University of Arizona Press

Chapter Title: Loving People, Hating What They Eat: Marginal Foods and Social
Boundaries
Chapter Author(s): Richard Wilk

Book Title: Reimagining Marginalized Foods

Book Subtitle: Global Processes, Local Places
Book Editor(s): ELIZABETH FINNIS
Published by: University of Arizona Press

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 chapter one

Loving People,
Hating What They Eat
Marginal Foods and
Social Boundaries

Richard Wilk

This is a conceptual essay that asks general questions about how likes and
dislikes for cuisines are related to attitudes towards groups of people. Why
do people sometimes want to eat the food of a despised other, for example,
Chinese food among Anglo settlers in gold rush California? How do food
boundaries relate to social boundaries? My goal is to put the whole issue
of why some foods become “marginal” and others central, why some foods
are loved and others despised, into a more general theory of taste and
social boundaries.
There are many reasons why a food, spice, or ingredient might be con-
sidered marginal. It could be extremely common, cheap, and low in sta-
tus, or rare and expensive, limited in seasonality or distribution, or highly
perishable. As psychologists and nutritionists suggest, a marginal food
might also be potentially (or seasonally) poisonous, lacking in nutrients,
contaminated with microbes or chemicals, or so labor-intensive to obtain
and prepare that the nutritional payoff does not justify the effort. Another
form of marginality that is more familiar to ethnographers is the cultural
definition of a food or ingredient as unclean or taboo, on the basis of either
mythological connections or the magical effects of particular foods on the
body. These kinds of marginal foods are peripheral to this paper, which
focuses instead on food that is socially marginalized.

15

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 16 · Richard Wilk

In every culture, foods acquire significance partially because of the way

they relate to social groups and boundaries. But there is no direct relation-
ship between marginal foods and marginal groups of people; in fact, the
opposite may be true, where socially marginal groups have to constantly
strive to fit in by conforming to the blandest of mainstream standards, for
fear of even greater marginalization (Murcott 1996). In this paper I argue
that in order to recognize the complex relationships between marginal
people and marginal foods, we must understand how foods and groups
are related to one another in a system of taste, a historically and culturally
specific set of relationships between foods that defines their values relative
to each other. Marginality is a relational concept, so a despised food is
always marginal in relation to others, and it is these relationships, rather
than qualities of the foods themselves, which I explore here.

Tastes and Distastes

An older anthropology of food and taste concentrated on the close rela-

tionship between taste and entire cultures, or even types of cultures. For
structural and cognitive anthropology in the tradition of Douglas, Leach,
and Sahlins, tastes are social and categorical, forming neat oppositional
pairs, and defining bounded categories of time and identity. As such, the
classic “primitive” has no individual tastes at all, only categories of proper
and improper, clean and dirty. So “primitive society” was constructed as
one shaped by constraint rather than demand, and these constraints were
categorical and typological rather than individual or interior processes
of identity formation. This is reflected in literature on rural and peasant
foods. Goody (1982) described a near-universal human diet based on one
or two staple starches, eaten with a simple sauce made from some com-
bination of vegetables and small amounts of meat, fish, or other protein.
More recent work challenges the “monotony thesis” that erases taste
from premodern society. Weiss’s work on the Haya of Tanzania, for exam-
ple, shows that they make very fine distinctions of taste and texture among
home-brewed banana beers and other staples (Weiss 1996). The Q’eqchi’
Mayan farmers I worked with in southern Belize in 1979–80 got almost all
of their calories from tortillas and corn dumplings, which I found indistin-
guishable (and often indigestible). But everyone in the village could iden-
tify an individual cook from the tortilla’s shape, texture, and flavor. They
were connoisseurs of subtle distinctions that I had not learned to make.
Even in a situation of seeming uniformity and monotony, and even where

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 Loving People, Hating What They Eat · 17

