User:Mdl516/sandbox

Melissa- good topic but VERY broad- glad to see that you are filling in many missing gaps. Strong bibliography. At this point, we suggest that you try to connect all of your smaller subtopics (i.e. Food Fashions, Special Events and Feasts, etc). We are trying to figure out how you flow from one section to the next. The article needs some structure and logical progression. Very good work so far.

WEEK 3 ARTICLE EVALUATION: “Social class differences in food consumption”

The earliest of several shortfalls within the chosen article can be seen in the following passage:

"Social class differences in food consumption are not necessarily static. A study of Finnish consumption patterns for the period from 1979 to 1990 found that across all classes the consumption of butter, high-fat milk, coffee and sugar had decreased and the consumption of vegetables had increased. From the mid-1980s, social class differences in food consumption had diminished with the lower social classes following consumption patterns established by the upper classes."

The extract here exemplifies a severely underrepresented viewpoint: the writer does not account for the social factors leading to symmetry in Finnish consumption patterns – for example, readers are not informed of why exactly it was that “across all classes the consumption of butter, high-fat milk, coffee and sugar had decreased and the consumption of vegetables had increased”. Additionally, the author has provided insufficient evidence (one weakly described example) to prove that “social class difference in food consumption are not necessarily static.” Lastly, the author’s decision to evaluate Finnish consumption patterns has not been justified and is somewhat random in its appearance.

Another shortfall lies in the fact that social class differences in Canada and the United States appear overrepresented (even then, these are brief examples lacking detail). That said, it would be highly ambitious to attempt analysis of global social class differences in relation to cuisines within a single article. There is a significant inconsistency in the timeline of information presented by the author. For example, restaurants and fast-food chains from the early 2000s onward are described, but the example of Finnish consumption patterns refer to research conducted between 1970 and 1990. The time period in which the author has attempted to report on the relationships between cuisine and social strata. Is unclear If the author were to attempt a rewrite, he ought to select a specific time period in which he discusses “social class differences in food consumption.” As it would be to analyze consumption patterns globally, analyzing social hierarchies and cuisine throughout all of history would be highly ambitious.

That said, the most significant deficit of the chosen article is perhaps that the historical origins of consumption patterns and their changer have not been noted by the author.Drawing from what we have encountered in Rachel Laudan’s Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History, significant additions could be made to this article. For one, the significance of a food surplus in class demarcation ought to be highlighted: recall that, in antiquity, those hoarding (typically upper classes) a sizeable surplus of harvests were granted experimental agencies leading to the development of high/elite cuisines. Additionally, one way in which the high culture of these upper classes was disseminated was through participation in the semiotics of such (high) cuisines.

Despite the article’s many shortfalls, what little information is presented appears to have been well referenced with credible sources; listed sources consists of published journals. The issue at hand lies in the author’s use of these sources, wherein much cited information appears to have been highly simplified. Another success can be seen in the absence of bias within this article.

Talk page. One user has asked the following questions (1) Does social class determine what we eat?”, (2) “Does social class predict our diet quality?,” and (3) “Does health cost or considerations factor in what we eat?” One might comment that Question 1 is an unstimulating question for it is essentially answered by the existence of the chosen article – whether or not the article has successfully answered this question is another concern. The author has stated that he will be “taking these questions into consideration” and has yet to directly respond to the asker. Answers to remaining questions can perhaps be found in the article are as follows. The answer to question 2 has not been defined within the article; as for question 3 (regarding health costs), the article states that “permissiveness, health and cost considerations are insufficient to account for the social class variation in food consumption.”

WEEK 4: ADD TO AN ARTICLE

ADDED TO “Social class differences in food consumption”

The significance of a food surplus in class demarcation ought to be highlighted. In antiquity, those (typically upper classes) hoarding a sizeable surplus of harvests were granted experimental agencies leading to the development of elite cuisines. This principle may be contextualized by food historian Rachel Laudan’s assertion that “the humble, constantly at risk of real hunger, had every reason not to experiment with innovative cooking techniques” due to a scarce reserve of harvests.

