Cooking food-a practical experience that followed catching
prey-represents an important moment in human self-definition. As
a form of praxis, it parallels the experience of
self-constitution through language. It extends, as language does,
far beyond satisfying immediate needs, allowing for the
establishment of expectations above and beyond survival. Cooking
implies generality, but also integrates elements of
individuality. Some foods taste better, are more easily digested,
support specific practical experiences. For example, some foods
enhance prowess. When eaten before a hunt, they can trigger lust
for chasing the animal. Some foods stimulate sexual drive,
others induce states of hallucination. Cooking was, in many ways,
a journey from the known into the unknown. Together with the
sensorial experience, intellectual elements were involved in the
process. They are observations, of similarities and
dissimilarities of certain procedures, of substances used, of
the influence of weather, season, tools, etc.; simple
inferences, discoveries-the effect of fire, salt, spices. The
experience of preparing food, together with many other practical
experiences on which it depends or which are connected to it,
opens avenues of abstraction. Cooking improves the quality of
individual life, and thus empowers members of a community to
better adapt to pragmatic expectations.
The constitution of the notion of food quality, as an abstraction
of taste, and crafting of tools appropriate to the activity, is
of special interest. An example: Pottery, in the natural context
where it was possible, became the medium for preserving and
cooking. In other contexts, carved stone, carved wood, woven
branches, or metal was used, for storing or for cooking,
according to the material. Progressively, tools for preparing
and tools for eating were crafted, and new eating habits were
acknowledged. When the multiple interdependency
food-container-cooking-preservation was internalized in the
activity of preparing food, a framework for new experiences was
established. Some of these experiences, such as how to handle
fire, transcend nourishment. The significance of this process
can be succinctly expressed: cooked food, which we need to
associate to the tools used, is food taken out of the context of
nature and introduced in the context of culture. The experience
of cooking involves other experiences and then expands into
other domains unrelated to nourishment. This experience requires
instruments for cooking, but even more an understanding of the
process involved, of the effects of combinations and additions,
and a strategy for delivery to those for whom cooking was
undertaken.
Satisfying hunger in the fight for survival is an individual
experience. Preparation of food requires time. In the experience
of achieving time awareness, cooking played a role not to be
ignored. If time can be used for different purposes by different
people, associated in view of shared goals, then some can tend
to the need of prepared food for others, while in turn partaking
in their effort of hunting, fishing, agriculture, and
craftsmanship. It was a simple strategy of labor assignments,
affected by tribal life, family, rituals, myth, and religion:
knowledge gained in preparing food disseminated without the need
for specialized activity. But once pragmatic circumstances of
life required it, some people assumed the function and thus,
once a critical mass of efficiency was reached, what we today
call the cook was identified. From the not-too- many written
recipes that come down to us through the centuries, as well as
from religious writings containing precise, pragmatically
motivated restrictions, we learn enough about the stabilizing
role of writing upon food preparation. We also gain
understanding of the new functions played by food preparation:
celebration of events, sacrifice to gods, expression of power.
People learn to cook and to eat at the same time. In this
process, they come to share values beyond the immediacy of
plants, fruits, and a piece of meat. Mediations pertinent to the
art of cooking and eating are also part of the language process
and become language. Culinary restrictions, such as those set
down in some religions, are but an example of this process. They
encode practical rules related to survival and well- being, but
also to some conventions beyond the physical reality of the food.
Language makes such rules the rules of the community; writing
preserves them as requirements and thus exercises an important
normative role.
Each pragmatic context determined what was acceptable as food and
the conditions of food preparation, henceforth the condition of
cooks and their particular role in social life. Many cooks,
serving at courts of royalty, in monasteries, in the military,
became the object of folk tales, fiction, of philosophers'
comments. No cook seems to have been highly educated, but all
their clients tried to impress through the food served and the
wines, or other drinks, accompanying them. In such circumstances,
the symbolic function of food indeed takes over the primary
function of satisfying hunger. Thus the cook, like the singer
and the dancer and the poet, contributes his part to what
becomes the art of living. It is probably worth pointing out that
memory devices similar to those used by poets and musicians are
used by cooks, and that improvisation in preparing a meal plays
an important part.
Writing entered the kitchen; and some of the last to resist
literacy, when it became a pragmatic requirement, were those who
cooked for others. Orality is more stubborn, for many reasons,
when it involves the secrecy of food preparation. There are
good reasons for this, some obvious even in our day of cracking
the most guarded secrets. Indeed, labor division does not stop
at the gates of factories. The segmentation of life and labor,
increased mediation, and expectations of high efficiency make
mass production possible. Almost everything people need to feed
themselves, in order to maintain their physical and mental
productive powers with a minimum of investment, is provided in
favor of productive cycles. In the pragmatic framework of the
industrial age, this meant the reproduction of the productive
forces of the worker in a context of permanency. The investment
in education and training was to be recuperated over a lifetime
of work. Nourishment contributed to the same pattern: the family
adapted to the rhythms of the practical experience of industry
related jobs.
At work, at home, in school, at church, and last but not least in
nourishment, acceptance of authority together with the
discipline of self-denial were at work. That literacy, through
its own structural characteristics (hierarchy, authority,
standardization) accentuated all these peculiarities should at
this time be evident. On special occasions, accounted for in the
overall efficiency of effort, nourishment became celebration. It
was integrated in the calendar of events through which authority
was acknowledged: Sabbath, religious holidays, and political
celebrations were motives for a better, or at least different,
menu. Other days were meant to raise the awareness of self-denial
(fish on Friday, for instance).
The cook did not necessarily become a literate person, but he or
she was a product of the literate environment of practical
experiences of pre-industrial and industrial societies. The
tools and the culture of spices, ingredients, matching food and
dishes, of expressing social status in the dinnerware set out,
and the meal, i.e., the structure of the entire statement which
a meal constitutes were all subjected to literacy. Labor
division made the cook necessary, while simultaneously
generating an industrial culture of food. In the equation of the
labor market in industrial society, with literacy as its
underlying structure, eating equals maintenance of productive
and reproductive power. It also means the reproduction of needs
at an increasing scale, as well as their change from needs to
desires triggering the expansion of industrial production.
In the expectations associated with food there is more than only
the voice of hunger. Our system of values, as it was articulated
in the literate use of language, is expressed in our hunger, and
in our particular ways to satisfy it. Based on this observation,
we acknowledge that all the forces at work in structuring
democratic social relations also affect the socialization of our
nourishment. Uniform quality, and access to this common
denominator quality, are introduced in the market, and with them
the possibility of stating and maintaining health standards.
Within the boundaries of the civilization of literacy and its
associated hygiene and health standards, there is little left
that can be identified with the country home that cannot be
industrialized and made uniformly available. Beyond these
boundaries starts a new reality of expectations, of transcended
needs, and of technological means to satisfy them within
standards of quality that reinforce the notion of democracy.