Gastro-anomie; perspectives on contemporary food

?Gastro-anomie is the diagnosis of a sick body. It generates an anxious conflict capable of affecting the body.

From anorexics to obese people, the uncomfortable anomic freedom generates eating patterns that portray the food crisis in contemporary times.

The excess of information about food makes diners not know what to eat.

Durkheim's concept led the French sociologist Claude Fischler to create the neologism gastro-anomie to refer to the paradox we face today in relation to food: we have never known so much about the effects of food on the body and, curiously, we have never had so many health problems related to food.

How does anomie present itself in today's society in relation to food?

How do nutritionists and kitchen professionals understand this issue?

Since art synthesizes the intrinsic properties of a society, these reflections were guided by art.

The Arnolfini couple, represented by Jan van Eyck, is a work from the 15th century, a time when medical and religious discourse mainly determined people's food choices. Michelle Medeiros and Alex Galeno made a major contribution to the subject in the essay published under the title Olhar a comida contemporanea: a gastronomia e os corpos de Botero.

Views on contemporary food

Contemporary cuisine is a specialty of gastronomy that combines technical knowledge of the area (harmonization of flavors and aromas, preparation methods, etc.) and knowledge of the eating habits of the most diverse cultures, in order to establish a broad basis for creating unusual traditions that will result in new dishes and drinks.

Contemporary cuisine is therefore a counterpoint to classical cuisine, which is formed by dishes and drinks typical of certain locations, which are reproduced by their fellow countrymen and people who do not originally belong to the same culture.

For example, Italian cuisine is traditionally consumed not only in Italy, but also throughout the world.

In this sense, contemporary cuisine bears the mark of those who conceive it, but is not tied to a single nationality, in addition to being constantly recreated by the chef who idealized it, or who makes it, in a certain way, exclusive.

Gastro-anomie and Botero's bodies; The excess of information surrounding the topic of food creates a scenario in which the diner no longer knows how to decide what to eat.

The French sociologist Claude Fischler, based on the Durkheimian concept, created the neologism gastro-anomie to talk about the paradox we experience in contemporary food: we have never known so much about the effects of food on the body and, curiously, we have never had so many health problems related to it.

How does anomie present itself in contemporary society when it comes to food?

How do nutritionists understand this issue? Art, because it synthesizes the intrinsic properties of society, was used as a guiding thread for the reflections.

The starting point was the analysis of two works from different eras: the Middle Ages and contemporary times.

Botero's parody, in turn, brings to light voluminous bodies, as a reference to excess: the excess of information that the diner faces today.

Gastro-anomie: diagnosis of the sick body

And the body is in the spotlight. In contemporary times, we are witnessing the new generation of subjectivities in which the body occupies a privileged place.

Enter the scene, morbid obesity, a complex, multifactorial pathology that requires treatment articulated with a set of specialties.

The obese person, with his body, has many points of discomfort, denounces the required social ideals and demonstrates in the flesh that one cannot escape the marks of a certain culture.

It is known that any attempt to reduce mental suffering to a characteristic that can be described and enclosed in universal diagnostic categories does not correspond to the experience of the subject who suffers from physical and/or moral pain.

It is from this significant articulation that the construction of this clinical case is based.

From the general to the particular of obesity, it brings together a discussion about the relationship of the subject with his body that, as a symbolic nature, cannot be domesticated, does not respond to medical-surgical therapy and that recovers and exacerbates a conflicting family romance.

The modern situation presents us with a paradox: we have never known so much about the effects of food on the body and, curiously, we have never had so many health problems related to it. Excess weight and obesity are good examples.

Data from the World Health Organization show that, in 2008, 1.5 billion adults were overweight. Of these, more than 200 million men and almost 300 million women were obese.

In Brazil, the Household Budget Survey (POF) of 2008 and 2009 shows that the situation is no longer an escape from normality: excess weight was diagnosed in about half of men and women.

It is true that we live in a time in which we have never had so much information about food.

The data above, however, make us think that excess information does not seem to help us eat better.

Instead, it could generate a cacophony of discourses, often dissonant: dietary, identity, advertising and ethical. Modern food has created a situation in which the scope of the diner's food decisions is broad.

