Food Values Beyond Nutrition - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 543

Chapter 22
Food Values Beyond
Nutrition
Ann Grodzins Gold
Introduction
This whole world is nothing but food!
( Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad , Olivelle, transl. 1996:11)
Food, food, brahman is food: / only they eat / who know / they eat their god.
( Taittiriya Upaniṣad , Ramanujan, transl. 2009: 3)
Like the ancient Hindu seers, cultural anthropologists have an expansive understanding of
food as a “many-splendored thing” (Counihan 1999: 6).1 This chapter first invokes selected
ways anthropologists portray food's links to wide realms of meaning. It then hastens to an
ethnographic location in rural North India to examine three pervasive themes surround-
ing food in South Asian culture: solidarity, separation, and decline as a pervasive critique of
modern tastelessness. Offering initially grounded examples of each theme, the essay moves
to broader circles of meanings in practice and narrative. Thus deliberately tacking back and
forth between spacious generalities and local specificities, this chapter employs a classical
interpretive mode in cultural anthropology (Geertz 1973). In the context of a volume largely
and properly focused on food materialities, the aim here is simply to evoke some less con-
crete, less quantifiable aspects of comestibles in human cultures that may be nonetheless
relevant to understanding the interrelated workings of food, politics, and society.
Beyond nutrition
To eat is a behavior that develops beyond its own ends, replacing, sum-
ming up, and signalizing other behaviors, and it is precisely for these rea-
sons that it is a sign.
(Barthes 1997 [1961]: 25)