food is scarce and people are close to starvation, people readily distinguish
their preferred foods, pick their favorites, and judge quality.
A focus on preferences alone, however, can be very deceptive. People
often attempt to map nations and ethnic groups with emblematic foods,
like roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, or hamburgers and hot dogs. Spier-
ing (2006), for example, discusses the English self-characterization as a
“beef eating people” and their complementary “phagophobia” towards the
overrefined cuisine of the French, and Markowitz (chapter 2) discusses
urban Peruvian perceptions of alpaca meat as a “dirty, hazardous Indian
food.” In practice, these emblems do not reflect real dietary practices or
even preferences in any systematic way (Rooney 1982). Like other kinds
of material culture, food styles do not always directly correspond to the
ethnic, national, or social borders that appear on maps (see Hodder 1982).
Defining social boundaries by looking at preferred or symbolic foods is
also subject to selection bias, where the choice of food determines the loca-
tion of the boundary.1 It is too easy to pick some dish, style, ingredient, or
recipe that defines whatever social boundary we seek. So in a multiethnic
country like Belize (where I have worked since 1973) it is possible to find
dishes that are eaten by people who define themselves as East Indians,
and other foods designated for Maya, Creole, Garifuna, and Mestizo. In
fact, this is exactly what people do every year at events like Carnival and
the national agricultural show, where each ethnic group presents an em-
blematic dish, along with their traditional dress, dance, and music, in the
kind of pageant of diversity approved by an official government policy of
tolerant multiculturalism. There is no question that from an emic point
of view, these foods have symbolic weight and cultural importance. But
objectively, ethnic boundaries do not always appear in the food practices
of daily life, and one could choose ingredients or dishes that would pro-
duce different boundaries, or even national uniformity. The location of
the boundary depends on which preferences are chosen.
Beyond the early literature on taboo and a psychological literature on
disgust, there is very little systematic research on the social role of distastes.
But in a world where preferences constantly multiply, one could argue that
distastes should become more and more significant. Certainly the explo-
sion of “picky eating” among North American and now Chinese children
seems to suggest that distaste is an important way for people to assert their
individuality and difference in consumer society (Counihan 1992; Jing
2000). In small, face-to-face communities, distastes can be much more
subtle and expressive means of expressing affiliations, origins, and beliefs
than preferences are (Brekke and Howarth 2000), and distastes can impose

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 18 · Richard Wilk

very different kinds of social discipline than tastes. As a matter of social

learning, distastes are also very important: playing a role in society requires
learning what kinds of goods to dislike, what things are inappropriate in
various settings and situations, and what are proper means of showing de-
grees of disgust with varying degrees of subtlety (Bourdieu 1984). Dislike
is an essential part of our conscious and strategic relationship with goods
in social life, and the flow of fashion, growth during the life course, and
social change all require that we learn to dislike things that we once valued
very highly.
There is also evidence that people learn tastes and distastes in different
ways, and that distastes can be manipulated by advertisers and marketers.
Historians have shown how disgust and distaste were carefully cultivated
and nurtured tools in selling twentieth-century consumers a huge range of
chemicals and cleaning tools, appliances, and products (Hoy 1996; Smith
2008). Vacuum cleaner manufacturers invented different kinds of dirt, and
deodorant producers elaborated a complex taxonomy of bad smells (Wil-
liamson 1986:223).
In their 1993 book Marketing to and through Kids, Guber and Berry
give practical instructions for selling products to what was then a $150
billion children’s market in North America (the figure rose to about $300
billion by 2001 [VOA 2001]). At the very beginning of the book, the au-
thors argue that what impels children is not so much the desire to have
the right things, but the fear of having the wrong things, tastes that would
make them outcasts. Critics of consumerism often see marketing as the
process of instilling new desires, but this manual reveals that the secret of
children’s mass consumption is instead teaching children to reject often-
familiar things they have already learned to like at home, to acquire a
complex set of distastes. It logically follows that any theory of how foods are
marginalized, taken off the menu so to speak, cannot be separated from a
theory that accounts for valued tastes and popularity.

Inclusion and Exclusion

It is an anthropological truism that social boundaries are produced

through relations of inclusion and exclusion (see particularly the work
of Frederik Barth and Irving Goffman). People can define themselves as
members of a group because they share qualities such as language, dress,
political beliefs, or skin color. In doing so they implicitly or explicitly con-
trast themselves with other people who do not share these qualities or who

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 Loving People, Hating What They Eat · 19

