If we were to analyze the language associated with what, how,
when, where, and why we eat, we would easily notice that this
language is tightly connected to the language of our
identification. We are what, how, why, when, and where we eat.
This identification changed when agriculture started and
families of languages ascertained themselves. It changed again
when the pragmatic framework required writing, and so on until
the identity of the literate person and the post-literate emerged
from practical experiences characteristic of a new scale of
human experiences. Today we are, for quite a broad range of our
social life, an identification number of a sort, an address, and
other information in a database (income, investment, wealth, debt
history) that translates into what marketing models define as
our individual expectations. Information brokers trade us
whenever someone is interested in what we can do for him or her.
Powerful networks of information processing can be used to
precisely map each person to the shelf surface available in
stores, to the menus of restaurants we visit on various
occasions, and to the Internet sites of our journeys in
cyberspace. Our indexical signs serve as indicators for various
forms of filtering calories (how many do we really need?), fats
(saturated or not), proteins, sugars, even the aesthetics of food
presentation, in order to exactly match individual needs and
desires. Scary or not, one can even imagine how we will get
precisely what best suits our biological system, influenced by
the intensity of the tennis game (virtual) we just finished, the
TV program we watched for the last 30 seconds, or the work we
are involved in. To make this happen is a task not so much
different from receiving our customized newspaper or only the
information we want through Pointscape, saving our monitors from
excessive heat and saving us time from useless searches.
In the pragmatic framework where illiteracy replaces literacy,
eating and drinking are freed from the deterministic chain of
survival and reproduction. They are made part of a more
encompassing practical experience. Each time we take a bite from
a hot dog or sandwich, each time we enjoy ice cream, drink wine
or beer or soda, take vitamins or add fiber to our diet, we
participate in two processes: the first, of revising
expectations, turning what used to be a necessity into luxury;
the second, of continuous expansion of the global market present
through what we eat and drink. Many transactions are embodied in
our daily breakfast, business lunch, or TV dinner. With each bite
and gulp (as with each other product consumed), we are
incorporated into the dynamics of expanding the market. The
so-called Florida orange juice contains frozen concentrate from
Brazil. The fine Italian veal microwave dinner contains meat
from Romania. The wildflower honey "Made in Germany" is from
Hungarian or Polish beehives. Bread, butter, cheese, cold cuts,
jams, and pasta could be marked with the flag of the United
Nations if all the people involved in producing them were to be
acknowledged. Meat, poultry, fruits, and vegetables, not unlike
everything else traded in the global market, make for an
integrated world in which the most efficient survives in the
competition for pleasing if not our taste, at least our
propensity to buy.
The efficiency reached in the pragmatic framework of illiteracy
allows people to maintain, within the plurality of languages, a
plurality of dietary experiences, some probably as exotic as the
literacy of ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Aramaic, or cuneiform
writing. Even the recipes of the Roman Empire can be enjoyed in
exclusive settings (as in Saint-Bernard-de-Comminges in the
Pyrénées) or as haute, ready-made cuisine (the Comptesse du
Barry food company offers wild boar in spicy sauce, stuffed duck
in ginger, and sea trout with wild leeks). The Japanese have
their sushi prepared from resuscitated fish flown, in a state of
anabiosis (organic rhythm slowed through refrigeration), from
wherever the beloved delicacies are still available.
The multiplicity of food-related experiences in our time is
representative of segmentation and heterogeneity in the
civilization of illiteracy. It is also an expression of the
subtle interdependencies of the many aspects of human
self-constitution. The democracy of nourishment and the
mediocrity of food are not necessarily a curse. Neither are the
extravagant performances of artist-cooks that fetch a price
equivalent to the average annual salary of a generic citizen of
this integrated world. Difference makes a difference. Feminism,
multiculturalism, political activism (from right to left)-all use
arguments related to how and what we eat, as part of the broader
how and why we live, to advance their causes. If nothing else,
the civilization of illiteracy makes possible choices, including
those pertinent to nourishment, for which we are ill prepared.
The real challenge is still ahead of us. And no one knows how it
tastes.