Food studies shares with cultural studies its focus on the connections between lived bodies, imagined realities, and structures of power. Both disciplines acknowledge that not only material practices, but also desires, fantasies, fears, and dreams coagulating around food, its production, preparation, and consumption, deeply influence our development as individual subjects and as members of all kinds of social formations. Lived food experiences, including recipes, food-related traditions, cooking techniques, even daily shopping, should then be analyzed in their relations with power structures such as the food industry, marketing and advertising firms, political lobbies, academic institutions, and media.
Cultural studies, an academic field that developed from the late 1950s, aims to understand contemporary cultures by examining their internal dynamics, their everyday performances, and their media representations, including expressions of popular and mass culture. Grounded in Marxian and post-structuralist critical theory, cultural studies explores how meaning is generated, disseminated, reproduced, negotiated, and resisted through values, beliefs, symbols, practices, institutions, as well as economic, social, and political structures within a given culture. Acknowledging the fluidity and constant transformation of its object of study, especially under the acceleration imparted by technological innovations and globalization, cultural studies critiques any a priori hierarchies imposed on the various facets of a culture, based on aesthetic, moral, or historical values, which the discipline actually considers as part of what needs to be analyzed as expression of class and other social dynamics (Simon, 1999; Swirski, 2005).
Popular culture is sometimes referred to as mainstream culture, or that which is popular with the masses, and its study is at times considered as a subfield resulting from the combination of cultural studies and communication studies. However, for the purpose of this article, popular culture is defined as the totality of ideas, values, representations, material items, practices, social relations, organizations, institutions, and other phenomena that are conceived, produced, distributed, and consumed within a market- and consumption-influenced environment, with or without the specific economic goal of reaping a profit. This definition both includes the mainstream and all possible alternative or oppositional subcultures, as well as the dynamics through which the mainstream is established, opposed, and constantly evolving. For example, specific subgroups in a society may develop their own forms of expression, through which they may directly or indirectly criticize and oppose the mainstream. Yet, by so doing they inherently engage with it, often fueling the interest of the very cultural apparatuses that they initially aimed to undermine. As a consequence, aspects of their subculture may eventually be taken out of context, absorbed, and used in mainstream popular culture.
Cultural studies shares many common elements with food studies, which promotes and practices the analysis of cultural, social, and political issues concerning the production, distribution, representation, and consumption of food. However, they differ mainly in that while cultural studies has historically focused on specific communities and subcultures, exploring expressions and practices among which food might or might not be featured, food studies concentrates its attention on food in its material, representational, and symbolic aspects as they unfold across societies, communities, and subcultures.
The presence of food in everyday life is pervasive, permeating popular culture as a relevant marker of power, cultural capital, class, gender, ethnicity, and religion, which both cultural and food studies recognize as crucial. Consequently, both disciplines are well equipped to examine lived food experiences, including recipes, food-related traditions, cooking techniques, even daily shopping, in their relations with power structures such as the food industry, marketing and advertising firms, political lobbies, academic institutions, and media.
Food studies and cultural studies share a keen interest in the fraught and complex connections between lived bodies, imagined realities, and structures of power built around food. Both disciplines acknowledge that not only the material aspects of individual and communal practices, but also desires, fantasies, fears, and dreams coagulating around and in the body, deeply influence our development as individual subjects and as members of all kinds of social formations. However, the ubiquitous nature of the cultural elements relating to food makes their ideological and political relevance almost invisible, buried in the supposedly natural and self-evident fabric of everyday life. Meanwhile, our own flesh becomes fuel for all kinds of cultural battles among different visions of personhood, family, society, polity, and economics. Employing cultural studies’ political sensibilities, its attention for lived experiences, and its critical approach towards cultural hierarchies, food studies can provide an accessible analytical framework to achieve a deeper comprehension of twenty-first-century globalized post-industrial societies.
Despite their similarity of approach and intellectual project, very little scholarship in food studies has explicitly acknowledged its debt to cultural studies in terms of attention to material culture and the way it is experienced by specific communities enmeshed in complex power structures. Probably due to the disciplinary provenance of its practitioners, most works in food studies locate themselves within more established traditions, especially history, geography, sociology, anthropology, American studies, and media analysis. As food studies grows in terms of popularity, academic respectability, as well as numbers of dedicated departments and students, it is likely that scholars will feel more comfortable in identifying themselves with the new field, and as a consequence will be more open to recognize food studies’ debt to other multidisciplinary and relatively recent fields of research, including cultural studies. At the same time, cultural studies might more frequently include food among its topics of investigation, originating work that could fall under both disciplines. Due to the lack of research on food explicitly falling under cultural studies and presented by its practitioners as such, this section will first briefly introduce the origin of cultural studies, and then focus on food scholarship that presents common traits with cultural studies, despite its possible formal classification under other academic traditions.
