Greetings from CMH! For those of you who don’t know, I’ve
been in Boston since this past Thursday, attending the Eastern SociologicalSociety’s annual meeting. I’ve definitely been enjoying the foodie scene and
taking in Beantown, but before I get too ahead of myself, I must first catch
you up on last Wednesday’s Food and Culture Colloquium. Last week,
Communication Professor and Department Chair Amanda Gunn’s FCC presented on
food communication, a timely module as we soon prepare to close out the
Colloquium in about a month’s time. In retrospect, her presentation was
especially helpful for me both personally and professionally as my
participation in this week-end’s ESS meeting was geared most specifically to
its Mini Conference on Food Studies.
Amanda first began by noting her angst around the subject of
“food” and a dissonance she felt when I had first asked her to present on any intersection of food within the
context of her field of communication studies, a dissonance that seemed to pose
greater internal turmoil when particularly highlighted by the term “foodie.”
With this in mind, her presentation sought to understand and name this
dissonance. And so, Amanda purposefully contextualised her presentation within
her field of Communication Studies, a field which she notes studies “meaning
making,” and from there, eventually found comfort in Feminist Communication
which in brief focuses on two themes: interdependence and power &
privilege.
In sum, Amanda’s presentation focused on words and the
meaning behind or perhaps more accurately the construction of their meaning
(i.e., communication). After asking us what words we typically associate with
the food (foodies, stylised, color, nature/art, organic/pesticide-free,
good-looking, authentic, comfort, allure, experimentation, family), she asked
what we thought of when we saw “insecure,” “desert,” and “obesity.” The leap
between the denoted meanings of these words (as objective definitions) and the
socially constructed/understood connotated meanings suggests that it is within
our power to change the language of the discourses in play (or rather, not in
play) as they pertain to the larger issues of food insecurity, food deserts and
food obesity.
As a prominent health issue, obesity and its counterpart of
malnutrition beg the questions of accountability and solution-making, both of
which tend to veer away from recognising these issues as human issues.
Instead, we are blaming “the individual” or “the system” and as such, our
language/symbols (words)/meanings being constructed need to adapt to return us
to the human element facing us. As “foodies” then, this places us in an awkward
space. And though we may not have a solution to this dissonance, one step
moving forward and away from that space is to first recognise and claim the
privilege we have to even be able to talk about food the way we have been for
the entire Colloquium, to claim the privilege of being a part of a system that
can and does look at these issues often devoid of the human element, where
language no longer has a meaning. For Amanda, the dissonance she had been
feeling was in presenting on a topic as important as the intersection of food,
nutrition and health that seemed disjointed because of the problem she
recognises with the terms the collective “we” have to work with and use without
much thought. In short, the language we use to see and talk about food reveals
injustices, the injustice in the language being at the forefront. For example,
Amanda shared that since 2008, the language of “food deserts” has been watered
down to an even weaker and less human “food environment.” In this way, human
lives and their suffering are hidden and unknown; we reduce our data to facts
and numbers, not lives; our civic responsibility is questionable unsaid and
unchallenged. Until today.
As we come face-to-face with the dissonance—an awareness of
all of the other things, the topics that often go unsaid among everyday foodie
parlance—we must find a balance between the joy of food we all share with the
acknowledgment of all those who are suffering. We must pay attention to our
role in the language and ask ourselves: what does it matter to me to be engaged
with food?
And so, as we acknowledge our foodie privilege we must also
acknowledge the power we have to seek solutions to equalising that privilege.
One great start is to push a paradigm shift by proposing new language for food
insecurity/deserts/obesity. We should start calling these by their true name:
human neglect among the food privileged. And we, as the people with privilege,
must be willing to interrogate ourselves, to claim hunger as a personal,
political act, a voting issue. In embracing our food privilege, we can only
become more openly honest in our food identity/-ies; indeed, with this self-reflection
comes a greater understanding through food.
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