Superfood? 18 January 2007 4:52 pm
Posted by Tracy in : anthropology,Derrick Jelliffe,eating,hungry planet,identity,Michael Pollan,vocabulary,Warren Belasco , trackbackOne concept that really stuck with me from my food and culture anthropology class last term is the idea of a “superfood”, which comes from a hierarchical food classification system described by Derrick B. Jelliffe. I’m bringing it up now because it was important to my thinking about my Hungry Tracy project. According to Jelliffe’s 1967 article “Parallel Food Classifications in Developing and Industrialized Countries” (The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 20., No. 3, March 2967, pp. 279-281, in case you were wondering or I need to look it up again), a superfood is the central food, usually a grain or other starchy carbohydrate, that provides the bulk of a community’s calories, occupies a major part of the community’s agricultural and domestic food work, and plays a central role in a culture’s myths and metaphors about food. Other categories in Jelliffe’s system (which I hasten to point out is an etic system, imposed by outside observers of a culture, rather than an emic system, defined from within a culture — did that anthropology class last term eat my brain or what?) include prestige foods, which are highly valued, expensive and rare, often animal protein, and foods associated with health concepts. The latter include body image foods (related to a culture’s understanding of the body and its functions), sympathetic magic foods (eaten in order to absorb their properties), and physiologic group foods (such as foods prescribed for or forbidden to people of certain age groups or life stages, such as children, the elderly, and pregnant or lactating women). What a great concept, what a useful way to organize thoughts about food consumption, what a good starting place for a definition of TracyFood, right? Well, sort of. For one thing, when I stopped to think about Jelliffe’s system as it applied to my own personal food habits, I honestly wasn’t sure, for instance, if I even had a superfood.
I don’t know why that revelation came as such a surprise: writing this now makes me remember a conversation when the fabulous Chiara asked if I took my cooking inspiration from any particular national or ethnic cuisine, and I was unable to answer. As a professional cook, I was embarrassed not to have a good answer — it seems like that kind of thing should be my bread and butter, so to speak, but I digress. My professional pride notwithstanding, it’s not like I’m unique in not really knowing what the hell I eat. As Michael Pollan writes in “Our National Eating Disorder”, the introduction to his 2006 book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the United States, as a relatively young nation of immigrants, has “never had a single, strong, stable culinary tradition to guide us.” What’s embarrassing to me about that claim is that as either a first- or second-generation immigrant, depending on how you count (mom’s side or dad’s), I’m really not that far removed from just such a national culinary tradition, namely that of the Netherlands. So that’s embarrassing in a whole new way, but national identity is a can of worms I don’t want to open in this particular essay, but mentioning that fact here will hopefully remind me to write something profound and personal about food, nationality, and language — bilingualism, biculturalism, bi-blah blah blah blah. To bring things back to superfood (and to borrow shamelessly from an essay I wrote for my anthropology midterm last fall) in the U.S., we usually think of bread and other wheat products, such as pasta, in this superfood way (the proverbial staff of life, “dough” as slang for money, and so on), but in The Omnivore’s Dilemma Pollan suggests that in fact corn (maize to non-U.S. English speakers) may be even more central to our diet, even though it is not valued as highly. In case you haven’t read Pollan’s book or a review thereof or one of his articles for various and sundry publications, he points out that the U.S. food supply is supersaturated with corn: in subtle forms like corn starch, lecithin, and high fructose corn syrup, to name a few, and more indirectly in animal feed. Of course, one of the main points of Pollan’s book is that most people in the U.S. are both geographically and psychologically distanced, even alienated from their food, and that in turn makes it hard to say how the “bulk of a community’s agricultural and domestic food work” part of Jelliffe’s definition even applies. So maybe for my purposes the definition of superfood might need a little tweaking, but it can still be very useful as a concept, if only for surprises like Pollan’s corn example.
Anyway, you can bet the idea of superfood was in the back of my head when I started my Hungry Tracy project last month. I wouldn’t be counting calories, but at least I could gather some empirical evidence about my eating habits, which had suddenly become so mysterious to me. In class a month or so before, we’d spent a lot of time talking about the identity dimension of Warren Belasco’s culinary triangle of food choice, which deserves its own entry but the identity component encompasses such questions as “Should I like this?” and “Is this something people like me eat?” — and for the life of me I couldn’t come up with a good defining summary of what I eat. A scribble in my notes of 4 October 2006 says, “I guess I eat like a hippie food snob?” and later, when we were discussing nutritional socialization and identity there’s a little note wondering, “What food is home?” and a few first guesses, mostly of the Dutch bread breakfast persuasion: hagelslag, vlokken, and of course boerekaas (farmstead, usually raw milk Gouda-style cheese). Those last notes were actually reassuring to rediscover, after all that national identity crisis stuff of the last paragraph. In the end, it turned out that my superfood was a similar familiar favorite. But that’s a story for later.
