What's Cooking? A Taste of Food Studies

In a world in which the Food Network exists, in which recipes and food writing are in every newspaper and increasing numbers of magazines, in which recipes are found in some novels (from the most serious literature to the lightest of murder mysteries), it is no surprise that academia has discovered food. Food studies is one of the newer and, to my mind, more exciting arenas of interdisciplinary studies to come our way.

I’m a sociologist who has spent the last 30 years studying and writing about motherhood, reproductive technology, and race. But I just recently went to my first food studies conference and had a blast. It was like a wonderful potluck dinner: I sampled some history, small business administration, ecology, nutrition, psychology, and fine arts and contributed some sociology. Food scholars are looking at such things as immigration patterns and how they are affected by and themselves affect patterns of food distribution and consumption, at what cookbooks tell us about the lives of women in the past, and at how we design our kitchens to reflect our values.

A classic advertising campaign told us, “Nothing says lovin’ like something from the oven,” but food says far more than just lovin’. Food is a medium through which people communicate. Food—the way we cook and present it in our homes, the way we order it in restaurants, the way we talk about it and read about it—expresses class and status, ethnicity, values, and beliefs. The vocabulary of food—what we purchase, what we do to it, and how we present the product—is one of the ways we talk to each other within the family and one of the ways we present “family” to the outside world. Annie Hauck-Lawson, a professor at CUNY’s Brooklyn College, calls this way of expressing ourselves through food choices “the food voice.”

That voice goes a long way back. For most of us, our family memories are deeply entangled with our food memories: with the memory of our mother’s voice comes the taste of her cooking. And it is mostly our mothers, mostly women, that we associate with food and cooking in the home. Within enormously varied constraints of time and budget, women managed to get dinner on the table night after night. Some did it working around the hours of full-time employment; some did it with the comparative leisure of middle-class full-time homemakers. Some did it by going from store to store seeking bargains; some could place orders with nearby supermarkets. Some of us had families that were able to sit down together, night after night, for the “family dinner hour,” and some of our families tried to fit a few moments together a few times a week around harried work schedules.

And now? Now that we can—if we have the money—just order ready-made dinners online or eat out any time we want to, what does dinner mean for us? The newspapers are telling us dinner hour matters—that sitting down together as a family is important for our children’s mental and social growth. But that doesn’t tell us where the food comes from, whether it’s something we stirred up by the ever-popular “dump and heat” method or painstakingly put together from a recipe handed down for generations. And I think that, too, matters to us—that it’s not only the eating of dinner that we do as a family that makes us family but the cooking of it as well.

Food is one of the few ways left in which people try to express themselves by making something. Cooking is pretty much the last area of production left in the home. A few of us sew clothes, do carpentry, knit, garden, paint, draw, or sculpt. But lots of people cook. We go into the kitchen, take hold of something, and make something else out of it, using just our hands and some tools. For those of us who have moved into the middle class, who are no longer struggling just to put food on the table, the choosing and cooking of that food is both a new area of leisure and a new way of claiming family space. We create a dinner, and we create ourselves and our families.

BARBARA KATZ ROTHMAN is a professor of sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center and in Baruch’s Weissman School of Arts and Sciences. Her books include The Book of Life: A Personal and Ethical Guide to Race, Normality and the Human Genome Project; The Tentative Pregnancy: How Amniocentesis Changes the Experience of Pregnancy; Recreating Motherhood; and, most recently, Weaving a Family: Untangling Race and Adoption.