Kennan Ferguson - Cookbook Politics

COOKBOOK POLITICS

KENNAN FERGUSON

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Democracy: The Recipe, the Cookbook,
and the Forms of Politics

Cookbooks are not usually conceived of as political texts. They do not seem political because the demands they make upon us do not seem to be ones concerned with power or authority. They do not declaim, as do manifestos. They do not constrict, as do laws. They do not command accord, as do arguments. Their stipulations are often vague (until browned) and their audiences inattentive (how many cookbooks are bought simply for the ideals of cooking and the beauty of the photography?). Even their narrative form is different from that of most books: they fail to tell a story, and one dips into them depending upon ones time, appetite, and taste.

But cookbooks do form who we are, in ways large and small. Tell me what you eat, Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously wrote, and I will tell you what you are. Cookbooks are repositories of human taste, meant to transmit particular blends of flavor, texture, and nutrition across space and time. They are locations of shared sensation, where collective affective dynamics have material (and materialized) traces, the printed, textualized locale of taste and identity.

Discovering the implications of these repositories is the central concern of this book. Why we turn to cookbookswhat they do for, and to, usturns out to be a philosophically complex question. Books are generally not so closely linked with our sensorial lives, even though they often represent sensation. Cookbooks, on the other hand, operate specifically on our bodies, but they do so through their readera cook. And their authority comes not through traditional lines of political power, such as law or force, but from a diffuse and experiential guidance. Betty Crockers Cookbook becomes someones favorite precisely because it aligns closely with the cooks history, traditions, imagination, and aspirations. So such an investigation concerns not only roasts, carrots, and brownies but also aesthetics, printing processes, and assumptions about domesticity, history, and location.

In this book, as in an actual cookbook, the reader is encouraged to pass over those aspects of the book that are not to their taste. Different sections will be used differently by different people. Historians may appreciate the particularities of food distribution and cooking technologies; cooks may be inspired (or revolted) by the mixtures of ingredients or by preparation techniques; philosophers will want to argue with the books theoretical foundations and conclusions. One does not need to read the chapter on the genres of cookbooks to make sense of cookbooks in international relations. Even within chapters, certain sections may be distracting, uninteresting, or unintelligible to certain readers. While some of the overly technical issues (say, a conflict between two twentieth-century French philosophers) appear only in the endnotes, other theoretical arguments do form and shape the content of the chapters. And yet, while this is a book of philosophy, no technical philosophical training is needed to read this book, especially for the reader who is more concerned with other aspects of cookbooks.

The preeminent claim of this bookthat cookbooks operate in political wayswill already raise suspicions. Most cookbook authors, readers, and users consider cookbooks very differently: as entirely apolitical works. If a cookbook is merely a repository of techniques (e.g., cook this for forty-five minutes, stirring once), as they presume, then it seems more like a manual than a political text. From this viewpoint, cookbooks are devoid of politics, and to claim that they operate along lines of power, distinction, and community seems counterintuitive at best, provocatively misleading at worst.

As an introductory exercise (not as a template for the forthcoming chapters), consider four ways in which one might admit cookbooks as having or doing politics, arranged from the most overt to the most subtle and so far unrecognized. Briefly, they are these: They could be organized and sold by political organizations and fundraisers affiliated with particular political parties. They also could be seen as replicating and reinforcing political barriers and boundaries. They might act to perpetuate practices of ideology or community. And most counterintuitively, there might be a politics of their very form: the format of the cookbook.

The first category consists of those cookbooks put together for overtly political party purposes, either to raise money for a political cause or to reinforce kinds of political loyalty. In 1984, for example, a group of American political activists collected recipes from prominent Democratic Party politicians and their wives to compile a cookbook entitled How to Cook Reagans Goose.

But these are uncommon kinds of cookbooks, unusual both in their production and in their distribution. (What sort of gourmand would buy a cookbook in order to cook the dishes favored by a politician with national aspirations?) Far more common, and certainly more familiar, are the second kind of political cookbooks: those that replicate and reinforce political boundaries or barriers. The national cookbook, one that concentrates on Chinese food or Mexican cooking, is typical of this kind. Such a book implicitly presumes the universality of a nation, promising the cook that she can experience and recreate the food of that state. Sometimes written for an external audience (as when an Italian cookbook is published by a British publisher in English), and sometimes for an internal audience (as when an Italian cookbook is published by an Italian press in Italian), such a book not only presumes the naturalness of the Italian people but also reinforces their collective identity through food culture.

Of course, the nation is not the only sort of political boundary that cookbooks emphasize and reduplicate. Throughout this book, various cookbooks will be examined that emphasize regionality as more important. Cookbooks can focus on cities, such as New Orleans. They may emphasize the continuity and homogeneity of larger regional areas; a book dedicated to Tuscan food or to the flavors of Provence marks out those places as different from the rest of the country. In each case, the affiliations among a large set of recipes work precisely because they buy into and reinforce the presumption that certain proximities of taste and culture coincide with geography; that a region and its food emerge naturally from one another. The geographically bounded cookbook proves an enduring staple in the cookbook publishers larder.