The Meaning of Food

How do food critics eat? Jonathan Gold eats with an awareness that the food in front of him is a text (or at least, has elements of symbolic value), and bears relations in form and history to a series of other food-texts. Consider this passage from his review of Noodle House:

If it is before noon, you will probably get soy milk, a bowl of warm, ghostly liquid dosed with probably more sugar than is good for it. Thin as supermarket 2 percent, with a chalky, beany flavor that half of Chinese cuisine may be devoted to masking, soy milk anchors a rich northern-Chinese breakfast as milky tea does an English fry-up

With this pair of sentences on something as ostensibly simple as a bowl of soy milk (although, of course, if anybody has made soy milk from scratch they will know that it is far from simple), Gold relies on the reader's familiarity with a range of cultural products, and situates the bowl of soymilk in relation to them. They are quite revealing in his (and thus our presumed) attitudes and relations to food and the culture around food.

Here then, is what I got from these sentences:

Food exists in tension with our desires

First, "more sugar than is good for it," grants the bowl of soy milk a will of its own. It is an implicit acknowledgment that food creates its own value systems, and, like text, bends only so much to our will, molecular gastronomy notwithstanding. There is only so much sugar you can add to soy milk before it becomes no longer "good for it." Note, not good for us, but good for the soy milk. Of course, one could argue that such language serves only as a metaphorical stand-in for "not good for us to eat," but it bears noting that the attribution of a value-for-itself is quite common not only in food criticism, but also in cookbooks and other guides to food. Milk will "spoil," and dough "needs" to rest. It is the delicacy of a fruit that may be "overwhelmed" by too much vanilla, and not our own robust senses (which, in many contexts, can deal with quite a large amount of vanilla indeed).

Food analogies are culturally dependent and may be invisible

Then, the metonymic "supermarket 2 percent," a phrase that would be essentially meaningless to many around the world. Supermarket what? 2 percent of what? The nouns missing, of course, are "milk," and "fat." Even as it is highly culturally and temporally situated, the comparison, if you should live in a country and era where it works, seems completely natural. Yet, to many others, even if explained, it might not seem appropriate at all. I know that growing up in Singapore, I considered soy milk to be a completely different drink from milk, and not at all interchangeable, either in application or in my imagination. Might as well compare soup to apple juice.

Indeed, the further comparison of the soy milk to a cup of milky English tea (an ingredient which, historically, of course, traces its roots to China) seems natural to one audience while being quite wrong to another. The categories of "food" and "drink" are distinct and comprehensible in both contemporary American and Chinese cuisines, but what falls into each category can be quite different. By comparing the soymilk to a cup of tea, Gold implicitly places soymilk in the "drink" category.

Yet, even in his own description of the soy milk, there are factors that weigh against this assessment. For example, it is served in a bowl, something that rarely, if ever, happens for drinks in American culture. Second, it has a "chalky, beany flavor" quality, again, not attributes that drinks usually have.

In my experience, soy milk is constructed as a "food" in Chinese diaspora breakfasts, and not a "drink," and thus does not "anchor" the meal in the way a distinctive drink can, but is rather an element of breakfast, more akin to the bowl of granola or the fruit salad in an American breakfast than the cup of tea in an English fry-up. Admittedly, the inclusion of a bowl of soy milk in a meal does mark it as "breakfast"-like (or, in fact, supper-like) in a way similar to the inclusion of a cup of milky tea. But of course, a similar role could be served by any number of foods, including the fried cruller, certain rice porridges, and soft boiled eggs.

Food is fully appreciated within a "cuisine," but the scope of that cuisine, and the relationship of the particular item of food to that cuisine, depends on the point of view of the diner

Then, "half of Chinese cuisine may be devoted to masking" a "chalky, beany flavor," is somewhat mysterious as well. It requires a working knowledge of Chinese food to understand what Gold is referring to. Tofu, I believe is the answer to this riddle. Gold refers to the many Chinese dishes that include tofu as a major element, and the various sauces that may serve to "mask" soybean products' characteristic taste.

And yet, there are a number of regional Chinese cookings each of which is quite distinctive and has claim to being a "cuisine" apart from the others. I don't mean to suggest that diversity within a group invalidates the coherence of that group - of course there can be "nesting" cuisines. Thus, there may be aspects that these regional cookings have in common that make a "Chinese" cuisine discernible. Gold's choice to speak of "Chinese" cuisine here, while earlier speaking of a "northern Chinese" breakfast may be especially apt when it comes to soybeans, whose products occur in all the regional cookings that I'm aware of.

The choice of "mask," however, suggests a certain attitude about soybeans that may be more in line with American cuisine than any Chinese cuisine. It is true that Chinese cuisine values the soybean and its products for their texture first and flavor second. Yet, it is strange to assert that half a cuisine is devoted to "masking" a certain attribute of a food. After all, it seems that if that attribute is worth "masking" (which implies a certain unpleasantness) it would be worth masking all the time, not just half the time. Indeed, in the various Chinese saucings of tofu, the sauce never so truly dominates the dish that the chalky flavor of the bean does not come through. In fact, the coherence of those dishes depends on the flavor of the bean curd - it would be a completely different (and probably unheard of) dish if the thing being "masked" was chicken, say, or bitter melon.

The belief that a "chalky, beany" flavor is one to be "masked" relies for its coherence on a culture where beans are seen as less desirable, a substitute or filler material for meat, eaten when one cannot afford meat (or cannot afford as much as one would like). I think there may be something too of a lingering Jewish fear of "mixing." The bean, after all, tastes a little like a starch (chalky), a little like a protein (beany), and so has a strange and frightening interloper-flavor. Indeed, legumes (including beans) make possible a diet that is complete in protein without the consumption of animal products - probably a secretly terrifying possibility for a culture whose underlying economy relies so much on animal-rearing.

You eat what you are

I suppose my next question is: are food critics more aware of how they eat than those who do not write about food? We all inherit a complex system of concepts, aversions, ethics, when it comes to food. Many of us undergo a change in that system as we go through life, whether consciously chosen (becoming Vegan or vegetarian, for example), or less consciously (learning another cuisine's tastes, adapting your own cuisine to new ingredients). Does this make us more aware of the contingent nature of the meaning of food?

And what of our perception of food's resistance to infinite malleability? Is this resistance real or merely something that we attribute to food in order to justify and render invisible our contingent assessments?