Food Stories

INVESTIGATIONS John Clark Food Stories Not only is the world integrated electronically, but the raw materials of its cooking, as well as the stories these ingredients tell, flow to many parts of the globe. The way a dish is prepared, the way ingredients are combined to create a certain taste, the manner in which food is offered and received, all bespeak the very substance of a particular culture. But what happens when the gap between cultures is breached, when food and its associated values move between cultures? What pleasures or shocks can occur in the transfer of culinary values? Although cultures do not always have transparent ways of transferring their culinary values, we can glimpse their attempts to do so through stories about food. Food stories are woven of ingredients, of the setting or ambience of meals, even of the emotional burdens the food carries—all of the associations people make between food and more abstract levels of experience. For me, the stories that people tell about food become currents that flow from one culture to another, transmitting understanding and, occasionally, misunderstanding. Examining the way such stories are told—mapping food vocabularies—may allow us to find deeper relationships among thoughts and values across cultural lines and so extend our discussion beyond the comparison of foods to broader aspects of the cultures involved. The stories we tell ourselves through food, and the expressions we use, appeal precisely because they seem to contain a deep meaning, which does not, within any given culture, require too much interpretation to be understood. When these stories and expressions are displaced from one culture to another, however, understanding may become problematic. This essay is my attempt to understand what happens when food marks an experience that people from different cultures variously interpret, tell, and respond to. My particular concern is with the transfer of Thai culinary, and cultural, values to Australia. Thai Food in the Australian Context In Australia one is faced on all sides with restaurants that claim to serve food having particular cultural origins. These restaurants may well produce dishes with correct ingredients, which may seem tasty to certain Australian palates. But culturally speaking, these transferred dishes are not quite telling the stories they appear to be telling, since they are not fully authentic. As often happens with Thai cooking in Australia, cane sugar is substituted for palm sugar, but sweetness produced by palm sugar and sweetness produced by cane sugar proclaim different ties to the land and culture of origin. Without the denotation of palm sugar, “Thai sweetness” may transfer into “Australian sweetness” but not actually translate as such; thus, there may be an ineluctable gap between what the customer wants (“Thai sweetness”) and what the restaurant actually serves (sweetness in a Thai dish). The server may even think that the food is authentic, even while knowing that the ingredients may not be. This situation is compounded in Australia by a willingness to like what other cultures serve up and to discriminate between good and bad versions, but never really to try to accept all that a foreign taste fully entails, still less to make any concerted effort to learn what that taste might connote for another culture. Thus, the notion of a transfer of culinary values or associations is distinct from their translation: the term “transfer” suggests a somewhat superficial “taste” of the culture of origin—for instance, when the same ingredients are used in an entirely different context or different ingredients are used to achieve approximately the same effect. The term “translation,” on the other hand, suggests a much more thorough integration by the adopting culture of the values surrounding the food, as well as an appreciation of the food enhanced by an understanding of its original cultural context. Great care and surface learning are lavished on the preparation of the Thai food served in Australian restaurants, especially since this cuisine is currently so fashionable. The food is often prepared by Thai immigrants, (1) who may fret, justifiably, about the use of coconut milk or the difference between a plain soup and a galangal-flavored one, but who often have a rather perfunctory understanding of fish sauce: they are more likely to use it to take the fishiness out of fish rather than to strengthen that taste. Deep learning in culinary preparation may, however, be accompanied by only surface learning in terms of cultural presentation. Deep learning can appear in a twist of kaffir lime or in the right amount of ordinary green lime squeezed onto a salty noodle dish. But the only restaurant I know in Sydney where this is done properly is a posh lunchtime noshery, where diners are served in what is possibly the noisiest restaurant, on one of the nastiest (but most expensive) stainless-steel dining tables. Is it possible to enjoy the right amount of crushed tamarind paste when thrust against a stranger’s