Cookery

Food Rhetorics and Social Production

Edited by Donovan Conley and Justin Eckstein; Afterword by Greg Dickinson

SERIES: Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique

University of Alabama Press

The rhetoric of contemporary food production and consumption with a focus on social boundaries

The rhetoric of food is more than just words about food, and food is more than just edible matter. Cookery: Food Rhetorics and Social Production explores how food mediates both rhetorical influence and material life through the overlapping concepts of invention and production. The classical canon of rhetorical invention entails the process of discovering one’s persuasive appeals, whereas the contemporary landscape of agricultural production touches virtually everyone on the planet. Together, rhetoric and food shape the boundaries of shared living.

The essays in this volume probe the many ways that food informs contemporary social life through its mediation of bodies—human and extra-human alike—in the forms of intoxication, addiction, estrangement, identification, repulsion, and eroticism. Our bodies, in turn, shape the boundaries of food through research, technology, cultural trends, and, of course, by talking about it.

Each chapter explores food’s persuasive nature through a unique prism that includes intoxication, dirt, “food porn,” strange foods, and political “invisibility.” Each case offers new insights about the relations between rhetorical influence and embodied practice through food. As a whole Cookery articulates new ways of viewing food’s powers of persuasion, as well as the inherent role of persuasion in agricultural production.

The purpose of Cookery, then, is to demonstrate the deep rhetoricity of our modern industrial food system through critical examinations of concepts, practices, and tendencies endemic to this system. Food has become an essential topic for discussions concerned with the larger social dynamics of production, distribution, access, reception, consumption, influence, and the fraught question of choice. These questions about food and rhetoric are equally questions about the assumptions, values, and practices of contemporary public life.

Cookery contributes to the fields of rhetoric a sophisticated mapping of how our consummatory pleasures are enmeshed in symbolic significance, including those moments where what is legible as food, desire, and satiation exceeds extant frames of meaning and feeling.’
—Isaac West, author of Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law

‘This collection affirms Plato’s critique of rhetoric by inventively adopting the motions of cooking as germane to rhetoric’s activity. To heat, to cool, to marinate, to brew …the essays herein invite readers to consider rhetorical practice and/as cookery to exceed language use and become understood as nothing less than our most pervasive practice: the constant effort to satisfy the singular tastes we collectively cultivate.’
—Casey Boyle, associate professor of rhetoric and writing at the University of Texas at Austin

Cookery takes the question of food’s and foodways’ relations to rhetoric in new directions with evocative, engaging essays throughout. The reader is asked to consider inebriation not as a metaphor but a material factor of influence; terroir as a concept for understanding the invention of favor for particular objects rooted to place; food pornography a visual genre that directs and interrupts concepts of taste; ‘strange’ foods as challenging to discourses of otherness when the strange becomes familiar; and the political importance of ‘contingent solidities’ regarding what constitutes food amid an increasing, almost structural, impermanence of what food is and does. The chapters work with and against comfortable notions of rhetoric to get at the material, sensuous, economic, and cultural power of food. It will inspire readers not only to take food and foodways seriously as a subject of rhetorical inquiry, but also to consider how food and foodways might alter what we think rhetoric is in a world of appetites.’
—Nathan Stormer, author of Sign of Pathology: U.S. Medical Rhetoric on Abortion, 1800s–1960s

‘Cookery represents an ambitious and provocative collective effort to tackle questions both abiding and timely regarding rhetoric as material and relational. Variously situating these nettlesome, often ‘dirty’ matters ecologically—and more to the point, positing food as the staple axis through which to engage them—contributors prompt novel considerations of how rhetoric becomes, moves, and evolves in and through the world and its inhabitants.’
—Helene A. Shugart, author of Heavy: The Obesity Crisis in Cultural Context

Donovan Conley is Berman Chair in Language and Thought and associate professor of communication studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is coeditor of Imagining China: Rhetorics of Nationalism in an Age of Globalization. He also has published articles in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Pre/Text, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and Culture, Theory and Critique.

Justin Eckstein is assistant professor and director of forensics in the communication department at Pacific Lutheran University. He has published articles in Philosophy and Rhetoric, Argumentation, Argumentation and Advocacy, Western Journal of Communication, and Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, among other journals.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Soiled

Donovan Conley and Justin Eckstein

1. Brewing Influence: The Mixology of Morals

Katie Dickman and Nathaniel A. Rivers

2. The Terroir and Topoi of the Lowcountry

Anna Marjorie Young and Justin Eckstein

3. Food Pornography

Casey R. Kelly

4. Rhetorically Strange Foods

Jeff Rice

5. More than a Membrane