EthnoGraphic food scholar Gillian Crowther

Gillian Crowther is a British trained social anthropologist who came to British Columbia, Canada to learn from the Haida First Nation. She teaches at Capilano University, North Vancouver. Her research interests include the anthropology of food, material culture, indigenous knowledge systems, representation, new kinship studies, and the anthropology of the everyday.​ The second edition of her book Eating Culture: An Anthropological Guide to Food was published last year by the University of Toronto Press. In this interview, Gillian tells interviewer Jessica Canose about learning from “chat-n-chews” with the Haida First Nation, teaching with drawings, and those foods that speak of home to her.

How long have you been an ASFS member?

I joined in 2011 when I found the journal and the organization during course/book research – and was overjoyed to find a superb collection of scholars working on the whole gamut of issues I was interested in using for my teaching. The journal is still my go-to first resource, and I constantly recommend it to my classes.

You place a much-appreciated focus on listening to public food discourses to understand local food culture. Who are your audiences and how do you gain access?

To answer this I need to conjure a dish of food – let’s say a piece of freshly barbecued sockeye salmon, served on a paper plate. This dish was one of many at an open-air, Haida First Nation feast, with the fish donated and barbecued by Haida lineages. As the food was consumed people talked about the salmon – its “greasiness”, the scent of the cedar smoke, the slight char of the skin, the “strong flesh – not flabby like farmed fish”, and that this was “good” and “healthy” food. As people ate they engaged with the material substance of the food, its materiality, and verbalized their cultural understandings, its meanings and values, as a part of their sense of identity and belonging. Academically, we can call these “public food discourses” – but it is this on-going “chat’n’chew” that surrounds food, that everyone engages in, that I have tried to narrow down to four categories concerning nutrition (health), cooking (doing), connoisseurship (evaluating), and sustainability (continuity and security). Now, as an anthropologist working at a teaching-focused university, I draw upon my fieldwork, and disciplinary approach, to encourage the students to pause and reflect on their sensory engagement with food, and address what they hear about the foods – the mediated public discourses, and how this influences their understandings. So I work from the food as a cultural artefact outwards, through its production, exchange, and consumption, and where and whenever possible, listen to what people say about its meanings and how we evaluate its contributions to our health and energy, our ability to cook, our taste preferences, and our commitment to the environment.

Your analysis of the power of modern images in Eating Culture: An Anthropological Guide to Food is a lovely contrast to the cartoons you began drawing for your ethnographic fieldwork in 1989, written about in the Graphic Adventures in Anthropology. Could you speak a little more about the overlaps, or differences between these two forms of visual representation, and what you present in your anthology?

Both the photographs and the ethnoGraphic material (the cartoons) are useful anthropological tools, offering endless ways to learn about people’s relationship with food. Each allows a framing and focusing upon food, and represents a snapshot of a moment through which the observer engaged with either foodstuffs, or the processes of making, sharing, and consuming foods as social acts.

In my research and teaching I am particularly interested in the anthropology of everyday life, the “imponderabilia of actual life” that is overlooked but foregrounds our meaning-making and identity-work. Ordinary foods, and acts of preparation, purchasing, and eating, are the stuff of our everyday existence, taken-for-granted, and yet vital to our health, energy, and sense of self, played out through our food choices made within wider societal constraints. To draw attention to this role I used my own photographs in Eating Culture to bring the book’s content into the viewfinder of everyone’s smartphone or camera. This approach parallels the recent popularity for posting daily images on social media platforms, such as Instagram, or watching videos of solitary eating (mukbang) or prepping dishes (#mealprep), and tries to make the book’s content relevant to everyone. The publisher – University of Toronto Press, were particularly willing to give the book a visual, sensory tone to add to its appeal, and showcase the visuality of our contemporary food culture.

While there is only one example of the ethnoGraphic cartoons in Eating Culture this format has continued to be a useful method for exploring our relationship with food. Cartoons offer an opportunity to bridge the apparent objectivity of a photograph (which isn’t entirely objective) and the subjective, sensory experience of food as it is appraised and consumed. Cartoons can sequentially depict the processes of transforming raw materials into food, our choices and desires to eat, the specificities of commensality, and the background understandings of the cartoon protagonists. They can often capture the nuances of food moments, without relying upon too many words, and for me, as I draw, they help delineate the essential experience. For instance, what was it about that piece of sockeye on a paper plate that made it “Haida salmon”? It was the growing greasy stain of salmon oils as they penetrated to paper; this was the “greasiness” of Haida food memories. Through the drawings I attempt to condense a complex series of events, which transform raw ingredients into culturally formed food, which is then shared. Each cartoon reproduces and represents the embodied experience of food, and transforms into a meaningful moment.  The two media – photographs and cartoons, both illustrate my experiences, but the cartoons offer to filter and refine the lasting meanings.

