Warren Belasco - Identity

Downloaded from www.bloomsburyfoodlibrary.com on Thu Jan 14 2021 17:42:05 Eastern Standard Time.
Access provided by The Culinary Institute of America. IP address: 132.174.254.163. Subject to the Bloomsbury Food Library
Belasco, Warren. "Identity: Are We What We Eat?." Food: The Key Concepts. Oxford: Berg, 2008. 15–34.
The Key Concepts. Bloomsbury Food Library. Web. 14 Jan. 2021.
<http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350042148-ch-002>.
Accessed from: www.bloomsburyfoodlibrary.com

Accessed on: Thu Jan 14 2021 17:42:05 Eastern Standard Time
Access provided by: The Culinary Institute of America
Copyright © Warren Belasco. All rights reserved. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without
prior permission in writing from the publishers.
terms of use, available at www.bloomsburyfoodlibrary.com/terms-and-conditions.
Identity: Are We What We Eat?
Downloaded from www.bloomsburyfoodlibrary.com on Thu Jan 14 2021 17:42:05 Eastern Standard Time. Access provided by The Culinary Institute of America. IP address: 132.174.254.163. Subject to the Bloomsbury Food Library
DOI: 10.5040/9781350042148-ch-002
Page Range: 15–34
For what is food? It is not only a collection of products that can be used for statistical or nutritional
studies. It is also, and at the same time, a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of
usages, situations, and behavior.
—Roland Barthes (1979)
We start our inquiry, to repeat Paul Rozin (1999), with the most “fundamental” and “fun” aspects of food
– the way food serves to express personal and group identities and to cement social bonds. These
functions may be taken for granted in our modern world, where eating is often of the “grab and go”
variety and where consumers are so removed from the complex and nearly miraculous means by which
solar energy and chemical elements are transformed into “dishes,” “meals,” and “feasts.”
It is an axiom of food studies that “dining” is much more than “feeding.” While all creatures “feed,” only
humans “dine.” As the French cultural theorist Barthes suggests above, what we consider “food”
extends far beyond nutrients, calories, and minerals. A meal is much more than the sum of its parts, for it
encompasses what Barthes calls “a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages,
situations, and behavior” (Barthes 1979: 166-173). People use food to “speak” with each other, to
establish rules of behavior (“protocols”), and to reveal, as Brillat-Savarin said, “what you are.”
Cuisine
One way to understand the expressive and normative functions of food is through the key concept of
“cuisine.” In popular language the term “cuisine” is often reserved for high-class, elite, or “gourmet”
food. But here, following anthropologists Peter Farb and George Armelagos (1980: 190–98), we take a
more expansive view to suggest that all groups have an identifiable “cuisine,” a shared set of
“protocols,” usages, communications, behaviors, etc. (A similar meaning applies to the word “culture,”
which extends beyond just Shakespeare, operas, and fine art to encompass a common set of ideas,
images and values that express and influence how group members think, feel and act.) Cuisine and
culture vary widely from group to group. While the human race as a whole has tried to eat just about
everything on the planet and may thus be considered to be omnivorous, specific groups are quite picky.
That is, within individual cuisines certain foods are considered “good to eat” and “good to think” (yum)
while others are considered “inedible” or “disgusting” (yuck).
Farb and Armelagos liken a cuisine to a culture’s language – a system of communication that is
inculcated from birth, if not before, and is hard to change or learn once you are grown. Even if you
migrate elsewhere, you will likely retain the “accent” of your native cuisine. A similar concept is that of
the “food voice,” which may range, according to Annie Hauck-Lawson, from “whispers” and
“utterances” to “shouts” and “choruses” (2004: 24). As with all vocalizations, some national cuisines
speak more loudly than others; while Irish or Scandinavian cuisines may tend to be somewhat muted in
range and resonance, Italian and Chinese are almost operatic in dramatic intensity. Similarly an individual
cook’s food voice may be more or less eloquent and evocative. Another way to imagine these
differences in cuisine is to think in terms of menus: some restaurants (cuisines) offer long and challenging
lists of complex dishes, while others stick to a short “McMenu.”
Farb and Armelagos, along with culinary historian Elisabeth Rozin (1982), suggest that a group’s cuisine
has four main elements.
First, each cuisine prioritizes a limited set of “basic foods,” the primary “edibles” selected from a
broader environment of potential foods. These selections are based on a mix of convenience, identity,
and responsibility considerations. As Rozin puts it, “The general rule seems to be that everyone eats
some things, but no one eats all things, and the basis for the selection of foods by a culture is dependent
on a wide variety of factors: availability, ease of production, nutritional costs and benefits, custom,
palatability, religious or social sanction.” Other analysts call these most highly prized staples “core”
foods or “cultural super foods.” In a seminal analysis of migrant Mexican American food practices,
anthropologist Brett Williams (1984) distinguishes tortillas (the simple, daily staples) from tamales (the
time-consuming dishes reserved for special occasions). “Basic foods” range from meat and potatoes in
Nebraska, to stew and fufu (porridge) in West Africa, to rice and soy in East Asia, and, yes, to tortillas
and beans in Central America.
Second, specific cuisines favor a distinct manner of preparing food. Rozin identifies several main
“manipulative techniques,” including particulation (cutting, slicing, mincing into smaller sizes),
incorporation (mixing two substances to yield a third, such as the combination of water and milled grain
to produce dough), marination, application of dry or wet heat, dry curing, frying, and fermentation. Such
techniques vary widely depending on the energy, time, skill, personnel and technologies available in
individual kitchens. Noting how convenience and identity factors interact, Farb and Armelagos detect
some “wisdom of cuisine” in the way that some groups ingeniously exploit scarce energy resources –
such as low-fat stir-frying in Asia and quick fermentation in hot and humid West Africa – but such
“wisdom” is less obvious when it comes to the far less efficient microwaving of elaborately packaged
“convenience foods” or the grilling of hamburgers produced in energy-intensive animal factories. Still, it
is fair to say that humans have been very creative in devising numerous ways to transform the “raw” into
the “cooked,” and learning about such techniques is one of the delights of food studies – and a major
appeal of cooking shows on television.
Box 2.1. A Holiday Meal
It is within the family that we do most of our eating. Through a complex set of domestic interactions,
we learn how to eat, shop, and cook; what to like, and what to dislike. We also observe rituals,
celebrate holidays, and create new traditions while discarding others. In this exercise you will apply
the concept of “cuisine” to describe and interpret a festive family dinner ritual – i.e., a special meal
that is planned, periodic, predictable, and especially loaded with meaning.
1. Introduction: What sort of meal is this and who’s coming? That is, give the overall setting: type of
event, time, place, personnel.
2. Food choices: Give a typical menu and tell me where the basic foods come from. Note prevailing
color patterns, shapes, textures, flavor principles. Whose food preferences prevail when it comes
to planning the meal? How do these foods compare with those used in daily meals?
3. Manner of preparation: Who acquires the food? Who prepares it? Describe any specialization or
division of labor. Describe the main manipulative techniques. Which dishes are made “from
scratch”? From a box? Where did the recipes come from? Who cleans up? Evaluate and rate the
kitchen work as a theatrical performance. (Is it a good “show”?)
4. Rules for consumption: How is the meal performed? Describe:

— Time and length of meal.
— Meal site (dining room, kitchen, family room, etc.).
— Types of utensils, dishes, napkins.
— Seating arrangements at the table.
— Serving procedures.
— Aesthetic arrangement of food on the table and on the plate.
— Appropriate dress.
— Appropriate conversation topics.
— Procedures for departure from the table.
— Post-meal rituals.
— Other relevant “table manners.”
— Family idiosyncrasies.
— Comparison with ordinary daily meals.
Further reading on meal rituals: Douglas 1975, Etzioni 2004,Visser 1991, Dietler and Hayden 2001,
Jacobs and Scholliers 2003, Albala 2007, Pitts et al. 2007.
Cuisines are also distinguished by their “flavor principles” – a distinctive way of seasoning dishes. These
unique flavoring combinations serve as important group “markers.” For example, culinary identity in
parts of China may be expressed through the combination of soy sauce, garlic, ginger, and sesame oil,
while a mix of garlic, tomato, and olive oil may signal “southern Italian,” and chili, cumin, garlic, and
tomato may communicate “Mexican.” To be sure, regional and personal variations in seasoning are
extensive, so one must be wary of over-generalizing – except perhaps if you are a mass-marketer selling
stereotypical “ethnic foods” such as tacos, spaghetti sauce, or egg rolls (Belasco 1987).
Cuisines also prescribe the way food is to be eaten – a set of “manners,” codes of etiquette, Barthes’s
“protocols.” These socially transmitted norms of behavior establish the boundaries of acceptability. As
the Victorians were particularly concerned about separating the “civilized” from the “savage,” their rules
were particularly complex. As one 1879 rulebook put it, etiquette “is the barrier which society draws
around itself, a shield against the intrusion of the impertinent, the improper, and the vulgar.” But all
cultures have their rules, culinary historian Margaret Visser notes, for “without them food would be
hogged by the physically powerful, civility in general would decline, and eventually society would break
down altogether. Furthermore the specific fashion in which a culture manages eating helps to express,
identify, and dramatize that society’s ideals and aesthetic style” (Visser 2003: 586, 588).
Here again notions and practices vary greatly, including the number of meals to be eaten per day, when,
where, with what utensils, and with whom. Some cuisines favor pickled fish and rice for breakfast, others
flaked grains with cold, pasteurized cow’s milk. Some dine on the floor, others at tall tables. Some use
the fingers of one hand, others use sticks, while others use prongs. Some compliment the cook with
gentle burps while others finds such expressions to be unimaginably crude. In some societies women eat
after men, in others at the same time but in another room. Hierarchies of power and preference may also
be expressed by the seating of guests, especially how close to the host and on which hand. Within
cuisines the rules may also change depending on the importance or “weight” of a particular dining
event. A casual “drink” with acquaintances entails quite a different set of protocols from a formal
banquet with one’s boss or in-laws. An afternoon snack may have fewer protocols than a wedding. And
even weddings are celebrated with varying degrees of culinary attention. A nuptial dinner in Connecticut
may take years to plan and cost a year’s pay (or more), while in parts of Mali a bride may not know whom
she is marrying until her wedding day, and no food at all will be served at the ensuing party (Menzel and
D’Aluisio 2005: 216).
Generally, however, pleasant social gatherings involve food consumption, whereas food is usually
prohibited in less friendly venues, such as traffic court, or, in keeping with the classic mind–body
distinction, in many libraries and classrooms. While banning food from library stacks makes some sense,
for this does protect the books, the general proscription on eating in class seems unfortunate, especially
if the learning involves teamwork. According to the concept of commensality, sharing food has almost
magical properties in its ability to turn self-seeking individuals into a collaborative group. Take, for
example, the classic French folk tale, “Stone Soup.” The story has many variants, but the general theme
is food’s transformative properties. In the midst of prolonged war, hungry soldiers stumble on a small
village whose self-protective inhabitants, in standard peasant practice, have hidden all the edibles.
(Potatoes in particular were especially useful for this, as they could be kept in the ground until needed.)
At first the residents hesitate to share any food with the soldiers. But when the visitors state that all they
need is a large stone and a pot, the peasants become curious and gather around to watch them boil the
rock. Soon a soldier suggests that, while stone soup is wonderful, it would be better with a potato, and
one intrigued peasant volunteers one of his own. The same happens when the cook muses about a
carrot. Then meat, wine, tables, music, and so on follow. Soon the whole village is engaged in a hearty
feast and the soldiers are invited to sleep in the mayor’s best bed. Upon their departure the next day,
the peasants send them off with many thanks, “for we shall never go hungry now that you have taught us
how to make soup from stones!” (Brown 1947). The message: Sharing food makes us wiser, better
people. This belief is also expressed in the Latin-based words “company” and “companions”: the people
with whom one shares bread.
Still, despite this general principle, an even rudimentary understanding of cultural anthropology or
history suggests that many of the practices that we take to be timeless and universal are in fact highly
variable and only recently “constructed.” Widespread Western use of forks is relatively recent; King Louis
XIV of France considered them “unmanly,” while American Puritan settlers supposedly denounced them
as devilish (Young 2004: 437). It was not until the mid-eighteenth century that at least half of New
Englanders owned forks – and these were mostly of the “middling” classes (McWilliams 2005: 216).
Many of us consider the well-mannered and elaborately equipped “family meal” to be sacrosanct,
“traditional,” and now endangered, yet here again we can date such rituals back only to the nineteenth
century, and even then inconvenient work routines, cramped space, and limited tools kept many working
families from dining together (Grover 1987, Turner 2006). Solitary eating is not a purely modern
invention or affliction (Mayo 2007). Conversely, despite much moralizing to the contrary, modern families
may be eating together more often than assumed, although the “rules for consumption” of a takeout
pizza in front of the television may be quite a bit more informal and ad hoc than those idealized by
Victorian gentry or depicted by Norman Rockwell.
To these four main characteristics of cuisine may be added a fifth: a distinctive infrastructure, or “food
chain,” by which a group’s food moves from farm to fork. Some societies have very simple infrastructures
– what’s raised in adjacent fields is transported a short distance to a family’s home, with only a few
products supplied through the nearby market. Modern cuisines, on the other hand, have highly
segmented and extended food chains in which a single bite may move thousands of “food miles,” with
many opportunities for “adding value” (profit) by countless middlemen before it finally reaches the
mouth. Thus do a few cents’ worth of wheat and sweeteners become a US$4 box of Frosted Flakes. The
modern food supply chain includes not only the familiar farms, truckers, factories, restaurants, and
supermarkets, but also research universities, government agencies (both civilian and military),
agribusiness suppliers, and oil companies. If we add up all the institutions that help to feed Americans, at
least twenty percent of the US workforce is involved, with an annual bill of at least US$1 trillion. Even so,
despite the huge price tag, stocking the modern commissary may occupy a much smaller percentage of
the population than in a society where food travels just a few steps from the back plot. Since such
complex supply chains have made modern food considerably more convenient; we will examine them
more closely in Chapter 4, while Chapters 5 and 6 will ponder their vast ecological, economic, and
political consequences.
To illustrate these concepts, we may inquire, “What’s American cuisine?” The question is quite
complicated, as many serious scholars debate whether Americans even have a cuisine, or they doubt
that the term is really applicable to an entity as uniquely amorphous as the USA (Mintz: 1996). Others
use their answer as an opportunity to criticize “tasteless” American mass culture. When I ask
undergraduate liberal arts students this question (as I do every year), I get certain predictable phrases:
fast, fried, super-sized, salty, greasy, bland, and mass-marketed. Mindful of America’s multicultural
heritage and nature, others will cite “diversity,” “the melting pot,” and “creolization.” Immigration
historian Donna Gabaccia writes, “The American penchant to experiment with foods, to combine and
mix the foods of many cultural traditions into blended gumbos or stews, and to create ‘smorgasbords’ is
scarcely new but is rather a recurring theme in our history as eaters” (1998: 3). Yet such celebrations of
American culinary complexity are relatively recent. For a long time there was what might be considered a
dominant cuisine of North America, the food beliefs and practices most associated with the heritage of
British America’s earliest ruling class. This hegemonic cuisine governed American cookbooks, etiquette
manuals, menus, and supply chains well past the middle of the twentieth century. So what follows may
be considered a rough sketch of “American cuisine” c. 1960. I write mostly in the past tense, as our
understanding of what is “American” has become considerably more contested in the past few decades,
although much of this still applies to broad segments of what is sometimes called Middle America
(Levenstein 1988, Pillsbury 1998, McWilliams 2005).
Basic Foods: In keeping with its Anglo- heritage, American cuisine put meat, especially beef, at the
center of the plate, while “starch” was considered to be a wrapper or side dish and vegetables mere
embroidery. The Spanish, too, prioritized meat and wheat, pushing indigenous maize, legumes, and
produce to the side (Pilcher 1998). As meat and dairy products have long been cheaper and more
available in America than elsewhere – thanks in large part to the huge government subsidies devoted to
replacing native grasses, buffalo, and Indians with corn, cows, and cowboys – almost all immigrants have
