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Sacred Cow, Mad Cow: A History of Food Fear

Posted on: Sunday, 12 March 2006, 03:03 CST

By Benson, Peter

Madeleine Ferrires, Sacred Cow, Mad Cow: A History of Food Fear. New York: Columbia University Press, November 2005.

In the last chapter of The History of Sexuality, Volume 7, Michel Foucault notes the constitutive role played by modern food production in the rise of biopower in the West. The days of famine, food scare, and plague were over centuries ago, so he tells us, and this relaxation enabled a new, more active form of life politics.

...an increase in productivity and resources even more rapid than the demographic growth it encouraged, allowed a measure of relief from profound threats. [... T]he development of the fields of knowledge concerned with life in general, the improvement of agricultural techniques, and the observations and measures relative to man's life and survival contributed to this relaxation: a relative control over life averted some of the imminent risks of death. [1978: 141-142]

Foucault is not exactly on point here; if modern food systems have given rise to new modes of governance, it is not simply because food is no longer a problem, and it is actually not the case that shortages always defined our past. The rise of governance around food production and consumption in the West is a much more complicated story.

Sacred Cow, Mad Cow starts us along this track. The English translation includes a special preface by the author, Madeleine Ferrires, a French historian. The book focuses on the history of food fears from medieval Europe to the rise of the great slaughterhouse system in early twentieth century America. Against the common assumption (as seen in Foucault's hunch) that "we are informed, demanding, connoisseur consumers; they were simply eaters" (3), this book emphasizes that our forbearers were just as discriminating, finicky, and fearful about foods as we are today, and for reasons that made sense to them. Today's fears about mad cow disease, bird flu, and salmonella are actually quite rational compared to the fears about food found in centuries past, where superstition and science always ran together. There were rumors about human bones being ground into flour, about serial killer chefs, and about the moral and emotional danger in not washing one's hands. Food fears, Ferrires tells us, are not new. And, since the medieval period, food fears have been met with public responses that sometimes make things worse, compound fears, and give rise to new forms of government. Among other themes, we learn about changing dimensions of city versus country cuisine, trade guild politics, industrial food production, and the emergence of sanitation systems and pollution politics. A nice addition to the literature on life politics that complicates Foucault's work, the book contributes to our understanding of the role played by food in the growth of modern public health, body politics, the professions, and urban life.

This book is among the most sophisticated and comprehensive accounts of its kind. It is a stunning critique of core assumptions of neoclassical economics and rational choice theory. It follows in the tradition of Mary Douglas in seeing social fears and conceptions of risk as much more than pragmatic responses to limited resources, rational calculations, and even basic needs. Food fears are a world of excessive, superfluous kinds of signification that make food matter in moral, emotional, and cultural ways. Eating is always much more than basic need, than slaking hunger; its phenomenology is not simply about filling one's belly but about exposure, danger, and enjoyment (Levinas). Sacred Cow does not go into this phenomenology, focusing more on the historical emergence and social function of food fears than their existential meaning. If what people eat (or do not eat) says something about who they are, then this book only goes so far in grounding eating, consumption, and anxiety in lived experience, focusing instead on the social function and impact of food fears.

I think of Sacred Cow as a kind of history of the present; it is not a standard history of what life was like in the past and there is no pretense about dissociating past and present. The book tracks emergences, shifts, and struggles more of a genealogy than a history. And its inquiries are avowed as stemming from the concerns of the present. As Ferrires writes in the new preface:

All human beings before us questioned the contents of their plates. Many of them experienced fear. We have forgotten that, as we have forgotten the threat of famine. And we are often too blinded by this amnesia to view our present food situation clearly. This amnesia is very convenient. It allows us to reinvent the past and construct a complaisant, retrospective mythology. Let us strive for lucidity, and let us look to the past for support. [xiii]

Especially apposite for today's readers is a discussion of how cattle disease in Hungary spread to ravage the livestock populations of seventeenth-century Europe. The epidemic instigated collective fears and anxieties that embodied cultural, social, and moral meaning as much as safety concerns. The development of new safety methods were embedded in the thickets of regional and national politics, emerging scientific debates, and religious explanations. In this way, Ferrires emphasizes not just the meanings of food, but what people do with them. Food prohibitions, fears, and associations of risk are not simply categories of mind that divide the world in terms of purity and danger but actual conditions that make danger and response modes of everyday living.