aftershave or mobile phone or both? The delicacy and consideration of people at Talaat Phluu in Talingchan (Bangkok) is something you must imagine as you sit on the floormats, contriving not to touch your deep-fried smoked catfish with your shoeless feet or drop onto your neighbor’s lap any of the green papaya salad made before your eyes to your own specifications. There is a curious passion attached to the experience of food but also a complex ephemerality to the experience of eating, which may make the emotional experience difficult to grasp or describe. We have a taste in our mouth only for a moment (or, at most, its complex illusion is fed back via our nasal passages), but that taste nevertheless can carry great meaning. Taste may be used to mark a geographic or cultural boundary, or a boundary between life cycles; or it may serve as a metaphor for changes in our bodies, where it appears to be traced along the very lines of our self-perception. STORY #1: DIPLOMAT MEETS REPRIMANDING MATRON An eminent French diplomat, invited by a colleague to a London gentleman’s club, found himself among socially distinguished persons, such as high court judges and lawyers, who spoke passable French and admired French cuisine and French notions of civility. But at the club dining room a contemptuous matron served up the most execrable boiled cabbage and over-stewed meat. Furthermore, she clearly had no compunction about berating the distinguished men to “eat up yer cabbage and like it.” For some unaccountable reason the senior men all beamed with joy at the shouting old hag. The diplomat was interested in the reversal of what he thought were conventional English gender and status rules, but on inquiry he discovered why the men tolerated and even liked such bad food and why they loved such a formidably unpleasant waitress. As boys, these upper-crust Englishmen had all been sent to boarding school, where they were desperate for any food at all and where their only emotional contact was with “Matron,” who had taught them the science of intimate abuse as an expression of caring. At the club, they were reliving a sense of gratitude for care and survival under what had been emotionally strained and sometimes harrowing circumstances. That primal association of bad food, rudeness, and emotional survival led them to put aside, during the meal at the club, what they now knew about food and civility. I confess to having spent a few years at one such boarding school, although not perhaps at such an emotionally vulnerable age. But I think I know how those old judges felt, for I still experience a profound sense of gratitude when anyone makes even half-decent food and serves it with any level of civility and consideration: I feel that I have survived and that someone has taken care of me. However, as the story demonstrates, this background can place one at a disadvantage when it comes to appreciating the finer points of food preparation. To Mix or Not to Mix To what extent the mixing of foods is accepted in a given culture may exemplify how that culture balances survival with refined culinary expression. (Here, I leave aside the obvious: those whose resources are so limited that all food is assessed only in terms of guaranteeing survival. However, as much as it seems to embody deeply authentic cultural values, the assessment of food in terms of some more refined notion of culinary expression is not entirely divorced from the fundamental need to survive.) Many cultures have rules about which flavors may be mixed. It took a very anglophile French friend to admit to me that he liked apple or mint sauce with pork or lamb, for as is well known, classic French gastronomy abhors the mixing of the sweet with the savory. But, in fact, this friend was not quite properly French, having been born at the Breton end of Normandy, a region whose inhabitants delight in apple-based flavorings. The wish not to discard what can still be used may lead some to ignore the cultural imperatives that warn against mixing bits of cooked foods into a soup or stew. Indeed, combining leftovers is abhorred in Thai cuisine, where the practice is described as may suphaab, or “impolite.”(2) This term implies a fall not only from standards of elegance appropriate to social station but also from standards of decency, as offering fresh and newly prepared foods is a mark of respect for one’s guests. In Thailand, the leftovers of once-prepared foods are generally given to dogs. Despite the great affection in Thailand, especially in Buddhist temples, for these fellow creatures, dogs are actually thought to be unclean, and the word for dog connotes defilement. Perhaps only cultures where people do not usually go hungry or starve can fuss over the distinction between what is consumed by humans and animals. The idea of culture, or refinement, being built into the notion of purity and admixture (after all, “to sophisticate” in English originally meant to mix in impure substances) also has a pragmatic side: Thai dogs, I am told, are usually fed cooked