added prodigious amounts of animal foods to their Old World cuisines (Diner 2001). Ratifying and
rationalizing their tastes, Americans still consider animal protein to be essential for proper nutrition.
Reflecting the New Nutrition of the early twentieth century (Levenstein 1988) vegetables became “good
for you” but were considered “boring” and not “filling,” except perhaps for salads, corn, and potatoes
slathered in animal fats. At the high point of WASP hegemony, the emblematic vegetable dish was a
mixture of finely chopped raw vegetables molded – indeed imprisoned – in plain gelatin, a byproduct of
the slaughterhouses. According to food writer Laura Shapiro, this “perfection salad,” was “the very
image of a salad at last in control of itself” (1986: 100). This compulsion to encase the vegetable within
the animal endures in the Jell-O cookery that is the pride of much Middle American cuisine. Conversely,
the belief that a grain-centered diet is inadequate and perhaps even dangerous persists in the belief that
“starches” are fattening, and thus out of control.
Flavor Principles: Genteel Americans long disdained certain strong spices – especially garlic and hot
peppers – perhaps because they were too closely associated with lower-class immigrants, or perhaps
because, Farb and Armelagos speculate, blandness served as a common denominator in a highly
pluralistic society. Here again, the British heritage mattered, for eighteenth-century French philosopher
Voltaire allegedly sniped that England was a nation of “sixty different religions but only one sauce”
(Egerton 1994: 44). Valuing “honesty” and “sincerity,” colonists suspected sauces of inherent elitism,
especially of the upper-class French variety (Kaufman 2004: 403). To be sure American gentry loved a
crude version of French food even in the early republican period, and the taste for complex spices has
expanded much in recent years. Even so, the process of “Americanization” today still resembles the way
Victorians absorbed a few “foreign foods,” such as “Hindoo” curries and Chinese “chop suey” – by
“blunting the flavors and dismantling the complications” (Shapiro 1986: 213).
In keeping with their traditional wariness of Old World cuisines, modernistic Americans were quick to
accept canned, frozen, and otherwise processed foods, but only by being convinced through advertising
and branding that they were somehow “fresh” and “natural.” (In this way the modern was reconciled
with the traditional.) Among the main criteria for “freshness” in North American cuisine:
▪ Packaged bread should be “soft.” Firm, chewy bread was considered “stale” (unless toasted).
▪ Vegetables must have certain predictable colors, generally “bright.” Tomatoes, strawberries, and
apples must be a certain shade of red; carrots and oranges, orange; string beans, peppers, and squash,
green; bananas, yellow. Similar color standards applied to animal foods, e.g., yellow butter, margarine,
and chicken, “red” meat. To achieve these colors, certain genetic strains were favored, and as a last
resort dyes and waxes might be added. (Here again, modernistic means were employed to achieve
“traditional” ends.)
▪ Sweetness was equated with freshness, hence the addition of sugar to most proc essed foods. And
extra sodium perked up tired canned and frozen foods, restoring some of the “natural” flavor lost
somewhere along the extended food chain.
▪ For drinks: the colder the better. “Keep it cold, keep it fresh.” Room-temperature ales might be
considered highly drinkable in Britain but were considered “flat” in America. Only an extravagantly
affluent society could afford such widespread and extreme refrigeration. (Convenience thus reinforced
taste.) Cheap refrigeration also shaped the American preference for dry-aged refrigerated beef –
thought to be more “tender” (or at least softer) than freshly killed meat (Pilcher 2006: 10–11). At the
same time, reflecting the same abundance of fossil fuels, “hot” meals had to be really hot – no lukewarm
street foods here. Coffee and tea had to be either “iced” or boiled.
▪ Given the growing distance between real farms and urban markets, consumers were easily assured of a
product’s freshness by advertisements that depicted stereotypical, Disneyesque farm scenes of ruggedly
hearty family farmers, well-groomed, pest-free fields, and contented cattle, piglets, and chickens running
free in sanitary barnyards.
▪ As in many cultures, whiteness was long considered a mark of refinement, sophistication, and
cultivation. Darker foods were considered more crude, primitive, and undesirable. In recent decades,
however, health-conscious elites have reversed such associations to the extent that heavy, dark “peasant
breads” are now marketed largely to the more affluent segments of the population, while white bread
has more populistic appeal (Belasco 2006b: 48–50).
Since such generalizations are so broad and open to exception, it is also possible to “read” a cuisine by
an intense analysis of a single favorite food. Take the Oreo, one of America’s best-selling, most cherished
brands. Over 360 billion of these three-layer cookies have been sold since 1912. Reading the label
reveals certain prominent ingredients in the industrial diet (basic foods): refined flour, sugar, assorted
vegetable oils, artificial flavors, stabilizers, preservatives, a dash of sodium, and the common
denominator – maize, especially corn starch and high-fructose corn syrup (Pollan 2006: 15–119).
Chocolate comes last on the label and thus constitutes the smallest ingredient – a little goes a long way.
“Freshness” is asserted by the plastic wrapping as well as by the Nabisco trademark imprinted on every
cookie and cracker – a symbol originating with the fifteenth-century Venetian Society of Printers and
signifying “the triumph of the moral and spiritual over the evil and material.” The Oreo’s sculpted
Maltese Cross pattern – emblem of medieval Christian warriors – further conveys a sense of loyalty, trust,
honesty, and bravery. If there is a flavor principle, it is ultra-sweet, with a smear of fat (the white layer).
We taste as much with our eyes as our tongues, so visual appearance is also important. The cookie’s
ornate carvings and fluted edges combine with the red, white, and blue packaging to convey a festive,
quasi-nationalistic feeling. Stark contrasts of color (deep brown; bright white) and texture (crunchy outer
layers; soft filling) also sharpen the taste appeal. An accompanying glass of milk cuts the sweetness and
clears the teeth of dark crumbs. In keeping with the corporate-industrial-global nature of the American
food system, the manipulative techniques that produce and preserve this pastry, and the infrastructure
that supplies it, are elaborate, energy-intensive, and opaque. The cookie’s cocoa and palm oil alone may
travel halfway around the world.
The Oreo isn’t all about business, however. As corporate, globalized, and mass-marketed as it is, the
Oreo also lends itself to highly individualized consumption “protocols” – as suggested in folklorist
Elizabeth Adler’s food studies classic, “Creative Eating: The Oreo Syndrome” (1983). We don’t all eat the
same food in the same way. Rather, Oreo consumers tend to divide between those who carefully take it
apart first and eat each layer separately (twisters) and those who crunch all three layers together
(nibblers), as well as between those who like to “dunk” their cookie in milk and those who like it dry.
While these differences may seem trivial, Adler’s point is that people like to play with their food, and this
is also seen in the varied approaches to eating a fried egg. “Not only do we ritualize our style of eating,
we tend to separate foods that are combined. We take apart the Oreo; we eat first the white, then the
yolk, of a fried egg. By attempting this separation, we create a risk, accepting a challenge to prove our
control over food whose fragile quality makes it easily destructible” (5). Similar variations apply to the
way we eat corn, fried potatoes, gravy and biscuits, pancakes, animal crackers (appendages first?), and
entire meals. “Do you eat foods one at a time, first all the vegetables, then all the meat, then all the
starches? Or do you eat a bit from each group, working your way around the plate in a circular fashion
until all is gone? Do you eat your salad first, last, or with the meal? Do you drink milk or other liquids
throughout the meal or gulp them down all at once at the end?” (7). Resisting the standardization and
homogeneity of modern life, people like to “customize” their eating to suit personal needs and
preferences. Adler suggests that those who carefully twist off all the layers and eat the sweetest one last
may be categorized as “neat eaters” who like to delay gratification, while those who simply crunch the
whole cookie at once are more impulsive and impatient. Pointing to some highly impressionistic
demography, Nabisco’s own market research claims Chicago and Philadelphia tend to be “dunking
towns, while New York and Las Vegas are “twisting towns.” And in an illustration of how new media
technologies have enhanced customization, entire websites are devoted to discussions of how to eat
Oreos and what that means. Aiming to control and “unlock the magic” of Oreo consumption, Nabisco
even maintains one of the most popular fan sites. Similar forums – some corporate, some consumer-
based (or “vernacular”) – exist for other mass-market icons, such as Jell-O, Twinkies, Coca-Cola, and
Velveeta.[1]
Personalization also applies to the way we think about common foods. While the Oreo may be a highly
predictable “cash cow” for Nabisco and its owner, Kraft Foods, for the individual consumer it may evoke
acutely poignant childhood. In “Ode to Oreos,” San Francisco Chronicle columnist Adair Lara recalls her
childhood in Marin County, California, in the 1960s: “Mother sang along to ‘Steam Heat’ on the record
player, my sister practiced with her Hula-Hoop, and I was in love with the taste and smell and look of
everything.”[2] Ask a hundred people, “What do you think of when you eat an Oreo?” and you may get a
hundred different answers, some intensely nostalgic, others painful, as in the student who will always
associate Oreos with throwing up in the back seat during one particularly long and stressful family
outing. And in a subversive appropriation of the brand name, the word “Oreo” has also been used by
some African-Americans to criticize assimilationists who are “black on the outside, white on the inside.”
Needless to say, such usages do not appear on Nabisco’s official “Oreo and Milk Memories” site.
The ability of particular foods to spark powerful personal recollections and associations leads us to
another key concept of food studies: we are what we ate.
Madeleines: Food and Memory

