"These people invited us here to make fun of us. This is a contest for the biggest idiot. Which I nailed!
"-Barry Speck
in Dinner for Schmucks (Ballard 2010)
Six months ago, I began to lose weight. Losing weight
meant that my body was changing shape and my
interaction with food was also changing – I was eating
substantially less. Significant aspects of my identity
changed as well. People seemed to see me as a different
person. I also noticed that I was starting to see myself as a
different person – and not just because I was getting
reacquainted with my newly exposed ribs in the mirror. This
shift in subjectivity, redefined through external social
interactions, internal renegotiations of identity, and
through the changing physiology of my body, made me
uncomfortable even while I was becoming more
comfortable with my new thinner self. My motivation for
weight loss had not been forged in the fires of some great
awakening of consciousness about my gross obesity. 1 My
greatest motivation was to prove that conventional rhetoric
about losing weight did not apply in my case. I wanted to
prove my critics wrong. My suspicion over changing social
dynamics and my desire to disprove annoying admonition
of conventional ‗wisdom‘ about weight loss drew me to
using this topic as the focus of research for this
assignment.
I began to blog my reflections on the multitude of
research available on this topic as they compared to my
experiences in losing weight. 2 This only served to heighten
my suspicion and curiosity. I decided to focus on the idea
of how food could represent a semiotic field that pertained
specifically to the production of subjectivity in weight loss.
As with the acquisition of any new language, there are
semantic meanings that are hidden to the non-native
speaker. My growing suspicion is that losing weight may
serve to further hide these meanings, by which I mean
ideologies. Does choosing this diet regime actually
constitute the commonly held rhetoric of freedom and
agency or is that agency only more illusive and subverted?
Could my disciplined approached to food really be such a
strong testimony to my personal strength of character and
success? Or was I actually more like a propaganda film for
1 My wife would suggest that she spurred me on to this project through
her vociferous exhortation. I am not callous to my wife‘s admonition nor was I
heedless of some of the other relevant motivational factors which included:
deteriorating health, lack of ability to participate in activities with my children,
and general discomfort. However, my greatest motivation for taking on this
project was curiosity. I was curious if I could prove a claim I have made since
was eighteen. I have been convinced that reducing my weight could only be
achieved if I were to eat one small meal a day and do extensive physical
activity. For more details on this conviction and my other motivations see the
post, ‗Less of Me‘ found here:
http://dcaffeinatedpickler.blogspot.com/2010/09/less-of-me.html
2 The collection of these postings can be found at:
http://dcaffeinatedpickler.blogspot.com/search/label/auto-ethnograph
prevalent social themes that entrench individuals‘
disconnection from real stuff? Was I swallowing a linguistic
framework where the moral dialect was an idea of
efficiency that could trump objectionable land use,
farming, and labour practices and could reinvigorate class
divisions?
To start poking at these questions, imagine a
conversation entertained around my dinner table around
which are gathered as guests some of the authorities I
have read in my research on this topic. The following is a
description of that imaginary conversation and my
reflections on the wisdom these dinner guests contribute
to my uncertainties.
* * * * * *
Nearly all the guests had arrived. The salutary
pleasantries had been appropriately dispensed and wine
was glistening in our glasses. I wandered over to the far
back corner of the table where Claude Lévi-Strauss,
looking rather ghostly sat hunched over in hushed
conversation with the eidolic Roland Barthes. When they
looked up I dove into the question that had been haunting
me for a while: in what ways could food be understood as
language? Was there a reasonable semiotic analysis of
food related to weight loss?
Lévi-Strauss began by pointing to, The Culinary Triangle,
where he had described the way food could fit into
categories in a doubly opposed semantic triangle that
parallels the way categories of sounds like vowels and
consonants where arranged in comparative triangles in
linguistic studies (i.e. consonant triangle: /p/, /t/, /k/)
(Lévi-Strauss 1997). Food, he suggested, could be
arranged into categories based on how materials that were
considered edible were manipulated.
“[N]othing is simply cooked, but must be cooked in
one fashion or another. Nor is there any condition of
pure rawness; only certain foods can really be eaten
raw, and then only if they have been selected,
washed, pared or cut, or even seasoned. Rotting,
too, is only allowed to take place in certain specific
ways. (Lévi-Strauss, 29)”
In the same way that vocal sounds produced alone provide
no function until they are combined to form words, so too
edible materials alone are not really food until they are
transformed into food through human interaction or
manipulation.
Mary Douglas had snuck up eagerly on Lévi-Strauss‘
comments waving a copy of Deciphering a Meal. She
noted that in the same way that sounds make up words
which in turn according to grammatical rules make up
sentences which convey information within paragraphs in a
given text, so too are edible objects transformed into foods
which are combined and arranged according to certain
social rules to become meals which themselves fit into
daily menus or diets (Douglas 1997, 39).3 Douglas
needled Lévi-Strauss in the ribs – undaunted he
continued. The various ways of preparing food can be seen
as fitting into categories, like raw, cooked, and rotted,
which are distinguishable in a type of oppositional stance.
These categories don‘t just indicate distinctions in flavour,
texture or even at what time of day it should be served but
they also help distinguish the social meanings that these
foods have within a cultural system of values. Foods have
meanings that can convey, ―contrasts of a sociological,
economic, esthetic or religious nature: men and woman,
family and society, village and bush, economy and
prodigality, nobility and commonality, sacred and profane,
etc. (Lévi-Strauss, 35).‖4 Douglas nodded wryly – it seemed
she was not completely satisfied with his explanation
(Douglas 1997, 37).
Before she could speak again, Barthes spoke up in his
support of the idea of food as language. He recited a point
he had made in Toward a Psychosociology of
Contemporary Food Consumption.
