If we outline tradition as a set of values and practices round which communities determine and cohere, then few issues are extra cultural than meals. The place else is the narcissism of small variations higher than in gastronomic issues? Amongst us we might disagree on the right way to put together this or that delicacy, however we will agree that the way in which the others do it’s unusual, if not downright fallacious. That does not make us meals nationalists, even when deep down most of us are conservative relating to what we eat.
In fact, there’s a good motive to not discuss politics throughout meals. As a result of after we sit down to speak about points similar to labor relations and the distribution of wealth, eventually the dialog turns to what’s on our plate and the way it bought there. And if meals is political, then we would not agree on something. Fundamental and superstructure. Class and carbohydrates. Dinner can be over.
As we all know from Catholic cultures, meals metaphors are sometimes persistent for the straightforward motive that everybody understands them. When Marx outlined labor because the metabolism of society, folks would have instantly understood this. The employees wanted meals and the depletion of the soil threatened to convey industrial capitalism to a standstill. And so started a race amongst Western international locations for brand new sources of fertilizer. As financial historian Staffan Granér writes, the good powers started on the lookout for guano.
A bit of later, chemists found methods to provide fertilizer artificially, together with Fritz Haber, the Nobel Prize winner who was additionally the mastermind behind German chemical warfare in World Conflict I. Billions of mouths might be fed, and the world actually grew to become hooked on artificial nitrates. making a plethora of much more complicated issues that we’re solely now totally realizing. In case you’d slightly your tradition did not matter, this text will make you assume.
John Singer Sargent, ‘A Eating Desk at Night time’, 1884. Museums of Fantastic Arts of San Francisco. Supply: Wikimedia Commons
In case you’re nonetheless up for some food-related content material, we have Anka Wandzel on brining as resistance (no hipster whimsy right here, preserving is a severe cultural apply); Markus Wild on meat and modernity (away with these frozen rooster nuggets – now!); Bogdan Iancu on cowboy boreholes in Romania’s parched Danube plain (possibly not such a good suggestion, guys); Viktoria Hubareva on the miraculous resilience of the Ukrainian grain trade (nonetheless the breadbasket of Europe); and Skinny Lei Win concerning the recalcitrance of the agricultural foyer and the way a lot agriculture is letting the EPP eat out of its hand (see Germany).
Ivajlo Ditchev (1955-2023)
We had been very unhappy after we heard of the demise of Bulgarian anthropologist and cultural theorist Ivaylo Ditchev on the finish of final 12 months. Ditchev was the writer of quite a few extensively learn and translated articles for Eurozine between 2000 and 2015.
Like his colleagues on the journal Criticism and humanism writing, he impressed many college students and researchers together with his concepts, as a former professor and founding father of the varsity of cultural anthropology at Sofia College. Together with his openness and curiosity concerning the world, Ditchev drew his readers into an understanding of modernity, the tradition of on a regular basis life and the crises of politics. Learn his articles for Eurozine in our archive.
Calling younger journalists!
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Simon Garnett
Editor-in-chief, Eurozine