For the connection between food and memory we inevitably turn to a very famous passage from the first
volume of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Book I (1934: 34). Visiting his mother’s home in
the French village of Combray, Proust’s stand-in protagonist Swann absent-mindedly dips a small, fluted
cookie called a madeleine in his mother’s tea. The experience is magical.
No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a
shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary
changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but
individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life
had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new
sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious
essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased to feel
mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I
was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely
transcended those savors, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Where did it
come from? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it? ...
And suddenly the memory returned. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine
which on Sunday mornings at Combray, ... my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first
in her own cup of lime-flower tea. And once I had recognized the taste of the ...
madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers ..., immediately the old grey house ...
rose up like the scenery of a theater to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the
garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents; and with the house the town ...
the Square, where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run
errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse
themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper
which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch
themselves and bend, take on color and distinctive shape, that moment all the flowers in
our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk
of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray
and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being,
towns and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.
Proust’s chance encounter proved unusually fruitful – seven volumes of fictionalized recollections. While
few can be so productive, almost anyone can write a short vignette based on their personal madeleines.
Some stories will be sweet, some sour, and some bittersweet. For example, I ask students to write 500
words about their own madeleines.[3] For some, powerful food memories spring immediately into mind,
while others need to await some serendipitous meeting – say, a distinctive aroma encountered when
entering a friend’s home. Either way, the stories amply illustrate the various ways that eating reveals who
we are – and are not.
For such young people these students are already profoundly nostalgic for pre-adolescent childhood.
“Grandma madeleines” prevail. One writer’s taste of cornbread conjures up thoughts of her annual visits
to her now departed grandparents in the rural South. “The summers spent in Alabama seem like a
lifetime ago but the memories remain in my mind as if they occurred yesterday: ... swimming at the local
pool and beach, going to the movies, go-kart racing, and eating the best food that I have eaten in my
life.” Another African-American student recalls her grandmother’s special Sunday dinners – barbecued
spareribs, baked macaroni and cheese, collard greens, and, again, cornbread – consumed avidly after
church and, in the fall at least, during Washington Redskins’ football games. “Those were the best times
of my life and all it takes is one bite of macaroni to take me back.” Such recollections transcend national
boundaries, as a taste of coconut chicken curry reminds one student of “my childhood in India, brought
me sweet memories of my grandmother, Indian summers, power failures, good friends and the meals I
looked forward to from school.” Making cafecito [strong Cuban coffee with milk] in her dorm room
returns another student to her Miami roots: “Cuban coffee provides the vehicle that allows the Cuban
exile community to gather to sip the brew and discuss the anger, the mourning and painful yearning for a
country in chains. It was through a simple cafecito with my dad and grandfather every Saturday and
Sunday morning at the omnipresent coffee stand, hearing stories of Cuba, that help shape my identity as
a Cuban.”
Box 2.2. Madeleines: We Are What We Ate

