We am what you eats

[imomus]

A Japanese friend has drawn my attention to Amupurin, the website of a husband and wife who've gone "back to the land" after working as graphic designers in Tokyo. They've built a wooden house in Hokkaido and made a "pudding factory cottage", selling the resulting puddings online. Their nearest town has no stores, not even a vending machine, but they do have a pretty solid DSL connection and update their site frequently. They also have a separate blog, The 3 Points Supper, which is a simple record of the food they eat each day (one photo per meal).

The visual poetry of the Amupurin food blog is complemented by beautifully stilted English labels. "Sardine's plum tree dry boiling, Japanese yam, Wheat meal, Miso soup, Tokyo, 15.04.2007" reads yesterday's entry. Friday's lists "Leek natto, OKAHIJIKI, Pickled Chinese cabbage, Leaf red pepper, The miso soup, The cereals rice, Tokyo, 13.04.2007". Sometimes it might be something as simple as "Beer, Salmon's canned food, Potato salad & onion, Hokkaido, 04.04.2007".



The formula isn't new. Cornelius is the first person I'm aware of to have maintained a strictly food-only blog, but keitai cameras make it a commonplace today. In fact, it's considerably easier to see the food a Japanese person eats each day than to see representations of the person herself. This is because it's considered bad etiquette in Japan to push yourself forward for admiration. But cooing over food is not only okay, it's more or less obligatory. Japanese TV, for instance, is at least 50% filled up with people cooing over food.

Mulling the meaning of this, I happened to be watching Michael Wood's epic TV series "Legacy: The Origins of Civilisations". In the film on China, Wood says "A cuisine is a whole way of seeing the world. It's one of the simplest and most direct ways in which people can enjoy life -- a mark of civilisation. And the Chinese excelled in it. As they still do."

One of the ways you can tell you've passed from one civilisation to another is that the binaries no longer work the same way. Things you took to be natural opposites suddenly no longer are. And it occurs to me that the food blog is a beautiful tool with which to slice and dice Western binary oppositions. Let's try it on a few of the best-known.



Body / Soul (a specifically Christian binary): I've often heard Japanese people say that, in the Japanese conception of what a person is, the stomach is the absolute centre of things -- a very tangible and worldly equivalent to the nebulous, otherworldly centre Christians are likely to designate "the soul". But of course Japan's fusion (via Shinto) of spirituality with the seasonal agrarian cycle means that to oppose the tangible and the spiritual is a false opposition; stomach and soul are the same thing (the nearest equivalent we have in the West is the black American expression "soul food"). That's why a portrait of what a Japanese person ate might be a much better depiction of who they are than a picture of their face.

Individual / Collective: We can also perhaps collapse the Western binary between the individual and the collective if we think of a blog showing the food an individual consumes daily as a kind of self-portrait which acknowledges dependence on others. Japanese preface eating with "Itadakimasu!" -- I will receive! It's an acknowledgment of interdependence and of the collective nature of food-making. But without that collectivity (of seeding, planting, growing, of trading and purchasing, of preparation and serving), and without the belief system that binds all this together into a spiritual as well as a logistical whole, no individual.

The idea of food as a portrait isn't a purely Japanese one, though. The 18th century French philosopher Jean-Anthelm Brillat-Savarin said "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are". It's a line Tucker Shaw quotes in his book "Everything I Ate: A Year in the Life of My Mouth" (2005).



High / Low: And Tucker puts his finger on another key Western binary -- high / low -- when he criticizes the way Western food is usually presented: "Food magazines are like fashion magazines: They celebrate what's beautiful, new, or unusual, but very rarely report on what people really wear or eat." His demotic, documentary approach is more "Japanese" in the same way that a street fashion magazine like FRUiTS challenges the standard high / low binary of the top-down fashion industry. FRUiTS (much like Fumi Nagasaki's Street Life video report for Flasher) is a grassroots documentary approach to what people are actually wearing, rather than what celebrity fashion professionals like Karl Lagerfeld or Hedi Slimane would like them to be wearing.

As if to prove he's an American after all, Tucker Shaw justifies the demotic grassroots sociology of his food blook with a bit of paradoxical bragging: "This project is a shameless bid to make history. I want my pictures to show up in anthropology textbooks 200 years from now. Some day, people are going to wonder about what people ate in New York City around the turn of the century. Maybe I'll be the one of the guys they talk about."

