Food as Origin

Adam and Eve by Michelangelo, 1508-1512 Sixtine Chapel, The Vatican

Food is ubiquitous. Universally necessary, it is understood by all. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has identified cooking and language as peculiar to humans, yet one might say that cooking transcends language in its ability to communicate. Cooking is a language that talks across languages; a medium that can withstand the tests of time. Whereas languages must be learnt, food, in its ubiquity, can speak an unspoken tongue. A peoples’ cuisine can become their cultural repository, and a traditional dish can encode a civilisation's story. Cooking can thus communicate a culture, just as consuming can help to better comprehend said culture’s ways. 

Eating is as important as cooking, and sharing a meal offers us a space in which to communicate our culinary languages. The philosopher Jean Soler suggests that there exists a link between a people's dietary habits and their perceptions of the world; to share a meal, then, is to better understand one another. As the 19th century scholar William Robertson Smith noted, a shared meal offers a form of fellowship that can cut across cultural differences. Similar notions are enshrined in our etymology: a ‘companion’—from the Latin com- ‘together with;’ and panis ‘bread’—is someone with whom you break bread. 

Dig a little deeper and you may find that much of our language is in fact rooted in the farmers field. Sexual discourse is thick with agricultural metaphors: if one is fecund they ‘sow their wild oats,’ ‘spread their seed,’ or are ‘fruitful;’ if infertile, they become ‘barren.’ Similarly, we may think of a ‘culture’ as being a people’s ideas, customs, and social behaviour, but this use arose in the late 19th century. Prior to that, ‘culture’ referred to husbandry and the tending of the land. Our notion of a ‘culture’ is quite literally fed by food.

Foundations entrée into food begins with a culture’s raw ingredients: their stories. From teachings in reciprocity to lessons on morality, a culture’s stories help define them, and give us insight into their ideologies. Perhaps the most telling of these tales are cosmogonies; a culture’s origin stories. The term ‘cosmos’ comes from the Greek kosmos, meaning ‘order’ or ‘world;’ and is defined as ‘the universe seen as a well-ordered whole,’ or ‘a system of thought.’ ‘Cosmogony’—kosmos: ‘order or world’; -gonia: ‘-begetting’—is the study of the origins of the universe, from both a scientific and a theoretical perspective. From the celestial to the sinful, food finds its way into myriad cultural cosmogonies, connecting disparate cultures across time and space through the common act of eating.

Sky Woman, by Ernest Smith. 1936

Cosmogonies can shed light on a culture’s core ethoses, and help reveal their ‘cosmovision.’ This term is defined by the scholar Elizabeth Morán as the “ways in which cultures combine their cosmological notions relating to time and space into a structural and systematic whole,” and can broadly be interpreted as a culture’s worldview. By studying and understanding a culture’s cosmovision, we can be enlightened as to its practices and beliefs. 

A culture’s cosmovision can reveal the intricacies of their contemporary practices. Had Eve not had such an insatiable appetite, humans would still be living ignorantly in Eden, and Christianity would not be so bent on penance. If Sky Woman had not grasped a handful of the tree of life before she fell, Turtle Island would be bereft of her gift of greenery, and the Citizen Potawatomi would not know reciprocity. 

Many culture’s cosmovisions are so tightly woven with what we know of their histories, that they are indistinguishable. Despite corn’s everyday prevalence in Mayan life, it nonetheless represented a powerful symbol for spirituality, connection to the land and ecological awareness. Similarly, the Mexica told their cosmovision through stories of migration, in which such things as quotidian food and eating became cosmic symbols of success, metaphorically representing the continuity of culture. In the words of Inês Neto dos Santos: Food as metaphor is “the most foundational of societal stones, a material which we know and consume everyday, and therefore the ideal material for a world-making process.” 

Some food metaphors remain prevalent across many cultural cosmogonies, such as the egg. Symbol of rebirth and new life, the egg for many has been synonymous with our origins. In one ancient Hindu Sanskrit scripture, the cosmic egg, or Brahmanda (ब्रह्माण्ड)—brahma (ब्रह्मा) the ‘creator god’ in Hinduism; anda (अण्ड): ‘egg’—is how the universe began. Similarly, the Chinese Hundun 混沌 is the universe in its original chaotic form of an egg. For both the indigenous Paiwan and Rukai of Taiwan, snake eggs are significant to their cosmogonies; just as the chicken egg is for the Bambara of Niger.

A wealth of culinary metaphors are cached in our cosmogonies, and reveal how food and cooking can be inherent cultural signifiers. From the source of all knowledge; to the fibre of our very beings: food has been interpreted by manifold cultures in myriad ways. In spite of their age, many of these cosmogonies remain concurrent, infused as they are with different understandings of human existence and ecological knowledge. 

If these cosmogonies share one commonality beside food, it is their disparity. From sinful fruits to cosmic eggs, their stories reveal that history is far from linear. Yet, despite this disparity, their language, metaphor, and symbolism can be understood universally. By beginning with food cosmogonies, Foundations uses this disparity to highlight how food can transect our cultural differences, and communicate in ways that words cannot.

You can find out more about food as origin in our course Foundations or our Alternative MA

The God Viṣṇu. Pahāṛī, Guler or Kāṇgrā school, late 18th or early 19th century.

Gouache and gold on paper. Bharat Kala Bhavan, Varanasi

Ugra Tara, Pahari, 18th century