Food is more than an amalgam of biochemical nutrients. What we eat has enormous significance as a
medium for personal recollection and collective identity. In this exercise, you are asked to reflect on a
food that is especially laden with emotional, autobiographical, and symbolic meaning to you – your
equivalent of the tiny cake (madeleine) that sparked French novelist Marcel Proust’s seven-volume
classic, Remembrance of Things t (1913-1926).
Read the Proust excerpt (page 25), then think hard about your own personal madeleine. It may be
anything – from a full meal to a packaged snack – as long as it’s edible. Try to taste it before writing. In
500 words, describe your madeleine and the images, associations, and memories it conjures up. These
images do not have to be positive, by the way. Describe, also, how you encountered this memory –
for example, by chance, or by will.
You can also try classifying your madeleine:
▪ Is it positive, negative, or somewhere in between (bittersweet)?
▪ Is it a comfort food or a discomfort food? A medium for conflict or reunion?
▪ Is it homemade or commercial?
▪ Is it a demographic “marker” of ethnicity, region, generation, gender, religion, or class?
▪ Does eating this food make you part of a group? Exclude you from other groups? (Boundary
maintenance)
Note: If you can’t come up with your own special madeleine, try the Oreo exercise described on
pages 23-25: “When I eat an Oreo I think of...”
For further examples of the creative use of food memories: Sutton 2001, Winegardner 1998, Reichl
1998, Boorstin 2002, Friedensohn 2006, Abu-Jaber 2005.
Many stories involve similarly strong ethnic or regional “markers” – Chesapeake Bay crabs and oysters,
Philadelphia cheesesteaks, boardwalk fries, baklava, kielbasa, goulash, schnitzel, chutney, pierogi,
pizzelles, tamales, puerco asado y arroz con frijoles, banh cuon (Vietnamese dumplings), Korean fried
fish. What makes these particularly poignant is that, when filtered through the lens of nostalgia, such
memories become a way of preserving identities now perceived to be endangered by migration,
mobility, and suburban mass culture.
Only a few actually welcome change, and for them the passage to adulthood may again be represented
through a particular meal – as in one student’s first experience (aged eighteen) with sushi, which signified
both the transition to adult tastes and the high cost of such treats: “Well, the first time I ate sushi, I was
ruined. It was orgasmic; even better. I knew when I took that bite of tuna that I was forever destined to a
life of knowing, but not always having. (Sushi is very expensive.)” As in Eden, tasting the fruit of
knowledge meant Paradise Lost. “Like the Aristotelian prisoner in the cave, I was shown a glimpse of
heaven, and then led back to the world of men, where beefburgers and buffalo wings were king.” A
similar story relates how a college student’s current binges with cheap beer pale in comparison with his
first sip of alcohol – a particularly expensive brand of vodka. And another’s encounter with pasta recalls
an eye-opening, mouth-watering semester abroad in Rome, where fine food and a healthier, pedestrian-
oriented lifestyle contrasted sharply with the car-based fast food diet of his youth; after Rome, returning
to suburban America was difficult indeed.

