FOOD DREAMS: FINDING OUR MUSES

A Muse Bouche | Dominica Tang and Lindsay Chisholm

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Happy summer days to you all! We have previously written on pressing issues such as the impact of COVID-19 on food and racism in the food industry. We are putting our other ideas on the back burner for now but we’ll get back to the meat of things in our next articles. In light of the sweltering humid heat of Toronto, we have decided to cool things down and take a more introspective approach to this month’s writing. We thought this would be an opportune time to reflect on our food journeys and dreams through a light conversation with each other.

Mother of All Foodie Muses, Julia Child, photographed in her own kitchen. 
This kitchen was reconstructed within the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

Source. 

Dominica: Lindsay, you are one of my favourite people to geek out about food! We’ve picked A Muse Bouche, so clearly, you have a special affinity for food in museums. What do you find so special about it?

Lindsay: Food is universally necessary for survival and intertwined into all aspects of life; through its research we can learn more about what it means to be human. The examination of tangible foodways can help uncover intangible concepts, whether they be reflections on society, culture, economics, and/or politics. Personally, I’m interested in people from past civilizations through the study of “edible archaeology”. What eats at you to study food and museums?

Dominica: Yes I think we both love food for its ability to provide insight on so many facets and intersections of human relationships, ideas, and activities. I'm interested in the broader modes of learning that multi-sensory experiences can provide, and intrigued by food as a medium for immersive learning. Most of my experiences with food studies in academia were purely theory-based, and while I thoroughly enjoyed that, my knowledge was enriched through cooking and baking in the historic kitchens of museums. I’d love for food to breach the walls of historic kitchens and infiltrate the larger museum sphere. COVID-19 has certainly stunted the growth of this aspect of museum learning, and I’m interested to see how museums further develop ways around this new challenge. 

Lindsay: What would your ideal museum food experience look like? Mine would be within a recreation of a Roman-style villa. I’d sample the elaborate tastes of the Roman elite while lounging on a kline atop an ostentatious mosaic within the triclinium. Bring me a globi and some peacock or boar to snack on. Possibly an edible chubby dormouse? 

"The Unswept Floor" mosaic in the Villa on Aventine Hill in Rome, created during Hadrian's reign. Source.

Lindsay: I’d also want to experience the life of a cook for a prominent family in a working kitchen. The grueling task of bread making can be recreated from this time period. The smells of sweat and smoke while enclosed in a hot cooking space would transpose oneself into the mentality of poorer Romans. These harsh and arduous working conditions exemplify what the daily life of a worker might have been like. Too often we get lost in the romanticization and wonders of elite and mythos of emperors, forgetting the larger portion of the population. Further dialogue should then take place within museum contexts that displays artifacts from antiquity in relation to food stuffs and cooking ware. And of course, my forever love of garum (the Monosdium Glutamate (MSG) of the Roman world). Who wouldn’t want to sample putrid fish guts?

Dominica: I love MSG and fermented fish sauce, so I would totally be into that. Echoing your thoughts on focusing on the general population, I want food and other multi-sensory experiences in museums to turn more towards marginalized histories and present-day experiences. MSG is still labeled as unhealthy, which is the legacy of a white scientist’s racism against Chinese immigrants. I still see “MSG-free” labels on Chinese food products and at Chinese restaurants. Of course, food can bring people together, but people also use food to antagonize, demonize, and ostracize a community as we’ve recently seen with the “bat soup” myth. As we’ve mentioned before, museums have a large platform to shed more light on these stories and I think food will play an important role in encouraging greater empathy towards these experiences. The Museum of Food and Drink put on the multi-sensory "Flavor: Making It and Faking It" exhibit, which included the science and history of MSG. The exhibition team offered home-made MSG tablets for visitors to try! 

The end of our conversation concluded with a hypothetical discussion about our new life goal to open a Michelin star restaurant together. The menu will be historic food inspired using kitchen instruments from that era. A historian and a classicist. What a dream team. GoFundMe account coming soon! (Just kidding!) 

                                Till next time in Julia Child's signature sign-off, "Bon Appetit!"

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.