HUNGRY MEMORIES - FOOD, THE BRAIN, AND THE CONSUMING SELF

"It is the same for our past. We would exert ourselves to no result if we tried to evoke it; all the efforts of our intelligence are of no use. The past is hidden outside its realm and its range, in some material objects (in the sensation this object would give us) which we don’t suspect."
(Proust 1984: 59)

What is the role of food in pop culture? Why does it seem to crop up everywhere we look? What are the mechanisms that determine its influence on how we chose, buy, consume, and enjoy ourselves? After all, one could say, eating and drinking are mere reflections of biological necessities and functions. As a matter of fact, they are usually perceived as purely “natural” aspects of our lives. If this were actually the case, how could they ever become an arena for competing political projects, ideological approaches, and deep beliefs and principles? If food were only a matter-of-fact, mundane requirement with which all humans need to cope on a daily basis, just like breathing or sweating, how could it acquire such weight and become the expression of multi-layered and intense attachments? The answer is quite straightforward: precisely for its key role in our survival since infancy as physical beings, eating is charged with very intense and complex emotional significance.

In fact, hunger and the desire for incorporation and appropriation, together with sexual drives, are arguably at the origin of consumption in all its expressions. It is definitely the case for contemporary consumerism, which lies at the core of Western society as its propelling engine, filtered through social and economic structures and dynamics. After all, it was the desire for goods and commodities that prodded Europeans to travel, explore, and colonize (Braudel 1982; Wallerstein 1980; Welch 2005).

Nevertheless, as modern Western consumers, we are definitely more complex than a simple bundle of drives and impulses. We are far from being defenseless victims of marketing and political maneuvers. We think, we evaluate, we decide, basing our choices and actions on values and goals. Although crucial, the emotional and physical influences of hunger and ingestion on our day-by-day choices and behaviors are not sufficient to explain their impact on our perceptions and on the ways we categorize reality and deal with it. However, we cannot revert to the opposition between rationality and the soul, on the one hand, and matter, the flesh, and feelings, on the other. I will address the possibility of a different resolution of the contrast between reason and emotions, spirit and body. To do this, we have to plunge into the complex and often still mysterious processes of the human brain, in order to acquire a better understanding of how our minds work.

Food will provide us an unusual point of entry into the functions of the brain, emotions, and memories. It is enough to pause and recall our liveliest memories related to taste, smell, and sensual pleasure to realize that they do not simply mirror past events. Instead, they are vivid, profound, and emotional. Our bodies almost seem to relive these moments. We are all more or less acutely aware of this. How does that happen? As a matter of fact, as we will see, most scientists now seem to agree that sensations and emotions heavily influence not only recollection, but also rational processes. According to recent research in neuroscience –exciting but developing and open-ended, like all scientific endeavor – memories turn out to be not fixed once and for all, but rather the result of an ongoing dynamic interaction between different activities in the brain and the information we receive from the senses. That is to say, the brain re-creates memories in different ways every time they are recalled, depending on emotional and sensory stimulations. Memories are alive and a fundamental part of who we are and of how we experience our lives. Gustatory and olfactory ones are especially intense. Their power over our functionality, even if often unconscious, enhances our experiences of desire, pleasure, pain, our emotional states and motivations. Our body appears to be involved in all cognitive processes, including rational ones. We cannot disregard its relevance for our participation in consumption and pop culture. Let flavors and scents guide us in exploring our brains and bodies. And could there be a better muse than a chef who is also a scientist?

The Neurologist and the Chef

“Let me introduce myself: I have been a neurologist and a neurophysiologist for twenty years, and a chef for six.” This is the matter-of-fact statement that opens La Cocina de los Sentidos (Cooking with the Senses), the first book by Miguel Sánchez Romera, chef and owner of the renowned restaurant L’Esguard in Sant Andreu de Llavaneres on the coast of Catalonia, Spain (Sánchez Romera 2001). Now in his 50s, Sánchez Romera has worked for many years in hospitals and scientific institutions, focusing particularly on epilepsy. He was always passionate about cooking and food, but the turning point in his career was his 40th birthday dinner, when he cooked for 50 people together with his friend, the famous Catalan chef Ferran Adriá (Bolasco 2000: 117–26) The dinner turned out to be such a success that the gatherings at the Sánchez Romeras became a tradition. It was only in 1996 that the neurologist decided to open a restaurant, namely L’Esguard, receiving a good deal of attention throughout Europe and, more recently, all over the world. When Mr. Romera, together with David Bouley, presented his work at the French Culinary Institute in October 2003, he attracted daring young New York chefs such as Wylie Dufresne and Sam Mason from WD-50 and Jonnie Uzini from Jean-Georges.

In La Cocina de los Sentidos, Sánchez Romera’s diverse interests meet in the most intriguing and stimulating fashion (Parasecoli 2003a). I will concentrate on Sánchez Romera’s theories regarding the senses, the mind, and memory. Being both a successful chef and a respected scientist, he is in a privileged position to analyze the connections between cognition and recollection in the realm of food and flavors. His whole argument, which also influences his cooking style, is based on the concept that memory and mind activities, at least in the case of food, are closely connected with emotions through the senses, the body, and its most basic needs, hunger and thirst.

"The sensory being is born from the sensations that its own brain reproduces under a determined stimulus, as this stimulus provokes a chain of reactions in different parts of the brain itself that go and come through electrical impulses. Nevertheless, the spirit and the degree of ability to feel sensations depend exclusively on the individual. The only necessities that the body recognizes from the brain are, in gastronomy, hunger and thirst. The necessity is to stay alive in some way or another: all stimuli from our brain end up transformed into emotions, and these emotions are part of our lives. . . . Everything depends on sensations; then memory and remembering take us to the world of analysis, from which a state of wellbeing and happiness, as well as its contrary, can derive."
(Sánchez Romera 2001: 38–9)

When they eat and drink, individuals find themselves at the juncture between biological necessity, the world of drives and instincts, the inputs from the outside world, and the tremendous landslide of sensations, feelings, and emotions resulting from uninterrupted brain activities. In a similar way Sánchez Romera, as a chef, is at the crossroads between the material world of edible products and culinary arts, a creative experience that connects human physiology to culture. His work enhances the notion that food is at the frontier between the biological and the cultural.

