Paper short abstract:

Soylent is a nutritionally complete powdered food designed by a Bay Area software engineer to “free your body” from the drudgery of traditional food. Marketed as a tool to increase productivity, Soylent signals food’s implication in disciplining the body-as-machine in a post-Fordist context.

Paper long abstract:

Created by Bay Area software engineer Robert Rhinehart in 2013, Soylent is a powdered food substitute that promises to replace the need to eat traditional foods. Because the user needs only to combine the powder with water in a blender and priced at just $2.42 per meal, Soylent claims to "free your body" from the drudgery of food by creating a product designed to increase productivity in reducing the time, money, and effort typically spent on preparing and consuming conventional foods. Rhinehart designed Soylent to contain "optimal" nutrition for most bodies at minimal cost and effort, such that people could use Soylent to replace all other foods—to "never worry about food again," as Soylent's tagline puts it. This paper places the "optimization of the body" in a post-Fordist context. By inviting users to view themselves in terms of time and money, Soylent provides a site through which to study the intersection of food, bodies, and labor in the neoliberal US. Though optimizing the body for productivity is nothing new, I follow the shifting forms of discipline out of the Taylorist factory and into what I term a kind of "Taylorization of the self," or a "scientific self-management." The notion of body-as-machine reflected in Soylent configures the worker not as an alienated "cog in the machine," but as an alterable bundle of "code" that can be flexibly rewritten, much like a computer. In this way, Soylent also reconceptualizes agency in a way that corresponds with a neoliberal imaginations of citizenship.

Paper short abstract:

Documentation is a central to producing food safety within late capitalist food systems. The documentation of animals destined to be food, and their relations to humans and each other, also has other effects, including making certain beings visible within institutions, and others unaccounted for.

Paper long abstract:

Documentary processes—the creation of documents, as well as their organization and circulation—are central mechanisms of institutionalization within late capitalism. Documents provide evidence of work accomplished, materials processed, and interactions that have occurred, as particular beings and objects are evidenced and tracked across borders, between sites of production and processing, within and among bureaucracies. Documentation of people—in the form of passports, visas, work permits—is an important way in which state and non-state institutions not only track who is where, but also attempt to control movements of various types, sorting people, for instance, into categories of belonging and foreignness. What does it mean, then, if some non-human animals in the EU and elsewhere, such as cows and pigs, also require passports (alongside other documentation), as they cross borders from birthplaces, to raising facilities, to slaughterhouses, and are eventually incorporated into food production? What types of beings are constituted through this sort of documentary institutionalization, which is central to modern modes of ensuring food safety? Based on ethnographic and linguistic anthropological fieldwork among northern Italian heritage food producers, this paper treats the documentary institutionalization of animals destined to be food to ask: what types of evidence are documents like passports? What kinds of beings are constituted through institutionalizing processes such as documentation? It will show how documents—or their absence—may produce states of safety or purity, as well as risk and danger, making certain beings and objects visible and recognizable within institutions, and others invisible and unaccounted for.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation explores the moral discourses that underlie representations of “Appelation of Controlled Origin” labels for Corsican charcuterie (cured meat), arguing that they display a semiotic competition between iconic, indexical and social/relational models of meaning and value.

Paper long abstract:

Corsican charcuterie (cured pork meats) is one of several culturally emblematic products in high demand by tourists and Corsicans alike. In 2012, after 10 years of efforts on the part of producers, several categories of charcuterie acquired the designation "Appelation d'Origine Controlée" [Controlled Designation of Origin] by the French Ministry of Agriculture. From that point on, the labels "lonzu," "coppa" and "prisuttu" could only be applied to products meeting strict criteria regarding the animals' breed (labeled in Corsican as "porcu nustrale" or 'our pig'), where they can be bred, what they can be fed (acorns and chestnuts only in the last 45 days before slaughter) as well as how the meat is cut and cured.

The AOC has since come to frame a moral discourse in which relative value and virtue are constructed around familiar criteria of authenticity related to place, pedigree, person and process.

At the same time, these discourses have opened up another field which is inherently moral: how quality can be discerned and guaranteed and in particular, what the role of texts—labels, appelations—plays. This presentation examines promotional texts and TV documentaries about Corsican charcuterie and official labels, arguing that they display a semiotic competition between iconic, indexical and social/relational models of meaning and value. Language is involved with food as both a discursive medium for the creation of cultural value and as part of a larger semiotic-ideological complex.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on ongoing changes in Denmark with regard to the meaning of pork. From a linguistic perspective it discusses sign values of pork, and how mediatized discourses’ constrain its meaning potential. Pork is changing from basic foodstuff to an index of Danishness /national affiliation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses ongoing changes in Denmark with regard to the meaning of pork, a food item with a key role in the traditional kitchen (Boyhuus 1998). The aim is to demonstrate how food items have sign value, how sign values are contextually embedded, but also how mediatized discourses may influence their meaning potential.

The historical significance of pork is reflected by pork featuring in most traditional (meat) dishes and meals eaten at religious holidays. Recently a pork-based dish was elected the National Dish. In addition, pork has become part of larger political struggles concerning immigration. Through erasure (Gal & Irvine 1995) all immigrants are understood as Muslims, and as Muslims uphold a taboo against pork, this creates the possibility of recursively reproducing (Gal & Irvine 1995) other cultural differences in terms of eating practices.

The meaning of pork is thereby changing from basic foodstuff to a Danish core value. Pork becomes emblematic of Danish-ness and national belonging, and pork becomes a moral issue which index one's Danish affiliation and alignment.

