In this two-part interview, Rose Facchini interviews Benjamin Wurgaft and Merry (Corky) White, authors of Ways of Eating: Exploring Food Through History and Culture (University of California Press, 2023).

Ben Wurgaft is a writer and historian. His books include Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food (University of California Press, 2020), Thinking in Public: Strauss, Levinas, Arendt (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) and, with Merry White, the recent Ways of Eating. Merry (“Corky”) White is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Boston University, with specialties in Japanese studies and food. A caterer prior to entering graduate school, she has written two cookbooks, one of which was recently reissued by Princeton University Press. Among other books and articles, she is the author of Coffee Life in Japan (University of California Press, 2012) and Perfectly Japanese: Making Families in an Era of Upheaval (University of California Press, 2002). For her work on Japanese society and culture, she received the Japanese Imperial Honor, The Order of the Rising Sun, in 2013.

This is Part 2. Read Part 1 here.

Rose Facchini: If I could shift gears slightly and just say that the colloquial tone of the vignettes in particular really help with the relatability of this text. In particular, what I found fascinating was when you evoked phantom senses for the reader, such as the taste of takoyaki or tellicherry peppercorns, or even the dung underneath toenails—a particularly strong one, right? How did you decide which sensory experiences to highlight in each of these vignettes, and how did you ensure that these details would resonate with the readers rather than push them away?

Merry White: That’s a really good question because it emphasizes what anthropologists do all the time. The anthropology of the senses is front and center as is the voice of the anthropologist. Of course, in the earlier anthropology of the 20th century, you never used the word I, you never put yourself in the picture, that was absolutely anathema. It would have been like putting a recipe in there. It would denigrate, it would reduce the quality of the work. But in the early ‘90s, anthropologists whose tool is participant observation stopped just using observation and used participation in a stronger more personal way, and that didn’t frighten people away.

Benjamin Wurgaft: If I can add something, I think that in terms of the history of cultural anthropology, this had an enormous amount to do with what we call the writing culture moment in the late ‘80s. This entailed the publication of writing culture and the work of certain leaders within the society for cultural anthropology who did a lot for promoting the role of the personal experience of the ethnographer in the writing of the story. So, the degree to which anthropology was accepted would not be some kind of faux scientific objective practice in which the ethnographers were somehow erased, but rather the actual experience of the practitioner.

MW: And the use of what we call the ethnographic present tense, which means the immediacy of that experience.

BW: But I think that there’s a kind of happy coincidence, which is that the reintegration of the voice of the food writer and the reintegration of the experience of the ethnographer kind of looks similar on the page.

MW: They do. Historians have perhaps more of a conservative traditional burden which would also suggest a reason why recipe inclusion was tricky for Ben.

BW: It absolutely was tricky for Ben! But I think that there’s a lot to say about this. I’m also my mother’s child, and I do get a lot of my interest in food from growing up in my mother’s fieldwork and her kitchen, but I also have different kinds of intellectual priorities and we’re different kinds of thinkers. I don’t think that my intellectual priorities are somehow better, they’re just fine, but they’re different. There’s something that I really wanted to talk about for this interview in particular, because the Journal of the History of Ideas is the oldest intellectual history journal still running in the English language and modern European intellectual history is the field in which I hold a doctorate and I consider my work in food to be separate from that work in many respects but I wanted to say that there are some strong senses in which I think that intellectual historians and food historians and Food Studies scholars more generally can have remarkably different interests. There are ways in which I have over the years thought that these are just completely separate fields and that in some ways food doesn’t have an intellectual history in the way that say biology has an intellectual history and philosophical phenomenology has an intellectual history. And then there is some consensus in which I’ve recently come to realize that I was wrong, and I’d love to talk about that for just a moment.

RF: Please do!

BW: If we think, for example… Mom, just for the sake of the conversation, would you mind naming a few things that you think Food Studies scholars care about? Like topics that they tend to think about.

MW: It depends both on the era in which they’re writing and on the purpose. Sid Mintz is kind of the Dean of Food Studies and of course political and economic issues seem to have more clout for obvious reasons. Questions change with the fashion, and questions to ask are changing. One of them we’ve already kind of dealt with is sort of ethnic issues or ethnic identities, the questions of oppression or exploitation or appropriation. These are fashions.

BW: I think that’s entirely right.

MW: But I think the people who I get a lot out of reading wouldn’t so much be on those platforms.

