Being European: a millennia-long history through food, writing, and difference
Kebabs, sushi, burgers, pizza-what do these specialties, which are now found everywhere by us and around the world and are often identified with what is called “fast food,” have in common? The answer lies in the evolution of culture, or rather, of various cultures and their contaminations. Of course, here we are talking about material culture, of food, but it too is one of the very many meanings given to the more general term of culture, and they are still expressions of seemingly distant cultures.
But how does one arrive at this? It is difficult to give an unambiguous answer, and this is already evident from the different interpretations scholars give to the term. Suffice it to say that two distinguished U.S. anthropologists, in a 1950s publication, listed as many as 163 definitions for the concept! However, one can at least agree on two main aspects, one individual and the other collective, as stated in the introduction to the Treccani entry “culture“:
«the totality of intellectual cognitions which, acquired through study, reading, experience, and the influence of the environment, and reworked subjectively and autonomously become a constituent element of personality, contributing to the enrichment of the spirit, the development or improvement of individual faculties, especially the capacity for judgment. – Complex of social, political and economic institutions, artistic and scientific activities, spiritual and religious manifestations that characterize the life of a given society at a given historical moment».
In short, it is not a simple matter, and culture is certainly not reducible to a store of notions that each of us makes for ourselves. Instead, it is something dynamic, constantly evolving and the result of countless exchanges between individuals and populations.
Returning to our fast foods (and already the term borrowed from the Anglo-Saxon world is a symptom of contamination between different cultures) we can of course say that their spread is due to the ever-increasing globalization, which is characterized by a great many elements: ease of movement, migration between different nations, increase in speed and quantity of information being transmitted, etc.
All of this of course applies to every aspect of the concept of culture, but it cannot be denied that in its most general sense, for certain periods and communities, areas, regions, nations, it is recognizable by particular characters and identities that seem to us at first glance immutable.
Take, for example, modern European culture, extremely diverse and rooted in a world remote in time, which we tend to associate more broadly with all of Western culture: indeed, with Western civilization, since “culture” and “civilization” are often paired or regarded as synonyms. Going back in History, we find fundamental traces of it in the ancient Greek world, in what it expressed in the arts generally, in philosophy, in the creation of social institutions such as democracy.
Of course, the Athenian one was a democracy quite different from the one we experience today: only a limited number of citizens had the right to vote and women were excluded, just to give two examples. The fact remains that it remains the first case of this kind of institution to appear in History. Over the course of a very few centuries that democracy sort of disappeared, but left valuable written records that revived it much later.
Precisely writing plays a very important role in cultural transmission between individuals, populations, communities and societies. Still remaining in Europe, it is thanks to it that it has been possible to preserve and communicate the immense cultural heritage of the classical world, which, beyond ancient Greece, naturally includes the Roman world. Literacy was long reserved for an elite few, and Latin the predominant language in conveying knowledge, but it still managed to impact societies considerably. Most important throughout the Middle Ages (mistakenly once considered a dark age) was the assiduous work of the amanuensis monks, who translated and transcribed valuable texts, not only religious. This allowed a line of transmission of various cultures through the centuries, adapting and transforming them according to the historical, social and political period.
In short, it is no coincidence that thanks to all this work Dante was able to produce his Divine Comedy (in vernacular Italian, not Latin), choosing as his guide in the afterlife the author of the Aeneid, Virgil, who in turn drew on the Greek Homer. And a couple of centuries later its spread was enormous, thanks to the invention of movable type printing by Johannes Gutenberg. But while we all know the importance of printing in the Western world, perhaps few know that this process was already in use a full four centuries before Gutenberg in China.
And here another fundamental chapter opens: every culture (nationally, regionally, locally, individually) is inclined to regard itself as superior to others. This is, however, a mistake, and most scholars agree that there are no cultures superior or inferior to others. Of course, at certain times in history there were cultures/civilizations that predominated over others for even long periods of time and deposited lasting traces. One thinks of the Roman Empire and its legacies, for example, the linguistic one, with many nations (Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Romania, and many local languages, as well as former European colonies such as Brazil and the totality of Latin America) still having a Latin-derived language, and the legal culture. Roman Law, in fact, has been applied with little change for as many as thirteen centuries, and subsequent legal systems have taken over some aspects of it.
The reason why in given epochs certain cultures and the civilizations they express have been dominant over others does not lie in a hypothetical superiority, but resides in a complex set of factors. For example, the development of the “Western model,” which has been and still is enormously successful, was explained by multidisciplinary researcher Jared Diamond in his popular essay (a true bestseller) Weapons, Steel and Disease (Einaudi, 1998). According to Diamond, populations first respond to random environmental pressures and adapt to them, thereby developing a certain type of culture, way of life, and productivity. And this is precisely the case with Europe and everything that today goes by the name of the West.
Moreover, what is considered right for one culture may very well not be right for another. This, returning to the initial discussion on food, brings to mind a book by anthropologist Marvin Harris, Good to Eat (latest Italian edition Einaudi, 2015). Here Harris (who, it should be remembered, has had plenty of supporters but just as many critics) starts with some questions: why do some people eat dogs, cats and dingoes, while others avoid cow, pork or horse meat? Why do some people hate milk and its derivatives, while others consider earthworms and grasshoppers to be delicacies? Why do peoples’ eating habits change over time and are so different? Harris in trying to answer arrives at some often surprising conclusions. To cite one, in analyzing the cultural and religious taboo of Hindus regarding cow meat, he argues that this choice of theirs has very ancient origins, as a way of reserving for themselves what for them is an important source of livelihood, in the form of working animals in agriculture and as milk suppliers.
So, according to Harris, the prohibition against eating cows would originate from material factors and then be reformulated in cultural, particularly religious, terms. Ultimately, therefore, not just literature, painting, sculpture, music, philosophy, visual arts, in short, the “usual things” we tend to associate with the idea of culture, but rather a complex set of elements that we create and, at the same time, shape our lives.
– Edoardo Grandi
“Ultimately, therefore, not just literature, painting, sculpture, music, philosophy, visual arts, in short, the “usual things” we tend to associate with the idea of culture, but rather a complex set of elements that we create and, at the same time, shape our lives.”
