Are We What We Eat? Food and Identity in Late Twentieth-Century ...

Significantly, Barthes also demonstrates that the cultural messages encoded by these edible “signifying units” depend not only on their “[s]ubstances” or their contents, but also on their “techniques of preparation” and “habits” of consumption, or their contexts—how, why, when, where, and by whom the units of signification are prepared and eaten (Barthes 22). To demonstrate this intrinsic relationship between content and context, Barthes performs “what the linguists call transformational analysis, that is, to observe whether the passage from one fact to another produces a difference in signification” (Barthes 22). He traces the “passage[s]” or changes in context that occur over decades and centuries, demonstrating that “food is an organic system, organically integrated into its specific type of civilization” (26). For example, Barthes describes the “changeover from white to brown bread” (22) that occurred in the dining rooms of affluent French citizens, causing brown bread, once a signifier of poverty and incivility, to “become a sign of refinement” (22). The significance of the bread changes when it is no longer baked and eaten exclusively by peasant farmers and poor workers but instead is consumed by members of France’s upper class in restaurants or at home. Similarly, Barthes explains that coffee, “a stimulant to the nervous system,” once a sign of work and activity, has evolved to signify “breaks [from] work, rest, and even relaxation” (26). The significance of coffee, like that of brown bread, changes after it becomes a dietary staple of upper-class French people, who leisurely consume this beverage in upscale cafés and restaurants. Coffee, like brown bread (and other signifying units), “is felt to be not so much a substance as a circumstance” (26); although each unit’s substance—the content—has remained the same, the circumstance—the context of consumption—has changed, and because of this, its cultural significance also has changed.

Whereas Barthes establishes how items of food work to signify one’s socioeconomic status in France, I suggest that in the United States, an edible signifying unit most often encodes ethnicity, “Americanness,” or sometimes a combination of both. Before I outline the different ways that food functions in the literature, I briefly turn to the process of identity formation, which may occur in one of two general ways. An individual