The Art of Eating and Being Together
Pierluca
Birindelli
US sociologist
Howard Becker coined the expression Art
Worlds: “The network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of
conventional means of doing things, produce(s) the kind of art works that art world is noted for” (Becker 1982,
X). This tautological definition and systemic approach, apparently trivial, has
interesting consequences summarized by
the statement, “A work of art is what people say it is”. Individuals and
institutions have the power to steer popular opinion on the aesthetic value of
an art work. The same, as we will see,
goes for taste and food consumption.
Art worlds and art markets follow opaque and evanescent rules, often
linked to the preferences and idiosyncrasies of a few opinion leaders. They
orient taste and define what is valuable in aesthetic terms, therefore even in
monetary terms. This top-down model will endure over time, but it is showing its
limits, especially in financial terms. This sort of oligopoly leads to a very
limited use of the art market’s potential.
Concerning food production and consumption, the discourse, declined in
a different way, does not change much. Even in this field the game is about orienting or re-orienting consumers’
practices and, following the French philosopher and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu
(1979), practices of “distinction.” People’s sense of identity can be
reinforced, and sometimes shaped, through the consumption of a product. This is
the case for the “veg-veg” (vegetarians and vegans) culture, but the dynamic consumption-identity can also be seen at
work in diet regimes clearly linked to a specific idea of the aesthetic beauty
of the body. If scientific criteria to define an art work are opaque, in the field of nutrition “science” comes into
play in a strong and pervasive manner. Nutrition means health; it means drugs
or herbal extracts; it means wellness. However, a scientific criterion is often
bent in one direction or another, and it is frequently supplanted by another based
on new scientific discoveries. Years ago I was put on a diet to manage my
cholesterol levels, and the well-paid
nutritionist told me: “Egg is a poison for you.” I recently discovered that the
new nutritionist mantra is “an egg a day keeps the doctor away.”
Scientific fields are not immune to the struggle for power and money.
And the “scientific” can become a means
to launch a product or a long-term consumption trend. “Science”, then, plays a rhetorical function within
the marketing discourse. The authority of science derives from
scientists’ ability to provide unbiased and trustworthy knowledge. This is the “standard
view of science” (Bijker 2001): the public and popular discourse considers science as universal, disinterested
and value-free.
Michel Foucault, among others, instead
tells us how scientific knowledge cannot be considered objective by definition;
it can indeed become instrumental to the advancement of particular interests of
certain social groups. More precisely, Foucault pointed out how categories of
thought initiated by scientific discourse are able to shape the government of
people’s lives and individuals’ understanding of themselves (Foucault 1980).
Emile Durkheim prefigured the
relationship of authority-opinion in the way we contemplate science. He brought
to our attention how science is often considered the antagonist of opinion,
whose errors it combats and rectifies. But science “cannot succeed in this task
if it does not have sufficient authority, and it can obtain this authority only
from opinion itself. If a people did not
have faith in science, all the scientific demonstrations in the world would be
without any influence whatsoever over their mind.” (Durkheim 2008/1912, 208)
Getting back to the fields of art and nutrition, we can identify
shared mechanisms regulating both fields. By using a simple formal abstraction,
we can recognize the opaque blend of
scientific and aesthetic judgement as a common governing criterion, which
contributes to defining a common
battlefield of trends, fashions and therefore wealth.
The distinction practices wind through what is valuable, in aesthetic
and scientific terms, and what is valueless and in a certain sense false or sugar-coated.
Let’s consider the strategic distinction operated within the tourism industry
between travellers and tourists. Here the declared goal is to sell an authentic
experience to the tourist – MacCannel (1973) calls it “Staged Authenticity” –
be it food or art, so as to make the tourist feel like a traveller, a
connoisseur: a person who, precisely, has knowledge, experience and taste in a
particular field. One result of such a dynamic in a culturally globalized world is that people feel more
cosmopolitan and less provincial. This apparently superficial and trivial identity
attribute is pursued tenaciously by both
tourists who want to be travellers and travellers who do not want to be
tourists.
The social mechanisms regulating distinction practices generate
wealth. The key criteria regulating the distinction are cultural, therefore
constructed, and embody strong symbolic meanings. The start-up “CarneItaliana” moves within such a field
of globally conceived cultural experience. Among other initiatives, it aims to realise
the Study Centre “Cultural Identity and Consumption”. This gives the overall
entrepreneurial project a far-reaching character, thanks to the monitoring of food
production, distribution and consumption trends in Italy, in Europe and in the
world.
