Consumption

Abstract

Consumption Mavis Reimer From the time that the word consumption entered English from Latin in the late fourteenth century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it carried a double meaning: it could refer to the “wasting of the body” generally (and so came to signify such illnesses as pulmonary disease) and it could refer to the “action or fact of destroying or being destroyed,” such as when a fire reduces something to ashes. Following these nominal uses in English, the verb consume was coined almost immediately to mean, first, to destroy something physically, and shortly thereafter, in its intransitive form, “to eat or drink; to ingest” specifically and to use or exploit resources more generally, and, in its transitive form, to spend (for example, money), especially wastefully, and to squander (for example, goods), as well as to “engage the full attention or energy of (a person).” Linked, then, from its beginnings as an English word to the body, the market, and forms of response, and associated simultaneously or alternately with necessity, engagement, disease, destruction, and waste, consumption has never been a simple idea. Its complications persist. In the introduction to The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption—a thirty-four-chapter, 695-page overview, published in 2012, of the state of scholarly study in the field—Frank Trentmann defines the contemporary study of consumption as including questions about “[t]he acquisition, use, and waste of things, taste and desire” (1); as “a major point of interface” between history and such disciplines as anthropology, sociology, and geography, “stimulating new directions in cultural, global, and material history” (2); and as a prompt to historians, including historians of the present, “to think about the production, representation, and circulation of things, and about the nature of symbolic communication, material practices, and identity formations” (2). Given all of this, Trentmann’s [End Page 1] opening assertion—that “[c]onsumption is a mirror of the human condition” (1)—does not seem to be an overreaching claim. Eating has been said to be “the prototype” of consumption, as Alan Warde observes in his chapter in Trentmann’s volume (377), the first instance from which other kinds of consumption are derived. There are some senses in which this would seem obviously to be true. Standard anthropological accounts of the long history of the development of human societies, for example, focus on the transitions in food sources available to those societies, with forager or hunter-gatherer groups displaying social organizations distinctly different from those of agricultural groups. In The Raw and the Cooked, Claude Lévi-Strauss famously argues that cooking food is the means by which humans first distinguish themselves from other animals and begin to manufacture culture: “not only does cooking mark the transition from nature to culture, but through it and by means of it, the human state can be defined with all its attributes” (164). While he maintains that the categorization of food as raw, cooked, or rotten is basic to all human cuisines (and metaphorically extended to other social activities), what is assigned to each of these categories varies from culture to culture. Once established, however, “culinary traditions remain recognizable over centuries,” according to food researchers, with “eating habits … among the most resistant to change” and “food behaviours … among the last to be abandoned by migrants” (Warde 376–77). The complex commitments of groups to particular food and eating behaviours are noted by Roland Barthes in “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption” when he proposes that food is not only a source of nutrition but also “a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behavior” that can be “read” for its semiotic codes as many other everyday practices can be (29).1 In Mythologies, published before the essay on method, Barthes performs such readings of wine and milk, steak and chips, and ornamental cookery, refusing to accept the “falsely obvious” notions of his society (11) and demonstrating that food can be read in relation to national imaginaries, capitalist systems of production, morphological structures of language, temporal organization, and the display of class identities, among other protocols and systems. In Distinction, his detailed analysis of the principles...