Musing on Meals

I found the series of essays about food to be enlightening as it relates to culture, class, and gender. In particular, the essays recalled how food has shaped my own identification with family, gender, and class. Similar to the blog from our group who is a deer hunter, I was raised in a predominantly German family in the Midwest where the men hunted deer out of necessity, if not passion. I remember that when I was a little girl, the men in my family would retire to the “front room” of my grandparent’s home in a small town in Wisconsin after a hunt so they could go over every little detail of their activity—several deer hanging in the cold garage waiting to be dressed. In my imagination, they seemed like Native American hunters around a celebratory campfire; they postured, boasted, listened, and bonded. All the while, the women of the clan were in another room (the kitchen of course) cooking, washing dishes, and gossiping about hair, nails, and the men. The family’s identity centered on the hunt and the preparation of food—the men were the providers and the women prepared the food and cleaned up afterwards. I found it enthralling.

However, as I spent more time observing, I could see that this gender division wasn’t as clear as I had originally thought. The women were equally as adept at fishing as the men (winning prizes in fishing competitions and coming home with the greater number of fish), and were equally as proficient in cultivating bountiful gardens that fed us all. Furthermore, the women were not the only ones preparing the food. The men always cleaned the fish, and I recall watching intently as my grandfather peeled mountains of potatoes that would become everything from mashed potatoes to doughnuts. In fact, it was my father who taught me to bake a pie, now one of my “claims to fame” in my circle of friends (my mother, good cook as she is, prefers to bury herself in her books while my father delighted in the process of preparing food, much like he delighted in tying flies for fishing, loading shot for deer hunting, and stringing his own bow). Perhaps the only thing that remained in the domain of the women was doing the dishes, but they seemed to like the ritual so they could be alone to bond with their extended family of women. Nostalgic as it all sounds, I see now that such memories centering on food is what has made me appreciate the love of my family through the small and common things of process and ritual that translate into a larger understanding of my art practice.

It is with this background that I found the Robin Fox essay, “Food and Eating: An Anthropological Perspective” intriguing, because in my experiences in the arts, I have seen firsthand how food is a marker for social status. When I was a struggling artist and working as a gallery assistant in my twenties (subsisting on Campbell’s tomato soup and cheap vanilla ice cream), attending an opening reception for an art exhibition meant not only the chance to interact with collectors and gallerists, but, like other artists, a chance to eat good food. Brie, salmon, caviar, and other delicacies were usually there in abundance for the wealthy to enjoy or sniff at and walk away because they had bigger dinner plans. I counted on those events, because no one wanted what was left on the table, so the trays of celery and carrots and cauliflower became soup, and the plates of leftover cheese became a gourmet version of macaroni and cheese that broke the monotony of my austerity.

Back then, I planned to write a cookbook called the Starving Artist’s Cookbook to share all the meals that one could concoct with people’s excesses. I gave up the idea when I realized how shameful it really was to wait for those leftovers during those years of serving wealthy clients all the while I had nothing but my ingenuity to keep me going during a rough time. I still struggle with wanting to take home food from the many high-end art functions I must attend for my job—not because I need it, but because I hate to see it get wasted. I now know that this display of excess and waste is a social construct. Like peacocks preening for each other, often at art openings, it is a show of status to provide an overabundance of gourmet food and then act like it doesn’t matter.

Years later, when I was living for a short time in Santa Fe at the home of my employer who was a wealthy gallery owner, I offered to bake a few apricot pies from the trees laden with fruit that were going to waste in the orchards on her property. I made fourteen pies that afternoon, a spectacle that no one living there had ever seen, but it was a common occurrence in my own extended family’s history. In fact, my boss’s husband gave tours of the kitchen to his business friends who were visiting that day—they had never seen a pie being made before, let along anyone cooking in their expansive kitchen. I no longer felt shame for my frugality and farm-family skills with food, but pride for my own special talent and a bit of pity that they were so helpless. Freezing most of those pies, I found out later that they all went to waste—no one in the house knew how to thaw them and put them in the oven to bake.
-Julie