Dis-course
For the last couple of weeks I've been mucking around with conceptual food articles; the semiotics of food, food fashions, the domain of eating as it intersects with the domain of the symbolic. The connotations of Spam and sundried tomatoes. Food as signifier beyond the calorific signified. This place (bless it) is so fucking intellectual that everything gets rationalised like that in the end, even something which ought to have as uncomplicated and positive a set of primal pleasure and sociability-connotations as eating.
For I say 'ought' advisedly - eating will only have an uncomplicated set of pleasure and sustenance connotations in a culture which does not have enough. And we have way, way too much food in this society. For Christ's sake, even the microscopic Spar on Walton Street which has girders to hold the ceiling up sells two different sorts of pesto; it's no wonder that half of the population of Britain is now overweight.
But fat is no longer simply a feminist issue. Fat is an economic issue, and, furthermore, fat and by extension food is a conceptual, a symbolic issue. Fat women are only considered attractive in cultures where there is not enough to eat. My mother grew up in Kenya; on one occasion, as a child, she put on a lot of weight on a visit to relatives in England, and returned to Kenya looking, in my grandmother's words, 'like a piglet'. The Africans found her not repellent and porcine but utterly beautiful.
By the same token, in a society where it's easy to get fat, indeed, quite difficult not to, the signification of a rounded belly is inverted and comes to connote trailer parks and a lack of control over oneself. And, O my droogs, in this state we're in where everything is taken care of (oh come off it, by the time you leave Oxford you'll all be bourgeois at least, wherever you started off), when there's nothing to keep the mind occupied but itself, then control becomes everything. I do not know a single girl who is not, on some level, neurotic about what she eats. I flirted with anorexia for a year - that's what turned me into a foodie, because I thought about eating all the time, and I wanted to enjoy my one meal a day.
I don't want this to turn into a piece of confessional-media narcissism, because that's not what I'm getting at. What I'm getting at is that we appear to have reached a point of consumer saturation where nothing is simply itself any more, where everything stands for something else, where even our bread and (bottled) water are the subject of ferocious market research and serve as indices, in the Darwinian chaos of consumer bracketing, through which to force yet another lifestyle choice upon us.
Pesto A or pesto B? Choice and control are cognates; and, this place being this fucking intellectual, you might as well give in, render the whole thing (ha) academic and live on coffee, cigarettes, adrenalin and self-disgust, like that other well-known genius, Kate Moss.
Next week: conceptual cookery - how to make an intellectual hash.
18th May 2000