"We don't know what we're eating, so we stop knowing who we are," points out anthropologist Eva Ferrarová
Eva, what led you to the anthropology of food?
It was Italy, where I lived for 20 years and where they really care about food. The Italians revere their cuisine and base it on good ingredients. That's also why food anthropology is taught in Italian universities. In the Czech Republic, no one is very involved in this field, so we only get to know it as a subject within anthropological studies. Simply put, we study why do or do not eat certain foods, how our eating habits change and to what extent our identity is shaped by this, whether we are talking about individual, national, cultural or social identity.
Do you have any idea when our eating culture developed, and when we perceived the social significance of food?
In my opinion, it has been happening since we as humans discovered fire and could start cooking. The French anthropologist and philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss developed what he called the 'food of the day' culinary triangle, and said that fire enabled man to transform nature into culture. It is generally argued that cooking over fire made us digest meat better, so we didn't use as much energy to digest it, and we could think and develop brain activity all the more. This distinguished us from the primates. Other milestones and phases followed, in which food sometimes played a greater and sometimes a lesser role. But it always depended on one's social status.
What does that mean?
The poor ate what they grew or bred, while the rich set the direction and drove society. The nobility preferred international cuisine. They had the means to import exotic ingredients, use lemons, cinnamon or sugar, and influence the diet of the lower classes. This was only ended by the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. The bourgeoisie then rejected the mores of the nobility and adopted a rational diet, i.e. less food and more work. In this way, we could go through history up to the present day, which responds to the changes of the last two centuries and provokes a crisis of our identity.
What exactly caused it?
The crisis is a response to globalisation. It is happening because we do not know what we eat and therefore we no longer know who we are. The market presents us with raw materials from God knows where. We have no idea who harvested them, where they were stored or how they were transported. Until the beginning of the 19th century or so, our tables reflected the cyclical nature of the harvest, but then came industrialisation and large-scale distribution. Food was suddenly available to everyone, even if it varied in quality as much as it does today, and this had the huge negative effect of turning food into an industrial product. We have lost track of its origins, which is something that we omnivores unconsciously resent because we have a genetically encoded fear of the unknown, as research shows. Michael Pollan writes about this in his book The Omnivore's Dilemma.
So we're simply afraid?
Our ancestors' experiences, from which a solid structure of customs, taboos, recipes and traditions emerged, lead us out of fear. Yet, as a society, we find ourselves at a point where we need and want to know where the food on our plate comes from. So a lot of people are returning to localism because we can take back control of local produce. This is the principle behind not only the aforementioned Italian cuisine, but also many other cuisines. The Czech Republic, as a post-socialist state, is slightly behind the times compared to Western countries, but I believe that we are also coming to a revival of our cuisine. First of all, we should not constantly compare it with others. After all, Czech cuisine is wonderful in itself!
What distinguishes it, if we look at it from your anthropological perspective?
Our cuisine is synthetic - it combines ingredients to create a new, delicate taste. In contrast, analytical Italian cuisine combines the flavours of the ingredients, but they remain recognisable in the food. At the same time, if we are talking about Czech cuisine, we should not neglect the regional cuisines in our ethnographic areas, which used to vary according to the local ingredients and their preparation. During the national revival, we were eager to prove to the Germans that we had not only our own language and literature, but also our own cuisine. Its picture has been painted, for example, by Václav Pacovský or Magdalena Dobromila Rettigová, but it deserves to be revised.
Why do you think so?
Specifically, Rettigová has collected bourgeois recipes, and we must appreciate that, but her selection has somewhat overshadowed the regionality of Czech cuisine. Later urbanisation and the move to the cities also contributed to this. Although we were building up the values of our own cuisine, in parallel we neglected traditional dishes from the countryside. Everybody knew muffins, but the desserts of the previous era gradually disappeared. Something similar happened in Italy. The country had been fragmented into small states for decades, which united in 1861, and the then-born Pellegrino Artusi collected recipes and essentially created the Italian national cuisine. Unlike us, however, the Italians have continued to preserve the culinary authenticity of each region.
