Some thoughts on food and its relation to FLT by Richard Bolt - KJO Łódź

Food is perhaps the most culturally sensitive of all the topics connected to culture in ELT. Its daily requirement and continual fresh supply mean that eating habits can change very quickly and it is much more responsive to changing attitudes and values than many other cultural themes such as housing. The diet of our choice (since the transformations of 1989) is now available and within the budgets of most of us. Food therefore is a very good indicator of cultural forces and cultural change.

Food and the classroom

Food is a topic appropriate to all levels of English and education, and to all ages. In the past though introduced in a simple way to young beginners it has often been avoided in more advanced coursebooks. This is unfortunate as expressing what you eat in another language, and across cultures, is a particularly difficult activity - witness the struggles of restaurant menus. From a linguistic point of view alone food deserves better treatment - see Confusing food words.

As food is ubiquitous it is a very good inclusive topic for the classroom, allowing all students to respond individually and usually proves a popular theme when introduced. It is not only about itself of course but also a good indicator of family and gender relations in the home and when shopping. It is an excellent starting point for comparing the cultures and tastes of different generations - parents and grandparents - as well as the students’ future children - see Food and Nostalgia. Thus it can be used on many occasions to illustrate other cultural themes.

Food engages all the five senses and ideally all these should be utilised in the classroom as they can be very effective for long-term memory. Food can produce very strong emotions both positive and negative and thus leaves strong memories from childhood which can be taken advantage of in story-telling activities - see Food and the Senses.

The necessity of food and its universality also mean it is big business, politically highly significant and closely related to agriculture. From a very simple classroom beginning - analysing a meal, some packaging or a supermarket receipt - extensions can be made into many areas of life, the economy, contemporary culture and language. It is important to give learners a contemporary understanding of food to give them the knowledge and language they will need in the future rather than an ELT culture mythology of fish & chips and so on. Food is a ‘site’ on which all the great political, economic and social forces of today leave their clearly seen traces.

There are a number of items in this issue with activities at a classroom level and in the ELT bibliography you will find more ideas Food and Nostalgia, Salt - Wieliczka and elsewhere and (Un)Healthy Food.

Food and language

Food is an excellent theme to demonstrate the inescapable interdependence of language and culture and therefore of special interest to the FL classroom. The impossibility of word for word expression makes it a very valuable theme for developing the students’ communicative skills - even from an early and young stage - demonstrating that culture is not something to be added on to FLT but essential to its full achievement. It allows plenty of scope for activities for developing intercultural competence.

Food is a very good source of examples of contemporary lexical change e.g. ephemera (words with a very short life), the internationalisation of the lexis (e.g. pizza), neologisms, informalisation (often through brand names as in the wine ‘Old Git’), language play, language ‘gradients’ (from more influential to less influential cultures), lifestyle language …

Idioms abound - cool as a cucumber/ apple of my eye/ bun in the oven/ half-baked/ make a meal of it/ bring home the bacon/ I could eat a horse/ pigging out … What is the difference between being grilled by your boss and being roasted by her/ him … ?

Forms of address such as Good morning, Good afternoon and Good evening were in use in English long before clocks, and mark the divisions between meals and the parts of the working day. Hence noon and 6 pm being used as arbitrary boundaries to give those in countries such as Spain or Poland an understanding of when to use them.

As in many areas of life English is becoming the international language of food, its production, distribution and sale. This makes food a very good subject for looking at the internationality of the contemporary globalising world. As the available English vocabulary is culturally highly specific it is not always helpful, but the custom in English of taking non-English vocabulary into the language in an approximation of its original form makes things easier. For instance chapati (India), chorizo (Spain), houmous (Greece), dim sum (China) and so on around the world - see Confusing food words for some general discussion and particular examples.

Food and literature

Food features prominently in many novels e.g. those of Günter Grass as well as in Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz. Of course not only literature but film e.g. Babette’s Feast, Chocolat or The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover, painting - as in many still lifes, and so on - see Food and Literature.

