To eat & drink with the enemy

Abstract

As ‘a highly condensed social fact’, food is another aspect of culture loaded with a system of meanings or signs. In this case, food is regarded as a means to advertise and display social standing, in the words of Appadurai, ‘whose [food] principal use is rhetorical and social, goods that are simply incarnated signs.’ Against this background, food production, distribution, processing and consumption offer a confluence of both clear-cut religious markers of identity (for example, fasting during Lent or Ramadan, avoiding the consumption of pork, insisting on kosher or halal standards of butchering) and non-religious cultural markers associated with certain regions or ethnic groups (such as consuming food when sitting on the ground or consumption of particular foods or drinks, such as coffee). Identifying the relative importance of how such meanings get to be generated help the cultural historian deciphers the official and popular meaning of food and how these changes through time.