have qualities or customs that are different (Royce 1982). The classic eth-
nographic literature on marginalized and “outcaste” groups like the Bura-
kumin, Gypsies, and Untouchables tends to assume that the dimensions of
difference that hold groups together on either side of a cultural boundary
are closely related to the ones that keep them apart, and even that they
are mirror images of one another. These complementarities are expressed
through dichotomies like clean/unclean, high/low, and light/dark, but
these differences are often portrayed as static and timeless, when in fact
anthropologists have found that they require constant efforts at boundary
maintenance and reinforcement.
The role of food in making social boundaries should lead us to think
these assumptions through in more detail. Let me give an example. When
I was growing up in southern Connecticut, I was an avid fisherman. In
both rivers and estuaries I would occasionally catch eels. Initially put off
by their size, sliminess, and resemblance to snakes, I asked in the local
bait shop if they were edible. The white owner and customers cautioned
me that eels were inedible, that they were dirty bottom feeders that ate gar-
bage, and that only blacks ate them. I was advised to kill them and throw
them back in the water because they were “trash fish.” I later confirmed
that there were indeed people in a neighboring, predominantly African
American community who considered eels delectable, and sought them
out. This contrasted strongly with the attitudes toward lobster in the same
two communities. At that time an exalted delicacy in the richer white
community, lobsters were considered dirty and inedible by many African
Americans (this attitude has changed since the 1960s). Eel and lobster
therefore provide a contrasting pair of foods with which we can explore
the relationships involved in creating and maintaining a social boundary.
In this case there are actually two very distinct forms of boundary mak-
ing at work. One is inclusion based on shared distaste: “we (white people)
do not eat eels.” The second is exclusion based on a shared taste: “they
(black people) eat eels.” But this does not complete the matrix of possible
combinations of taste/distaste and inclusion/exclusion, as I show in figure
1.1.2 People can also define themselves as members of a group (inclu-
sion) because they share tastes with others: “we (white people) love lob-
ster.” And they can exclude others on the basis of not sharing a taste: “they
(black people) do not eat lobster.”
The various symmetries of this matrix reveal that a taste or distaste is
not enough in itself to create a social boundary. Furthermore, instead of
two possible sets of relationships between likes and dislikes, there are ac-
tually four. Both likes and dislikes can act as forms of social inclusion or

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 20 · Richard Wilk

Inclusion Exclusion
Love “We love lobster.” “You love eel.”
Hate “We hate eel.” “You hate lobster.”

Figure 1.1. A matrix defining possible combinations of ways that food likes and
dislikes can be used to define social boundaries through either inclusion or
exclusion.

exclusion. We might expect the sets in figure 1.1 to line up in diagonal

pairs, such that one group likes something that another group hates, and
vice versa, but there is no necessary reason why likes and dislikes should be
linked in this way. It is equally possible for the two horizontal positions to
exist independently, or for all four to operate at once. We could make the
chart even more complex by introducing indifference as another option,
as in “Lobster is our favorite food, but you don’t care about it or consider
it special.” Rejecting the significance of another group’s special feast or
festival foods, or indeed its unclean or forbidden ones, may be enough to
instantiate a boundary. One can even imagine cases where indifference is
more powerful than distaste, since distaste involves recognition, a kind of
categorical equality. Indifference can actually signify a superiority so great
that the “other” is not even recognized or allowed on the social “map.”
My key point here is, first, that we need to pay attention to the specific
kinds of relationships that make some foods marginal, and to recognize that
social boundaries can be created, challenged, and maintained through
a variety of tastes, distastes, and other emotions. It is also worth noting
how the public possibilities of taste and distaste are very asymmetrical. In
anonymous, large social groups, likes are much more easily signaled than
dislikes. It is easy to see what you do like to eat, because eating is a visible
performance, but it is much harder to tell what you don’t like to eat—that
takes a lot more time and observation. So tastes may have much stronger
signaling possibilities in public social situations, while distastes and avoid-
ances are much more effective in smaller and more intimate, face-to-face
communities. Carnivory is visible to everyone who sees you coming out of
the butcher shop, while buying vegetables alone does not identify you as
a vegetarian. Social knowledge and expertise is always required to make
useful sense out of other peoples’ tastes and distastes, but it is a more com-
plex task to interpret distastes. This might help explain why consumption
is not always very conspicuous, while avoidance and taboo may require
strong assertions of faith, visible and prominent symbols of orthodoxy, and

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 Loving People, Hating What They Eat · 21

repeated public statements of abstention, in order to be visible and taken

seriously. Identity through consumption does not require constant over-
sight or supervision, but distastes or aversions are ever-present and need
vigilance, constant effort to avoid pollution.