foods. Since most have never known the taste of raw meat, they are unlikely to attack farm animals. Subversion When cultures meet, their culinary rules may be subverted. The transfer of culinary terms and food vocabularies can function as a creative, if slightly naughty, mistranslation. Sometimes the mistranslation is intended. STORY #2: THE PROFESSOR COMES TO TEA Once, when serving tea to a Japanese professor, I deliberately offered it in a chipped noodle bowl I had dug up in the garden from the refuse of the previous owner of the tea house I then lived in. I served the professor Darjeeling tea with milk, sugared and warmly rounded, instead of the usual green, unsugared, and astringent tea. Being something of a deconstructionist himself—he translated Baudelaire—my Japanese colleague quite enjoyed the way I literally “transcribed” parts of the tea ceremony without attempting to “translate” them. That is, I offered the surface prescriptions of an aesthetics of poverty, represented by the weathered utensils, without the deeply selfprivileging compact between guest and host. Discomfort Culinary subversions are not always so deliberate, however. Deep structures of meaning and associated feelings are often revealed only when they are profoundly challenged. The resulting discomfort may be so great that such challenges are unlikely to be purposely engineered, unless one is habitually insensitive (or practices cross-cultural sadism!). STORY #3: LET THEM EAT NOODLES! A Thai visitor to Japan began to look increasingly uncomfortable and desperate as she journeyed by train deeper and deeper into the Japanese countryside. The lonely ruined castle, inside whose yard her companion was interviewing a curator, provided little nutritional solace beyond the standard chocolate and soft-drink machines. After the interview her companion sought a place to eat lunch and was relieved to see a noted buckwheat-noodle shop across the road. Thinking his Thai friend would be happy with noodles and enjoy the rather expensive, deep-fried prawn noodle soup, he ordered two dishes. To his surprise, however, this food caused his Thai companion even greater distress. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “It tastes of cake, and the noodles taste of flour,” his Thai friend replied. The emotional distress the food caused his companion was apparently greater than the discomfort of hunger—she had, after all, been very hungry. Here, many incompatible food genealogies were being overlaid. The man, who was European and whose culinary experience was not narrow, thought that all noodles tasted the same, give or take variations in sauce, additions of meat or fish, or hardness and texture. Clearly, though, they did not all taste the same to his companion, for whom the soup was too sweet, so sweet, in fact, that in her cuisine it could be identified only as cake. The noodles tasted too much like the flour of which she presumed they had been made, paeng (“starchy”) in Thai being the ultimate word of contempt for improperly prepared or over-cooked noodles. Moreover, the emotional antipathy this food aroused meant that she could not accept the nutritional value it offered. STORY #4: A SPOONFUL OF SUGAR MAY NOT HELP… During a recent television program on wok cooking, in which a celebrated CanadianCantonese chef demonstrated a Thai-style green curry, he prepared all of his ingredients properly, but fried his meat in oil before adding the coconut milk. He then added the curry paste and, at the end, white cane sugar. I noted with amusement my own instantaneous horror at this double misuse of materials. In most Thai cooking involving coconut milk, the meat or fish is not first cooked in oil but is heated directly in the coconut cream from the top of the can, which contains its own fats. The milky residue is added later. Nor does one add sugar to curries made with the particularly astringent green curry paste the chef was using. I had clearly accepted the transfer of culinary values implicit in standard Thai cooking and rejected the noted chef’s rules of translation for a Cantonese expression. But I was also amused at the power of the chef’s culinary inheritance, which would not let him vary the ordained procedures and cook directly in the coconut milk. This inheritance led him to use oil and could not stop him from adding sugar. The assimilation of the Thai dish into Cantonese culinary practice thus involved a denial of both the conventional Thai antipathy to oiliness and of the Thai requirement for an astringent saltiness. The sugar that was added may have been functioning as a concrete symbol for some value that the adopting cuisine regards as given or inalienable. As long as dishes of this kind are sweetened— however inappropriately—they generate a taste that falls within the system of Cantonese cuisine; if not sweetened, they cannot be accepted within that system. Thus, culinary values may resist translation because what is “natural” in one culture may not be in another. The Grammar of Food What if cultural categories for food and