In the spotlight in culinary blogs and magazines, diet books, television shows and competitions, food nevertheless holds an unsuspected place, often underground or clandestine, in founding works of the social sciences. This file reviews the editorial and scientific news of work grouped in the United States under the label of food studies.
If food is more frequently in the spotlight in culinary blogs and magazines, diet books, television shows and competitions (“ who will be the next great pastry chef ? “), investigative reporting (“ if you knew what you were eating ! “) and other edifying cultural productions than in social science journals, in short, if it presents itself more to the eyes of the general public and certain researchers as a “ social phenomenon » that as an object for the sciences of man and society, it nevertheless holds an unsuspected place, often underground or clandestine, in the founding works of our disciplines.
Objective measurement of the working condition for Frédéric Le Play and Maurice Halbwachs, symbolic issue of distinction between classes for Thorstein Veblen and Pierre Bourdieu, instrument of “ civilization » for Norbert Elias, a practice of ordinary resistance to the ordering of the world for Michel de Certeau and his students or, conversely, a place for reading the hidden structures of a society for Claude Lévi-Strauss and Mary Douglas, Food, cooking and table manners have irrigated generations of sociological and anthropological work, through the use of inventive sources and methods: family budgets and monographs, household consumption surveys, treatises on good manners, structural analysis of myths, factor analysis, etc. Historiography is not left out, if we think of the old question of food riots and the high price of grain in the societies of the Ancien Régime, promoted as a causal factor in the Revolution of 1789 by Ernest Labrousse, where to the major survey on food launched by Fernand Braudel in the May-June 1961 issue of Annals in the project of a history of the “ material life and (of) biological behavior », to focus on just two famous examples. It is not until Michel Foucault who, questioned in 1983 during a stay in Berkeley about the pace of publication of his History of sexuality, bluntly proclaimed “ sex is boring » and called for consideration of this great problem, omnipresent among the thinkers of ancient Greece as well as in the regulations of monastic life: “ food, food, food » !
It will be understood that food is a fragmented object, present everywhere and therefore nowhere, which has often been approached in a fragmentary way to illustrate a theory or an event of more general scope (the process of civilization, distinction, Revolution, etc.). Few surveys place it at the center of their demonstration, inviting for example to “ track production to the point where it becomes consumption » like the historical anthropology of Sidney Mintz on the role of sugar in the formation of capitalism on both sides of the Atlantic, as if the social sciences had abandoned too unreasonable an ambition to the directors of documentaries and television reports Thursday and Sunday evenings. What can the social sciences say about food, if its apparent banality confines it to the role of an illustration of great theories, and if many journalists prove more intrepid than researchers in their investigative work? ?
The objective of this file is not to claim to restore its coherence or its dignity to an uncertain object: it has been a long time, in France at least, that the social sciences have taken up this project, as evidenced by the publication of manuals and attempts at synthesis devoted to the history and sociology of food since the 1990s. More modestly, this file aims to present ways of seeing and doing the social sciences of food, by bringing into play varied problems, fields and research experiences. A bias brings together the contributions of this file: against a tendency to consider food in its most spectacular or noble forms, those of a leisure activity or heritage, it is a question of grasping it through the bottom, by looking at the experience of ordinary people, but also activists, “ reviews » and “ experts » confronted with this object, in its multiple dimensions – dietary, aesthetic and political.
Claude Grignon’s article, “ Is a sociology of dietary standards possible? ? » presents a concrete epistemological reflection on the position of sociologists regarding food standards, taking the example of obesity. Long-time collaborator of Pierre Bourdieu and founder of an interdisciplinary research team on consumerINRAthis calls for overcoming the alternative of the temptation of a “ expeditious criticism » and “ deviations from expertise », to better distinguish the arbitrary from the necessity and the social from the biological. As an extension of a reflection on the usefulness of sociology, this article goes beyond the framework of food to question the conditions of exercise of the profession of sociologist, as well as its place in the city.
The article by José Luis Moreno Pestaña, “ The market prefers thin ”, is the result of a field survey on the incidence of eating disorders in the labor market in Andalusia. Based on interviews with women from working-class backgrounds, it sheds new light on the issue of eating disorders by showing that they do not result only from primary socialization but also from the adoption of body models that break with habits acquired from family, peer groups and the educational institution. Against this great division which assigns anorexia to the rich and obesity to the poor, he shows that the working classes are led to develop new “ body cultures » in order to respond to employment constraints at « strong aesthetic demands », referring here to saleswomen in fashion boutiques.
Julie Guthman, geographer and one of the founding figures of food studies in the United States, returns in an interview (“ Activism and alternative food in the United States “) on the constitution of this field of research and on a cultural phenomenon still little known outside the English-speaking world, the reform movements promoting alternative food systems (alternative food movements), of which she developed a consistent critique throughout her work. These led him to write a history of the contradictions of organic farming in California and to publish a polemical book on the environmental causes of the obesity epidemic, before focusing today on the effects of legislation banning certain pesticides on strawberry production in California.
Reviews of recent works on the history of popular food cultures will complete this file.
The diversity of these contributions invites us to abandon any attempt at an a priori definition of food: a total social fact, it sometimes appears in the form of an incorporated practice, being the subject of a “ physical investment » differentiated according to gender and social trajectory, sometimes in the form of a “ project » of reform, the issue of struggles between a plurality of actors (activists, researchers, producers and consumers), sometimes in the form of a scholarly norm, negotiated between its “ reviews » and its “ experts “.
As we can see, the human and social sciences have much more than their say on food. If cooking is a language, in the words of Lévi-Strauss, then this language is very much alive today, as evidenced by the growing public interest in these questions: by publishing this file, The life of ideas And Books & Ideas invite themselves to the discussion table.