The study centre will produce
scientifically rigorous knowledge. Good knowledge promotes good individual
choices (or at least more informed ones) and good economic entrepreneurship, for
those who are eager to pursue it. Knowledge, however, cannot be limited to data
collection. What is necessary is the multidisciplinary in-depth interpretation
of data, aiming to construct theoretical propositions. I will lend a hand to “CarneItaliana”
in this aspect.
For a critical approach to meat production and consumption, as well
as a deeper understanding of the vegetarian or vegan culture, we need to extend
the sociological examination to the interpretation of individual and collective
identities. The theme “meat production-consumption” can be analysed under a
plurality of viewpoints. Besides the distinction practices mentioned above, we
can move in other directions. We can, for instance, take into account the late Zygmunt
Bauman’s insights.
Bauman (2007) invites us to observe how the consumer society favours
the disruption of group ties. He sees consumption, even in the company of others, as a solitary activity; he
even goes so far as to deem it the archetype of solitude. The consumer society
disintegrates traditional ties and promotes ephemeral ties, associated with the
temporal and spatial limits of consumption activities. If we read Bauman carefully,
we discover the importance given to the link between production and consumption.
The distinctive feature of “home”, represented by the family sitting
at the dinner table, is neither “eat and
go” practice nor a contrived display of knowledge about wine. The set table
is the final distributive stage of a production process that begins in the
kitchen, or even in the workshop or on the family plot of land. Within a
traditional society, what unites the family is,
in fact, the collaboration of each member in the overall production
process, not just the enjoyment of its fruits (Bauman 2007).
This model may be unrepeatable, unique, or just a distinctive practice
for a few (un)sustainable rich freaks. Yet we can imagine other
production-consumption practices that might help to support the creation of
deeper human bonds by transcending the act of mere consumption. Knowing what we
eat, its origin, and the history of those who breed and deliver it to our table,
might be a viable way to move forward from the disruptive effects of a consumer
culture. The foundation of cultures such as vegetarian and vegan, but also the potential
“grass-fed meat” culture, can strengthen ties and solidarities going beyond the
consumption of a good dish and all the Master Chef fluff that goes with it.
Bauman tells us that fast food and TV Dinners render family meals obsolete,
and that they symbolically indicate the insignificance of the human bonds of
the consumer society. However, if the image of the traditional home seems to
vanish or be severely compromised in our liquid times, nothing prevents us from imagining new homes.
Certainly, to gather around our own totems, and to despise others’
totems, does not seem the best way to move along. Discussion helps. That’s what
we did in the debate “A qualcuno piace carne”
(Some Like Meat). I introduced it and partially tried to gear it according to
what I have written so far. The debate, which was not intended to be “academic”
in the narrow sense of the word, was lively, polite and constructive. It
certainly also portrayed the battlefield Omnivores
vs. Veg-Veg (Vegan/Vegetarian). The two tribes hold on to their totems,
supported (and influenced) by the interpenetration of old and new media logics.
The event had an impressive
audience on Facebook Live: 65,400 people were reached, 8,900 interacted with
the post, 19,000 watched the debate from start to finish, 867 comments were
made and the event was shared 76 times.
During the discussion, the two journalists and several people
attending the event kept their feet in two shoes. The Facebook Live “like” and
“angry face” dialectic, along with colourful comments, entered and partially affected
the real-life discussion taking place in the physical room hosting the debate –
and the other way around. It was a sort of “Live-Live” discussion, in which it
was hard to distinguish between frontage, backstage
and audience. Sometimes it looked like a house
of mirrors. I realized that the day
after, watching the video with analytic
attention. Apparently,
I was one of the few monotasking actors performing in just one scene, right
there where I was with my body. We should probably change the title of the study center and add
the word “media” somewhere.
References
Bauman, Z. (2007) Consuming Life.
Cambridge: Polity.
Becker, H.S. (1982) Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bijker, W.E. (2001)
“Understanding Technological Culture Through a Constructivist View of Science,
Technology, and Society” Visions of STS:19-34.
Bourdieu, P. (1984/1979) Distinction. Harvard University Press.
Durkheim, E. (2008/1912)
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.
Mineola, N.Y.: Dover
Publications.
Foucault, M. (1980)
The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. An introduction. New York: Vintage
Books.
MacCannell, D. (1973) “Staged Authenticity:
Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings” American
Journal of Sociology: 589-603.