No other organ in the human being embodies the complexity of this frontier better than the brain itself, where electrical and chemical signals become the texture of perception, memory, thought, creativity, and emotions. Already in the seventeenth century, the French philosopher Descartes identified the pineal gland – the small endocrine organ located in the center of the brain that is responsible for the production of melatonin – as the contact point between res extensa and res cogitans, that is to say, between body and soul, the material and the spiritual worlds (Descartes 2003:19). In Western culture, following Plato’s split of reality between the world of matter and the intelligible world of ideas, these domains have often been kept separated, even as knowledge about our mental processes and the physiology of the brain itself were making spectacular advances. Sánchez Romera, both as chef and as scientist, spearheads a different approach. The fact that he focuses on food and its appreciation – that is to say, pleasure – is particularly relevant since taste and smell are the least studied senses, whose importance and impact on mental processes and especially on memory have been almost neglected (Classen 1994; Rouby et al. 2005).

In La Cocina de los Sentidos, which is also an unconventional cookbook (it does not give precise measures for the ingredients for the recipes), Sánchez Romera delves into the most recent findings of neuroscience research about sensations, emotions, memory, and rational processes. While highlighting the connections between food and memory, he states: “Remembering is first of all a dynamic process, and not only a trunk of memories or a library of experiences lived once, which can be later evoked according to the circumstances. It is something as lively and nimble as our own self, since . . . individuals create memories in connection to many personal necessities” (Sánchez Romera 2001: 220). In Sánchez Romera’s work, food ushers in a conception of the mind that clashes with traditional conceptions of knowledge as representation. These theories consider the senses and memory as faculties that limit themselves to mirror nature, and their contents as more or less precise reflections of the external world. For the Spanish chef, recollections are rather the result of an ongoing dynamic interaction between different properties of the brain and the stimuli deriving from the senses. In this process, memory is not fixed once and for all, but, rather, a creative and vibrant faculty that allows human beings to relive the past each time in different ways.

Furthermore, memory depends heavily on the body, not only because most of the material the mind elaborates is derived from the senses, but also because the body and the emotions connected with it (pleasure, pain, fear) influence the way memories are maintained and eventually recalled. The necessary conclusion is that rational processes, heavily depending on memories, cannot be totally isolated from what is traditionally considered irrational, physical, and instinctual. Many activities, such as eating, cooking, having sex, dancing, singing, and exercising, place themselves beyond the mind vs. body split that has informed much of Western thought. In certain quarters, these activities are still not considered theoretically relevant because they intrinsically erase the separation between inquirer and inquired, the subject and its object, and because they are not concerned with truth, with the eternal and the immutable, but rather with “the transitory, the perishable, the changeable” (Heldke 1992; Onfray 1995: 223–58).

Using food and eating as points of departure, we will approach alternative theories concerning sensations, memory, and emotions, and more generally the relationship between body and mind. We will see how pop culture employs food-related images and concepts to reflect on these issues, endorsing different theories and making them popular with the general public in the form of more or less natural assumptions about how our minds function, the role of feelings and sensations, and the appreciation of our own bodies.

Computers and the Flesh 

Let us start with memory. Several science fiction narratives are based on an understanding of this function as a storage device where pieces of knowledge, actions, and even emotions are stored in neat equivalents of computer bytes, ready to be retrieved and, if necessary, mechanically substituted with electronically originated elements. Mnemonic materials are considered discrete, composed of recognizable, circumscribed, interchangeable, reproducible components that can also be disposed of. Memories can be easily transferred from a human being to a machine: they share the same physical nature and structure, which allows them to travel freely from one medium to another.

This theme plays an especially important role in sci-fi movies such as Johnny Mnemonic, The 6th Day, Strange Days, and many others. The plot of Johnny Mnemonic (1995) is built on the premise that huge amounts of data can be saved in special chips implanted in the brain of so-called “messengers,” who remain totally human even with a trifle of cyborg in them. Just plug a computer in and upload. The information that you need will be safely and unassumingly stored in the memory of a professional.

The same concept underlies the three movies in the Robocop series (1987, 1990, and 1993), where the policeman Murphy, killed in service, is transformed into an invincible semi-human android that shares the dead agent’s memories and capacities, obviously enhanced by a never-ending array of gizmos. In Robocop 3 the antagonists try to deprive Robocop of the emotional content of his memories, in order to transform him into a stupid but efficient killing-machine. A good-hearted scientist compelled to implant into Murphy’s brain a device that would serve that goal actually discovers that certain mnemonic elements are triggered by clues that apparently have no connection with the event that created the original memories. Interestingly, the scientist can view Robocop’s recollection on a monitor connected with the cyborg’s brain, implying that mental activity can be easily televised once neural signals are transformed neatly into electric impulses through a computer. The theme of the cyborg, which usually is employed to undermine the concept of a unified, Cartesian subject, here denies the complexities of the mental life of human beings.

In the 1995 visionary movie 12 Monkeys, by Terry Gilliam, the character played by Brad Pitt, the schizoid founder of an anarchic organization trying to destroy humankind by spreading a deadly virus, finds himself wondering how his ex-psychiatrist managed to discover his plot.

Six years ago I had not thought about the 12 monkeys... When I was institutionalized I was interrogated, I was X-rayed, I was examined thoroughly. They learned everything about me, and they put that into a computer where they created this model of my mind. Using that model, they managed to generate every thought I could possibly have in the next, say, ten years, which they then probably filtered through some probability matrix of some kind to determine everything I was going to do in that period. So they knew everything I was going to do even before I knew it myself.

In The 6th Day (2000) the personal memories of the main character, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, are extracted through the optic nerve, saved on disk, and then transmitted to his clone, without suffering any damage. During the movie both the main character and the clone share the same personality, the same sensibility, and the same set of memories, up to the point where they were extracted. Once again, memories appear to be easily encoded into bits and bytes, kept in some artificial device and used when necessary, without any change even if the person who uses them is not the same who produced them in the first place. A similar instrument constitutes the main theme of Strange Days (1995) by Kathryn Bigelow, starring Angela Bassett and Ralph Fiennes. At the dawn of the third millennium a machine has been created which is able to record everything a person experiences, sees, and feels, when connected with the surface of his or her head. Stored on diskettes, these memories can be replayed, allowing another individual to relive them, with all their emotional charge and the sensations connected with them. Needless to say, the memory diskettes become a very popular device with the porn industry . . .

