food moves socially – Food Moves

As I write this, I’m on day 7 of a stomach bug. One the ways that food moves is biologically, which is to say, “through us.” And food has been moving very quickly through me for the past week. I’m the type of patient who initially tries to figure out how (and from whom) I got the bug and whether it’s viral or bacterial. My family has been sick a lot in the past month. Only one of the five of us hasn’t had some form of intestinal distress. So in my head, I’m pointing fingers. On top of that, I’m cranky. It’s not a good look. I do not like this about myself, and I’m trying to change my thinking.

When I’m in this kind of mood, I try to create a web of connections that makes individual judgment seem kind of reductive and not really that significant. What is interesting about this situation isn’t the fact that kids in daycare bring home literal and figurative bugs. It’s not the fact that I can’t eat (which is my main focus). Parents of young kids are accustomed to this (even if our bodies are not). It’s not the general fact of transmission of viruses and bacteria in the world. I kind of got my fill of that kind of discussion during Covid. Even after Covid, I’m not even versed enough in science to have an informed opinion about the transmission of viruses. However, the particular transmission of this particular bug (if that is what it is) has shut me down enough to make me stop and think about all the other things that we are transmitting to one another, some of which are very interesting.

For example, In The Transmission of Affect Teresa Brennan writes about how we transmit feelings to one another not just through words, but also through hormones. She writes, “the behavior of hormones has a profile that fits with what we have learned so far about the transmission of affect; and what we have learned is that such transmissions affect the subject’s intentionality, insofar as the subject’s agency is composed of its affects or passions” (76). Pheromones can jump between individuals, influencing behavior.

When I was an assistant instructor at The University of Texas at Austin, giving students an introduction to rhetorical concepts, writing, and argumentation, I used to have them bring in an object from their daily lives to analyze. They would have to say, this is an X that I got from Y, which is near my Z, and here’s what I think it says about me. This was a way to talk about how ethos is situated, emplaced, relative, and communicated through artifacts as well as words. I always used an Ethos water bottle from Starbucks to model the assignment. “This is a bottle of Ethos water that I got from Starbucks, which is near my office.” (It was a cubicle.) “It suggests that I’m not above going to Starbucks and paying for water, even though I like other coffee shops better and I like to use reusable water bottles more. It also says that words like ‘ethos’ jump out at me.” It was a bit cute, but at least it reinforced the concept of ethos, which I still find to be useful. That assignment came to mind recently when I read an article in The Washington Post about Gwyneth Paltrow’s Water Bottle that lightly analyzed the significance of the brand of water she carried with her.

I felt the urge to comment on it, but I no longer knew to whom, or why, or really what was going on behind the scenes. In our current media landscape, doing the kind of rhetorical analysis I did with my students feels almost impossible. Her hoisting of a large glass water bottle during a trial felt extra product-placement-y or at the very least awkward. (I took a similar bottle to a job interview one time and the interviewer said he thought at first I was drinking a 40, which I mention only to say that the experience of drinking from it is not like a drinking from a plastic bottle of Dasani. It’s too big for a car’s cup holder. It’s breakable.) Suggesting that a water company paid Gwyneth Paltrow to drink their water during a court trial about a skiing accident seems both extremely plausible and mildly paranoid. If it was part of a media campaign for the water company, then saying anything about its meaning in relation to Paltrow is almost irrelevant. It has to be understood as part of the tradition of celebrity endorsement, a financial transaction. If it’s not part of an official campaign, does that even matter? Is the display of any product in the hands of any celebrity a de facto endorsement? Are we to believe that no one was coaching a lifestyle influencer about what the artifacts she carried prominently said about her? Perhaps the explanation is that she’s is really good at cultivating her own ethos, and/or making her own deals. Skepticism is probably warranted, but isn’t it always? The oscillation between skepticism and trust at some point led me to think, “Does any of this matter? What’s the point? I don’t actually care what brand of water Paltrow drinks in any context, and I don’t care what it says about her. So why did I feel the need to comment? Did the algorithms make me do it? Why put another lukewarm take out there amid all the noise? Why write at all?

Food Moves

Tag Archives: food moves socially

Transmitting Bugs, Transmitting Affect

Analyzing Gwyneth Paltrow’s Water Bottle