WEEK 5: CHOOSING POSSIBLE TOPICS

Animal Slaughter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_slaughter

• More on “world-wide view,” as recommended by Wikipedia editors
• Early Christians rejected sacrificial slaughtering rituals; they valued simplicity through simple, clean, and pure lifestyles; slaughtering for sacrifice for religious purposes went against ways in which early Christians envisioned themselves
• “[Milked] mammals thereby yield several times more calories over their lifetime than if they were just slaughtered and consumed as meat.” (Diamond 88)
• Requires a section that addresses slaughter in context of history and religion

Social class differences in food consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_class_differences_in_food_consumption

The implications of a food surplus in class demarcation via cuisine ought to be added. In antiquity, upper classes hoarding sizeable crop surpluses harvests were granted experimental agencies leading to the development of elite cuisines. This principle may be contextualized by Rachel Laudan’s assertion that “the humble, constantly at risk of real hunger, had every reason not to experiment with innovative cooking techniques” due to their scarce harvest reserves (Kindle Location 1372). More importnantly one significant way in which high culture of elite classes was disseminated was through indulgence of such (elite) cuisines and their embodied semiotic values.

Semiotics of fine dining and “Aristocratic Borders”: Emperor’s New Clothes Theory According to Charles Feldman, thinking of food as cuisine rather than sustenance marks a shift from “[need]ing” to “[want]ing” in consumers (11). In “Roman Taste” Feldman refers to our physiological need-based consumption as “banal”: namely, once an individual has satisfied his hunger, he ought to be able to conceive of “abstract culinary constructs—the ingredients and foods that help define his or her place within a culture” (Feldman 16). The conceptions mentioned here refer to consequential advantages brought about by an initial hoarding of a food surplus. As such, non-elite classes who are not afforded the preliminary culinary resources (namely, a food surplus) to obtain such elite status could never develop a consciousness for elite taste.

High taste can be indicated through standards such as “setting and presentation,” as well as dining etiquettes, such as those propagated within a “royal context” (Feldman 22)

Thus, Feldman recognizes foods as embodying semiotic properties specific to the elite: Through processes of informal legislation and appropriation, elites were able to claim such symbolic elite taste indicators as customs of the well-to-do. By means of “unspoken understandings, contemporary chronicles, literature, and cookery books,” elites disseminated awareness of an association of certain foods and etiquettes with the strata to which they belonged (Feldman 24). Feldman terms such a claim on certain foods (and associated behaviors in how they are served and feasted upon) by elites as a creation of “aristocratic border[s],” wherein culinary notions of the humbler classes that lay outside were excluded (Feldman 24,17). As such, food existed not only as a barrier but also served to mark inclusion of elites in early empires. A paradox exists wherein these elite customs were publicized in the process of their dissemination, in a sense being given up to the humbler classes (Feldman 25).

WEEK 6: FINALIZING TOPIC / SOURCES

Chosen Article/Topic: “Social class differences in food consumption”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Feldman, Charles. “Roman Taste.” Food, Culture, and Society, vol. 8, no. 1, 2005, pp. 7–30.

Laudan, Rachel. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking In World History. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2013.

Mennell, Stephen. All manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France to the Present. University of Illinois Press, 1985.

Twiss, Katheryn. “The Archaeology of Food and Social Diversity.” Journal of Archaeological Research, vol. 20, no. 4, 2012, pp. 357–395. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41680530.

Wesson, Cameron B. “Chiefly Power and Food Storage in Southeastern North America.” World Archaeology, vol. 31, no. 1, 1999, pp. 145–164. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/125100.

★★★★★★★FINALIZED PROJECT [WEEK 7 → 16]★★★★★★★

Chosen Article: “Social class differences in food consumption”

One way to analyze the makings of a class society is to recognize the variation in cuisines consumed by its members; as a society increasingly engages in social diversification, its “alimentary” class symbols become increasingly the “complex and rigid”. Indeed, individuals in many early class societies, especially those of elite ranks, came to appropriate certain edibles and the semiotics of their consumption under certain meticulous standards of “setting and presentation" and meticulous dining etiquettes —such as those propagated within contexts of royalty. Thus, in many ways food and its connotations can indicate the presence of hierarchy. At least in the case of the upper classes, the dissemination of culinary customs and their correspondence to said classes was strongly tied to literacy, for such habits were often broadcasted through “unspoken understandings, contemporary chronicles, literature, and cookery books”.