These similarities between humans and machines appear to be so widely spread and accepted that contemporary culture often refers to computers to create metaphors for our brain. Political scientists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri affirm:

"Just as modernization did in a previous era, postmodernization of information today marks a new mode of becoming human... Today we increasingly think like computers, while communication technologies and their model of interaction are becoming more and more central to laboring activities... Interactive and cybernetic machines become a new prosthesis integrated into our bodies and minds and a lens through which to redefine our bodies and minds themselves. The anthropology of cyberspace is really a recognition of the new human condition." (Hardt and Negri 2001: 289–91)

Nevertheless, some science fiction movies seem to put forth different concepts about the nature of memories and, as a consequence, a different appreciation of the role of the body in their construction, storage, and retrieval. Intriguingly, they use eating and ingestion to make their point.

Let us start with The Matrix (1999), a motion picture that at the turn of the century became an instant cult for the wired, Internet-oriented, dot.com-employed, Nasdaq bull-riding generation. In the year 2019 or so, machines dominate the world.

To do so they exploit human beings as a source of heat and electricity (which is to say, food): living creatures are fed with the liquefied remains of the dead. To keep humans under control, the machines have created a digital virtual reality, directly transmitted to their victims’ brains, which is a perfectly functioning image of the world like it used to be before the machines took power. In reality, humans are kept in a state of suspended animation within cocoons, deprived through wires and pipes of their life force, while dreaming of a normal life. A group of men, aware of the situation, decide to live outside the illusion and to jeopardize the whole system to free humanity. Although the main tenet of the movie is the intrinsic similarity between the human brain and computers, there are two back-to-back scenes that appear to undermine these assumptions. Interestingly enough, both scenes focus on food.

The first one takes place in a restaurant located in the virtual reality projected on the human mind. One of the rebels is cutting a deal with an envoy of the machines to betray the rebel leader. All he wants in exchange is to be sucked into the matrix and to abandon the sad reality of the dehumanized world, though he is fully aware the whole move is a delusion. The two characters talk over a steak.

Rebel: I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth the matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what? [He chows on a chunk of meat, sighing with delight] Ignorance is bliss.

The other scene happens in the rebel warship, in the grim reality outside the matrix. Since the crew have to nourish themselves, they have recourse to an artificially processed aliment that “looks like snot.”

Rebel 1: Tastee wheat. Did you ever eat tastee wheat?
Rebel 2: No, but technically neither did you.
Rebel 1: That’s exactly my point. Because you have to wonder, now. How do the machines really know what tastee wheat tasted like? Maybe they got it wrong. Maybe what I think tastee wheat tastes like actually tasted like oatmeal or tuna fish, that makes you wonder about lots of things. You take chicken, for example. Maybe they could not figure out what to make chicken taste like. Which is why chicken tastes like everything.
Rebel 3: Shut up, Mouse
Rebel 4: It’s a single-celled protein, combined with synthetic aminos, vitamins, and minerals. Everything the body needs.
Rebel 2: No, it does not have everything the body needs.

The dialogues point out that machines cannot possibly know what real food tastes like, and above all that they cannot convey the actual sensations that flavor memories elicit. The Matrix algorithms are not able to give the same depth and emotional value as real food recollections to neural perceptions of taste and smell, although the system is able to re-create them, and also to activate the connection between food and sex. In the second episode of the Trilogy, The Matrix Reloaded (2003), the Merovingian, an embodiment of the computer system, is able to give an orgasm to a woman through a slice of chocolate cake. Despite the virtual world created by the machines, however, the body seems to reaffirm its own autonomous, specific memories – in particular, gustatory and olfactory ones.

The same theme emerges in The Island (2005), starring Ewan McGregor as Lincoln 6 Echo, a cloned human being. In the not-too-distant future, a biotech company finds a way to ensure longer lives to all those who can afford it, providing them with organs developed from their own tissue that can substitute aging or damaged ones. During the development of the projects the scientists realized that organs could only thrive and grow as part of bodies. As the manager of the project states: “Without consciousness, motion, human experience, without life, the organs failed.” The body/mind split sounds like a souvenir from the past. As a matter of fact, as the plot unfolds, Lincoln 6 Echo discovers he is able to ride a high-speed motorbike or to drive a boat simply because, as a clone, he was developed from the tissue of his original donor: the whole body developed from that tiny portion of tissues carries all the physical experiences of the donor. As they say, once you learn how to ride a bike, you never forget. At least in the movie, you do not forget your food preferences either. In one of the first scenes, Lincoln 6 Echo craves bacon at a breakfast counter, where a very unfriendly canteen lady tries to impose the foods that have been chosen for him by his creators in order to ensure his health. He is actually mirroring the likes and dislikes of the person from whom he has been cloned.

Canteen Lady: You have a nutrition flag.
Lincoln 6 Echo: In that case, I’ll have two eggs, over easy, not too runny; a side of sausage and a French toast maybe. And a little powder sugar.

The power of these bodily and sensual memories is so strong that the new clones need to be conditioned with new memories in order to avoid any resurgence of the past. It does not work, though. The body still remembers, if not consciously, in the form of dreams. It is actually after dreaming of driving a boat that Lincoln 6 Echo starts having doubts about his situation. Again, in a visit to the doctor, he expresses his malaise in terms of food, the only communication tool he can still master.

Tuesday night is tofu night, and I ask to myself: who decides that everyone here likes tofu in the first place? And what is tofu anyway? Why can’t I have bacon? I line up every morning and I can’t have bacon for my breakfast . . . I want answers, and I wish there were more.