Classifying Food and People

One of Bourdieu’s most important dicta in Distinction is that consump-

tion is an act that simultaneously classifies objects while it “classifies the
classifier” (1984:6). When people divide food up into groups, they also
divide themselves into groups. So across social boundaries, we should ex-
pect to find different classifications of food, and different systems of names
for food groups and ingredients. For example, poor rural people may clas-
sify snails and eels as subsistence foods, while rich urban people classify
them as gourmet treats, and the middle class treats both as inedible and
disgusting. This dynamic means that in a single society or social group
at any moment there are popular and unpopular foods, but because of
social competition and the instability of social boundaries, food taxono-
mies instantly change, and foods or dishes may switch positions in those
taxonomies.
Food anthropologists often study the changing social positions of foods,
and the ways classifying food as traditional, modern, national, or ethnic
acts to mark class or ethnic groups (e.g., Billard 2006; Stanford, this vol-
ume; Utari, this volume). Typically, some group identifies itself as the
keeper of real tradition, stereotypes others as inauthentic, and chooses a
group of symbolic foods that represent their concept of the past. Alterna-
tively, a group might classify some foods as healthy, hygienic, and modern,
and depict themselves as partisans of a new and progressive social order.
The boundaries between “traditionalists” and “modernizers” may stay the
same even as foods change their polarity and meaning. As Pilcher (1998)
documents, dietary modernists in Mexico championed wheat over indig-
enous maize for decades, but moved on to other issues when science con-
spicuously failed to support their claims.
Similarly, the above-mentioned case of eels in the United States is a
striking example of how a food can go from being mainstream to margin-
alized in a relatively short period of time. From settlement right through
the nineteenth century, eels were considered a great delicacy in the east-
ern United States, associated with sophisticated consumers, as they were
in Europe. They were harvested in large quantities, and eaten widely in

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 22 · Richard Wilk

urban and rural areas. Then, in a relatively short time between 1900
and World War I, for reasons that still remain obscure, they became
“unwholesome” and even “inedible” and dropped off menus entirely
(Schweid 2003). In all likelihood they were associated with European
immigrants at a time of severe public backlash and hostility towards mass
immigration. Eels were replaced with “safer” and more recognizably na-
tive fish and meats. They only returned to favor in the late twentieth
century in the form of Japanese sushi, which ironically is usually made
from eels caught in the United States then shipped to Japan for fattening
and processing (Corson 2007)! The regularity and predictability of these
processes of replacement of one food by another suggests that there is
an underlying order to the way food classifications change in complex
capitalist societies.
To try to identify some of these patterns, I set out in 1990 to replicate
the survey that formed the basis for Bourdieu's book Distinction (1984)
and is reproduced in an appendix to that book. My survey included 389
individuals from three different communities: 250 from Belize City, 81
from the small but cosmopolitan city of Belmopan, and 58 from a rural
Creole village. There was a high degree of ethnic mix in Belize City and
Belmopan, and 101 people identified their parents as speaking two differ-
ent birth languages.
In the survey items I paid much more attention to foreign travel, close
relatives living abroad, ethnic background, exposure to media, and gender
than Bourdieu did in France. Also, Bourdieu asked only what people liked,
and what their favorite items and practices were, in retrospect a peculiar
choice for a book about social distinctions. I mostly followed his lead. My
survey covered all kinds of tastes and preferences in music, interior deco-
ration, clothing, music, television, films, and reading matter, usually by
asking respondents to pick their favorites from a list.
While I was making up the survey and pretesting it in focus groups,
though, I was struck by the dramatic uniformity of Belizean preferences.
Most people, regardless of class and ethnicity, seemed to like pretty much
the same foods, the same TV shows, and the same music. When I tried to
discuss with people why they liked particular foods or shows or music, I
found them very inarticulate (unusual for Belizeans!). “Well, I just like it.”
“It just tastes good to me, that’s all.” But when I got people talking about
what they did not like, I often could not stop them. Strong distaste was
evocative of personal events, family connections, politics, cultural differ-
ences, aging, and life philosophy—the full, rich range of ways that taste
and preference are part of daily life.

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 Loving People, Hating What They Eat · 23

