to support
some food choices and militate against others, and to contribute to the
construction of subjectivity and embodied experiences .
Despite the clear importance of food rituals and meanings in the
formation and experience of human embodiment and subjectivity, just as,
until recently, sociologists have tended to simply accept the human body as
a given and thus neglected the study of embodiment, so too, sociology has
paid little attention to the study of food and eating practices which
comprise an integral dimension of embodiment. This disdain for taking
seriously the study of the body's desires and habits has its roots in ancient
philosophy. As the ancien t Greek philosopher Plato argued, 'the true
philosopher' despises such topics as bodily pleasures and adornments, for
'we are slaves' in the service of the body: 'if we do obtain any leisure from
the body's claims and turn to some line of inquiry, the body intrudes once
more into our investigations, interrupting, disturbing, distracting, and
preventing us from getting a glimpse of the truth' (1992: 26). According to
Plato, the 'follies' of the body 'contaminate' the pure search for truth and
knowledge. Hence the philosopher's soul must stringently try to ignore the
body, 'becoming] as far as possible independent , avoiding all physical
contacts and associations as much as it can in its search for reality' (1992:
25). Thus, not only were everyday practices such as eating and food
preparation regarded as being beneath philosophical study, they threatened
pure thought by encouraging philosophers' bodily needs to disrupt and
disturb their cogitations. Devoting attentio n to embodiment indeed con-
founds the entire logocentric project of philosophy; the drive to rationalize,
the emphatic separation of the mind from the body, the elevation of
thought over embodiment.
The practice of cooking has similarly received little serious scholarly
attention because of its transitory nature and link with physical labour and
the servicing of bodies rather than with 'science', 'art' or 'theory'. Cooking
is identified as a practical activity, enmeshed in the physical temporal
world. It is therefore regarded as base and inferior compared with
intellectual or spiritual activities (Heldke, 1992a: 207). Yet cooking is not
simply the application of heat or other technologies to raw materials so as
to render them more edible by changing their texture, flavour or digestibility .
Cooking is a moral process, transferring raw matter from 'nature' to the
state of 'culture', and thereby taming and domesticating it. This act may be
as simple as plucking a piece of fruit from a tree and washing it, or cutting it
with a knife, or it may be as complex as the greatest creations of haute
cuisine, requiring hours of preparation. Food is therefore 'civilized' by
cooking, not simply at the level of practice, but at the level of the
imagination. Indeed, argues Fischler, 'It is an act so magical that one
remembers the strange kinship between cookery and witchcraft' (1988:
284).
Introduction 3
Philosophy is masculine and disembodied; food and eating are feminine
and always embodied. To pay attention to such everyda y banalities as food
practices is to highlight the animality always lurking within the 'civilized '
veneer of the human subject. Food intrudes into the 'clean' purity of
rational thought because of its organic nature. Food is unclean, a highly
unstable substance; it is messy and dirty in its preparation, its disposal and
its by-products; it inevitably decays, it has odour. Delicious food is only
hours or days away from rotting matter, or excreta. As a result, disgust is
never far from the pleasures of food and eating. Food continually threatens
to become dirt: 'the slimy and the greasy have a definite and important
place, the fatty and the sticky are shown proper respect, in short, every
possible characteristic of dirt is found in food' (Enzensberger, 1972: 28).
Food is a metonym of the mortality of human flesh, the inevitable entropy
of living matter. Food is therefore a source of great ambivalence: it forever
threatens contamination and bodily impurity, but is necessary for survival
and is the source of great pleasure and contentment.
In this book I explore the links between the overtly 'practical ' phenomena
of food, eating and cooking, and the more apparently 'abstract' and 'socio-
logical' phenomena of subjectivity, emotion, memory and acculturation. In
doing so, I discuss such aspects of the intertwinin g of food habits and
practices, culture, embodiment and the self in western societies as
childhood, the maternal-child relationship, the family, the gendering of
foodstuffs, food tastes, dislikes and preferences, the dining out experience,
spirituality and the 'civilized' body. Although the book fits into the broad
category of 'the sociology of food and eating', I take a strongly inter-
disciplinary approach, including discussion of a number of major social and
cultural theorists who have written about embodiment and subjectivity,
including Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu , Norbet Elias, Mary Douglas
and Julia Kristeva, as well as many other scholars and researcher s who
have explored the sociocultural and historical dimensions of food and
eating in western societies. The primary data used in this book were
derived from a number of sources, including popular cultural products such
as newspaper and magazine articles, advertisements , films, and books on
diet, health and parenting, as well as official texts such as public health and
medical journal articles, books, reports and health promotion campaigns.
In addition to these sources, three methods of directly eliciting people's
memories, thoughts, experiences and ideas about food and eating were
used with three different sets of people living in Sydney: memory-writing,
semi-structured individual interviews and focus group discussions (see the
Appendix for further details of this research and the participants).
It should be noted that the discussion in this book is culturally specific
in primarily dealing with the subject positions, emotions, memories and
embodied experiences around food and eating in the context of individuals
in western societies who are in the position of having good access to food
and a wide range of foodstuff s from which to choose. None of the
