Celebrating Asparagus: Community and the Rationally Constructed Food Festival

"Traditions are always defined in the present" Regina Bendix Inventing Traditions For Whom? (1989: 137) "Asparagus ice cream:...Ya gotta love it!" Festival Goer, Stockton Asparagus Festival (1997) Popular festivals that purport to center on, and revolve around, food are a social phenomenon encountered in virtually all human cultures, from the ritual banquets of ancient Rome to the chili cookoffs of Texas today. In all cases, the colorful variety and oft-times dramatic intensity of these social gatherings have underscored the deep cultural meaning that underlies them, both for natives of the communities involved, and travelers, tourists, and casual visitors who have attended-and many times informally chronicled-these events. Although festivals as a general social form do have a history of academic study,' with some few exceptions (see Humphery and Humphery, Bonner, and Sokolov as examples), the food festival has received far less attention than many of its other types based as they are around foci such as games, music, seasons and/or religious events. This is unfortunate, as the food festival has always been a central source of cohesion and cultural meaning for human communities. As Robert J. Smith has noted, "The central function of this festival seems to be to give occasion to rejoice together-to interact in an ambience of acceptance of conviviality.... The satisfaction creates a bond between participants; they have had pleasure in each other's company"(67). In American culture, this social meaning of the food festival can probably be traced back at least as far as the invention of the myth of the "first Thanksgiving," with its reaffirmation of community for the Pilgrims,2 and its (fictive) celebration of a democratic cultural sharing with Native Americans (Lupton, 26). Ignoring the shaky and often-times exploitative relationship the settlers actually had with these Native American groups, this myth of the dominant culture invents a "reality" of the forging of social bonds of mutual respect between these two groupsand of their cooperation, sharing, and "pleasure in each other's company" (Siskind). The food festival as an American cultural event, then, likely rests on similar mythic reinterpretations of reality that define these events as existing almost outside the constraints of reality itself-community can be both invented and celebrated at such festivals. And, hopefully, some of this fictively instigated social cohesion will actually remain in the community once the festival is over-to (again, hopefully) be ritualistically renewed the following year. Along with this ideologically fostered belief in the worth of community cohesion, there is also the uncomfortable social reality in America of a history of racism, competitive cultural pluralism, and the symbolic and actual mistreatment of immigrant groups (as well as the exploitation of Native Americans and Black American descendants of West African slaves). These uncomfortable facts can perhaps be masked somewhat by celebrations of difference in the relatively neutral area of food preferences. Given the fact that ethnic foods in this immigrant nation stand out sharply as cultural markers against the bland culinary sameness of "American" steak-and-potatoes cuisineit is not surprising that the bulk of academic attention paid American food festivals has focused on this ethnic form and the usefulness of the form in underscoring in-group pride even as it (hopefully) creates multi-cultural cohesion in American communities (see Brown and Mussell, and Udell and Wilson for discussion and examples). And yet there is another type of food festival that is increasingly commonplace in defining cultural forms of community in America. This type of festival which has attracted nearly no academic attention and which I shall term the rationally constructed food festival, is linked to no ethnic heritage, but instead "celebrates" a particular foodstuff, and by so doing, attempts to link this foodstuff to a particular communit or region-such as Waxahatchie, Texas , Cabrito Cookoff or Rockland, Maine's, Lobster Festival do. …