How do you imagine that Czech cuisine should be revived?
I think we should cook with the best possible ingredients and bring regional recipes back into the game. When you travel through the Czech Republic, few gastronomy restaurants offer local specialities, and just as few of us cook them at home. Of course, this is no longer Rettigová's fault, but that of socialism, which has unified our diet and impoverished it terribly. The same dishes were repeated on restaurant menus, the shops were flooded with semi-finished products, and when we wanted to prepare something decent, there was nothing to use. In the 1990s, foreign cuisine opened up in our country and for a long time there was no one to object and say: What about the Czech one?
The remnants of socialism are probably not going to be wiped out immediately. What else is influencing us, perhaps even unconsciously, when it comes to food?
We must mention religion and its rules, which affect food and impose mainly prohibitions. A typical example is the fasting imposed by the Catholic Church, which once lasted up to 180 days a year. We have therefore learned to cook Lenten meals while circumventing the regulations. For example, beaver was classified as a fish so that it could be eaten during Lent. Beaver meat contains plenty of fat, which our ancestors have always sought. Interestingly, at first even fish was not allowed to be eaten during Lent, and when the Church allowed its consumption, it greatly encouraged the development of the Czech fish farming industry. Religion, in short, shaped cultural patterns, which of course also influence what we eat.
Where do our cultural patterns stem from?
Each of us has different identities. In addition to the ones I have already mentioned, these include religious identity, but also age and gender. All of these are folded into patterns that are embedded deep within us. Our individual predispositions and choices are layered on top of them. We can therefore say that we are passing on these original, minimally altered cultural patterns to our children. You may leave them, but you will still return to them. Culture is conservative and changes very slowly, otherwise it would not be a culture.
Eva Ferrarová
Eva Ferrarová teaches anthropology of food at Charles University in Prague, publishes books, and is involved in other projects and topics such as the importance of food for the elderly and issues of eating in relation to gender, body image and eating disorders.
To what extent do these patterns relate to, for example, what I normally eat for breakfast?
More strongly than one might think. Culture is part of us and food is part of culture. The American anthropologist Marvin Harris came up with the idea that every community works out a kind of cost-benefit analysis and eats in the way that is most beneficial to them. Logically, therefore, they cook with what they can get in the place where they live. We should therefore understand Czech cuisine in our context. Alongside Italian, it probably gives the impression of a heavy cuisine, but it suits us natives. The English anthropologist Mary Douglas explains that people before us have built so-called dietary cultural patterns on this 'convenient' basis, defining what we have for breakfast, what we do not eat, but also with whom, where and how we dine.
Is there such a thing as individual food?
In my book, Eating for Pleasure, I have included a table of questions we unwittingly ask ourselves before we start eating. Is it edible? Is this appropriate to eat in my culture? Is it appropriate to eat this at my age? And so on. The brain decides for us first, since it has cultural memory and follows the patterns and rules of the social group in question. Then comes our individual approach, our experiences, memories and subjective evaluation with our senses. Food is a product of culture, which interferes in our lives whether we want it to or not.
In the book, you also write about the need to eat together and about eating alone, which is only a recent 'trend'.
Sharing food was the beginning of everything. Food is the social link through which we express closeness to each other. It cultivates us. However, we usually only deal with dining etiquette in restaurants anymore, and in most households it is only respected during festive occasions. Besides, many working people eat out, away from home. Experts call this vagabond feeding or "vagabond eating". We eat what and when we want, often sitting at the table alone. We forgo communal dining, called "dining out". Commensality which mediates communication between us humans, connects us and symbolises our collective identity, both spiritual and gustatory. At the same time, we are losing the everyday order that food gives us and that humans need.
What do you think our food culture needs?
When you go to the market or shopping in Italy, your neighbours don't ask you how you are, they ask: What are you going to cook today? I wish we would greet each other like that and make food a priority. Because the French thinker Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin was certainly right when he said that we are what we eat.
