The Culture of Wild Things: Consuming Weeds in Hard Times and Haute Cuisine

• In Event: 178 - Regular Session. Consumers and Consumption 2

Abstract

Few questions are more urgent (and not only to humans) than “can I eat that?” We seek to examine a particular way that people have answered this question, in a particular time and place. What accounts for the appearance of ostensibly free wild foods—foods essential to so many people’s daily life, in and out of hard times—on the tables of some of the world’s most expensive and respected restaurants? The foods of last resort become objects of acquisitive desire among elites. In this paper, which is part of a larger project on the cultural transformations of foraging, we investigate the fates of weeds in popular food writing, asking what meanings people assign to weeds, and how these meanings change over time. It is an understatement to say that foraging is nothing new. We, as a species, have foraged since we began to walk the earth, and even then we clearly didn’t invent this thing ourselves. That said, however, serving foraged foods (with the very significant exception of truffles and other fungus, as well as fish and game) at $200/person meals in restaurants is a new phenomenon, and is part of the puzzle we are trying to address. How does this come to be? How does the fate of purslane, samphire, or various sea vegetables change so significantly, and how do the foods often relied upon in hard times become expensive status symbols?

Authors

• Jennifer A. Jordan, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

• Ashkan Rezvani Naraghi