THINKING OF SUSTENANCE AS CUISINE

Food Security: Implications of Reliable Surplus

The implications of a food surplus in class demarcation via cuisine ought to be noted. Historians have often described available food surpluses as allowing for the development of cuisines, to which certain semiotics – pertaining to given social classes – are assigned.

Experimenting with Food Reserves

As early as in antiquity, upper classes hoarding sizeable crop surpluses were granted experimental agencies . This principle has been contextualized by Rachel Laudan’s assertion that “the humble, constantly at risk of real hunger, had every reason not to experiment with innovative cooking techniques” due to their scarce harvest reserves; experimentation within the safety of a food reserve guarantees that, should harvests be prepared so dreadfully that they cannot be consumed, one will not face jeopardizing his biological demands. Successful experimentations – and their repetition – with raw harvests leads to the development of cuisines. 

Discerning Food and Cuisine  

According to the Encyclopedia of Global Studies, cuisine connotes a particular “style of cooking” that comes to embody social conceptions. With relevance to this article on social class differences in food consumption, one such conception frequently tied to cuisine is class superiority: cuisine is a “boundary-marking mechanism” that allows for social groups to discriminate between “us” and “them”. As such, in many cases cuisine refers to foods that have been socially classified.  

Thinking About High Cuisine

Often cuisine can only be derived from a food surplus, since successful experimentations and their repetitions can only occur where there is food security. Typically, it was the elite and other upper classes that had access to a food surplus; thus, it is no wonder that the luxury of those food surpluses monopolized by elite classes, when contrasted to the scarce harvests of peasant classes, contributed to a varied diversification of foods between classes arising from freedom to experiment or the lack thereof. It is also for this reason that elite cuisines tended to develop more prominently and rapidly than their humbler counterparts – whose “styles of cooking remained the same”. Using cuisine, elites were determined to set themselves apart from lower classes, while underprivileged classes remained concerned with the nourishing properties of food.

In addition to discriminating against the cuisines of lower cultures, elite classes thought it necessary to assign semiotic values – pertaining to their class status – to certain cuisines they devised and/or appropriate. In doing so, they could disseminate the appearance of their own high culture by ritualistically indulging in cuisines they made.

SIGNALING ELITE CULTURE: ASSIGNING SOCIAL MEANING TO CUISINE

Cultural Capital: The Semiotics of Fine Dining

To conceive of culinary semiotics of dining among classes is considered as secondary to one’s biological needs. According to Charles Feldman, thinking of food as cuisine rather than sustenance marks a shift from needing to wanting in consumers. In “Roman Taste”, Feldman refers to our physiological need-based consumption as “banal”: namely, once an individual has satisfied his hunger, he ought to be able to conceive of “abstract culinary constructs—the ingredients and foods that help define his or her place within a culture”. Additionally, high taste can be indicated through supplementary standards such as “setting and presentation,” as well as dining etiquettes. Historian Ken Albaba deems the early proliferation of such differentiated cuisines a “sign of growing complexity and also of anxiety” attached to one’s consciousness over his place within an emerging class structure.

Recall that the conceptions mentioned here refer to consequential advantages brought about by an initial hoarding of a food surplus. As such, non-elite classes who are not afforded the preliminary culinary resources (namely, a food surplus) to obtain such elite status could never develop a consciousness for elite taste.

Feldman recognizes foods as embodying semiotic properties specific to the elite: Through processes of informal legislation and appropriation, elites were able to claim such symbolic elite taste indicators as customs of the well-to-do. By means of “unspoken understandings, contemporary chronicles, literature, and cookery books,” elites disseminated awareness of an association of certain foods and etiquettes with the strata to which they belonged. Feldman terms such a claim on certain foods (and associated behaviors in how they are served and feasted upon) by elites as a creation of “aristocratic border[s],” wherein culinary notions of the humbler classes that lay outside were excluded. As such, food existed not only as a barrier but also served to mark inclusion of elites in early empires. A paradox exists wherein these elite customs were publicized in the process of their dissemination, in a sense being given up to the humbler classes. We shall now see how this paradox was especially demonstrated following the appearance of print recipes.

