[interview: Joana Pellerano] "eating what's edible seems simple, but food is a hard nut to crack”
asserts the communicator, anthropologist, researcher, professor, and co-author of the scientific divulgation site Comida na Cabeça (in English, literally "Food in the Head")
this issue was translated by Luciane Maesp 📧 luciane.maesp@gmail.com
clique aqui para ler em português
On both Saturday mornings I attended Joana Pellerano's Aesthetic Movements, Gastronomic Movements [Movimentos Estéticos, Movimentos Gastronômicos] open course, I held the pee for longer than urologists would recommend. It happened because of – and I was aware of – Joana's ability to speak 50 words per second, knitting concepts, and weaving a beautiful reasoning line with countless references. I couldn't leave my desktop for a minute; if I did, I would lose about 300 words and the sense they build together.
For this reason, I wrote 11 whole pages in less than six hours and complemented them with more notes when I reviewed the classes the following week. I also spoke widely during the course, as, unlike my bladder, my tongue is uncontrollable (in hindsight, this had better be).
Joana is a communicator, anthropologist, researcher on food matters, and a professor on Gastronomy, History, and Culture post-graduation course at SENAC. I came to her through Bia Nunes de Souza, the woman that most knows and recommends interesting gastronomy people.
In Aesthetic Movements, Gastronomic Movements, Joana makes a retrospective from Lúcia Santaella's work Aesthetics: from Plato to Pierce [Estética: de Platão a Pierce], and interwoven the historical thread, presents the transformations that acts of cooking and eating have taken place over the centuries. Marchesi & Vercelloni, Montanari, and Perullo also appear to unroll the skein and reveal intersections with the themes of identity, food choices, behavior, and constructions of meaning in eating. Among the authors esteemed by communicators, Bourdieu and Benjamin neaten the last stitch.
The greatest contribution of this course for the ones who like to think about food – no wonder Joana is one of the brains behind the scientific divulgation site Comida na cabeça [Food in the head] online since 2013 – is contextualizing the social construction of taste at different times, emphasizing the complexity contained in the daily choices that may seem trivial, and, of course, showing how a ruling class call the tendency shots and distinguish itself through food consumption.
Therefore, it was amazing being able to take one hour of Joana's time to interview her and make myself free to ask some preposterous questions. The main excerpts of this conversation organized and edited to fit in this newsletter are next on:
During the course, you said that contemporaneity is a time when we have a myriad of references, that not everyone is looking to the same past. Among this diversity, can we point to examples of food aesthetics of our time?
In this post-modern aesthetic period, we have the possibility of accessing several different food practices, of knowing they exist, and that it's possible to listen to other narratives not only those related to European cuisine.
The possibility of having so many references today doesn't weaken identity?
In post-graduation, we have a subject exactly on it [laughs]. We now have access to ways of eating; weakening of food rules, which are less clear; a very large individualization. These three factors are problematic, but at the same time, they make people feel free to make their own decisions about food choices. That doesn't necessarily mean a loss because the opposite movement also happens: as new developments arrive, people feel impelled to protect what they hold.
Food is a hard nut to crack. Eating what's edible seems simple, but the meanings we give to food are quite complex.
One thing I like to endorse is the complexity of the food act. The choices we make to eat are more complicated than they seem. When we're lucky enough to make three meals a day, these decisions, choices, exchanges, and meanings remain backstage. People who are privileged to eat what they want and when they want, who could think better about food practices and their meaning, don't even chew on it. If they tried to understand this complexity, everyone would benefit.
This line of reasoning that whoever can choose what to eat should make choices thinking about the collective is what I tried to draw on that vegetarianism essay. I just got afraid of reading it again and finding an argumentative loophole [laughs].
I get the impression that people focus on the wrong issue. For example: following a vegetarian diet. They don't try to understand the logic behind it, which is eating everything but animal protein; they miss objective guidance and a magic solution. Then, they go along with digital influencers because they believe these people have secrets to share.
The secret is to have repertoire and autonomy. It's having enough information and leveling it up to knowledge. Even with knowledge, maybe they won't want to make decisions or take the ones we don't judge right. It seems to me that some think that if we tell everyone that the food industry is unhealthy, people will stop consuming. They may stop, but they may keep this consumption as well, and take responsibility for their choices – to save time or because they find it tasty.
Even though it's not easy to list examples of our time's food aesthetic, I wonder if we could say that there is a hegemonic aesthetic based on products loaded with flavor enhancers, and lots of salt, sugar, fat... Would the food industry be one of the resonant voices of our time narrative?