BW: For sure, I mean there’s certainly a diversity of interest, but I do think that you’re correct in asserting that for many people who write about food in contemporary academic circles, one of the fundamental horizons of interest is the politics of contemporary food practice. So, people writing about immigrant labor in the fields, about soup kitchens, about nutrition, they’re often very interested in issues of contemporary practice, not exclusively political, but often very practical. Sometimes historians of food, by contrast, are very interested in the origins of things. They’re interested in commodity studies—how a food gets from A to B.

MW: Globalization.

BW: Yeah. As a food historian, I think that’s incredibly important, but the things that interest intellectual historians, which are often issues of interpretation and hermeneutics, issues of what makes an idea imaginable for a given group of scholars in a given moment, or what makes a given transformation in the arts or ideas possible for a given generation of people, tend to be very different kinds of questions than the ones that interest food historians or food anthropologists.

MW: Or as in Rose’s case, people interested in food and literature. That’s a very big topic in Japan, actually.

BW: Just to try to wrap up this sort of chip I’ve had on my shoulder about this issue, which is that intellectual historians, especially European intellectual historians, often want to write books about ideas of great scope and seeming explanatory power—say the idea of totality and Marxism or a debate between a Kantian and an existentialist that seems to get wrapped up in the issue of liberalism versus fascism, or in contemporary European intellectual history, that they seem to want to write exclusively about ideas that have direct political payoffs and direct political implications in the contemporary marketplace of ideas. I think that’s been a huge problem in many respects, but it’s very, very different obviously from the kinds of things that motivate people who publish in Food Studies journals like Gastronomica or Food, Culture & Society. For many years, I thought that simply these were different magisteria, these were worlds that didn’t really connect, and that I happened to be very interested in the history of ideas on the one hand and food on the other and that these were separate interests.

I’ve recently been writing a review of a new book about the history of Dietetics, of Dietetic thinking, going back to Galenic medicine and the idea of the humors and the spirits of the body and one of the things that this book is showing me is that there are in fact subtopics in which intellectual history, the history of ideas, and food history come together quite strikingly. They tend to have to do with food as part of a larger system of thought in which human health is closely linked to our nutrition, our dietary practices, the way we use our bodies in the course of our lives. I love being shown that I’m wrong or potentially wrong, even though I continue to think that intellectual historians and historians of food often have very different attunements. There are in fact ways in which these fields overlap.

MW: May I just jump in with a very simplistic way of talking about this problem? It seems to me that there are ways in which food is either the sort of prime focus of a work or used as a case for explaining something either in a more global or more inclusive way. I have one example I want to use, which is an anthropologist from my department named Joanna Davidson. She writes about rice in Africa. What she’s doing, though, is giving thick description, deep context, for the identity that rice has in her communities in Guinea-Bissau or wherever she’s looking at it. It’s not necessarily reducing food to just a case example of a phenomenon, but it’s close to that. It’s quite different. I think there are reasons for both, and the anthropologist on the ground is not just seeing the fields of rice but is talking to the women who are pounding it or the people who are eating it and the head man who is extracting rice from his followers. There’s a big picture there. It does make rice the prime topic, but it also allows rice to explain a whole bunch of other things at the same time.

BW: Oh, absolutely. There are different intellectual tools for addressing different questions and there are different practices of research and writing that tend to yield different questions and the study of food allows us to engage in multiple kinds of questioning and inquiry at the same time. So often, what we’re trying to do is to figure out what is the right method for the right topic. We’re trying to match tools and methods to the subjects for which they’re most appropriate.

RF: Is this something that you’d like to explore some more in a future project?

BW: I would say that when it comes to writing about food, my primary interest is in using a charismatic and delicious and appealing, appetitive subject to get people thinking in new ways. And by people, I don’t mean scholarly readers primarily, but in fact general readers first and foremost. That’s an artifact primarily of my career arc and where I stand relative to those few intellectual historians who remain within academic institutions. By and large, I’m not writing for them. I’m writing for interested educated general readers and to some extent for other scholars who I’m still in conversation with. Even when I write intellectual history, I don’t write it primarily for intellectual historians.

RF: I know some of your writing, and I think it holds true to having this kind of accessibility to a wider audience than just an academic one, and I think this book in particular, Ways of Eating, does that. Do you think that the book challenges the reader’s perception of their own eating habits or relationship with food?

MW: I think it could lead to people doing more experimentation with food, but even better, understanding their own experiences of food and going a little deeper about a meal they’re making, eating, or being served. This allows for contemplation and takes food out of an automatic routine experience.

