Food Values Beyond Nutrition - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 555

Changing eating habits are reported from other parts of India, signaling varieties
of transformations; some manifest as increased attention to rules of food purity, some
quite the opposite. In Bengal, according to Donner's ethnographic study, urban women
may decide to embrace a “full” vegetarianism—non-fish-eating and, therefore, quite
non-Bengali—for reasons having to do with identity, class, consumerism, sexuality and
self-determination. Donner suggests that young wives deploy their adopted ascetic veg-
etarianism, “to make a stand, and create a space where their individuality has to be rec-
ognized by their affines.” She argues further that, “this somatic truth is political insofar as
it reconstitutes a gendered morality at a time when consumerist indulgence establishes
a tight grip over middle class imaginations” (2008: 176). Janeja—who has also recently
looked closely at food and society in Bengal and Bangladesh—points to different pro-
cesses, namely to breeches of vegetarian identity in middle-class households where, as
she vividly puts it, the refrigerator is “guilty of attacking boundaries” (2010: 80).14
Such disparate examples of the ways dietary habits interact with other social pro-
cesses reveal food as predictably signalizing, even as they display evident unpredict-
ability of just what messages are sent. I have barely skimmed the bubbling cauldron
of non-nutritional food values in India, but these assembled examples do attest to the
many ways that food—as it is cultivated, cooked, shared, begged, savored, or sold—is
always more than food within any given cultural world documented by ethnography.
Appadurai in 1981 argued that “South Asian civilization has invested perhaps more than
any other in imbuing food with moral and cosmological meanings” (498). Although
drawing on South Asian examples, as does Appadurai, this chapter claims that all cul-
tures invest heavily in imbuing food with moral and cosmological meanings.
In her cogent contribution to a different handbook, Judith Farquhar states as anthro-
pological principle that “links connecting food to everything else are irreducible, and
should not be analytically dissolved” (2006, 147). The composition of that “everything
else” includes power and politics. Dunn affirms this emphatically in the afterword to a
recent collection of essays exploring food worlds in postsocialist Eastern Europe. Dunn
stresses the ways food “jumps scale”:
... food is the most important and frequently encountered material object that
translates regulatory regimes and power relationships into lived experience. Thus
food has the almost magical property of jumping scale: as it moves, it links the global
economy and household economies, political bodies and the bodies of individuals,
the world and the self. To study food, then, is to study power.
(Dunn 2009, 208)
Here is how Ugma Mali of Ghatiyali, Rajasthan, interpreted the local proverb, “Grain
is the seed of adornment.” He told me, “We say this because grain is the source of life
and health. If you are hungry you won't look good no matter how much jewelry you
wear, but if you are healthy [that is, well fed] you look good, even without jewelry” (Gold
1998). This insight from a North Indian farmer returns us to the blunt knowledge that,
although the world's abundant food lore is culturally constructed, to suffer pangs of hun-
ger is a physical and visible plight. Food's capacity to “jump scale” means that the sight