He da man! Well, da mankind.

Comments

[obelia.livejournal.com]

this is fantastic! thanks for the link. MMMMMMMMMM food.
I am usually too famished to remember to take a picture until AFTER I've eaten most of my meal
I like it when you write about food, fashion and or porn :P

[akabe.livejournal.com]

I think you would have enjoyed Mariko Yamamoto's slideshow with 4 years worth of food at our nakano Izakaya biennale yesterday.

[mme-furiosa.livejournal.com]

Wow. This is such a fascinating subject. Thanks for the post. This assessment of binaries makes a lot of sense.

[scythrop.livejournal.com]

I didn't realize Plato was a Christian.

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

I think thay made him an honorary Christian posthumously, didn't they? Neo-Platonism and all that.

[deadbatteries.livejournal.com]

ha! good one.

[peacelovgranola.livejournal.com]

I was wondering how long it was going to take before someone pointed out this most common mistake (that is, attributing the body/soul split to the Xians). Though I understand the convenience and practical purpose it serves toward the above thesis--however philosophically negligent it may be.

The LOHAS vibe from these guys is cool. And I can appreciate the acknowledgment of food by the Japanese--once, upon not finishing the last morsel of my rice, Kiyomi reported quite matter of factly that "the farmer would be disappointed," or something to that effect. Mottainai! indeed. (Now, I just put less of the glutinous gohan in my bowl to begin with to avoid any further international incidents).

[(Anonymous)]

He wasn't.
He died three centuries before Christianity.
Christians adopted him as their own.

ugh, food

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

<< A cuisine is a whole way of seeing the world. It's one of the simplest and most direct ways in which people can enjoy life -- a mark of civilisation >>

Simple? Since when is maintaining a "cuisine" simple? It's a huge pain in the ass as far as I'm concerned. All the fresh food that one has to buy, that then spoils if not consumed on a proper schedule, the preparation and clean-up, and all to service a few stomachs?

I stick with packaged food myself. No spoilage, no preparation, no cleanup. (Though as I type this, I realize the packaging creates its own problems, but not for me directly)

I see all this focus on food as a little embarrassing, that humans are so consumed by our stomachs that we'll spend hours out of the day preparing what's to go in them. But maybe that's because I was bulimic for a long time, so now I feel I shouldn't waste any more time on food than I already have. And maybe I shouldn't be so critical when others want to spend time on food, since I spent 15 years obsessed by it

I wonder if Japanese girls struggle with eating disorders the way U.S. American girls do

about bulimia

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about bulimia a lot, the rush of intense pleasure that comes with no (apparent) consequences. And thinking that bulimia for women is like gangbangs for men. I think the gangbang represents a rush of sexual acquisition and satisfaction with no (seeming) bad consequences. Of course, it turns out that there are bad consequences to bulimia (fucked up teeth and stomach linings, among others) and certainly there are negative results to a gangbang that involves degradation (no human can "gain" by degrading another), but the behavior is so seductive that it is easy for some to overlook the negative impact

(sorry, momus, I'm guilty again of twisting a Click Opera column around to accommodate what I've been thinking about)

[mandyrose.livejournal.com]

Whew! Back in the city from the quasi-wilderness for a day. There I live in an old farmhouse. I've been reading a lot of Wendell Barry lately, he focuses on this food connection quite a bit. Basically saying that food, and agrarian lifestyle, are the optimal connection between man and wilderness.

When I try to connect this back to Eastern philosophies, the folks at the Sanctuary don't seem to grok it. A lot of anthroposophy there--- an outbranch of Christianity. But at least it's Christianity of the East/West Gnostic sort, not that fundie stuff you see all the time in the US.

I'll be growing a few gardens this year. Getting really into cooking, constantly, especially baking!

I love whole food porn, and the people who make it. Amen.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I used to be a bit of a fellow-traveller with anthroposophy. When I was a student I'd go out to Newton Dee, a Steiner-inspired community in a forest outside Aberdeen. There's an interesting radio programme about it here (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/opencountry_20041009.shtml).

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Here's some of the architecture of the "scientist of the invisible", Rudolf Steiner, inventor of the agricultural method of Biodynamics, all about the spiritual energy of matter.

"It's working with the unseen side of life that brings that change of atmosphere here," says one of the Newton Dee organizers. That Steiner thing always reminds me of Rilke's line "we are the bees of the invisible".

