84 The Global Food System
is the transformed role of the media from that of being disseminators of expert
knowledge to becoming virtual battlefields of conflicting expert claims. In this
situation, the politics of food is also a ‘politics of discourse’ in which the power to
set the public agenda, to frame the debate, and to silence opponents become a key
resource. Such politics of discourse may be analysed as the strategic use of food
metaphors, the distribution of blame and shame, and the role of the media in
framing abstract risks in such a way that they are perceived as ‘real’ or relevant to
ordinary consumers.
A third set of issues that emerge from the connections that food help us make
relates to the sensory and experiential dimensions of food and eating. As an anchor
of embodied experience, food often plays a key role in collective or individual acts
of remembrance (cf. Karen Blixen’s Babette’s Feast, or Marcel Proust’s account of
‘La petite Madeleine’). David Sutton has explored these dimensions by drawing
attention to the often ignored potential of food to evoke memory. In his book
Remembrance of Repasts (Sutton, 2001), he makes a fine attempt to bridge the Car-
tesian dualism of mind and body by analysing food in a Greek village as both
semiotics and embodied experience. Drawing on the works of Paul Connerton
(1989) on commemoration and Thomas Csordas (1994) on embodiment, he
demonstrates how worlds of experience and interpretation are contained in food.
Here, we take this further, showing how eating as a commemorative act highlights
the role of food in political conflicts regarding land claims and displacement of
refugees. Food thus emerges as a material link that confirms and establishes, in a
very sensual manner, the felt connections between a people and a place. Such con-
nections reveal important nuances to the alleged ability of globalization to weaken
ties of kinship and place (Eriksen, 2003). The fact that food politics is also body-
politics has also been developed in other directions, through explorations of food
and gender (Counihan and Kaplan, 1998; Counihan, 1999) and of food, body
image and self-identity (Lupton, 1996).
Finally, a view of food as nature draws attention to the connections that are
made between food and the natural environment, and between food and an ideal-
ized image of nature as opposed to culture and technology. Today, when science
and technology can more than ever before refashion what we used to see as nature,
the concept of nature appears to retain an even greater capacity to capture our
imagination and to encapsulate notions of what is good, sound and true. Thus,
even though the foods we consume are shaped, adjusted and manipulated by
human intervention, references to nature abound in food advertising, culinary dis-
course and public debate (Lien, 1995, 1997). This obsession with nature affects the
way we think about food both in relation to environments of production (e.g. organic
farming methods), in relation to food products themselves (e.g. processed foods ver-
sus ‘natural’ foods), and in the way we envisage the way food shapes our body and
health (e.g. popular ‘Paleolithic’ diets). We need to pay attention to a ‘politics of
nature’ which, in contemporary discourse, goes beyond what is traditionally
captured by the term environmentalism. As Macnaghten and Urry (1998) note,
there is not one single nature, only a diversity of natures that are contested and