GASTRONOMY

Gastronomy

Gastronomy

Introduction

"Gastronomy" is the art or science of good eating. This would seem to give designers ample opportunity to show off their country's best food and drink, so it's surprising that several postal administrations missed this great chance.

Literature Review

Anthropology may be the only discipline that has begun to ask the question in fully comparative and relativistic terms, turning to literatures beyond ethnography for inspiration. Studies of gastronomy, nutrition, and commensality are rich and tempting resources not only for anthropology of eating but also, by extension, of the body. Scholarship on everyday life and materiality becomes especially helpful in this desalinization of 'the body' when the contingency of bodies as lived formations of time and space is theoretically acknowledged.

The rather Eurocentric literature on gastronomy and 'food culture' is paralleled around the world by equally complex but often less fully acknowledged alimentary cultures. It would seem that every people, even if they lack traditional literature, has a more or less articulate body of lore about food, a history of eating and a way of remembering it, geography that distinguishes neighbours and strangers by what they eat, an embodied understanding of food efficacies. (Atkins, 2001, 91)

Some traditions also offer systematic dietetics, an ethics of eating, a nutritional therapeutics, even an indigenous political economy concerned with hunger and waste. All of these rich human archives display a process of slippage: one may start with food, but soon the topic has shifted to physiological agents, social form, cosmic forces, moral precepts, bodily health, or historical memory. It is precisely because the discrete anatomical functional body, the body with nutritional needs, the body that embodies an individual biography, is not a given piece of nature that this slippage takes place. We begin with a simple bodily process and we end up everywhere. Or at least, everywhere that is material. (Ferguson, 1998, 597)

Historical Background

Germany just used a line drawing of wine bottle and glass, while Greek Cyprus pictures some elaborate table settings.

Switzerland brings out the silver platter but will not let us see what's under the cover. Slovakia has what looks like a piece of bread (or is it a cracker?) in the shape of the country, and Italy shows us wheat and grapes, with only hints of what they can become. San Marino picks up on that idea, however, with a basket of breads and bottles of wine. France sends out a classic French chef with his towering white toque to preside over the dining table.

Some more creative ideas worked out better than others. Iceland's effort of picturing an assortment of foods ended up quartering two round stamps, and the result is images that are simply too small to have much impact. Norway offers a bizarrely-colour fish and a colourful but obscure view of a table setting. Romania takes us back to the days of hunting on horseback and pictures of how the catch might have been served.

Britain, which has been in a San Marino, picks up on that idea, however, with a basket of breads and ...