TracyFood

Shameless nerditude: Belasco’s culinary triangle 25 April 2007 10:27 pm

Posted by Tracy in : convenience, responsibility, culinary triangle, Sidney Mintz, school, identity, Michael Pollan, anthropology, eating, vegetarian, Warren Belasco, cooking , trackback

So. Warren James Belasco is a historian and professor of American studies at the University of Maryland who writes about food — and very well, I might add. I read his 2006 book, Meals to Come: a History of the Future of Food over winter break, and today I finished his 1989 book, Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture took on the Food Industry, because it was due back at the UO library today and I wanted to return it on time rather than provoke the wrath of our housemate The History Librarian. Belasco is the co-editor of Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies, a collection of excellent academic papers about food and its marketing which was also due today. (Eventually I would like to review all these books on TracyFood, because I am a colossal geek.) In my Fall 2006 food and culture anthropology class (ANTH 365 at the University of Oregon), we used Belasco’s “culinary triangle” model of food selection to describe and discuss the way individuals approach the question of what to eat, and I find myself wanting to refer to Belasco’s terminology on TracyFood a lot, so I’m going to define it here for future reference.

To borrow shamelessly from an essay I wrote for my anthropology midterm last fall, all societies construct food classification systems as a way of negotiating what Michael Pollan calls the omnivore’s dilemma in his book of the same title, a phrase he attributes to University of Pennsylvania psychologist Paul Rozin. Simply put, because human diets are so generalized, we are not genetically programmed to know what to eat, and so we need cultural knowledge to help us determine what is edible or inedible, healthy or unhealthy, and so on. Rozin’s theories of disgust suggest that our cultural conceptions of what is disgusting began as pragmatic ways of protecting the body from substances that were likely to cause illness, and were later generalized into systems for protecting our moral and spiritual health as well. As Sidney Mintz writes in “Food and Eating: Some Persisting Questions” (Chapter 2 of Food Nations and one of the first articles assigned in ANTH 365) the morality of food varies across cultures — as do notions of health, such as those described in an article we read about Chinese nutritional therapy.

Warren Belasco’s model of food selection, the “culinary triangle,” focuses on individual consumers as the locus of each choice. Food choice is negotiated or defined in terms of three somewhat overlapping dimensions: identity, responsibility, and convenience. Identity includes personal preferences, including the individual’s physiological response to taste, which is highly idiosyncratic and personal. It also addresses questions such as “Is this something people like me eat?” and “Should I like this?” which can reflect personal family background, cultural and ethnic traditions, as well as life experiences like negative associations with food eaten prior to or during illness, and of course allergic reactions, which can be both physical and psychosomatic. Convenience refers to a food’s availability, ease of preparation, and price, all factors which can play into food selection and conflict with identity and responsibility. Responsibility refers to an individual’s awareness of the impact of food choices on herself as well as in a larger social and political system. It can easily conflict with identity and convenience. In the original midterm essay on this subject, I used the example of vegetarianism as a food choice to further illustrate the dimensions of Belasco’s culinary triangle, but since that paragraph wasn’t particularly interesting or well-written, I will skip that discussion for now, and return to the subject later.

TracyFood concerns itself primarily with the identity dimension of Belasco’s triangle, but as I’ve already mentioned, these three dimensions overlap quite a bit. I am especially interested in how identity, responsibility, and convenience can be used to describe choices in cooking as well as eating — because for me cooking and food are almost inseparable, but I know that’s not true for everyone. So. I feel better for having defined those terms, which I learned in Professor Geraldine Moreno-Black’s lectures of 4 October 2006 and 9 October 2006 for Anthropology 365, Food and Culture at the University of Oregon. I tried to find a printed source, but it turns out freaking Claude Levi-Strauss originally used the phrase “culinary triangle” to describe cooking methods, so that made things a little trickier because everybody’s been borrowing the phrase ever since. When I gave in and emailed Prof. Moreno about it, she replied that Belasco’s triangle was published in an older issue of the Association For the Study of Food in Society newsletter, so I’m citing her lecture since I don’t have access to the ASFS archives (and would probably disappear for weeks reading them if I did). Right. Clearly that’s enough academic-speak for one day, even if I did my best to keep it relatively jargon-free. Tomorrow’s post will have less chat, more splat. Or maybe more thoughts on local food. Or something.