We are granted autonomy to choose and the question of the day becomes another: what to choose? We do not know.

Claude Fischler would say that increasing autonomy is a bearer of anomie.

In a state of anomie, due to a division of labor that is not solidary, ways of acting do not find space to be replicated and become habits and, subsequently, rules of conduct.

Regulatory forces external to the individual can no longer sustain the rule.

There are an infinity of them under the same theme being stated at the same time by bodies that are not in contact.

What is said becomes vague and general. Without rules, it is no longer known what is possible and what is not, what is fair and what is unfair, what are the legitimate demands and hopes, which are those that go beyond the limits.

Furthermore, it is no longer known what should and what should not be eaten. Fragmented opinions no longer form a solid whole.

For this state of absence of rules concerning food, Claude Fischler used Durkheim's concept of anomie and created the neologism gastro-anomie.

The excessive fragmentation of social groups and modern individualisms has contributed to an unprecedented crisis of civilization.

Society increasingly resembles a collection of private and individual interests, compromising the dynamics of cooperation and social cohesion.

For Durkheim, society needs a social cement that reconnects the separate parts and configures an organic whole.

When we analyze today's society, we can see that we live in a paradox.

On the one hand, we reproduce collective values and behaviors, mainly based on media images and consumption patterns.

The body to be seen and consumed symbolically acts coercively on those who are outside the standards.

Being overweight, therefore, is not conforming to the moral imagery standard of contemporary society.

On the other hand, the demand for the standard of worship of a beautiful and thin body falls on the individual's responsibility.

The body that must lose weight and the responsibility to become beautiful are presented as individual moral duties and not as collective responsibility.

It is clear that anomie also occurs when we witness obesity as a pandemic in society and its consequences for the health of individuals.

Bodies sickened by the depressive fatigue of daily melancholy, cultural and genetic inheritances of families and the resulting chronic non-communicable diseases are examples of contemporary diseases that attest to such anomie.

This does not mean that excessively thin or anorexic bodies do not also constitute bodies that deviate from the collective standard.

In short, both poles express symptoms of an anomic culture. In some of his works - such as El (H)omnívoro and Comer, the latter published in Portuguese - and in an interview with anthropologist Mirian Goldenberg, Fischler discusses this category in more detail, and presents it - without disregarding other conditions that affect the topic - as one of the ways to analyze the difficulties that people have in dealing with the complexity that eating practices and representations have become in contemporary society.

Gastro-anomie is the diagnosis of the sick body. It generates an anxious conflict capable of affecting the body.

From anorexics to obese people, the uncomfortable anomic freedom generates eating patterns that portray the food crisis in contemporary times.

This essay deals with this gastro-anomie phenomenon. How is anomie portrayed in contemporary society? How can we live with it?

Why art?

Understanding art as an image of what we are and what we build as humans, as Lévi-Strauss once said, we will take as a starting point the comparison of two works of art: the classic painting by Flemish artist Jan van Eyck,

The Arnolfini Wedding, painted in 1434, and its parody, the painting by Colombian artist Fernando Botero,

Arnolfini Wedding, 1997.

The works, in fact, will be pretexts to access the theme of gastro-anomie.

The reflection that instigates this work is the following: what could the science of Nutrition do to help diners to live in this gastro-anomie environment?

Let us not disregard the fact that art contains a profound thought about the human condition. Art speaks about us.

Therefore, it can serve as a means of instruction in reality.

Botero's works, with their voluminous figures, offer us the possibility of thinking about a society of excess, with bodies that portray their time.

Following Lévi-Strauss's proposal of reduced models, we could therefore say that the work in question synthesizes the intrinsic properties of society, spatially and temporally.

It operates through metaphor: through the part, we proceed to understand the whole.

Excess as anomie

The Arnolfini couple represented by Jan van Eyck is a work that dates back to the Middle Ages and probably represents the wedding of the Italian merchant Giovanni Arnolfini and his fiancée Jeanne de Chenany.

The work, from 1434, marks the use of oil painting, idealized by van Eyck, in the world of pictorial techniques.

The use of oil instead of egg in the preparation of paints, as was previously used, gave the artist the possibility of working more slowly, and therefore with greater precision and detail.

Jan van Eyck

Jan van Eyck (Maaseik, ca. 1390 – Bruges, July 9, 1441) was a Flemish painter of the 15th century, of the late Gothic period, brother of Hubert van Eyck.

He is considered one of the best and most famous artists of the early Flemish for his innovations in the art of portraiture and landscape.

Along with Robert Campin, who worked in Tournai, he was considered a key figure in the creation of the Flemish school, which emphasized observation of the natural world.

He drew inspiration for his artistic career from the writers Klaus Sluter and Melchior Broederlam, two distinguished figures in Flemish art.

He was a painter equally characterized by naturalism, with meticulous details and vivid cores prevailing in his work, as well as extreme precision in textures and the search for new systems of representation of three-dimensionality, that is, perspective.

Van Eyck, however, did not resort to perspective as often, painting the wood on which he created his paintings white, which gave the painting an exceptional shine and a particular effect of depth.

The dry wood was also polished. This tells us that the artist was very innovative and even a little daring.

Continuation

It is no wonder that Van Eyck achieved his triumph in portrait painting: canvases painted with meticulous detail and precision depicting the world outside them, as seems to be the case with the representation of the Arnolfini and their residence.

During this period, much of the medical knowledge in Europe came from the Church, which treated the body as something irrelevant: everything should be done for the sake of the soul and life after death.

The prerogatives regarding fasting and the warnings about the sin of gluttony created a temperate attitude in the faithful or, when they did not, led them to adhere to a diet so restrictive that it could lead to death, as in fact happened.

According to Bruno Laurioux, a medieval historian of food, religion occupied the first place among the cultural norms that influenced the discourse on food in the Middle Ages.

The artist provides us with clues about the couple's religiosity. Take the mirror depicted in the background of the painting as an example.

The medallions that surround it represent biblical scenes. In addition to the name of the work, there are signs in it that indicate that the theme is a religious ceremony.

The dog could be a symbol of fidelity; the oranges could be a symbol of original purity, as Carlos Fuentes also thinks in El naranjo; the chandelier has only one lit candle, which could probably indicate the spirituality of the act (In addition, it was customary in Bruges, the Belgian city where the couple lived, to keep a candle lit on the night of the wedding); the characters holding hands in the center of the painting indicate that the main theme of the work was the union of the couple, which is reinforced by the way the couple arranges their hands: the young woman has just placed her right hand on Arnolfini's left, and he seems to be about to place his right hand on her left, as a solemn symbol of their union.

The reflection in the mirror seems to indicate that Giovanni received people who arrived for the ceremony.

The signs give us indications of the religiosity of the couple, who possibly heeded the Church's discourse on moderation in eating.

This hypothesis would be supported by their long, slender bodies.

From the 13th century onwards, the hegemonic discourse of religion began to walk alongside that of the doctor, a profession that was beginning to undergo a process of professionalization. Universities appeared (Universities of Bologna, Paris and Montpellier), where the translations of the works of Galen were mainly discussed, who understood dietetics, for example, as the appropriate use of non-natural things: climate, physical exercise, baths, sleep, sexual activity, emotions and diet.

It is worth noting here that although Galenic ideas constituted a canon for medical training, as well as the Hippocratic model, centuries later (15th-16th century) the physician Paracelsus emerged, advocating the complementarity between the knowledge inherited from alchemy and the academic knowledge of the time.

Let us not forget philosophy itself, which, according to Jung, Paracelsus understood much more as experience than reasoning.

From Carl Gustav Jung, in The Spirit in Art and Science, we can see the uniqueness of the ideas of this important alchemist and physician when Jung shows that in his thinking, medicine should be guided not only by a focus on medication and what was considered strictly scientific, but also by relating it to the elements of nature and the cosmos.

For example, Jung highlights in Paracelsus that the physician, when making a diagnosis, prognosis, etiology - as well as pharmacology and the manipulation of medications - must relate them to the data of astrology.

We can therefore see the uniqueness of Paracelsus in the process of understanding medical sciences.

A broader knowledge for the training of the physician and, therefore, much contested.

In fact, we could say that such uniqueness is also perceived in Jung himself, with regard to the paradigmatic field of science hegemonically constituted by Cartesian methods of separation between objectivity and subjectivity or between the subject and the object of his investigation.