Fuel for the Brain

Despite the exceptions we mentioned, which interestingly use food to get their point across, most science fiction movies, books, and comic books are particularly attuned to theories that assume a fundamental similarity in the ways computers and human brains operate. As a matter of fact, contemporary pop culture often references computers to create metaphors for our brain. Outside the realm of fiction, many scientists seem to share a similar take on mind and memory that developed into a new branch of research – cognitive psychology – during the second half of the twentieth century. As Ulrich Neisser stated in 1966, “the term cognition refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used” (Neisser 1966: 2). Cognitive psychologists are not primarily interested in analyzing the mind at the physiological and neural level, understanding its structure and function starting from the cell level up. Their goal is rather to assess the brain’s unconscious processes in functional terms. In an introductive book to cognitive science, oddly enough, kitchen recipes are used as metaphors to describe how the brain operates.

"Readers who have never written a computer program but have used cookbooks can consider another analogy. A recipe usually has two parts: a list of ingredients and a set of instructions to the ingredients, just as a running program results from applying algorithms to data structures such as numbers and lists, and just as thinking results from applying computational procedures to mental representations. The recipe analogy for thinking is weak, since ingredients are not representations and cooking instructions require someone to interpret them". (Thagard 2005: 12)

As this example demonstrates, one of the main tenets of cognitive psychology is that information functions according to patterns and rules constituting a formal logic that is totally independent from the actual medium that carries it out (LeDoux 1998: 27). As psychologist Jerry Fodor elaborated in 1983, brain operations would be based on modules, each focusing on a specific function, e.g. face recognition, speech, and numbers (Fodor 1983). These modules would constitute a sort of “architecture of the mind,” another metaphor that suggests stability, if not a static condition.

The medium within which these modules can operate can be indifferently a brain or a machine. As a matter of fact, terms that are widely used in information studies, such as “code,” “signal,” “processing,” “transformation,” “processor,” are employed in other fields connected with the human mind, such as neuroscience, semiotics, and psychology. The relevance of the research on Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be attributed to the spectacular advance of this discipline and to the fact that modern computers and robots are symbol-using entities, based on formal systems. Furthermore, AI reinforces the choice of cognitive psychologists to concentrate on the software of the mind rather than on its hardware (Flanagan 1984: 222). To a certain extent, humans and computers are different manifestations of the same phenomenon: they are thinking engines, based on systems organized like computers, which function using signals (Haugeland 1981: 31).

According to these theories, the long-lasting mind vs. brain opposition becomes irrelevant, since the mind is virtually disembodied, for all research purposes. Furthermore, the logical and rational aspects of the mind take over its emotional side since emotions are closely connected with the body and its responses to external stimuli, even if under brain control. Nonetheless, with the enormous development of neuroscience in the last 20 years, many scientists have turned their attention back to brain structures, trying to come to terms with the new discoveries about the relevance of their physical functions and dynamics (Thagard 2005: 170). Joseph LeDoux noted in his seminal work The Emotional Brain (1998) that it is not possible to separate cognition from the emotional elements of the mind. Furthermore, LeDoux argues, the hardware, the actual structure of the brain, is non-secondary in understanding the mind, especially when it comes to emotions (LeDoux 1998: 41: LeDoux 2002). It is not an easy task. As biologist Steven Rose points out, “the brain is full of paradoxes. It is simultaneously a fixed structure and a set of dynamic, partly coherent and partly independent processes” (Rose 2005: 4). At the same time, “the mind is wider than the brain” (Rose 2005: 88). That is to say, we cannot approach the brain’s hardware and its functioning in the same way we would dissect the internal wiring of a computer.

One of the most influential voices in this field is the Nobel Prize recipient Gerald Edelman. In his book A Universe of Consciousness (2000), written with Giulio Tononi, he underlines the features of the brain that point to fundamental differences with computers. Since no two brains are identical, the overall pattern of connections in a brain can be defined in general terms, but the microscopic variability of these connections in different individuals is enormous because of their developmental history and their past experiences. For instance, when it comes to food, although children of the same family might be genetically similar and are likely to be exposed to the same dishes, they all show their own likes and dislikes, different tastes, sometimes even diverging memories concerning the same events. Synaptic connections change, die, are created every day, and vary in each individual, affecting the way things and events are remembered (Edelman and Tononi 2000: 47).

Of course, computer simulations of neural networks reveal that a man-made system can develop exceptional complexity in a short time if it is programmed to develop patterns that are beneficial to the goal it is created to carry out. Nevertheless, the inputs the brain receives from the external world are not an unambiguous series of signals, as in the case of computers. The brain has developed functions aimed and filtering and organizing perceptions into categories, which are instrumental to our interaction with the world. Furthermore, our perceptions and the categories we use to give them order are not neutral, impassionate, and impartial. In fact, the brain has developed several mechanisms called “value systems,” that is to say, dynamics aimed to evaluate the relevance (also called “salience,” meaning “to stick out”) of all sensory inputs. These dynamics are regulated by organs – sometimes defined as the limbic system – located outside the cortical areas in charge of rational thinking. The evaluation of relevance is also determined by substances (e.g. neurotransmitters, hormones and even peptides, a specific kind of protein) that respond to emotional stimulation and that travel through our body through all kinds of fluids, including blood. These facts all indicate that neural impulses cannot be compared to computer information in that they travel following many alternate routes and that their flow is not linear, going from A to B, bur rather “parallel, recursive, feedforward, and feedback” (Cytowic 2003: 156).

All these elements influence the strength of synapses (i.e. the contact points between neurons) because neurons that “fire together, wire together,” using the expression modeled after Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb’s theory (Hebb 1949). In other words, repeated neural activity involving two or more neurons strengthens the connection between them, under the influence of “value systems” (LeDoux 1998: 214). These dynamics have a great impact on learning, categorizing abilities and adaptive behaviors. Because of these factors, human memory differs from a computer’s in that it is selective. Not every item is retained in the same way, or always retrieved in the same way.

As biologist Steven Rose pointedly noted, “Dynamism is all. The brain, like all features of living systems, is both being and becoming, its apparent stability a stability of process, not of fixed architecture. Today’s brain is not yesterday’s, and will not be tomorrow’s” (Rose 2005: 147).

