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

[(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.