“When (a person) buys an item of food, consumes it,
or serves it, modern man does not manipulate a
simple object in a purely transitive fashion; this item
of food sums up and transmits a situation; it
constitutes an information; it signifies. That is to say
that it is not just an indicator of a set of more or less
conscious motivations, but that it is a real sign,
perhaps the functional unit of a system of
communications. (Barthes, Toward a
Psychosociology of Contemporary Food
Consumption 1997, 21)”
Barthes then regaled us with examples. He asked us to
think about the wine we were holding in our cups. Wine is a
distinguishing sign of French national identity (―felt by the
French nation to be a possession of its very own (Barthes,
Mythologies 1972, 58).‖), which has the mythical power to
transform every situation in life to a more honourable
state. For a French person to drink wine is to participate in
a collective morality within which everything is redeemed
(Barthes 1972, 59). He continued by pointing out the way
that, much like wine, steak signifies notions of strength in
French culture. So that now through wine and steak a
French person can communicate the distinguishing
features of their French-ness. Food provides a way for the
individuals to represent themselves to themselves and to
separate themselves from others. Food speaks.
3 Actually breaks the field of a meal down even more suggesting that
important evaluative components: mouthful, helping, course, meal, and daily
menu (Douglas 1997, 37).
4 See Appendix A: for an elaboration of Lévi-Strauss‘ The Culinary Triangle
using the dialectic features of a number of categories present in research
material for this paper.
Mary Douglas couldn‘t resist.
“[T]he message (food) encodes will be found in the
pattern of social relations being expressed…about
different degrees of hierarchy, inclusion and
exclusion, boundaries and transactions. Like sex,
the taking of food has a social component, as well
as a biological one (Douglas, 36).
From this point of view I could see that food is more
than the sum of its nutritional components. Thinking of
food in this way was not going to be easy and I immediately
thought of the chapter I had read in Deborah Lupton‘s
Food, the Body and the Self,
“It is evident from several empirical studies that
people are highly aware of the relationship routinely
established in nutritional and biomedical discourses
between food and health states, and seek to control
their diet so that they conform to the imperatives of
good health (Lupton 1996, 80).”
But Lupton herself, who had joined the fray, suggested that
the notions of ‗health‘ that people expressed were
couched in notions morality (Lupton, 82, 83). As if
anticipating my next question Barthes interjected, ‗a
consciously worked out diet‗ isn‘t so much about meeting
certain nutritional needs as it is about producing an illusory
reference to the ability of the individual to competently
participate in demands of the modern world. The use of a
‗healthy‘ diet by an individual is not a statement so much
about moral values but about how powerful this individual
is within modern society (Barthes 1997, 25).
That was troubling. Losing weight and choosing a
healthy diet from my own experience seemed to be
thought of as a virtuous, moralistic choice – a form of
altruism5. On the other hand, it now was possible to see
the choice of a healthy diet as an important way to
demarcate the powerful from the weak in any given
society. Perhaps it was even possible that the notions of
morality most evident through the abundant compliments
showered on me might be more of a discursive distraction
from these power stratifications that were happening at
the very same time.
Barthes recognized the problem I was up against. He
reminded me of his point in Operation Margarine where
he talked about how an ―Established Order‖ (i.e. nutritional
medicine/science) was able to cause social conformity
through public discourse that made certain ways of
thinking normative. Any challenges or ―progressive
prejudices‖ that one might mount against these
established modes of thinking became too costly and led
individuals to be isolated. In other words when it comes to
5 See Appendix B: Facebook conversation re: Blog post- Leaving Marx on
My Shirt. Blog post found at:
http://dcaffeinatedpickler.blogspot.com/2010/10/leaving-marx-on-my-
shirt.html Notice the way losing weight is affirmed as a virtuous endeavour on
par with other substantially altruistic activities like charitable work with
poverty situations.
food and health (and even more importantly in weight loss)
thinking outside the ‗food as nutrition‘ box might imply
significant social consequences (Barthes 1972, 42).
Instead of facing social exclusion, individuals were more
willing to reinforce the dominant system even if that
individual could not achieve the standards set by the
established order themselves (Lupton 1996). I thought
about how many women had lathered me with praise for
my discipline and determination in losing all this weight
even though for them the prospect of losing even ten or
twenty pounds seemed incredibly daunting.6 The mere fact
that I was thinner implied that I had led a more disciplined
lifestyle – I was committed to exercise and eating right. I
was a hero – an example! Through my weight loss –
through a disciplined approach to food (which was largely
assumed by those who praised me) – it seemed I had
become a living testimony to the ‗truth‘ of the ideologies of
health, obesity, body image, and who knows what else. I
found myself a reluctant expert of sorts; doling out advice
to others struggling with weight loss who would ask me to
describe my strategy. Rejecting my overwhelming approval
was completely out of the question.7 Could it be that I had
become just another cog in the ―Established Order‖ –the
ideological machinery? And was this established order in
need of some ‗progressive prejudices‘ or was it better to
leave well enough alone?8
Barthes pointed across the room to Daniel Miller
indicating that Miller‘s book Stuff might have something
important to add to this line of questions.
“There is a natural humility to things, in that they
work best as the frame that guides our sense of
what is appropriate, rather than as things we pay
regard to in their own right. This tendency can make
stuff quite powerful when put into the service of
ideology. When someone tells us we should do this
or be that, we bridle and feel put upon. When this
message is carried, not by a hectoring voice, but
well hidden with the mere substance of apparently
silent stuff, we are less likely to sense our
disempowerment. (Miller 2010, 82)”
Who ever stops to wonder if a carrot is actually ‗healthy‘?
Even more so who ever stops to think if the food belonging
6 It seemed like every time I posted a significant milestone in my weight
loss people (especially women) would fall all over themselves to heap praise
on me. Much of this came through comments on my Facebook status. What
7 See Appendix B: Facebook conversation re: Blog post- Leaving Marx on
My Shirt notice how I am valorized as a better person at the beginning. My
question about whether I was a worse person before I lost the weight is not
responded to. In personal conversation, though, this was a very difficult issue
to discuss and caused much reaffirmation of how much I was loved (and
valued) prior to my weight loss.