Paradoxes of Print Recipes 

The availability of fixed text granted by the Gutenberg printing press was viewed as an egalitarian development. Cookery books were believed to increase the access of lower classes to elite culinary cultures, and of upper classes to peasant and laborer cultures. However, the reality of printing did not embrace any cultural homogeneity among classes. In fact, class disparities between urban elites and peasants were enhanced according to an additional criterion – one concerning “the educated urban élite and the illiterate urban laborer”. In All Manners of Food, Stephen Mennell attributes this paradox to an “effect of wider literacy, amplified by printing,” which encouraged urban “literate, learned culture” to evolve more rapidly than and independently (and thus, distinctively) of “the traditional culture of the less educated” have-nots of literacy.

Another implication of recipes in their print form involved accelerated “social emulation — of the habits, styles, and interests of one class stratum by another” . In the case of the Renaissance, the social emulation effect elicited another paradox: varying classes engaged in a constant game, wherein the attempt of lower classes to emulate upper classes was followed by attempts of cultural gatekeepers of elites to separate themselves from lower classes. Mennell describes this displacement and replacement of emulated foods as an “aristocratic response” to “pressure from below” (the emulation of upper classes by lower classes . Such was the case with the 16^th century “disdain for butchers’ meat” by elites that came about as a response to the non-discriminatory availability of butchers’ meat to “all classes in the previous two centuries”: elites responded to this non-exclusive variety meat with rejection and replacement with “less easily obtained game” .  

Special Events and Feasts

Historians have recognized the “ideological prominence” of feasting in signaling social diversity. To name an example, the potlatch, a traditional Native American medieval feast, is one way in which images of power and prestige are disseminated. In these rituals,  excess and quantity (demonstrating a host’s generosity) are used to express power and social prestige. Potlatches involved accumulation of food and goods in “quantities far beyond what was usefully needed…the more property [hosts] were able to shower on their rivals, the greater their prestige”; thus, food presented in these large feasts were often not necessarily pleasant in taste. Rather, hosts valued displays of large quantities rather than “quality of cooking”.

A significant feature of potlatches involve not only the accumulation and display of goods and food but also the ability to waste such property. This was either done through the (1) mere act of giving away property to guests who attended the potlatch or, in the most theatrical of potlatches known as grease potlatches, (2) “actual destruction” by burning property over a fire.

Food Fashions: Establishing Culinary Leadership

CASE STUDY: French and English Renaissance Cuisine

One puzzle we are faced with has to do with how and why high cuisine and its socially-stratifying properties are thought of as characteristic to some regions and not others. This issue can be observed by comparing the development of French cuisine to that of English cuisine during the Renaissance following the expansion of printing presses in Europe – and the resulting circulation of cookery books.

According to Stephen Mennell, French cuisine resulted from a comprehensive adaptation of Italian cuisine. Cooks accompanying Noblewoman Cathérine de’Medici of Florence When travelling to wed Henri II in 1533, were believed to have introduced Italian cookery to France. Mennell argues that it was from this point onward that the French "raised [Italian cuisine] to new heights of elegance" and "assumed for themselves the culinary hegemony of Europe”. The extravagant connotations surrounding French cuisine can be seen as the result of a calculated communal decision which involved repackaging Italian cuisine.

In England, a “national prejudice in favor of plain food” prevailed; this prejudice embodied a rejection of courtly developments present in “foreign” culinary notions of France and Italy. According to this outlook, the English were concerned with the practical, physiological uses of cookery. As Gervase Markham argues in The English Hus-Wife (1615), at the core of the English diet was the satiation of nature –“kill[ing] hunger” – rather than our “affections”.

The French adaptation of Italian cuisine was documented in French cookbooks, which typically transmitted “élite, professional cuisine[s]” written for a “bourgeoisie audience”. Mennell has noted how, in the Renaissance, “cookery seems to have been socially stratified much less markedly in England than in France”. In France, elaborate cookbooks “conveying the latest advances in technique and fashions in service” were prevalent. Conversely, English cookbooks were concerned with preserving and conveying the “highest skills of a traditional and relatively unchanging craft”; English cookbooks were not targeted exclusively at elites – rather, their primary audiences were composed of housewives concerned with the “practical tasks” of homemaking. Here, we can observe France's attempt to elevate its national character by means of extravagant cookery – that is, by developing its values and culture around cuisine and its social connotations.

