A reflection on flavor shaped by history, memory, and song.
Words by Vera Rios
La sangre del pueblo (The blood of the people
Tiene rico perfume; has a pleasant smell;
La sangre del pueblo The blood of the people
Tiene rico perfume; has a pleasant smell;
Huele a jazmines, violetas, It smells of jasmines, violets,
Geranios y margaritas; Geraniums and daisies;
A pólvora y dinamita.¨ To gunpowder and dynamite.)
–– Flor de Retama (1969)
Peruvian huayno
Ricardo Dolorier
In his book Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor, and Why it Matters, neuroscientist Gordon Shepherd tries to lay the foundations for a new branch of science called Neurogastronomy. For this shift to happen, he gathers essential nonscientific information. He uses testimonies from friends, personal experiences, and research on evolutionary and biological transformations in human beings to understand the olfactory system. Shepherd explains from a biological (physical) and evolutionary perspective that human beings perceive the smell/taste of food not only by sniffing (orthonasal); we also perceive odors in the mouth when exhaling (retronasal route). The retronasal function of our body gives us, humans, the ability to taste.
According to Shepherd, smell has been underestimated by biology, anthropology, and related disciplines. To fill this void, he presents us with social, economic, and biological aspects that superficially explain the importance of this sense and its relationship with learning, memory, language, and other critical social problems such as obesity. For Shepherd, the study of the brain, and its size, is essential to understand how olfactory receptors work in humans. He argues that since birth, if not before, humans learn to discriminate between smells/tastes in the same way they do with visual and auditory patterns. Scents and flavors are also related to the food’s textures; humans experience a synesthetic reaction between the senses. We use language to express the experience of eating. For the author, all senses come together in personal memory. To explain this relationship, he uses as examples of the synesthetic condition of Neurogastronomy Proust's writings on the madeleine and Gérard Depardieu's recollection on how he intuitively found the ingredients to prepare a dessert as examples of the synesthetic condition of Neurogastronomy. He argues that the olfactory system should be given more priority when studying taste.
On one hand I agree with his thesis about the relationship between taste and smell. However, on the other hand, he loses credibility when he discusses healthy and unhealthy decisions. These decisions are relevant to smell/taste’s social and economic aspects, yet he oversimplifies them by following economists’ approach of seeing food as merely financial decisions based on their tastes.. Furthermore, he does not explain how Neuroeconomics and food choices relate to the social aspect of smell/taste when it comes to obesity and addiction. His argument is based simply on a limited biological analysis. For him, the vacuum in this area of knowledge is a direct consequence of the lack of understanding of the relationship between desire and obesity. He makes an interesting point because one of the greatest human pleasures is finding pleasure in taste. For Shepherd, there must be a balance between advertising and nutrition of foods with desirable flavors. In his argument, he does not question capitalism’s structures and how cheap food is often unhealthy, and therefore poor people can only afford unhealthy food and tend to be more susceptible to obesity. Shepherd tends to propose regulations but shows a lack of understanding of social issues around the food system.
As I read Shepherd’s work, I thought a lot about my personal experiences with food, my favorite flavors, and their relationship to my country’s history, memories, and the different roles I play in them. As Bourdieu explained, there is a direct connection between cultural dominance and taste. Smell and Taste are defined from its class relationships and not from a biological perspective. The upper class has a certain idea of what is tasty, and what smells good, hence taste is culturally shaped. There's nothing objective about taste or smell. The song Flor de Retama (1969), with which I open this paper, is an example of this. The song alludes to the killing of 20 low-income students of Huanta Ayacucho by the Peruvian police forces. The students were killed for protesting for affordable and quality education. Later, in time, this same song became more popular since it was used at many commemorative events to remember the deaths of the armed conflict in Peru (1980-2000). During this internal war, the same force was responsible for 6.6% of the total deaths. There are disputes about the song’s meaning, while some will call this it an emblem of the internal conflict, others, like the Peruvian political right, middle upper classes and the military will use regional stereotypes to accuse people who sing this song of being terrorists. The smell of best known "occidental" flowers such as jasmines, violets, geraniums and daisies, is used to make a larger audience understand the smell of the retama flower, which also represents the dead and their blood. Although this song is not an example of gustatory memory, it is an example of olfactory memory in which different perspectives of the same event converge. A very powerful song that shows us how class, language, memory and history play a fundamental role in the collective perception of smells and flavors.
Academics like Paul Ricoeur have used the field of memory to understand how the memory and history of the Holocaust and other historical events that marked Europe are constructed. Ricoeur, who sees taste from a Bourdieusian perspective, points out that history is sedimented precisely in these historic spaces, and that the memories of physical spaces (cities) are experienced at different sensory levels and socially . I find it interesting to analyze memory and taste in the broader sense instead of reducing it to biology when trying to understand taste as a taste/smell experience. Memory is subjective but it’s not strictly an individual process. Throughout the book, Shepherd gives us some hints of the connections between memory, the olfactory system, and different social aspects that could lead to public policy and food and nutrition regulations; however, he does not explore power relations in the food and flavor production systems.
Shepherd argues that ¨cooking is important culturally because of the complex social organization that arises around it¨. When explaining this importance, he sticks to the utilitarian and practical social organization around cooking in a family or local group. He points out that someone provides the meat, the vegetables, etc., other people store and guard the food, while someone prepares and serves it. Also, tools are needed to eat and prepare the food, but he misses the issue of power dynamics related to cooking, food, and smells. On this topic, Jaroslava Panakova, in her presentation at EASA 2020, on the panel “The horizons of sensory transformations: experiences, representations and meanings of changing food tastes” explains how, three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, in Chukotka, Siberia, ¨the mental representations of sensory stimuli through the nose and tongue, and the metaphors of cultural values, show how social institutions, from their position of power, use the capacity of these two senses to pursue expectations of civility¨. Panakova narrated the case of a group of women who ritualized, and performed, the repulsion of the smell of whale blubber and local food, while in the same community, the manufactured food products from the Russian military intervention were seen as tasty and symbols of modernity. In the line of analysis of taste and military intervention, my autoethnography on US-made military food, meals ready to eat (M.R.E.), argues that such foods played an important role in my memory of the internal war in Peru and in my perception of what American food was and tasted like. This demonstrates that personal memories are associated with broader historical processes, in this case, the US military’s intervention in my country. Having grown up in a military milieu, I did not want to get caught up in my romanticized memories and flavors of the war, which is why contrasting these two presentations with Shepherd's book helps me understand the field of memory and the relationship it has with class, power, and the appreciation of flavors and taste. Such examples show that it is essential that scientists develop theories taking into account the social contexts and historical processes of power and domination before being governed by questionable concepts like the ones used by the author to understand obesity.
References
Final report of the truth and reconciliation commission (2003) Lima, Peru
Vera Rios is a Peruvian anthropologist, food creator, recipe developer, and NYU Food Studies scholar based in Brooklyn, New York. She's interested in all things about food, culture, immigration, and identity. When she’s not thinking about the intersection of immigration and food, she spends her time adapting Peruvian food with local ingredients. You can follow her on Instagram @veritalacocinerita.
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