8 I touched on some of these topics in the following posts as well:
http://dcaffeinatedpickler.blogspot.com/2010/11/thats-gross.html;
http://dcaffeinatedpickler.blogspot.com/2010/10/all-this-talk-about-healthy-
is-really.html; http://dcaffeinatedpickler.blogspot.com/2010/10/leaving-
marx-on-my-shirt.html;
http://dcaffeinatedpickler.blogspot.com/2010/10/less-of-me.html
to a certain diet are present in that diet for any other
reason than for their nutritive properties?9
Generally, the individual sounds in a word pass innocently
unnoticed – even to the speaker. In the same way food
objects seemed to have a natural quotidian innocence
within a meal or even an entire menu or diet. Exposing
those innocent meanings seemed crucial in knowing the
relationship between food and the weight losing eater.
What is the ideology of food consumption related to weight
loss? The coercive force of alimentary objects is not
noticed and certainly not challenged when the constructed
ideological meaning they bear escapes recognition as
natural properties of the foods themselves.10 Everyone
agrees that a carrot, a broccoli stem, or a green pepper is
an intrinsically healthy food item. Flavour, appearance,
cost, nutrient content, calories, and agricultural method all
seem like qualifying factors of the food items that are
largely assumed or ignored in light of the food‘s status as
healthy. A young child is ‗persuaded‘ to eat carrots, even
through clenched teeth, and the ameliorating parental
advice is, ―It‘s healthy!‖ What does the baby know about
healthy? The carrots taste bad. Before long the baby
changes her mind and willingly gobbles down only carrots
for a whole week to avoid bursting the seams of her
wedding dress.
Barthes grimaced as he wiped off his knife on a piece of
baguette and sopped up the gravy left on his plate but my
mind wandered back to some pro-anorexia websites I had
visited. In these sites many suggested that in order to
maintain their ultra skinny physique their daily diet
consisted of around 300 calories.11 The irony was that my
own caloric intake on many days would have matched that
standard. Yet those anorexic girls were considered sick
and I on the other hand was honoured as a champion over
my apparent illness of obesity. Things were even more
ridiculous than that. Apparently, whether I would have
followed the doctor recommended regimen of reduced
portion size and caloric intake12 or had launched into a
Twinkie diet I could have accomplished the same honorific
ends (Park 2010). The same food consumed in the same
amounts could be considered the ‗right‘ diet for me but the
9 Actually this is something that I start to wonder about the emergence of
the Atkins Diet and its coincidental emergence during a time when meat
consumption (especially beef but also tuna and salmon) were threatened.
10 See Appendix A1: Feature: Sensuality in presentation/advertising for an
example of how coercive meanings are framed within images of food. Is it
possible, for instance that food can be presented in ways that transmits a
sensuality that might not be overt but none the less can communicate
indication of flavour or even certain class distinctions?
11 The following are three of the myriad websites devoted to pro-anorexia
support. These sights try to frame anorexia as a good thing and not typically
as a disease. There are numerous pages of advice and tips for weight loss. I
was astonished to see that the very strategy that I was employing to reduce
my own weight (portion control) was in fact the very same strategy used by
these individuals. (http://www.prettythin.com/ ; http://ana-
beauty.webs.com/inspiration.htm ; http://anaregzig.blogspot.com/ )
12 In my case a diet that involved significant reduction in portion size to
the point where 750 – 800 calories per day is fairly typical. The role of
exercise is significant in my weight loss as well but I have left this aspect out
of the field of research for this topic.
indication of a mental disorder in girls. From this vantage
point the food itself seemed to fade leaving only
collectively agreed on imaginations of what the food meant
within the meal or diet plan. In fact these collective
imaginations about food seemed more ‗real‘ than the food
itself (Durkheim 1982).
In a television documentary on CNBC, Coca-Cola chief
marketing officer had described how the company‘s
marketing strategy has relied on its ability to, ―build up the
memory bank of positive associations between (our) brand
and what it stands for (Lee 2010, m: 4:15).‖ These
marketing professionals described their product as
conveying majesty and company historian and archivist
Phil Mooney13 claimed that Coca-Cola has transcended its
rank as a consumer product to become a deeply
embedded icon with magical powers to transform the very
lives of consumers. With perceived growth of an obesity
epidemic, however, these executives made an astonishing
sociological admission.
“We let others take the dialogue away from us and
the category started being portrayed as one of these
bad for you kind of things and you should drink
something else…there‟s nothing bad in this bottle its
pretty much all natural – its very refreshing – it‟s the
original energy drink – I wouldn‟t suggest you drink
like 20 of „em a day but in moderation – and you
know everything in balance (Lee 2010, m: 6:45).”
Corporate giants like Coca-Cola seemed to recognize the
importance of how these collective understandings could
control the perceptions of health that their product carried
in public imaginations. This was starting to sound like
another chapter for Barthes‘ Mythologies. His description
of the ―Established Order‖ seemed to be evident in this
case as well.
It also felt like, Émile Durkheim‘s moustachioed ghost
must be present, whispering the idea that these collective
understandings, even the most embedded and ignored
ones, deserved to be analyzed as objects not as myths or
social fictions (Durkheim 1982). I also thought of the great
revolutionary writer, Frantz Fanon who in framing the
problem of racism within a colonial system seemed to tie
language and a collective identity or understanding
together.
“To speak means to be in a position to use a certain
syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that
language, but it means above all to assume a
culture, to support the weight of a civilization…A
man who has a language consequently possesses
the world expressed and implied by that
language…Every colonized people-in other words
13 Mooney has very intriguing comments about how he views the
collection of Coca-Cola Memorabilia, ―I really have to draw a very strict line
here: I don‘t collect Coke materials, and anybody who works with me can‘t
collect Coke materials either, because you inevitably come into a conflict of
interest at some point. That‘s just a rule. I get to have my own collection here
at the company. It belongs to the company, but I treat it like it‘s my own
(Keane and Marks 2009).‖
every people in whose soul an inferiority complex
has been created…finds itself face to face with the
language of the…culture of the mother country
(Fanon 1968, 18).”