The food industry is paradoxical because it offers a larger variety, shelf time, and outreach. On the other hand, food industry choices are oriented to raise profitability, and its specific objectives don't consider food diversity, so it ends up limiting the possibilities we have.
Whenever there is irony or something misexplained written down, I wonder myself if the future archeologists would understand what it was really about. In other words, with such an enormous amount of highly processed food sales and advertising everywhere, in a thousand years, will people understand that was a lot of effort on the other end of this food-tug-of-war to tension the debate?
[laughs] It all depends on the registers and how they will interpret it. I'm not an archeologist, but I know they are concerned about avoiding anachronism and understanding the pieces of evidence in their context. I believe it's possible to see these differences from what we've been recording.
This battle against the food industry as a whole, from when they serve ready-to-cook meals to when they manufacture what comes inside our homes, is complicated. When these developments came out, the idea was to provide more food and nutrition; to standardize the production method so it won't harm people. A portion of fast food with lots of flavor enhancers, salt, and fat offers a meal with strong and noticeable flavor – whether it's good or not – that gets done quickly and cheaply. This kind of creation revolutionizes the market. People understand it's tasty, low-cost, and fast.
We have a meaningful criticism of the food industry because it still needs to change a lot to offer us beneficial outputs. It brings potential advantages to people, even if we food scholars don't see it as an advantage. The industry does not create a market failure: it takes advantage of pre-existing gaps, and within it either solves or creates a necessity – but the gap was there. The food industry is able to offer ease that people appreciate, such as time-saving, shortcuts, ready-to-eat meals, or at the very least, pre-processed or minimally processed food. As a home cook, industry saves you time, and indeed people look for saving time. Cooking probably shouldn't be a side task, but there are people who have no choice.
That brings up a question that we had no time to discuss during the class, which is about condensed milk, the creation of brigadeiro, and its impact on Brazilian cuisine. I can't imagine being against brigadeiro, but this story is longer and deeper than we know, isn't it?
Brigadeiro1 was created because of or created right after condensed milk was created. The traditional brigadeiro recipe was born with this industrialized product. People tend to think that condensed milk is an issue because it reduced the variety of traditional Brazilian sweets recipes. We used to have all kinds of pudim then it became pudim de leite2 only. It is a concern because we lost variety and flavor, but the condensed milk recipe was practical, low cost, and always worked. As it saved time, money, and frustration, condensed milk reached its place in the national imaginary.
Before, there were dozens of pudins, each cook's own variations. As an example, the orange pudim could be made with more or less orange juice and sugar, measured with a saucer or a specific glass. After condensed milk becomes part of the recipe, it brings a pattern and the can itself becomes the measure. Débora Oliveira researched it in her Masters, and her dissertation turned it into the book "From recipe notebooks to tin can recipes: industry and culinary tradition in Brazil'' [portuguese only].
Today's recipes are minutely detailed, but back then [19th century and early 20th], recipe registers were for people who knew how to cook. The recipe was a reminder and no detailed orientation was needed. Nowadays, people think that the recipes were written that way so the "secret" wouldn't be given away. I believe this is an anachronistic way of thinking. At that time, people used their own knowledge to reach the right point, to know how much an ingredient was enough.
They drown upon the construction of repertoire and culinary knowledge, which we no longer have: people lost the autonomy of reading a recipe and thinking about the amount of an ingredient it will take and the expected cooking point.
Before food industrialization, was there any equivalent transformation that changed the aesthetics of what we eat?
The great navigations deeply altered how we eat. First with the most privileged people, who managed to have access to spices and ingredients, but in the long run, this transformation reached everyone – try to wonder Italia without tomatoes, an American plant. The Industrial Revolution is another point: it changed even agriculture, the way we grow food. There was an acceleration in society and those developments were readily incorporated, so the effects were perceived in the short term.
I have to ask you something I already discussed with a friend, and I don't remember if we reached any conclusion: Can a dish have an aura, according to Walter Benjamin's concept? I ask because currently we understand that haute cuisine has excellence in the dishes it builds and presents, but to be actually tasted for someone, it must be reproduced. An artwork scale reproduced diminishes its intrinsic value... I even doubt whether it would be possible to apply the aura concept for food because there's no way to provide its experience without necessarily reproducing it.
Well, you answered it. The reproducibility is in the food dish production system upfront. In gastronomy, dishes are built to be different. Even restaurants that cook what's available on market, like [kilo] buffets3, the menu changes weekly, and despite using the same ingredients, recipes end up being diverse.
