Carlo Petrini, in his essay “Slow Food Nation: why our food should be good, clean, and fair,” mentions this idea of the importance of pleasure derived from food. For Petrini, one of his main grievances with the current industrial food system is that it strips away the pleasure of eating by substituting the highly artificial for the natural. He maintains that, because of the tendency to eat what is quick, cheap, and readily available, we deprive ourselves of the pleasure that comes from food. Petrini goes on to say that in order to fight this consumption-based-on-convenience-culture we must equip everybody with the tools to recognize pleasure: “Since pleasure is a human right, it must be guaranteed for everyone, so we must teach people to recognize it, to create the conditions whereby ‘naturally’ good products are producible everywhere” (105). He also notes that “good” is culturally dependent: “it is not easy to arrive at a definition that is “good” for everyone… the study of what is good, therefore, necessarily restricts the field to a single culture and a single social group” (100). This idea of cultural variability and its link to pleasure intrigues me…
If we are saying that “good” varies culture to culture then pleasure necessarily changes with it. Can one not derive the same pleasure from what is “good” in a culture other than their own? Petrini argues no…
Using the example of the larvae eaten in Burkina Faso, Petrini says that “objectively speaking, I did not find anything that corresponded to my categories of “good”… To my personal taste, those insects are bad, but since they are important for that culture… I must say that they are good… This is the absolute relativity of the good: according to culture, according to “naturalness,” according to sensory characteristics” (107-108).
While I do think there is importance in expanding our concepts of good in a way that recognizes preferences outside of the dominant, Euro-centric culture, I find Petrini’s arguments about tastes and pleasures as distinct, mutually-exclusive categories troubling. These claims seem to be making clear statements about inherent differences between cultures which becomes a little worrying for me as it promotes separation and isolates those living in areas where they are not surrounded by people of the same cultural background. Petini argues that we should “gain respect for other cultures by learning to understand other people’s categories” which is troublesome for me as people are not always allowed to define their own categories and in this situation falsely assigning someone a category they do not identify with makes clear statements about what they do and do not enjoy and sets who they can relate and identify with (108). Petrini’s use of categorization of people also seems to assume that there is little to no overlap between cultures and peoples. It makes blanket statements and puts parameters around people’s abilities to enjoy and derive pleasure.
Good morning, Chloe. John here, just checking out the blog before my morning conferences with Fellows in DC.
Your resistance to Petrini’s sense of cultural distinctness struck me. His example from Burkina Faso is an extreme one, and it’s probably true in fact that for most people from the industrialized West grubs would be an acquired taste. But I wonder whether in not wanting to draw the line so firmly between cultures you may also reflect something characteristic about American culture. Namely, that we don’t have an established national cuisine so much as a tasty mélange of cuisines. Here in Washington, beyond such established favorites as Mexican, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese food, many people now delight in going to restaurants and delis established more recently by arrivals from Ethiopia, Morocco, and Jamaica. We eat and cook in ways that reflect, and celebrate, our society’s expanding diversity.
This goes along with my sense of food as the center of a more invitational environmentalism. “Taste this!” we say to people arriving at the party. Which is followed by “What do you like to eat that I can try?”