Fanon‘s ideas seemed to tie Durkheim‘s social facts and
Lévi-Strauss‘ semiotic analysis neatly. Embedded collective
meanings seemed tied to the syntax and usage of the food
/ weight loss language under investigation. These
meanings might also reveal the ways in which the
language could operate in an almost Imperialist manner
producing the categories of colonizer and colonized. Power
structures, political and class analysis seemed open from
this perspective as well. Who were the ‗native speakers‘ of
this language? What of the non-native speakers? How
does this language shape the type of individual that
speaks or, in the case of weight loss, is learning to speak
this language? As would be natural for a careful linguist it
would be necessary to start by looking at how this
language had come to be dominant – colonial.14
The history lesson came from the lucky invitation
of Professor Massimo Montanari that Wendell Berry had
encouraged me to make for tonight‘s dinner party. My
Italian was rusty so the food historian kindly pointed to
some important sections in his book The Culture of Food
shedding light on how the food / weight loss language
might have come to be established. Famine was an
everyday emergency from as far back as the third century
where preoccupations with securing sources of food in
what would come to be known as Western Civilization
seemed to outweigh many other human activities. So
having food and being well fed was an indication of being
able to successfully negotiate the challenges of food
scarcity and the resulting plagues or the pillaging common
to war routines (Montanari 1996, 21). But even in these
times of scarcity where food could have been consumed
ostentatiously15 in the feasts of the powerful and rich,
practices tended toward moderation. Food items came to
be identified with certain social identities. Meat was the
food of the strong. Bread and wine the food of the religious
(Montanari, 11, 15). As tool development advanced in the
early Middle Ages, agricultural practices made the
production and storage of grain a more efficient way of
securing food. The ongoing need to have a ready supply of
food that could last as long as possible became a
motivating factor in shifting dietary practices away from the
important role that meat had played in the common diet to
that point. Meat was scarce and could therefore be
appropriated by those with means to display status
(Montanari, 46). Montanari said that as peasants were
able to reach greater food security the rich moved the
14 Frantz Fanon‘s theories about language and racism provide an
interesting angle to evaluate issues of food, weight loss, and body image. This
precisely the liberty I took in this post:
http://dcaffeinatedpickler.blogspot.com/2010/11/invisible-fat-man.html
15 And certainly in some cases was consumed ostentatiously in order to
display notions of hierarchical status (Montanari 1996).
―threshold of class distinction upwards‖ taking to
displaying their wealth in gluttonous banquets (Montanari,
57). From this vantage point it was possible to see power
that food has had to indicate class distinctions that traded
on the perception of being a fit member of society. This
was a discourse of mastery involving efficiency, ability,
aptitude, and fitness. Celia Kingsbury‘s chapter Food Will
Win the War seemed to connect here. Her analysis of
World War 1 propaganda revealed how the ‗food as fuel‘
rhetoric increased the scientific scrutiny of food in order to
produce a strong victorious front line soldier and home
front labourer. Rationing, measuring, controlling
appropriate nutrition caused food to become a site for
social surveillance (Kingsbury 2008).
Professor Montanari went on to describe the dynamics
of the religious discourse. As the church, increasing in
decadence and corruption, came to possess ubiquitous
social control, asceticism became an important way for the
emerging monastic order to indicate spiritual purity.
―[A]mong spiritual values it was the refusal of food that
held pride of place (Montanari, 24).‖ Discretion with food
could now be used to indicate moral distance from the
sinful debauchery of the oppressive rich – a form of
protest. Nevertheless, the peasantry may have actually
desired the debauchery of the rich over the discretion of
the religious. Caroline Walker Bynum had been listening in.
She suggested that it was small wonder in the daily
emergency of famine that voluntary starvation might be
seen as, ―requiring the kind of courage and holy
foolishness that make the saints (Walker Bynum 1997,
139).‖ Walker Bynum recounted evidence from her piece
Fast, Feast and Flesh that pointed to the way women had
used fasting as a way to control their bodies denying
pleasure, enhancing spiritual fervour, and even controlling
sexuality (Walker Bynum, 147). I made a note of how the
moral discourse of food had distinctly gendered
implications and I marvelled at how broad a moral field
food could cover – from piety to purity, from combating
corruption to charity, and from self-discipline to self denial.
The powerful discourses of morality and mastery also
seemed to possess a long historical influence extending
even to today‘s food/weight loss language.16
I invited the remaining guests to gather in my library for
coffee. I was planning a panel discussion. I proposed to
them the task of elaborating the discourses of morality and
mastery through the lens of Lévi-Strauss‘ culinary triangle.
Rebecca Popenoe showed us the curious picture of her
Nigerien friend‘s rather large buttocks. She explained how
having a fat behind for a Nigerien woman was evidence of
the efficacy of her husband to provide for plenty of rich
food for her which eventually led to her inability to work. A
man can invest and symbolically display his earnings in his
16 It is valuable to note that there were many ways that the discourses of
morality and mastery were challenged or shifted in the post-Medieval
centuries but as Montanari has indicated these discursive fields seem to
remain prominent and also tend to repeat their influential arc in history
(Montanari 1996).
wife‘s butt (Popenoe 2005, 18). This was the mastery
paradigm. A fat bottom was the ideal in Niger and a sleek,
efficient, machine-like body, with a disciplined approach to
food was the ideal in the Western capitalist economy
where both genders were needed as workers and
consumers. Popenoe noted the irony of a capitalist
requirement of ever-expanding markets and commodities
which in turn requires the need for an indulging consumer.
“By this logic, our bodies should be anything but self-
denying and machinelike; instead we should give in
to our every whim and fancy. …This tension between
production and consumption…creates the tension…
(To) restrain our appetites in order to express our
diligent, energetic, and efficient natures… But we
should also indulge as dutiful consumers, in all
manner of things available to us through the
marketplace, not least the Big Mac, tall latte, and
the jumbo muffin (Popenoe 2005).”17
Wendell Berry nodded agreement. Food, he told us, had
become disconnected from the source of its production –
namely the farm. For most people then, ―food is pretty
much an abstract idea — something they do not know or
imagine — until it appears on the grocery shelf or on the
table (Berry 1990).‖ Eaters, Berry claimed, were passive
consumers with perceived choices about what food they
were purchasing but unaware that even qualities like
freshness, nutritional value, price, the presence of
preservatives or dangerous chemicals were already
dictated to them by food industrialists. These organizations
Berry claimed were able to successfully convince
consumers to purchase bland pre-prepared food – grown,
delivered, and cooked. ‖The ideal industrial food
consumer,‖ Berry said, ―would be strapped to a table with
a tube running from the food factory directly into his or her
stomach (Berry 1990).‖ (See Features 20 and 10 in
Appendix A:) It was no wonder that obesity was being
considered an epidemic. If corporations driven to increase
consumption were shaping the collective will toward a
detached relationship with the food itself then rampant
obesity was a preferred outcome of this system. But Berry
was actually suggesting a moral argument. He imagined a
restrained, diligent approach to food (perhaps even a diet
plan) and its sources of production as a way to be more
responsible with the world we occupied.