Flavors and Memories

If memories are anchored to our sensual and physical experiences, we can easily understand how the connection between body and mind, and in particular between memory and food, with its flavors and smells, has become a center of interest for sociologists, anthropologists, and ethnographers, both as topics of research and as methodology (Geurts 2002; Howes 2003; Sutton 2001). Outside academia, too, these themes frequently appear in various forms of pop culture all over the world.

Memory seems to play a key role especially in contemporary movies that revolve around food, a theme that in the past few years has become central in all sorts of film genres, following the growth of general interest towards food and eating in Western societies. The evocative potential of moving images acquires a particular depth and power when cuisine and ingestion are used to convey feelings and emotions that would otherwise be difficult to express visually or verbally.

It is often when women are involved that food and cooking reveal their deeper connections with memory, especially with activities that involve meal preparation, nourishing, and nurturing. Needless to say, these chores are identified with a bodily dimension that has been historically considered not very intellectual, since it deals with the sheer survival of individuals, families, and communities, rather than with personal achievements and spiritual aspects of life.

When the lead characters are women, movies often shift towards genres such as biography, memoir, sentimental journey, and romantic exploration, where visual and narrative elements concur to put viewers in touch with the more emotional and mundane aspects of life: pleasures and sorrows, affections, memories, and the joys deriving from activities such as cooking.

This aspect is particularly strong in the so-called “magic realism” novels by authors like Gabriel García Márquez (particularly A Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera) and above all Jorge Amado, who has dedicated the novels Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon (Gabriela, Cravo e Canela, 1958) and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos, 1966) to smell and taste. Both novels were adapted for the big screen as amusing and touching movies, starring the sensual Brazilian actress Sonia Braga and directed by Bruno Barreto respectively in 1983 and 1976. The character of Dona Flor in particular finds in food a conduit through which she can express her sensuality and also develop her business expertise, affirming herself as an individual. She actually manages a cooking school, while her husband Vadinho, a gambler who is nevertheless capable to keep her sexually happy, spends all their money. When he dies of a heart attack during Carnival, Donha Flor marries the town pharmacist, a very decent man who lacks passion and sexual appetites. She soon finds herself desiring Vadinho so much that she begs a Candomblé priestess to bring his spirit back. Eventually Flor keeps them both, one to satisfy her sexual and bodily appetites, the other to give her respect and to make her a lady. Food plays a more crucial role in the book than in the movie, but also on film some scenes remain unforgettable. Right after the death of Vadinho, she relives their passion by thinking of one of his favorite dishes, the moqueca de siri mole, a soft-shell crab stew with coconut milk and red palm oil, and the memory of the sensations that punctuated their sexual bliss carry her back to the first night after the wedding, when his mouth tasted like onion, one of the main ingredients of the recipe. During one of her most lonely moments, she compares herself to a hot, steaming dish that no man consumes and enjoys.

Spanish actress Penélope Cruz plays a similar character in Fina Torres’s Woman on Top (2000), a movie where exotic food and sensuality are used to wow Western audiences, supposedly disconnected from these fascinating but ultimately primitive aspects of life. Isabela Oliveira (Cruz) is a very talented chef who is deeply in love with her husband Toninho. They own a restaurant in Bahia where she cooks while her husband works the front of the house, taking all the merit for the success of the establishment. When she discovers him in bed with another woman, she runs away to visit a transvestite friend in San Francisco, finding a job as a teacher in a cooking school. One day, while preparing a moqueca, the smell of the malagueta pepper brings back memories of Toninho, of how he would rub some chili peppers on her lips to arouse her. That is when she realizes she has to free herself of those memories, and also with the intervention of a Candomblé priestess she manages to set herself free. That is when her career as a chef takes off. The flavors and scents of her dishes, reminiscent of Brazil, make her famous as a TV celebrity chef, able to excite and stimulate both men and women with her cooking.

Emotions and feelings are actually incorporated into food in the novel by Laura Esquivel Like Water for Chocolate (Como Agua para Chocolate, 1989), which in 1992 became a movie by filmmaker Alfonso Arau, Esquivel’s husband at the time. Tita (actress Lumi Cavazos), brought up in the kitchen by the Indian cook Nacha, is condemned to celibacy in order to take care of her mother in her old age. Her love interest Pedro (Marco Leonardi) decides to get married to one of her sisters so that he can be close to her. During the preparations for the nuptial banquet, the tears of sorrow of Tita for her lost love end up in her sister’s wedding cake, provoking desperation and stomach upset in all those who taste it. Later on, Tita’s passionate feelings, concentrated in a bunch or roses Pedro gives her, end up in a dish of quails with rose petals, which has such a potent effect that one of her sisters has to run to an outdoor shower to calm herself. The passion unleashed by Tita’s dish is so potent that her sister ends up burning the whole wood shack where the shower is located, attracting with her scent a revolutionary soldier who takes her away naked on horseback.

In the 1999 novel by Joanne Harris, Chocolate, brought to the screen by Lasse Hallström in 2000, chocolate brings back to life a whole village suffocated by the traditionalism of the local mayor and other oppressive characters. Vianne, an independent woman traveling around with her young daughter, is a descendant of the Mayas, and she has inherited the faculty to be able to use chocolate to treat any emotional trauma. The sweet substance comes to embody all that is passion, body, and sensuality, able to transmit feelings and recollections. Chocolate, probably for its supposed effects on women, appears in many movies, novels, and also TV commercials as the favorite substance in the fight against feminine depressive states.

However, other foods also would seem to have the power to revitalize women and the men around them: in the 1985 Japanese movie Tampopo, the eponymous character, a young widow with a child, finds herself in the quest for the perfect ramen noodles. Her research for taste, texture, and technique, with the help of a cohort of unusual male friends, helps her focus on who she is and her goals as a professional, although often it seems that it is the men who know better and are more aware of what she actually needs than herself.

Not all women in the kitchen appear to be so defenseless and in need of guidance. In the 2007 Walt Disney animated and Oscar-winning blockbuster Ratatouille, the story of the rat Remy and his culinary achievements in one of the most successful restaurants in Paris, the female chef Colette shows her male coworkers that she doesn’t need anybody’s help in the kitchen. Her encounter with the sweet and disaster-prone Linguini mellows her out a bit, but she remains in charge. In a world dominated by men, Colette shows how skills and determination are necessary for a woman to succeed, despite the movie’s motto, “Everybody can cook.”