As among North Americans, food dislikes were often associated with

unusual textures and strong odor: “I don’t like that because it is so chewy”;
or “That slimy feeling in your mouth afterwards,” were common answers
to my questions about why particular foods were hated. This is an inter-
esting contrast with preferred foods, for which texture and smell rarely
surfaced as key qualities when informants explained their choices.
For this reason I added items about dislikes to the survey. Question 23 was
a list of twenty-two kinds of music, with people asked to pick three favorites.
The next question asked them to pick two that they “really don’t like and
would not listen to.” Question 30 offered a list of twenty-one kinds of food,
including Creole, Hispanic, English, and international dishes. Respondents
rated each item on a four-value scale: “love,” “like,” “dislike,” and “hate.”
In general, the data from the main section of the survey (regarding the
things that people liked) proved opaque and unenlightening. Unlike the
France of Bourdieu’s depiction, Belize did not have a refined hierarchy of
taste, where subgroups could be easily distinguished on the basis of their
preferences for particular kinds of music, food, dress, and décor (Wilk 1994).
The average person loved 6.1 foods on my list (range 0–19) while hating 4.3
(range 0–14). Very few of the preference items in the survey showed statisti-
cally significant correlations with any of my measures of education, wealth,
exposure to media, amount of foreign travel, age, gender, or ethnicity. My
“Loving” food index correlated significantly (1-tailed at < .01 significance)
with only one variable: education level. More highly educated people
tended to love fewer foods, a sad commentary on the value of education
perhaps, but a realistic measure of its success in imparting cultural capital.
Distastes in music and food, on the other hand, were easy to connect to
a number of social traits. My index of food hatred correlated significantly
with eight out of ten social variables. Urban people tended to hate more
things, as did those whose parents were both Creole. People who were
richer, had higher household incomes, were better educated and worked
in higher-status occupations all tended to have fewer specific hated foods.
This may be a direct product of the colonial history of Belize, which
achieved independence only nine years before the survey was conducted.
As citizens of a newly emerging state, educated and well-traveled Beliz-
eans may have found it important to be cosmopolitan, open to a wide
variety of tastes, while expressing fewer strong preferences or antipathies
towards the mixture of local and foreign items on my survey.
This accords with work in the United States which showed that more
highly educated people are more tolerant and have fewer dislikes, at least
when it comes to music styles (Bryson 1996:895). Little other systematic

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 24 · Richard Wilk

work has been done on the social distribution of dislikes (but see Warde
2011).
Regardless of their significance independently, the data on likes and
dislikes, when combined, provided a means of dividing the twenty-one
different foods into groups, based on the combinations of likes and dislikes
shown for each. I simply tabulated the number of people choosing each
of the four scores for each of the foods on the list, and sorted them accord-
ing to the profile of responses. Ignoring for the moment those that did not
evoke strong feelings one way or the other, the rest of the foods fall into
four categories, as mapped in figure 1.2.

1. Those that many people love and many people hate (e.g., cowfoot
soup)
2. Those few people love, but many people hate (e.g., tuna sandwich)
3. Those many people love and few people hate (e.g., rice and beans)
4. Those few people love and few people hate (e.g., hamburger)

In Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) and later works, Bourdieu pro-

vides a model for thinking about how cultural taxonomies and structures
like kinship are used and practiced in daily life. His analytical categories
can be readily adapted to make sense out of each of the positions defined
in figure 1.2. According to his terminology, cell 4 on the lower right is the
space of doxa, or the habitus, the taken-for-granted, habitual practices that
people hardly notice. A food occupying this position is so much a part of

Love
+ –
1 2
cowfoot soup tuna sandwich
+
(Bourdieu’s
Hate heterodoxy)
3 4
– rice and beans hamburger
(Bourdieu’s orthodoxy) (Bourdieu’s doxa)

Figure 1.2. A matrix defined by preference scores given to differ-

ent foods on a survey conducted in Belize in 1990. Foods were
ranked according to the total number of people in the sample
who rated a food as “loved” or “hated.”

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 Loving People, Hating What They Eat · 25