The foundation of the theoretical approach that would be later defined as cultural studies is usually identified with Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957) and Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961), which in different ways point to the vitality and richness of contemporary “mass” culture and its expression through language, places of socialization and entertainment, new technologies, and popular media, among others. A living culture is not only made of its highest achievements and literary works, but also of all sorts of material artifacts, texts, representations, behaviors, attitudes, institutions, and places that constitute the framework of analysis of what Williams defined as “structures of feeling”: the particular living result of all the elements in the general organization of a culture in a certain period (1961: 48). In 1964 the new discipline found a home in the newly launched Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, directed by Hoggart and soon after by Stuart Hall. Drawing from critical theory, semiotics, and sociology, but also influenced by feminist theory, the Centre introduced the Gramscian concept of cultural hegemony, interpreted as the manipulation of the value system by the ruling class to establish its cultural dominance and to impose its world view as natural and beneficial to society as a whole, to understand the dynamics of power and dominance that shape popular culture. However, the Center tended to consider citizens not as defenseless dupes that accepted whatever was presented to them by the cultural industry, but rather as capable of producing their own interpretations and uses of any mass culture object. For example, in the essay “Encoding and Decoding in Television Discourse” (Hall, 1973) Stuart Hall argued that media producers often find their intended messages failing to get across to their audiences, who instead distort it or accept it quite selectively, depending on their cultural, social, and political environment and by doing so resist any attempt at dominating their worldview and sensibility.
Over time, researchers in cultural studies turned their attention to subcultures, delineated as social groups within a larger society that differentiated themselves through the adoption of specific behaviors, languages, dress codes, and modes of congregating. The discipline was also influenced by the work of the French theorist Michel Foucault, who focused on the analysis of discourse and the structures of power that at the same time it constitutes and expresses. Under the influence of French theory and upon its diffusion in the US and Australia, cultural studies lost some of its more political undertones and the concern about class that had characterized it in Birmingham, while shifting its focus on identity issues such as gender, sexuality, embodiment, ethnicity, race, nationality, status, and consumption, and maintaining a constant and productive interaction with similar developments in queer studies, performance studies, and media studies.
Food studies, as an interdisciplinary field that deals with a specific aspect of material culture, its representations, and its lived experiences, has often embraced subject matters, theoretical frameworks, research methodologies, and predilection for the qualitative that would also fall under the heading of cultural studies. Based on previous classificatory schemes elaborated in other disciplines by Goody (1982), Mennell, Murcott and Van Otterloo (1992) and Beards-worth and Keil (1997), in their volume on food and cultural studies – so far the only one explicitly dedicated to the relationship among the two disciplines – Bob Ashley (2004) and his colleagues at Nottingham Trent University identify three distinct approaches: Structuralist, Culturalist, and Gramscian.
The structuralist approach, inspired by the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, analyzes food as a cultural system and as a code continuously producing signs that allow a specific community to engage in meaningful symbolic action. However, the meaning of food signs, generated by the differences between all the elements in the system as a whole rather than by pre-existing and defined signification, can never be fixed, revealing itself as variable, contested, and incomplete. Food does not have any intrinsic and natural meaning, if taken separately from the social and cultural habits that surround it, which at any rate are closely connected with it, to form a complex set of practices and representations. Examples of this approach would be Mary Douglas’s “Deciphering a Meal” (1975), where the renowned anthropologist analyzes the structure of a meal in terms of acceptability and cultural communication, and Jean Soler’s “The Semiotics of Food in The Bible” (1973), which interprets the dietary prescriptions of the Bible in terms of underlying cultural structures and the oppositions and differences that determine them. Structuralist frameworks have been often evaluated unenthusiastically because of their intrinsic difficulty in explaining change. Furthermore, they tend to highlight the preeminence of systems of meanings in which individuals are born into rather than the initiative and autonomy of individuals and communities.