CASE STUDY: Liquid Stimulants and Social Class in Industrial Europe (Wolfgang Schivelbusch)

In Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants, cultural Historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch reviewed the partaking of various European social classes in the Industrial Revolution, as reflected by the preferred beverage of each class.

Coffee and the Industrial Bourgeoisie Worker

In early industrial Europe, coffee consumption was overtly blanketed by overtones of social class diversity. Since coffee stimulated intellectual functions necessary to the work performed by the bourgeoisie worker, it prevailed in consumption by the middle-class bourgeoisie and – in part – defined its “commonsense and industry”. The English coffeehouse embodied these class implications, acting as a “sober space where business was conducted; the coffeehouse stood in contrast to “working class taverns where debauchery and disorder allegedly reigned”. Schivelbusch notes that, since members of the rising merchant class tended to exchange commercial knowledge within the English coffeehouse, its clienteles were largely composed of businessmen. It was also in coffeehouses that interests of the bourgeoisie were seen at play — such as the diffusion of literature and journalism.

The Devaluation of Liquid Chocolate as a Luxury Class Symbol

Schivelbusch made his assessment of liquid chocolate in industrial Europe in light of a declining Spanish and Italian Catholic aristocratic ethos. Between the 17^th and 18^th centuries, warm liquid cocoa was recognized as an exclusive “status beverage” of European aristocracy – first in Spain, then later in the southern Ancien Régime. However, by the 19^th and 20^th centuries, liquid chocolate spread to northern and central European regions. According to Schivelbusch, it “sunk [in status] to the world of” women, children, and the middle-class overall. It then became the case that liquid chocolate was no longer exclusively a class symbol for the European aristocratic class. Schivelbusch attributes this new accessibility to Van Houten’s 1820 modern cocoa processing, and to the arrival of “major [chocolate] producers” in Holland and Switzerland. Similar to how the social emulation paradox functions, this case of chocolate illustrates how alimentary class symbols of luxury come meet a fate of devaluation when a food item becomes increasingly common. In many cases, societies have exhibited a “learned, cultural” tendency to equate sparsity with rarity and value. In the case of chocolate, that diminished once chocolate-producing giants came into play, and chocolate was made more quantitatively available.

The Industrialization of Drinking

Amongst the European proletariat, the Industrial Revolution prompted a demand for rapid, powerful, inebriety. According to Schivelbusch, industrialization “brought such an intensification of social misery into workers’ lives that the motive of escapism became far stronger than it had been”. Under this circumstance, proletarian laborers felt compelled to reach inebriation much faster than could be achieved with milder alcohol types such as wine or beer. This need was fulfilled by the appearance of distilled liquor, which, in the early phases of mechanical industrialization, “dealt a deathblow to traditional drinking…based on wine and beer”: containing ten times the alcohol content of beer and wine, distilled spirits produced a state of drunkenness at a far higher rate than its milder counterparts. Ultimately, liquor allowed the proletariat laborer to withdraw from agonizing factory conditions. These states of drunkenness led to what Schivelbusch terms alcoholic stupefaction: a state of mind that allowed the European proletariat worker, frustrated by “regimented and unsatisfying factory labor,” to – at least temporarily – withdraw from his undesirable situation.

Liquor supplemented the class nuances of coffee. Coffee and the sobriety it enabled was generally limited to the middle-class bourgeoisie, who were increasingly repulsed by practices of unconstrained drinking. Conversely, amongst lower classes intoxication and alcoholic stupor “carried no social stigma”. Rather, liquor was a “symbol of class identity” and of virtues of group cohesion amongst the European proletariat. As the English coffeehouse was to working-class businessmen, the pub came to embody a center of communication where unsatisfied laborers formed unions and met during strikes. Schivelbusch argues for another contention between both substances: “the coffee drinker’s good sense and business efficiency were contrasted with the alcohol drinker’s inebriation, incompetence, and laziness”.