"Anthropologists can't live without history," says Merry White, an ethnographer who focuses most of her work on Japan. "We take the same stories, we just spin them differently." She and her son, author and historian Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, decided to collaborate on Ways of Eating: Exploring Food Through History and Culture.
Although their curiosities take them in different directions, the mother and son team began working together before their separate projects, Coffee Life in Japan and Meat Planet. "We were originally asked to write a short book that would be all of world food history in a kind of 'Just the facts, ma'am' spirit," Wurgaft says. Eventually their focus shifted to an introduction of food world history and the cultural anthropology of food, inspired in some ways by John Berger's 1972 publication Ways of Seeing, based on a BBC series.
One connection they make is between the birth of agriculture and the rise of statehood. Wurgaft explains the theories of political scientist James Scott, who argues that grain became the basis of taxation, exchange, and bureaucracy, giving rise to food politics and a means of control over populations.
White muses on the allure of foreign foods and notions of authenticity with an anecdote about dining on pre-contact food in Korea with Japanese friends. She explains that the meal imagined a past before chiles dominated gochujang sauce and kimchi.
White describes the regionality of knives in Japan and how their designs are based on functionality. Wurgaft quotes architectural historian Reyner Banham, who writes about potato chips (aka crisps) and their packaging as emotional in its function. "It's the first and most familiar of Total-Destructo products and probably sublimates more aggression per annum than any quantity of dramaturgical catharsis," Banham wrote in his 1970 essay, "The Crisp at the Crossroads."
"There is something vernacular about certain physical experiences, and industrial packaging fits into that in the same way, Banham is telling us, as oars in the hands of ancient Greek sailors or the plough in the hands of an 18th century English peasant," says Wurgaft, who along with his mother, wanted to get at the root of the complicated relationship between food cultures and their tools.
"Ways of Eating: Exploring Food Through History and Culture" takes inspiration from a 1970s BBC series. Photo courtesy of University of California Press.