the pleasure it brings overlap between cultures? I have noted the Japanese antipathy for oiliness, yet I have often been surprised at the number of Japanese dishes that are really very oily, including whale meat, a supposed delicacy, (3) or the over-fatted or marbled Kobe beef. Does the Japanese dislike for the oily—as seen in the Japanese words aburakkoi and aburappoi [‘thick with oil’ and ‘oily’—correspond to the similar Thai sentiment, seen in pejorative phrases such as man lian (“so full of oil it would overflow”)? And do any other Japanese food adjectives used to tell stories about people who are disliked correspond to similar expressions in Thai? The Japanese use terms such as shibui (“astringent,” close to the English “sour”) to comment on food, clothes, and personal style, but the corresponding words in Thai, such as khem (“salty”) and priaw (“sharp”), have quite varied collocations and do not correspond to the Japanese system of usage, which originated in the eighteenth century. In other words the ‘Japanese’ values are relational not absolute, and cannot correspond to any misleadingly similar ‘Thai’ values. Indeed, how many food terms correspond, if only analogically, across cultures? And how many terms initially codified in the notion of a cuisine are then used to qualify human character, visual style, design, clothes, and so on? These questions are nearly impossible to answer with any precision. (4) Indeed, positively appraised tastes can be used to indicate distaste; therefore, a broad range of interpretations is required to convey the meaning of these terms. Just as disparate taste or food-related metaphors may be applied to the weather or to other phenomena (such as “roasting” or “bitter” in English), food vocabularies—specific words or expressions—can be deployed to describe experience or to represent values in areas having nothing to do with food, such as the aesthetics of color or clothing, or even the appreciation of human beings. This property of language is by no means restricted to food, but food expressions in many languages are so close at hand that they are useful for revealing deep structures of values. For any community of speakers, food expressions constitute natural metaphors, reinforced in their naturalness all the more for having a concrete denotation. But what happens when someone outside of a culture hears and must interpret such terms, which are initially codified as part of a cuisine but then used to qualify other areas of experience? Stories from different cultures may be understood—or misunderstood—depending on the meaning of these terms in one context or another. A great deal can be understood about particular cultures if we try to map their aesthetic values by examining the habitual use of terms describing food. Whatever the individual, personal, or even eccentric application of any particular value, tastes need to be described within the context of a total system of socially mediated aesthetic values. This system may be so broad that one set of values, such as that for food, when applied to another, such as that for clothes, can easily become specious. And some arguments may not be valid beyond the limits of one particular set of values, that is, beyond one particular culture. The Aesthetics of Food, in Thai Thai culinary aesthetics is articulated around three major contrasts: the fresh-crispy vs. the formless over-cooked; the well-cooked vs. the undercooked; and the plain vs. the spicy, sharp, or tangy. Sweetness, saltiness, and even the richness of the oils in coconut milk are merely variables added to these three basic pairs. These last three characteristics do not constitute major categories in themselves, as would sweet and salty in many parts of Europe. In Australia, Thai food is appreciated for its freshness and spiciness, which are only two of the six Thai culinary descriptors [See Diagram II], and ones that are not normally paired. The pairs of contrasting qualities can be schematized by applying a method invented by the Japanese philosopher Kuki Shûzô in Paris in the 1920s. Kuki, who wrote what later became a major codification of Japanese aesthetics, invented a hexahedron for mapping Japanese aesthetic values as antithetical pairs. (5) DIAGRAM I Japanese Aesthetic Values [ after Kuki Shûzô] Iki [Chic] Shibumi [Astringent] P Amami [Sweet] Jôhin [Refined] Yabo [Conventional] Jimi [Subdued] O Hade [Showy] Gehin [Unrefined] [Kuki’s concrete universal is at P-O] Kuki’s schema may be taken as a very sophisticated exercise based on correlating words that occur as aesthetic descriptors in literary texts, artworks, design, food, clothes, etc., and then analyzing them to produce a prescriptive denotative structure. Yet I believe that his map can be used at a simpler level. Below, I attempt to show how the antithetical Thai culinary values mentioned above may similarly be arranged in a hexahedron, though this preliminary scheme requires further elaboration. DIAGRAM II, A Schema of Thai Culinary Values Suk [Ripe] Phet [Spicy] Priaw [Sharp] Le [Soft] Khaaw krup [Under-cooked] Dip [Unripe] Cüüd [Plain] Waan [Sweet] Kroop [Crispy] Khaaw suk [Well-cooked] [The notional Thai concrete universal is as Priaw-Waan] The above formulation indicates opposition between “sweet” and “sharp” which may be worked out in actual food dishes by projection onto two planes. These are the back plane [ripe – spicy – unripe - plain] and the front plane [soft under-cooked – crispy- well-cooked]. The opposition can also be projected onto the two sides planes [ripe – soft – unripe – crispy] and spicy – under-cooked – plain – well-cooked]. All of the terms in this formulation, except perhaps “wellcooked” , indicate a positive appraisal; the connotation of “unripe” (dip) in Thai is close to that of “uncooked” in English. Sameness and Difference The abstract problem remains of whether any particular set of aesthetic values can be extrapolated from one domain of practice, i.e., one culture, to another. This problem, in turn, poses another: we who listen to or read an interpretation of food cannot eat exactly what was eaten by those who made the interpretation. This is why recipes, particularly those that include a critical commentary, often can function as maps, musical notations, philosophical propositions, or even cosmic diagrams. But there is no escaping taste as the basis of discriminations concerning food and thus as the basis of a system of culinary values. At both levels, tastes themselves must be identifiable, as must the situations in which the tastes are experienced. In other words, it must be possible to distinguish the sharpness of lime from that of lemon, as is clearly important in Thai cuisine, but it must also be possible to distinguish the various situations (or experiences) in which “limeness” is tasted. For example, the fruit or juice of lime as it is used in scrambled eggs is not the same “experience” as that of lime juice used in certain kinds of chicken curry. Understanding the differences between experiences of this kind may require interpreters, a group consisting of both those who cook and those who eat. Without interpreters, we would have no idea of whether our experience of a taste when eating (and, indeed, our memory of the taste) corresponded to that taste as it was described to us. Thus, discrimination in taste, as for many other aesthetic values, must always function in two modes: the mode of preparation, cooking, and offering; and the mode of receiving, eating, and appreciating. Tuning In The issue of recognition will not go away. In her appraisal of the buckwheat noodle, was our Thai friend recognizing difference, or was she unable to recognize it because her taste did not fit the Japanese scheme? To use a musical metaphor, was her culinary experience out of tune with the food she was offered, or was it tuned differently? These two positions in cross-cultural aesthetics are usually, though perhaps not necessarily, causally interlinked. When they are causally dependent, what seems to be required is a full-blown cultural transfer, assimilation, and translation of values because otherwise the system of relations would not survive. When they are causally independent and system of relations is not called into question, we may expect cultural transfer to proceed with much less strain because selective if in the event syncretic adjustment may be allowed. These adjustments are often found in ‘cross-over’ dishes such as the kinds of salad dressing which may be made from Thai soy sauce, sesame oil, and Italian balsamic vinegar over various kinds of par-boiled Thai vegetables. However, the basic problem of cultural transfer in taste and then of translation into another cultural system is that antitheses of taste do not always correspond to clearly positive and negative values. Thai culinary values, like those of many other cultures, involve certain specific pairs of opposites: the fresh-crispy is paired with the soft or over-cooked; the well-cooked is paired with the under-cooked; the plain with the spicy; the ripe with the unripe; the sweet with the sharp. The specificity of these pairings may well be the defining characteristic of Thai cuisine. Yet the pairs encompass a wide range of possibilities rather than a single set of categories to be rigidly reproduced. For instance, Thai cuisine privileges the properly rich taste of coconut milk, which would fall under the category of “well-cooked,” but it sharply discriminates this taste from the oily, which cannot be appraised too negatively. Terminology The terms used in cuisine or as signs for specific culinary values may also be used more generally. The widespread occurrence of a variety of adjectival qualifications, which might be termed “sympathetic metaphors,” may be precisely what enables an outsider to understand Thai culture. Many metaphors are used in Thai to express satisfaction and even a surfeit amounting to boredom. Duu nang im means to “be full up on seeing a film,” in other words, a satisfying film; duu laew ian means “already seen to the full,” i.e., boring. However, the range of