Food For Thought
Author And Teacher Margaret Visser Explores The Extraordinary Stories Behind Our Most Ordinary Foods
Interview by Barbara Spronk
To readers who listen regularly to CBC-AM, Margaret Visser will need no introduction. Many guests on Peter Gzowski's morning program, including some regulars, come and go without leaving any lasting impression. Not so with classics teacher and writer Margaret Visser. Once heard, Dr. Visser's cadenced delivery and the evident delight she takes in her material are not easily forgotten. Even more impressive is the way in which she applies her quick wit and considerable erudition to the task of making the listener aware of the wealth of historical significance, contemporary connections, and symbolic freight carried by even the most mundane and seemingly ordinary objects of everyday life.
Take, for example, a meal of corn with butter and salt, chicken, rice, lettuce dressed with olive oil and lemon, and ice cream. What could possibly be more ordinary, more typical of the Sunday - or company-dinner routine on which so many of us were raised? "Aha", answers Visser, "it is precisely this ordinariness which gives these foods, and the routines of which they are a part, their power to order our lives". Under Visser's scrutiny, corn becomes not merely a food for animals and for their keepers, but the “driving wheel of the North American supermarket.” Salt is transformed from the most common seasoning into the only “edible rock.” Butter becomes the focus of the “butter mystique,” chickens the product of factory farming, lettuce “the basis of a vast and specialized industry,” and so on. As Visser exposes layer after layer of myth, history, chemical properties, industrial production, and marketing hype, the more respectful we become, not only of the role these apparently humble foodstuffs have played in human history and prehistory, but of their vulnerability to human greed and manipulation.
It is to make the reader aware of the terrible power we wield, and to engender respect for the life forms over which we wield it, that Margaret Visser describes as her purpose in writing her book. Much, indeed, depends on dinner.
Aurora: In Much Depends on Dinner you say that one implication of using the word “ordinary” in the phrase “ordinary things” is that such things order our culture and determine its direction. Govern, order, determine— these are very strong verbs indeed; there's no hint here of scholarly caution or qualification or waltzing about in gray areas. What gives food, as an example of such ordinary things, such extraordinary power over our lives?
Visser: Several aspects account for this power. One is the amount of time that people have always spent on food— getting it, organizing it, cooking it, and deciding who should eat it, when and where. Aside from such practical considerations, which are based on the fact that food is a necessity, we have the psychological aspect. It's interesting, for example, that in many languages there are different words for animals eating and for human beings eating; in English, we usually say that animals “feed” whereas human beings “eat.” That shows how our human identity is bound up with the attitudes we indulge in as we eat, attitudes which we know are not the same as those of animals. That's because we invest symbolic meaning in eating, especially in eating together in groups. This expresses all kinds of things about our attitude toward society; it expresses hierarchy, it expresses ideas, such as fate among the ancient Greeks. And, of course, in the major religions food is absolutely central to their symbolic religious system. In some West African cultures, for example, the value system is expressed in terms not of money but of beer, which there is nutritional stuff. Where I come from, in Zambia, there are tribes which are part of a system called “the clanship of porridge.” Food metaphors can pervade the entire matrix of a society.
If you think about something that is ordinary, it's something that's done all the time. Anything which you do all the time has to be very important. And eating is an obvious example of something that everybody does, several times a day.
Aurora: Another implication of the fact that we do it all the time is that there must be some pattern to it. You emphasize three sorts of patterns: those that connect us, through food, with the past; the ways in which food connects us with a multitude of systems and organizations in the present; and also the implications that those patterns, if they continue, have for our future. First, in terms of the past, I know that in future I won't treat olive oil, for example, as casually as I have done. It is and has been a very revered substance.
Visser: This is one of the reasons I wrote the book. The last few sentences in the introduction, where I talk about boredom, are in a way the key to the whole book. I think that one of the great poverties of the modern world is the lack of the sense of the numinousness of things. In most cultures people have great reverence for the ordinary, little things they encounter, and that reverence springs not only from realizing how necessary they are, but also from all the meaning that is invested in simple things. For example, a traditional Eskimo was tremendously interested in and thought hard about his knife or clothes. These mattered in the sense that he knew their symbolic meaning, he knew how his ancestors had developed these things, and he was grateful for them. That knowledge - what I call religio (which means “connectedness”)— or sense of the meaning of things, a reverence and gratitude for them, all that is almost absent in our culture. The book is partly an attempt to fill at least a little of that gap. If we appreciated the ordinary things, our lives would be infinitely richer and more satisfying.
I'm always very aware of the lacks in this book; I know how much has been cut out of it. But I will have achieved my purpose if I can give the people who read it a sense of the great range of factors—history, inventiveness, struggle, meaning—that converge upon any little object.
Aurora: The symbolic element of food seems to be very important for you, and I suspect you think it should be important for us. For example, your notion of the meal as an artistic social construct.