This sounded very much like Matthew Crawford‘s idea of
mindful labour in his book Shop Class as Soulcraft. It was
more virtuous for people to pay attention to the natural
resistance of objects. This moral attentiveness he claimed
allowed individuals to exercise real agency in their lives
instead of falling victim to the false agency of
contemporary marketing schemes. These marketing
17 Would Jamie Oliver‘s revolutionary energy, currently focused on ridding
America of its junk and super-sized portions, be better spent on defeating the
embedded tension produced by the production/consumption conflict within
the capitalist economic system? See three of my posts on Jamie Oliver here:
http://dcaffeinatedpickler.blogspot.com/search?q=Jamie+Oliver
schemes, themselves a product of an over emphasis of a
‗knowledge economy‘, could successfully convince
consumers that they were exercising freedom over
products when even the options available to them were
pre-packaged. He illustrated this by pointing to the way
Betty Crocker cake mixes provided the consumer with the
illusion that they were exercising agency by adding water
and eggs to the mix. The consumer could get convenience
and the feeling of agency all while supporting the system of
production and marketing that had already limited the
actual agency available to the consumer (Crawford 2009,
66) (Also see Appendix A:). This was the whole idea of
homemade versus store-bought, factory assembled food
that I had talked about in one of my posts18. Most people
thought that homemade or ‗farm fresh‘ food was somehow
more nutritious and tasty (Crawford 2009, 102). It also
seemed clear that homemade food was more mindful,
more engaged with the natural ingredients, than the
assembled garbage produced by food industrialists. Food
industrialists, I wondered, had already set up the conveyer
belt Berry had imagined. Paul Connerton had suggested
that in modernity, the carelessness or unmindful approach
to the world (which he called forgetting), was the product of
mechanized systems of production where efficiency was
paramount. This type of production counted on products
perpetually appearing as new and engaging (Connerton
2009). So by substituting home cooked meals with the
ever-changing and improving ―Hungry Man‖ microwavable
facsimiles these large food industry corporations could set
up this virtual conveyor belt of food with customers
perpetually forgetting what had come before and setting
up the new product as the standard19. Was it any wonder
people were fat? Could it be that curbing obesity might be
as simple as just getting people to grow and cook their own
food again as they had in the past? If obesity was at least
partially a result of contemporary disengagement with the
real world produced by the schemes of the dominant
political/economic system then was the appropriate
‗monastic‘ response a prompt call to the nearest natural
facsimile to Jenny Craig (See Item 4 in Explanatory Key for:
A Comparative Elaboration of Lévi-Strauss‘ Culinary
Triangle)?
Now I was faced with a dilemma. On the one hand I was
bothered by how losing weight might be an embodied
complicity with established punitive indications of class
structures. On the other, dieting might be a way to mount
one of the most significant protests to the amnesia-
steeped ecological and social corrosion of industrialized
food20. Which one was it? I remembered, director of Yale
18 See blog post:
http://dcaffeinatedpickler.blogspot.com/search?q=silent+pie
19 Marcuse suggested that a form of hyper-alienation was at work in this
system as well he might have seen Hungry Man meals as a way to further
alienate labour from its products. I muse about this connection here:
http://dcaffeinatedpickler.blogspot.com/2010/11/meal-with-marcuse.html
20 To say nothing of their responsibility for some of the most apparent
causes of obesity in the first place.
Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, Dr. Kelly
Brownell‘s comments on Big Mac: Inside the McDonald‟s
Empire, ―If you‘re hungry and you need to fill up and you
don‘t have much money you want to go for the greatest
number of calories per dollar and the fast food industry
offers a lot of that (Quintanilla 2007).‖ Now I recognized
another disturbing problem that seemed to harken back to
the historical motifs we had uncovered. An obese
individual desiring to display his moral superiority might
have two choices: the first to lose weight and engage with
food more responsibly or, the second, to remain large as a
way to protest the conforming pressure of class
oppression.21 With regard to mastery, the fat person also
faced a choice: on one side he could display a thinner body
as an image of discipline, health and success especially
with regard to the seductive onslaughts of food. Or
conversely he could display strength, status, or even the
highly revered ideals of manliness by maintaining a larger
frame and conquer food by eating.22 I knew that even this
limited look based on a small slice of analysis using these
two paradigms hardly scratched the surface but alas my
guests wanted to go home.
I shook hands with them as they left. Don Kulick paused
at the door before leaving and looked at me as if he was
looking in a mirror. He started slowly,
“(This) is about how fat in any society is never just
about weight or health or looks. Instead, fat is a
symbol, a mirror we can gaze into to glimpse the
things society tells us are the fairest of them all-and
the things society tells us are the grossest, least fair
of them all. Looking closely at how people think
about fat tells us a lot about how they think about
the world in which they live (Kulick and Machado-
Borges 2005, 122).”
Looking closely at how people think about food, I
thought could tell us a lot about how they think about the
world and themselves as subjects as well. I picked up
Daniel Miller‘s book as I shut the door on my dinner
guests. My eyes fell to this passage.
“(In the) process of objectification people may well
understand themselves in the mirror of the world
they live within. But what happens when that world
is created by others, rather than by themselves? If
they see themselves in that world, then it would
follow that they now misunderstand themselves
(Miller 2010, 84).”
Food seemed like just such a mirror. It was a mirror and
language that people could use to talk about the nature of
21 I know oppression sounds way too moralistic here but until you have
walked a day in a fat man‘s shoes can you really say otherwise? And then of
course it is easy to see the connection between modern ideals of thinness
and fear of fat to the prevalence of problems like anorexia nervosa.