metaphors used may be profoundly affected by non-culinary values or systems of thought. Thai uses colorful metaphors for food items, which when translated can easily be understood in other languages. May pen sapparod, for example, means “it’s not a pineapple” or, less literally, “it hasn’t made it,” as in the English expression “it doesn’t cut the mustard”. The Thai language also uses culinary terms to qualify colors, clothes, and other aspects of visual aesthetics, as well as to appraise human character, but apparently such usage is less frequent than it is in some other languages, such as Japanese or English. The expression khon khem, literally, “a salty person,” means “stingy”; naa cüüd, “a plain face,” means “not beautiful”; and naa waan, “sweet face,” means “attractive.” The relative paucity of such expressions in Thai might be attributed to a Buddhist avoidance of terms that demonstrate carnal pleasure and thus attachment to the illusory material world, although plenty of evidence exists for several distinctively Thai modes of physical enjoyment within it. Interestingly, phrases and terms derived from cooking procedures most often express concern with psychological appraisal: genuineness and deception are represented by the correctness or incorrectness of the procedure. Phrases emphasizing over-cooking provide metaphors for deception, such as doon tom con suk, “cooked to the full,” and doon tun con suk, “steamed to the full,” both of which mean “deceived.” To Eat and To Live Sweetness, sourness, and saltiness are frequently encountered as qualifications of personality in Thai, as in other languages, but Thai is particularly rich in expressions that use the verb kin, “to eat,” to mean “consume,” “use up,” “survive by,” “depend on,” “win,”” occupy,” “take in,” “exist,” and “live” (see Table 1). Eating as a metaphor for other kinds of perception extends to expressions for looking at with desire, visual calculation, and enjoyment of a sight. But the most prominent usages of kin concern survival and consumption, including winning in games of chance and getting by without working. There are also a number of expressions in which kin means the seeing through, or revelation of, ulterior motives and the exposure of morally unworthy action. So “eating” for Thais in these linguistic representations also involves appraising a range of qualities from economic viability to mendacity. With the numerous uses of kin, culinary values have come a long way from describing dishes or describing the enjoyment of eating. However, the expressions using kin and related words do not overtly concern themselves with other kinds of aesthetic appraisal, such as those regarding clothes, as they would in Japanese, despite phrases such as teng tua priaw, “dress up sharp,” that is, to wear modern clothes. STORY #5: THE FINICKY CHILD Let me end by telling another story, one that I personally observed. A close relative’s family came from Thailand for their first visit to Australia with their eighteen-month-old child. The family could not eat ordinary Australian food and disliked even the fried eggs served in the hotel. The child refused all local food, so the family, in some desperation, went to McDonald’s: the parents thought the food would be the same as that found in similar restaurants in Thailand and thus acceptable to the child. But the food, even the fried egg, was not the same. The child again refused to eat until a special visit was made to a Chinese restaurant to buy rice congee. This first visit abroad was clearly a shock for the child and even for the parents, despite quite a bit of international travel experience. All that the family could find to say when asked why they felt such resistance to Australian food was may aroy, “it’s not tasty.” I would not like to count the number and variety of culinary contexts in which, even in my temporally limited, non-native speaker’s experience, I have heard this expression arise in Thai. Of course, on the surface its straightforward meaning is “not taste good,” but it also comprises the meaning of “not taste as it should,” or more deeply, “does not belong to the taste system required.” The fried eggs, for example, would have to be fried in oil, to a temperature and consistency that the child liked. Frequently in Thailand this means not quite as well-cooked as would be normal for Australian taste; in Thailand the egg itself may be served with naam plaa, fish sauce, or naam phrik, a chili and ground-prawn condiment. It may even be offered with a sweet tamarind sauce with fried onions in a special dish called khaay luuk khuey, or “son-in-law’s eggs,” which would make it close to a cake in Australian terms. Even if the fried eggs had been geographically out of place, the concept at least could have been culturally transferred to a foreign context. But the actual system of taste was not translatable back into the Thai interpretive context, and the child’s barely verbalized level of response allowed him only to use the simplest and most profound food expression available, “it’s