We could say the ingredients are limited editioned, but the dish reproducibility is part of a restaurant operation. It's an interesting discussion. Even though reproduction creates a reaction in people, I'm not sure if we can guarantee that it could be at some point compared to seeing the aura.
As an example, dadinho de tapioca4 is a recipe that has very few registers before it was included in Rodrigo Oliveira's Mocotó restaurant. After serving the dadinhos at Mocotó, the recipe became popular in Brazil and worldwide – even industrialized versions are available now! Adriana Salay, researcher, and Rodrigo's wife says that someday she'll open Instagram and find a Dadinharia [dadinho de tapioca shop] that will sell every possible flavor of dadinhos. We're living in this time where food has been more fashionable than plastic arts. Food gets in use, reproduced, passed down, and then sooner or later settled in people's lives.
Establishing feijoada as a dish that represents Brazilian identity and based on the idea of the "three races union" brings up many questions – especially at this time where we try to think back with the intersectionality prism to understand our colonial history, which wiped out native and enslaved people's culture. In this context, would it be possible to pick iconic dishes of any country?
Whenever we try to point representations it is a cutout, it will always leave something out. These choices are the ruling classes' choices, which have influenced power in society, due to their political and/or economic dominance. This happens when feijoada is understood as a “three races union”5 dish.
Feijoada is adopted precisely as an attempt to include those who were so far left outside. It's a pretty condescending intention to compensate for the lack of political power these dominated peoples had by giving them cultural power, I'd say. As if by handing cultural power it would be possible to erase all the harm of the past. This appraisal is randomly made, and not according to what these peoples identify as important contributions from their culture.
The national representation topic is tricky because how would it be possible to find something that contains so many different aspects of Brazil? A country this big, with so many people living in, talking and eating in such different ways? Even feijoada, which is prepared all over the country, is made in distinct ways – with vegetables; seafood; pork; beef. However, some symbols are recognized as Brazilian throughout Brazil, even if some people don't see themselves represented in it, such as rice and beans. So does farofa, either from corn flour or cassava flour, depending on the region.
Paula Pinto e Silva seeks for these ingredients and ways of eating in the book "Flour, beans and dried meat: a culinary tripod" [portuguese only] in which she talks about these three ingredients and their variations, as different varieties of pulses instead of beans; the diverse processings of corn or cassava flour; and the protein source, which can be dried meat, jerked beef (charque), sun-dried meat (carne de sol), dried shrimp or even dry-aged beef [laughs]. Through this triad, we can include many more people.
But national cuisines will always be choices, and almost always a political choice that aims to bond people around something collective. It's a symbology that looks for unity.
Do you have a suggested interviewee for LOW HEAT? Email me! schiochetflavia@gmail.com
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NT: A fudgy confection of cooked condensed milk with cocoa powder. In the most traditional version, usually served at children’s birthday parties, it is round-shaped like a truffle and covered with chocolate sprinkles. Cheffed up versions, called brigadeiro gourmet, have taken place in sweet shops and wedding parties. Some modernist versions can be found on fine dining restaurants’ dessert menus. When homemade, probably it will be served as brigadeiro de colher when people casually eat it with a spoon directly from the plate used to cool it down after cooking.
NT: Pudim's recipes have varied a lot through time, from denser and heavier to lighter smoother textures. The most iconic version is pudim de leite, a cold silky flan dessert, baked in a water bath usually on a tube pan. Its recipe takes only condensed milk, regular milk, and eggs – topped with the golden color of caramel sauce.
NT: In Brazil, a buffet por quilo is a very popular option for lunch, especially for the ones who are short on time. The prepared dishes – like salads, dressings, rice, beans, grilled meats, french fries, etc – are displayed in a line where you can self-serve. In the end, you’re charged by the weight of your plate.
NT: Rodrigo Oliveira's dadinho de tapioca recipe is made of small tapioca pearls/tapioca granulada cooked in milk and coalho cheese. After resting in a tray, this dough gets firm and is sliced in a dice shape (dadinho means "little dice"), then deep-fried. The result is a delicious fritter, crispy on the outside, with a cheesy, moist, and slightly sticky interior. This Brazilian 21st-century recipe is sometimes translated as tapioca cubes or tapioca dices. If you are in Los Angeles you can taste it in the recently opened Caboco.
NT: The myth of "the union of the three races" is an early 20th-century racist idea that advocates that Brazil was equally built by Europeans/Portuguese, Native, and African people. Although it is still present in some conservative minds, this theory ignores our decimation, repression, and enslavement past which developed for Brazil being an extremely unequal society, with an open wound of this unsolved background. This article discusses one face of this problem.