In this regard, it was certainly no coincidence that Jung decided to rescue the figure of Paracelsus, that is, to rescue a rebellious knowledge from another in order to also highlight his own.

Alchemy and astrology, together with the scientific knowledge that was established in this period of history, constituted the medical discourse.

Or as Michel Foucault would say in The Order of Things, an episteme that was emerging at the time.

During this period, there was an intense production of dietary texts, such as Le Régime Du corps by Aldebrandin de Sienne, Tacuinum Sanitatis by Ibn Butlan and others.

Such texts were widely distributed in the Middle Ages and were present in the homes of aristocratic families, as was the case of the Arnolfini couple.

The pieces of furniture and the fact that they commissioned a portrait are indicative of the couple's economic power.

Medical and religious discourses were those that largely governed individuals' choices at the time.

It is clear that, even in this context, there was no dietary theory that unified the variety of eating practices.

What we can assure is that the amount of information - if we think of the third pole of communication, the telematic informational, stated by Pierre Lévy, that is, the information coming from the mass media, especially television and the internet, with which individuals had to live - was not as broad as what we encounter today, where the multiplicity of normative voices in relation to food seems to result in no voice at all, placing us in a scenario of discomfort, uncertainty and anxiety.

An anomie towards lack or excess.

Botero's parody, entitled Marriage Arnolfinisegun van Eyck, 1978, brings to light voluptuous bodies.

There are interpretations that can be made. Was the use of these forms merely for aesthetic purposes?

When asked about the reason for painting obese figures, Botero replied that he did not paint fat people.

The artist emphasizes his style as an aesthetic strategy and a way of forming a style, thus frustrating many who expected his speech to briefly analyze the place of obese bodies in today's society.

Would it evoke wealth, health and sensuality, as fat was seen in Latin America until recently? Voluptuous bodies? Obese bodies?

The interpretation of a work of art, in addition to the author's purpose, also depends on the reader.

Thus, we can arrive at multiple readings and, in one of them, see the forms in the art of Colombian Fernando Botero as a reference to excess: to the excess of complacency of a world that no longer deals with rules, but with an irritating cacophony, an excess of information.

Excess smothers information while information gives shape to things; overinformation submerges us in the formless, as Morin would say.

This is the scenario in which Botero's Arnolfini are inserted.

The characters, despite being obese, seem ready to float due to the lightness of the lines that paint their skin, a striking feature of a fluid society, where anomie is more similar to lightness than to solidity.

A liquid modernity? Looks and gestures do not convey emotion to us.

Botero's work is devoid of emotional commentary.

Excessive complacency, the result of excess discourse, generates disproportionate bodies: the society of excess.

Through the lens of someone who tries to problematize the crisis in contemporary food, this is the world of excess that we can find in Botero.

It is in the gap of anomie that the pressures on the modern diner flourish.

Food becomes a field of personal decisions that is fed by a diversity of norms that are dissonant: hygienist, identity-based, hedonistic, aesthetic.

There is a rupture in the unanimity of opinions that pulls the subject away from the reproduction of customary norms.

Diners no longer have regulatory concepts.

The body bears the mark of this malaise, which seems to rest on the excess of information.

A recent study conducted by Claude Fischler, when trying to investigate what eating well means to some populations of different countries, found that although Americans, more than Europeans, report that today it is easy to find any information that is needed to eat healthily, they are the same ones who believe that they eat less healthily.

Claude Fischler (born 1947) is a French social scientist (sociology, anthropology).

He is the research director of the French National Center for Scientific Research and directs the Institut Interdisciplinaire d'Anthropologie du Contemporain (Interdisciplinary Institute of Contemporary Anthropology), a research unit of the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. Claude Fischler's main area of research has been a comparative and interdisciplinary social science perspective on food and nutrition.

His work covers the structure and function of cuisines, tastes and preferences and their evolution and change over time and space, as well as body image.

He has subsequently focused on the perception of risk, scares and crises, on comparative approaches to attitudes towards food and health across cultures (in relation to, among other things, the prevalence of obesity), on the reception and perception of sensitive technologies (including new foods) and, more recently, on the assessment and measurement of well-being and quality of life in a comparative perspective.

His main current research is on commensality – eating together – its forms and functions, and its possible impact on public health.