not tasty.” I often ask in Thailand what would happen if people living in a certain place found that their local food stall or restaurant were not serving food with the taste they required. Would they still eat the food because of the need for nourishment? “No one would eat there,” comes the regular answer. Why would you not eat their food? Because it was may aroy, not tasty. [TABLE 1] Expressions in Thai involving the word kin, “to eat” kin puun roon thong: “eat the betel paste which heats one’s belly”; the idea of feeling guilty while not suspected by others but inadvertently revealing the guilty feeling. kin yuu kap paak, yaak yuu kap thong: “eat through the mouth, desire through the belly”; someone who conceals his intention by denying without having been asked.(6) kliat tua kin khay, kliat plaa laay kin nam kaeng: “dislike the body but eat the egg, dislike the eel but eat sauce from it”; said of one who accuses others or who says one thing but does another. kin phua yuu, yuu phua kin: “live to eat, eat to live”; to exist kin yuu: “be eating”; to live yuu kin:“be and eat”; to live together (said of a married couple) kin caay khon : “eat at people’s hearts”; to be impressive (when speaking) kin ruup: “eat form”; to conceal a shape or to conceal something by another shape kin tua: “eat itself”; to wear out (said of clothes) kin may luak: “eat without choosing”; to gobble up or consume everything indiscriminately kin muang: “eat the city”; to govern kin plaaw: “eat nothing”; to eat for nothing or profit without investing in something kin bun kaw: “eat from old karma”; to live by inherited money kin lek kin nooy: “eat both little and small”; to corruptly skim off money kin sinbon: “eat treasured recompense for service”; to benefit from a bribe (said in reference to a god or a spirit) kin taam naam: “eat with the flow of water”; to do what everyone else does (said, for example, of corrupt civil servants) NOTES For those who want to cook at home, numerous Thai cookery books are available. Interestingly, the best English-language book on Thai cooking is written by an Australian based on Thai recipes, many of which were published only in Thai in small-circulation commemorative cremation volumes. See David Thomson, Thai Food / arharn thai (Camberwell: Penguin Books Australia, 2002). Thai transcription into English is broadly as follows, with Thai romanization on the left and approximate English sound on the right of each equation: ph=p, b=b [boo bay maay], p=b’ [boo plaa], th=t, d=d [doo dek], t=d’ [doo taw], c=j, kh=k, k=g, ü=a closed “u”. The Thai unaspirated b and d, where the tongue is back from the teeth, also have forms where the tongue is closer to the teeth. These are conventionally transcribed as p and t but to most English speakers they will still sound like the English “b” and “t”. See the Royal Thai Institute orthography in Mary Haas, Thai-English Students’ Dictionary (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964). 3 An eighteenth-century Edo Period phrase was kemonodana no yamakujira: “mountain whale [wild boar] from the flesh shop,” hinting at antipathy to meat presumably because it was oily, like whale meat. See Kuki Shûzô, Reflections on Japanese Taste: The Structure of Iki, translated by John Clark, with notes by John Clark and Matsui Sakuko (Sydney: Power Publications, 1997), 142. 4 It is a singular fact of such attempts that they sink into essentialism, as does Kuki’s. Their totalization seems to require a limited period and a society in restricted contact with the outside world, yet at the same time one which is highly mediatized with wide-scale, rapid circulation of values and style models. In pre-modern times outside Europe, such situations seem to have been possible only in certain medieval Islamic cities, in the Hangzhou of the Southern Song dynasty, and in the three major cities of eighteenth-century Japan, Edo (Tokyo), Naniwa (Osaka), and Heian (Kyoto). 5 The hexahedron is presented here for illustrative purposes; further discussion of it can be found in the translation of Kuki’s work. See Kuki, Reflections on Japanese Taste, p.62, for the hexahedron and discussion. The major overall survey of Kuki is Leslie Pincus, Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shûzô and the Rise of National Aesthetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). For further background and bibliography see also John Clark, “Sovereign Domains: The Structure of Iki’, Japan Forum 10, no. 2 (1998): 197-209. 6 There are also a large number of Japanese cognates to notions surrounding the belly as the site of resolution, desire, and honesty/deception, as in hara wo kimeru “to decide one’s belly” = make up your mind; hara wo kitte hanasu “to cut one’s stomach and talk” = be frank; hara no naka wo misezu ni, “not to show what’s in your belly” = conceal your intentions. 7 See Penny Van Esterik, “Nurturance and Reciprocity in Thai Studies,” in E. Paul Durrenberger, State Power and Culture in Thailand (New Haven: Yale Southeast Asia Studies, monograph 44, 1996), 22-46.