22 See blog post for a link to video clip of the television program ―Man vs.
Food‖ available here:
http://dcaffeinatedpickler.blogspot.com/2010/11/monster-resistance.html
the individual character, their position in the social system,
and their ability to manage or avoid the complex moral and
practical problems that existed in the management of
weight. Foods were symbols that made up an intricate set
of meanings that were shared across society out of which
an entire language was constructed to make sense of what
losing weight meant and the real identity of the weight
loser. This highly elaborate language system was so
common that one hardly realized all that one was saying
whether savouring a hotdog or gulping down a fine sherry.
As a newcomer to the thin dialect of this food language I
was aware that some of the words seemed out of place
and I could tell that they seemed to mean different things
from this side of the fat divide. Some words seemed to
have embedded meanings from ancient times and others
seemed to give advantages where none were deserved.
After losing all this weight, I might have been thinner but
perhaps a type of moral obesity or gluttony was still
present. Perhaps in losing physiological weight I had
actually gained the unwanted ideological weight through
the acquisition of this new food language. Had I wasted
away to this?
Appendix A:
A comparative Elaboration of Lévi-Strauss Culinary
Triangle
Feature: COOKED RAW ROTTED
Food Transformed by: "cultural" processes (+) (-) neither/both-'natural'/'cultural' (-) (+) "natural" processes
1 processes
2 Basic Recipes: Smoked (+) (-) Roasted (-) (+) boiled

WATER
AIR
Means - Device used in Nature: indirect heat held over (+) (-) Nature: indirect on a grill or no (-) (+) Culture: direct heat applied in a
3
cooking: fire heat required pot
How food is perceived Culture: can connote imagery of (+) (-) Nature: can connote imagery of (-) (+) Nature: can connote imagery of
4 by the eater: control or manipulation of primitive, elemental mysterious natural forces and
natural dangers or difficulties requirements for life instincts
Examples
5 Beverages Coffee (+) (-) Milk (-) (+) Wine
6 Meat Smoked Salmon (+) (-) Steak (-) (+) Farmer Sausage/Stew
Friesen Family Supper Spaghetti, Pasta, Caesar Salad, (+) (-) Steak, Potatoes, Corn, Garden (-) (+) Lazy Enchiladas, Refried Beans,
7 Menu Garlic Bread Salad Spanish Rice, salsa
ELABORATIONS
8 Morality Sinful (+) (-) Righteous (-) (+) Sinful
9 Mastery Display Impotent/Weakness (+) (-) Impotent/Weakness (-) (+) Potent/Strength
DISTANCE: BORED:

INTIMACY: ENGAGED:
Recipe Difficulty Betty Crocker-ish: microwave (+) (-) Compromise between ease and (-) (+) Cordon Blue Chef: Duck a
10
dinners nutrition and enjoyment L’Orange

RESISTANT
COMPLIANT

Sensuality – Bawdy/Promiscuous/Strip (+) (-) Virginity/Innocent/Nude Beach (-) (+) Erotic/Discreet/Art Nude
11 Advertising** Tease-Burlesque
Meal / Drink Paradigm Acquaintances, strangers, (+) (-) Private: Family, close friends (-) (+) Private: Close Friends,
12
colleagues Honoured Guests
Restaurant e.g. McDonalds: Public / (+) (-) e.g. Tony Roma’s: Compromised (-) (+) e.g. Ric’s Grill: Privacy / Residual
13 Representation Emergent Traditions / Privacy / Blended Traditions / Traditions / Fete Speciale
Convenience Amusement
Health Food Paradigm
14 Nutrient Low in Nutrients (+) (-) High in Nutrients (-) (+) High in Nutrients
Examples Hot Apple Cider (+) (-) freshly squeezed orange (fruit) (-) (+) Vegetable/fruit drink mixture
juice e.g. V8
15 Toxic/Healthy Toxic (+) (-) Healthy (-) (+) Toxic
Examples cream cheese (+) (-) Cream (-) (+) Eggnog
16 Nutritional Value Carbohydrate/Fat (+) (-) Protein/Sugar (-) (+) Carbohydrate/Fat
Examples Special K cereal (+) (-) Whole grains (oat, wheat, etc.) (-) (+) Bread, Danish, Muffin
17 Medicinal Value Medicinally Neutral (+) (-) Remedial/Therapeutic (-) (+) Remedial/Therapeutic
Examples corn on the cob (+) (-) garlic - lower cholesterol (-) (+) Chicken soup - common cold /
stir fried vegetables mandarins - vitamin C Blended teas - various remedies
broccoli – Calcium
18 Epidemiologic Risk Non-Pathogenic (+) (-) Potentially Pathogenic (-) (+) Non-Pathogenic

Examples fruit leather (+) (-) pesticides on fruit (-) (+) Jam /Preserved Fruit
cheese pasteurization and removal of Eggnog/Chocolate Milk
sushi fat from whole milk Sandwich Meat*
raw meat - salmonella, mad cow
disease
Weight Loss Paradigm
19 Caloric Value Empty (+) (-) Full (-) (+) Empty
Examples White sugar - Brown sugar (+) (-) Honey (-) (+) Corn Syrup
20 Digestive Labour Absorptive (+) (-) Resistive (-) (+) Absorptive
Examples Choy Mein - 'leaves you hungry (+) (-) Celery - 'burns more calories in (-) (+) Gravy - 'goes straight to the
in an hour' digestion than it contains' hips'
Portion Unrestricted: Although some of (+) (-) Unrestricted: diet sets not (-) (+) Restricted: strict limits set on
Control/Evidence of these foods can be restricted parameters on amounts of the amounts usually regulated
21
Restraint they are generally fairly liberally these foods according to caloric/fat content
doled out in weight loss diets

See the Explanatory Key on the next page.

Explanatory Key for: A Comparative Elaboration of Lévi-Strauss’ Culinary Triangle
1. Features 1-4 of this table represent some of the essential elements of Lévi-Strauss‘ semiotic framework in The Culinary Triangle.
2. Features 5-7 are illustrative examples derived from features 1-4. Some of these resemble the examples that Lévi-Strauss used as well.