Given that one’s first conscious experience is usually at the maternal breast (or bottle), mother-related
madeleines seem less likely to evoke a particular place or event than an ongoing process of parental
nurturing. Just as Proust’s mother offered tea and cookies to warm him up on a chilly day, mothers often
prepare special foods for sick children, and these may become the “comfort foods” of adulthood –
chicken soup, orange sherbet, cinnamon toast, plain rice, scrambled eggs, soft-boiled eggs cracked with
a teaspoon and with white bread to dunk. Eggs seem particularly evocative this way – a reflection
perhaps of their reproductive significance. Missing the small routines of childhood, some recall the foods
eaten often – such as the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or the simple milch reis (milk and rice)
prepared by Mom and consumed every day for many years. Especially moving is the soldier’s request for
Mom’s familiar mashed potatoes on the eve of his departure to Baghdad. Dads, too, are remembered
for their recurrent feeding rituals – such as weekend pancakes, barbecues, post-game visits to
McDonald’s.
More bittersweet is the wistful association of the smell of cooked cabbage with a stern boarding school
to which one writer and her sisters had been confined when their mother became gravely ill. And yet,
she also finds that these memories “are not disturbing. What is so remarkable is the clarity of these old
events, so much so that my sisters and I have been exchanging these thoughts from our past, bringing to
mind old promises, feelings and bonds of sisterly love.” A literary form of commensality, shared food
memories overcome distance and reinforce relationships – perhaps one reason for the popularity of food
memoirs.
Some are distinctly sour and establish borders, not bonds. Recently finding herself “incapacitated” by
the aroma of stuffed peppers at a friend’s house, one writer is transported back to a traumatic dinner of
early childhood, when she balked at eating her father’s special dish of rice, tomatoes, and beef – the
same combination in the stuffed peppers. “Little girl,” her father threatened, “if you don’t eat it, you’ll
wear it!” and he then proceeded to dump the full plate on her head. Although she subsequently forgave
her parents “for the cruel and unusual punishments they inflict on us,” such incidents remind us that the
family dinner table can be as much an arena for rebellion as for reunion. Along the same lines, another
student’s story begins with nostalgia for the aroma of Mom’s cold-weather chili but then goes on to
remember that, for some reason, whether digestive or cognitive, chili has always made her sick –
signaling her separation, even alienation, from the rest of the family. Fixing boundaries, food reminds us
of who we are not, as when one writer visits her spouse’s Greek family and commits the “major taste-
testing faux pas” of eating the bitter cloves holding his grandmother’s baklava together; only an insider
would know that the cloves are to be removed before biting.
Given the American antipathy to “healthy” vegetables, many negative memories involve childhood
resistance to spinach, broccoli, squash, lima beans, peas, and okra. Conversely, vegetarians who reject
meat at the family dinner table recall even stronger stigmatization, at least at first. Reporting on familial
conflicts over meat, folklorist LuAnne K. Roth writes, “If patriotism is indeed ‘the love of the good things
we ate in our childhood,’ as [Chinese writer, 1895–1976] Lin Yutang remarks, then it makes sense that
vegetarians are initially perceived by their families to be unpatriotic, un-American, and even downright
un-family like” (Roth 2005: 188). One suspects that vegetarians receive similar reactions in other
carnivorous cultures as well. Noting how vegetarians can be inconvenient dinner guests, journalist
Michael Pollan finds himself “inclined to agree with the French, who gaze upon any personal dietary
prohibition as bad manners” (2006: 314). But historically, such “manners” are relatively recent, especially
in ordinary homes, where children were generally ignored until the nineteenth century, when they
became the object of more moralistic “nutritional policing” by anxious bourgeois families, by would-be
reformers, and by the state itself (Coveney 2006). The intensity of family meal memories is both a
product of modernity, as well as a reaction to it.