We cannot proceed without a short mention of Babette’s Feast (Babette Gaestebud, 1987) by the Danish filmmaker Gabriel Axel, based on the tale of that name in Karen Blixen’s collection Anecdotes of Destiny (1958). Babette, a French refugee in a Danish Protestant village, decides to spend all the money she won in a lottery to offer a memorable dinner to the villagers, whose faith makes them impermeable to any sort of sensual pleasure. The only dinner guest who actually is reanimated by the fantastic dishes and the spectacular wines is a general whom Babette’s flavors transport back to his youth as a soldier in France. In the dinner, Babette’s mysterious past is translated into actual sensory elements, a communication that most guests are unable to decode. She does not care: her generosity and her desire to express her gratefulness towards her hosts knows no limit.

In all the movies we mentioned, women appear to have access to a special connection with food, which allows them to translate their sensuality and their emotional world in pleasurable – and socially sanctioned – ways.

It is very interesting that when science fiction and action movies, frequently perceived as masculine or at least as favored by young men, focus on food and eating as narrative elements, they seldom refer to nurturing and caring. They project this approach also on women: more and more often science fiction comics and movies present hot babes ready to kick ass, such as Charlize Theron in Aeon Flux (2005), originally an action-packed, anime-influenced cartoon series broadcast on MTV, the above-mentioned Angela Bassett in Strange Days, or the black mutant Storm in the X-Men comics and in the movie trilogy under the same name (2000, 2003, and 2006), with Halle Berry playing the role of the weather-controlling hero. Their nurturing role is either secondary or totally absent, even in Storm, who is supposedly a teacher of younger, more insecure mutants. We could hardly imagine the tomb-raiding Lara Croft (2001), played by Angelina Jolie, as a cooking woman. In the 2007 Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Ms. Jolie plays a killer who leads a double life, playing the devoted housewife to her husband, played by Brad Pitt, who is also an undercover killer. Of course, the two are unaware of each other’s true identity. In various scenes, dinners turn into tense confrontations: knives and all kinds of kitchen elements (including the oven) become deadly weapons, to the point where one crucial fight between the spouses turns into a violent and systematic destruction of their house, starting precisely from the kitchen. Could there be a better metaphor for the instability of domesticity?

Men in the Kitchen

Food apparently threatens masculinity in action and sci-fi movies. When man are represented in nurturing roles, like Arnold Swarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop (1990) and Vin Diesel in Disney’s The Pacifier (2005), it is only for comical purposes, and at any rate their femininization is only temporary, used as a decoy or as an emergency measure. By the end of the movie, the main characters have forgotten all about stoves and dishes, and they are back to their tough, criminal-punishing selves. Food definitely does not constitute a significant part of their world.

In other genres, though, men can express themselves freely through cooking and dishes when they are chefs or cooks. The professionalization of food preparation safeguards their masculinity, allowing them to express feelings and connect with memories that otherwise would not be acceptable. We can find examples in movies from all over the world. In Roland Joffé’s Vatel (2000) Gérard Depardieu plays the role of the eponymous chef and master of ceremonies working for the Prince of Condé. While scrambling to prepare the most spectacular banquet for the king Louis XIV, on a visit to his employer at the Chantilly castle, he falls for Anne de Montausier, a fascinating dame played by Uma Thurman. Unable to convey his passion any other way, he prepares a beautiful sugar composition with flowers for the object of his longings. For political reasons, the woman cannot accept his courtship, and the chef eventually kills himself. The movie leaves it to the viewers to decide if Vatel took his life for love, or because he was distraught by the fact that his mentor had lost him to the King during a game of cards, or because the fish he was expecting for the banquet had not arrived, as the tradition relates.

Not all movie chefs are doomed to such a gloomy destiny. Through food, cooking men often find ways to express themselves and get in contact with their loved ones. The main character of Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman (Yin Shi Nan Nu, 1994) and of its American remake by María Ripoll, Tortilla Soup (2001), is a widower, estranged from his three daughters, with whom the only tie seems to be Sunday lunch. In both movies, the magnificent opening scenes picture the chefs preparing sumptuous banquets (Chinese in the Ang Lee version, Mexican in the American remake), where no virtuosity is spared and unusual and exotic techniques and ingredients are displayed. The meals, despite their goal to nurture ailing family feelings, are definitely works of art and the achievement of professionals. Once again, the chef is represented as a masculine role that struggles with its emotional overtones. Viewers soon realize that the artist has lost his sense of taste: his connection with his memory and his identity risks being lost forever. Only when he falls for his younger neighbor and starts preparing school lunches for her daughter is he able to recover his sensual abilities, while reconnecting at the same time with his inner, most delicate feelings. The final sequences, where the older man declares his love for the young woman who had secretly shared the same feeling, reassures the viewer of the chef’s masculinity and potency. Despite his age and his ability to connect with his sensory memories and to express nurture and love through food, he is still undoubtedly a man.

Male chefs are also safely allowed to use food to express their longings for their far-away homelands. Curiously, two of the most renowned emigrant chefs in recent films are Italian: Mario, played by Sergio Castellitto in Sandra Nettlebeck’s Mostly Martha (Bella Martha, 2001), and Primo, played by Tony Shalhoub in Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci’s Big Night (1996). Despite the different plots and characters, the two chefs are both interpreters of a culinary tradition that is described to viewers as full of care, passion, and sensual involvement. The memories of flavors and dishes from their childhoods give both a sense of direction in a new land, respectively Germany and America, where not everybody is able to appreciate their skills. Though food, Mario is able to restore the joie de vivre of his female head chef, Martha, and to give hope to her little niece, distraught by her mother’s loss, while Primo re-creates the protective womb of the family where his Americanized brother Secondo finds refuge when all his hope and projects to become a successful businessman miserably fail.

