DINNER AT THE MUSEUM PART II: FOOD IN THE AGE OF ITS MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION

The language surrounding food and its consumption is often a language of great sentimentality. To give a few examples this website has offered: we have spoken of the comfort of food as “one of the strongest connections any of us can feel”, called it “immensely important to our sense of self”, and “a moment of passion in mundane everyday situations”. It is truly cringy content. But, not unlike falling in love, which can turn the most level-headed individual into a giggling teenager, flushed cheeks and all, talking about food just does that to you. Or, at least, some food. Perhaps that bouillabaisse you had in “that sweet little restaurant on the Côte d’Azur one night in July many moons ago” (another one from the archives); probably not that bucket of wings from KFC, however, as delicious as it may have been, and even if that KFC was also right there, on that same Côte d’Azur. Reading that last sentence, you might have let out a small sigh, felt your eyelids become heavy and thought: I’ve heard this before. Because as often as the language around food is sentimental, it is also elitist. But the point here is not that fast food is bad. The point is that there is nothing sentimental about KFC. It is no place for illusion: KFC is a cold reality.

Although, of course, there is a myth, a backstory — everything has a backstory —, and KFC’s is actually quite a good one, one some might even call sentimental. It is something about a man in a white suit and an old-timey string tie: a colonel, and something about Southern hospitality from mythical Kentucky, as well as some very secret herbs and spices. It’s a story no one believes — or ever thinks about. No one thinks about Kentucky. Instead, what people think about is chicken, and they could be in Manilla, or Gdánsk, or Benin, or, for what it’s worth, on the Côte d’Azur. It does not matter, for when one is at KFC, one is at KFC. This peculiarity, this “quirk”, is something that KFC shares with all other international chain restaurants, as well as airports, train stations and highway hotels: places which French anthropologist Marc Augé dubbed non-places.

To understand what this means, it’s important to note the anthropological difference between places and spaces. Space is purely geographical: it is ‘location’ in the sense of coordinates on a map. A place, on the other hand, is meaning assigned to space. A place is charged with identity, culture and historical awareness; in short, places are spaces with which we have relationships, and which, in turn, exist in relation to their surroundings. Take, for instance, a school. As an individual inhabits it, it offers them structure, a sense of identity and a relationship to the location and its culture. When Augé wrote his book Non-places in the early nineteen-nineties, he saw us increasingly inhabiting what-seemed-like-places but weren’t really places at all, in other words: places that stood in no relation to inhabitants and their surroundings — to the culture and history of place. Driving down endless highways, a person is in limbo, quite literally neither here nor there, passing through anonymously without ever feeling connected to, say, a particular stretch of asphalt. Few people, except perhaps truck drivers, will feel a sense of belonging on a highway. And while one might argue that is sort of the point of a highway, more and more commonplaces of our lives are exhibiting that same quality — or lack thereof. These non-places include hotel rooms, airports, shopping malls and, arguably, a lot of restaurants.

Years from now, we still remember fondly the restaurant on the Côte d’Azur, but we will only remember a general idea of KFC, of any and all KFCs. The first restaurant is charged with symbols (vacation, summer, life “as it should be”), that are tied to space and time: it has meaning. KFC, for the most part, is reduced to a place of function as we pass through to fulfil a craving for crunchy, juicy chicken. Of course, these restaurants can — and do —  become the stage for celebrations or other momentous occasions, but it will be hard, years down the line, to remember a specific locale to which those memories belong, because they too easily blend into memories of other KFCs. That isn’t just because these restaurants all look the same. It’s the food, too.

Sentimental narratives push the point of food as an expression of creativity, culture and custom. Recently, we ourselves pondered: isn’t food in equal measures fuel and art form, up there with painting and sculpting and writing? It’s a difficult question to answer, but say it is so —  what would that mean for chain restaurants, where the same food can be bought from Dubai to Medellín? We might look to Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay of cultural criticism The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction for some context. In the decades leading up to Benjamin writing what is probably his most famous text, new forms of popular culture had emerged which drastically changed the means of production and consumption of media and art. In the span of a few years, both radio broadcast and film had revolutionised the media landscape and created new forms for artists to work within. Benjamin notes that while art, in theory, had always been reproducible, these new forms were meant to be reproduced. In fact, they had to be. Had a single person been able to own a painting, the creation of a film was so expensive that it could only be done if it was paid for through the masses’ ownership of it. This act of reproduction completely threw out what had always been a holy grail of sorts in art: genuineness. In film, there is no Original — or: each duplicate is as much Original and copy as the other original copies. How different that is for, say, the Mona Lisa, whose mysterious smile still brings hordes of people to Paris each year, some 500 years after she was created. Seeing her is a transcendental experience. You might take a photo, but why bother? A photo of the Mona Lisa is not something everyone hasn’t seen before. But being there is how she works her magic. It’s an experience that is related to time and space, and can’t be repeated. One can go back, of course, but it won’t be the same experience.

According to Benjamin, what films — in contrast to the Mona Lisa — lack, is aura: their relation to a “here and now”, a sense of presence, of singularity. What they offer, instead of perhaps excitement, is a sense of familiarity, of ease, of distraction. Perhaps, this also goes for fast food. Anyone who has spent more than a week abroad in a country with an eating culture drastically different from one’s own knows how comforting a hotel breakfast can be, or a meal from a major chain: something that isn’t necessarily a part of one’s identity, but still feels familiar. Of course, this won’t be the meal that one will remember, or write home about. Instead, these meals seem to root us, once again, in “real life”. And that can be a great comfort in its own right — as Annie Dillard once wrote: “One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.”

Looking at life through the most matter-of-fact glasses, it consists of time passing, from the moment we are born until the moment we die. Ask any biographer, however, and they will tell you that “life” is something different than that. Only some of actual life is worth retelling, only part of it adds to the narrative. The narrative, of course, is always sentimental, and the narrative is what will be remembered. Real life, on the other hand, is banal, often boring. As is a lot, if not most, of the food we eat while living it. In that sense, there is something very honest about chain restaurants. Their nondescript locales don’t claim to be memorable, their food doesn’t pretend to have any local flair. It just is what it is, practical, temporarily satisfying, familiar yet coolly distant: it doesn’t ask of us to pay any particular attention to it. Food from big chains is food in the age of mechanical reproduction, and as such serves a function. Like all food, of course, it’s fuel (although its quality as fuel in many cases can be argued). But it’s also a form of comfort, in the least sentimental sense of that word. As much as food writing focuses on the meaningful and the life-changing, some food is comforting exactly because it does not ask us to remember it, to pay attention to it, or to see it as a part of ourselves and our stories. We are told to always be present when we eat, to be grateful for each bite. That is a noble idea, but it sets a standard that seems to be way out on the horizon for most of us mere mortals. On some days, we are ready to receive the aura of the first spring peas, freshly harvested — to bathe in the bounty of nature and life and the universe. On others, we want a quick meal and then get on with it. That, too, is food— and that, too, is life: it might not be right, but it’s real.

Text: Yannic Moeken
Copy Edit: Charlotte Faltas
Video: Junshen Wu, Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain, Yannic Moeken

Sources: 

The Cultural Courier: Everyday Anthropology. Space vs. Place.
Walter Benjamin: Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Frankfurt am Main, Edition Suhrkamp 2015.
Marc Augé. Nicht-Orte. München, C.H. Beck 2014.
Annie Dillard: Total Eclipse. In: Teaching a Stone to Talk. Expeditions and Encounters. New York, Harper Collins 1992.