daily life that it has little significance. It is the kind of food you might serve
at an informal event not related to food at all, where you just want to make
sure you serve food that everyone will eat.
In a society like Belize, where few people are vegetarians, grilled meat
generally fits this category neatly, and the hamburger has been a common
casual food for at least fifty years. And of course, since Belizeans watch
a great deal of cable television taken from satellite feeds complete with
commercials, they see thousands of advertisements for hamburgers every
week. Cell 4 on the chart corresponds well to what Miller and Woodward
(2007) call “the ordinary,” or the “blindingly obvious” everyday articles of
consumption like denim pants which are so common we barely see them
any more. They are unremarkable and ubiquitous, and on one level quite
uniform, while at the same time being infinitely adaptable and customiz-
able, so they allow each person both to fit into a public group and to feel
like an individual.
Cell 1 on the upper left corresponds to Bourdieu’s category of hetero-
doxy, a zone where strongly opposed positions are contested in public.
These positions are more than just different interpretations of the same ide-
ologies or rules; they are contested values that people think of as opposed
or mutually incompatible. In heterodox situations, people are forced to
choose sides. Bourdieu depicts doxa as a relatively stable position, where
cultural values are experienced as entirely natural and unquestioned, in
contrast to the inherent instability of heterodoxy. It is also possible to think
of situations where heterodoxy can be stable. When contrasting values are
held by different classes or ethnic groups within a nation-state—when they
represent alternative political, moral, or religious ideologies—heterodoxy
could persist for a long time, mirroring the stability of the boundaries be-
tween categories of people.
Foods can certainly be closely linked to heterodox positions, as is cow-
foot soup in my Belize survey. This dish is a soup made from cow’s foot,
tripe, okra, and cocoyam; it has the thick texture of many New World stews
that have deep African roots (Twitty 2006). In 1990 it aroused strong pas-
sions in Belize because for some people it evoked “roots” food, grounded
in Afro-Caribbean traditions, Creole ethnic identity, rural traditions of self-
sufficiency, and pride of place. For others it marked poverty, unsophisti-
cated taste, dirty and cheap ingredients, and narrow or parochial values.
Twenty years after the initial survey, the polarities of tradition and moder-
nity have realigned in a number of ways, allowing Creole traditions new
forms of legitimacy, so cowfoot soup is no longer such a volatile dish, and
it has probably moved out of cell 1 into cell 3. New kinds of foods have

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 26 · Richard Wilk

become heterodox in the meantime, and this turnover suggests that foods
may cycle through positions on this matrix in regular ways.
Cell 3 is occupied by rice and beans, the self-consciously national dish,
which probably had its origins as a Sunday-dinner counterpoint to slave
rations of flour and salted meat (Wilk 2007).3 This position best accords
with what Bourdieu calls orthodoxy, where discursive power is exercised
to suppress alternatives. Doxa does not require any reminder, threat, or
pressure to conform, because its dictates have been thoroughly natural-
ized as bodily experience (what Bourdieu calls hexis). Orthodoxy, on the
other hand, requires a constant reminder, and indeed rice and beans has
emerged only recently as a public symbol of Belize, the single dish that ap-
pears on every menu. Every tourist guidebook alerts tourists to the ubiquity
of rice and beans, and there are regular cook-offs and contests to see who
makes the “best” version. Every public event or banquet that has any pre-
tense to being cultural, in the sense of relating to local rather than global
cosmopolitan values, must include at least a token scoop of rice and beans
on the plate. This dish is like a flag, which must constantly be kept visible
as a reminder that some values are more important than others (indeed it
is called the “coat of arms” in Jamaica).
This suggests that cell 3 is where we should expect to find “emblem-
atic” foods that stand for place, strong common identity, and group soli-
darity. It is tempting to think that over time and through constant use, the
symbolic power of the orthodox might wear out, and objects or substances
with this meaning will gradually fall into the taken-for-granted, habitual
space of the hamburger. In Belize, at least, this has been a very slow pro-
cess, since rice and beans became the orthodox national dish some time in
the middle of the twentieth century and shows no sign of losing its place in
the present. If anything, with the growth of tourism and the need for some-
thing “local” to sell to visitors, rice and beans is now more firmly identified
with Belizean national identity than ever before. This fact is somewhat
ironic given that variations of the very same dish are found throughout
Latin America, in most places in the Caribbean, and in many parts of
North and South America as well.
Cell 2 is the most curious and interesting place on the chart because it
does not correspond to any of Bourdieu’s categories in his theory of prac-
tice. Nobody picked a tuna sandwich as a favorite food, many people were
neutral, and even more reacted with strong distaste. In 1990 a tuna fish
sandwich was an uncomfortable food for most Belizeans, closely identi-
fied with the United States, expatriates, and the cosmopolitan urban
upper middle class. That is not to say that people never ate it—canned

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 Loving People, Hating What They Eat · 27

