Material Food, Spiritual Quest
Authors: Taira Teemu 
Published: October 2020

There is a wide range of academic effort put into the questions of food. It is obvious that eating is necessary for everybody, but it is equally acknowledged that there are lots of cultural meanings in the area of food as well. However, it is rarely answered why preparing food is important to some people. My aim is to address this question in the context of unemployment, where food has social, recreational and spiritual meanings for the whole life. My analysis is based on the writings of the unemployed written during the unexpected recession in Finland in the 1990s. It occurred, perhaps surprisingly, that many participants wrote about food in their entries to the writing contest called 'The Story of the Unemployed'. It is worth mentioning that to be unemployed in Finland means that it is possible to get along because of the -- still on-going but shifting -- welfare state.
Usually the study of food is based on specific problematics within different disciplines. Examples of these include the symbolic connection between food and culture à la Mary Douglas in anthropology, meanings and connotations of food in Barthesian semiotics, and taste as a distinctive feature or the connection between taste and class position in the sociology of taste. In addition, phenomena such as anorexia nervosa and vegetarianism has been explained within a social context by cultural sociologists. Personally I want to introduce a slightly different route. It goes from actual articulation of food and unemployment in the writings of the unemployed to the context of media and consumer culture.
There are certainly some basic explanations why food is included in the stories. When you write a story in the form of a diary, it is easy to tell about eating or cooking. The time of eating is the glue of human relations, the moment of the day which connects partners together. It is not surprising, then, that human relations are of great importance when there is no work and workplace to offer social relations and position in social hierarchy. In spite of this I want to offer more interpretative and provocative insights.
In the societies based on 'primitive technology', hunger was shared (see, for instance, Sahlins). On the contrary, hunger is privatised in modern and postmodern societies. The uneven sharing of food is a result of a hierarchy based on having or not having money. As a result, to keep hunger away means to have at least some money (or favourable friends). In this context, writing about food is a part of the conceptual battle against hunger. It is a conceptual proof of having survived thus far. For those who have a job, their work ensures an economic ability to stay far from the poverty. In addition to this, they have a privileged access to the space of 'normality' of being a good citizen. This is because the Protestant work ethic says so.
In the case of the unemployed the relations are more complex. One's social position is marginalised since the beginning of one's period of unemployment but I suggest that food and things related to it take the place of work. Food becomes a space for continuity when work does not offer it. As long as you have food you do not have to be a criminal to go on. This should be understood in the context of Zygmunt Bauman's provocative statement that, according to the logic of consumer society, differences between its Others (poor, unemployed, criminals, madmen, drug addicts) are fading. To be poor is to be an enemy of the society. Society wants nothing from its others. It would be best if they just burnt their tents and left (Bauman 72-7).
In this context food functions as an element in constructing self-definition of the unemployed. Food prevents them from sliding into a criminal position and keeps up the cultural boundaries between different forms of otherness. The actual point is not whether Bauman's claim is correct or not but its power to illuminate both the worries of the poor and the unemployed and the role food plays in it.
Anything that produces empowerment for the unemployed is important in the situation which normally narrows one's possibilities to act. The situation of the unemployed is usually devoid of social dignity and material resources. That is why it is especially important for them to experience success, to learn something new and to measure it in some ways. Normally these kinds of acts are reserved for the area of work but the unemployed person transfers them into the area of cooking. Making good, perhaps healthy and affordable food allows one to experience feelings of success. This raises one's self-esteem and ability to act. It is perhaps no surprise that most writers emphasise the meaning of cooking in their lives only after they have been left without work.
Food is connected to empowerment in two senses. It is important in itself but it has an instrumental function as well. It produces pleasure and it becomes a part of identity-building (for example when people put effort into making healthy or affordable food). It can also be an instrument in building different life projects when it offers feelings of success and leads to an ability to act on some different level. Thematically, food is a good example of the many activities that allow the unemployed to empower themselves.
When all this is articulated in the context of media, the point and battleground become clear. The image of the unemployed presented in the media is unfortunately one-dimensional at least in Finland and perhaps in other countries as well. Outside the 'human interest' type of magazines, media describe them as unskilled job-seekers or as 'lazy bums'. This picture is part of the neoliberal machinery which blames individuals for their inability to get a job even though the reasons for high unemployment rates are mostly based on changes in the economic structure (such as the breakdown of the Soviet Union, which the Finnish economy previously leaned on, and the low state of technology except for a few leading enterprises). So the notions of food in the writings of the unemployed pointed at the media are an attempt to disarticulate and rearticulate the image of the unemployed.
There is one hegemonic discourse on the topic of identity in consumer culture. Identity is not something you are born with. It is something that everybody constructs, it is changeable and what is more, it is something you can buy in postmodern consumer society. Buy it, be it! Buy caviar -- be high class! Pleasure follows purchase as well as identity. I am not saying that talk about changing identities is just capitalist mishmash. In fact, it is relevant for the unemployed as well. If identity was understood as petrifying, not possible to change, it would be sad to live as an unemployed, carrying the burdens of Protestant work ethic and seeing getting a job as the only way for constructing a reasonable life. That is why talk about contextually changing postmodern identities is not out of picture here. What is the other side of postmodern consumer identity discourse is that the unemployed have no resources to buy their identity. Thus, food comes again into the picture.
For the unemployed, buying food does not lead to identity or to pleasure. It depends on who cooks (unemployed him/herself, partner, friend) and what the food tastes like. Food is not an equivalent to commodities that are ready to use. Raw materials should be handled with skill or with care before food can produce pleasure or empowerment. Accumulation of cultural capital is not based on buying as such, because it is a race where unemployed are definitely determined to resignation compared to economically privileged people. A commodity does not guarantee happiness. It must be made to mean something by using it in a specific way. You can consume cars, clothes and television without the requirement of any special skills. Food and especially cooking resonate with other rhythms. It requires skills. (This point is emphasised in Warde, especially pages 200-1.)
As we have seen, food as a hobby is a part of the life projects of the unemployed. It is an important way to acquire feelings of success. As such, it produces empowerment on an individual level. At the same time, it extends its tentacles to struggle for articulations in the contexts of media and consumer culture. Its aim is to rearticulate the term unemployed as different from the passive media creations. Moreover, it is directed towards consumeristic identity discourse in the sense that food and especially cooking represent an area where identity and pleasure do not follow directly from buying and consuming. Thus, writing about food is a part of a wider spiritual quest -- a way of constructing meanings for life outside the world of work.
On a more general level, this text shows clearly that the questions posed on the problematics of food are complex. Food is never only about material food for biological needs. Its discourses always point to some other spaces depending on the context. Furthermore, when food is articulated together with the unemployed, it should be seen as different from many other forms of building identity by consuming.

References

Bauman, Zygmunt. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor. Buckingham: Open UP, 1998.
Warde, Alan. Consumption, Food and Taste: Culinary Antinomies and Commodity Culture. London: Sage, 1997.
Sahlins, Marshall. Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine, 1972.

Citation reference for this article
MLA style:

Teemu Taira. "Material Food, Spiritual Quest: When Pleasure Does Not Follow Purchase." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/pleasure.php>.

Chicago style:

Teemu Taira, "Material Food, Spiritual Quest: When Pleasure Does Not Follow Purchase," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 7 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/pleasure.php> ([your date of access]).

APA style:

Teemu Taira. (1999) Material food, spiritual quest: when pleasure does not follow purchase. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(7). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/pleasure.php> ([your date of access]).