Sometimes modernity itself is the stuff of nostalgia. Akin to the way different people eat and perceive
Oreos, some mass-marketed convenience foods become the subject of customized recollections: a
Velveeta cheese sandwich consumed on road trips in an old VW bus to Grateful Dead concerts; an
“Archway molasses cookie” purchased to reward a four-year-old for getting up early to help her now
divorced father cook breakfast; a simple Handy Snack (four crackers packaged with cheese and a red
stick for spreading it) routinely shared with a beloved grandfather while playing cards; or a 7-Eleven
slushie bought on the way to grandma’s. It is the cheap, artificially flavored crushed ice, not grandma’s
home cooking, that sparks this memory. For one writer, the unorthodox blend of Lay’s potato chips and
plain cottage cheese recalls visits to grandma, who claims to have invented this family snack. (According
to market researchers Brian Wansink and Cynthia Sangerman, 2000, potato chips are America’s favorite
comfort food.) For a former Little Leaguer, Gatorade evokes “old teammates, hot summer days, triple
headers, harsh defeats, and brilliant victories.” In an R-rated version, the “pop” of Gatorade’s “freshness
seal” suggests trips with high school friends to the beach, where – in a taste of the complex sexual rituals
of teenage boys – they drank massive amounts of Citrus Cooler as a purported cure for “blue balls” (a
euphemism for painfully unconsummated male sexual arousal). And, belying the conventional wisdom
that mass culture endangers family life, students warmly recall the mass-produced foods eaten with
family members while watching television together. Eating normally proscribed “junk foods” on sick days
while watching daytime TV is another common memory.
Given the mind-bending power of madeleines, it is inevitable that some have attempted to channel
those memories toward social goals more significant than merely fulfilling a professor’s assignment or
selling a memoir. In Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory (2001), David
Sutton shows how Greek islanders plan elaborate feasts with the conscious goal of having them
remembered collectively later on; conversely their keen ability to remember and discuss particular meals
many years later prolongs the community-building function (commensality) of social eating. In perhaps
the grimmest example of how food memories can empower people, starving concentration camp
inmates during the Second World War found emotional sustenance by sharing recipes for meals past. In
Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin (1996), editor Cara De Silva sees such memories
as a form of resistance “to those who want to annihilate you and your cultures and traditions, and
everything about you ... By writing [them down, the women] were using these as weapons. They were
using potato doughnuts and dumplings, and stuffed eggs, and caramels from Bonn, instead of bombs
and bazookas” (quoted in Rosofsky 2004: 52). In a variation, affluent descendants of slaves, famine
survivors, war refugees, and impoverished immigrants will cherish the stigmatized foods of their
oppressive past as a way to honor their ancestors’ courage and endurance – for example, the simple but
fragrant biscuits of a mill town tenement, the scrounged “hedge nutrition” of Ireland, the “Geechie
Rice” of the Sea Islands, the unleavened bread of the Jewish Exodus, the boiled chicken feet of Chinese
peasants (Avakian 1997). And remembering even the most distasteful foods of the past may have some
survival value. Lacking many of the genetically programmed “instincts” of the more selective species,
omnivores may employ memories as a way to distinguish the harmful from the wholesome. The longer
the memory, the longer the life (Pollan 2006: 287–298).
Madeleines can also be exploited for commercial purposes. Whether in Disney-world or Bali, the
vacation industry is well known for its stereotypical representation of so-called “traditional foods,” which
have become an essential ingredient in “culinary tourism” (Long 2003, Halter 2000, Heldke 2003).
Anthropologist Richard Wilk shows that a distinctively “Belizean” cuisine emerged not so much from the
ordinary citizens of Belize – an exceptionally multicultural society – as from the pressure of nostalgic
expatriates and authenticity-seeking travelers (2002, 2006). A somewhat similar dynamic is seen in
anthropologist Carla Guerron-Montero’s study of the Bocas del Toro region of Panama, where locals
learned to serve the Spanish-style meals that tourists expected, rather than the very different Afro-
Antillean cuisine of the area (2004). Attempting to cash in on “heritage tourism,” the declining industrial
city of Pueblo, Colorado built a new identity around the once despised chili pepper (Haverluk 2002). In a
classic study of such “neo-localism,” historian Kolleen Guy suggests that the legendary French terroir
that one supposedly detects in a taste of good Bordeaux or brie was in fact the relatively recent
concoction of an opportunistic alliance among nationalist politicians, ambitious growers, and tourist
chateau operators all seeking to serve their narrow economic interests while stifling the competition from
seemingly less “authentic” locales (2002). An analogous process took place in Victorian America, when
descendants of the original British colonists consciously invented the components of the now familiar
Thanksgiving dinner – roast turkey, stuffing, pumpkin pie – as a way to assert their superiority to
newcomers who arrived with radically different cultures and cuisines (Smith 2004).
Similarly, advertisements for McDonald’s, Frosted Flakes, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, and Kool-Aid may
take advantage of childhood associations with processed foods to build loyalty for their brands (and for
industrial food in general). Such associations “work” best if they tap dominant myths. According to its
advertising, a bite of sausage at Bob Evans’s Farm Restaurant “takes me back home” – but only if my
home resembles a Currier and Ives print of a prosperous Ohio farmstead. And, as we have seen, Nabisco
even has a website where consumers of Oreos – the national madeleine? – can exchange their
memories, but only the positive ones. One does wonder about whether such mass-mediated
recollections will further homogenize the modern mind, producing “McMemories.” Yet just as the
playing of a “golden oldie” song may spark vastly different recollections of teenage life, so too may
consumers experience and recall a Big Mac and fries in very specialized ways. A similar “localization”
occurs in the way specific cultures view and reinterpret globalized fast foods: a Big Mac in Beijing may
“mean” something quite different from a Big Mac in Chicago (Watson 1997). Similarly, Tim Horton
donuts are prized as an ironic emblem of Canadian national identity precisely because they seem
“simple,” “humble,” and thus un-American, even though they are now mass-produced by Wendy’s, an
American corporation (Penfold 2002).
Along with imparting meaning to our daily lives, these rich linkages between food and identity pose
major challenges to those who worry about responsibility – the costs and consequences of what we eat.
If pot roast, bacon-laden collards, or chicken curry recall Grandma, it becomes hard to see much evil in
the animal industry. If a Happy Meal or pizza reminds us of dinner with Dad after the soccer match, then
rejecting fat means rejecting Dad. The same might be said of a post-hockey game Tim Horton donut,
sugar and trans fats notwithstanding. Can we really label Grandma and Dad “irresponsible” and
“deadbeats”? If Nabisco is beloved for its Oreos, can we really be angry at its former corporate parent,
Philip Morris? By renaming its food divisions Altria (with the same word root as “altruism”), Philip Morris
certainly hoped to obscure its identity as a tobacco marketer.[4]
Further difficulties result from the uncertain nature of identity in a mobile, multicultural world. If “we are
what we eat,” who are “we” anyway? How many people does it take to comprise a “we”? And in what
context? As voters? As soldiers? Cooks? Customers? Do we define a group’s identity by bioregion, by
foodshed, by arbitrary lines drawn on an inaccurate map two hundred years ago by imperial politicians,
by the selective recollections of aging immigrants? An especially vivid example of the last difficulty can
be seen in Barry Levinson’s film, Avalon (1990), which traces the progress of a large Baltimore Jewish
family through three generations. In an early scene, the extended immigrant family crowds a small row
house for a Thanksgiving feast. While the family has no interest in the holiday’s Anglo-American history,
they do value this annual ritual as an opportunity to remember the old country and their early struggles
in America. Yet the fallibility of memory is accentuated in a disagreement over whether one crucial event
– the arrival of the family’s patriarch – took place in midsummer or midwinter. As if to emphasize the
subjectivity of remembrances, Levinson reenacts The Father’s arrival twice, in both seasons. Moreover, to
demonstrate the elusiveness of memory in a culture that values youth above age, the Thanksgiving
gatherings become increasingly contentious over the years, as the children grow impatient with their
elders’ stories. Near the end a much smaller nuclear family – a mere sliver of the original clan – is seen
eating its dinner in silence, in front of the TV. Perhaps to be an American is to forget, not remember. To
be sure, memory, like taste, may fade with age everywhere. In Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), a
retired Taiwanese chef attempts to keep his splintering family together by cooking elaborate Sunday
banquets, only to discover that he has lost his ability to taste. Rather than binding his daughters with
pleasant tastes of the past, his nearly inedible dishes almost drive them away.
And what about the phrase “what we eat”? We eat so many different foods! Which ones signify deep
identity and which simply fill us up? Culinarians like to draw deep distinctions between human “dining,”
which is full of deep cultural significance, and animal “feeding,” a purely biological act, but not
everything we eat has a lot of meaning. Sometimes we just “feed.” And then there is that troublesome
identity verb “are,” derived from “to be.” What is identity anyway? Can we even be sure of our own
personality or “character,” much less the defining qualities of broader entities such as “neighborhood,”
“region,” or “nation”? What about those of us who come from several different ethnic or racial
backgrounds? In an affecting study of Korean-American adoptees, social worker Kathleen Ja Sook
Berquist finds people caught between markers – not really Asian, not fully American either. When well-
meaning white parents attempt to cultivate their children’s Korean identity with iconic foods such as kim
chee, moon cakes, and bulgolgi, the adoptees may come away feeling even more alienated. “Food as an
access point creates an awareness of the estranged position adoptees find themselves in and the
incompleteness of their cultural memory. Instead of feeding a hunger [for identity], it exposes a void”
(2006: 150). Sometimes people may feel most “whole,” most like “themselves,” over neutral food. For
example, in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever (1991), a mixed race New York couple escapes from equally
intolerant Bensonhurst (Italian) and Harlem (African-American) by sharing takeout Chinese food in
blandly corporate midtown Manhattan. Similarly, sociologists Gaye Tuchman and Harry Gene Levine
argue that second generation Jewish New Yorkers took to Chinese food because it seemed so
“cosmopolitan, urbane, and sophisticated” – i.e., less confining or “provincial” than the kosher Eastern
European fare of their parents (1993: 164). And anthropologist James Watson writes that the Chinese
youth of Hong Kong embraced McDonald’s, “precisely because it was not Chinese”; that is it seemed
more “laid-back” and “non-hierarchical” (Watson 1997: 86). In all, we don’t always want to eat “what we
are.”
What if Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” was right in claiming that the self is so full of contradictions
and uncertainties as to be “not a bit tamed” and ultimately “untranslatable”?[5] It doesn’t take
psychoanalysis or romantic poetry to tell us that if our personal identities are so elusive, our collective
affiliations must be much more so. And the confusion does not apply to just modern or postmodern
cuisines. Richard Wilk has shown that ever since the first pirates arrived in the sixteenth century, Belizean
food practices have been “heterogeneous, polyglot, disorderly, and even incoherent” – an apt
description, perhaps, of human cuisines in general (2002: 79).
So, returning to our original culinary triangle, we may find that deciding what to eat may be complicated
not only by considerations of convenience and responsibility, but also by conflicts within identity itself.
Chapter Summary
▪ Dining is more than feeding.
▪ All cultures have a “cuisine,” which consists of a distinctive set of basic foods, flavor principles,
preparation techniques, rules for consumption, and a supply infrastructure for getting food from field to
fork.
▪ Foods have different symbolic “weights.” Some are “tortillas” – simple, daily staples – while others are
“tamales” – time-consuming dishes reserved for special occasions (Williams 1984).
▪ According to the concept of commensality, sharing food has almost magical properties in its ability to
turn self-seeking individuals into a collaborative group.
▪ Many of the dining practices that we take to be timeless and universal are in fact highly variable and
only recently “constructed.”