BW: Rose, an answer to that question: I would say that my fantasy is that readers of our book will eventually stain the pages of their copies of Adorno and Hans Blumenberg with chili. My fantasy is that people will come to see their lives with food and their other forms of intellectual life as running into one another and that people will understand cooking as a way of thinking and as a practice of thinking and that our lives with food as not somehow in a separate compartment from their life with history or their life with philosophy or their life with the theory of cultural anthropology. I’d like people to understand that the kinds of bodily practices that we write about in our chapter on knives and other instruments of cooking and eating, that these are all part of the same larger project of inhabiting the world.

MW: I think at one point I was sort of saying the title should be Ways of Thinking about Food or Ways of Thinking about Eating. We derived the title from Ways of Seeing by John Berger. Seeing, which is kind of an ordinary experience for those who are lucky enough to be able to see, he drew attention to that as a practice of consciousness.

BW: A practice of consciousness shaped by the material circumstances of life. So, if Berger shows that this seemingly apolitical and innocent-of-social-forces practice in European history, European portraiture, turns out to be shot through with issues of patronage of class conflict, of the question of who has money and who doesn’t in a particular time, we think that Ways of Eating applies a similar kind of lens to our experiences of cooking and eating. That is to say that our consciousness is inflamed by these material practices, by our hunger. There’s that wonderful Yiddish expression that “the full cannot understand the hungry.” In a way, consciousness is very much shaped by the question of what you had for breakfast.

MW: And the society that surrounds you, down to the grandmother whose food you think you remember. Another Yiddish expression comes in there, which is “ess, ess, mein Kind,” “Eat, my child.”

RF: This could have a lot to do with individual memory and collective memory, which could be explored even further.

BW: Absolutely, and it helps us, ouroboros-like, go back to the beginning of our conversation and the question of how traditions take shape and how long a tradition has to last before it seems permanent.

MW: Yeah, when does a custom become a tradition and get sort of hardwired.

BW: In Japan, there are these local foods, often agricultural products, that are often sort of there for travelers to purchase and bring back as omiyage, souvenirs, from their travels, but often—and mom this is something that you’ve looked into—they’re not actually that agriculturally deeply rooted and have often been cultivated and revived.

MW: For the purpose of tourism. They’re called meibutsu, which means “special local product.” In fact, in Kyoto, in the last twenty years maybe, this idea of the Kyoto vegetable, which would be an eggplant or a tomato or a cucumber or whatever, but that it’s been bred especially since time immemorial or since the Columbian Exchange anyway, to be a local thing of great merit. In fact, talking to farmers in the Kyoto area who are growing these from seed that was given to them by the Chamber of Commerce some decades ago to be called Kyoyasai or Kyoto vegetables, they’re saying, “We never ate this stuff, our grandmother didn’t have this. What are we doing?” But they got great money for making and selling something created as a local specialty.

RF: That says something about the external perception of what a culture is or what a national identity is through food.

MW: You can invent it, you can create it.

RF: And it may be forgotten within a generation or two, as well.

MW: Absolutely.

BW: In addition to the trends of tourism, there are also these kinds of interesting official categories that sometimes appear, like the idea of an artisan being a national treasure in Japan. Or the idea of UNESCO World Heritage sites, like the Fushimi Inari in Kyoto, the very famous Shinto shrine with its many vermillion gates, is a UNESCO World Heritage site. And that’s political; it had to become one through various forms of lobbying.

MW: UNESCO was actually looking for a World Heritage cuisine in Japan, and so Japanese experts created a committee to decide what that would be because it wasn’t obvious. There is no singular Japanese cuisine, like Italy.

RF: I was just going to say, pizza napoletana springs immediately to mind.

MW: Absolutely! Oh, I have to tell you about the experience of the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana.

RF: Oh, please do, I would love to hear that!

MW: It’s such a story in Japan. So, as you know, these people go throughout the world to certify the true, the vera, pizza napoletana, so they come to Japan where the pizza proliferates, and the expertise is perfect. Tokyo has more certifications from that association than any other city in the world, over thirty certifications. Ben has eaten the pizza, one of them several times.

BW: Three of them! I did a whole “Neapolitan pizza in Tokyo” tour.

