Food promotion, consumption, and controversy
Autor
Elliott, Charlene
Institución
Resumen
To begin a book on food with Brillat-Savarin’s most famous aphorism has
become a cliché. As the American journalist Bill Buford observes, the idea
that you are what you eat has been “repeated so relentlessly that it is now
a modern advertising banality” (2009, viii). Certainly, Brillat-Savarin offers
other pithy insights to choose from in his Physiologie du goût, including
such claims as “the destiny of nations depends on how they nourish themselves” and “the discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness
than the discovery of a star” (Brillat-Savarin [1825] 1884, 15, 16). Yet despite
aphorisms that tackle such grand themes as national destiny and human
happiness, it is his comment on food and identity that steals the limelight:
“Tell me what thou eatest, and I will tell thee what thou art.”
As a communication scholar, I am interested less in the identity than
in the telling, less intrigued by the you are what you eat than by the communication through and about food. Brillat-Savarin’s “tell me what thou
eatest” captures the representation, expression, and language of food; his
“I will tell thee what thou art” captures the evaluative component of this
representation. The phrase as a whole suggests a dialogue, an interactive
exchange around food that—while bound up with normative judgments—
is less final than it sounds. It is difficult to imagine that being told “what
thou art” would put an end to the conversation. One would imagine,
instead, that this would be a starting point for debate.