Culturalist approaches, on the other hand, focus on the value of lived experiences of people and their agency, often underlining their resistance to power. Michel De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), for instance, theorizes that consumers’ tactics are a form of struggle against the strategies put into place by economic and political powers. This kind of culturalism has been criticized for its tendency to essentialism and to romanticized representations of its subjects, the sensibility towards the transmission and the reproduction of culture. However, the emphasis on the creativity and autonomy of subcultures, including all kinds of marginal communities, and the participated description of their lives has generated excellent research not only on migrant communities, ethnic, and racial minorities, but also on the connection between memory and present-day customs (Adapon, 2008; Fine, 1996; Ray, 2004).
The necessity to take change into account has led to what Mennell (1996) and Beardsworth and Keil (1997) have defined as a developmental approach, corresponding to what Ashley et al. (2004) define as the Gramscian approach when its focus shifts to the constant negotiations between cultural groups and social classes, as well as to the hegemonic dynamics engendering ever-changing configurations of domination and subordination. While emphasizing the power of the leisure industries, media, government, advertisers, and politicians, this approach has also been influenced by cultural theory and post-structuralism, adopting the analysis of discourse, ideology, and frames, the theorization of contextual and multiple subjectivities in the absence of prevalent narratives, and the examination of consumption and lifestyles as identity markers, also as expressed in popular culture, media, and other kinds of performances (Belasco, 1989; Johnston and Bauman, 2010; Williams-Forson, 2006).
Due to its inherent multidisciplinarity, food studies employs information, theoretical frameworks, and methodologies developed in academic traditions as diverse as social and political theory, political economy, nutrition, biology, agronomy, the culinary arts, history, philosophy, literary and art criticism, feminist and queer theory, performance studies, and media and communication studies. What can the research approaches developed so far in the exploration of food bring to cultural studies and its understanding of popular cultures and their connection with power structures? And what can cultural studies contribute to food studies in terms of methods?
Sharing with cultural studies its concern towards social differentiation, stratification, and inequality both in its synchronic and historical dimensions, food studies has often borrowed analytical tools and methods from sociology and history (Caldwell, 2004; Caldwell, Dunn and Nestle, 2009). At the same time, it underlines the importance of the lived aspects of these dynamics, which has led to the discipline’s preference for qualitative research and its penchant for what Geertz (1973) called “thick description.” Consequently, the food-related research that could also be considered under the cultural studies discipline has often had recourse to the anthropological method of ethnography, based on fieldwork and different forms of observation and participation, which are also integrated with an emphasis on the material and performative cultural forms that used to constitute the domain of research of folklorists (Adema, 2009; Bestor, 2004; Farquhar, 2002; Wenner, 2009).
At the same time, due to the globalized and instantly connected nature of contemporary pop culture, both in its mainstream and oppositional aspects, food studies and cultural studies have made frequent use of concepts and methods developed in post-colonial studies, global studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, semiotic, discourse analysis, media and communication studies. New conceptualizations of the connection among seemingly distant elements, influencing each other and surfacing in the most unexpected contexts, are being developed (Parasecoli, 2008). A given ingredient or food-related practice can be analyzed, embraced, or demonized by scientists and nutritionists, media gurus, politicians in search of visibility, and social activists in different parts of the world and different cultural and social contexts. Their diverse and often opposite conclusions may then be picked up in bits and pieces by newspapers, magazines, TV talk shows, and blogs, influencing consumers’ expectations and behaviors, creating fads and fashions, generating new and always shifting practices and subcultures. At the same time these changes may influence the manufacture of novel products by the food industry, which translates into nutritional claims, advertising, marketing campaigns, and changes in distribution chains that in turn interact with consumers’ perceptions and shopping habits, scientists’ research, and myriad social and political agendas. Cultural studies, and the food-related research that gets its inspiration from it, are outlining methods to grapple with the connections, the mechanisms, and even the malfunctions in the extensive, intrusive, and all-encompassing web of meanings, practices, and values that constitute the contemporary food world. To respond to these stimulations, some authors have adopted the approach developed by Appadurai et al. in The Social Life of Things (1986). The essays in the collection suggest that, rather than focusing on specific communities and how they incorporate a variety of food in their lived experiences, it can be effective to look at how specific ingredients, dishes, and foods acquire different cultural, social, and political meanings depending on their context of consumption (Watson, 1997; Watson and Caldwell, 2005).
The food-related research in cultural studies has the potential to expand in many directions, applying scholarly analytical rigor and its emphasis on power and politics to phenomena in contemporary popular culture that so far have been the favorite domain of self-appointed cultural commentators, bloggers, and journalists.