MW: And these are Japanese pizza makers, in terms of ethnic and racial background. I think food knowledge is so complicated and it is very political. When they were trying to create for UNESCO a World Heritage cuisine that would be Japanese, this committee finally decided well it has to be the epitome, the highest level cuisine of Japan, which would be, they thought, kaiseki, which is the meal before the tea ceremony. Kaiseki has globalized and become something quite different outside Japan and sometimes confused with chef’s choice, which is omakase, and so they created this thing, which could not represent all of Japan. It’s Kyoto. Kyoto has a lot of cultural clout being the city of spirit and art. But it was kind of a joke in Japan; well, we want the certification, we’ll create the cuisine for it. I’m writing about kaiseki right now for a journal and it’s so many different things, and of course it’s all about seasonal and local anyway and fresh and it is about the notion of the chef, some creativity, so it isn’t one thing. But they had to make it one thing, which a tourist can go and eat in Kyoto—it’s sort of like going to the North End and eating the authentic Italian meal—you can go in Kyoto to tourist restaurants where they will have the singular, completely invented kaiseki meal. It does create its market.

BW: It’s interestingly different from other forms of set cuisine like the shōjin ryōri cooking at temple restaurants where they are giving you a version of a Buddhist meal that priests would eat at certain times of the year and it’s a kind of similar but different practice, but it is also a common point of tourist interest.

RF: Is there a lack of contextualization? Where it’s just the meal prepared for patrons?

BW: Oh, absolutely. Very often, you will find that kind of decontextualization even within Japan at different restaurants, but that’s not so different from decontextualizations of cuisine that we might see in the US in which you’re given the idea that you’re eating an elevated version of cucina povera, but you’re doing it in a nice rustic setting.

MW: With a white tablecloth.

RF: I was thinking of my own family who came from Italy right after the war. They saw the evolution of Italian food become one served in a very fancy restaurant, with white tablecloths, serving cucina povera that they were required to eat at a certain point.

MW: Why are you paying those prices? For pasta fagioli.

RF: Thirty dollars for cacio e pepe.

MW: Yeah, exactly. Actually, I think cacio e pepe is very difficult. It’s very simple, it has minimal ingredients, but getting it right…

RF: The technique may be more important than the ingredients themselves.

BW: That’s right. This is true of so many foods. Ideas about elevation and sophistication are often very separate from the actual issue of the skill needed to do it right. Certain ideas about sophistication of practice and skill may be coming to us from the heritage of French cuisine, which rests on a bunch of finicky sauces, or the way we fetishize Japanese cooking, which seems to rest on a set of highly ritualized knife cuts (but actually doesn’t). This creates some confusion because there are dishes like cacio e pepe, which aren’t seen as fancy, but are actually quite difficult to do.

RF: That begs the question: In what way do we elevate food? Is it based upon the sophistication, as you say, of the skill of the chef who’s making it or is it the sophistication of the ingredients themselves (are they hard to find, for example), or is it the ritual behind it? Or none of those things, is the setting instead? It could be completely horrible food that you’re eating at a restaurant, but the restaurant itself, being in a particular area, alone elevates the food.

BW: I’ve learned so much about Italian food from listening to Evan Kleiman. Evan is the host of Good Food, a KCRW program out of Los Angeles, and Evan ran Italian restaurants in her career as a chef and a restauranteur. She has commented on the ways in which some of the sophistication of Italian cooking can get lost in stories about Italian cuisine being ingredient-driven. Many of us love to talk about Italian cuisine being all about the freshness of the ingredients, which of course it is, it often is, and yet it’s not just about that somehow, so that a nudnik like myself could make great Italian food if he had the right tomatoes. That’s clearly not true. There are things I actually need to know how to do.

MW: In Japan, I am told that I can’t make good sushi, and it’s not because I’m a foreigner, it’s because I’m a woman. Somehow this is the essentialization of gender, too. No matter whether I have the best fish or not, cooked exactly the right way, the right amount of vinegar, all that. My hands are said to be too warm, which is completely false because I have very cold hands.

BW: About gender essentialism, it’s one of the many wounds. When I was cooking at a campus restaurant in college, I remember getting a lot of skepticism from everyone around me because I was male. The assumption that, I don’t know, maybe white men from middle class households don’t know how to cook, that was sort of the ordinary assumption at the time. The Japanese assumption about gender is very interesting because it relates to an assumption about women’s physiology, the idea that women are just thought of as having body heat that is too high for cooking.

MW: Which is completely not true, but it’s not about science. The fact is that, of course, in much of the world, pretty much all the home cooking is done by women and all the professional cooking is done by men, and that’s changing. Women hold up more than half the stove.

BW: They certainly do, and this goes back to the issue of the struggles of Food Studies. The struggles of intellectuals to think about food as something that might be includable in our work that the gendering of food is a women’s topic and the gendering of philosophy is a man’s topic may be at the root of that. Now this is a western problem. The Chinese scholar Lin Yutang commented on the fact that European intellectuals didn’t think about food, but that Chinese intellectuals did, and that the idea that one would have views on food, views on cuisine, views on the experience of eating, and that there was nothing that would be contradictory, there was nothing about that that would preclude you also being smart about the natural sciences or about philosophy is very different from the European mindset.