But in Shinto they've taken this kind of thing the whole way. Spirituality invests the tangible and the visible and the edible. You don't need to invoke the invisible, the distant or the absent to dignify what's present.

[akabe.livejournal.com]

wow the 2nd Goetheanum. it looks kind of like a le corb thing that's been rolling in the sea for many many years.
wonderful as it may be as an idea i don't think it works at all. the combination of hard concrete and supposedly soft forms creates more bad tension than a true brutalist could ever dream of. i think beuys took steiner's thought to a much nicer place.

[(Anonymous)]

Appropriation of Steiner's philosophy also made a few old hippies very wealthy, nonetheless some of his ideas are worth perusal.
An interesting parabolic refraction of binaries Nick, enjoyed that culinary post.
Regards - Thomas.

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

that's beautiful.

[erin-lindsay.livejournal.com]

thank you so much for those links. a food blog plus another blog to practice my japanese with? great.

"a portrait of what a Japanese person ate might be a much better depiction of who they are than a picture of their face."

i think this may be true for a lot of people not only japanese persons. what a person eats says a lot about them.

[beketaten.livejournal.com]

How succinctly and beautifully you described my deepest belief that the individual and the collective are one!

food pics

[(Anonymous)]

There are a lot of great food themed groups on flickr. One of my favourites is Mr. Bento Porn

http://flickr.com/groups/mrbento/


Neil

[(Anonymous)]

I don't mind the concept of food blogs in general, and amupurin looks great, but generally speaking, food blogs (and the idea of cooking, with gourmet cooking emphasized) are ridiculous because the owners get so obsessed with restaurant food as opposed to the simplicity of, say, eating strawberries sprinkled with sugar on a spring day. generally speaking, they have money, and with food blogs, they become even more gluttonous, greedy, obsessed not really with food but about the act of direct, immediate consumption.

...but amupurin is pretty great.

Toward a more prosaic food blog

[(Anonymous)]

Everyone has a different attitude toward their food, and this should be reflected in the food blog. Here was a democratic attempt, http://whatrweeating.blogspot.com, dedicated to John Cage.

[intergalactim.livejournal.com]

Avant-garde switch!!?

http://www.plainjapan.com/tsukiji/3point/data/12042007.jpg

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

Hello Momus.

Have you seen this? It will apparently be broadcast this evening:

http://www.channel4.com/more4/drama/g/ghosts.html

hmm

[(Anonymous)]

well, unfortunately we ARE food.
We are the food of the Earth Monster GE.
Hello Japan folk. Cooing this cooing that..
in the end. Burp. Ge Eats all.

so jolly whatever..
no style. no articulation.
no nothing.

Burp. Oops. Ge Eats all.
Maybe you read the right books.
study old statue.
hiccup. burp. Ge not mind anything really.
Only law natural law.
Ha ha! you think you rude? Ha, Ge most
rude of all!! Ge eat ALL!

so sorry you not notice
how absent it all really is..

see

"is"

very odd.


ge like odd.
taste good.
taste same as everything else.

burp.

Cynics: some of the first Back-to-landers?

[(Anonymous)]

I didn't know this, I'm not sure if this is accurate due to it being wikipedia and all:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynicism

"Cynicism was the ancient Greek philosophy, primarily concerned with virtue, whose followers were known as "The Dog Philosophers."[citation needed] They believed virtue was the only necessity for happiness, and that it was entirely sufficient for attaining happiness. The Cynics followed this philosophy to the extent of neglecting everything not furthering their perfection of virtue and attainment of happiness, thus, the title 'Cynics', derived from the Greek word 'kuon', 'dog' in English, was assigned them because they lived like dogs —neglecting society, personal hygiene, family obligations, pursuing money, et cetera— to lead entirely virtuous, and, thus, happy lives [1].

They did not escape Socrates' ridicule.

After his enlightenment, Diogenes traveled throughout Greece, almost naked and without provisions; enjoying the sun, the warm weather, the beaches, and so gathered about him thousands of pilgrims who listened to his talks, pregnant with sarcastic remarks about society. Even Alexander the Great, en route to Asian campaigns once went to him. Diogenes advised him to renounce conquest, however, Alexander declined, with "resignation", believing his destiny already written."

[grrrlishgrin.livejournal.com]

-> friendslist!!