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Carole Counihan

Food for hungry brains – Capra and Counihan

Recently I posted a link to Time’s What the World Eats feature (and later found a related article), and have since found an NPR radio feature on the book (Hungry Planet) that these images come from. The NPR page features some interesting background and interviews with the photographers, who enlisted an impressive list of writers to flesh the book out, including Marion Nestle, Alfred W. Crosby, Francine R. Kaufman, Charles C. Mann, Michael Pollan, Carl Safina, and even our upcoming lecturer Corby Kummer.

Last week we had four things to occupy our minds. Still reeling from Serge Latouche‘s lectures, we were offered some therapeutic time in the kitchen with Barny Haughton, as previously reported. Then we had two head-spinning days with Fritjof Capra, a day of gelato, and a concluding meeting with Carole Counihan. I have covered the gelato day separately.

Speaking mainly from his book, The Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living, Capra explained his theories about food’s systemic role, from the molecular to the environmental level. In brief, he said his view was all about ecosystems; that every living thing – even a cell – is part of a system, and we consider anything in isolation at our peril.

He also expanded on the point that had brought him to Carlo Petrini’s attention: that living things are divided and defined by food. For example, the two categories at the base of the kingdoms, bacteria and protists (single celled nucleated mechanisms), ingest food through semi-permeable cell membranes; the intake of food actually determines the molecular (biological) identity of the cell. Distinctions between the other three kingdoms – fungi, plants and animals (humans) – are also through food. Plants are defined through photosynthesis; fungi send enzymes outside the organism, digest the food outside the organism and then ingest it in digested form. Animals ingest and then digest food. In the human realm: biologically we are animals, but for us food also has its cultural dimension – which we share through communal, social and cultural events. So, he argued, you need to understand cognitive as well as cultural elements to fully understand human relationships with food.

He talked as well about the globalised world: its foundation on the whims of electronic investors, which he described as a global casino. No longer, he said, are companies measured by ‘bricks and mortar’, but by their place in ‘analyst expectations’ – which can change in a moment with immeasurable impact on the lives of the real people who work for those companies, while enriching a global elite. Like us, he had been greatly affected by the film Life Running Out of Control, and its message about our unprecedented destruction of and genetic tampering with existing life forms.

So: to survive on this planet, we must change the rules of the game, he says. The underlying principle that making money is the only company value is outdated and dangerous. Human values are not laws of natures; they can be changed. He urges us to consider a new global civil society, built on networks and an underlying pair of basic values: human dignity – the right to shelter, housing, food, security, free speech, educational and religious freedoms; and ecological sustainability.

Implementing this kind of change includes three areas: addressing the negative impact of globalisation, reshaping governing rules and institutions, through such organisations as the International Forum on Globalisation; agroecology, reshaping food and agriculture, oppositn genetically modified foods and promotion of sustainable agriculture through such organisations as Slow Food; and ecodesign, redesigning technology, buildings and physical structures for sustainability, through such institutions as the Rocky Mountain Institute.

It was a relief to have some tangible resources to explore and find concrete ways to counter the bleak global vision we’d been thinking and talking about. It made me think some more about what and how I think about food; and sustainability and ecosystems have got to have more to do with the total picture.

Barny Haughton had asked if we felt optimistic about the potential for people, companies, countries to change, even in the midst of unassailable evidence of environmental damage. He didn’t get much of an answer, but he himself observed rather bleakly that from his experience he thought people unlikely to change unless forced to do so.

Indeed. We can talk till we are blue in the face about the need for change, but will we give up our cars, our pre-packaged convenience foods, our comfortable heat and cold, our plastics and fossil fuels? Just one more little car ride to the mall when we could have walked. Just one glass bottle we can’t be bothered to wash for the recycling. Just one more package of pre-washed salad with individual portions of inedible dressing, all in full plastic armour. Who else can stop it?

We had concluding food anthropology meetings with Carole Counihan, who shared her research into food cultures in the San Luis Valley of Colorado, and had us share our mini-research (observation studies of local food-related places) with her. Mine was the quirky and I think laudable Progetto Latte, one of several interesting enterprises of the Bertinelli family.

Back in the classroom: anthropology and décroissance

Returning from stage is always a bit of a culture shock, but come Wednesday morning we had shaken off bus-lag and were back in our places (with bright shiny faces) at the University of Gastronomic Sciences. Everything was pretty shiny, in fact, as it was raining – bucketing down – and Torrente Parma was looking like a torrent of latte, not the sparse trickle we’d left behind only ten days earlier.

We met our new instructor of the week, Carole Counihan, who has us paddling swiftly down the byways of foodways, gender and the anthropology of food. We’re talking about the preservation of food cultures through anthropological methods, like interviews and observations. We’ll be trying an observation of our own in the next week.

The other instructor this week was economist Serge Latouche, who came from Paris to tell us about décroissance, which argues that civilization can no longer be founded on infinite economic growth. He picked up the thread where An Inconvenient Truth left off.

Referring often to the ideas of Romanian economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, he spoke at some length about the implications of unchecked growth on every aspect of our lives. Where food is concerned, a growth economy means the food industry is encouraged to force consumers to consume (or at least buy) more than they need so that profits can continue to grow, which of course requires industrialised food production and massive waste. You could take that to mean that if we buy into this pattern, we’re complicit in building populations of spiritual and physical obesity. And their harvests of waste, illness and pollution.

He spoke of three evils of the growth economy: advertising; programmed obsolescence; and credit.

Advertising’s crime is creating desire for products that are not needed; its job is to generate additional growth by nurturing a chronic sense of discontent and inadequacy in the target audience. A successful campaign will create cycles of insatiable demand and overproduction. The victims are vulnerable people who can be brainwashed into feeling inadequate, and the most vulnerable of those are children, already subject to excesses of advertising through television, but also through corporate sponsorship within their schools. He also singled out the mailshots that he says create up to 50kg of unwanted paper per household in Italy, with attendant issues of deforestation and pollution.

Programmed obsolescence forces consumers to replace items rather than repairing them. The lifespan of a computer is two years or so, and after that it simply stops working (or one year and one month in the case of my dead Acer laptop); the corporate solution – and the one that we consumers have implicitly consented to – is to dump these dead machines on foreign shores, all toxic chemicals and non-biodegradeable parts. Gone are the days when you could be self-reliant in your own home with a few good wrenches and screwdrivers; nowadays you can’t even diagnose the problems with most of our appliances and cars unless you have computer diagnostics. We will persuade people – shame them, mock them – that wearable clothes can no longer be worn because they are no longer fashionable. And what was I reading recently, that talked about the loss of the verb “darn” – that the very idea of repairing a hole in a sock had become passé in a culture that simply threw old clothes away because they were cheaper to replace?

Credit, he said, attacks consumers by encouraging them to consume even when they are unemployed or unable to afford what they are manipulated into wanting. He cited some depressing figures: in France, 80% of the population is indebted to the amount they will earn this year and next; Americans owe what they will earn until 2010. And, unsurprisingly, it seems that Canadians, too, owe more than they earn. It got me wondering who pays for the debt of the one in 53 American households that declare bankruptcy (and presumably go on to assume more debt as soon as they’re legally able, since credit helps to fund bank profits growth), and what implications that will have for all of us down the line if the debts are ever called in.

There was of course much more said, and I look forward to the next installment this afternoon, and some time to digest it all.