tuna and mayonnaise were available in almost every shop. But it was seen
as a kind of polite white food, a dish richer parents might serve children as
an after-school snack or as part of a light lunch served at a formal church,
charitable, or political event. It manages to be both foreign and expensive
without having high status, so it brings little benefit at a high cost.
Foreign foods often enter Belize in this position. A good example is
the fast-fried chicken that Chinese immigrants introduced into Belize in
the early to mid-1990s. While Chinese restaurants have been popular in
all Belizean towns for well more than a century, at that time a new wave
of immigrants from Hong Kong and southeastern China opened small
takeout stands in almost every neighborhood, rich and poor, offering
small portions of fried chicken and potatoes at prices that made them an
economical alternative to other street foods or even full meals cooked at
home. “Dolla fry chiken,” as it was called, was a new kind of fast conve-
nience food, and it quickly became a staple, but it was also extremely
controversial. Public health officials blamed the Chinese for rising rates
of high blood pressure and diabetes. Newspaper articles accused the Chi-
nese of debasing traditional cuisine and driving Belizean restaurants out
of business. Callers on radio programs claimed that rats, cats, and other
animals were being served in place of chicken, or that the Chinese were
engaged in a stealthy extermination of the Creole population by giving
them diabetes and high blood pressure.
Chinese food as a whole was not being questioned or blamed. Instead
a single dish became the focus of intense dislike. A lot of people were eat-
ing the Chinese quick-fried chicken (which was not actually very different
from any other fried chicken), but few publicly admitted actually liking
it. Like a tuna sandwich, quick-fried chicken was a convenience food that
was closely associated with a minority; interestingly enough in both cases
this minority was widely perceived to be unjustly privileged.
This situation accords with theories of fashion that locate sources of in-
novation among marginal and foreign groups that are engaged in a search
for legitimacy (Frank and Weiland 1997; Simmel 1902). In many cases,
the innovation fails and never has the chance even to become unpopular.
It is also possible for a new item to enter the system of taste in cell 2 then
disappear because it never becomes an established part of the local diet for
ecological, economic, or other practical reasons. But given time, it is also
possible that the item may fall into the insignificant position of doxa in
cell 4. This has probably been the history of hamburgers, which were an
unusual and anomalous food in the early twentieth century, and were still
recognized as a North American import in the colony of British Honduras

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 28 · Richard Wilk

when I first visited in 1973. As they increased in popularity, again as a con-

venience food, they gradually lost their Americanness and became part of
daily life. Pizza has followed a similar course, with the added novelty of
being the first food in Belize that has ever been expressly delivered, though
there is a long tradition of door-to-door vending of freshly cooked local
breads, tamales, fruit, and snacks.
Neither burgers nor pizza ever became controversial and heterodox,
perhaps because they were so closely associated with being higher class,
better traveled, and more educated. Chinese fried chicken, on the other
hand, quickly moved over to the left. Despite some predicting it would
cause the death and destruction of Belizean culture, it continued to grow
in popularity, and I suspect that if I ran a survey today I would find many
people who rated Chinese takeout chicken as something they loved.
Sushi followed something of the same trajectory in the United States,
entering as a strange and alien food that contradicted every cultural cate-
gory of edibility (Mintz 1996). The American fascination with sushi is
complex, and has never been clearly explained by scholars, although the
popular press has linked it to the American sense of growing Japanese
economic and political stature in the 1980s. But once it became a fashion-
able food, it took no more than twenty years to move gradually downscale,
into cafeterias and supermarkets, gradually being adapted and adopted by
Americans into a favorite food found in almost every supermarket. Eventu-
ally, it may become so much a part of North American foodways that it will
lose its Japanese associations entirely and become a completely natural-
ized part of daily food habitus. This constitutes a counterclockwise path
through figure 2, starting in cell 2, moving through 1 and 3, and finally
ending up in 4.

Conclusions and Marginal Comments

Food is a complex system of signification, loosely connected to sets of so-

cial relations. Therefore, we should not always expect a close congruence
between marginal foods and marginal people. In fact, marginal cultures
have been continuously mined for fashion innovations and popular trends
for hundreds if not thousands of years. Enjoying a plate of jerk chicken
in a Caribbean restaurant does not mean you actually want to know any-
thing about Jamaican culture or walk by a Jamaican on the street in your
neighborhood. It can be a performance of sophistication, a mere fashion
accessory.

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 Loving People, Hating What They Eat · 29