Well-established subcultures sprouted around food issues, including foodies, vegetarians, vegans, locavores, dumpster divers, would deserve greater attention not only from the sociological and political points of view but also in terms of the lived experiences and the performances of newly built and shifting individual and collective identities. The same can be said of groups that embrace a diet as a permanent lifestyle out of religious or health motivations, or adopt a determined eating pattern to achieve specific physical goals, like athletes and body builders. While the symbolic, discursive, and psychological content of diets such as Weight Watchers and Atkins has been examined (Bentley, 2004; Hendley, 2003; Parasecoli, 2005a, 2005b; Stalker, 2009), the internal dynamics of the communities built around them have not been fully explored in terms of shared values, practices, and power relations.
Interesting subcultures also have grown around the symbolic and material negotiations around body images in their connection with food, in particular around fat. While foundational work in this direction has been produced in critical theory, gender studies, and media studies (Bordo, 1993; Braziel and LeBesco, 2001; Rothblum, Solovay and Wann, 2009), cultural studies could give a unique contribution with its explicit analysis of how communities built around these issues create specific subcultures that may relate in diverse ways with the mainstream.
Both food studies and cultural studies could also find useful analytical tools to understand these aspects of food-related experiences in embodiment theory, which, starting from the 1980s, has underlined the interplay between brain, body, and world (Blackman, 2008). Building on Marcel Mauss’s anthropological reflection the “techniques of the body” (1935) and Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on Carnival and the grotesque in literary criticism (1965), this approach emphasizes how power and the principles it promotes are not always imposed on the subject from the outside, but are materialized through norms and regulations in the body itself. Although we perceive our body as natural – we are actually taught to categorize it as such – it would be naive to assume that these crucial elements of the embodied experience are irrelevant in terms of power relationship (as diffused as the power sources may be). We cannot exclude food and ingestion from hegemonic struggles. The way we categorize and experience our physical needs, the way we choose, store, prepare, cook, ingest, digest, and excrete food, are far from being neutral or innate.
Research has also highlighted the role of both sensory experiences and memory in the way individuals and communities experience and represent the consumption and distribution of food (Holtzman, 2006; Parasecoli, 2007; Sanchez Romera, 2007; Sutton, 2001, 2008). This approach disputes the understanding of bodies as pre-social, fixed, and static, but rather conceptualizes them as affective, permeable to the outside, always unfinished, and in process. They are not there just to be passively inscribed on by cultural and social norms, as malleable masses that cannot talk back. Through their connections with food, bodies show that nature and culture are deeply entangled, existing in complex relations that are contingent and mutable.
Although the interest in food and food-related issues is growing rapidly, as the expansion of food studies as an academic field suggests, there are no cultural studies programs that focus specifically on food. However, since food studies is increasingly being recognized as a legitimate discipline and new departments are being established, students can apply to cultural studies programs in institutions where food studies is either present with its own department or practiced in other departments, and where students are allowed to focus on two areas of study rather than just one. However, since food studies is still a relatively recent field, especially when applying to a PhD program, students should make sure that there are advisors who share that particular interest.
Academic associations are important forums to network with other students and more established scholars, to explore possible directions of study, and to stay updated about recent research. The Association for the Study of Food and Society, the Association for Cultural Studies, the Cultural Studies Association (US), and the Popular Culture Association/American Studies Association organize yearly conferences and local meetings that accept graduate students’ submissions for posters and panel presentations. They all have websites that provide helpful resources and links, and edit journals that can be useful for students’ research and for the publication of their own work. Among the food studies journals that publish work that could fall under the heading of cultural studies we can mention Food, Culture & Society, Food and Food-ways, and Gastronomica. Also journals focusing more specifically on cultural studies and popular culture accept food-related articles and essays, such as the digital journal Lateral, Cultural Studies, The International Journal of Cultural Studies, Continuum (with a specific interest also on media), the Cultural Studies Review (published in Australia), and TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies.
Institutions that have cultural studies Masters and PhD programs offer frequent postdoctoral fellowships and scholarships. Announcement can be found on the websites and listservs of the above-mentioned associations, on university websites, and also on websites such as Humanities and Social Sciences Online (www.h-net.org), GoAbroad (scholarships.goabroad.com), and Free Scholarship Information (infoscholarship.net).
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