3. Features 8 and 9 are loosely based on the work of Massimo Montanari in The Culture of Food.
4. Feature 10: This feature grows out of Matthew Crawford‘s dialectic of mindful and careless labour (Crawford 2009, 66, 102). He suggests
(in much the same way as Wendell Berry does) that creating the illusion of agency over objects like food can be as simple as asking for the
baker to just add water and an egg. A trained chef can make ingredients bend to his will as he gets to know their properties. The
homemaker must negotiate the desire of interesting food, convenience, price, and time available to make food. Microwave dinners like
hungry man are closer to what Crawford would call careless labour and also evokes the imagery of the conveyor belt that Berry used in The
Pleasures of Eating. The idea of agency or control over food in Weight Loss rhetoric (counting calories, etc.) is prominent. One factor that is
often overlooked is the labour involved by the person cooking to create healthier meals. Jenny Craig is one weight loss program that has
bridged this gap without identifying it directly. Their pre-packaged food is the heart of their weight loss plan. Convenience and variety are the
features of their meals that are highlighted as critical in the success of their program (Boslaugh 2008). (Feature 20 is also related to this)
Does Jenny Craig represent a curious reconfiguration and co-opting of Connerton‘s notion of forgetting in modernity?
5. Feature 11: This feature is inspired by a number of almost incidental references to the ability of food to
communicate notions of sexuality. Allen Shelton‘s piece, A Theatre for Eating, Looking and Thinking: the
Restaurant as Symbolic Space uses lust as a qualifier for the distinction between boredom and engagement.
Walker Bynum, Lupton, and Gerber all refer to sensual qualities of food indicating notions of appeal, appetite,
accessibility or morality. I was also fascinated by the way sensuality was a prominent part of food advertising both in
terms of how Shelton saw a menu representing certain provocative features but also as Jean Retzinger analyzed
how advertisements paired sexualized female images with notions of health in the food products they were
promoting (Retzinger 2008). Kathleen Nutter‘s piece From Romance to PMS: Images of Women and Chocolate in
Twentieth Century America was also useful in developing this category. She measured the connection of the specific food item chocolate to
lust as a feature of women‘s sexuality (Nutter 2008). The Food Porn Daily: The Cookbook provided an excellent illustrative example of this
that seemed to extend the field of sexuality in the sensual aspects of food. See the Appendix A1: Feature: Sensuality in
presentation/advertising.
6. Feature 12: This feature is loosely based on a reading of Mary Douglas‘ ideas in, Deciphering a Meal (p. 41), about how some foods and
type of eating ceremonies (i.e. Drinks and Meals) are considered appropriate for honoured guests, family, and acquaintances.
7. Feature 13: This feature is a compilation of concepts that I derived from Allen Shelton‘s article, (Shelton 1990). He combines the work of
Raymond Williams (the idea of Hegemonic Tradition) and Joanne Finklestein (the idea of the eye of the diner and the spectacle unfolding) to
evaluate the class symbolic representations available in restaurants. These categories while not a direct comment on the issue of weight
loss nonetheless allows for located perspective of how tradition, privacy, convenience and prestige factor into how certain types of food are
restricted to specific contexts. These restrictions may indeed play into collective representations of the availability or appropriateness of food
items as a part of diet. The Atkins diet focused on consuming meat which according to traditional ideas of food would pertain to situations
that are normally considered restrictive and not coincidentally also often more costly than other kinds of food.
8. Features 14 – 18: These categories and their subsequent examples are adapted from the reading of Lupton around issues of risk and
safety in food (Note that with regard to sandwich meat it has been only recently that Listeriosis was found in processed meats. This food
item fits neatly into the Rotted category because of how it is made and consumed but there is no small irony that this product now also
faces health problems that essentially come from literal rotting processes in the factories where they are made). The Encyclopedia of
Obesity was also important in developing these categories as was the work of Retzinger and Douglas.
9. Features 19 – 20: These features are born out in weight loss literature and researchers like Dr. Kelly Brownell (cited earlier) in regards to
how foods are imagined with regard to their potential service in reducing obesity and controlling appetite. These features also bear some
resemblance to earlier categories around mindful labour except that in this case the work being done on food is inside the digestive system
instead of external to the body.
Appendix A1: Feature: Sensuality in presentation/advertising
Exemplar using the food item normally referred to as a Hot Dog.

1. Cooked: Bawdy/Promiscuous/Strip Tease-Burlesque

Using these images an elaboration of the
Culinary Triangle system seems available
as Lévi-Strauss indicated was possible
(Lévi-Strauss 1997, 35). These images
also illustrate Daniel Miller‘s ideas around
how objects function as frames. In this
case the objects might have an embodied
frame. We can see how image #1 connotes
certain expectation (largely of hunger and
its satisfaction). Image #2‗s bareness has
the effect of producing the notion of quality
and value. Image #3 seems to be all about
flavor and decadence (that is a hotdog you
could serve a guest at a fancy party). The
photos clearly demonstrate how the hidden
Image Available at: http://www.countryliving.com/cm/countryliving/images/Hot-Dog-Relish-Onions-
REGFOOD0805-de.jpg aesthetics that make up the frame of an
object work powerfully to produce a
specific response in the viewer. These
2. Raw: Virginity/Innocent/Nude Beach responses are not really open to challenge.
But these are precisely the sites for
investigation from a
functionalist/structuralist perspective as
Miller outlines (Miller 2010, 53). Other
evaluations are also available. The Veblen-
esque lens of conspicuous waste which
reveals class demarcations seems evident
along the same argumentative lines as
Matthias Zick Varul has posed. The
production of the food item in Image #3
seems to have had more time and effort
‗wasted‘ on it. The ‗workmanship‘ of Image
#1 seems to be occurring right in the
Image available at: http://www.restaurantwidow.com/images/2008/11/02/weiners.jpg eater‘s hand. Image #2 almost appears not
to have been worked on at all. The exotic
ingredients in #3 also hint at a type of
3. Rotted: Erotic/Discreet/Art Nude conspicuous wastefulness that the eater
and the maker (chef), server (host) can
engage to demarcate a particular social
status. After all, this is just a hotdog. Why
put all that expense, effort and time into
something so quotidian if not to somehow
give evidence that even in the participation
in the banal the elite class can distinguish
itself successfully (Zick Varul 2006). With
regard to the questions of this paper the
issue of which one of these food items is
‗healthy‘ gets complicated since the choice
has to negotiate whether the nutrient
values of the more expensive ingredients is
better than what might be available in a
Image taken from: Food Porn Daily: The Cookbook by Amanda Simpson. Also available at:
http://foodporndaily.com/pictures/spicy-pork-garlic-and-gouda-sausage-baked-in-a-semolina/ (Simpson less expensive food item.
