Re: arugula

[Jon Beasley-Murray <jpb8@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 27 Aug 1995 glevy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> What are "bourgeois" vs. "working class" veggies and fruits anyway?
> I am reminded of what Big Bill Haywood once said when someone noticed
> him smoking fancy cigars: "Nothing is too good for the working class."

Strange, I was going to post on this topic, and use exactly the same
phrase--but attribute it to Nye Bevan upon being seen walking out of the
Ritz.  Has anyone got the definitive source of this phrase?

Obviously no vegetable is intrinsically bourgeois or proletarian.
However, saying that Italian communists eat sun-dried tomatoes doesn't
mean that their consumption in the US is not indicative of a particular
(yuppie or whatever) class fraction quite different from that of the
Italian working class.

Taste is historically and socially contingent--but that is not to explain
it away (capitalism or dictatorship are historically contingent too,
after all).

There is no simple use value to a vegetable.  It is inevitably enmeshed
in a system of hierarchy or distinction among tastes.  You can't just
overturn the meaning of eating arugula in 90s New York City merely by
invoking either rural proletarians in a different continent or a
post-revolutionary utopia.  Social meanings are more intractable than that.

There is also the whole issue of the *style* of eating arugula, so far
untouched in this discussion.  There are the autodidacts of the
salad-eating world, who inevitably betray their "Johnny-come-lateliness"
and in the face of those who inherit a certain amount of cultural capital
in the world of leafy greens.  So even organizing an arugula-eating drive
in your local factory scarcely disturbs or even subverts the systematic
structure of social exclusion of which leafy salads are (contingently, of
course) a part.

A bit of Bourdieu (but whom else?):

"The art of eating and drinking remains one of the few areas in which the
working classes explicitly challenge the legitimate art of living.  In
the face of the new ethic of sobriety for the sake of slimness, which is
most recognized at the highest levels of the social hierarchy, peasants
and especially industrial workers maintain an ethic of convivial
indulgence.  A bonviant is not just someone who enjoys eating and
drinking: he is someone capable of entering into the generous and
familiar--that is, both simple and free--relationship that is encouraged
and symbolized by eating and drinking together, in a conviviality which
sweeps away restraints and reticence." (_Distinction_ 179)

"In opposition to the free-and-easy working-class meal, the bourgeoisie
is concerned to eat with all due form.  Form is first of all a matter of
rhythm, which implies expectations, pauses, restraints; waiting until the
last person served has started to eat, taking modest helpings, not
appearing over-eager....  The manner of presenting and consuming the
food, the organization of the meal and setting of the places, strictly
differentiated according to the sequence of dishes and arranged to please
the eye, the presentation of the dishes, considered as much in terms of
shape and colour (like works of art) as of their consumable substance,
the etiquette governing posture and gesture, ways of serving oneself and
others, of using the different utensils, the seating plan, strictly but
discreetly hierarchical, the censorship of all bodily manifestations of
the act or pleasure of eating (such as noise or haste), the very
refinement of the things consumed, with quality more important than
quantity--this whole commitment to stylization tends to shift the
emphasis from substance and function to form and manner, and so to deny
the crudely material reality of the act of eating and of the things
consumed, or, which amounts to the same thing, the basely material
vulgarity of those who indulge in the material staisfactions of food and
drink." (_Distinction_ 196)

In the light of these quotations, I find it interesting that only one
post to the list has attempted to describe the *taste* of this lettuce,
rather than it's appearance of its (non)trendiness.

> Jerry

Take care

Jon

Jon Beasley-Murray
Literature Program
Duke University
jpb8@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons


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