Visser: It's very interesting to look at meals in different cultures and how they are patterned. I think every meal has a plot; it is a drama. For example, an ancient Greek meal, like an ancient Greek play, ends on a low note. The real fascination of a Greek play is in the middle, and then comes the catastrophe, about four-fifths of the way through, and then the rest of the play sort of trickles down to an end, so that you're left with a sense of peace and security. The romantic play, however, ends with a bang! Unlike the ancient Greeks, we have a dessert at the end, which is a very romantic attitude. The meal structure imitates the structure of literature in our culture.
The British meal has been dissected in great detail by [social anthropologist] Mary Douglas, who finds in the British meal a whole series of categories which have to do with dryness, hardness, wetness, and softness; The British meal is all to do with a hard thing and two soft things; that's the structure. That's the reason there are always custards; that's why there's always gravy. The custard on the pudding echoes the gravy on the meat, and so on. Cookies in England have jam in the middle, which is a drier version of the custard. I don't know how far you are willing to push these things, but there's at least some truth in our requirement for drama or for our meal to have a certain shape.
Aurora: These things—the structure of cookies, for example-are quite wonderful to pursue. But they are not just games, are they? They do have great significance in people's lives.
Visser: Right. They're patterns which are evolved by a culture. We take them very much for granted, and the more we take them for granted, the less we notice them, and the more we are compelled to carry them out. If you demythologize them too much—and I'm very anxious not to do that—you risk destroying them. I've tried to analyze in a way that isn't destructive, but rather enriching. You have to be very careful; if you analyze something too much, you can kill it. Our word “analyze” comes from a Greek word which means “to destroy.”
Aurora: You discuss food not just on the symbolic level, but on the material level as well; for example, the ways in which various substances operate in our bodies, or the chemistry of cornstarch mixtures.
Visser: I chose to write about things rather than themes or ideas because nothing you can say about a thing can ever comprehend that thing. There's a sense in which you can never fully understand a tablespoon of spinach. It points in hundreds of different directions: there's the scientific aspect, the social aspect, the historical aspect, where it fits in the meal, and so on. Choosing the thing as your focus enables you to range in all those directions, yet the thing remains concrete, and you never get totally carried away as you can with an idea, which can finally become so abstract that you take off altogether. So I tried to choose things that would enable me to express particular themes rather than think of themes first and then use things as examples. Most books are written the other way round.
Aurora: Was it difficult choosing the foods that would best express your themes?
Visser: Yes, it took quite a long time because I chose foods which had to do many different things. I had to cover as many countries as possible and provide variety—that's one of the reasons I chose the meal as a structural principle, because all meals provide variety. And I wanted to bring in certain themes such as the mechanization of agriculture and the dangers of crop uniformity. That's how I thought of lettuce. Lettuce is very interesting, because I could use it as a basis for discussing the mechanization of farming and the problem of freshness—the whole sulphite scandal. It would also be wonderfully symbolic about sex, because food has always had sexual meanings, and lettuce is particularly revealing.
Aurora: You mean the argument about whether lettuce is an aphrodisiac?
Visser: Yes, and that whole business of lettuce being classed as a female food. It also has an interesting history; I liked it because it came from the Mediterranean and was something that nobody had written about. Then I had to think about what meat I should have. Should I have beef? Perhaps I should have chicken, because then I could talk about battery farming.
Aurora: I think it worked superbly. It also helped make your point that nothing is boring. A menu consisting of corn with butter and salt, chicken, rice, barely dressed lettuce, and factory-made ice cream sounds at the outset boring and turns out to be anything but.
Visser: Ever since I wrote the book, I cannot tell you how many times I have had this wretched meal! It usually happens on television shows; they have to think of something visual, and they all think how very brilliant they've been to have had the meal on the show.
Aurora: And they've all done the same thing—another instance of order and pattern in our lives!
Visser: It's really terribly funny; I almost die laughing every time I see it.
Aurora: In regard to the points you make about the ways in which food ties us to the worldwide industrial complex, it seems to me that one result of our becoming aware of these ties is a kind of tension within us between two conflicting ideals. One ideal is the debonair worldling that we would all like to be, ordering our filet mignon without regard to the world grain supply and grapes without regard to exploited grape pickers. The other ideal is the social hero, self-denying, placing public policy above private pleasure, being rigorously rational; eliminating marbled beef or coffee from our diet as decreed by Health and Welfare or the Third World. Is there any way of coming to terms with this tension?
Visser: Well, we have a problem. In the past, you saw the poor. Today, the poor are no longer before our eyes. I realize, of course, that there are poor people in the United States and Canada, but generally speaking, the only chance we have to see really poor people is on the television or if we travel. Very often we are not aware of poverty; we just think that everybody is like us.
People are innately selfish, especially where food is involved. If you're hungry, you take what's available. That's one reason we get so fat; we're biologically primed to eat food whenever it's available. While we were evolving, food was not always available, so we evolved the desire to eat while it was there. It's difficult to be rational about food. However, we have no right today to be ill informed.
Another thing this book tries to do is to make people feel reverence. A quotation from Auden, “Irreverence is a greater oaf than Superstition,” is an important part of my philosophy. We are in danger of being irreverent, and given the power we wield, our irreverence is extremely dangerous. If we appreciate food, for what it cost in the past to produce, for what it costs in the present to produce, we might be able to appreciate the fact that we have a lot and that we ought to share. We're very dangerous people. We have such power over the world and over its food resources. Our irresponsibility is caused by our short-term view. If we have respect for things, we wouldn't take that short-term view, and we wouldn't behave in this irresponsible way.
Aurora: In response to knowing more, there are such a variety of actions that we could take, individually and collectively. As individuals, for example, we could become vegetarians, not so much out of religious conviction as out of a commitment to conserving the earth's food resources by eating only those foods that are low on the food chain.
Visser: My daughter is a vegetarian, and I understand perfectly her point of view. I haven't reached that stage myself, but I do eat less meat than I used to, now that I know more. We know that we eat too much meat, for health reasons, apart from using up too much of the world's resources. But there are other things that are even more difficult for us. Take, for example, the problem of overproduction. This is the first time in human history that we have had a problem like this. Can you imagine such a thing? The world is producing too much food. And even worse, we are polluting the earth in order to produce too much food. One of the reasons we are doing it this way is because we don't want to work the land in the old ways. Are we willing to go back to the old ways in order not to pollute the earth? The problems are incredibly complicated and serious, and people really have hardly even begun to think what's involved.
Aurora: Not only is the problem the opposite of what has characterized human history for the last two million years, but it also is the opposite of what is usually portrayed as being the problem. There doesn't appear to be a wide awareness that overproduction is a problem.
Visser: Every now and again it pops up in the news; for example, the fact that the price of food is so low that farmers have to go out of business. We hear about that, but we don't hear too much about it because we like cheap food, and that keeps getting in the way of our being told and seeing what's going on. And there is the butter mountain in Europe, where they keep on making butter but don't know what to do with it. Meanwhile, other people are scientifically manipulating cows so that they will produce more and richer milk. Meanwhile, millions of people are suffering and dying from hunger—but not because there is too little food in the world.
Technology has gotten out of kilter. We make things when there's no reason for it. Just because we can, doesn't mean that we should. We should be able to stop and ask questions like, why? We really have to sit down and do some honest thinking about these things. My book is very understated. I cut out whole sections at my editor's request because they were considered too horrific.
Aurora: Could you give us an example?
Visser: One chapter that had to go was about what happened in Kampuchea in the last ten years. The whole country decided to grow more rice and become modern. The Pol Pot regime, via the Khmer Rouge, turned the entire population of Kampuchea into what they called “The Rice Force.” They squared off all the rice fields, which was a disaster because the rice fields previously had been designed to follow the curves of the hillsides, and squaring them off meant that all the drainage was ruined. They also used hybrid rice forms, which wouldn't grow well in Kampuchea. These people slaved for ten years. They had to draw ploughs like cattle. They were whipped, and if they complained they were executed. It just goes on and on, absolutely horrific. And at the end of it, they had nothing. If it hadn't been for the chance fact that Americans had collected Kampuchean rice before all this happened and kept it in storage in the Philippines, the Kampucheans would not have been able to grow rice to this day. They destroyed their whole rice economy, trying to be modern. I wanted this to be in the book, but my editor said, no, that was too much.
Anything horrendous in my book is rather low-key, compared to what could have been in it. I was anxious not to overstate it; I didn't want to become shrill. If you go on and on about doom and gloom, people don't want to read it. I figured that if a lot of the book were amusing, when you came to the horrible things, the contrast would make the point.
Aurora: Yes, you do sneak the horrible things in. For example you start talking about ice cream in a rather jolly fashion, how yummy it was in the old days, and how making it depended on horses going out into the middle of the lake to cut the ice, and so on. But before we realize it, we're being presented with modern, industrially produced ice cream and what a fraud it is. By the end of that chapter, I had become almost angry about ice cream; I felt betrayed, let down.
Visser: I hope you were also laughing, because I think that chapter is hilarious. That bit about the creation and marketing of Haagen-Daaz, for example, I think is really very funny.
Aurora: Yes, I've been tricked into buying that stuff.
Visser: It's fun to do. I love doing this; I really love writing this.
Much Depends on Dinner, Harper Collins Publishers, Ltd., 1988
The Rituals of Dinner, Harper Collins Publishers Ltd., 1991
The Way We Were, Harper Collins Publishers Ltd., 1996
The Geometry of Love, Harper Flamingo, Canada, 2001
Dr. Spronk is a professor of anthropology at Athabasca University.
All of Margaret Visser's books have been number one bestsellers or have won numerous book awards, her latest book, A Geometry of Love: Space, Time, Mystery and Meaning in an Ordinary Church, 2001 has become #1 National Best Seller: MacLeans Magazine, Best of Year: Globe and Mail, and Toronto Star.
For more information on Ms. Visser, check out her official website.
Updated February 2002
Aurora Online
Citation Format
Spronk, Barbara (1990). Food For Thought: Author And Teacher Margaret Visser Explores The Extraordinary Stories Behind Our Most Ordinary Foods.. Aurora Online: