The Good, The Bad
And The Yummy:
Food and What it Means
Within the Warren Wilson College Coming of Age Ritual
Wyn Miller
15 May, 2007
Miller 66
Table of Contents
Abstract
Part I Food and Other Parts of College Life: An Introduction
Chapter 1 Introduction: Coming to Cultural Capital
Personal Motivations
An Undergraduate’s Discovery of Cultural Capital
Refining My Research
Chapter 2 Past Research and Literature
An Introduction to Cultural Capital and the Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu
College as a Coming of Age Ritual
Past Research on College Culture
Methods
Part II Welcome to Wilson: Getting to Know the Site and Participants
From Crazy to Straight: Growing up at Wilson
Work Hard, Play Hard: The Twin Spheres of “College Life”
Negotiating Identity Within a Coming of Age Ritual
Part III Food and What (Or How) it Means to Wilson Kids
Chapter 1 Food: A Form of Cultural Capital
Alternative Types of Cultural Capital
Food: There’s Nothing Funny About It
Foodism: An Everyday Aesthetic
Countercuisine: Food as a Political Statement
Food as a Key Symbol
Food as a Religion
Chapter 2 Foodism: An Ambiguous Binary Opposition
Part IV Foodism and the Coming of Age Ritual
Food Dichotomy Linked to Other Dichotomies
Part V Appendices
List of Interviewees’ Pseudonyms and other data
Interview Questions
Drawings
Miller 66
Abstract
I attempt to discover the roots of perceived elitism present in the environmentalism practiced at Warren Wilson College in the 2000s. I investigate food as a key arena, finding that the system of distinction between “good” and “bad” food constitutes an ambiguous body of knowledge that serves as a form of cultural capital. I apply four anthropological perspectives of food to the “foodism” found at the college: food as an aesthetic preference, as a political statement, as a key symbol, and as a religion. I find that no matter what approach taken, the system of distinction is still an integral factor that allows for the implementation and reproduction of cultural capital, thus introducing elitism into the environmental values of the college. I also view college as a coming of age ritual and explore how the identity-forming aspect of this ritual intersects with the system of cultural capital described above.
Part I
Food and Other Parts of College: An Introduction
Personal Motivations
When I first came to Wilson,[1] I imagined it as a place where an institution and a community practiced the values that I held, and gave opportunities for all members of the community to be involved with what I considered the good things in life. Environmentalism, social equality and simple living were at the core of my value set. Like other prospective students of the College, I was excited and hopeful as to what the institution had in store, and what it was capable of.
Yet during my time here I have come upon a bothersome realization: Warren Wilson is, more than it knows, “not for everyone.” From my first year here, I came to understand that the kids where I grew up—farmers through and through—would not come to this college, and would not last long if they did. Throughout my time at the College, I have come to know closely several individuals who were not “a good fit.” What I mean by this is that they seemed to “lose out” in the Wilson way of things. I think most people, upon hearing this, would say that their personalities just didn’t “fit.” What I have come to understand is that personality does not have all that much to do with it. Rather, one’s demographic background—more plainly put, their socioeconomic status—is one of the biggest deciding factors in whether or not they will turn out to be “good fits” at Warren Wilson College.
To be honest, I must point to one instance in particular that astounds me and stays with me as I consider the issues in my research. I knew a girl my freshman year, very closely, who was on “the losing end,” as I see it. She was an incredibly sweet girl, who loved people and loved the land as much as anyone. She was interested in environmentalism but had not grown up with the environmentalist discourse around her. She had come to Wilson because she loved the world, and she wanted to learn about issues that Warren Wilson considers important—basically the same reasons that brought me to the school. Yet in my fourth year, Savannah[2] (as I will call her) is no longer here. She “failed out” her third semester. Her first semester, when I knew her best, Savannah had chronic problems finding the “balance” required of college students. She had problems with drugs, sexual relationships and work ethic. She also had very few close friends and felt isolated by the “community.”
It bothered me that Savannah had so many problems at this school because it didn’t seem like her fault. Unlike myself, (I come from a perfectly “clean” and safe background) Savannah came from a family and a background that seemed like a scary movie to newly out-of-the-nest me, as a freshman. Savannah’s father was a crackhead and a criminal. Continuously in and out of jail, her father periodically stole money from the family and physically and verbally abused his wife and children. Her mother worked minimum-wage jobs. Savannah had what some refer to as a “troubled background.” She was also a first-generation college student.
As a freshman with no friends, and Savannah’s dorm neighbor, I grew very close to her. I began to see the reoccurring problems in her life as a disease that I could not fix, but only sympathize with (even though I, luckily, was unscathed by the problems). As much as she seemed to want to do her work, to want to believe in her capacity to be a functioning member of the community, Savannah inevitably could not fulfill her obligations. Being the first person with this kind of life that I’d ever met, I was deeply impacted by my experiences with Savannah. I have never forgotten how sad I felt when I learned that she was leaving the college, never to return. I remembered wondering why it was that someone who had seemingly lost out in all other areas of her life had to also lose out at a place that was meant to be just, good, righteous, wonderful—at least in my mind.
