The Politics of Food: An Introduction 81Yet, as anthropologists’ attention shifted from small-scale exotic societies to
post-industrial societies closer to ‘home’, the holistic approach has become more
difficult to realize. At the same time, there has been a tendency toward analytical
specialization through subfields since around the 1970s. Today, food is no longer
an indispensable component of a social and cultural analysis. Rather, in more
recent publications, food tends to be either the paramount topic of analysis, or
hardly mentioned at all. Thus, the ‘anthropology of food’ has emerged as a distinct
subdiscipline,^3 widely popular but often also somewhat detached from more gen-
eral research issues. What we witness here is partly an attempt at cutting problems
‘down to size’ (such as ‘food and gender’, ‘systems of provision’, ‘food production’,
‘food and risk’, ‘food consumption’ and so on) in order to address urgent chal-
lenges in applied research, or to link food to topical concerns. However, as a result
of such delineations, the complex entanglements that were the hallmark of more
holistic anthropological accounts tend to be lost.
Furthermore, the way we choose to cut the problem down to size is often
informed by the way we order and classify food generally, that is deeply entrenched
in Western ways of thinking about and ordering the world. Certain Euro-Ameri-
can cultural distinctions have therefore – almost unnoticed – slipped into our
theoretical apparatus and provided us with approaches to food that split apart
dimensions of food that are, in fact, closely connected. Thus, broadly speaking,
food is approached as either nature or culture, either production or consumption,
either as an aspect of the private or the public domain. Although this is a common
problem and difficult to escape, it is perhaps more problematic in the field of food
than in other areas, because it often implies that we cut our analyses precisely at the
most interesting junctions. As a result, the analytical possibilities inherent in the
multiplicity of food, i.e. the analytical potential of food as a mediator between
domains commonly set apart, is often lost.
What we need is not a return to meticulous accounts of villages as in the
anthropological classics, but rather a re-evaluation of an underlying premise that
has shaped the anthropological structure of inquiry: the fundamental assumption
that relevant connections cannot be defined in advance, but emerge as a result of
empirical research. This inductive approach lay at the heart of functionalist anthro-
pology and went hand in hand with the holistic approach. Today, in an academic
world already ordered by neat and sharp subcategories (risk, globalization, embod-
iment, etc.), a more holistic approach may seem impossible to achieve. Research
projects must to be formulated in relation to culturally predefined domains, and
food studies are no exception. Yet, I would suggest that precisely in this situation,
more widespread intellectual disobedience in relation to the overarching categories
would allow food studies to move a step forward. The degree of entanglement of a
phenomenon can never be ascertained in advance, and this is especially the case in
relation to food. In a world of global systems of provision, abrupt material transfor-
mations and complex layers of governance, most efforts at compartmentalizing food
in accordance with predefined categories are bound to be too narrow. Malinowski
claimed in 1922 that: