Of Metabolic Myth. Food Authenticities, Infrastructures, and Identities

F is for Food Fake

In 1973, the famed American author Orson Welles released a collaboratively made film entitled F for Fake. It is a documentary, a drama, a fiction and a biopic, with quick edits, multiple media³ and sources, and a brilliant, stuttering, rambling Wellesian voiceover that continues almost unabated throughout. The film’s coherence is elliptically maintained by the intertwining biographies of two ‘real’ cultural forgers, an early-70s friendship that emerged on the island of Ibiza between famed modern art painting forger Elmyr de Hory, and hoax biographer Clifford Irving who “ghost wrote” a completely fictionalised “autobiography” of billionaire recluse Howard Hughes (and then went to jail for fraud). F for Fake enacts its subject matter—of authenticity and authorship, artifice and artificiality, reals and fakes, showing and narrating a number of dubious propositions, encounters and localities. It is, on first and further watchings, never entirely clear which parts of the film are, ‘true’, ‘authentic’ or misdirections concocted by Welles. How, indeed, are we to believe the promissory words that open the film— “everything you hear from us is really true and based on solid fact”⁴—as spoken by a narrator who provoked widespread panic in the U.S. thirty-five years earlier with a fictional radio drama called The War of the Worlds that caused anxious pre-WWII mobs to file into the streets of Midwestern towns believing that Martian beings had really invaded New Jersey.⁵

F for Fake is a particularly interesting film in our current moment of fake news and perspectival, ‘better’ and ‘worse’ truth(s). A restored and remastered version of F for Fake was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021,⁶ and has unearthed its prescient treatment of what we now live as a contemporary condition of deconstructed genius,⁷ devalued expertise, distributed authorship and markets,⁸ widespread fakery and post- truth. The film was not much of any kind of success— artistic, critical, commercial or otherwise, when it was released. Famed German film critic Lotte Eisner’s disapproval of the fast-cut, experimental documentary was unequivocal. The overtly sexist, indelicate pastiche of ‘great’ male artists-scoundrels was for her not only different from other films Welles had made: “It isn’t even a film,” Eisner said.⁹ Welles’ meandering, indulgent, philosophical docu-fiction is now considered a founding, if problematic and braggadocious, example of the form known today as the ‘essay film’ or ‘audiovisual essay’.¹⁰ The beauty of the ‘essay’, as the French language more readily indicates, lies in its character as a ‘test’ or ‘try’ that allows us to relinquish but for a moment the burdens of ‘truth’ or ‘proof’ from our makings. In weaving together disparate elements, differences and threads, such forms encourage conjecture and adopting perspectives that acknowledge that realities are multiple, and that we can or must “consent not to be a single being”.¹¹ Welles’ film, as I hope my own essay here also does, sidesteps a tacit reductionist, ruthless rationalist efficiency that dictates how everything should have a single ‘point’ or final, ‘bottom line’.

In a scene nearing the end of the film F for Fake, we see the self-proclaimed charlatan and engorged gourmand, Orson Welles, encircled by a group of Europeans, toasting glasses of red wine and recounting raucous tales of grandeur. The small crowd tucks into platters of seafood in a corner banquette at La Méditerranée, a restaurant that still serves such pescatarian fare in Place de l’Odéon in Paris (“The seafood isn’t phony in here, thank God,” reassures our baritone narrator): “Tell it by the fireside or in a marketplace or in a movie, almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie.”¹² The dinner guests seem to be enjoying themselves immensely, laughing and reeling in the presence of this raconteur, a true artist and a great liar, whom they love for his flagrant misuse and mingling of fact and fiction, for the way he seems to consume and regurgitate the world, for his telling of ‘fish tales’.¹³ Orson Welles was immensely interested in food, and his biographies are peppered with stories of opulent, pleasure-based diets involving things like oysters, lobster and champagne. His favourite evening meal was two steaks and a pint of whiskey. Culinary forgery is addressed in F for Fake in a section that pinpoints the perverse criteria of rarity as the chief cause and encouragement of fakery and phoniness in everything. Welles complains to the viewer that “an awful lot of forgery is committed these days in the kitchen”.¹⁴

A is for Art Artifice, C is for Craft Craftiness, D is for Design Deception

The insightful brilliance of F for Fake lies in how it is, and is about, ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’, ‘fake’ and ‘genuine’. It is a meditation on relationships between art, creativity, imagination, responsibility and truth-telling. The works and ways of Ursula K. Le Guin, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavia E. Butler, José Saramago, Werner Herzog, Imbolo Mbue and others model how real, actual and operative the “beings of fiction”¹⁶ are in the rituals that constitute everyday life. Magical realisms offer viable illusions and refashioned mythologies, which should also inspire art or design practices that press for pluriversal, practicable futures.¹⁷ Fictional tales like A Life with Cibi by Natsumi Tanka, for example—in which a population of beings called “Cibis” survive amongst us as we carve off their flesh for our own nourishment—destabilize “any ideas of innocence or ability to separate ourselves from the world of predator-prey relationships”.¹⁸ There are many ways to talk about veracity and falsity, life and death, which do not resort to fixity or objectivity, nor critical, speculative escapism or oversimplifying solutionism.

Vilém Flusser points to a similar, ambiguous power, facility and danger of art and design in his etymological essay “On the Word Design”. For Flusser, “[t]he words design, machine, technology, ars and art are closely related to one another, one term being unthinkable without the others” and “after all, what links the terms
mentioned above is that they all have connotations of (among other things) deception and trickery”.¹⁹ It would be difficult to overestimate how many of our human activities, technologies, and knowledge practices have been developed precisely to manage and test against the “vaste illusions in which we all collaborate willingly”.²⁰ ‘Culture’, ‘art’, ‘media’, ‘design’ and ‘cuisine’—are words that we hold dear, but are words describing a few of the many ways that we “fake each other out”.

These are testing times; perhaps they have always been. Yet, certainly what marks our current moment is a contradictory data drive and zeal for means of validation, and a proliferation of false-facts, conspiracy theories and fakes (deep, shallow or otherwise). We are surrounded by scalar systems designed, developed and distributed in ways that are beyond the immediate understanding or control of localized actors or individuals. It has become a preoccupation of artists, designers, media makers, scholars and researchers to ply their trade in the service of ‘truth’, evidence, and validation. Many of us have become field-workers, our creativities presuming and requiring an empirical base.²¹ Ethnographic and anthropological, forensically-minded toward establishing an attached, relational care, artists and designers intend to gain trust and obtain truth in the matters and communities²² they encounter and investigate.²³ Indeed, our current moment is one in which our most touted and ‘advanced’ technologies are those devised, intended, developed and promoted for the initiation, management, supervision of trust amongst “mutually suspicious groups”.²⁴ These blockchains are a pinnacle of contemporary innovation, engineering and design talent, a ‘solution’ for the ‘problems of trust’ that underlie planetary crises like disease, climate change, and food access. Xiaowei Wang’s book Blockchain Chicken Farm²⁵ describes how these technologies are being directly applied to food, as “provenance use cases” to help ration alise the “sprawling supply chains [that] lead to issues of contamination and food safety”.²⁶

M is for Meal Media

Approaching food from a media studies perspective (as scholars like Liam Young, Jacqueline Botterill, and others do²⁸) show up all the interpretations, meanings and messages, other than those given by the raw utilitarian need we have for sustenance. Foods carry and nourish particular kinds of information and meanings, which can be perverted and faked, misconstrued and misunderstood. Taking up the history and uses of salt,²⁹ Young elaborates how salts fulfil the three criteria of technical and symbolic media set out by Friedrich Kittler³⁰— processing, storage, and transfer—to show “the imbrication of naturally-occurring substances in the operations and supply chains of digital culture”.³¹ “Mediation has never been the sole purview of technical devices”,³² as Young writes, and food systems are an originary media infrastructure, pervasive yet often barely noticed, accessed only at endpoints and so poorly understood.³³ As Marcel Mauss has written, “the body is man’s first and most natural instrument”.³⁴

Food and cooking, and the (fake) global myth of their scarcity, are a category of human, creative practices that are infused with issues related to authenticity, purity, provenance, imaginaries, storytelling, myth, trust, fake and fact. Although such anthropological speculation on origination should always be taken ‘with a grain of salt’,^{35 36} the very concept of veracity very plausibly has an origin in the production, sourcing, trading of nourishment. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss extracted a structuralist theory of language from his canonical interpretation of the sensuous sensitivities and qualities of foods prepared and eaten by the indigenous cultures of the Bororo people. His first volume of Mythologiques,³⁷ Le Cru et le Cuit (The Raw and the Cooked) points to origins of conceptual language in distinctions between ‘fresh’ and ‘rotten’, ‘wet’ and ‘dry’, ‘crude’ and ‘prepared’.³⁸

Cooking, particularly with fire, is for Lévi-Strauss a generalisable mediation between nature and society, life and death, the infinite (heavens) and the finite (earth):

The conjunction of a member of the social group with nature must be mediatized through the intervention of cooking fire, whose normal function is to mediatize the conjunction of the raw product and the human consumer, and whose operation thus has the effect of making sure that a natural creature is at one and the same time cooked and socialized.³⁹

The important function of breaking down proteins to transform raw and pre-digested products of photosynthesis available to human digestibility should survive as a continual and central metaphor across cultures and localities. Similarly, what could be more developmental in the emergence of dual concepts like legitimacy/fraudulent, or fidelity and trust, than the procurement and exchange of the ‘fresh’, locally sourced substances which sustain health and life?

Cultural historians and anthropologists point to the culinary origins of creative storytelling, myth and the making of artful objects.⁴⁰ As humans, we have needfully found ways of dealing with our need, desire and responsibility for the death and integration of other beings. It is a need that inaugurates many other cultural techniques, including, perhaps, speech or language itself.⁴¹ We tell ourselves stories of justification, memorialisation, and gratitude, small acts of self-deception, providing the necessary distance and misdirection that authorise and haunt larger metabolic infrastructures.

Imagined and normalised, abstract forms of value (e.g., money) operate to keep us from feeling directly responsible for the suffering or demise of other living things, plant or animal. Money is a proxy that mediates a messy involvement in acts that most of us are glad to be relieved of.⁴² This kind of deputizing is a deception that often erupts into violence, shattering individual and collective bonds. For example, a number of studies have linked increases in rates of crime and family violence in communities exposed to animal abuse in slaughterhouse work.⁴³ As Walter Benjamin pointed out, civilizations rely on this kind of externalised barbarism.⁴⁴Commerce and markets provide modes of plausible deniability and abstraction, many means of modernist magic and financial fakery that also allow us to trust, confide in and become indebted to institutions and one another.

A main characteristic of food myths across cultures relates explanations for the passage from nomadic and hunter-gatherer societies to the founding of more sedentary ‘civilisations’. In Christian traditions, this transition is narrated by “the fall”, in which the first humans move from an authentic, balanced state of innocence and relation to God toward a state of deception, culpability and disobedience. The ‘first human’, Adam, sparks this transition through an alimentary act—the eating of an apple.

Recent work in the humanities—bridging to cultural studies of food and social and spatial geography, contemporary scholarship in food studies,⁴⁵ the political ecology of food⁴⁶ and on “foodways”⁴⁷—critically examine systems, practices, traditions and beliefs surrounding food in a particular social or cultural milieu, often with an emphasis on biopolitics and nonhuman relations.⁴⁸ Spatial and ecological dimensions are helpfully pointed to through other terms of study like “foodshed” (after ‘watershed’, a term from hydrology and water management), “the geographic area that grows and transports food for a particular population”.⁴⁹ Studies and programmes for black, indigenous, and other people of color’s alimentary landscapes importantly account for historical and present-day difficulties that marginalised and minority groups have in accessing nutrition and in articulating non-normative or main- stream food cultures without discrimination or judgement.⁵⁰ Accesses to alternative food networks,⁵¹ food justice,⁵² environmental racism,⁵³ the whitening of bread,⁵⁴ and the anti-hunger politics of the Black Panthers⁵⁵ manifest a metabolic politics that pulls the veil back on the realities of race, gender and class inequities. That these issues arose through the rise of industrial capitalism is underlined by the fact that these political-ecological ‘rifts’ were diagnosed by Marx and Engels in the 19th century.⁵⁶ Concepts like “gastro-politics”,⁵⁷ “gastro-citizen”,⁵⁸ and “gastro-diplomacy”⁵⁹ help us understand media-moments in which politicians performatively ingest “British beef” or “Italian pasta” on-camera to assuage public safety concerns or to perform trustworthiness and authenticity.

In a moment when it is difficult to see the usefulness or plausibility of many other kinds of previously projected universalisms, it remains ‘true’ that every living thing must eat and has always needed to eat, and also, as such, that life is predicated on the death of other beings. This “rare robust generalisation about human behaviour”,⁶⁰ this fundamental ‘truth’, becoming incongruous or unpalatable to the overt values of Western civilisations, has precipitated all kinds of systems and imaginaries for its mediation through and beneath layers of storytelling, mythology, media and technology. Val Plumwood reminds us how “all ecologically embodied beings exist as food for some other beings,” and how “the human supremacist culture of the West makes a strong effort to deny [...] that we humans can be positioned in the food chain in the same way as other animals.”⁶¹ Thinking and connecting anew with our own ecological intimacy through food couples the “gut-level intimacy”⁶² human beings have with deep-time planetary processes and with the realities of mediated, infrastructural and globalised existence. These are imaginaries with potentials, as Huiying Ng writes, to metabolise hope.⁶³

B is for Baking Bogus

In the civilisational history Against the Grain, James Scott 15 puts forward “the grain hypothesis”, which states that virtually all classical States have only ever been based on grain. “History records no cassava states, no yan, no sweet potato states. (”Banana republics” don’t qualify!)“, writes Scott.⁶⁴ Wheat and grain are well suited to proto-modern state crafts like concentrated production, tax assessment, appropriation, storage, and the imposition of scarcity (for example, through rationing). Soil, wheat and grain are one side of a media-infrastructural chain at the other end of which is the phenomenon of sourdough bread baking and its documentation through social media, an activity that was given a sudden boost during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic and its associated lock- downs. Never before has the scale at which food as media could be mediated, told and retold, posted and reposted, been so great and widespread.

Media-researcher Gwyn Easterbrook-Smith writes how such a performative orientation toward bread marks historical, political shifts in the nature of domestic, artisanal practices and in the creation of what is touted as a genuine, authentic food. In the case of “Instagram-bread-baking” it is “the ability not to partake in food preparation [that] is one of the mechanisms by which engaging in it is constructed as leisure”.⁶⁵ Instagram- bread-baking is a phenomenon in which performances of authenticity and identity are negotiated, as homebakers attempt to establish culinary cultural capital through the social production of “real bread”. Many of the now millions of Instagram posts tagged with #sourdough or #breadmaking express performance anxieties or concerns about being accepted as authentic ‘real bakers’ and dedicated ‘real foodies’, or being labelled as ‘newbies’, provoking online foodie ‘imposter syndrome’.

Bakers, at least in Anglo-Saxon cultures, have long 17 suffered from allegations of inauthenticity for millennia.
As long as baking has been a distinct trade in Europe, bread-makers have been the subject to strict consumer’s rights advocacy ordinances and legal restrictions, arising from and underlining the centrality of bread in European diets. The political economy of early baking meant that bakeries were allied with flour mills, and both were monopolies in their local regions. These were, as such, fiercely unpopular trades, and their tradesmen were continuously accused of disingenuous activity, of skimping on loaf weights and quality. A response to this widespread public skepticism was the development of the “baker’s dozen”, arising from the custom of the baker to include an extra loaf in a sack of twelve to ensure there would be no accusations of shorting on the product. Marchant, Reuben and Alcock’s Bread: A Slice of History recounts how fiercely and often English bakers were publicly shamed as punishment for regulation infringements of this staple food and its quality.⁶⁶ Baking’s status as the site of early food governance means that bakers were amongst the first to ‘label’ their products, each baker was given a stamp or mark to place on their bread so that loaves of substandard quality could be traced back and the baker punished. Accusations and infractions—e.g., the presence of sand or ash in bread—have been the presence of sand or ash in bread have been common since Greek and Roman times, as is evidenced by archaeological dental records—the eating of sandy bread wears down the teeth.⁶⁷

The whiteness of bread, in the absence of such adulterations, has created an association between ‘whiteness’ and ‘quality’ of baked goods that is only now being tempered by the resurgence of artisanal baking of wholegrain and darker loaves. Aaron Bobrow-Strain notes how later in mid-20th Century America

the meaning of white was increasingly stabilized around notions of purity and control. At a time when white America’s collective sense of the ambiguous shades of racial whiteness was more unstable than at any other time in its history [...] Whiteness, as never before, had become synonymous with control over threatening disorder, and this association manifested itself in multiple arenas, including food production.⁶⁸

F is for Food Forgery

Food forgery is an ongoing concern of consumers, agri-business and governmental organisations world-wide. Based on a 5-7% rate of product fraud globally, the selling of counterfeit foods is supposed to cost the industry up to 34 billion euros per year.⁶⁹ The most commonly forged foods are bulk products that can be diluted or adulterated as flour was before the rise of British baker’s guilds. High-margin products like olive oil, honey and maple syrup can be ‘cut’ with other oils or liquid ingredients, resulting in larger volumes of product that can be sold at higher prices. As one example, New Zealand is the only place where the monofloral, anti-bacterial “Manuka honey” is made, as it is the only place where the European honey bees can feed on the nectar of the mānuka tree, the Maori name of a kind of native, flowering tea tree. The total amount of production is around 1700 tons annually, and yet over 10,000 tons of the product is sold per year internationally.⁷⁰ Visually indistinguishable species substitutions are the main form of fish fraudulence, as are practices like ‘overglazing’, which increases water retention and can bulk up weights of caught fish by over 50%, defrauding consumers and adding unwanted and potentially harmful chemicals. Gel injections that ‘plump up’ products like shrimp and scallops or colourings that alter the interior or exterior of lower quality catches are other forms of seafood fraud. Food doctoring for motives of profit, through techniques like mislabeling or false advertising, is important to producers and consumers alike but are, of course, not as grave as food forgeries that result in hospitalisation or even death. These include the replacing of edible fish with other, cheaper and more plentiful species that can cause serious allergic reactions or with species that are naturally toxic.⁷¹ The spiking of drinkable alcohol with methanol as in an outbreak in 2012 caused 38 deaths in the Czech Republic and a further four fatalities in Poland.⁷²

Although cases in which fake foods present risks to health and safety are easy to appraise as unethical and unacceptable, the line between the deliberate alteration or misrepresentation of food and a calculated, creative stroke of culinary substitution can at times get blurry and grey. The 2016 film Sour Grapes⁷³ is a documentary about an affable, gregarious wine connoisseur active on both coasts of the U.S., who was known in circles of affluent self-styled gastronomes (all male), to be both great companies and have a very fine ‘nose’ for wine. His name was Rudy Kurniawan, and it turned out that he was also a conman, who produced blended wines that were similar to priceless vintages, and then bottling, relabeling, waxing and distressing (the forger’s activity of making something appear aged) them in the kitchen of his apartment. Kurniawan, for a while (he is now in prison), made millions of dollars selling French wine year-vintages that had never actually been created. Confronted with the often-untrained palettes of nouveau-riche Californians, Kurniawan’s ability to express and recreate these wines, and his story, provokes a good deal of sympathy for him. This compassion is particularly poignant against a background of the unsympathetic, pointlessly and overly affluent men that he swindled. Many of Kurniawan’s ‘victims’ did not seem to want to believe they had been swindled and defended him to some degree even after he was arrested, found guilty and given ten years in prison. In the same way that F for Fake renders a portrayal of the artist and forger Elmyr de Hory and the actor and charlatan Orson Welles, amongst others, Sour Grapes is also the story of a savant, a craftsperson whose art was the imitation of great wines and in his convincing performance as an epicure.

There are many cases in which we might rather not know what we eat, drink or digest is not what we think it is, just as we may not wish to know someone’s true nature, nor that an artwork we own is a forgery.⁷⁴ The fake is always ambiguous and ambivalent, a mix of creative illusion and deceptive falsehood. To presume ourselves always in search of the ‘truth’ is to discount the productive beauty of artifice, craftiness and design— and the sheer prevalence of fakery and performance— in matters cultural, and culinary. Fakes and forgery, and the metabolic imaginaries they rely upon, are further and rather solemn reminders that “truth is a matter of the imagination.”⁷⁵

Bibliography