In what ways are food and culture connected?
Last week , I wrote about the history and culture of Mexican food. This week, I would like to talk a little more about food, specifically about the connection between food and culture.
My Food, Your Poison
Lucretius (96 BC - 55 BC) said, "What is food to one, is to others bitter poison." How true this is. During a recent road trip, we stopped in Fort Macleod, a community of 3,000 inhabitants in the prairies of South West Alberta, Canada. There, I was introduced to "Prairie Oysters." Also known as Rocky Mountains oysters, Montana tendergroins, cowboy caviar, swinging beef or calf fires, prairie oysters are, I was told, Western delicacies.
Prairie Oysters
When bulls are still young, their testicles are removed to make them more obedient, meatier, and less likely to be aggressive. The testicles are cut off and thrown in a bucket of water. They are peeled, washed, rolled in flour and pepper, and fried in a pan although they can be cooked in a variety of ways - deep-fried whole, cut into broad, thin slices, or marinated.
Well, suffice to say that I was never more grateful for being a vegetarian and thus, to have a legitimate excuse to pass on the delicacies with dignity. There are indeed some distinct cultural differences in what counts as edible and not edible!
Disgust or Delight?
The idea of eating bull's testicles (or any kind of testicles for that matter) is disgusting to me, and this disgust arises from the fact that I have learnt to classify testicles as "not edible." Eating is not just about satisfying hunger. Instead, it is a social endeavor that is an intricate part of a complicated and multifaceted web of ideas, values, feelings, behaviours. Last week , I quoted French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin once proposed: "Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you who you are". And indeed, what and how we eat is an expression of how we see the world. Culture works like a lens through which we see the world. It puts our experiences in focus. Culture becomes such part of our entire being, including pure physical reactions we think of as natural instead of cultural (for example nausea or gagging at the sight of a plate of prairie oysters).
Classifying Food
While I do not share the fondness for bull's balls with the rugged inhabitants of the Western prairies, what we do have in common is a tendency to classify and categorize. The content of the classification is different, but the inclination to classify and categorize is universal. We all create systems of classification, for food and otherwise.
Delight or Disgust: Universal Reactions to Food
I hope the story is illustrative of the intricate relation between the universal and the cultural. The people at my table there in Fort Macleod were delighted at the sight of prairie oysters. My reaction was something akin to disgust. These feelings were shaped by the ways in which we had come to understand food. The foods we react to with delight or disgust are certainly different. Yet both - disgust and delight - are universal reactions to food, shared by us all.
References
John Monaghan & Peter Just (2000). Social and Cultural Anthropology. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press