▪ Resisting the standardization and homogeneity of modern life, people like to “customize” their eating
to suit personal needs and preferences.
▪ We are what we ate.
▪ Food memories can serve many personal, social, political, and economic purposes.
▪ We don’t always want to eat “what we are.”
[1] “Twist.Lick.Dunk.Oreo.”
See: http://eat-all-you-,want.blogspot.com/2006_05_01_eat-all-you-
want_archive.html , accessed August 30, 2006; Also: “Superlaugh,”
http://www.superlaugh.com/1/oreo.htm , accessed August 30, 2006. “Oreo and Milk Memories,”
http://www.nabiscoworld.com/oreo/memories/ , accessed August 30, 2006.
[2] Adair Lara, “Ode to Oreos,” Cooking Light, March/April 1993, 170.
[3] These 500 anonymous memoirs were collected between 1990 and 2006.
[4] It’s
hard to keep up with the world of corporate mega-mergers. Nabisco was founded in 1898 and was
acquired by R. J. Reynolds Tobacco in 1985. Philip Morris (PM) bought Nabisco in 2000 and merged it
into its Kraft Foods Division, which PM had acquired in 1988. PM renamed itself Altria in 2001 and then
spun off Kraft – and Oreos – in 2007.
[5] Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Leaves of Grass, 185–55.

Warren Belasco - Identity

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Warren Belasco - Identity

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Warren Belasco - Identity

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Downloaded from www.bloomsburyfoodlibrary.com on Thu Jan 14 2021 17:42:05 Eastern Standard Time.

Accessed from: www.bloomsburyfoodlibrary.com

Box 2.1. A Holiday Meal

4. Rules for consumption: How is the meal performed? Describe:

another key concept of food studies: we are what we ate.

Madeleines: Food and Memory

Box 2.2. Madeleines: We Are What We Ate

to suburban America was difficult indeed.

product of modernity, as well as a reaction to it.

only recently “constructed.”

You might also like