CUISINE, OR: HOW I STOPPED WORRYING AND LEARNED TO LOVE THE WORD

A Muse Bouche | Jordan Fee

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In the past ten to fifteen years, food in the museum has seen a great increase in popularity. The discipline of Food Studies has also become much more visible, as chefs, restaurateurs, activists and anthropologists continue to edge their way into the public eye. Recently, I was privileged with joining a class that revolved around the methods of research being applied in this field today. While I was initially very excited to enter into a discussion about food with some of my fellow colleagues (an opportunity that I rarely come by), I was quite taken aback by some of the conversations that I heard in this setting.

A wonderfully cute display on "Foods Made from Wheat" at the Kyoto University Museum. (Source.)

Immediately, I found myself immersed in a pool of thick, unforgiving academia. With each passing week I became more and more estranged from the topic that I originally intended to study. It is certainly possible that these negative feelings resulted from my own philosophy surrounding food, and it would be unreasonable to claim that the other students in this class were at fault for my own misgivings. The fact is that the kinds of conversations that I encountered in this class had been taking place for many years.

One heavily discussed topic in this class was the notion of ‘cuisine’. Referring to books and articles written by Amy Trubek, who is currently acting as Faculty Director of the Food Systems Graduate Program at the University of Vermont, the class focused on the question of dominant cuisines, as well as on the recognition of cuisines in countries and communities that had yet to be acknowledged on a national or international scale. It was by no means an uninteresting discussion, and many of the other students applied the notion of ‘cuisine’ to their respective research focuses, showing how the concept might fit into a wide variety of food systems, ranging from the spice trade in Imperial China to contemporary food systems in Latin America.

Nevertheless, the topic was discussed with a certain reverence that I found unsettling. While many people in the discussion were attempting to identify particular definitions and interpretations of cuisine, nobody seemed to be questioning the importance of the notion itself. This lack of critical interrogation fuelled my skepticism, which has in turn led me to write this article.

My face when listening to a conversation about the importance of cuisine (Source.)

In this discussion about cuisine, the problem was not the existence of the concept itself; both the notion and the practice of cuisine have important historical roots. However, these roots spring forth mainly in the Western world. Therefore, to assume that the concept should be applied to traditions that exist outside of Western thought is, to me, somewhat paternalistic. Certainly these traditions are deserving of recognition. However, to simply group them under the banner of ‘cuisine’ is to ignore their agency. The fact that we, as students in a Western university, believed so strongly in the power of the word was quite unsettling. Furthermore, I would argue that this belief is symptomatic of a more generally euro-centric way of thinking that continues to dominate the food industry today.  

Ultimately, I became too frustrated with the class. Resigned, I dropped it just a few weeks ago. I still feel saddened by the thought that I gave up so quickly, and I wonder if my decision to leave was quite childish in nature. Nevertheless, I have become convinced that words like cuisine, which seek to recognize a particular set of culinary traditions as being of particular importance, can in fact serve to perpetuate discourses that ignore the uniqueness and exceptionality of other cultures. And unfortunately, these terms usually find favour in Western institutions (universities included). 

(Source.)

Again, let me be clear: I am not claiming that the students in my class were to blame for the prevalence of these discourses. Theories of culture and cuisine have been developed by multiple generations of thinkers and practitioners. However, we as students should not become resigned to these discourses; we should question them fundamentally and ask ourselves whether or not we are being indoctrinated into a self-justifying system that determines its own sense of importance and value from within.