The comedy genre protects masculinity, when goofy chefs – and the movie’s main characters – reveal all their weaknesses and food becomes a security valve for their emotional needs. This is the case for a romantic Adam Sandler in Spanglish (2004) and the surreal Hong Kong movie star Stephen Chow in God of Cookery (Sik San, 1996). Sandler plays an award-winning chef who rediscovers his passion for cooking and his skills, almost forgotten because of the stress of fame and his failed marriage, through the straightforward sensuality of his home caretaker, played by Paz Vega. The celebrity chef played by Chow falls into disgrace and manages to get back to the top only with the help of an ugly, but effective woman, who creates a new sort of meatballs that become all the rage and with whom he eventually falls in love.

Of course, when gay men cook in movies all bets are off and masculinity is no longer an issue. With them, food preparation reveals all its nurturing and poignant undertones. The Turkish filmmaker Ferzan Ozpetek often deals with gay characters whose emotional lives and memories are expressed through food. In His Secret Life (Le Fate Ignoranti, 2001), Michele (Stefano Accorsi) is the center of a whole community of unusual characters, including gay men, a transsexual, a prostitute, and an AIDS victim, who gather every week around the table, and for whom cooking and feeding each other constitutes an act of resistance and a declaration of love for life. When his deceased lover’s wife Antonia (Margerita Buy) discovers his existence, it is by inviting her to join the cooking and by preparing her morning coffee that the two manage to create a relationship built on respect and affection. In Facing Windows (La Finestra di Fronte, 2003), Giovanna (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), an aspiring baker, meets an old man suffering from amnesia who turns out to be a Holocaust survivor whose suffering was compounded by his repressed homosexuality. The man turns out to be a expert pastry chef who, by making cakes and desserts with the younger woman, succeeds in reconnecting with his past and his memories, even if only briefly, while giving to Giovanna a new sense of herself and of her femininity. In another of Ang Lee’s movies, The Wedding Banquet (Xi Yan, 1993), it is through food that an interracial gay couple convey their emotional attachments and their mutual love. Wai-tung (Winston Chao) a successful and career-driven Taiwanese businessman, and his American lover, Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein), have to fake a wedding with a Chinese woman and organize a massive banquet to appease Wai-tung’s parents, visiting from the mainland and unaware of their son’s sexual inclinations. Despite the difficulties, Simon reaffirms his nurturing qualities by cooking for his partner’s parents, who eventually show acceptance by enjoying his food, even if it is not Chinese.

These works focusing on food, although from different genres, share a model of human being where the body and the mind are not separated, but integrated in a functioning whole. Emotions and sensations are not considered as better or worse than rational faculties, just as a different, complementary dimension of human inner life. They propose a totally different position from the computer-related movies we analyzed previously, where the body is a mere material support for higher functions that – autonomous from the flesh – can be easily shared with machines and computers. This deep contrast between two different conceptions of the human experience emerges in different instances of pop culture, which we know plays an important role in disseminating and naturalizing concepts and ideas, values and anxieties. The presence of diverging, even contradictory, approaches to food points to the fact that an ongoing negotiation is taking place among different ideologies to assert their take on human life, the mind, and its connection with the body. The political and social implications go well beyond pop culture.

Sell It to the Brain!

A new branch of neuroscience is being developed in collaboration with sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and philosophers: the neuroscience of human behavior, which focuses on the interaction of the brain with the social environment (Adolphs 2003). Some researchers have pointed to the existence of brain functions, defined as “emphatic,” that are tuned to perceive and react to another’s pain (Singer et al. 2004). Others are studying the so-called “mirror neurons,” which allow individuals to imitate another’s action by stirring in their brain the same areas active in other persons (Frith and Wolpert 2004; Meltzoff and Prinz, 2002). This link connecting different brains would also explain the capacity swiftly to synchronize and harmonize people’s movements, body postures, and vocal intonations as they interact with other individuals (Goleman, 2006). These studies could throw new light on the dynamics that take place around the table, on the emotional relevance of the act of sharing food, and on the desire to adapt to other people’s eating habits. Other scholars are working on the new field of “neuronomics,” which analyzes the dynamics of the brain in behaviors related to economic choices, and the relevance of the emotional and values systems in risk-taking and decision-making (Camerer 2005; Cassidy 2006). Social relations are still to be fully analyzed from the point of view of neuroscience: for instance, how do humans read intentions out of a fellow human’s actions (Blakemore and Decety 2001)? This line of research is crucial to understand any collective behavior, including food consumption. For instance, it could allow new insights into how children are socialized into eating, how likes and dislikes develop, and how we try to experiment with new ingredients or dishes.

We also witness the rise of a new interest in the emotional dynamics of the brain to assess the relations that humans build with the objects they acquire and employ in everyday life. Design, marketing, and advertising are paying new attention to this dimension of human psychology and culture. Donald Norman, a cognitive scientist, is at the forefront of these studies both as an academic and as a businessman, having served as vice-president of Apple Computer’s Advanced Technology Group and having co-founded the Nielsen Norman Group, a consulting firm that focuses on human-centered products and services. In his books, Norman puts forth the intriguing hypothesis that appealing things, able to elicit intense and positive emotions, actually work better (Norman 1989 and 2004). He often uses kitchen design objects as examples, but the same line of reasoning can be applied to food packaging, arrangements of food on dishes, and produce itself. Norman argues that design and use of objects are influenced by strong emotional components. He actually identifies three different aspect of design, each of them responding to a different brain dynamic: the visceral, concerning appearances and related to immediate, almost mechanical reactions; the behavioral, connected with enjoyment and usability and corresponding to routine performances and learned skills; and the reflective, regarding intellectual and rational aspects (Norman 2004: 38).

The three levels also differ in their relations to time: while the first two are all about the present, about “now,” the third level is not so much about immediate use as about the long run, the memories that objects solicit, and the future satisfaction derived from their possession. At this level, self-esteem and identification processes play a key role, as do customer service and interpersonal interactions.