2010, 89)
Appendix B: Facebook conversation re: Blog post- Leaving Marx on My Shirt
Woman #1
I don't know Dale. I know you've thought about his waaayyy more than me and you have the benefit of that gigantic brain of yours that I can't compete with, but it seems
to me being Healthy, taking care of your 'temple' (don't want to over use ...that), and Having more Energy might make you more useful in this world. Both to the poor and
desperate and also to those beautiful boys of yours. Never mind how happy I am sure your wife is to know you have a better chance of being around for longer. I know
you didn't do this to look good, that is a side benefit, but I have a feeling you won't be thin and useless. You might even have more time on this earth to bring Him Glory.
We could say more, but why don't we chat in real life say down in Mexico in a week and a half. :) On that note, I am going to go work out on our Elliptical so I can look
better on the beach...
October 26 at 9:35pm
B. Dale Friesen
Ha good one. Thanks Woman #1 - I appreciate your optimism both about my prospective health and my ability to be more useful in the future. If it‟s a temple I'm building I
think that we might be in the process of renovating the mega-church.
The reasons you've sighted here are some of the strongest motivators for me in my quest - what's interesting is that all of those motivators seem to be altruistic - you
know focused on others. But if this is all about meeting other people's perception of what I should be - is it really something I should be doing? If after all that time on the
treadmill I had something tangible that had been produced maybe I could use my regimen of conformity toward some good purpose. You know what if after you and I
spend all our time on the equipment a little jewel would come out one end of the thing. Then we could sell it and feed poor people or send our kids to college. Since
sainthood is not in the cards for me, I can also see that my penance has a name and its name is treadmill. I think it was Jesus who said something like this -- if you want
to get credit for doing good things (you know living a good life, being there for your wife and kids, etc.) you better be even better than the Pharisees if you want to get
noticed by God at all... (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+5%3A19-20&version=NIV)
October 27 at 12:50am
Man #1
Your right Dale. I've decided to stop sleeping, after all, think of the time that I am wasting, that I could be doing good for the world, and eating, if I would just not eat, then I
could spend that money on feeding the poor, and paying $10 to watch hockey games with my son, think of the personal evangelism that I could get done by doing door to
door evangelism. (Obvious sarcasm) Philippians 3:9 (NLT) "I no longer count on my own righteousness through obeying the law; rather, I become righteous through faith
in Christ. For God‟s way of making us right with himself depends on faith." stop trying to earn it.
October 27 at 11:06am
B. Dale Friesen
Good call Man #1. I think you have identified the fulcrum (I haven't used that word since grade five) of the problem that I am identifying. What I am 'earning' is exactly
what I am trying to unravel. The fact is that in the process of becoming ...thinner I am accepting several social conventions about what I should look like and how I should
behave. But who is to say that these conventions are actually virtuous or have anything to do with what actually exists (we normally call this truth). . What I am challenging
is the notion that spending this time on changing my physical appearance and apparently making me healthier is actually valuable. Consider this problem: what if I had
the opportunity to volunteer for two hours every week but that time would mean that I would have to miss my exercise time- would I be justified in refusing to help that
organization or would it be better if I were to forgo my time on the tread climber to make the volunteer activity possible?
October 27 at 2:00pm
Woman #1
Your motivators are altruistic (first time I've used that word - feels good). That sounds like a great thing to me! I wish my reasons were focused on others and not always
myself. Are you meeting their perceptions of what you should be or just making them happy that they get to enjoy you more. I am assuming you are more pleasant to be
around as well (extra energy, better thinking, more positive - these tend to come with health). I am glad you are being altruistic. It's about time.
(Did you notice I used that word twice? So fun).
As for conformity? I am afraid your dreaming if you think that word will ever be used to describe you. Nice Try.
Anyway, I love you friend and am glad you make others think.
-Here's too you and me sweating jewels and changing the world.
October 27 at 2:31pm
Man #1
My thinking is that there will always be one more thing that we can do, it will never stop. Maybe you taking an hour a day to exercise means that someone else has the
opportunity to serve in that capacity. Maybe you giving up your exercise... time would give an excuse for someone else to sit and not participate.
If we think of the world only in what I do or don't do we are hooped (how is that for a philosophical word) But when we start to see ourselves as part of a collaborative
community, then those questions change. Your 8-10hrs/week of exercise increase OUR communities ability to engage and interact with the world. I need you to exercise
so that you can be a healthier husband, dad, and follower of Jesus.
October 27 at 3:31pm
B. Dale Friesen
Nice work both of you - I appreciate the deference to my use of $20 words. When you guys use that regular language I have such a hard time following what you say....:)
Woman #1 and Man #1 I think you are suggesting basically something similar - - by losing weight I am able to be a better person and that is good for everyone. If I got
that right then I have question for you...
How can we determine that this weight loss is actually making me a better person? I mean, I am still me right? I don't think you are suggesting that I was a worse person
before when I was obese so how is it that being thinner makes me a better member of society? Is it possible that characteristics that seem on the surface as virtuous -
might actually not be that virtuous? Didn't Jesus say something about how true followers of His would be willing to give up family, etc?
And Man #1 your suggestion is a fine as long as we don't read that story about the three servants with the talents. If I spend my time on myself anticipating that others
will pick up the slack am i not just as guilty as that third servant?
Its nice batting this stuff around with you - it helps be to know if I am on track with my thinking. Usually, as you have clearly come to know by now I am very rarely on track
except once again you guessed it when I am on my treadmill...
October 27 at 10:20pm
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