The anthropology of commensality is linked to the general issue of sharing food, at the local and global levels.

Claude Fischler, who coined the concept of gastro-anomie, raises the following question: does too much information kill information?

In our society, information about food takes on frightening forms that feed gastro-anomie.

Never has so much information been produced on the subject of food.

Although the list of the ten best-selling books in the United States of America (USA) changes every week, two types of publication invariably appear: cookery books that offer recipes for increasingly refined, delicious and seductive dishes, and diet manuals promising increasingly infallible regimes to produce fat-free, slim and graceful bodies.

The lives of diners become a continuous experimentation fraught with uncertainty. We are living in a situation of food panic.

The situation is so uncomfortable that in the same study by Claude Fischler, people in most of the countries where the interviews were conducted showed a desire to give up the task of choosing. Would they give it up so as not to have to deal with the specter of freedom? During the study, two questions were asked to people: First: You feel like having an ice cream and have to choose between two ice cream shops. The first offers fifty different flavors; the second, a selection of ten flavors. The price is the same, which would you choose?

Second: You have been invited to dinner at a large restaurant. Which would you prefer? A menu with a wide variety of dishes or a small number of suggestions chosen by the Chef? Of all the countries investigated, only in the USA would people prefer the long menu and the ice cream shop with fifty flavors.

The others opted for pre-selection and fewer options to deal with. In their social contexts, Botero's Arnolfini would have to deal with a much greater amount of information than the van Eyck couple would have to manage. In addition to the multiplicity of discourses, those that would offer a safe haven in the face of the uncertainties of anomie would appear weaker.

Let us take the place of religion as an example: compared to the Middle Ages, today it does not play a hegemonic structuring role in society.

It is no coincidence that the theme is presented timidly in the Colombian artist's parody.

The elaborate mirror gives way to a simple rounded mirror, making the reference to the biblical passages around it disappear.

The oranges, a symbol of purity, share the scene with apples: a fruit that, according to Zierer, became the main representation of Adam and Eve's sin in the Garden of Eden from the 13th century onwards.

Mrs. Arnolfini, breaking with the Christian rule of chastity, appears pregnant at the time of the wedding celebration.

In the original work, although the bride appears to have a slightly protruding belly, a closer look reveals that the lady does indeed appear to be pulling the skirt of her dress up towards her belly, which would cause the area to bulge.

This was the fashion of the time. Immersed in excess, would Botero's Arnolfini family have to deal with more points of uncertainty? Apparently, yes.

Thinking for and thinking with

The paintings by Colombian artist Botero seem like a portrait of the bodies we see in the mirror and on the streets.

We find ourselves daily immersed in a disconcerting excess. Gastro-anomie has taken hold within us.

It accompanies us from the supermarket shelves to the moment we put food in our mouths.

Freedom and restriction, like never before, hinder the struggle for balance in the individual control of our bodies. We lack norms.

A discourse that tells us where to go.

What to eat? How to eat? Questions that echo daily in the minds of our society.

The more insecure we are, the more we see the multiplicity of discourses offered by the market to help us deal with our dietary fears flourish: the moon diet, the Atkins diet, the South Beach diet, the Paleolithic diet, the Mediterranean diet, shakes and teas that promise immediate weight loss and charge a lot for it. And us? We buy them.

The discourse on the science of Nutrition is just one of the thousands that contemporary diners encounter in their quest to eat well.

Although this is a message that bears the seal of science, the hegemonic paradigm of today's society, let us not forget that there is still much to think about.

What is the line between norm and excess? What is health?

What is eating well? As Durkheim would say, the progress of a science can be seen by the fact that the issues it addresses no longer remain stagnant.

What do we do with these new issues? Do we focus on them? Do we think about them together with diners?

Or, on the contrary, do we limit ourselves to offering yet another ready-made discourse to people.

Due to the endless factors that permeate food, we may not be able to arrive at a food theory that summarizes good eating.

And, in truth, perhaps this should not be the purpose of Nutrition.

The role of the nutritionist in today's society should not be to think about food for people - providing them with ready-made formulas for their questions - but to think about food with people, helping them to deal with the avalanche of information they are faced with, so that they can become subjects of their own choices.

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