Kitchen objects and tools can shed some light on these matters. They may be bought just because they are cute and then never be used. This is often the case, for instance, with copper pots and pans, which usually end up as decorations because they are hard to keep clean and in good condition. At the same time they satisfy intellectual needs: the owners’ desire to show their refinement and their taste, a nostalgic connection with the past, or just the will to display expensive objects. On the other hand, expensive pots and pans can be bought for their functionality and usability. In this case their quality not only satisfies behavioral requirements, but also ensures durable enjoyment for people who actually cook and can use them with pleasure over and over. Many Western kitchens are full of gizmos of all kinds, either received as presents or actually bought, whose main value is definitively reflective. It relates to the pleasure of owning something unusual or designed for very specific purposes, underlining the owner’s expertise.

The relevance of these factors on food consumption is evident. If a product is meant for impulse buying, for instance a candy bar placed at the check-out of a supermarket, its packaging will above all be alluring, stimulating, and able to catch the shopper’s attention. Its format and size should interact with the behavioral habits of consumers, without challenging but sending clear messages about its content and its use. Everyday products should more or less fall in this category, underlining their utility, their easy usage, and their performance.

The same category of products can play on different levels. For example, bottled water can be very straightforward: small transparent bottles can be kept in a pocket on the go, while larger bottles, usually in packages of six, underline convenience and practicality. On the other hand, certain exclusive and refined bottles are sold only in restaurants. In this case the aesthetic pleasure is paired with the reflective enjoyment of something supposedly rare. Luxury products have to appeal at a very intellectual level to be successful. Because of their rarity and their high prices, they need to entice consumers’ sense of taste and their connoisseurship; in other words, they relate to the consumer’s sense of self, reflecting their sense of distinction. Very often the consumption of these products presupposes some sort of acquired taste: caviar, truffle, or foie gras have unusual flavors, whose appreciation is frequently associated with refinement, high social status, conspicuous consumption, and other values perceived as positive. Other high-end products also require knowledge: wine or cheese may not be necessarily expensive, but expert consumers tend to know what they like, are eager to try new products, and willingly share with other passionate consumers their thoughts and their latest discoveries. Furthermore, a certain amount of information – regarding origins, fabrication techniques, and the correct mode of consumption – is necessary to distinguish one product from another. The reflective aspect of this kind of enjoyment is obvious. In this case, visceral and behavioral values are not relevant, since consumers are not primarily attracted by the appearance or the usability of the products. Connoisseurs would not pick their wines or cheeses based on packaging or labels. On the other hand, a supermarket shopper would probably be influenced by these elements and also by other factors such as price and convenience.

Similarly, good advertising must be able to get in tune with our brain dynamics if it wants to prompt us to buy particular brands (du Plessis, 2005). Advertisers try to find the best ways to access the emotional functions that determine value and action. Emotions, we have seen, feed into and mold our thoughts, including the conscious ones that we like to consider completely rational. Since emotions solicit our attention, advertisers have to find ways to stimulate our interest, and to do so they attune the communication tools precisely to those mechanisms that in our brain control attention, excitement, and pleasure. So doing, advertisers also ensure that memories they create are durable and positive. We have seen how the value systems in the brain are able to reinforce and stabilize synaptic connections, increasing the strength of certain memories because the neurons involved become more likely to fire under future similar stimuli. But this is not enough: ads need to be more than memorable; they must aim at reinforcing the recollection of the brands they promote.

"We use our existing concept of the brand (our memory of the brand, if you prefer) to help us to decode this advertisement; and in turn, our decoding of the advertisement has an impact on our existing concept of the brand. So (provided the advertisement is not so disastrously obscure that it fails to evoke the brand concept at all...) there is a direct connection between our memory of the advertisement and our memory of the brand." (du Plessis 2005: 171)

In commercials directed to children, their favorite cartoon characters often promote certain products, creating a pleasurable connection between the positive feelings about the beloved character and the product itself. For example, if a child is emotionally attached to Mickey Mouse and Mickey is shown together with a certain brand of cereal, the child is likely to attach positive feelings to that cereal. Commercials directed to adults often work on the same principles. Hence the abundance of more or less explicit sexual undertones in advertising: we all recall seeing girls promoting certain brands of beer in bars. First the sexually charged image captures our attention, and then the arousal that it provokes helps to reinforce the memory and the pleasurable feelings connected to it. Other products and brands target more behavioral and reflective levels of memory, to use the terminology we have already introduced. This is the case for commercials that depict lifestyles that are perceived as positive and desirable. This strategy goes well beyond the printed ad or the TV commercial: events, shows, and happenings are organized to attract the attention of the media and reinforce the strength of the brand. For instance, alcoholic beverages often throw A-list parties in fashionable bars or clubs to accentuate their hipness.

Of course, consumers cannot be considered as helpless dupes without defense against the shrewd promotional techniques of advertising. As marketers are well aware, myriad elements interact with the actual effectiveness of commercials: social and cultural values, monetary constraints, personal likes and dislikes, historical contingencies. On the one hand, products are created for certain segments of the market, supposedly characterized by a defined set of preferences determined by social status, cultural capital, engrained and acquired habits, and desire for distinction (Bourdieu 1984). On the other hand, consumers continue to show an unbridled creativity in negotiating their relationship with markets and products, even when they appear to have no power. As French scholar Michel de Certeau pointed out:

"Culture articulates conflicts and alternately legitimizes, displaces, or controls the superior forces. It develops an atmosphere of tensions, and often of violence, for which is provides symbolic balances, contracts of compatibility and compromises, all more or less temporary. The tactics of consumption, the ingenious ways in which the weak make use of the strong, thus lend a political dimension to everyday practices." (de Certeau 1984: xvii)

Whatever the relations of power in the marketplace, designers, marketers, and advertisers can rely on a stable element: the desire for ever-growing consumption, which has become one of the main characters of contemporary Western society. We have examined different aspects of the role food plays in the complex relationship between mind and body, as reflected in pop culture items such as movies and advertising. We get a picture of human subjects whose rational function and memories are closely connected with sensations and emotions, practices, and desires, and whose mental and physical processes are more related than we would care to admit. Actually, we have noticed how this approach, leaning on contemporary research on the brain, is still contrasted by forces that refer to a disembodied human spirit or alternatively to similarities between the mind and machines.

By Fabio Parasecoli in "Bite Me - Food in Popular Culture", Berg, USA, 2008,excerpts pp. 15-35. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa. 

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