Since Savannah I have known many other people who seemed to be in a similar situation. She is one of the many students who come to the college with problems, only to have those problems exacerbated by the pressures of living in a small community. As an anthropologist, there seems to be all too much of a pattern as to who it is that ends up losing out on Wilson. The idea that children from demographically “lower” status don’t do as well in institutionalized education is not new, and this no doubt applies to all levels of education, including college. Yet why at Wilson, my idealized utopia, does this have to take place? Why, at a place that strives for equality, must social hierarchy be reproduced? And why, of all things, must environmentalism—the interest, issue and value that I held in highest regard—seem to be elitist?
This has been the biggest question that I have wrestled with in my time at Wilson, and it has become, in the past two years, the focus of my research. So from the outset, my research has been a personal issue, motivated by my values and my life experience. With this stated, I would like to insist that though it may be motivated by personal reasons, the answers I have found to my own questions should be relevant for a much larger audience than merely myself. I have found that everyone unknowingly perpetuates this hierarchy in their daily lives. We are all equally to blame, and all equally not to blame.
An Undergraduate’s Discovery of Cultural Capital
As I began studying anthropology, I found that I was not alone in questioning why some certain “types” of people seemed to lose out in various areas of our society. Anthropologists seemed to be asking that question in many different ways. I was immediately intrigued by Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital, which to me seemed to be the answer to my question. Bourdieu worked in the 1970s and 1980s to develop an idea called cultural capital, which, as he saw it, was a vessel for the reproduction of social hierarchy. Bourdieu said “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier” (Distinction 1984). Although seemingly complex, the statement is actually implicit common sense: people have tastes about different aspects of the material world, and based upon their tastes, they are either assumed to be “high” or “low” class. An example that sums up this idea is the difference between someone who is “tasteful” and someone who is “tacky.” I observed that Savannah and others like her seemed to be what people considered tacky and therefore I imagined that cultural capital was the answer to my question. This became my research question: How does cultural capital play out on campus and how does it impact students’ lives?
As I began to research, however, I realized that my original idea of “cultural capital” as one entity was not only ambiguous but also incredibly broad. I saw that people differentiate themselves in many ways: the clothes they wear, the dorms they live in, the jobs they hold, the grades they make, the drugs they use, the alcohol they consume, the music they listen to, etc. However, I began to see, among many students, an emphasis on something I hadn’t ever really seriously considered before: food. Whereas I had thought originally that food was merely a snobbish preference for some people who fancied themselves “aware” of the environmental and social impacts of what we consume, I learned that food is much more than that. For a large portion of the student body at Warren Wilson College, food is a definitive aspect of one’s personality. Sometimes it even seems to be so important as to constitute something (anthropologically speaking) sacred. I became more interested in food as my research progressed, and eventually I felt assured that food, more so than anything else, held extremely important meaning for Wilson students.
Refining My Research
The focus of my research has changed considerably from start to finish. After initially investigating in terms of aesthetics and cultural capital, I then started being interested in college as a coming of age ritual. I have come around to seeing that, with college as a coming of age ritual, the important play of cultural capital does take place, though it exceeds the boundaries of what I had originally planned to investigate. Rather than thinking of cultural capital as emanating from aesthetics, I have learned that cultural capital emanates from any type of exclusive knowledge. The conclusions I have made from my research can be summed up in the following statements:
· Cultural capital at Warren Wilson is the primary way in which social hierarchy is reproduced.
· The College must be viewed as an institution that provides for a coming of age ritual—within which individual identity and relation to shared communal values is key in socialization.
· Food constitutes the most important identifying symbol within the community.[3]
· At Wilson, foodism identifies someone who is more “aware” of communal issues and values. (Foodism is the distinction between “good” and “bad” food.[4])
· Foodism may be viewed from a variety of anthropological approaches, all applicable to the Wilson community:
o Food as an aesthetic arena
o Food as a political statement
o Food as a key symbol
o Food as a religion
· No matter which approach taken, foodism constitutes an ambiguous system of distinction.
· Some students learn this system of distinction; others do not. Typically the demographically “higher” population is more able or willing to learn this distinction.
· Foodism thus serves as a form of cultural capital, able to differentiate between high and low classes.
· This cultural capital is the vessel for the reproduction of social hierarchy in the student community.
· Environmentalism, when made manifest in food preferences, becomes elitist through the process described above.
Throughout this essay, I would like to trace the process through which environmentalism becomes elitist through all the different aspects I have witnessed in my research and hopefully show successfully that food is not “merely food” but rather a key player in this process.
Past Research and Literature
An Introduction to Cultural Capital and the Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital was set forth in his book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1984). In this study, Bourdieu set out to “determine how the cultivated disposition and cultural competence that are revealed in the nature of the cultural goods consumed, and in the way they are consumed, vary according to the category of agents...” (1984:13). He carried out a survey that investigated peoples’ tastes in fine art in relation to their socioeconomic status (which he defined mostly by their educational background). Bourdieu stated that
Two basic facts were thus established...the very close relationship linking cultural practices to educational capital [and] social origin...(13)
Thus one finds at the higher the level of education, the greater is the proportion of respondents who, when asked whether a series of objects would make beautiful photographs, refuse the ordinary objects of popular admiration—a first communion, a sunset or a landscape—as “vulgar” or “ugly,” or reject them as “trivial,” “silly,” a bit “wet,” or…naively “human”; and the greater is the proportion who assert the autonomy of the representation with respect to the thing represented by declaring that a beautiful photograph, and a fortiori a beautiful painting, can be made from objects socially designated as meaningless—a metal frame, the bark of a tree, and especially cabbages (35).