Above all, this book is good because it is just plain interesting. It probes deeply into the historical archive of events large and small, and its attentiveness to anecdotes and quotidian experience will be particularly appealing to anthropologists and historians alike. Among the most interesting of the numerous historical cases involves the difficulties that pastry chefs in sixteenth century France had in selling pts, meat pastries. Rumors developed where the meat was said to be either ground human flesh or cat meat. There were popular songs about cat meat pastries. Montaigne even used the rumor as an example of the powers of human imagination. Interestingly, the rumors seem to have emerged out of the very practice of making pastries. Meat pies were made of leftover meats, which were cut, ground, and mixed; the meat was filled out with spices, so that its flavor was masked. Any semblance of the original materials was lost to the composition of an adulterated filling. During the period, pastry chefs were held in deep suspicion, regularly accused of poisoning or doctoring, and rumored to be serial killers by night.

The title of this book is somewhat misleading, Sacred Cow, Mad Cow. Readers wanting to learn about today's food scares about mad cow disease will be disappointed; a literal translation of the French title would have been A History of Food Fears, and the choice of translation might play to the concerns of an American and British audience. There is only brief mention in the special preface, and the reference is much more one of analogy and historical comparison. Where she does speak to the needs of the present, Ferrires makes one broad claim: in general food fears are the result of opaque food chains and a lack of awareness about where food comes from. The shorter and more transparent the food circuit, she says, the happier the consumer.

That consumer happiness is the end of critical thinking about today's food chains is an assumption that goes unchecked in this book. Plus, we can think of historical situations in which fears and anxieties were a routine part of life even where the food circuit was very short. Think of the history of debt peonage in the post- reconstruction era United States South, where poor white and black sharecroppers subsisted on plots and gardens that were close to the tenant house that they lived in but did not own. The food on their tables was produced by their hands, near to their kitchen. They knew where it came from. And yet, each year, they were indebted to landowners who often used insecurity, illiteracy, and lack of ownership as strategies of control. See, sharecroppers were not just consumers of food; they were producers whose labor was exploited by landowners. Here, food is linked to fear not because its consumption might be harmful but because its production was embedded in a context of psychical anxiety, racial oppression, material constraint, and power.

Today's fears about food are part of a broader culture of fear. There are fears about body image and security, fears about health and longevity, fears about purity, fears about the border, about bioterrorism, and about invisible dangers. Food is one outlet for these fears. Ferrires cites the Gulf War as a situation in which food fears intensified, since it provoked many Americans and Europeans to stockpile vis--vis the threat of global food shortage. But isn't this really emblematic of a more general situation in which self-preservation, nationalism, fatalism, and the escapism of mediated experience are core ideals of consumer citizenship, the prevailing subjectivity of the day? It is not just about food fears, but about how collective responses speak to what matters to people, and a\bout how what matters to people coalesces, historically, around very particular ideals of personhood and citizenship.

If striving for lucidity and seeing the present situation clearly are at stake for us today, then it will be necessary to question the assumption about consumer happiness, to historicize consumerism as a particular form of life. If we can look to the past for guidance and be assured that our forbearers also contended with food fears, that we are not alone, then we must also admit that the fears of past centuries were not always reflective of today's desires for consumer choice, transparency, and health. In tracing the birth of the consumer back to medieval Europe, the book does not specify how today's consumer citizenship is unique, definitive in ways that earlier forms might not have been, indeed part of a different phase of capitalist production and international governance. What this book lacks, then, is what makes Foucault's histories so powerful and pragmatic for today's readers, a parallel account, alongside the description of changing modes of perception and thought, of changing forms of subjectivity and citizenship. The idea that we are all the same, that we are all consumers with discriminatory pallets, risks overwhelming the real differences across historical and cultural contexts. I wonder whether the very practice of food consumption has different meanings today than in the past; that people's relationship to food and to their table has changed. It might not just be a matter of content, the particular foods that are preferred or feared. It might be a larger question of the very form that life takes in a time and place, where consumption, more than a matrix of preferences, is a moral orientation, a mode of response, a kind of membership, and an aspect of what it means to be a person.

Peter Benson

Harvard University

Copyright Institute for Ethnographic Research Winter 2006

Source: Anthropological Quarterly

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