Abstract
Parallel to the last 20 years’ boom in gastronomy and food media is the relatively smaller boom in the sociology of food. In a prior article, Michaela DeSoucey (2010) showed that food policy is an excellent lens for a sociological analysis of how national cultures are dealt with within a post-national world. Now in her book, DeSoucey brings the reader face to face with the producers, consumers, and opponents of foie gras, to show what ‘gastropolitics’, the intersection of food choice and social movements (p.xii), means on the ground. This mythical fattened goose’s or duck’s liver becomes the theme of political conflicts over what one should eat, and in the end, what taste one is supposed to have.
Showing the cultural dependence of personal and political involvement with foie gras in France and the USA, respectively, is what makes up the bulk of DeSoucey’s study. In France, foie gras is readily available and treated as both a cultural heritage and a showpiece of festive dinners. ‘Gavage’, the process used to force-feed geese and ducks in foie gras production, is in itself regarded as a traditional practice. In contrast, foie gras is a polarized issue in the US. The issue primarily concerns animal rights activists, foodies, high-end chefs, and, most present in the study, a small number of foie gras producers. However, while foie gras is an alien food for the majority of the US, it spurs a puzzling degree of conflict (pp.7–10). Studying these two cultures, DeSoucey shows how foie gras has become as important as a symbol for ‘frenchness’ and gastronomy, but simultaneously symbolizing the cruelty of the contemporary food system. A symbol so powerful it has provoked both legal action and violent protests.
In Chapters 1 and 2, foie gras is introduced to the reader as a sociological issue through its history and institutional treatment, concluding with a detailed account of its production process. Thereafter Chapter 3 sets out in the French countryside. The French production sites for foie gras are vividly described with detailed ethnographic scrutiny. The reader is presented with a compelling story of proud and hard-working, but also suspicious, foie gras producers and enthusiasts. What they all have in common is that foie gras for them is a symbol for France and what it means to eat (i.e. be) French. To outlaw gavage or foie gras, as is often discussed in the EU, would for these people be the same as outlawing French culture.
In Chapters 4 and 5 DeSoucey shifts her perspective from the French producers and enthusiasts to the conflicts over foie gras in US gastropolitics. In contrast to France, foie gras is dealt with as a morally tainted food in the US. It is under pressure from animal rights activists, drawing on the (in general) alien character of foie gras in the US. Chicago in particular is a place where ‘foiehibition’ has stricken policymakers, making them ban the sale of foie gras. In the book, a few enthusiastic producers, restauranteurs, and foodies who try to defend the product are portrayed, in relation to the bureaucratic processes of gastropolitics. To battle prohibition, the proponents use the ‘artisanal character’ of foie gras production in order to contrast it against, for example, factory farming (p.116). In effect, to serve and eat foie gras becomes a subversive social activity for the upper classes in fine dining establishments. The individual’s right to choose is thus put in contrast to animal rights and the taste of a small, supposedly decadent elite.
Concluding the book in parts of Chapter 5 – and especially in Chapter 6 – DeSoucey ends up rather ironically drawing both a relativist and a rational choice conclusion. The conclusions she draws are more or less entirely focused on the conflicts of taste in the US. On the one hand, she finds that the animal rights movement, whose aggressive practices and passionate antipathy against foie gras have been readily depicted, attack foie gras because it is the ‘low hanging fruit’ of meat production. Activists’ focus on a single uncomfortable act (gavage) and a single uncomfortable process (extreme liver fattening) fits easily within their broader strategy of discomforting people. [Foie gras] becomes the most despicable, abusive, and inhumane food practice conceivable. (p.165)
This quote shows how DeSoucey outlines the strategy of the animal rights movement to blacken and throw suspicion on foie gras, to gain momentum against animal production overall. The relativist conclusion originates from the recurring citing of scientific studies about foie gras from producers and other enthusiasts – as well as from the opponents. ‘Confirmation bias’ seems to become the basis for the ‘mercurial morality’ around foie gras. This morality is essentially a moralist version of personal taste, that is turned into policy. Because of the heated debates on foie gras, it has also gained symbolic power, DeSoucey argues, as a symbol of the risks of future gastropolitics – whether it be the prolonged cruelty against animals, imposing of a moral minority’s preferences on the general population, or the criminalization of ‘Frenchness’.
While the narrative and ethnography of DeSoucey’s book is truly engaging, I cannot stop wondering about its sociological contribution. Persistently, DeSoucey reminds the reader that food and taste are anything but trivial, and that we ought to think about food from a cultural sociological perspective to understand social values. This insight, while true, is also one which goes back at least to Bourdieu and Douglas, if not all the way to Simmel and Veblen. The relation of contemporary gastropolitics to religiously and traditionally justified taboos on food is one which could be granted a much more prominent place in the book’s argument. Still, in Contested Tastes: Foie Gras and the Politics of Food the reader is granted a trip down the rabbit hole to the strange world of people whose lives concern the contest over fattened goose and duck livers.