Food and identity

Food is often seen as culturally defining e.g. the pejorative ‘frogs’ when people in the UK speak of the French and the ‘rosbifs’ used in return. But do we eat only according to our nationality, or are our choices dependent rather on our generation, our social class, our gender, our region …? - See Food Identity Heritage

Every time you eat you are reflecting unconsciously a variety of cultural positions and identities - for example your generation, your family tradition, your stage of life as well as individual taste. Possibly you are making a conscious cultural statement e.g. by refusing meat or using only ingredients from your region. It is not only food that you eat at every meal but in a way cultural meanings too, a cultural struggle in your stomach with dishes reflecting the different demands of our different identities. In a much more complicated way than we might at first imagine perhaps really ‘we are what we eat’.

From stomach to culture - can you visit a country without visiting its ‘stomachs’? Can you understand another people with your eyes only? Even in McDonalds the food might be the same but would the other cultural aspects of the meal be - e.g. greetings, table manners and so on? Any cuisine in the world could be tasted on top of a pizza - but what is the ‘culture’ that is being eaten? When tourists come to Britain and photograph Big Ben or eat fish and chips - is it UK culture they are taking pictures of or eating, or an international western globalised tourist culture? Is food being de-cultured or re-cultured?

As with all questions of identity, authenticity is much talked of but what is it? Is authenticity in the cooking (production) or in the eating (reception - the dining ‘audience’)? Is it more authentic in a traditional setting (either original or imitation) or with certain music? Is Polish food more authentic in Chłopskie Jadło (traditional style Polish restaurants in Kraków) or in a Bar Mleczny (‘milk bar’)? How does Bigos in a Polish restaurant in London compare for authenticity with that produced in a Vietnamese restaurant in Poland? See also the item Food and Nostalgia

Tradition is an equally difficult term - fish and chips seems to have come into the UK in the late 19^th c, and is much more typical of Belgium. Turkey is obviously from the New World. Does a dish have to originate in a country to be traditional and for how many generations does it have to be eaten? What is the cultural location of the fashion for ‘Irish Pubs’ in Europe? What of the ‘Bull’ chain of pubs in Poland advertising English beer and Polish food?  See Food and the Senses for some illustrations of this issue.

Globalisation

The rapidly globalising processes connected with food are obvious from the articles introduced in Contemporary Food in Britain but what is less clear is that the 20% or so of the population who seem  ‘traditional’ in the UK in terms of gardening, shopping, cooking and so on are largely the elderly. Among younger generations the changes discussed there reflect their entire eating habits, widely accepted and seen as normal.

Food by being essential to the everyday life of everyone is particularly susceptible to globalising forces. It is a very good classroom theme for illustrating these processes which are bringing us all together and making us all dependent - willingly or not. A long way from our learners in the classroom perhaps - but this is the world our students are growing up into. How can we prepare them for this future?

What proportion of what you spend in a supermarket is on the basic food and what on value-added ingredients + packaging/ processing/ promotion/ labelling/ branding/ advertising and so on (e.g. coca cola). There is a very great separation of the origins of a product from its final form - not only geographical but whether it is possible to connect the burger you buy with a cow, or rather a field of wheat or a chemical factory - there are so many stages and routes. Pictures on packaging tell us what we feel should be true e.g. the happy farmyard hens on a box containing eggs from an enormous sunless concrete shed full of tightly caged birds.

The domination of food by the big four supermarkets in the UK - Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda (Wal-Mart) and Safeway simply reflects equivalent domination in other areas of life. The big four ELT publishers - Pearson-Longman, CUP, OUP and MacMillan - dominate the market in the same way and use the same business strategies - very many ‘lines’ yet only one producer. There is seemingly choice and yet lack of choice at the same time. Take a look at where your coursebook was printed to get a close feel of globalisation.

Food and post-modernism

Cultural studies - that epitome of post-modern academic life - is very interested in food and it appears in the works of many writers there, though sometimes with a feeling that the menu is more valuable than the meal. Postmodern culture itself is often presented as a supermarket shelf.

Biotechnology is the coming science - ingredients can be designed in and grown in a laboratory. Will perhaps an aversion to such developments by many older people be matched by an acceptance among the younger? Genetic art is already here - perhaps the chefs of the future will be designers of flavour, artists extending the range of our sensory experiences in their gastronomic creations ...

Food and …

Many other connections can be explored: food and religion, food and the EU, food and history, food and the upbringing of children, food and lifestyle. These ideas seem a long way from the classroom at the beginning of the article but they represent the world that our learners are growing into and that we must prepare them for.