MASSIMO MONTANARI, FOOD IS CULTURE, Columbia University

Press, New York, 2004

Chapter
Fire > Cooking > Kitchen > Cuisine > Civilization
What distinguishes the food of men from that of the other animals?
Cooking is the human activity par excellence; it is the act of transforming
a product from nature into something profoundly different.
Man, as we have shown in the preceding pages, in addition to consuming
already available resources in nature, learned to produce resources
himself by developing the practice of growing plants and
raising livestock. Production, however, applies only to the preliminary
phase of retrieving food, not to the ways of consuming it. Moreover,
man, being omnivorous, chooses food out of individual and
collective preferences tied to perpetually changing values, tastes, and
meanings. But this subject (which we shall treat more extensively
later) does not suffi ce to identify the ways in which the human race
eats, nor why other animal species, albeit in more primitive fashion,
develop special habits and differentiated tastes.
Perhaps the principal element of diversity lies in the fact that man,
and only man, is capable of lighting and utilizing fi re. This technology,
along with other procedures, allows him to cook, and to create a
kitchen and a cuisine. Cooking is the human activity par excellence: it is
the act that transforms a product from nature into something profoundly
different. The chemical modifi cations induced by cooking, and the
combination of ingredients, work together to bring to the mouth a
food, that, if not completely artifi cial, is surely created. That is
why in ancient myths and in the basic Ur-folk tales and legends, the
30
conquest of fi re represents (symbolically but also materially and technically)
the constitutive and foundational moment of human civilization.
The cooked and the raw, to which Claude Lvi-Strauss devoted
a justly famous essay, represent the opposite poles of the dialectic
(however complex and by no means simple, as we have seen) between
nature and culture.
In Greek mythology fi re belonged only to the gods, until the day
when the Titan Prometheus revealed its secret to men. It was an act
of compassion toward these naked and helpless beings that his
brother Epimetheus, charged with distributing different talents
among living beings, had overlooked in a moment of distraction. To
compensate for this forgetfulness Prometheus stole the fi re in the
workshop of the god Hephaestus and gave it as a gift to men. In this
way he became the true artifi cer or creator of human civilization,
which, with this new tool, succeeded in rising above the animal level
and learning the techniques of mastering nature. Controlling fi re
made man a divinity of sorts: no longer a slave, but now the master
of natural processes which he had learned to control and to modify.
For this deed Prometheus incurred the wrath of the gods and was
punished in an exemplary fashion.
The clearest symbolic change of this major happening, made famous
and represented by the myth, is refl ected in the imagery of the

kitchen, which, linked to the use of fi re, became a fundamental constituent

of human identity. From that moment onwards it was no
longer possible to call oneself man without cooking ones own
food. The rejection of cooking took on (as we shall see) the meaning
of a veritable challenge to civilization, equivalent to the rejection of
domesticated farming in the practices of food production.
The idea of an artifi ce that transforms nature governed the activities
of the cook for centuries. Forms, colors, textures were modifi ed,
shaped, and created with techniques expressive of a deliberate disThe Invention of Cusine
31
tancing from naturalness. The typical cook of premodern cultures,
at least until the seventeenth century, was an artist in no way
respectful of the original qualities of products. The idea of a natural
cuisine, when and where it subsequently established itself, undercut
this image and put forth a new idea of nature (positive rather than
negative). This happened many times throughout historyabove all,
today.
We need, however, to establish that fi re and cuisine do not always
coincide. On the one hand, to defi ne the culinary act simply as the
transformation of foods by means of fi re seems reductive. We would
thereby effectively see excluded from the realm of cuisine all the
preparations not requiring cookingfor example, the refi ned techniques
used by Japanese cooks in the preparation of raw fi sh. No one
would dare to assert that this practice is apart from haute cuisine,
even though it does not involve the use of fi re.
On the other hand, there are those who believe that cooking foodstuffs
is not by itself synonymous with cuisine. As Franoise Sabban
has emphasized, in the Chinese tradition, cooking and creating
cuisine are quite different notions. The fi rst simply implies the ability
to use fi re (hardly suffi cient in our perspective to defi ne a realm of
civilization), whereas the second suggests a technical ability with
rich aesthetic and artistic implications.
The Chinese writer Lin Yutang alluded to this distinction in a 1936
essay. He juxtaposed the heights of Chinese cuisine against the impoverishment
of Western cuisine (actually he is referring to the
Anglo-Saxon culinary tradition), which knew only one word, cooking,
to designate both the act of cooking and the creation of cuisine. In
Lins eyes this betrays a banal approach to food, one aimed only at
making foodstuffs edible.
This distinction brings a further element of uncertainty into our
discussion. This is not to detract from the ongoing fact that in the
Fire > Cooking > Kitchen > Cuisine > Civilization
The Invention of Cusine
32
symbolic representation that man has historically given of himself,
mastery of fi re and the cooking of foodstuffs have continued to be
perceived as a main element in the formation of human identity and
of mans evolution from a wild to a civilized state. Nonetheless, Lin
Yutangs distinction makes us think about the multiplicity of meanings
of the Italian word cucina. Cucina (cooking, kitchen, cuisine), in
fact, designates a whole range of possibilities, from the simplest to
the most complex, from the daily practices of housewives to the virtuoso

displays of great specialty chefs.

In general, cucina can be defi ned as an ensemble of techniques for
the preparation of foodstuffs. But even in such a broad and simplifi
ed meaning of the word one fi nds that, according to particular societies,
times, and places, the ensemble of these techniques can be
more or less inclusive. That is, they can include a great variety of procedures,
depending on their degree of specialization, their greater or
lesser levels of professionalism, and their possible integration into
the commercial economy. For example, in a business such as the
slaughtering of animals and the butchering of meat, grinding and
pounding are excluded from the daily culinary practices in contemporary
European societies, although for a time they were a part of
those practices. Moreover, grinding and pounding are still part of the
culinary practices in numerous traditional rural societies.
In any case, the complexity of kitchen procedures is not linked (as
we might erroneously have thought) to the professional level of the
cooks. On the contrary, it is precisely in order to prepare the more
common subsistence foods that more complex manual techniques,
requiring more time and more skill, were perfected. One need only
recall the lengthy procedures required for preparing the tortilla in
Mexico or couscous in North Africa, or indeed for mortar-andpestle
ground millet in Central Africa, or for making cassava tubers edible
in Oceania. Processes like these require hour after hour of highly
33
Fire > Cooking > Kitchen > Cuisine > Civilization
specialized labor carried out daily by women (the eternal heroines of
the kitchen and custodians of the techniques that defi ne cooking), all
this handed down by practice and imitation; all this, in traditional societies,
is organically included in the idea of cuisine.
In industrialized countries, however, the ensemble of techniques
needed for the preparation of daily meals is much more limited and
less burdensome, given that a large number of the preliminary tasks
have devolved onto professionals, and to the agro-food industry.
Moreover, in the industrialized countries, culinary activity tends to
forsake the domestic domain to become a profession practiced in the
public arena of restaurants. In this new dimension, cooking tends to
change genders, becoming no longer a female domestic activity but
to a profession exercised principally by men.