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I use the cartoon drawings in my classes as a way to focus the students’ attention, to learn to move beyond just looking and instead really seeingfood, its substance. This makes us aware of our sensory engagement with the materiality of food. Drawing has a magical means of delineating what is important – the look of a dish, the quality of its ingredients, and how it has been created and presented for consumption. These are the blindingly obvious, aspects of any food that we tend to overlook. Drawing cartoons – and talking through them in class, and asking students to draw their own, helps direct our attention to this crucial aspect of our engagement with food, and its consumption. The drawings help us understand how food’s materiality is linked to meaning-making, and our sensory evaluation of it as we engage in our own identity-work.

What do you think are the best methods for introducing non-food oriented individuals to the idea of food anthropology? Are there any best starting points to communicate?

Anthropology as a discipline aims to explore what it means to be human, to be alive, living with others of our own species, and the multiple species with which we share our environment. It offers insights into our similarities, helps explain our differences, and recommends we learn from each other to achieve an equitable and sustainable existence. By focusing on food – an essential substance, rich with meaning, there is really no better way of beginning to know ourselves, appreciate others, and hopefully gain an understanding of why we need to eat certain foods, how our tastes have been shaped, and how access to food patterns our daily lives, and the social order. To make these rather lofty goals palatable I usually begin my anthropology of food course by asking the class to describe their perfect meal – and even the non-foodies – have something they like to eat. There are no limits to the perfection; anything can be on the menu, it can be homemade or commercially made, and eaten with company or enjoyed in solitary satisfaction. This exercise then becomes a reference point to explore the ingredients and flavours, cooking skills and knowledge, the aesthetics of the dishes, and the commensality of dining. The takeaway message is anthropology is relevant to everyone’s lives, and food allows us to see and taste our own culture, and begin to understand how society shapes our choices, through place, age, gender, class, race, and ethnicity.

Are there any major differences that you cite within your work or research between the United States and Canada?

To my mind – the answer to this begins with a “no” and moves into a “yes”! The reach of the globalized food industry unites all industrial nations, and the demands of a waged livelihood lived in urban centres. This has shaped our contemporary diet through industrial cuisine found in equally packaged quantities and qualities in Canada and the United States (and pretty much everywhere – think of instant noodles). However, there are also differences, which are incredibly important for shaping people’s sense of place and regional identities. Yes – we are globally connected, but we still live in one place at a time, and local environments (cultural, social, climatic, and historical) will shape distinct patterns of food culture across Canada and the United States. We have hybrid consumption – globalized and localized, and relevant to place and person. These variations are real and meaningful, and are the stuff of continuing research in all aspects of food studies.

What are your top 3 “must read, must see” (book, article, film) that informed you via-a-vis food studies)?

There are so many wonderful books on food, and I look across my shelves and glimpse many important names – David Sutton, John Holtzman, E.N. Anderson, Heather Paxson, Rachel Laudan, Jack Goody, Jeffrey Pilcher… to name just a few  – so this is really tricky to narrow down. However, Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power (1985) certainly resonates through so many later analyses of how wider societal factors shape our consumption. Similarly Richard Wilk’s Home Cooking in The Global Village stands as a model for examining the construction of cuisines and the interconnected of the global food system. Finally, my third choice(s) brings food into the realms of the kitchen, and alerts us to the skills and knowledge at play in the work of cooks. I have very much enjoyed Amy Trubek’s Making Modern Meals: How Americans Cook Today (2017), and cheekily I would bundle it with Frances Short’s Kitchen Secrets: The Meaning of Cooking in Everyday Life (2006), and Joy Adapon’s Culinary Art and Anthropology (2008).

What is one dish that says home to you? (Considering your father’s background, I am curious if it will be cheddar cheese)!

This is a simple combination dish I associate with Bonfire Night (November 5th) the British commemoration of Guy Fawkes’s 1605 Gunpowder Plot to blow-up parliament. On this night across Britain bonfires are lit, fireworks let off, and families “celebrate” (what exactly I am not sure – Fawkes’s failure or the fact he tried?) with sausages on sticks sizzled on the bonfire, and eating jaw-wrench tooth-pulling treacle toffee. My memories of this exhilaratingly scary night include mild burns from sausage cooking and handheld sparklers, the cheek-glowing heat of the crackling bonfire, and most importantly eating my mum’s Parkin and chunks of cheese. Parkin is a cake, associated with a recipe from the north of Britain – Lancashire and Yorkshire, where my family originated. It is made from flour, oatmeal, golden syrup, treacle, ginger, butter, egg and bicarbonate of soda. According to someone’s “rule” it must be baked in a square pan, and cut into square pieces. Parkin is simultaneously dry and dense, but somehow moist, and tastes sweet and deliciously medicinal. In our household it was enjoyed with a chunk of cheese – the sweet crumbly texture of the cake, contrasting with the savoury smooth, fattiness of the cheese. The cheese was whatever was to hand, usually Cheddar or Lancashire. Through this dish – Parkin and cheese – I revisit my childhood home, and my parents – mum’s Parkin, and dad’s cheese. It is best enjoyed outside in the back garden with bonfire smoke, fireworks, and company.

Yorkshire Parkin. Photo by Spider.Dog 2008