There is an amazing essay that I wish all intellectual historians would read by the historian of science Steven Shapin. This essay is called “The Philosopher and the Chicken.” I think this is one of the more influential essays in my own thinking about the relationship between philosophy and food. Steven has told me that the essay is a joke and I persist in not believing him and thinking that it’s incredibly important. It is essentially about the myth that serious thinkers, be they physicists or philosophers, don’t care about their bellies and aren’t hungry and don’t think about food and don’t cook, certainly and probably are too busy having serious ideas to set the table. What Shapin shows is that this is a myth that has origins, it has origins in Christian and Jewish ideas about sin, the body, about moral purpose. They have a long history in the unity of ideas, that is, of prejudices that the person of the thinker would really matter for their capacity to think well—and these are ideas that eventually become wound up in Dietetic thought—that, in fact, the kind of bodily creatures we are and the kind of mental creatures we are, are not so different from one another. This is a long-standing prejudice in European culture and it manifests itself in the myth that, say, Isaac Newton would never think about eating a chicken. Now, the essay ends with the reality of Newton’s life, which is that he actually became grossly corpulent because of all the chickens that he ate.

MW: This is kind of belied by the fact of gourmandise and the whole idea that food is an important part of life. Many European thinkers, whatever brand of thinking you want to use, espoused male thinkers who would keep journals of meals they’d eat. Of course, you’re right, though, they keep it separate from other kinds of thought things but they are very invested in food.

BW: I think that there may in fact be lots of exceptions to these myths. The point isn’t whether or not the myths are true, but that they’re promulgated. The point is that by the 20th century, this has started to break down, but nevertheless, through all of these popular stories about what a bad cook Wittgenstein was and how poor his diet was, as if that were a sign of purity of moral purpose for this very serious analytic philosopher. The notion that hard students don’t have full bellies is common even today and one of Shapin’s points in the essay was that something changes in the culture of expertise in the modern world, and that as expertise is thought to be something that is abstract and that has less to do with the character of the expert. This notion that experts don’t eat, don’t have sexual appetites, don’t have various kinds of needs breaks down to the point where by the mid-20th century nobody would assume that a scientist was automatically not going to care about what they ate.

MW: I was just thinking about that line in Julius Caesar, “Yon Cassius hath a lean and hungry look.” He doesn’t trust anybody who’s thin and wants people who are plump and well-fed around him.

RF: In another sense I think that if we view these great thinkers as eating like we do, there’s a certain kind of commonality that we don’t want to acknowledge, idealizing and idolizing them in a way.

BW: In a funny way, this goes back to Roman banquets, which we talk about in our book, were very conscious about class status, but the way in which they involve forms of eating self-consciously cut across class lines. So a given banquet might have both very simple dishes that were meant to remind everybody of the Roman peasantry and of everybody’s origins in a simple agricultural people and fancy dishes that demonstrated the reach of empire.

MW: Yeah, power.

RF: Power and humility.

MW: The whole idea of orgiastic eating is kind of false. It appears that overeating and the power of food to demonstrate your power is one thing and the so-called orgy is quite another thing. The eating was one thing but the ritual dancing, the orgiastic dancing, and other things connected with that possibly sexual activity, was quite separate. So Roman orgies weren’t part of a banquet, apparently, they were quite separate.

RF: Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your thoughts with me today. It’s been a pleasure, and I look forward to seeing more of your work in the future!

MW: If you’re coming through Cambridge or Boston, let us know. We could eat!

RF: We could actually practice what we preach!

BW: This has been really, really fun and I think a great opportunity for us to rethink a few things from the book.

***

Ben Wurgaft is currently working on a review of Steven Shapin’s forthcoming book Eating and Being, which he says is “really is a history of ideas about food and health, and which challenges my own assumptions about [intellectual history] and [food studies] being non-overlapping magisteria.”

Rose Facchini is a Lecturer in Italian at Tufts University and the Editor and Italian Translator Editor for the International Poetry Review. She explores the intersection between Italian Studies and Environmental Humanities with a focus on climate change and foodways, particularly through the lens of speculative fiction. Her translations have appeared in several journals, most notably Asymptote and West Branch, and her non-fiction work appears in Military Medicine.

Edited by Rajosmita Roy

Featured image: Cover of Ways of Eating, by Benjamin A. Wurgaft and Merry I. White, University of California Press, 2023. Cover design by Kevin Barrett Kane.