Seven Curious Cases of (In)edibility

What makes food edible or inedible? Or rather, how does food that is edible become inedible, and the other way around? While functionally one would expect stable categories that regulate the respective reproduction of the individual and the social body, some curious cases show remarkable ambiguity, flexibility and openness, moving swiftly from one category to the other.The seven cases are all examples from my own lifeworld, which consists of personal anecdotes as well as global trends, of direct as well as mediatized experiences. The only real selection criterium has been my own capacity to decode a case. Every case presents its own semiotic problem that relates to the dilemma of edibility/inedibility.Semiotically, edibility can either be explained as a function of material affordances (Nanay 2011; Roe 2006), or as a function of symbolic meanings (Douglas 1966; Lévi-Strauss 1983). In the first, taste, shape, color, nutritional properties, etc. of food, actively constrain how food is (bodily) perceived, while in the second, food is only recognized as food because of its cultural location. Both conceptions seem to contain an element of truth and do not exclude complementarity (Fischler 1988). In response, Borghini and Piras (2021) advocate a negotiated structuralism where cultural understandings of food are circumscribed by physical affordances, and the other way around. Similarly, I take food as a conceptual domain where material affordances and socio-symbolic structures live side by side, a wedding cake for example evokes an associative map of ingredients like sugar and cream, but also of rituals, decorum, and people that correlate with it. These maps are culturally variable, both in terms of the conventional ingredients used for such a cake (Borghini 2015), and in terms of social connotations (Barthes 1961). Food is a floating signifier open for a potentially infinite number of readings (Eco 1979). Without a fixed denotation, the meaning of food depends on an underlying context or discourse to anchor it (Barthes 1977). But how exactly does context anchor the meaning of food in the face of its open, yet materially circumscribed, meaning?I attempt to formulate a solution by looking at food and context as two interacting conceptual domains, where context is pragmatically reduced to the salient cues that constitute a frame (Goffman 1974). Next, readers transfer a selection of analogical properties from both domains into a blended conceptual space (Fauconnier 2001), giving way to inferences about edibility/inedibility.The inference that leads to a final judgment on edibility takes place in two steps. The televised story of Willy the calf, for example, conveys some typical signs of a human-pet relationship, giving weight to a first inference of Willy as a pet, rather than Willy as a potential piece of meat. In a second inference, a pet is seen as inedible. In a similar way, the tattoos on the pigs’ skin signify the hand of the artist Wim Delvoye, giving inferential weight to the reading of the tattooed pigs as artistic objects. And although art can be edible, as culinary dishes are increasingly staged as pieces of art and chefs as artists, the tattooed skin analogously turns a pig into a canvas, an inedible object. As for the supermarket product, the expiry date imposes an absolute standardized temporality of before and after, the latter giving inferential weight to the food as rotten, and in a second inferential step, to rotten as inedible. Although rotten is in itself an ambiguous category that can also lead to an edible inference, as is the case with Swedish surströmming where the rotting is deliberate. When the expired (inedible) food is resuscitated by a chef like Bottura and turned into a dish which no longer bears any visual signs of expiration, the final dish and “fiat” of the chef (see Borghini 2015) outweighs the expiry date, making it edible again. Similarly, in sushi and sashimi, raw fish, largely considered inedible, is made edible by fitting it into a cultural format that involves conventions of form and presentation, ways of eating, and implied nationality, generating the cultural output of sushi and sashimi as edible meals. Finally, Bens’s jar of peanut butter is only spoiled because he believes it has been touched by someone. Potentially polluted by an imagined stranger, it becomes inedible (to Ben).In every one of these analogical inferences, a sense of magical thinking (Frazer 1990 [1890]) is involved or even required. Through every inference, food is mentally and socially transformed. The touch of the artist magically turns pigs into art, the televised story turns a calf into a pet, an unseen stranger contaminates a pot of peanut butter, and expiry dates impose metaphorical death sentences onto food. In all instances, food is made inedible. In the cases of “garbage gastronomy,” sushi and sashimi and the “human sausages,” the touch of cooks, techniques, and traditions forge a magical transformation in the opposite direction. Arguably, analogy and magical thinking are part of what makes social life work in the sense that it provides scripts for predictable inference. While the categories of (in)edibility seem stable at first, as are the categories that activate them like pet and artwork, for example, the signs that lead us there can be organized in creative ways to navigate (or fool) us in most unexpected ways. Yet however unpredictable food semiosis can be within a given semiosphere (Parasecoli 2011), human beings show a remarkable ability to read signs in socially accepted ways. We curiously manage to navigate everyday inferences and connect food to a “right” first and a “right” second category in order to make the “right” moral choice.Through these seven curious cases, we can reflect on bigger questions of meaning in social life and move beyond a simplistic framework of rationality/irrationality or materiality/symbolism. Is it rational to eat the tattooed pig or to protect it under its definition as artwork? Hard to say.