The global arena is something like a beauty pageant, where ethnic and
national cuisines compete for legitimacy and prestige, each taking their
moment in the public eye (Möhring 2008). The parade of national dishes
and styles all have similar structures—emblematic ingredients, celebrity
chefs, star restaurants, critics, journalists, historians, and experts who
create what I have called a “structure of common difference,” an arena
defining the grounds and stakes for competition (Wilk 1995). From this
global perspective the truly marginal people are those who have no voice,
no cuisine, nothing that can be appropriated or marketed. They may be
the people whom we know nothing about; for example, the hundreds of
millions of people in African nations and cultures whose rich, complex
cuisines are compressed into a few emblematic Ethiopian dishes, Wolof
rice and peanut soup. In making choices about cuisines in the interna-
tional arena, each group has its own “significant others,” which tend to
overshadow the unknown thousands of “insignificant others.” It is not hard
to see why modern types of mass-produced fast food, having originated in
the United States, would arouse so much passion around the world, at a
time when that country seeks to extend its economic and political power
to new levels.
Similarly, in this paper I have not really asked why some foods in Be-
lize remain so marginal that people do not care about them one way or
another. Why should so many of the subsistence foods of rural people
gradually fall out of use, with younger generations failing to learn even
their names (Zarger 2003)? On the other side of the planet, in Laos, the
same kind of rural “starvation food” is suddenly elevated to the status of
“yuppie chow,” a gourmet treat with magical medicinal qualities, enter-
ing the export trade at a huge price premium (Van Esterik 2006). Are
we really “saving” these foods when we wrench them out of their social
and ecological context, and shine the light of glamor on them in gourmet
magazines? Answering these questions will require excursions into media
studies, global and international trade and regulation regimes, and a de-
tailed understanding of development politics and practice in each specific
locale. Perhaps invisible foods might be a better label than marginal foods,
a way of identifying ingredients and dishes that are actively being erased,
eliminated, silenced, or suppressed.
Marginality can be defined relationally within a single food system,
through foods' connections with classes, ethnic groups, religious groups,
and regions. I argue that we have to pay closer attention to how this process
of association works, thinking about boundaries as more dynamic and as
being created through both inclusion and exclusion using positive and

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 30 · Richard Wilk

negative associations. Marginality of this kind is positional, not inherent in

the food’s ingredients, qualities, costs, or origins.
A relational approach gives dynamism to what could otherwise be a
very static analysis of how a group’s foodways are rooted in timeless tra-
dition. Instead, there is a constant interaction between the significance
of foods and the social boundaries they both reflect and help constitute.
Marginal groups may indeed be the sources of foods that become “main-
stream,” but that does not mean that the group’s position changes. Food
may sometimes have that kind of transformative power—there are, for
example, signs that hostility towards Chinese immigrants has dropped
significantly in Belize, now that their food traditions have become more
widely accepted (and as Chinese immigrant farmers have started to in-
troduce new fruits and vegetables in local markets). But more often, I
suspect, foodways have relatively little power to actually change ethnic or
other social boundaries in significant ways. Did the acceptance of Japa-
nese food onto the American ethnic menu reduce general anxiety about
resurgent Japanese economic and cultural power? I think it more likely
that the collapse of Japan’s economic miracle into stagflation and the rise
of China had much more substantial effects than learning to relish wasabi
and pickled ginger. Food may have more symbolic power in smaller, less
mass-mediated multiethnic societies like Belize.
Instead of transforming social categories or boundaries, more often
foods have a tendency to move through different social contexts and posi-
tions, changing their meaning and valence in subtle ways as they go. I
have used several conceptual devices to try to show how this movement
can follow regular patterns and pathways, though my analysis is suggestive
and partial rather than definitive. My survey instrument was really not de-
signed for this purpose, and since the survey was only done once, it cannot
really tell us very much about dynamic processes. It would be much more
interesting to repeat the survey at intervals, to see how different kinds of
foods move and change meanings over time.
Another question about marginal foods that I have not addressed here
at all is why some foods and dishes disappear and lose all significance. The
processes of social memory have tended to attract more attention than the
complementary project of understanding loss and forgetting, especially
in the realm of food, since the cherishing and revitalizing of traditions is
so visible, public, and easy to study. However, the loss of foods and their
disappearance from everyday life would be a very worthy anthropological
project, likely to tell us a great deal about class and ethnic politics in tur-
bulent times, as well as the politics of marginality.

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 Loving People, Hating What They Eat · 31

Notes
1. Selection bias was one of the issues raised often in the early twentieth-cen-
tury anthropological debates over migration and diffusion. With the right selection,
you can prove that any two cultures share a common ancestor. To some extent the
same problem continues to bedevil attempts to use DNA analysis to trace ancestral
connections.
2. An earlier version of this table was published in Wilk 1997.
3. Various authors have argued that the combination of rice and beans was an Af-
rican invention carried to the New World by West Africans from rice-growing regions
(Carney 2001; Twitty 2006). As far as I can tell, neither rice nor beans was grown in
any quantity by slaves in Belize, who concentrated on root crops and plantains in their
“provision grounds” (see Murray 2006).

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