Bento Day

In Andrea's presentation to us on Thursday, she made a number of points that are important for us to keep in mind as we move on to other topics in the course. The first is that "food is never just food." It is always caught up in cultural systems of meaning, relations of power, and the organization of economic production (meaning, power, value)! Andrea described how Japan's modernization was accompanied by a rural to urban migration during which rice became symbolic of a modern Japanese identity. We forget how novel "national cultures" are because we assume they have always been around. But Japan was tremendously fragmented culturally and even linguistically--there were so many local traditions with no sense of nationhood to bind them together--until the modernization movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The idea of Japan had to be constructed and "rice" became a kind of "common substance" that defined Japaneseness. We might want to think here about food as a common substance--as if consuming it together connects individuals into a larger collective body. This is one important point that Steven Feld was making in "The Boy Who Became a Muni Bird."

However, Andrea also suggested that even today Japan, despite its "myth of homogeneity," still has lines of class, regional, rural/urban difference. In particular, she was anxious for us to understand that the practices described by Anne Allison were most representative of upper-middle-class mothers during the 1980s, in which children were prepped from an early age for the "escalator" toward elite schooling and life-long employment and where much of social life was organized around consumption. This has all changed now with the economic recession in Japan, beginning in the early 1990s. Much of the middle class now face economic insecurity and mothers no longer have the time to make such elaborate bentos. No wonder there is so much nostalgia about them!

In a discussion I had with Andrea prior to the class, she emphasized how important the convenience store has become in Japan, and the rice ball has changed from being something one would make at home and carry to work or school to becoming a commodified form of mass-produced food. This is a topic also discussed in the recommended article by Gavin Whitelaw. You might want to be on the look out for onigiri (rice balls) in their nori-wrapped traditional triangular shape in the food outlets on campus, including the HUB!! I first discovered these early last year and remember thinking that, among all the over-priced options available there, it seemed to offer the most nutritional value for the money--way cheaper than a sandwich and more likely to satisfy late afternoon hunger pangs than a bag of chips. Thinking about this now, after all the reading I have been doing this summer on how industrialized agriculture has changed our diets and the very narrow range of options we have readily available to us, I am struck by the relative healthfulness of the rice ball--yes, I know, it is white rice and all that, but it has a short list of ingredients (one of my criteria for the degree of processedness of foods) and eating one will certainly satisfy. Most processed foods only make me hungrier!