With a linguistic approach, the paper compares media discourse with data from three different ethnographic settings: a high-end restaurant where pork is tradition and authenticity (Karrebæk & Maegaard forthcoming), a classroom where the differences between Muslim and non-Muslim children's understanding are left unexplained (Karrebæk 2012), and a modern fast-food restaurant where newer discourses of pork as Danishness are exploited.

Paper short abstract:

This paper is concerned with the discursive production of class status and, specifically, the management of distinction/privilege in contemporary, “high-end” dining practices: the mediatization, marketing, preparation, staging, and eating of – and talking about – food at restaurants in Brooklyn, NY.

Paper long abstract:

Grounded in Bourdieu's (1984) classic perspective on the cultural production of taste, this paper orients to recent work on scale-making and second-order indexicality (Silverstein, 2016), language materiality and political economy (Shankar & Cavanaugh, 2012), and elite discourse and the social semiotics of luxury (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2012). Against this backdrop, I am concerned with the discursive production of class status and, specifically, the management of distinction/privilege in contemporary, "high-end" dining practices: the mediatization, marketing, preparation, staging, and eating of - and talking about - food. My paper presents a multimodal discourse analysis of four restaurants in Brooklyn, New York, drawing on interviews with owners/chefs, marketing materials, newspaper reviews and my own fieldwork observations. These four restaurants typify a current fashion for "up-market low-brow" eating, which is itself indicative of the way the borough as a whole is styled or branded. Documenting a range of semiotic tactics (e.g. words, images, sounds, spaces, corporeal actions), my analysis examines the key inter-dependent frames by which these particular dining experiences are organized and understood. Across the aforementioned genres, modalities and venues, a series of rhetorical strategies become apparent: historicity, simplicity, entrepreneurial spirit, and low-brow appreciation. In this way we see how the material-symbolic economy of these Brooklyn restaurants hinges on the careful management and (dis)avowal of distinction/ privilege in the discursive production of what I call elite authenticity (c.f. Cavanaugh & Shankar, 2014); all of which encapsulates and expresses the post-class ideologies (Thurlow, 2016) and omnivorous consumption (Khan, 2014) at the heart of contemporary class formations.

Paper short abstract:

Using data gathered on communal meals held during summer village feasts in the Quercy (France), I discuss community building and agonism. I pay special attention to the semiotics of the food served at these meals and to the metagastronomic discourses complementing the meaning of these meals

Paper long abstract:

In the area of South West France known as Quercy, summer is epitomized by a succession of feasts in many of the villages: they last about 3 days and always culminate in a communal meal on the Monday night. Social actors and commentators claim that these feasts and the communal meals are festive affairs. Indeed they are, but underlying tensions within villages are particularly obvious during the preparation and consumption of the communal meals where features associated with community building coexist with mild rivalries and agonism. Keeping this in mind, and using data gathered over the last 30 years in the Quercy, I am discussing the central role played by these communal meals in community building, but also in the reinforcement of agonism between villagers and villages. I am paying special attention to the semiotics of the food eaten during these meals, sustained as it is by metagastronomic discourses that complement the meaning of these meals.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes how offers of food and drinks are performed in Toraja. By bringing within a single analytic field the exchange of words and things, it argues that the expression and concealment of desires within host-guest interactions is key to the reproduction of the local political economy.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyzes how offers of food and drinks are conversationally managed within Toraja domestic spaces. I draw on my participation in the everyday life of a Toraja household and I argue that in order to understand the interplay of intimacy and hierarchy that characterizes human sociality in this rural area of Indonesia we need to analyze commensality practices and everyday visiting. Throughout one year of continuous fieldwork, I gradually transitioned from being a guest of my hosts to being the host of my hosts' guests. Through this process, I became aware of how specific ways of exchanging words and things within host-guest interactions encoded fundamental social and moral principles. I describe how, in Toraja, relations of social subordination and reciprocity were mediated through stylized speech acts characterized by a prevalence of short commands and abrupt directives, or even by the silent giving of "food things". I argue that these instances of "hard speech" or "almost no speech" stemmed from a social concern for the explicit expression and recognition of preferences, needs, and desires. These patterns for the linguistic and semiotic encoding of volition played a key role within the local gastro-politics (Appadurai 1981). The practice of compensating the extraction of unremunerated labor through "generous free" meals has been long described as deeply ingrained in the "subsistence ethics" of Southeast Asian agrarian societies (Scott 1976). My analysis suggests that this large-scale "moral economy" depends on careful conversational negotiations aimed at mitigating the expression of mutual dependence and individual desires.

Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates how talk about and around food in Dominica contributes to cultural continuity and change in the sociocultural meanings of creole cuisine, modernity, and national identity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates how talk about and around food in Dominica contributes to cultural continuity and change in the sociocultural meanings of creole cuisine (Ochs and Shohet 2006). In Dominica, a distinction between local and non-local pervades discourses about food in the home, community, and nation. Types of foods and methods of food production and preparation index rural/urban differences, socioeconomic class, social identity, and ideas about tradition and modernity. Many foods that are grown and prepared in rural communities are considered local or "traditional." Things "brought in" from town or abroad are considered foreign and expensive, but also "modern" and desirable. In rural villages, packaged foods have become associated with higher status and wealth, while foods like root crops are increasingly considered old-fashioned and signifying lower socioeconomic means. Meanwhile, local "creole" food has become part of national efforts at cultural revitalization as well as the development of a tourism industry. This paper examines how child language socialization practices in rural settings devalue local foodways and cultivate the desire for commercially available goods, while cultural revitalization and ecotourism discourses prize and promote them as representing a uniquely Dominican culture and identity. Further, it analyzes a recent debate over which "national dish" truly represents this postcolonial nation, as its previous dish was based on a now endangered frog. The paper gives insights into how language and food are intertwined and related to identity, nationalism, and cultural and linguistic change over time.