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Taste Tests: Pizza and the Gastropolitical Laboratory in Mumbai

2013; Routledge; Volume: 79; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00141844.2012.751928

1469-588X

Harris Solomon,

Anthropological Studies and Insights

AbstractThis article is about experiments in taste. Focused on the cultural politics of pizza in Mumbai, it highlights the visceral work required to naturalize consumer choice as a catalyst of social futures in contemporary India. It emerges out of interviews and observations among food marketers and among customers and workers in a pizza restaurant. Guided by the concept of 'experimentality' elaborated in medical anthropology and science and technology studies, the article reframes definitions of food in experimental terms through two ethnographic registers. The first narrative focuses on the marketing of pizza, and explains how marketers turned their restaurants into laboratories of cosmopolitan cultivation. The second narrative shows how laboring bodies become enrolled in that laboratory, as young adults recruited from low-income neighborhoods come to work at a pizza restaurant. Such experiments blur the lines between evidence and enjoyment, and ultimately add up to a revaluation of public eating itself.Keywords: Indiatastefast foodconsumerismlabor AcknowledgementsThis research was generously supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, Fulbright-Hays, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. I am deeply grateful to my interlocutors in India for allowing me to witness the hard work that makes food happen. Thoughts and encouragement from Fouzieyha Towghi, Kalindi Vora, Lawrence Cohen, Gabriel Rosenberg, and several reviewers for Ethnos sharpened my thinking and writing, although any mistakes here are my own.Notes1. Numerous videos of Pizza Hut in India circulate on the Web; the actual locations are often speculative or not given. This particular video is entitled 'Crazy Pizza Hut Waiters in India, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf1CckuMF3o2. All names of persons and institutions in this article are pseudonyms.3. According to Bruno Latour, it is these 'flows of translations' that make a network coherent (2005: 132).4. See Sutton (Citation2010) for a recent review on anthropology's engagements with the senses and food.5. On Gandhi's gastropolitics, also see Alter (Citation2000).6. My focus on pizza should certainly not eclipse the numerous forms of more 'local' fast foods and their enjoyment, a topic that is beyond the scope of this article. On the dynamics of fast food's territoriality, see Nandy (Citation2004) and Watson (Citation2006). Nandy reflects on this de- and re-territorialization through food: The contours of this life are increasingly defined not merely within the geographical boundaries of India but by, what most Indians consider, the less familiar territory of Indianness as a form of ethnicity that is being re-imported from the diaspora into India to reshape many domains of life, including the cultures of food within the country. (2004: 10)7. Also, see Marks (Citation1997) and Rheinberger (Citation1997) for extended treatments of the epistemic workings of experiments. As Hacking (Citation2006: 86) notes : 'The experiment does not strictly prove anything, but it is a significant anecdote'.8. See Mazzarella (Citation2003) and Applbaum (Citation2009) for extended discussions on the 'hype' of marketing language, and on doing fieldwork among marketing and advertising agencies.9. Hindi, Marathi, and English were the operative linguistic environments for my research into pizza in Mumbai. Both written and spoken Hindi and Marathi allow for /z/ through diacritical marking of the Devanagri letter ja. Although Adiga's novel is set in the Hindi-speaking North, its sociolinguistic esthetics certainly extend to Mumbai.10. For engagements with substance in South Asia, see Alter (Citation2000), Copeman (Citation2009), Fruzzetti and Ostor (Citation1982), and Marriott (Citation1968).11. See Lukose (Citation2009) for a discussion on the gendered ways that young people 'style' themselves to enter public space and to account for the observations and judgments of others.12. See Mazzarella (Citation2003: 243) on the consumer psychology applied to Indian teenagers.